Toyota found to be playing cost analysis games when their products are defective? Hmmm, last I heard, the unintended acceleration cases were primarily overblown: see here. Also, I am not entirely sure what your point is with regards to the FAA and NTSB. Both agencies are setup to help regulate both the logistics and safety concerns regarding modern transportation, which, incidentally, also includes regulating space tourism: see here. The reason some regulation is needed is not because every company that has access to a particular technology will abuse it at the expense of its customers. The reason regulation is needed is because in any industry there will be a lot of quackery products right alongside viable products. So, while Virgin or SpaceX might establish a safe and healthy space tourism industry because they need continued revenue from customers, another company might come along, make some, "too good to be true," claims about cheap access to space, charge it's first set of customers for a ride, kill them, and run off with their money. Regulation helps establish a barrier of entry at a particular point that balances the need to prevent a monopoly with the need to prevent fraud. This is a good and necessary thing.
If you are under the impression that any and all companies will hurt their customers simply to make a buck, you are quite mistaken. While there is no shortage of examples of this happening, there are also quite a few companies that genuinely do attempt to provide good, safe products. Some that come to mind are Trader Joe's groceries, Maytag appliances, Cessna, and Bobrick. It's easy to think that companies and corporations are out to do nothing more than screw their customers because that's all we see in the news about companies and corporations. But what a lot of us fail to realize is that for every scandal story involving a single company, there are probably a dozen other small, medium, and even large companies that don't make the nightly report because they don't screw their customers. Thus, we get inundated with a very single-sided view of business.
So I guess what I am getting at is that, while there are companies that have killed people in the past (due, more often, to accident rather than negligence), there are also a lot of companies that haven't. Thus, immediately jumping to the conclusion that a new industry, filled with new players, is going to skimp on safety in order to save a buck is nothing more than bias. As it stands now, we don't have enough data to determine whether or not Virgin, SpaceX, Bigelow, Masten, or anyone else is going to kill their customers. My default assumption as an engineer is that they won't because, well, their engineers get paid not to. Supposing someone does die in a crash eventually (and eventually someone will, I have no doubt about that), I will wager that occurs due to some unforeseeable accident (which does happen because even the most intelligent engineers and scientists are not precognitive) rather than some terrible negligence or intentional flaunting of safety regulations on a company's part. As the space tourism industry stands right now, it is employing some of the most talented engineers in the field, and it is under extreme scrutiny by existing players (NASA and the FAA, not to mention various congressional financing committees), thus, I think jumping to the conclusion that any players in the industry will skimp on safety is fairly unfounded cynicism.
During my spacecraft design class, my team used to complain that we should just higher a bunch of electrical engineers to design our satellites since that's what it seemed like everything boiled down to. When we came back from Christmas break after our first quarter together, the administration had tried to re-image all of our workstation computers, rendering 90% of them unusable. When the IT maintenance guy was in our lab one day, my team lead asked him why it was taking so long to get the computers working again. When he mumbled something about the wrong image being used for the wrong systems, I irreverently shouted out, "Find an electrical engineer to fix it!" which brought a chuckle from the class.
Three days later an EE student was in the lab to talk something over with one of his aero friends and he sat down at one of the non-working computer consoles without anyone noticing. Three hours later, I walked by and realized he had the system up and running. I couldn't help but snicker.
Troll? Oh come on mods! That was a disturbingly morbid and beautifully corny pun. In other words, it's comedy gold by Slashdot's standards. Mod him up.
Perhaps I am missing something, but this technology doesn't seem like a holograph at all. It seems like it's a dynamic hologram. While that is interesting, it still requires a custom display sheet upon which to project the image. So I would still have to carry around a square of material in order to view my electronic hologram message, or whatever. When I think holograph, I think about a three-dimensional figure of light being projected onto a table top. I don't think of a moving hologram. In other words, it's not a holograph until there is no display to truck around anymore. Combine this dynamic hologram technology with a projector that constructs a life-size (scalable of course) light-only version of an object, and then you've got a holograph. I am waiting. =)
Well, believe it or not, the type of data that reflects this particular fault would need to be gathered just to allow the engine controllers to function properly. In other words, the redundancy that is built into such a two channel system is in-built so that both processors can check one another in order to have one more reference input to their feedback loop. If I have controller 1's best estimate of the current system state, and I have controller 2's best estimate of the system state, and I have a third estimate of the system state uploaded to the launch vehicle through telemetry resources based on observed flight characteristics, then then I have three system states that I can compare against one another in order to develop and process a command set for the next clock cycle. This type of three-state estimation is pretty much necessary just to damp your transient responses in any highly dynamic system within a reasonable amount of time. Without such a system, your controller often cannot damp out the transient responses for any given state variable and your system decays into an unstable (exploding) mode. In other words, no steady state is achieved.
