Nonsense. It takes a huge amount of energy to drop back down the gravity well to Mars three days out of Earth, and another huge amount to get back up and back onto a trans-martian orbital trajectory. Secondly the martian environment is massively different from the moon. For example, a lunar lander isn't going to work on Mars, what with the much higher gravity, much higher arrival speed, oh yes and the atmosphere. There's no benefit whatsoever in stopping at the moon on the way, and anyone who says different either doesn't know what they're talking about or is a moron.
Not a cat in hell's chance; an attempt at a manned Mars mission won't happen this side of 2050. And I still haven't had any takers on that bet. *shrug*
Microsoft is the result of a diabolical conspiracy to take over the world.
Honestly, what world do you come from? It must be nice there.... It's... ok, I guess... blue sky, green grass, you know, the usual. So... you're not just talking about selling lots of software through evil an amoral business practices. You're advancing the notion that Gates and Ballmer want to enslave the whole of humanity beneath the iron heel of Clippy domination. Son... you need to get out of your basement more often, not to mention seek professional help. And this is card-carrying FSF member speaking, so you KNOW you got problems...
If you're claiming that Vista is a diabolical conspiracy to take over the world, I think that proves my point about the inevitability of cock-up triumphing over conspiracy.
As it happens, I still have this article bookmarked from when it was posted to Slashdot - oh hey look, it was just over a year ago. At the time I thought: oh sure, I remember hearing this six months before Windows 2000 came out, too. Now... now I'm starting to dream the impossible dream. Could 2008 really be the year of Linux on the desktop? Ten years after I started using Linux regularly as a lowly web developer peon, I'm now high enough up my employer's org that I can make a serious case for looking at Linux for some selected end-users (on top of the developers and network admins already on it), on a combination of cost and security (or rather, the cost of securing, and then managing, them.) I think the tide's turned. Despite their emerging strategy to start vapouring up the next version of Windows which will fix all the problems with Vista, honest it will, there are at least two or three clear years ahead for Canonical, Red Hat and hell, even Novell if they pull their fingers out to actually start making real inroads into the corporate market. My guess is that home users will be amongst the last segments to switch; partly because home users don't generally depreciate their machines over three years, so a longer upgrade cycle, and partly because they need a toy to play games on.
Alan Shepard hit over 11g during re-entry, and he didn't pass out and could still hit switches. Yeah? Well Chuck Norris could hit 12G and wouldn't need to hit the switches, he'd just look at them and they'd switch themselves out of pure fear.
Exactly... 1971, the last fatality in a Soyuz capsule. How many fatal accidents have the US had since 1971?
Did you ever read up on how close STS-1 came to disaster? Go look at some footage of John Young at the post-landing press conference. Seem a little perky? No wonder, he's just flown the thing in manually after the aerodynamic models failed to predict the hypersonic airflow at re-entry correctly. The point of degeneracy (the hottest spot, right on the nose cone) moved off to the side of the orbiter, the sideslip meter pegged at off-scale high at +4 (twice the maximum expected value), at which point Young took manual control and flew Columbia back to Florida himself. Oh yeah, and a bug in the aerodynamic body flap forced it all the way upwards during the launch, which should have wrecked the hydraulics. Young also said afterwards that had they known that was happening, they'd have flown to SRB separation and ejected. Don't get me started on the manual override of an error condition that the textbook said would result in the orbiter ditching in the eastern Atlantic, which was not expected to be a survivable accident. A ground controller decided the signal was spurious, overrode it, and waited to hear if an SSME exploded...
Anyway - the Soyuz 11 accident was in fact caused by a first-flight glitch; although Soyuz was proven design by then, this was the first mission to Salyut 1, the forerunner of Mir. (Arguably the lineage of the ISS runs straight back to Salyut 1, but that's another tangent.)
Story submitter here... I used 300 miles because the NASA press release (the second link in the story) says:
"The landing was approximately 295 miles from the expected landing site" ...which I rounded to 300 to try to make the story sound more exciting than it really is, just in order to flatter my inadequate sense of identity and self-esteem. Little did I reckon on the elite mental arithmetic of the Slashdot readership! I hang my head in shame.
The US hasn't had a man-rated traditional stack since the last Apollo in 1976, but the next-gen Ares launcher will be a traditional inline design with the payload at the top. That, plus the lack of enormous asymmetrical control and lifting surfaces required for (some value of) atmospheric flight pretty much eliminates the sources of danger caused by the shuttle design.
