NASA To Try To Resume Flights By Fall

underground alliance writes "According to BBC News, space shuttle flights could resume as early as this fall. The article says that 'Engineers have been put on standby to fix problems already raised by the investigating board, and devise a way of checking the exterior shuttle for defects while it is in orbit.' I think that this is a good move especially since ISS construction has been put on hold because without the space shuttle. The space shuttle is the only heavy freighter and the only means of putting a new ISS component in space."

Comments

I know this is off topic, but..

[drfreak]

If these journalists weren't all buddies who also created most of slashdot, they would never have kept the job for so long with how fucking bad their grammar is.

Re:Two common sense things they can do now

[Flakeloaf]

1.Equip each shuttle with a little mini-satellite with a web cam they can use to take pictures of the underside.

2. Get science-savvy teenage girls between fourteen and eighteen to spacewalk on camera, rub the chests of their space suits and complain about how moody they are.

3. Solicit donations from lonely single guys on cam portals.

4. Use the proceeds to build a better shuttle.

Re:Stupud self-centric americans again

[meringuoid]

Are you people so stupid you don't release a full 50% of the planet considers "fall" to be exactly the opposite as you?

1) The southern hemisphere is mostly ocean. The vast majority of the human race lives in the north. They're not being so very self-centred on that count. But...

2) In a whole lot of places there aren't the traditional four seasons; instead there are two, dry and rainy. So they don't call it fall, because it isn't.

3) In a whole lot of other places most of the trees are coniferous. So they don't call it fall either, because the leaves don't.

4) Most people alive, even those with four seasons and deciduous forests, don't speak English, and so don't call it fall anyway.

5) Of those who do speak English, live in areas with a four-season climate and deciduous plant life, a whole lot STILL don't call it fall, they call it autumn.

flying by fall

[matt4077]

yeah, keep falling and try to miss the ground - and you're flying

Re:What??

[Ponty]

It verbs. English, like most human languages without verbs. Do you what I'?

(To the sticklers, the apostrophe there was beyond deliberate. :-)

--proper section--

I wish I was in a position to be a linguist or have one at hand and get a meaty grant to investigate language skills/usage/customs of the 'geek' community. Not just the superficial stuff like 'verbing' and strange mutations of english influenced by the structure and timing of Japanese and C, but the fundamental understandings of both the dynamics and structure of language. The relation of same to the specific mechanics is also fascinating to me. I have a friend who hates English for its constraints, but uses an intricate, nuanced implementation of the tongue that is highly effective when communicating with some, but impenetrable to those who are unable to contort their brains to see his logic.

To a non-trivial degree, I suspect that the homogenization and misuse of degree adjectives and verbs (amazing, wretched, awful, ultimate, amazing, best and need, hate, require) has contributed to a constriction of our basic ability to assign precise labels to concepts in our realm of internal representation. The net result of that is that language becomes less powerful as our denominations for thoughts all creep to the shrinkingly-available upper end of the spectrum. The longer this phenomenon continues without extraordinary and revolutionary (and consequently unpredictable) linguistic change, the more we will turn to jargonistic or degraded constructions away from the already-existing, currently-proven basic precepts.

The disappointment that I find in the trend is that those who should be most responsible for wrestling these trends to the ground and killing them (or at least giving them structure and harmony) are the ones with the most vested interest in promoting them. Those who are at risk of losing relevance can do the most damage to that for which they are responsible. (Parallels abound -- heck, look at the evolution of MS Word and Excel from good office tools to bloated monsters.) The current linguistic elite [word used not for its implications but for its meaning] requires fresh content and concept to justify their continued work. And, unfortunately for them and us, the pursuit of what I've come to call neo-archaism has been out of style since Eliot and the modernists rebelled against the prevailing school of thought and sparked the trend that that subordinated to integration of perception and amelioration of greater uncertainty the diversity of language. Interestingly, their efforts had precisely the opposite effect on the language, producing undermining effects that depopularized meaning and traditional structure in favor of the comprehensive powers of symbol and allusion. Not knowing much about the authors, I have to speculate about their responses to what they wrought. I can't but believe that Joyce would be all for the outcome (Finnegan's Wake has to be the climax of the trend!) But could Eliot, a man with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock rattling inside of him, be fully at ease with the careening path of postmodern deconstruction that he and his contemporaries set off? Whether a literary person or not, the average geek can't but be influenced by the inflation of pretension resulting from the relentless pursuit of "progress" by Academia. Unfortunately, the further you move from fundamentally sound structure, the more you have to resort to writing like de Lillo and Toni Morrison to fuel your self deception with novelty.

I have no idea how I got here, but that's how it goes. And there's a healthy chance that this is all bunk, as I really don't know enough about what I'm talking to properly base my speculations.

You know what's sad?

[Cyno]

I get about as much "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." from CNN as I do slashdot.