That said, in order to achieve stable flight (something already demonstrated by the space tourism industry with SS2, Falcon 1 and Falcon 9), the space tourism industry is going to have to have these checks inbuilt on their systems. They wouldn't be able to fly without them (in fact, considering the complicated geometry for SS2, I would be extraordinarily shocked if they could achieve any stable flight without at least 4 redundant state readings). Ergo, this type of pedantry is a necessity in order to have a functioning vehicle. Thus, the likelihood of the space tourism industry killing customers by skimping on these kinds of checks seems highly unlikely, if not entirely impossible, by the very nature of designing a controllable, complicated launch vehicle. Now, don't get me wrong, the space tourism industry (and NASA) very well could kill customers by various other means. I just don't think a problem like this would be the likely cause based on little more than my own experience in designing flight controller systems (as well as an undergraduate degree focused on that subject).
Of course, you might just be trying to say that, while NASA is willing to slip a launch and miss a launch window in the name of certainty, the space tourism industry might not. Many 'dotters probably feel that an industrial launch industry would say, "Waiting a day will cost us X many dollars in profits, launch anyways!" (kind of like NASA did with Challenger). Personally, I also find this highly unlikely as dead customers don't tend to be able to spend more money on your company. If Branson blows somebody up, he can't count on them to fly a second time. Combining that with the fact that any engineers involved in such a company would promptly quit (because no engineer wants a customer's death on their conscience, trust me on that), and the company would then undergo a brutal brain drain and a period of stagnation, leads me to conclude that no entrepreneur (especially one that intends to fly on his own hardware) would be willing to take that chance. As you seem to imply, companies want, more than anything else, to protect their profit. Anyone getting involved in the commercial space industry that is flying hardware would not be so dull as to think that killing their customers will increase their profits.
Saying, "Hey look, my company is flying people into space every week!" is awesome and generates a sense of pride.
Saying, "Hey look, my company has only killed five people in the last five years!" brings on epic levels of shame and thoughts of suicide.
This article contains some more specifics regarding the problem. Apparently one of the main engine controller computers (the computers that regulate main engine gimbaling and throttle control) failed to power up properly. There was a short time period where a low-voltage occurred which flagged a boot-up sequence issue. Engineers are trying to figure out what caused the voltage drop and, thus, triggered the error in the processor initialization. More information regarding the SSME controllers can be found here.
Apparently the breaker that controls the processor was cycled five times over night. Engineers are guessing that the cycling caused some funny transient anomalies in the circuit which caused the fault. Despite the fault, the main events controller for the shuttle system was brought to full power and is operating nominally, so it's not like the whole computer is crap. NASA just wants to be sure that, a) the fault was actually caused by the breaker cycling and b) the fault won't cause further glitches in any of the other controller systems on the shuttle.
Interesting stuff indeed. It's probably a good thing that NASA is demanding certainty from it's engineers before clearing Discovery for launch.
Why not write someone in that you do support? That way you add to the total number of votes in your state, but none of the douchey candidates get to count your vote as a contribution to the majority. Remember, a candidate has to win the majority of votes to win a seat (at least, they do where I'm from). Thus, if enough people vote, but don't vote for the specified candidates, thus ensuring that no candidate gets a majority, then the electorate will have, quite effectively said, "Hey guys, you suck, find us someone better!" That's an important message to send since it sounds like the one that most reflects your thoughts on the current candidate choices.
Thank you, I was waiting to see someone post something like this on this thread. I don't understand the spineless, "humans shouldn't be in space," attitude. Sure, it's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Unlike you, I wasn't around for the Apollo days, but my head was filled with glorious stories regarding men setting foot on another celestial body as a kid. Back then I never even considered the possibility that such a feat was a mistake a or a waste. These days, I still can't understand how that question can be asked with a straight face.
So once again, thank you for this little rant. Someone needed to say it.
Oceano, California. Twenty minutes south of SLO, right next to Pismo Beach. There have been quite a few foreclosures around here and there are definitely some condos less than two miles from the beach that are going for well under $300,0000.
