On the third hand (this guy must be a mutant!;)) a lot of companies won't bother to fix flaws if they aren't publicly and obviously posted, so crackers might find the flaws and use them for exploits, while the company that makes the software gleefully ignores the problem and gets to avoid responsibility and liability. That's definitely not good. I don't know (it's not clear from the English writeup) whether any attempt was made to notify, but many people who release exploit data do so only as a last resort.
I need an ad blocker for those damned banner ads that the HISTORY CHANNEL is now putting over the content! C'mon, I have enough annoying commercial junk to skip over with TiVo already! What's next, the commercials are the content, the show is the "after these messages"??
Good for you! Did you tell the cashier and/or the manager exactly why you did it and made noise about refusing to be ripped off in earshot of other people (without acting like a total jerk)? If more people knew they weren't really getting discounts, some of them might go elsewhere.
Amtrak IS run by the government, and while it's doing slightly better of late, it's still losing money. Partly their service stinks, partly they aren't offering enough destinations, partly their equipment is old, and partly they get treated like dirt by the freight railroads (Amtrak just has trackage rights over freight lines, rather than owning its own track.)
They have seen an uptick lately because they don't treat their customers like criminals and make them do completely undignified things, something I think is good, and plan to patronize them for, though they're making noise about getting nasty, too... grr, it makes you just want to drive everywhere in your own car...
The passenger services in the US were once run by individual railroads up until the 1960s or so, then they started filing with the ICC to kill the passenger services. And the government granted them that.
If you pick up a copy of Trains magazine or Model Railroader magazine, or look on railfan photography websites, chances are you'll find at least one picture of a passenger train from the mid-1800s through the mid 1960s, somewhere -- and you won't find Amtrak at all unless the picture (or the model railroad layout) is dated mid-1970s or later.
I personally think that if Amtrak had more modern equipment, continues to treat their customers like actual customers rather than like cattle (legroom, anyone?), added some luxuries and got rid of the stale '70s decor, added destinations, and generally improved their services and played up all these things in print and television ads, they could do a fair bit better.
Part of the problem is professors assigning new editions every couple years. I got by fine in a cell biology course using the last edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell -- while some of the field does change, and pretty quickly, it doesn't change so much so that the old book was no longer applicable. If more people would do what I did (borrow older editions from others or buy them used), they wouldn't be ripped off as badly.
So it's a combination of book publishers, professors who keep going along with the schemes by assigning new editions way too frequently (I have read that article, when it originally came out; I think professors in fields that don't change as much, e.g. calculus, should start putting their foot down and saying "no more, this is ridiculous') and students who blindly follow the book list without considering that a slightly older text will do just fine.
And what are we getting in exchange for subsidizing the rest of the world? The country I live in shouldn't mean I automatically get reamed if I need some drug to stay alive just because somebody with the exact same condition needing the exact same drug in Canada is going to get it cheaper than I do. That's blatantly unfair. That guy is ripping me off and if I complain about it, I get told to shut up and just take it. Suppose that guy makes a million bucks a year and can afford to pay the full price. But I make a lot less, and even so, I get to pay out the nose, he gets it paid for for him.
Our goverment needs to get off its ass and fix this. The drug companies are using us and know it, and we know it and are raising a fuss, but no one is listening.
Science journals use it, too. I'm constantly downloading PDFs of journal articles and most of the time when I get curious and look, they're stamped as having been created in FrameMaker.
Then we'll probably end up disagreeing to some extent. That's life, it's to be expected. Nobody's necessarily an idiot. I just happen to think it's perfectly doable and a lot more "worth it" than a lot of people do, after lots of skims of different discussions of this that have turned up on Slashdot and elsewhere. Some people think it's even more "worth it" than I do. And I know other space-buffs and program engineers and all kinds of people who know what they're talking about if I ask them about something, and I've talked to some of them about this.
A few quick comments - As for lifeboats - if you look at the report, it calls for autonomous capabilities, which means not having to have the station handy. And it doesn't seem, to me at least, that that's really being taken care of. Over and over the argument trotted out is that Hubble is in the 'wrong' orbit... which, ironically, is better suited to the shuttle than the orbit the ISS is in, which was chosen to please the Russians, or at least accommodate them, depending on the sort of mood you're in.
