And yet, consider what Lawrence Lessig wrote about why he failed to persuade the Supreme Court to limit the 1998 extension of copyright terms (Free Culture, pgs. 244-45, emphasis added):

The Supreme Court that Lessig addressed was composed of some of the most highly trained, best respected legal minds in the world. And they could not, and did not dispute the logic of his argument. As Lessig wrote, "It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile [the Commerce Clause and the Progress Clause] simply by not addressing the argument." (242, emphasis in original) Lessig failed to give the issue a human face: an emotionally real story demonstrating the harms done by the retroactive extension of copyright terms. And because the Justices could not see -- could not feel -- that harms were being done, they ignored his argument and denied his requests.

Geeks worship at the altar of logic. It is a foundational assumption of our sub-culture that reason, based on sound evidence, is the best way to make decisions. But, as Lessig found out, reason is not the only way to make decisions. I would venture to assert that reason is not even the most common way that humans make decisions. On balance, we are creatures of emotion first, and of reason only second.

Bear Lessig's experience in mind the next time you denigrate the "emotional, rhetoric-laden argument style that humanities teaches". Rhetoric is about persuading your audience. If logic alone works, great! But if logic fails in the face of blinkered ideology, or incomprehension, or sheer human cussedness, do not be too proud to present an argument founded more on emotion than on evidence.

As a named plaintiff in this lawsuit, I'm awfully happy to see the widespread support here on Slashdot. I'd like to be able to keep driving Mars rovers around without having to sign a form that says NASA can interrogate my priest, my doctor, my lawyer, my accountant, and my ISP to make sure I'm sufficiently uninteresting.

If you'd like to help, please consider donating to keep our amazing legal team afloat. The privacy you save could be your own. Thank you!

We never particularly expected to hear from Spirit before this coming October +/- 1 month, making the suggestion that we're "beginning to realize she might never wake up again" more than a little misleading. According to our best models, the energy levels on Mars are just barely reaching the point where Spirit might wake up for even a few minutes a day, and hearing anything from her at this point would be a great stroke of luck. Have patience. She's there.

I understand that NASA is trying to manage expectations, but their way of doing it is bad management that needlessly demoralizes the team. My own personal expectation is that we damn well will hear from Spirit, and after a certain recovery period she'll be moving on Mars again.

Although they said "the recordings ... can no longer be obtained", they later sent him copies of the recordings. Sooo ... how did they send him copies without "obtaining" them? Could it be that they were capable of obtaining the tapes and lied about it because they didn't want to?

Also note that he requested the tapes both during the disclosure proceedings in court and after the charges were dismissed through freedom of information laws. In both cases, they were legally obligated to provide the information if they were capable of doing so.

The response was carefully worded, yes; but phrasing it in the passive voice is not going to get them off the hook this time.

I lived in Britain for two years (I'm American) and never carried my passport except when I was actively traveling across national boundaries.

In fact, I think it would be pretty dumb to carry your passport around when you're not actually using it -- it would be much, much easier to lose it that way. Or have it stolen. I'd much rather carry my American driver's license and have to explain that my passport is stored at my current residence for security's sake.

You might claim that Britain is a "safe" country and that it would be wise to carry your passport in countries with more crime and/or governmental corruption. I don't know whether that's the case or not. If there's more crime, I might want to leave it in my hotel even more, because there's a greater possibility of theft. And if there's all THAT much governmental corruption, I might be afraid that the cops themselves would steal it, sell it on the black market, and then claim I was in the country illegally. It's hard to say.

If I was really worried about it, though, I'd contact the American Embassy (or whatever embassy is appropriate to your own nationality, gentle reader) and ask whether they think I should carry it all the time or not. They know the local laws and law enforcement far better than I could hope to, and would likely get involved if I were arrested for anything.

My understanding was that improving the solar tilt would likely risk making it "more stuck" such that the probability of digging out after winter was through would be much lower.

That depends on what we do. Some actions would indeed risk embedding Spirit permanently; we're not going to do those if we can avoid it.

The most severe such action would be to bury the right front (RF) wheel. For better or worse, this would likely require the RF drive actuator to be significantly more cooperative than it has been. That's the wheel that died two years into Spirit's surface mission, and we tried to restart it during extrication. To our surprise, we've seen a little bit of life in it, but not so much that it can bury itself. So we probably couldn't do that even if we wanted to.

Instead, we'll probably focus mostly on arcing Spirit around so that her own structure (camera mast and high-gain antenna) casts fewer shadows on the deck, then maximize our wheelie on one side and flatten it on the other side in such a way as to aim the solar panels more to the north. The first part of this (arcing around) is what we'd be doing for extrication anyway, and the second part might reduce our extrication chances slightly but not too much. Only then, if our northerly tilt is still insufficient and we think we can materially improve it, will we take actions that could severely reduce the odds of eventual extrication. But it's not likely to come to that, if only because there's not a whole lot more we could do, period.

Don't get me wrong, Spirit's situation is bad. But it's not as bad as it sounds.