OTOH, the somewhat... controversial? decision to make the Ares first stage an adaption of the existing shuttle solid rocket boosters is proving rather problematic, owing to the well-known pogo oscillation modthrusterse problems of SRBs. (that's just a random story that popped up on google, no doubt there are much better overviews elsewhere.) Basically as designed the vehicle would crush the crew to jelly with high frequency +/1 70G vertical oscillations (shortly before the entire stack shakes itself to pieces.) (This wasn't a problem on the shuttle because there are two SRBs coupled through the external tank.)
Anyway, in a few years' time we'll be able to start comparing the safety of like with like.
No-one outside the space geek community seems to have noticed, but the Ariane-V launched ATV cargo vessel (payload: ~20 tons) has now launched human flight-rated hardware (the ATV, now docked to ISS), albeit without humans in it when it went off. I suspect there are some interesting things being doodled on napkins at cafes and bars all over Darmstadt.
They might well stand up to threats pleas and bribes from my employer to take it down if I started up an insider's whistle-blowing blog all about how FooCo's riddled with corruption, makes dangerous products for children and supplies the directors with cocaine and prostitutes on tap; however that wouldn't be much help for me when they fired my ass when they work out who's doing it. So this is a sort of supply-side freedom (or server-side, if you will) - fine and dandy 'cept that we need a client-side equivalent. Yeah yeah, tor, proxies,.. there are plenty of other ways to deduce things like "who knows about this stuff and does not stand to lose big if it comes out?" and such.
No-one's lost their life on a Soyuz vehicle since 1971, and they're still flying today. They should have a sign up outside Baikonur... "Safety is #1! [ 37 ] years since a fatal accident".
And of course NASA are switching back to a traditional geometry for Ares / CEV, the Shuttle replacement. Oh and goodness, me, ESA just launched a pressurised, man-rated vehicle which is now part of the ISS on an Ariane 5. Goodness, that ATV sure is a neat looking bit of kit; stick a small thruster on the back and you've got something that could spend a few years slowly chugging out to Mars with tens of tons of payload, rather than half a ton making the journey in six months. I don't think a manned Mars mission will ever happen, but I guarantee you the people are doodling sample return and manned orbital missions in cafes all round Darmstadt...
Right, but my point (which I must have expressed in too trollish a manner) was that vehicles that move in the air are called aircraft. Once they've launched something into orbit, then they can call themselves a spaceport. Otherwise it's like the sign on Del Trotter's van "New York Paris Tokyo Peckham"...
The idea of reusable space craft just makes more sense. Maybe it will make sense one day when materials science is up to the job, and building and flying novel engine and aeroshell stacks straight off the simulator is down pat, but for now straight stacks with the payload at the top is the hands-down winner on all counts that matter except "how cool it looks" (which, admittedly, has a non-zero value.) However ask the families of those who've lost their lives on the Shuttle where through accidents that wouldn't have happened on a conventional launcher/lander whether the eye-candy's worth the cost or not. And as for the dollar costs... don't even go there.
"Spaceport America"... puh-lease. They're doing atmospheric tests on a 1/5 scale model flying with either solid rockets or most likely small conventional turbines, validating aerodynamics of a aerospace equivalent of a concept car. And that vehicle ladies and gentlemen is an AIRcraft, and that big ol patch of concrete is an AIRport.
This post brought to you courtesy of Grumpy Friday [tm]. Bah! Humbug!!
The Gustloff wasn't a civilian vessel at the time it was sunk, and it was sunk by U boats not through shipwreck.
"During Operation Hannibal, while evacuating German soldiers, U-boat personnel, and refugees trapped by the Red Army in East Prussia, she was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea" - Wikipedia.
Predictably (but reprehensibly) an overloaded Philippine ferry going down doesn't cause much by way of press over here, which is probably why I'd forgotten it: thanks for the reminder. TBH the one that exercised a really horrible fascination for me was the Estonia in '94... having been on a lot of North Sea and Irish Sea/Atlantic ferries, my overactive imagination runs away with me... gave me more than a few sleepless nights. That and the Kursk... *shudder*
If you know of a greater loss of life in a civilian ship sinking (not counting the Lusitania and suchlike) in the last 150 years, I'd be interested to hear about it. The fact that she was a hugely prestigious vessel on her maiden voyage and carrying hundreds of the social elite of the day also helps.