Science - well, honestly, I think part of the reason the scientists are so upset is that they know full well that they can't depend on having a replacement any time soon like they supposedly will get. And the "replacement" isn't going to have all the capabilities Hubble has. It essentially is the equivalent of razing an irreplaceable instrument when it is quite possible to save it. Perhaps a lot of the people arguing to save it don't know all the reasons they're being argued against, but I would say in return that I think a lot of the people who are arguing in favor don't know all of the scientists' reasons fully.
And there's always going to be disagreement, no way around that. People involved in this debate are going to be biased in favor of their own position. Yes, that includes both of us. That's how it always is.
My mind is open, too, but all *I* see is a rather lopsided mess with the scientific and engineering community trying to actually do work to come up with something and ever-morphing justifications to maintain a unilateral "forget it" from the feds. Admittedly I'm not happy with the government in general, but it seems to me like they could seem a lot more willing to listen than they are at this point.
We need to get something straight here, and the point I was trying to make was apparently completely missed.
There is fixing a problem by burying your head in the sand and claiming you're not going to deal with the situation that causes the problem, thus "fixing" the problem. Which is what's going on. What was done in the past isn't as relevant as what gets done now and what kind of attitude there is toward getting it done. It's nowhere near satisfactory.
And then there is really fixing the problem by actually going to the effort of figuring out what needs to be done and doing it, none of this complete bullshit that's flying around. The excuses keep morphing as the reasons continually keep getting shot down. That's a hint of the Ostrich Mentality.
Frankly I'm tired of all this taking the easy way out. The bullshit-mongerers need to be fired and real engineers brought in who will come up with a real answer. Nobody's acting "accordingly", they're just playing ostrich.
I have read the report. And we actually knew all along about this particular problem and had developed, or started to, ways to inspect the tiles and repair them in orbit. At the time, there was no way to get it working, but not for lack of trying. (That research has been resumed with new information and knowledge developed over the past few decades.)
It's ridiculous to change our tune this late in the game and decide we're a bunch of wimps. And I'm ashamed to say some of my taxes go toward such idiotic notions. If we were too scared to do these sorts of things we should have decided that in the first place. Now we have a beautiful vehicle that is largely useless for many of its major intended uses for no real legitimate reason.
If you look at the report yourself, it says to develop an autonomous repair capability. Apparently, some people in the goverment can't read very well and didn't see that word, or didn't look it up to see what it means...
The 737 is actually still in active production as is the 747. The same basic design is expanded and enhanced with completely new technology, based on the original designs of the 1960s and 70s. The cockpit of a modern 747 or 737 looks absolutely nothing like those installed in the original aircraft. They just look the same from the outside.
Similarly, try finding an original example of the Porsche 911, the original air-cooled version, and then looking at the modern water-cooled electronically-controlled version and look at all the changes that were made over the years. But the basic car still looks the same -- 2+2 seating, the engine's in the back, same overall contours to the body, and relatively minor changes in size over time. But it's going to perform differently and emit less junk into the atmosphere than the original did, and it has become a safer car due to better seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, and other improvements -- you could be quite a bit more likely to survive a crash in the newer 911. And it's still in active production.
No. You can't. Hubble cost several billion dollars to develop and launch. And many years to build and design and launch and so on. And it makes a lot more sense to build a telescope that can be upgraded over time with new equipment as new ideas and technologies come along than it does to just throw it away. Should we have failed to convert the Hale telescope to digital and just razed it or let it go to ruin when newer, sometimes better ideas came along? You'd rightfully have astronomers up in arms, just like we do now, if you suggested something along those lines.
And we do have "throw-away" hubbles - KH-11 and KH-12 satellites. But they're designed to look at Earth, not up at the sky, and they can't be upgraded on orbit, just thrown away when they're no longer usable.
And we were insane and stupid to go to the hubble and repair it all those previous times? Out of our minds to retrieve that Intelsat satellite? Lunatics to repair and release Solar Max? Irresponsible to retrieve a comsat whose kick-motor failed to start?
And then there's the fact that it's just insane to throw away something that is doing a fantastic job and can continue to do so if a small investment is made to keep it running. It's like throwing away an old Civic just because you might buy a BMW -- no reason you can't keep both cars in your garage, and there are just some things that a Civic makes sense for. Plus, with two cars you have more resources available.