We are not going to extricate Spirit by winter, that much is true: we have a handful of drive attempts left, we progressed about 7.4 cm on our best sol so far -- 4-5cm has been more typical for our recent drive attempts -- and we have over a meter to go (to the nearest likely extrication point) before we no longer have enough energy to drive. You can't argue with arithmetic: we're not going to make it in time.

Instead, we'll focus our remaining drive attempts on improving Spirit's northerly tilt, which in turn improves her energy intake through the winter. We'll then hunker down for the winter and focus on performing stationary science, such as investigating the soil and rocks we've newly exposed during our extrication driving and participating in radio science experiments to determine whether Mars's core is liquid or solid. (Incidentally, how freaking cool is that?!)

After about six months of stationary science observations, we'll start moving again, at least within a small area. If Spirit feels up to it, we might even get properly back on the road again next year, though her mobility will always be limited -- relative to what she used to be able to achieve -- by the fact that she now has two broken wheels, not just one. That second wheel failure was what put the kibosh on our first serious attempts at extrication from the "Troy" sand pit. We now have a workaround that has been showing some real promise; there's just not enough time to complete that path before winter stops us.

As an important caveat, that "six months of stationary science" will be extended by however long Spirit goes into a low-power mode for the winter. We are likely not to hear from her at all for about six months, and during that time she can't make the observations that will contribute to the stationary science plan, so she'll probably be sitting still for an Earth year or so. Worst of all, during that low-power period, she might die: lack of energy means insufficient heating means components operating below design temperatures means, possibly, end of life. But if she survives that, she'll move again.

In summary: Grandma was already limping, and now she's broken her leg. She's also probably going to go into a coma for a while. But we've known her a long time and she's a feisty sucker; don't ever, ever count her out.

It's equal parts -- can't remember if that's by weight or by volume, but I think it's by volume -- of Lincoln 60 fire clay and food-grade diatomaceous earth. (FGDE is normally used for, among other things, de-worming horses and killing centipedes. I tasted it. Bleah.)

One entertaining afternoon a few months back, when we were testing out different mixes, fellow rover driver Paolo Bellutta and simulant designer Kim Lichtenberg (the mix is called "KimSim" :-) and I drove out to a local ranch, picked up a huge bag of food-grade diatomaceous earth, and drove back to Lab. Later, I was up to my elbows hand-mixing a batch of the stuff in a wheelbarrow. Ah, the things I get paid to do!

why aren't there six more of these things wandering around by now?

Because I can drive only two at a time. When these two are done (gods forbid), then it's time to send two more. :-)

Using the arm to help isn't completely off the table, but pretty close, largely for reasons you conjectured about in your post. First, we can't actually push while driving, because the motor controllers are shared between the arm and the wheels -- you can run one or the other, but not both at once.

We could, potentially, push down with the arm to lift Spirit slightly, then run the wheels. But Spirit's just not strong enough to make much difference. :-) In the best case, we can push down with maybe 70N of force, and that's if we had a hard surface to push on. (But if we had a hard surface to push on, we probably wouldn't be mired in this stuff in the first place.) For comparison, you'd need to apply ~ 650N to completely lift Spirit, so the arm can apply only about 1/10 of the needed force. As you can see, she wasn't designed to do one-handed push-ups. :-)

Further, doing so would pose a high risk of damage to the arm itself, and since four of Spirit's science instruments -- about 2/3 of the total science payload -- live on the end of that arm, the potential downsides are quite significant.

In addition, it's not completely clear that pushing down with the arm to partially lift Spirit would actually help: one effect of that would be to reduce the traction on the wheels, and not having enough traction is one of our big problems here.

Resculpting the terrain is a less unlikely scenario, but something we're keeping in our back pocket for now. There are few suitable rocks within reach, we've never tried it and (again) would risk damaging the arm by doing so, and on top of all that we don't even know if it would actually help, since the rocks might simply slip quickly under the wheels without moving us forward much. Even so, if things get desperate enough, we might possibly try that one.

The soil we're stuck in is very weird, and has some counterintuitive properties. It doesn't work like dirt or mud. We mixed up a batch of simulant to drive our test rover in, and while there are known differences between the simulant and the real soil, the experience of working with the simulant is quite illuminating. The stuff feels like flour and flows like water: run your hand through it, and it flows away from you like water does, it just stops moving sooner. Weird, weird stuff.

Hmm, DYI. That stands for "Do Yourself In" ... ?

Somebody tagged this "defectivebydesign", but that's not accurate here. The problem is that it was designed for mostly pleasure-reading, not for academic study (which, as the student pointed out, usually involves highlighting, marginal notations, and so on). I rather doubt the wicked Kindle designers set out to thwart undergraduates. It's just that's not really what they were shooting for. Me, I'm waiting for an e-Reader that supports a wide variety of formats smoothly, and has a much better refresh rate. My Mom has a Sony e-Reader, which runs Linux and worked pretty well when I tried it. The main problem with it is that I read pretty fast, and so I spent lots of time waiting for the screen to re-draw. When they've got the e-ink refresh rate up to civilized standards (say, 500 ms for a full screen, maximum), then I'll be interested.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.