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Actually, the particular system used for weighting each state's vote exists because the US was originally meant to be a federation of states.  The electoral college came to exist because delivering votes on horseback from Georgia to New York was a pain in the behind. 

I like weighted votes.

Because the votes are weighted, an individual voter in a less populous states (like Louisiana) casts a vote that is slightly more likely to influence the election outcome than an individual voter in a more populous state (like Florida).  Being from a little podunk state, I kinda like that.  Since winning my little podunk state's electoral votes offers less bang for the buck than winning a larger state's, that tends to keep those big nasty presidential candidates off bothering someone else, allowing my neighbors and I to avoid television commercial poisoning.  I kinda like that, too.

So, I get to say a little bit more and vote with a little bit clearer head.  I also get a presidential election that's more like the world series in baseball than a simple vote tally.  (It doesn't matter how many total points the teams get.  If they want the penant, they've got to win the games.)

Flattering, comfortable and entertaining.  What's not to like about the electoral college?   

The United States of America is too large a country - too many people over too large an area - to give equal weight to everyone's vote.  For its orderly function, people must have a greater voice in their local affairs than those living a thousand miles away.  Quite frankly, the average person is too ignorant of daily events occurring that far from home to make informed decisions. 

The United States is not a true democracy.  It is a collection of oligarchies, each responsible for its own distinct sphere of influence.  Some of those oligarchies are democratic; some are bureaucratic; others are dictatorships.  Some are, on paper, capable of running themselves, but not one of them is capable of running the entire country alone. 

And when I say "not capable", I'm not talking about their budgets, military power, or anything that could be made up with additional resources.  The shortfall is in the way each oligarchy makes its own individual decisions.  No one decision making style is capable of addressing all the decisions that need to be made in this country any more than one person is capable of gathering all the information they need to vote equally informed with someone living one thousand miles away.  It's an impossibility.  It can't be done.

People who claim that all decisions in a nation of 300 million people should be made by direct democracy make my blood run just as cold as those who claim that all decisions should be made by their fuhrer and his secret police.

Does anyone remember the President's name from that old Dark Horse comic series, "Give Me Liberty"?  :;):

Actually, I would be surprised if the mechanics of the US election system itself broke down.  (One of the virtues of the electoral college is that it produces an outcome no matter what.)  However, since the US's two-party political system is on the verge of a breakdown, I fully expect serious challenges to this election outcome.  It's entirely possible that we may not have a president by January, much less November 3.

At this point, liquid water would be an "other possible subsurface liquid", since it's never been confirmed to exist.  There's also been speculation about liquid carbon dioxide being able to exist deep under the Mars polar ice caps (many kilometers north & south of Opportunity).  If there's liquid there, it's almost certainly water.

Of course, there are other possibilities (hydrocarbons, alcohols, etc.) but most have even lower evaporation limits than water.

The light would distort.  As space expanded and contracted in the passing wave, its energy density would change.  The surrounding solid objects would distort, too, but not as much.  LIGO, in theory, can detect the difference in distortion.

It's an effect analogous to the cosmological redshift.  Current theory holds that this effect occurs because space itself is expanding, gradually drawing the energy out of distant starlight after emission.  However, the expansion does not dramatically effect solid matter, which is held together under influences much stronger on the local scale.  It's like solid matter is shrinking relative to the universe.

So, if the effect is there to be seen at all, LIGO will probably find it.

I don't believe it is, but that's a whole other topic...

I know that this may come off as a bit radical, but...

With all our talk of writing the US Congress with our demands and displeasures, how often do we suggest thanking them for something they've done right?  For example, the US Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously last month to approve a version of the federal budget with increased funding to NASA - including a small percentage added on their own initiative above what was asked for by the presidential administration.  Some may argue that it's unlikely to pass through the US House of Representatives unaltered, but that's not the point. 

The US Senate has done something we wanted them to do, and we should thank them for it. 

I suggest pre-made greeting cards.  Hallmark and other greeting card printers sell numerous "thank you" cards, and at least one is bound to be right for the occassion.  They're relatively cheap, and a blank card or simple letter can be adapted.  A typical card can be personalized just like a letter, but is much easier to write because it's message is simpler. No one responding has to be a literary genius.  It also relieves us of running around trying to muster some sort of "mass mailing". 

If you appreciate what these people have done for the US space program, thank them for it.  It's just that simple.

Thanks for your time.

CME

*BUMP!*

This particular feature, Burns Cliff, is on the schedule for Opportunity to examine before attempting to depart Endurance crater. 

Apparently they've saved the best for last.

Be careful what you wish for.   :;):

The idea that the propulsion systems on both probes malfunctioned is hokum.  Even if it could conceivably have gone out in the same fashion on both probes at once, they  haven't lost enough fuel to execute the maneuver. 

No, something unexpected is retarding their progress.

