1) Does this kid need to learn his lession in jail? No, This kid is young.
No, he needs to have some time out in his room (20 minutes max) after which his mother should compliment him about how quiet he was during the time he spent there.
Then his father needs to hug him to reinforce the message that it was his actions that were bad, and it is not that he is bad personally....
To get to shuttle inclination from Russia's launch facility or to Soyuz inclination from Kennedy requires you to take the scenic route to orbit and no system currently has that much performance margin.
As I say the options are too many to rule them out. Here is yet another example: perhaps they can get rid of the Soyuz re-entry gear (heat shield, parachute, the works) and instead have a larger tank, which would allow a Soyuz to (a) reach a different orbit and (b) have enough fuel to reach the ISS after recovering the astronauts.
Is that really possible? I don't know, and in all likelihood not even the Russian engineers know right now as why would they ever consider not taking the parachute and heat shield up?
When Apollo 13 happened, NASA had to call the guys who actually built the things to determine how far could the hardware actually go. For example, many life pod circuits were not required to perform at subzero temperatures, and it was a question if they would power back up after a deep freeze and thaw cycle. They had to call up the designers and manufacturers to find out. Can the fuel tank in the Soyuz be enlarged if the parachute is taken out? We would have to ask the people who built the thing to know for sure. You see my point?
I was just pointing out the realsitic options where a lot fewer than you seemed to be indicating and had more problems than you seem to want to admit.
Sometimes all the naysayers see is the problems when an alternative is staring at them right in the face. There is this movie where some bad guys riding through the desert reach an unmanned toll gate. They wait for hours for somebody to show up and charge the fee, when they could have easily ridden around the gate. The scene illustrates our natural ability to focus on the obstacle while ignoring the alternatives.
I have no doubt that the rescue was by all means non-trivial, and that the attempts to rescue could well have failed, but based on my intuition and experience I believe there was enough time and options to make at least two attempts at a rescue, one of them being, of course, the Atlantis.
I'm also privy to the fact that all the Progresses and Soyuzes in the pipeline are spoken for
Boy! I'm amazed by the depth of your thought. I would had never considered such an unsurmountable technical difficulty! And of course none of the proposed users of the Soyuz and Progress would willingly delay their launch to save the lives of seven astrounats whose plight has captured the world's attention.
with neither seating for a crew nor a heat shield and recovery system for landing anything safely.
And of course, using the progress to ferry to the ISS is not an option, they must reenter. Why? because AC here cannot come up with the alternative, sorry folks you are SOL up there.
that Columbia was not carrying a docking adapter so people could be transferred.
and without a docking adapter nothing could have possibly been rigged to make the connection. you are right again!
Your nonsense about recycling an Apollo capsule is just that, nonsense.
I was just throwing one more possibility on the table, not suggesting that an Apollo rescue was a done deal. The point is to illustrate that there are so many options, whose performance can be stretched to such an extent, that its idiotic to state that a rescue was impossible.
Furthermore, from the number of available choices chances are, at least one could have been made to work.
We have ten different choices to attempt a resupply the shuttle: ariadne, progress, soyuz, ISS scape pod, titan, atlas, long march and brazilean rocket and the shuttle atlantis.
Of those, six could have been used to attempt a rescue, either by reentry of by transfer to the ISS.
The number of options is sufficiently large, that the odds were in favout of a rescue.
How would you know? Are you privy to the actual design specs of a Progress to assert that it cannot have reached the shuttle under any circumstances?
Do you have a direct line to the Chinese space program to know exactly how many capsules they have in ready-to-launch mode and the exact limits of their reach on an emergency basis (as opposed to day-to-day) use?
Say, if you ask me how long it takes me to design you a web site, I'd say a couple of months. But if your life depended on it, I could have it ready in two days. That is a ratio of 30 in performance between day-to-day and emergency use.
Another example, I would never ride my expensive racing bike more than 100 yards on a dirt road, but if your life depended on it, I'm sure it can take 100 miles on it even though the carbon alloy rims would likely be untrue by the end of the day and would have to be replaced. That is over a factor of 1000 between day-to-day use and emergency use.