And, the additional Hubble instruments have already been built and are just waiting to be launched!
Ahhhhh! Do you realize how irritated Bob Ballard is going to be when you wreck his perfectly-preserved ancient ship!?! But you can have the Dead Sea Pizza (or other leftovers) in my fridge... heck, I'll save it and donate this stuff if it means cheap tickets to space for me!
I don't have every answer, but here are a few facts:
You've got it right on the heat dissipation, though I mentioned that more to address comments that all the heat would be "taken" along the leading edges of the wings, which isn't the case even though they do tend to get pretty hot - which you can see in infrared pictures of the Shuttle as it descends.
This isn't an orbital vehicle, no. A flight will take around half an hour and it'll reach an altitude of 100km or so - across the official space boundary, but it won't stay there long. A lot more fuel would be required to reach orbital velocity, and a lot more heat shielding to make it back.
Re-entry profiles are usually "corridors" only a few degrees wide; come in too shallow, and you skip off the atmosphere; too steep, and you're crushed by G forces. The exact profile differs from design to design, I'd imagine.
A glider like this one is going to require a different kind of test regime than a pure rocket is, and large flying things tend to be more noticeable to the public. All kinds of static rocket tests are carried out for all kinds of programs (one of the STS-114 SRBs got ground-test-fired this year to see how it stood up to a long wait on the pad, for instance) yet few make regular news. I think a lot of the "show" factor is coming from what the press does and doesn't find worth bothering with. Maybe not all, but a fair amount.
Slashdot Mirror
... You might be eaten by a Shambler.
Most, but I'd bet not all. It's an interesting debate, to be sure.
On the third hand (this guy must be a mutant! ;)) a lot of companies won't bother to fix flaws if they aren't publicly and obviously posted, so crackers might find the flaws and use them for exploits, while the company that makes the software gleefully ignores the problem and gets to avoid responsibility and liability. That's definitely not good. I don't know (it's not clear from the English writeup) whether any attempt was made to notify, but many people who release exploit data do so only as a last resort.
I need an ad blocker for those damned banner ads that the HISTORY CHANNEL is now putting over the content! C'mon, I have enough annoying commercial junk to skip over with TiVo already! What's next, the commercials are the content, the show is the "after these messages"??
from the once-the-rockets-go-up-who-cares-where-they-come-d own dept.
"That's not my department," said Wernher von Braun.
Good for you! Did you tell the cashier and/or the manager exactly why you did it and made noise about refusing to be ripped off in earshot of other people (without acting like a total jerk)? If more people knew they weren't really getting discounts, some of them might go elsewhere.
Amtrak IS run by the government, and while it's doing slightly better of late, it's still losing money. Partly their service stinks, partly they aren't offering enough destinations, partly their equipment is old, and partly they get treated like dirt by the freight railroads (Amtrak just has trackage rights over freight lines, rather than owning its own track.)
They have seen an uptick lately because they don't treat their customers like criminals and make them do completely undignified things, something I think is good, and plan to patronize them for, though they're making noise about getting nasty, too... grr, it makes you just want to drive everywhere in your own car...
The passenger services in the US were once run by individual railroads up until the 1960s or so, then they started filing with the ICC to kill the passenger services. And the government granted them that.
If you pick up a copy of Trains magazine or Model Railroader magazine, or look on railfan photography websites, chances are you'll find at least one picture of a passenger train from the mid-1800s through the mid 1960s, somewhere -- and you won't find Amtrak at all unless the picture (or the model railroad layout) is dated mid-1970s or later.
I personally think that if Amtrak had more modern equipment, continues to treat their customers like actual customers rather than like cattle (legroom, anyone?), added some luxuries and got rid of the stale '70s decor, added destinations, and generally improved their services and played up all these things in print and television ads, they could do a fair bit better.
Part of the problem is professors assigning new editions every couple years. I got by fine in a cell biology course using the last edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell -- while some of the field does change, and pretty quickly, it doesn't change so much so that the old book was no longer applicable. If more people would do what I did (borrow older editions from others or buy them used), they wouldn't be ripped off as badly.