You know, most of my older co-workers keep telling me to invest in real estate as it is the best sure-fire long term investment out there. For the price of a condo in California, I could afford this Darth Vader costumer. I wonder if investing in iconic Hollywood paraphernalia is actually a better investment strategy than real estate...
If any of my coworkers broke down and went into a savage fit of rage due to information overload, I would be ecstatic. The resulting incident would be YouTube gold. I'd have a great story to tell my nieces. My employer would start doing more to ensure that I was happy at work. In other words, this sounds like a big win! =)
I suspect that the lack of work comes from an excess of boring jobs that make workers feel unimportant or useless. Nobody wants to do a job of mostly busy work where they feel like the results don't matter or are not noticed. As a result, such employees will just browse the internet instead.
I know that, at least for me, if I am given the opportunity to work on a genuinely interesting project, or to provide some aspect that seems valuable to the species overall, I will actively try to reduce distractions, including the internet. If I am asked to perform the same boring, repetitive tasks over and over, or if I feel the work I am doing is, quite literally, something that the world could do just fine without, I will actively seek out distractions. That's just my 2 cents though.
Next time I ask for a model or data, you might think about providing such resources, as cgaertner did in response to my inquiry. To folk who genuinely want to learn more about the entire climate controversy, such civil discourse earns you much more respect than providing a snarky comment that provides little evidence backing it up. Snarkiness may get you mod points on/., but it completely fails at generating interest and respect from someone who is genuinely interested in learning. In fact, it's pretty off-putting and just furthers the notion that folks who claim to know all about climate change are really just following a politically correct trend that is backed up by a few strict talking points and FUD.
In short, if someone asks you for evidence, provide evidence. Don't act like a smug asshole.
Thank you for actually supplying some papers and reading material rather than making a snarky comment. That does a lot more for your cause than the facetious response posted by the parent.
As a recent graduate of an aerospace engineering program, I would like to ask you to reconsider auctioning this software, or the patent for it, out to a private company. Engineering students are already forced to choose between shelling out a ton of money for commercial software (Matlab) or working with something less applicable in industry (Scilab). As a result, students who have extra cash get the opportunity to tack "Matlab experience" on their resume, while students without extra cash have to spend half their interview explaining why a free, open-source alternative is just as good as the industry standard. Some universities help bridge this gap by buying commercial licenses for industry software and implementing it on student computers. However, the licensing fees simply serve to drive tuition costs up and, as a result, quality education favors aspiring professionals with more cash from the start.
Thus, I would request that, rather than create more commercially available software, please release the software referenced under the patents under an open license instead. Toss the source code into the wild somewhere (sourceforge or whatever) and encourage universities to start integrating it into the educational process. This software was developed with tax-payer money. There is no reason that the highest bidder company should get a zero R&D product based on your work. Rather than encouraging expensive industrial software, please use this opportunity to encourage open software to help current and future students gain a better education by working with professionally developed tools.
Sincerely,
A former engineering student.
I'll be sending that letter to the Goddard Spaceflight Center this afternoon by post as well as e-mail. Anyone who wants to copy and modify the letter themselves in order to voice their concerns is welcome to do so.
You failed to address the point he made about a warmer Earth. What model or data is there that shows that having the temperature of the planet increase a few degrees, overall, would be a bad thing for our species or any other?
Well like he said, different drugs get people high in different ways. I knew one kid that couldn't keep himself from punching stuff when he drank. Meanwhile, a little asian gal I know can't keep from giggling when she drinks. And yet another fella I know can't restrain himself from trying to kiss guys.
Of the pot smokers I know, some tend to get very contemplative, quiet, and focused. Two others basically just fall asleep when they smoke. And still, a third, starts mumbling to himself and trying to climb things. I wouldn't rule out hallucinations completely, though I do admit that seems like it would be pretty extreme. But the parent's point still stands either way: pot, like alcohol, has different effects on different people. Hell, Golsdchlagger's made me hallucinate and go into a paranoid frenzy before, and normally I am a pretty happy drinker.
Perhaps your kindergarten experience differed from mine, but I have explicit kindergarten memories involving:
Kids eating glue.
Kids eating sand.
Kids throwing sand in each other's eyes.
Kids hitting each other with sticks.
Kids walking up to one another, and forcefully stealing their favorite toy from someone else.
Kids screaming, crying, and positively shrieking for attention.
Kids vocally calling each other out on one another's bodily functions (okay, I'll admit, that is actually pretty funny).