To recap, there are too many alternatives, each of whose, the limits of performance are much beyond day to day use (see Apollo 13, which operated using less than 10% of the normal power consumption).
intresting notion but progress can't make Shuttle's primary orbit which is where Columbia was. That is the reason for ISS's odd orbit, it is the compromise position between shuttles ability and soyuz.
Wrong. Progress cannot reach Shuttle's orbit on normal, day-to-day operations, but in an emergency, only Progress engineers know for sure if it could be stretched to reach the Shuttle.
To give an example that is familiar to all of us, the lunar module was most certainly not designed to house three astronauts moving around (in places the walls of the module where literally tin-foil thin), yet in a pinch it was used thus, and saved the lives of Lowell and his crew.
Escape pod in the SS ???? What the hell are you talking about ?
There is a Soyuz capsule in the ISS for use as an escape pod.
Certainly there was no ready made escape for them like send another shuttle but simply pointing out difficulties does not get you any closer to proving impossibility. The rescue of Apollo 13 looked equally impossible at the beginning, yet they pulled it off.
not even talk about the fact the quesiton of who the hell would fly it.
Actually Apollo astrounats reported that it was reasonably close to flying an airplane and reported good success on it (as opposed to the lunar module, which was a lot more difficult to handle). The Shuttle had, count'em four extremely profficient pilots (two test pilots, Israeli air force ace Ilan Ramon and US air force flight instructor Michael Anderson).
To launch Atlantis you risked having two injured birds and even more crew loss
Again you confuse normal operation with emergency use. I bet it is possible to launch the Atlantis with a crew of two and an escape pod in its cargo bay, thus ensuring that, at the very least, the two rescue astrounats could return safely back to earth, even if the Atlantis suffered the same damage (which is unlikely as foam separation was mostly an old shuttle problem).
BS. Once the breach had been identified, any number of out-of-the-box solutions could have been worked out to go and rescue the astrounats... E.g.
- resuply with a Progress ship - rescue with a Long March - send space-age duct tape with an Atlas - send more fuel to the escape pod in the SS, then use the scape pod to ferry astrounats from the shuttle to the SS - dust off an Apollo re-entry capsule from the Smithsonian and send it on an Ariadne 5 to be used as re-entry pod
and on and on... With so many options available chances are we could have found a way...
Look, the reference to the GPL in the original posting only makes sense in the context of Linux and other open source software. Distributing GPL software does not stop you from claiming other legal rights in non-GPL related software.
6. Actually it may be a good idea to have abstract one-syllable names like "bin" and "etc".
I knew there would be an idiot who would defend the arcane/var,/etc,/bin convention. Because you see, half of the/.ers start from the assumption that *nix is perfect.
If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book,
Sure, and if the slides are awful one shouldn't use them either. However (1) slides are usually prepared by somebody other than the author and (2) what the professor _says_ is still a lot more than what is written on the slide.
I agree that certain things should be done live on the board to get the true feel of it. By the same token, other things such as animations of an algorithm or the chart of a function are much better understood from a computer presentation (you never truly "get" a taylor series approximation until you see each the approximations overlaid on the original function. It is also quite striking how good the approximation is for very few terms).
It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us.
The don't do that simply because books are meant to be read on your own, but PP slides have been designed to be used, guess what, in front of an audience.
If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic, embellish them with well thought out colours and charts, made expensive animations, why would that be inferior to some slides put together by the prof for the exact same purpose?
In my CS classes, the teachers HAD PREPARED their own notes, and the textbook was just a reference (sometimes obscure).
This is just an inane "grumpy old man" grudge. The fact that it was that way when you went to school does not mean its better. When I went to school we had chalkboard, does that mean professors shouldn't use now whiteboards instead? of course not.
Yes, when you went to school professors had to prepare their own notes. So??
As to my attitude, school becomes more and more expensive every year
Look, if school expensive then complain about the friggin tuition fees instead of taking it out on the use of PP slides.
Erh, believe me, if the professor wasn't needed on top of the slides, he wouldn't be standing there, sonny. Surely s/he'd rather be in his office surfing the web for pr0n^H^H^H^H research material than stand up in front of students with an attitude like yours.
