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Energiya Pushes For A 6-Person Space Capsule

Posted by timothy on from the isn't-funded-'til-it's-funded dept.

voss writes "Apparently the Russians want to build their own reusable capsule called the Clipper that can be used up to 25 times and can fit 6 people. They also say they can build their ship in 5 years. The key here is if they can get the funding. The shuttle will be retired in 2010 and with no credible replacement on the horizon...why doesn't NASA give the Russians a chance?"

16 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. first liberal post by DanThe1Man · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    anybody but Bush in 04!

  2. Sure, it seats 6 people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    But what about the trunk room? And does it have 4 wheel drive?

  3. John "Eff-ing" Kerry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    KERRY CALLED SECRET SERVICE AGENT 'SON OF A B*TCH' AFTER SLOPE SPILL

    Dem presidential candidate John Kerry called his secret service agent a "son of a bitch" after the agent inadvertently moved into his path during a ski mishap in Idaho, sending Kerry falling into the snow.

    When asked a moment later about the incident by a reporter on the ski run, Kerry said sharply, "I don't fall down," the "son of a b*itch knocked me over."

    The Secret Service agent in question has complained about Kerry's treatment, top sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.

    Last month, Kerry began receiving Secret Service protection.

    "Obviously, the complications and burden of being monitored 24-hours a day is not just an a simple inconvenience," a government source explained Friday. "But Senator Kerry should understand agents are working for his safety and well-being."

    On Friday, Kerry, his snowboard strapped to his back, hiked past 9,000 feet on Durrance Peak, then snowboarded down the mountain, taking repeated tumbles. Reporters counted six falls, although Kerry was out of sight for part of the descent.

  4. OMG LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    YO

  5. AMERICANS! Get your act together! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    The article states that the Australian authorities are unable to charge him, indicating that he has done nothing illegal in his country of residence and the country where the act was carried out (Australian server,.au domain). Many Americans have "broken Norwegian law", by allowing Norwegians to download hardcore porn from American servers. Should they all be extradited? Your country and laws are not above anybody elses. The fact that some of you clearly think so sickens and frightens me. If we are to go by the logic put forth by some of you, we should all be extradited to China (if not North Korea)... Sure you want that?

  6. this actually is bad if not specified correctly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I think its great that Microsoft includes basic functionality like a media player, word processor, calculator, internet browser, etc.

    I hope that we all realize that the PROBLEM lies in preventing the uninstallation of said items without "crippling" the OS.

    I think MS should be allowed to include whatever they want, as long as the no-install/uninstall option is there and its real (as in really uninstalls the files, not just "hiding" them).

    Why can't Microsoft see how easy it would be to fix this? But then again, that sort of tunnel vision is what has gotten them into the hot water they are in.

  7. Article Repost by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    One of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for GNAA/Linux is the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, and it has no GUI -- instead it aims to start from a simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.

    LilyPond is the result of several years of work by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. In this extensive interview, GNAA/Linux Musician's Chris Cannam talks to them about recent and future directions for the project.

    Chris: I recently found a file of music examples I had printed out from LilyPond, probably in 1998. The LilyPond printouts looked less professional than they would be today, but many of the capabilities of today's software were in place. What have you been doing for the last six years?

    Han-Wen: About five years ago we were working up to release 1.0. Our target was to have a usable program that could produce basic music notation, where we defined "basic" as "whatever is in our set of simple test pieces", and usable was "will not dump core, mostly."

    We succeeded, but of course it didn't work very well for things that weren't in our test-pieces. By that time, we were also reaching the bounds of what was possible in our model of notation, an object-oriented model, hard-coded in C++. So we decided to integrate the GNU's GUILE library, a Scheme interpreter which was specifically designed to extend programs. We spent the next two to three years refactoring our C++ code into Scheme functions. This resulted in a more flexible, more efficient and better maintainable program.

    "We knew what 'publication quality' engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that."

    The second big change was catalyzed by an invitation to join a workshop in Firenze, Italy, organized by Nicola Bernardini of AGNULA fame, then director of Centro Tempo Reale. At the workshop we met Nicola, a few top-notch engravers, and an editor for Universal Edition, an Austrian publisher that does a lot of contemporary music. We had the chance to discuss LilyPond with several experts. On the one hand, we were thrilled that they took us seriously, but on the other hand they pointed to several inadequacies in our output. We arrived back home a great deal wiser.

    We knew what "publication quality" engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that. Since we like hand-engraved music, we started reproducing simple pieces in LilyPond and comparing the output side-by-side. By doing close comparisons, we learned how music should really look, and we fixed all the deficiencies that we found.

    In anything that you write, there will always be a neat, simple, small idea that is obscured by crufty implementation, bad design or suboptimal algorithms. According to me, the real art of programming is recognizing the neat idea, and being ruthless enough to redo all the other bad bits. Since we're writing new code all the time, we also have continue to refactoring everything, and this how we have spent the last few years: coding new stuff, and refactoring old stuff.