Kids pushing each other off the swingset.
Kids talking each other into trying positively stupid stuff just for the fun of it. ....
And the list goes on.
It's fun to sit around and fantasize about how easy life used to be as a kid (and in many ways it was). But I think we often forget about all of the things that weren't quite so positive when being a kid. We lacked the practice and development of social skills that came from years worth of peer-peer interaction. Young kids tend to have no problem acting as if there is absolutely no such thing as etiquette at all. Of course, that never stops teachers from trying to enforce simple common courtesy rules on children. But what those rules have in simplicity, they lack in applicability to more complex social interactions that form as a consequence of more developed social skills building on top of one another (flattery, imitation, anticipation, reaction, empathy, logical reasoning vs. emotional reasoning, etc.).
As we grow as social animals in age, so, too, do our social interactions and, thus, the complexity of the social situations we find ourselves in. We meet more people. We gain more freedom. We learn more basic laws about the nature of reality. As a result, social interactions involve more players, more observers, more factors to consider, and have further reaching consequences (a kindergartner doesn't need to consider whether or not eating sand will ruin their ability to support their family or not). Therefore, the etiquette we choose to follow, and the rationalizations we make to justify our actions to ourselves, grow ever more complex and nuanced. This is the natural progression of the human mind dynamically adapting as a structure evolved to ensure the survival of a very social species.
It's fun to trot out lines and ideals like, "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten..." and what not. But when childhood is observed from a non-romanticized perspective, it is easy to see why we do not remain as children in our actions, thoughts, or abilities. This is as true for social skills as it is for anything else. If everyone followed kindergarten etiquette, large social entities like national governments, guilds, international clubs, unions, cities, and even, probably, advanced schools would not be possible.
Wikipedia has been able to retain a generally productive and civil culture.
Unless the page being worked on is about some particularly controversial topic which is at the forefront of the public mindset....at which point civility and productivity go out the window in lieu of the typical pseudo-anonymous dick waving that happens everywhere else on the internet.
And that doesn't even begin to address those many instances of a Wiki moderator (or whatever the hell they are called) falling in love with some pet page and refusing to let legitimate edits be made to it....
You need to have engineers with experience more than anything.
Apparently you missed the part of my post where I talked about the already developed industries in California that employ thousands of engineers who work already work on everything from manufacturing to theoretical, computer designs...
The best universities that actually deal with the stuff you need to run CNCs and other machines is actually taught in the midwest -- Univ Michigan, Perdue, Iowa, etc.
Yeah, actually we teach a lot of that here too. In fact, in my design-centric education, even I had at least three classes where I worked in machine shops and programmed CNC machines. The folks I knew in degree programs centered on manufacturing and engineering often spent more time in machine shops than most of my peers spent developing mathematical models for their theoretical designs....so not, it's not just taught in the midwest. California has an incredibly rich and diverse education system and industrial landscape. Far more than most folk realize.
For some reason it seems like it is much cooler or more respectable, these days, to hate on things than to be excited about them. In the existence of building a really big toy that rips shit apart, a lot of people will find fault with it being a big, wasteful, over-power-hungry, ego driven monstrosity. I find that, while this sentiment is reflected to some degree on slashdot, it is much calmer here than it is in many other cultural niches of society in general. Being the person that sees something and says, right off the bat, "Holy shit! That is amazing!" is, for whatever reason, taken to mean that the observer is gullible, stupid, or incapable of critical thinking. I can't really tell you why that trend seems so dominant in culture today (to me at least), but that's just what I've noticed.
For the record, as soon as I read the summary, my first thought was, "Fucking Epic!" Then I started thinking about all of the bad ideas that could go along with a machine like this that might involve a flying-squirrel suit and a helmet. So, no, you're not alone. =)
Yep, that makes sense, seeing as how just about every spacecraft designed nowadays uses gold foil attached to the bus for thermal and radioactive control. No, really, from a materials or chemistry perspective, you might be dead on. But gold is one of the most commonly used materials in spacecraft design and engineering being implemented in everything from microelectronic connections to full size gold sheets buttoned on the side of the spacecraft. Gold is inert and conductive for both heat and electrical energy. It is also very easy to process into thin/small parts. It is very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong agency, we're talking about the folks that launched a bat into space this time. Personally, I think Brian's family is sabotaging the launch.