So it's a combination of book publishers, professors who keep going along with the schemes by assigning new editions way too frequently (I have read that article, when it originally came out; I think professors in fields that don't change as much, e.g. calculus, should start putting their foot down and saying "no more, this is ridiculous') and students who blindly follow the book list without considering that a slightly older text will do just fine.
And what are we getting in exchange for subsidizing the rest of the world? The country I live in shouldn't mean I automatically get reamed if I need some drug to stay alive just because somebody with the exact same condition needing the exact same drug in Canada is going to get it cheaper than I do. That's blatantly unfair. That guy is ripping me off and if I complain about it, I get told to shut up and just take it. Suppose that guy makes a million bucks a year and can afford to pay the full price. But I make a lot less, and even so, I get to pay out the nose, he gets it paid for for him.
Our goverment needs to get off its ass and fix this. The drug companies are using us and know it, and we know it and are raising a fuss, but no one is listening.
Science journals use it, too. I'm constantly downloading PDFs of journal articles and most of the time when I get curious and look, they're stamped as having been created in FrameMaker.
But Sam never made it home, so all the junk mail is probably spread all across the timeline.
You don't have to use the card to shop there. Or just claim that you forgot it or something.
My local chain (mostly local, it's sort of regional) doesn't believe in loyalty cards at all, though. I certainly don't mind that attitude.
Then we'll probably end up disagreeing to some extent. That's life, it's to be expected. Nobody's necessarily an idiot. I just happen to think it's perfectly doable and a lot more "worth it" than a lot of people do, after lots of skims of different discussions of this that have turned up on Slashdot and elsewhere. Some people think it's even more "worth it" than I do. And I know other space-buffs and program engineers and all kinds of people who know what they're talking about if I ask them about something, and I've talked to some of them about this.
... which, ironically, is better suited to the shuttle than the orbit the ISS is in, which was chosen to please the Russians, or at least accommodate them, depending on the sort of mood you're in.
A few quick comments - As for lifeboats - if you look at the report, it calls for autonomous capabilities, which means not having to have the station handy. And it doesn't seem, to me at least, that that's really being taken care of. Over and over the argument trotted out is that Hubble is in the 'wrong' orbit
Science - well, honestly, I think part of the reason the scientists are so upset is that they know full well that they can't depend on having a replacement any time soon like they supposedly will get. And the "replacement" isn't going to have all the capabilities Hubble has. It essentially is the equivalent of razing an irreplaceable instrument when it is quite possible to save it. Perhaps a lot of the people arguing to save it don't know all the reasons they're being argued against, but I would say in return that I think a lot of the people who are arguing in favor don't know all of the scientists' reasons fully.
And there's always going to be disagreement, no way around that. People involved in this debate are going to be biased in favor of their own position. Yes, that includes both of us. That's how it always is.
My mind is open, too, but all *I* see is a rather lopsided mess with the scientific and engineering community trying to actually do work to come up with something and ever-morphing justifications to maintain a unilateral "forget it" from the feds. Admittedly I'm not happy with the government in general, but it seems to me like they could seem a lot more willing to listen than they are at this point.
Where can I find Linux for an Axim? That'd be neat. Point me to a distro/project?
We need to get something straight here, and the point I was trying to make was apparently completely missed.
There is fixing a problem by burying your head in the sand and claiming you're not going to deal with the situation that causes the problem, thus "fixing" the problem. Which is what's going on. What was done in the past isn't as relevant as what gets done now and what kind of attitude there is toward getting it done. It's nowhere near satisfactory.
And then there is really fixing the problem by actually going to the effort of figuring out what needs to be done and doing it, none of this complete bullshit that's flying around. The excuses keep morphing as the reasons continually keep getting shot down. That's a hint of the Ostrich Mentality.
Frankly I'm tired of all this taking the easy way out. The bullshit-mongerers need to be fired and real engineers brought in who will come up with a real answer. Nobody's acting "accordingly", they're just playing ostrich.
I have read the report. And we actually knew all along about this particular problem and had developed, or started to, ways to inspect the tiles and repair them in orbit. At the time, there was no way to get it working, but not for lack of trying. (That research has been resumed with new information and knowledge developed over the past few decades.)