I want to say I'm on Apple's side on this one (they should get to say "only on Macs"), but a big part of me hates all the crazy restrictions in EULAs and I'm sure if Apple wasn't in a minority position I'd be crying foul over that clause as monopolistic. +1 insightful. Cognitive dissonance: you want something rewarding (teh shiney! lovely lovely Apple hardware), but at the same time you know it would be showing support for someone who's doing the Wrong Thing. And that my friend is what we call a moral dilemma. Shiny but wrong? Second best, but right? We all make that call a million times a day and we all make at least some tiny compromises with our ideals for the sake of convenience. (Apart from RMS, of course.)
I think there's a happy medium whereby if someone demonstrably can't do their job, they can be fired for failing (that's pretty much the UK system.) What sucks is that not failing requires dedicating one's working life to making other people rich - no matter how much you enjoy what it is you do that makes them so rich.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no more chance of any significant "expansion" of manned activity in space than there is of building cities in Antarctica.
Nonsense. It takes a huge amount of energy to drop back down the gravity well to Mars three days out of Earth, and another huge amount to get back up and back onto a trans-martian orbital trajectory. Secondly the martian environment is massively different from the moon. For example, a lunar lander isn't going to work on Mars, what with the much higher gravity, much higher arrival speed, oh yes and the atmosphere. There's no benefit whatsoever in stopping at the moon on the way, and anyone who says different either doesn't know what they're talking about or is a moron.
Not a cat in hell's chance; an attempt at a manned Mars mission won't happen this side of 2050. And I still haven't had any takers on that bet. *shrug*
If you're claiming that Vista is a diabolical conspiracy to take over the world, I think that proves my point about the inevitability of cock-up triumphing over conspiracy.
As it happens, I still have this article bookmarked from when it was posted to Slashdot - oh hey look, it was just over a year ago. At the time I thought: oh sure, I remember hearing this six months before Windows 2000 came out, too. Now... now I'm starting to dream the impossible dream. Could 2008 really be the year of Linux on the desktop? Ten years after I started using Linux regularly as a lowly web developer peon, I'm now high enough up my employer's org that I can make a serious case for looking at Linux for some selected end-users (on top of the developers and network admins already on it), on a combination of cost and security (or rather, the cost of securing, and then managing, them.) I think the tide's turned. Despite their emerging strategy to start vapouring up the next version of Windows which will fix all the problems with Vista, honest it will, there are at least two or three clear years ahead for Canonical, Red Hat and hell, even Novell if they pull their fingers out to actually start making real inroads into the corporate market. My guess is that home users will be amongst the last segments to switch; partly because home users don't generally depreciate their machines over three years, so a longer upgrade cycle, and partly because they need a toy to play games on.
It was bollocks when you said this earlier and it's bollocks now. A mission which does not kill the crew is a success.
[Citation needed.] You are astonishingly badly mistaken.
Oh dear, +5 informative and no-one's noticed that figure's fantasy. No-one's died on a Soyuz since 1971.
Did you ever read up on how close STS-1 came to disaster? Go look at some footage of John Young at the post-landing press conference. Seem a little perky? No wonder, he's just flown the thing in manually after the aerodynamic models failed to predict the hypersonic airflow at re-entry correctly. The point of degeneracy (the hottest spot, right on the nose cone) moved off to the side of the orbiter, the sideslip meter pegged at off-scale high at +4 (twice the maximum expected value), at which point Young took manual control and flew Columbia back to Florida himself. Oh yeah, and a bug in the aerodynamic body flap forced it all the way upwards during the launch, which should have wrecked the hydraulics. Young also said afterwards that had they known that was happening, they'd have flown to SRB separation and ejected. Don't get me started on the manual override of an error condition that the textbook said would result in the orbiter ditching in the eastern Atlantic, which was not expected to be a survivable accident. A ground controller decided the signal was spurious, overrode it, and waited to hear if an SSME exploded...
Anyway - the Soyuz 11 accident was in fact caused by a first-flight glitch; although Soyuz was proven design by then, this was the first mission to Salyut 1, the forerunner of Mir. (Arguably the lineage of the ISS runs straight back to Salyut 1, but that's another tangent.)