Toyota found to be playing cost analysis games when their products are defective? Hmmm, last I heard, the unintended acceleration cases were primarily overblown: see here. Also, I am not entirely sure what your point is with regards to the FAA and NTSB. Both agencies are setup to help regulate both the logistics and safety concerns regarding modern transportation, which, incidentally, also includes regulating space tourism: see here. The reason some regulation is needed is not because every company that has access to a particular technology will abuse it at the expense of its customers. The reason regulation is needed is because in any industry there will be a lot of quackery products right alongside viable products. So, while Virgin or SpaceX might establish a safe and healthy space tourism industry because they need continued revenue from customers, another company might come along, make some, "too good to be true," claims about cheap access to space, charge it's first set of customers for a ride, kill them, and run off with their money. Regulation helps establish a barrier of entry at a particular point that balances the need to prevent a monopoly with the need to prevent fraud. This is a good and necessary thing.
If you are under the impression that any and all companies will hurt their customers simply to make a buck, you are quite mistaken. While there is no shortage of examples of this happening, there are also quite a few companies that genuinely do attempt to provide good, safe products. Some that come to mind are Trader Joe's groceries, Maytag appliances, Cessna, and Bobrick. It's easy to think that companies and corporations are out to do nothing more than screw their customers because that's all we see in the news about companies and corporations. But what a lot of us fail to realize is that for every scandal story involving a single company, there are probably a dozen other small, medium, and even large companies that don't make the nightly report because they don't screw their customers. Thus, we get inundated with a very single-sided view of business.
So I guess what I am getting at is that, while there are companies that have killed people in the past (due, more often, to accident rather than negligence), there are also a lot of companies that haven't. Thus, immediately jumping to the conclusion that a new industry, filled with new players, is going to skimp on safety in order to save a buck is nothing more than bias. As it stands now, we don't have enough data to determine whether or not Virgin, SpaceX, Bigelow, Masten, or anyone else is going to kill their customers. My default assumption as an engineer is that they won't because, well, their engineers get paid not to. Supposing someone does die in a crash eventually (and eventually someone will, I have no doubt about that), I will wager that occurs due to some unforeseeable accident (which does happen because even the most intelligent engineers and scientists are not precognitive) rather than some terrible negligence or intentional flaunting of safety regulations on a company's part. As the space tourism industry stands right now, it is employing some of the most talented engineers in the field, and it is under extreme scrutiny by existing players (NASA and the FAA, not to mention various congressional financing committees), thus, I think jumping to the conclusion that any players in the industry will skimp on safety is fairly unfounded cynicism.
During my spacecraft design class, my team used to complain that we should just higher a bunch of electrical engineers to design our satellites since that's what it seemed like everything boiled down to. When we came back from Christmas break after our first quarter together, the administration had tried to re-image all of our workstation computers, rendering 90% of them unusable. When the IT maintenance guy was in our lab one day, my team lead asked him why it was taking so long to get the computers working again. When he mumbled something about the wrong image being used for the wrong systems, I irreverently shouted out, "Find an electrical engineer to fix it!" which brought a chuckle from the class.
Three days later an EE student was in the lab to talk something over with one of his aero friends and he sat down at one of the non-working computer consoles without anyone noticing. Three hours later, I walked by and realized he had the system up and running. I couldn't help but snicker.
Troll? Oh come on mods! That was a disturbingly morbid and beautifully corny pun. In other words, it's comedy gold by Slashdot's standards. Mod him up.
Perhaps I am missing something, but this technology doesn't seem like a holograph at all. It seems like it's a dynamic hologram. While that is interesting, it still requires a custom display sheet upon which to project the image. So I would still have to carry around a square of material in order to view my electronic hologram message, or whatever. When I think holograph, I think about a three-dimensional figure of light being projected onto a table top. I don't think of a moving hologram. In other words, it's not a holograph until there is no display to truck around anymore. Combine this dynamic hologram technology with a projector that constructs a life-size (scalable of course) light-only version of an object, and then you've got a holograph. I am waiting. =)
Well, believe it or not, the type of data that reflects this particular fault would need to be gathered just to allow the engine controllers to function properly. In other words, the redundancy that is built into such a two channel system is in-built so that both processors can check one another in order to have one more reference input to their feedback loop. If I have controller 1's best estimate of the current system state, and I have controller 2's best estimate of the system state, and I have a third estimate of the system state uploaded to the launch vehicle through telemetry resources based on observed flight characteristics, then then I have three system states that I can compare against one another in order to develop and process a command set for the next clock cycle. This type of three-state estimation is pretty much necessary just to damp your transient responses in any highly dynamic system within a reasonable amount of time. Without such a system, your controller often cannot damp out the transient responses for any given state variable and your system decays into an unstable (exploding) mode. In other words, no steady state is achieved.