If they were still travelling at their original speeds, I'd say the idea of drag from the heliopause was ridiculous, too.  However, these probes are only travelling at a few kilometers per second.  It's become relatively easy to nudge their course compared to how they behaved in the inner solar system.  I don't think it's that, though.  This is a cumulative effect; this anomalous force has been acting on the probes for a long time, probably since before they cleared the solar system.

I think it's either a problem with our idea of gravity or a problem with our idea of what energy is actually available in our solar system and its neighborhood, and my guess is the latter.  I can't see why General Relativity would work on both our local scale and the scale of the universe at large but not just outside Pluto's orbit.  However, I could see how some vast error in accounting for the sun's energy budget would do that.  Energy creates gravity, but which way the vector points depends on the energy source.  Maybe there's some aspect of the Sun's structure that we don't know about, or haven't accounted for because it doesn't match the tiny trickle we see on its surface, that is nudging gravity at a funny angle out there at Pioneer 10. 

Then again, maybe Pioneer 10 has become snagged by a passing epicycle.        There's no telling at this point.

If NASA won't get off of it and send a probe to check this out, ESA needs to.  I've always wanted to see Pluto and Charon.  This anomaly is just one more good excuse.

Caution: Pedantic, off-topic ranting ramble follows.

An increasing general laziness and false entitlement are indeed rotting out the modern workforce.  However, these are just symptoms of the real problems, not root causes.  The real problems are overpopulation (which magnifies every minor defect), shortsightedness, and greed. 

Unenlightened greed is more insidious than merely attempting to gouge workers and suck up resources.  It has corrupted the very theoretical foundations of economics.

For example, consider the fate of time-and-a-half paid overtime.

For an employee, computing your pay with overtime is fairly simple (though getting less & less familiar to the average worker).  For the employer, it's a little more complicated because you have to pay all of your employees.  However, the boss's job is made simpler by the fact that each employee's job task (in theory) only takes a certain number of man-hours per pay period to accomplish.  Putting double the number of employees on any given job should half the time needed to do it.  Employees must compute their paychecks in real time, but employers can accurately project their payrolls in man-hours.  This is advantageous to the employers, because if they can just assign enough employees to a job, they can reduce the real time needed to do it below the level where they need to pay anyone overtime.  This is cheaper.  The employer gets the same amount of work done, but only pays the base wage to get it done. 

In theory, this is how all jobs should be managed.  It's better to throw more people at a problem than it is to throw more money.  Any overtime paid reflects a problem in management or workforce.  Overtime preferrably shouldn't even be allowed.  The equations say so!   

That's the theory, anyway. 

In reality, all economic terms have a margin of error.  Saying that one intends to manage a task so that no overtime is required is really saying that one intends to micromanage every fifteen minute segment of every worker's day like a switch-toting schoolmarm.  This erodes morale, and builds an expectation that the boss and/or company will step in and solve any problems an employee won't. 

Just flatly denying overtime also erodes morale.  It creates an entire workforce where half the employees are thinking "Gee, if I could just stay at this for just fifteen more minutes, I wouldn't be set back by an hour tomorrow morning," and the other half are thinking, "I'll just do it tomorrow, since nothing I do makes a difference to my workload anyway."  Small amounts of overtime claimed on their own initiative are an indication that employees are actually concerned about doing their jobs.  Denying them implies that employees can't make a difference or that the job itself isn't important enough to bother.  It also promotes clock watching, which degrades efficiencies still further.

Cost efficiency isn't necessarily cost efficient.  But there's an entire school of business management that says this sort of thing is exactly what we need.  Just go to Walmart, the world's largest employer at this time, and ask around.

If you think this isn't an insidious problem, ask yourself the following:  Would you, as an employer, prefer to save several hundred thousand dollars in overtime, or spend that extra money just to have that one mission-critical bolt tightend on your company's next $50 million communications satellite that wouldn't be tightened if your technician can't spend 30 extra minutes at work before his two week vacation?  You might be surprised at how many greedy bastards would pick the first option.

To get to Mars in a week, you'd need to accelerate at nearly Mars surface gravity - 0.3 G's.  That's not possible.  But one month of accelerating at 0.003 G's might be done if you had the right electric propulsion.  It would require some really big engines, but the crew quarters could be reduced to a tiny little speck. 

PS:  I wonder if  we can replace the capsule egress with a sardine can key?  Think of the mass savings.  :;):

My guess: It won't work for this app, but don't throw away the cocktail napkin sketches just yet.

Orbit to surface microwave transmission losses due to the atmosphere occur mostly because of ionization in the air.  Creating an ionized "shield" between the transmitter and rectenna is unlikely to help. 

However, those ions are potentially useful.  What about adapting Nicholas Tesla's idea of atmospheric power transmission and using the ion trail itself to conduct electricity?  Keep enough power flowing down the pipe, and you won't need the laser anymore.

Actually, my limited experience with catastrophic ruptures in high pressure storage tanks is that they act more like rocket engines than bombs.  With the inertia of an entire vehicle, the passengers would survive long enough to be launched.

The end would suck, but the ride would be spectacular.