By the way, have you ever thought about the fact that most courses use textbooks RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER, instead of in-house notes? Why is it acceptable for the textbook but not for the PP slides?
In practice the most common thing I've seen is throw together whatever you have and take it to market, then clean up code afterwards (insert obligatory snide comments about Microsoft here).
The biggest problem is that business patents essentially open up patenting ideas, which you are not supposed to be able to. Over a hundred years ago, you actually needed to build one of your gadgets and bring it to the patent office to be able to patent it. This became unpractical and the USPTO allowed diagrams instead. But now I can walk up to the patent office and patent the idea of using computers for selling sex services over the internet and it would get a green light as a 'business method' patent.
In reality the hard part of selling sex over the net is coming up with the actual mechanical interface (ick!). That is what is worthy of patent protection.
Ditto for one-click purchase. This is trivial. What is not trivial is coming and should be patentable is a specific method for tracking state using a cookie with enough security features to make it fool proof.
A few years back when Grid computing was all the rage we sat down with some investment partners and worked out the figures. We came pretty much to the same conclusion. The "average" commercial supercomputing application (pharma, oil drilling, simulation) would not benefit from "free" cycles on the network.
Essentially, any commercial computation valuable enough to require that amount of effort can justify purchasing a hundred thousand node beowulf cluster and run locally. The reduction in network costs, the advantages of total control and tight security more than pay for the difference in computing cost.
Non-commercial computations such as SETI will benefit from grid computing, and we expect to see more efforts long those lines (RSA, Mersenne, Stanford DNA). But remember, we were thinking about starting a business, and none of those pay for the services, so we moved on.
The article is basically arguing that the Federal judges are setting bars that are too high, that juries should be the ones who decides whether or not the scientific claims are valid. PHOOEY!!!
Clearly, this ruling has hand a profound negative impact on our judicial system.
IANAL, but I had heard of this ruling several times before, and my impression is that, on the whole, very positive. I've been reading the links given on this topic, and haven't seen anything to change that **overall** judgement.
He's right, IMHO it happened once the W3C took over. Committees are great at slowing down progress.
There are many natural innovations which are screaming to be done. Here's a list:
1) A simpler way to navigate a set of pages as intended by the author, 2) better history management, 3) better programming support (javascript sucks, java doesn't even know what the browser is) 4) XML style links (which in particular allow for inline inclusions)
I admit that SCO's example unsettled me by what it implies. Although in itself trivial, it does suggest that some Linux contributors may have been careless about copyright infringement. That is unfortunate.
I said it before: with all the rampant plagiarism going around in this day and age, why is it so unthinkable to the/. community that an overzealous programmer (not necessarily from IBM) might have copied copyrighted code into Linux?
IANAL, and I don't know what the implications are, but not only can I believe there is copyrighted code in Linux, I would actually bet there is copyrighted code (although not necessarily SCO's) somewhere inside the a Linux distribution.
It won't work. There are already cheaper alternatives out there which are not used thanks to the massive marketing efforts (some might call them bribes) from the publishing companies to have teachers adopt the latest, most expensive textbook out (as if elementary mathematics or chemistry were changing from year to year).
Anybody who has a large number of drives running knows that the figures have become meaningless over time. They use to predict to the T the expected time of failure. They are now a marketing term assuming "a duty cycle" and computed by an absurd "units x time to failure". Using that system, the MTBF of the Honda Civic engine is 100,000 years as there are 1 million Civic's out there and none of them had their engine seize up in the first month.
Somebody ought to sue them for deceptive advertisement.
You can't be that stupid can you. Do you really believe something has to be spelled out in so many letters to be true? Even after the author of the GPL has publicly declared that he designed the GPL to put proprietary software out of comission?
Chew on that, and when you understand it come back.
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1) Does this kid need to learn his lession in jail?
No, This kid is young.
No, he needs to have some time out in his room (20 minutes max) after which his mother should compliment him about how quiet he was during the time he spent there.
Then his father needs to hug him to reinforce the message that it was his actions that were bad, and it is not that he is bad personally....
I'm sure that will teach him not to do it again.
To get to shuttle inclination from Russia's launch facility or to Soyuz inclination from Kennedy requires you to take the scenic route to orbit and no system currently has that much performance margin.