    We also did a lot with the documentation. Some of our users complain about the current documentation, and they're probably right, but what we have now is light-years ahead of the manual a few years ago.

    Your website features an essay on music typesetting that is quite critical of other software, with an entertaining piece of bad typesetting from Finale. You make an effort to explain that it isn't just an exceptional example -- but surely if programs like Finale and Sibelius are so widely used by good musicians, they can't really be that bad?

    The default output of Finale is indeed shockingly bad, which is why almost all other vendors routinely compare their packages to Finale. Of course, that's why we use it too. The default layout of Sibelius is not very elegant, but at least it's usable. A Sibelius sampl

  8. Certified SMTP Hosts. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    What would work well is SSL certified SMTP relays. If every valid SMTP relay needed an SSL certificate then, If spam was sent their SSL certificate could easily be rejected. And hosts that didn't have one at all could just be dropped.

    SSL certificates are costly, and that limits everyone from having one. However, there is no reason the Open Source community could not make up our own root certficate, and have an SMTP SSL certificate signing organization. Where we verify the authenticity of someone before we give them a cert. For a small fee to cover costs. It wouldn't be like we'd have to convince Netscape, Microsoft, Apple and whoever else makes a browser to include the cert. It'd just need to be available for people hosting servers to download.

    Yes, this would mean rejecting massive amounts of email to begin with. Maybe some intern solution could be thought of as people move over to it?

    Ideas? Comments?

  9. Starbucks sells coffee? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I always thought they were selling milk, sugar and "lifestyle" with some kind of dark caffeinated substance occasionally thrown in.

  10. Spyware and its legal status by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    While I find spam as annoying as the next person, I'm more interested in the legal status of spyware. What are the rights of the individual when he visits a site? What rights to the individual's machine does the site have? Is permanently altering a user's browser a legal operation? What constitutes permission with regard to this type of manipulation?

  11. Meanwhile, MySQL does transactions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Meanwhile, MySQL is now doing transactions, and VIEWs are on their way in 5.1. It's GPL, so it's free (as in speech).

    --Mike--

  12. Re:What ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    MS SQL Server's "corporate" competitor is Oracle 9i. Oracle will beat a SQL Server hands down in any scenario unless it is a small database system, if that's the case there's no point using SQL Server, you can use MSDE or any freeware product. Postgres (last time when I had a look at it under Windows) runs on top of Cygwin and horrendously slow unlike its Unix-compatible brother. MySQL can be used but what's the point if you have already decided to use a toy database, you shouldn't use SQL Server, go and use MSDE instead, or Access. Most used MySQL is 3.x family and it used to not support lots of features (all changed in 4.x but are we being adventorous today?).

    Unfortunately, as far as I can see (and my idea will be readily disputed by others) no OSS database is ready for "enterprise" systems (whatever that means, I work in a company who writes software and the backend can be any RDMBS as long as they have a decend JDBC driver). SQL Server 2k has lots of missing features which makes our life very hard and I'm not a fan but at the moment I can't go to any of our customers and say use postgres or mySQL etc.

    Another big player is DB2 by IBM which claims it has the fastest database on the world but DB2 is cumbersome, hard to manage compared to Oracle and MS SQL2k but it works almost under any platform under the sun.

    Database world is quite interesting, I can't say any RDMS system out there is perfect.

  13. Re:Why not give the russians a chance? by The+Snowman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I can think of a LOT of reasons.

    Such as...?

    The first thing that comes to my mind is that while Russia is now a democracy, they are still communist. Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his... oh, he is still technically alive? Crap.

    --
    24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
  14. First prime factorization post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    2010 = 2 * 3 * 5 * 67

  15. No, I don't have a girlfriend by SweetAndSourJesus · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    but I am going to try that on the next female I come in contact with.

    --

    --
    the strongest word is still the word "free"
  16. Re:Race for Mars? by eille-la · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    dont expect better moderating from slashdot users. slashdot also have his own crowd of "joe sixpack" average which is of course not the same as the one of a country, but it still exist (in majority!). i cant exactly describe how the popular slashdot "joe" moderate here, but the mod points wont be given with a total and deep (scientific) analysis of the post each time the Moderate button is pushed. for some heavier discutions you should visit something like kuro5hin.org (which i dont really well know), just a suggestion.

    something frustrating with slashdot is the non-scientific zealotry about things that are so much scientific themselves. programming languages for example. there was a story this week who bringed many discution about which programming language was for what. there was some post who explained really well the situations and they merited their score of 5. but many other 5 modded posts were really badly overrrated. thats bad.

    i think about a site who could make an inteligent and relatively neutral synthesis of important slashdot discutions, which slashdot story themselves could link once the story became read-only mode. a kind of strongly modetared and monitored WIKI of post discutions.