That's what you were trying to say? You don't need to slow down you just need to say things in a way that makes sense. Yes, the sensors were functioning when it entered orbit and nearly continuously since.

No, it only means that the craft has provided data of unprecedented detail, and that it's about the lunar structure. These aren't Star Trek sensors that just "scan" the moon and somehow directly spit out all the salient details about its composition. Actually going from the raw gravity sensor data to the 3D density map you desire takes a lot of work.

The implication being that they're recording the same data over and over and should have been done after the first 'pass'. Which is hilarious; thank you for clearly explaining. These are gravity probes, not cameras looking at large regions of the surface. Every unique position over the moon is a unique data point.

I think it's perfect that you'd trot out this analogy in an instance where an army of geology majors spending their whole lives with buckets and shovels couldn't get us the data this probe has. It really does put everything you said in perspective.

So you're upset at the lack of progress in manned exploration. Understandable. What's less understandable is how this has turned your thinking on anything related to the subject of space exploration to mush.

Just as long as you avoid the brown note, you shouldn't suffer any ill effects.

I'm not complaining to you. This is something the Slashdot editors should have caught as well, as they can even now change the logo away from the NASA meatball.

It all goes back to the notion that obviously everything dealing with space must involve NASA at some point. That is a notion I would like to eventually see dispelled completely so you really aren't to blame in this case. I'm just saying that a more obvious commercial spaceflight logo should be made available to designate activity in space rather than something just related to NASA.

Please don't take this personally.... in fact I'm sort of jealous that you got credit for this story instead of me. At the very least, this is most definitely "News for Nerds" and something which deserved to be on the front page and get the attention of the Slashdot readership, so making a minor mistake like this is really small potatoes. You got the gist of the story down correctly and deserve to get credit for this scoop with a pretty well written summary of what was going on.

Are there really any libertarians anywhere who would get rid of public police and fire departments? I've never met one, nor even seen a discussion about such a thing except as a thought experiment or SF story.

Mainstream libertarian thought is that that government has a narrow and specific role: maintian social order, national defense, contract enforcement, fraud prevention, and those few infrastructure efforts where a Central Planning Committee really does a better job (fire departments, roads, funding open ended research, certain standards groups) The governement retaining its "monopoly on force" is a core part of most of that.

There's a huge difference between "we don't need government" and "we don't need 90% of what government spends money on today". I'm not sure I entirely buy the latter, but it's a reasonable position, unlike the former.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by the "Walmart effect" exactly, but Walmart certainly makes life easier for those who can only afford to shop there. Yes, when you charge less, by being more efficient, those who can't compete go under and those jobs are lost just like every other technological advancement. That's what technology does, it puts people out of work, but makes more people life better and on the whole it's a win. I think /.ers sometimes miss that Walmart is not just the leader, but the soruce of significant innovation, in logistics chain management - because that's not the sort of technology we're used to talking about here.

No, the article only makes it sound like the data collection is done. And it is. Data of unprecedented detail, and about the structure of the moon. That doesn't mean you just run the data through a plotter and get a picture of what the data means about the structure of the moon. That will take time.

Sorry you're disappointed that this article is only about the successful end of the main mission, and not about the conclusions from that mission's data, but that's what it is.

The correlation is there, you've just got the causation backwards in your accusation. Stupid people mostly wind up poor - or if they were born rich, die far less rich.

And yes, on the whole, poor people aren't as smart: real poverty (the kind where you go hungry often) causes lower intelligence, and lower intelligence causes poverty. It's not an "all X are Y" thing, but it's a markedly uneven distribution. The gradual fading away of "no food today" poverty in the world is possibly the most significant change we've made as a species in my lifetime. Of course all that has little to do with "has an XBox, an internet connection, and a big-screen TV" poverty.

That's the worst argument you could have made. The market does a great job at setting prices that balance supply and demand, far better than any Central Planning Committee. Where you get problems is the stuff that's more complex than a number: contract terms. The market does a poor job of preventing businesses from cooking up ever-more-devious contract terms, that businesses then conspire to use uniformly - from your ISP agreement to Facebooks terms of use to the Win8 EULA, to every apartment complex's lease agreement, to "Whites only" diners, back in the day.

There's are plenty of flaws with thinking the market will sort everything out, but you picked the one example that's not actually a problem.

...drugs, cigarettes, liquor, gambling, lottery tickets, flat screens, cell phones, junk food, etc...