As I say the options are too many to rule them out. Here is yet another example: perhaps they can get rid of the Soyuz re-entry gear (heat shield, parachute, the works) and instead have a larger tank, which would allow a Soyuz to (a) reach a different orbit and (b) have enough fuel to reach the ISS after recovering the astronauts.
Is that really possible? I don't know, and in all likelihood not even the Russian engineers know right now as why would they ever consider not taking the parachute and heat shield up?
When Apollo 13 happened, NASA had to call the guys who actually built the things to determine how far could the hardware actually go. For example, many life pod circuits were not required to perform at subzero temperatures, and it was a question if they would power back up after a deep freeze and thaw cycle. They had to call up the designers and manufacturers to find out. Can the fuel tank in the Soyuz be enlarged if the parachute is taken out? We would have to ask the people who built the thing to know for sure. You see my point?
I was just pointing out the realsitic options where a lot fewer than you seemed to be indicating and had more problems than you seem to want to admit.
Sometimes all the naysayers see is the problems when an alternative is staring at them right in the face. There is this movie where some bad guys riding through the desert reach an unmanned toll gate. They wait for hours for somebody to show up and charge the fee, when they could have easily ridden around the gate. The scene illustrates our natural ability to focus on the obstacle while ignoring the alternatives.
I have no doubt that the rescue was by all means non-trivial, and that the attempts to rescue could well have failed, but based on my intuition and experience I believe there was enough time and options to make at least two attempts at a rescue, one of them being, of course, the Atlantis.
I'm also privy to the fact that all the Progresses and Soyuzes in the pipeline are spoken for
Boy! I'm amazed by the depth of your thought. I would had never considered such an unsurmountable technical difficulty! And of course none of the proposed users of the Soyuz and Progress would willingly delay their launch to save the lives of seven astrounats whose plight has captured the world's attention.
with neither seating for a crew nor a heat shield and recovery system for landing anything safely.
And of course, using the progress to ferry to the ISS is not an option, they must reenter. Why? because AC here cannot come up with the alternative, sorry folks you are SOL up there.
that Columbia was not carrying a docking adapter so people could be transferred.
and without a docking adapter nothing could have possibly been rigged to make the connection. you are right again!
Your nonsense about recycling an Apollo capsule is just that, nonsense.
I was just throwing one more possibility on the table, not suggesting that an Apollo rescue was a done deal. The point is to illustrate that there are so many options, whose performance can be stretched to such an extent, that its idiotic to state that a rescue was impossible.
Furthermore, from the number of available choices chances are, at least one could have been made to work.
We have ten different choices to attempt a resupply the shuttle: ariadne, progress, soyuz, ISS scape pod, titan, atlas, long march and brazilean rocket and the shuttle atlantis.
Of those, six could have been used to attempt a rescue, either by reentry of by transfer to the ISS.
The number of options is sufficiently large, that the odds were in favout of a rescue.
How would you know? Are you privy to the actual design specs of a Progress to assert that it cannot have reached the shuttle under any circumstances?
Do you have a direct line to the Chinese space program to know exactly how many capsules they have in ready-to-launch mode and the exact limits of their reach on an emergency basis (as opposed to day-to-day) use?
Say, if you ask me how long it takes me to design you a web site, I'd say a couple of months. But if your life depended on it, I could have it ready in two days. That is a ratio of 30 in performance between day-to-day and emergency use.
Another example, I would never ride my expensive racing bike more than 100 yards on a dirt road, but if your life depended on it, I'm sure it can take 100 miles on it even though the carbon alloy rims would likely be untrue by the end of the day and would have to be replaced. That is over a factor of 1000 between day-to-day use and emergency use.
To recap, there are too many alternatives, each of whose, the limits of performance are much beyond day to day use (see Apollo 13, which operated using less than 10% of the normal power consumption).
intresting notion but progress can't make Shuttle's primary orbit which is where Columbia was. That is the reason for ISS's odd orbit, it is the compromise position between shuttles ability and soyuz.
Wrong. Progress cannot reach Shuttle's orbit on normal, day-to-day operations, but in an emergency, only Progress engineers know for sure if it could be stretched to reach the Shuttle.