That said, in order to achieve stable flight (something already demonstrated by the space tourism industry with SS2, Falcon 1 and Falcon 9), the space tourism industry is going to have to have these checks inbuilt on their systems. They wouldn't be able to fly without them (in fact, considering the complicated geometry for SS2, I would be extraordinarily shocked if they could achieve any stable flight without at least 4 redundant state readings). Ergo, this type of pedantry is a necessity in order to have a functioning vehicle. Thus, the likelihood of the space tourism industry killing customers by skimping on these kinds of checks seems highly unlikely, if not entirely impossible, by the very nature of designing a controllable, complicated launch vehicle. Now, don't get me wrong, the space tourism industry (and NASA) very well could kill customers by various other means. I just don't think a problem like this would be the likely cause based on little more than my own experience in designing flight controller systems (as well as an undergraduate degree focused on that subject).
Of course, you might just be trying to say that, while NASA is willing to slip a launch and miss a launch window in the name of certainty, the space tourism industry might not. Many 'dotters probably feel that an industrial launch industry would say, "Waiting a day will cost us X many dollars in profits, launch anyways!" (kind of like NASA did with Challenger). Personally, I also find this highly unlikely as dead customers don't tend to be able to spend more money on your company. If Branson blows somebody up, he can't count on them to fly a second time. Combining that with the fact that any engineers involved in such a company would promptly quit (because no engineer wants a customer's death on their conscience, trust me on that), and the company would then undergo a brutal brain drain and a period of stagnation, leads me to conclude that no entrepreneur (especially one that intends to fly on his own hardware) would be willing to take that chance. As you seem to imply, companies want, more than anything else, to protect their profit. Anyone getting involved in the commercial space industry that is flying hardware would not be so dull as to think that killing their customers will increase their profits.
Saying, "Hey look, my company is flying people into space every week!" is awesome and generates a sense of pride.
Saying, "Hey look, my company has only killed five people in the last five years!" brings on epic levels of shame and thoughts of suicide.
That is just my $0.02 on the matter though.
This article contains some more specifics regarding the problem. Apparently one of the main engine controller computers (the computers that regulate main engine gimbaling and throttle control) failed to power up properly. There was a short time period where a low-voltage occurred which flagged a boot-up sequence issue. Engineers are trying to figure out what caused the voltage drop and, thus, triggered the error in the processor initialization. More information regarding the SSME controllers can be found here.
Apparently the breaker that controls the processor was cycled five times over night. Engineers are guessing that the cycling caused some funny transient anomalies in the circuit which caused the fault. Despite the fault, the main events controller for the shuttle system was brought to full power and is operating nominally, so it's not like the whole computer is crap. NASA just wants to be sure that, a) the fault was actually caused by the breaker cycling and b) the fault won't cause further glitches in any of the other controller systems on the shuttle.
Interesting stuff indeed. It's probably a good thing that NASA is demanding certainty from it's engineers before clearing Discovery for launch.
Why not write someone in that you do support? That way you add to the total number of votes in your state, but none of the douchey candidates get to count your vote as a contribution to the majority. Remember, a candidate has to win the majority of votes to win a seat (at least, they do where I'm from). Thus, if enough people vote, but don't vote for the specified candidates, thus ensuring that no candidate gets a majority, then the electorate will have, quite effectively said, "Hey guys, you suck, find us someone better!" That's an important message to send since it sounds like the one that most reflects your thoughts on the current candidate choices.
Thank you, I was waiting to see someone post something like this on this thread. I don't understand the spineless, "humans shouldn't be in space," attitude. Sure, it's a hard problem to solve, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Unlike you, I wasn't around for the Apollo days, but my head was filled with glorious stories regarding men setting foot on another celestial body as a kid. Back then I never even considered the possibility that such a feat was a mistake a or a waste. These days, I still can't understand how that question can be asked with a straight face.
So once again, thank you for this little rant. Someone needed to say it.
Oceano, California. Twenty minutes south of SLO, right next to Pismo Beach. There have been quite a few foreclosures around here and there are definitely some condos less than two miles from the beach that are going for well under $300,0000.