As a matter of fact, two-third of the crew were women.
The US hasn't had a man-rated traditional stack since the last Apollo in 1976, but the next-gen Ares launcher will be a traditional inline design with the payload at the top. That, plus the lack of enormous asymmetrical control and lifting surfaces required for (some value of) atmospheric flight pretty much eliminates the sources of danger caused by the shuttle design.
OTOH, the somewhat... controversial? decision to make the Ares first stage an adaption of the existing shuttle solid rocket boosters is proving rather problematic, owing to the well-known pogo oscillation modthrusterse problems of SRBs. (that's just a random story that popped up on google, no doubt there are much better overviews elsewhere.) Basically as designed the vehicle would crush the crew to jelly with high frequency +/1 70G vertical oscillations (shortly before the entire stack shakes itself to pieces.) (This wasn't a problem on the shuttle because there are two SRBs coupled through the external tank.)
Anyway, in a few years' time we'll be able to start comparing the safety of like with like.
No-one outside the space geek community seems to have noticed, but the Ariane-V launched ATV cargo vessel (payload: ~20 tons) has now launched human flight-rated hardware (the ATV, now docked to ISS), albeit without humans in it when it went off. I suspect there are some interesting things being doodled on napkins at cafes and bars all over Darmstadt.
No - !! Not the... comfy packets?!?
They might well stand up to threats pleas and bribes from my employer to take it down if I started up an insider's whistle-blowing blog all about how FooCo's riddled with corruption, makes dangerous products for children and supplies the directors with cocaine and prostitutes on tap; however that wouldn't be much help for me when they fired my ass when they work out who's doing it. So this is a sort of supply-side freedom (or server-side, if you will) - fine and dandy 'cept that we need a client-side equivalent. Yeah yeah, tor, proxies,.. there are plenty of other ways to deduce things like "who knows about this stuff and does not stand to lose big if it comes out?" and such.
No-one's lost their life on a Soyuz vehicle since 1971, and they're still flying today. They should have a sign up outside Baikonur... "Safety is #1! [ 37 ] years since a fatal accident". And of course NASA are switching back to a traditional geometry for Ares / CEV, the Shuttle replacement. Oh and goodness, me, ESA just launched a pressurised, man-rated vehicle which is now part of the ISS on an Ariane 5. Goodness, that ATV sure is a neat looking bit of kit; stick a small thruster on the back and you've got something that could spend a few years slowly chugging out to Mars with tens of tons of payload, rather than half a ton making the journey in six months. I don't think a manned Mars mission will ever happen, but I guarantee you the people are doodling sample return and manned orbital missions in cafes all round Darmstadt...
Right, but my point (which I must have expressed in too trollish a manner) was that vehicles that move in the air are called aircraft. Once they've launched something into orbit, then they can call themselves a spaceport. Otherwise it's like the sign on Del Trotter's van "New York Paris Tokyo Peckham"...
This post brought to you courtesy of Grumpy Friday [tm]. Bah! Humbug!!
The Gustloff wasn't a civilian vessel at the time it was sunk, and it was sunk by U boats not through shipwreck. "During Operation Hannibal, while evacuating German soldiers, U-boat personnel, and refugees trapped by the Red Army in East Prussia, she was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea" - Wikipedia. Predictably (but reprehensibly) an overloaded Philippine ferry going down doesn't cause much by way of press over here, which is probably why I'd forgotten it: thanks for the reminder. TBH the one that exercised a really horrible fascination for me was the Estonia in '94... having been on a lot of North Sea and Irish Sea/Atlantic ferries, my overactive imagination runs away with me... gave me more than a few sleepless nights. That and the Kursk... *shudder*
If you know of a greater loss of life in a civilian ship sinking (not counting the Lusitania and suchlike) in the last 150 years, I'd be interested to hear about it. The fact that she was a hugely prestigious vessel on her maiden voyage and carrying hundreds of the social elite of the day also helps.
I'm running Mandriva BTW :)
I think there's a happy medium whereby if someone demonstrably can't do their job, they can be fired for failing (that's pretty much the UK system.) What sucks is that not failing requires dedicating one's working life to making other people rich - no matter how much you enjoy what it is you do that makes them so rich.
They're not incompatible; they're counting different things.