To give an example that is familiar to all of us, the lunar module was most certainly not designed to house three astronauts moving around (in places the walls of the module where literally tin-foil thin), yet in a pinch it was used thus, and saved the lives of Lowell and his crew.
Escape pod in the SS ???? What the hell are you talking about ?
There is a Soyuz capsule in the ISS for use as an escape pod.
Certainly there was no ready made escape for them like send another shuttle but simply pointing out difficulties does not get you any closer to proving impossibility. The rescue of Apollo 13 looked equally impossible at the beginning, yet they pulled it off.
not even talk about the fact the quesiton of who the hell would fly it.
Actually Apollo astrounats reported that it was reasonably close to flying an airplane and reported good success on it (as opposed to the lunar module, which was a lot more difficult to handle). The Shuttle had, count'em four extremely profficient pilots (two test pilots, Israeli air force ace Ilan Ramon and US air force flight instructor Michael Anderson).
To launch Atlantis you risked having two injured birds and even more crew loss
Again you confuse normal operation with emergency use. I bet it is possible to launch the Atlantis with a crew of two and an escape pod in its cargo bay, thus ensuring that, at the very least, the two rescue astrounats could return safely back to earth, even if the Atlantis suffered the same damage (which is unlikely as foam separation was mostly an old shuttle problem).
BS. Once the breach had been identified, any number of out-of-the-box solutions could have been worked out to go and rescue the astrounats... E.g.
- resuply with a Progress ship
- rescue with a Long March
- send space-age duct tape with an Atlas
- send more fuel to the escape pod in the SS, then use the scape pod to ferry astrounats from the shuttle to the SS
- dust off an Apollo re-entry capsule from the Smithsonian and send it on an Ariadne 5 to be used as re-entry pod
and on and on... With so many options available chances are we could have found a way...
Coffee is brewed at 95 C, but should never be kept in the hot plate at that temperature. It ruins the flavour!
Look, the reference to the GPL in the original posting only makes sense in the context of Linux and other open source software. Distributing GPL software does not stop you from claiming other legal rights in non-GPL related software.
RTFA, the claim from IBM is for infringement inside SCO's OpenWare, not SCO Linux.
6. Actually it may be a good idea to have abstract one-syllable names like "bin" and "etc".
/var, /etc, /bin convention. Because you see, half of the /.ers start from the assumption that *nix is perfect.
I knew there would be an idiot who would defend the arcane
If you go to a class where the PP slides are structured and presented exactly like the book,
Sure, and if the slides are awful one shouldn't use them either. However (1) slides are usually prepared by somebody other than the author and (2) what the professor _says_ is still a lot more than what is written on the slide.
I agree that certain things should be done live on the board to get the true feel of it. By the same token, other things such as animations of an algorithm or the chart of a function are much better understood from a computer presentation (you never truly "get" a taylor series approximation until you see each the approximations overlaid on the original function. It is also quite striking how good the approximation is for very few terms).
It is acceptable to use textbooks because the profs do not hold up the textbook in front of the class and read the subheadings and bullets to us.
The don't do that simply because books are meant to be read on your own, but PP slides have been designed to be used, guess what, in front of an audience.
If a publisher has gone out of its way to select the salient points of a topic, embellish them with well thought out colours and charts, made expensive animations, why would that be inferior to some slides put together by the prof for the exact same purpose?
In my CS classes, the teachers HAD PREPARED their own notes, and the textbook was just a reference (sometimes obscure).
This is just an inane "grumpy old man" grudge. The fact that it was that way when you went to school does not mean its better. When I went to school we had chalkboard, does that mean professors shouldn't use now whiteboards instead? of course not.
Yes, when you went to school professors had to prepare their own notes. So??
As to my attitude, school becomes more and more expensive every year
Look, if school expensive then complain about the friggin tuition fees instead of taking it out on the use of PP slides.
Erh, believe me, if the professor wasn't needed on top of the slides, he wouldn't be standing there, sonny. Surely s/he'd rather be in his office surfing the web for pr0n^H^H^H^H research material than stand up in front of students with an attitude like yours.