You know, most of my older co-workers keep telling me to invest in real estate as it is the best sure-fire long term investment out there. For the price of a condo in California, I could afford this Darth Vader costumer. I wonder if investing in iconic Hollywood paraphernalia is actually a better investment strategy than real estate...
If any of my coworkers broke down and went into a savage fit of rage due to information overload, I would be ecstatic. The resulting incident would be YouTube gold. I'd have a great story to tell my nieces. My employer would start doing more to ensure that I was happy at work. In other words, this sounds like a big win! =)
I suspect that the lack of work comes from an excess of boring jobs that make workers feel unimportant or useless. Nobody wants to do a job of mostly busy work where they feel like the results don't matter or are not noticed. As a result, such employees will just browse the internet instead.
I know that, at least for me, if I am given the opportunity to work on a genuinely interesting project, or to provide some aspect that seems valuable to the species overall, I will actively try to reduce distractions, including the internet. If I am asked to perform the same boring, repetitive tasks over and over, or if I feel the work I am doing is, quite literally, something that the world could do just fine without, I will actively seek out distractions. That's just my 2 cents though.
Next time I ask for a model or data, you might think about providing such resources, as cgaertner did in response to my inquiry. To folk who genuinely want to learn more about the entire climate controversy, such civil discourse earns you much more respect than providing a snarky comment that provides little evidence backing it up. Snarkiness may get you mod points on /., but it completely fails at generating interest and respect from someone who is genuinely interested in learning. In fact, it's pretty off-putting and just furthers the notion that folks who claim to know all about climate change are really just following a politically correct trend that is backed up by a few strict talking points and FUD.
In short, if someone asks you for evidence, provide evidence. Don't act like a smug asshole.
Thank you for actually supplying some papers and reading material rather than making a snarky comment. That does a lot more for your cause than the facetious response posted by the parent.
Hey NASA,
As a recent graduate of an aerospace engineering program, I would like to ask you to reconsider auctioning this software, or the patent for it, out to a private company. Engineering students are already forced to choose between shelling out a ton of money for commercial software (Matlab) or working with something less applicable in industry (Scilab). As a result, students who have extra cash get the opportunity to tack "Matlab experience" on their resume, while students without extra cash have to spend half their interview explaining why a free, open-source alternative is just as good as the industry standard. Some universities help bridge this gap by buying commercial licenses for industry software and implementing it on student computers. However, the licensing fees simply serve to drive tuition costs up and, as a result, quality education favors aspiring professionals with more cash from the start.
Thus, I would request that, rather than create more commercially available software, please release the software referenced under the patents under an open license instead. Toss the source code into the wild somewhere (sourceforge or whatever) and encourage universities to start integrating it into the educational process. This software was developed with tax-payer money. There is no reason that the highest bidder company should get a zero R&D product based on your work. Rather than encouraging expensive industrial software, please use this opportunity to encourage open software to help current and future students gain a better education by working with professionally developed tools.
Sincerely,
A former engineering student.
I'll be sending that letter to the Goddard Spaceflight Center this afternoon by post as well as e-mail. Anyone who wants to copy and modify the letter themselves in order to voice their concerns is welcome to do so.
You failed to address the point he made about a warmer Earth. What model or data is there that shows that having the temperature of the planet increase a few degrees, overall, would be a bad thing for our species or any other?
I might be missing something, but how the hell did something like this get modded up on /.?
Well like he said, different drugs get people high in different ways. I knew one kid that couldn't keep himself from punching stuff when he drank. Meanwhile, a little asian gal I know can't keep from giggling when she drinks. And yet another fella I know can't restrain himself from trying to kiss guys.
Of the pot smokers I know, some tend to get very contemplative, quiet, and focused. Two others basically just fall asleep when they smoke. And still, a third, starts mumbling to himself and trying to climb things. I wouldn't rule out hallucinations completely, though I do admit that seems like it would be pretty extreme. But the parent's point still stands either way: pot, like alcohol, has different effects on different people. Hell, Golsdchlagger's made me hallucinate and go into a paranoid frenzy before, and normally I am a pretty happy drinker.
Perhaps your kindergarten experience differed from mine, but I have explicit kindergarten memories involving:
....
Kids eating glue.
Kids eating sand.
Kids throwing sand in each other's eyes.
Kids hitting each other with sticks.
Kids walking up to one another, and forcefully stealing their favorite toy from someone else.