It's ridiculous to change our tune this late in the game and decide we're a bunch of wimps. And I'm ashamed to say some of my taxes go toward such idiotic notions. If we were too scared to do these sorts of things we should have decided that in the first place. Now we have a beautiful vehicle that is largely useless for many of its major intended uses for no real legitimate reason.
If you look at the report yourself, it says to develop an autonomous repair capability. Apparently, some people in the goverment can't read very well and didn't see that word, or didn't look it up to see what it means...
The 737 is actually still in active production as is the 747. The same basic design is expanded and enhanced with completely new technology, based on the original designs of the 1960s and 70s. The cockpit of a modern 747 or 737 looks absolutely nothing like those installed in the original aircraft. They just look the same from the outside.
Similarly, try finding an original example of the Porsche 911, the original air-cooled version, and then looking at the modern water-cooled electronically-controlled version and look at all the changes that were made over the years. But the basic car still looks the same -- 2+2 seating, the engine's in the back, same overall contours to the body, and relatively minor changes in size over time. But it's going to perform differently and emit less junk into the atmosphere than the original did, and it has become a safer car due to better seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, and other improvements -- you could be quite a bit more likely to survive a crash in the newer 911. And it's still in active production.
No. You can't. Hubble cost several billion dollars to develop and launch. And many years to build and design and launch and so on. And it makes a lot more sense to build a telescope that can be upgraded over time with new equipment as new ideas and technologies come along than it does to just throw it away. Should we have failed to convert the Hale telescope to digital and just razed it or let it go to ruin when newer, sometimes better ideas came along? You'd rightfully have astronomers up in arms, just like we do now, if you suggested something along those lines.
And we do have "throw-away" hubbles - KH-11 and KH-12 satellites. But they're designed to look at Earth, not up at the sky, and they can't be upgraded on orbit, just thrown away when they're no longer usable.
And we were insane and stupid to go to the hubble and repair it all those previous times? Out of our minds to retrieve that Intelsat satellite? Lunatics to repair and release Solar Max? Irresponsible to retrieve a comsat whose kick-motor failed to start?
Where were all the naysayers then?
And then there's the fact that it's just insane to throw away something that is doing a fantastic job and can continue to do so if a small investment is made to keep it running. It's like throwing away an old Civic just because you might buy a BMW -- no reason you can't keep both cars in your garage, and there are just some things that a Civic makes sense for. Plus, with two cars you have more resources available.
And, the additional Hubble instruments have already been built and are just waiting to be launched!
Ahhhhh! Do you realize how irritated Bob Ballard is going to be when you wreck his perfectly-preserved ancient ship!?! But you can have the Dead Sea Pizza (or other leftovers) in my fridge... heck, I'll save it and donate this stuff if it means cheap tickets to space for me!
Eww. You ate it?! So what do spoiled electrons taste like?
*giggle*
Take a look at this site -- it's really well done and informative.
I don't have every answer, but here are a few facts:
...
You've got it right on the heat dissipation, though I mentioned that more to address comments that all the heat would be "taken" along the leading edges of the wings, which isn't the case even though they do tend to get pretty hot - which you can see in infrared pictures of the Shuttle as it descends.
This isn't an orbital vehicle, no. A flight will take around half an hour and it'll reach an altitude of 100km or so - across the official space boundary, but it won't stay there long. A lot more fuel would be required to reach orbital velocity, and a lot more heat shielding to make it back.
Re-entry profiles are usually "corridors" only a few degrees wide; come in too shallow, and you skip off the atmosphere; too steep, and you're crushed by G forces. The exact profile differs from design to design, I'd imagine.
Most of the envelope is determined by fuel and the shape of your ship. Amazing things can be done by designing your vehicle well and taking advantage of physics... take a look at the Sanger skip bomber", a suborbital craft designed to fly once around the world and make an unpowered glide landing, "skipping" off the atmosphere like a stone off water.
Notice how flat the underside of the spacecraft is
A glider like this one is going to require a different kind of test regime than a pure rocket is, and large flying things tend to be more noticeable to the public. All kinds of static rocket tests are carried out for all kinds of programs (one of the STS-114 SRBs got ground-test-fired this year to see how it stood up to a long wait on the pad, for instance) yet few make regular news. I think a lot of the "show" factor is coming from what the press does and doesn't find worth bothering with. Maybe not all, but a fair amount.