By the way, have you ever thought about the fact that most courses use textbooks RIGHT FROM THE PUBLISHER, instead of in-house notes? Why is it acceptable for the textbook but not for the PP slides?
Well, geeks have come to believe that Unix circa 1990 was brought down from the mountain top and thus it cannot be improved.
This is bad for Linux, because once we come to accept it as perfect it stops evolving and it will lose market share (see Macintosh 1990-1998).
In practice the most common thing I've seen is throw together whatever you have and take it to market, then clean up code afterwards (insert obligatory snide comments about Microsoft here).
The biggest problem is that business patents essentially open up patenting ideas, which you are not supposed to be able to. Over a hundred years ago, you actually needed to build one of your gadgets and bring it to the patent office to be able to patent it. This became unpractical and the USPTO allowed diagrams instead. But now I can walk up to the patent office and patent the idea of using computers for selling sex services over the internet and it would get a green light as a 'business method' patent.
In reality the hard part of selling sex over the net is coming up with the actual mechanical interface (ick!). That is what is worthy of patent protection.
Ditto for one-click purchase. This is trivial. What is not trivial is coming and should be patentable is a specific method for tracking state using a cookie with enough security features to make it fool proof.
A few years back when Grid computing was all the rage we sat down with some investment partners and worked out the figures. We came pretty much to the same conclusion. The "average" commercial supercomputing application (pharma, oil drilling, simulation) would not benefit from "free" cycles on the network.
Essentially, any commercial computation valuable enough to require that amount of effort can justify purchasing a hundred thousand node beowulf cluster and run locally. The reduction in network costs, the advantages of total control and tight security more than pay for the difference in computing cost.
Non-commercial computations such as SETI will benefit from grid computing, and we expect to see more efforts long those lines (RSA, Mersenne, Stanford DNA). But remember, we were thinking about starting a business, and none of those pay for the services, so we moved on.
The article is basically arguing that the Federal judges are setting bars that are too high, that juries should be the ones who decides whether or not the scientific claims are valid. PHOOEY!!!
My thoughts exactly and well worth repeating.
Clearly, this ruling has hand a profound negative impact on our judicial system.
IANAL, but I had heard of this ruling several times before, and my impression is that, on the whole, very positive. I've been reading the links given on this topic, and haven't seen anything to change that **overall** judgement.
He's right, IMHO it happened once the W3C took over. Committees are great at slowing down progress.
There are many natural innovations which are screaming to be done. Here's a list:
1) A simpler way to navigate a set of pages as intended by the author,
2) better history management,
3) better programming support (javascript sucks, java doesn't even know what the browser is)
4) XML style links (which in particular allow for inline inclusions)
and on and on...
first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS...
Conventional wisdom is that we have yet to witness such a thing.
I admit that SCO's example unsettled me by what it implies. Although in itself trivial, it does suggest that some Linux contributors may have been careless about copyright infringement. That is unfortunate.
/. community that an overzealous programmer (not necessarily from IBM) might have copied copyrighted code into Linux?
I said it before: with all the rampant plagiarism going around in this day and age, why is it so unthinkable to the
IANAL, and I don't know what the implications are, but not only can I believe there is copyrighted code in Linux, I would actually bet there is copyrighted code (although not necessarily SCO's) somewhere inside the a Linux distribution.
It won't work. There are already cheaper alternatives out there which are not used thanks to the massive marketing efforts (some might call them bribes) from the publishing companies to have teachers adopt the latest, most expensive textbook out (as if elementary mathematics or chemistry were changing from year to year).
Anybody who has a large number of drives running knows that the figures have become meaningless over time. They use to predict to the T the expected time of failure. They are now a marketing term assuming "a duty cycle" and computed by an absurd "units x time to failure". Using that system, the MTBF of the Honda Civic engine is 100,000 years as there are 1 million Civic's out there and none of them had their engine seize up in the first month.
Somebody ought to sue them for deceptive advertisement.
You can't be that stupid can you. Do you really believe something has to be spelled out in so many letters to be true? Even after the author of the GPL has publicly declared that he designed the GPL to put proprietary software out of comission?
Chew on that, and when you understand it come back.