Kids screaming, crying, and positively shrieking for attention.
Kids vocally calling each other out on one another's bodily functions (okay, I'll admit, that is actually pretty funny).
Kids pushing each other off the swingset.
Kids talking each other into trying positively stupid stuff just for the fun of it.
And the list goes on.
It's fun to sit around and fantasize about how easy life used to be as a kid (and in many ways it was). But I think we often forget about all of the things that weren't quite so positive when being a kid. We lacked the practice and development of social skills that came from years worth of peer-peer interaction. Young kids tend to have no problem acting as if there is absolutely no such thing as etiquette at all. Of course, that never stops teachers from trying to enforce simple common courtesy rules on children. But what those rules have in simplicity, they lack in applicability to more complex social interactions that form as a consequence of more developed social skills building on top of one another (flattery, imitation, anticipation, reaction, empathy, logical reasoning vs. emotional reasoning, etc.).
As we grow as social animals in age, so, too, do our social interactions and, thus, the complexity of the social situations we find ourselves in. We meet more people. We gain more freedom. We learn more basic laws about the nature of reality. As a result, social interactions involve more players, more observers, more factors to consider, and have further reaching consequences (a kindergartner doesn't need to consider whether or not eating sand will ruin their ability to support their family or not). Therefore, the etiquette we choose to follow, and the rationalizations we make to justify our actions to ourselves, grow ever more complex and nuanced. This is the natural progression of the human mind dynamically adapting as a structure evolved to ensure the survival of a very social species.
It's fun to trot out lines and ideals like, "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten..." and what not. But when childhood is observed from a non-romanticized perspective, it is easy to see why we do not remain as children in our actions, thoughts, or abilities. This is as true for social skills as it is for anything else. If everyone followed kindergarten etiquette, large social entities like national governments, guilds, international clubs, unions, cities, and even, probably, advanced schools would not be possible.
Wikipedia has been able to retain a generally productive and civil culture.
Unless the page being worked on is about some particularly controversial topic which is at the forefront of the public mindset....at which point civility and productivity go out the window in lieu of the typical pseudo-anonymous dick waving that happens everywhere else on the internet.
And that doesn't even begin to address those many instances of a Wiki moderator (or whatever the hell they are called) falling in love with some pet page and refusing to let legitimate edits be made to it....
Not to mention, way too obsessed with sex and the human form.
You need to have engineers with experience more than anything.
Apparently you missed the part of my post where I talked about the already developed industries in California that employ thousands of engineers who work already work on everything from manufacturing to theoretical, computer designs...
The best universities that actually deal with the stuff you need to run CNCs and other machines is actually taught in the midwest -- Univ Michigan, Perdue, Iowa, etc.
Yeah, actually we teach a lot of that here too. In fact, in my design-centric education, even I had at least three classes where I worked in machine shops and programmed CNC machines. The folks I knew in degree programs centered on manufacturing and engineering often spent more time in machine shops than most of my peers spent developing mathematical models for their theoretical designs....so not, it's not just taught in the midwest. California has an incredibly rich and diverse education system and industrial landscape. Far more than most folk realize.
For some reason it seems like it is much cooler or more respectable, these days, to hate on things than to be excited about them. In the existence of building a really big toy that rips shit apart, a lot of people will find fault with it being a big, wasteful, over-power-hungry, ego driven monstrosity. I find that, while this sentiment is reflected to some degree on slashdot, it is much calmer here than it is in many other cultural niches of society in general. Being the person that sees something and says, right off the bat, "Holy shit! That is amazing!" is, for whatever reason, taken to mean that the observer is gullible, stupid, or incapable of critical thinking. I can't really tell you why that trend seems so dominant in culture today (to me at least), but that's just what I've noticed.
For the record, as soon as I read the summary, my first thought was, "Fucking Epic!" Then I started thinking about all of the bad ideas that could go along with a machine like this that might involve a flying-squirrel suit and a helmet. So, no, you're not alone. =)
and not a particularly useful one
Yep, that makes sense, seeing as how just about every spacecraft designed nowadays uses gold foil attached to the bus for thermal and radioactive control. No, really, from a materials or chemistry perspective, you might be dead on. But gold is one of the most commonly used materials in spacecraft design and engineering being implemented in everything from microelectronic connections to full size gold sheets buttoned on the side of the spacecraft. Gold is inert and conductive for both heat and electrical energy. It is also very easy to process into thin/small parts. It is very useful.