Huh? The most expensive was $3B?

The James Webb Space Telescope is estimated to be just under $8B to make and launch, then another ~$800M for operations.

An article from 2011 suggested that they had already spent $5B (or maybe it was just that they had only planned on it costing $5B at that point). An FAQ from JPL states that as of 2011, they had spent $3.5B.

If they're smart on this Europa mission, they won't design the mission around low TRL technology.

1: Don't ramble so much that your audience stops caring about your recommended solution before you get to it.

2: Trim out all of the extraneous parts.

3: Give appropriate responses for your audience, their motivations and capabilities.

and maybe:

4: Use lists instead of long paragraphs so maybe we can identify which parts are important.

(yes, #1 is likely just a specialization of #2 ... but did you see that horrible post?)

How quickly it gets to the point.

All NASA websites have to be renewed annually in STRAW (System for Tracking and Registering Applications and Websites). If they're not updated, they're supposed to get blocked at the firewall.

Of course, they never define what a 'website' is, so someone could claim that the item in question was a 'web page' that didn't have to be individually registered.

(I made the mistake of listing a webservice as a 'web application', and had much back & forth as I said there weren't any privacy issues ... of course, their definition was that a 'web application' is something that you give logins & passwords to.)

But my complaint was that the 'official' page is that there are other pages out there that are *not* trying to be comprehensive that are doing a better job than the 'official' page. I had contacted the NASA official responsible for data.nasa.gov, and asked him how they had sent out the call for information to put in there ... he said they didn't, they just added websites they found. I told him they'd be more complete if they just linked to the GCMD as their system hardly had anything in it. I also complained about how stuff was organized (not by mission, or investigation ... but by the websites they found ... never mind that a given archive might have hundreds of different heterogeneous datasets.)

And I seriously doubt that the projects are what you claim -- as someone who's tried to push some NASA-funded software to CPAN ... after a while, we gave up as the legal department made it such a burden to do so. (admitedly, this was ~8 years ago).

http://code.nasa.gov/

I gave up on it years ago, when I realized there were only 32 items in it. (2 have been listed as 'coming soon'). You'll find more open source software if you look at the lists that the individual centers maintain :

• 78 : https://sr.grc.nasa.gov/
• 50 : http://opensource.gsfc.nasa.go...
• 27 : http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensou...
• 46 : http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jo...

Or see the NASA Github page (34 items, but that includes 'code.nasa.gov') : https://github.com/nasa

The listed 'NASA Official' has changed since it was released ... maybe this one will actually care about maintaining a list, rather than doing the bare minimum to meet some requirement from the White House.

(which was my interepretation of the response I got when I contacted the previous official about http://data.nasa.gov/ ... of course, back then, it actually linked to places, rather than crap like the content-less http://data.nasa.gov/solar-dat... )

I mean, realisticly -- if NASA sends someone on a one-way trip ... are they then obligated to keep paying them until they die?

What about once they get old, and the other people on the mission have to start taking care of them?

Or do you have to implement a euthenasia policy? And then the federal government has to approve it, which would likely open all sorts of protests, etc.

I noticed how EA / Origin didn't even make it onto the list.

(which I 100% agree with)

All it takes is one congressman inserting language in an appropriations bill about what countries NASA isn't allowed to work with.

But they'd never do something like that, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It was so bad, we had to get a legal opinion on if I was allowed to respond to a question e-mailed to the support address for one of the projects I work on. (they said yes, because the project was international in scope, and not just between us and China).

I also had a to pass up an invitation from the US Academy of Science, as it was for a meeting that was being held in China. (later, I was informed that it was Taiwan, which didn't count as China, but it was too late at that point).

ps. if it's not obvious, I work at a NASA center.

pps. and then let's not forget about earmarks and the like. Or how the shuttle was built all over the US and then brought together, to make congress happy that it was being built in their district.

Super heroes to save us from the zombies?

If you haven't read 'Ex-Heroes', I highly recommend it. (Ex-Patriots was good, but not great ... I haven't read the other two)

... Brandyn White, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, and Scott Greenberg, a PhD candidate at MIT ...

At least this time we can blame Network World for the crappy headline, and not someone here at Slashdot. We can just blame them for not bothering to read the summary, much less the article.

The good news about being late to post stories (that aren't for nerds and don't matter), is that they've already been debunked:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

Are we going to have to use Swatch Time with this calendar?

All kidding aside, they mention:

MINUTES, SECONDS, & FRACTIONS OF A SECOND
Both minutes and seconds have a range from 0 to 59. If including a fraction of a second, write it as a decimal at the end: 41.13.27.23.59.59.999 TC .

... so no handling of leap seconds. I know some people would be happy about this, but if you're not going to care about solar noon, why deal with leap days and such, too?

(and for those who complain that UTC shouldn't have leap seconds ... I say go and use TAI or GPS, but don't change UTC because you don't want to deal with the complexity)

Last month, I was at the International Digital Curation Conference, and Atel Butte started talking about outsourcing lab tests .... and put video of rat colonoscopies in the talk. It's about 32 min in, but you should watch the whole thing for the context:

  http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/id...

He went downhill after Meet the Feebles. He should go back to docmentaries

The day before this article came out, the AAAS released a report on The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, and seems to be starting a publicity push on the topic.

Here's what I see -- the majority of scientists believe that there are real problems with global warming, even if there may be some cyclic effects (heat kills off all the humans, they stop causing problems, everything cools back down).

So instead we have groups trying to sow disinformation with questions about the incidence of some severe weather events (are we just monitoring better and catching more, in part because humans are in more places, or are they actually increasing), and are the increases in intensity statistically significant?

And at this point, I've seen some data that might've been tainted (eg, temperature monitors that have had buildings encroach), but the general concensus is that yes, storms are getting worse.

I'm not going to say his results are completely bunk, as he's likely right in that some of the problems can be explained by how and where people build (eg, in the flood plain -- but the flood plain was resurveyed and is growing in my area ... that might be because of silting up of rivers from construction, it could be because of increased rainfall))

Where I do fault the article is for referencing a 'recent' UN report that hasn't been released yet (website says "The Summary for Policymakers will be released on 31 March 2014"), so we can't actually get to the underlying data that he's basing his claims on.