No if you're going very a geo sync orbit, which has a very high altitute mind you, but you don't have to get up much horizontal speed. Takes a bit to get up there I assume though..
In fact, it takes so many bits to get up there that it ends up being significantly more efficient to achieve LOE, and then perform two burns to effectively trade your horizontal component kenetic energy for "height." The vast majority of the earth's atmosphere is packed in around sea-level; doesn't take much altitude to negate drag effects w.r.t. horizontal acceleration.
Of course, in a sanely designed backbone, ingress filtering should be in place to filter source ips from BGP peers that aren't specifically on the interface matching the peer (yes, there's multi-hop BGP, but ignoring that for the moment...).
I do realize this likely isn't the case on many networks, but perhaps this will push such sanity (and very simple) filtering to become more widespread.
Ahh, yes, "the poor children" strawman argument. But did you notice how my post didn't mention minors?
Blaim for addiction always rests on the one who is addicted. Anything less is simply lack of personal responsibility.
If you don't know whether you can control yourself or not, perhaps you need to do some personal development in the self-awareness arena. It sounds like you may be running through life without performing any reality testing, which can be a highly self-destructive path. There are many, many addictions; most all of them are not nearly as obvious as cocaine.
Guess you've never heard of "The first one's free!". You're telling me that no dealer would EVER, EVER give away free X or rock just so the hosebag taking it would come back for more? I can't believe that.
People get themselves hooked by making just one mistake. Crack is HIGHLY addictive. One hit is all it takes to make you start thinking about wanting more and how you're going to get it. Two free hits would probably be enough to give you a lifetime customer.
And around here, they wonder how to get repeat customers. Their problem is they need more addictive products.
Oh, please. You're just regurgitating prohibitionist propoganda. Yes, cocaine is addictive. Yes, people with addictive personalities who respond well to cocaine can become quite rapidly addicted, especially in its purer form ("crack").
Many, many, many people have tried both cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine ("freebase", and to some extent "crack") more than one time yet are somehow not addicted for life. Most people who are capable of reality testing, can logically decide, after the experience is over, that the risk of addiction (and cost) is just too high. People get themselves hooked by making the same mistake over and over again, until they have reached the point where they feel they no longer have a choice.
To parrot this "the first one's free"/"try it once and you're hooked" excrement is an insult to the intelligence of any rational person. Maybe YOU can't control your impulses, but most of us can.
I was merely pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of many who insist that downloading music isn't "theft", yet GPL violations somehow are. Legally, neither is theft; they are all just copyright violations.
You can't. Release under the GPL or don't use GPL code at all. RMS, Linus, ESR et al did not write their code so some selfish tosser could take it and lock it away in a piece of closed-source proprietary software. It was their intention that the code should remain out in the open, where anyone can study it and make changes. And that's the way it should be: not sharing is theft.
Would that be "theft" as in "downloading mp3s for music I don't own (and don't have the artist's permission) from Kazaa style theft?" Or are we talking about two different types of theft here?
If music copyright violation isn't theft, how can this be?
Also, there is no "stop along the way". The kinetic energy of the spacecraft on the LEO is reused quite effectively.
True, but just to be fair, the same is true of an earth-based launch. Apollo/Saturn launched into a very low "parking orbit" and then used all the kinetic energy from this to help perform TLI at just the right moment.
Now, the most wasteful would be to attempt to rendezvous at some intermediate station (say in a clarksian geo-sync orbit), because it requires at least four major burns (probably more, with corrections) to get enroute:
Burn #1: Establish nominal eccentricity on initial orbit (so we don't come right back into the atmosphere) [ok, this may not actually be a major burn, depends on launch]
Burn #2: Rendezvous orbit for intersection with geo-sync station.
Burn #3: Apoapsis burn at/near station rendezvous to match station's eccentricity.
(note, now we have significantly less kinetic energy than we had at LEO because geo-sync is such a high orbit)
Burn #4: TLI burn from station.
The whole "stop along the way" bit was pretty amusing, but I originally chose to ignore it, just because space travel is all about orbital mechanics, and there is no "stopping" when you are in orbit: just transfering from one orbit to another.
Bunk. GPS uses atomic clocks and trilateration, not the earth's magnetic field. A GPS system would work just fine on the moon. You'd need a constellation of lunar GPS sats and a lunar-based GPS receiver, though, so I guess you would be more correct in stating "YOUR CURRENT GPS WON'T WORK"
While that's a nice idea, the problem lays in the simple physics of it. It takes an enormous amount of energy to break the earth's gravitational pull, and once you've expended that much energy(read:fuel) you're just as well off coasting the rest of the way to the moon until you get picked up by the moon's gravity, rather than stop along the way.
This is true, but there are other benefits to TLI (trans-lunar-injection) orbits that are based on an existing LEO (low earth orbit) station, rather than an earth-based launch:
1. Orbital inclination. If the station is at the same inclination (which a station used exclusively for TLI would be) as the moon's orbit, it's a very very easy shot. No inclination burns/azimuth adjustments at launch.
2. Orbital windows. TLI windows based on LEO are "wider" and there is no chance of atmospheric/meterological conditions screwing the window up.
3. Large payloads. As you indicated, the bulk of spent energy is to get into LEO. However, for large mass projects, they can be ferried to an LEO station, assembled, and then (relatively) cheaply injected to the moon. Currently, delivering large-mass to a lunar orbit is impossible, we don't have a rocket or "space transport system" large enough to deliver both payload and TLI/Lunar Orbit/Descent propellent from an earth based launch site in one go.
Well, if it's not an IT company, there's no reason not to do it. Why deal with having your own IT department, where you might not be able to hire the best people, when you could let someone else, with more infrastructure to deal with that kind of thing, do it?
The problem is that a cultural disconnect occurs between the employees of the main company and the employees of the out-sourcing company. The main company employees should be focused (at whatever level) on the products and services offered by the main, while the outsourced employees are more interested in keeping *their* employer happy and thus typically have little "buy-in" to the goals of the primary company. The end result of this disconnect is a breakdown in communication and IT infrastructure.
One needs to weigh the benefits of the cost savings versus the IT degradation that will occur with out-sourcing. As a company continues to grow, there will inevitably be some point at which the cost savings simply no longer make sense. It's my belief that a common management error is to not take this cultural disconnect into consideration.
No. People like you REALLY need to stop parroting RIAA propoganda.
She did NOT steal. She did NOT deprive anyone of their property. Theft is a crime, and if she was accused of committing it, she would have been arrested. The RIAA is alleging that she infringed upon the copyright of one or more of their clients. This is a civil matter, and is NOT the same as theft.
Accidentally lean on a motorcycle or bicycle and you'll turn too. It's using gyroscopic progression to turn, just like a bike. When it's stationary I don't know how you'd do that though, unless it's got a flywheel spinning the same direction as the wheel does when it's moving forward (dual-use for regenerative brakeing too, perhaps).
I presume that the device is not stabilized via direct mechanical gyroscopic precession as a motorcycle or bicycle is, because that would obviously be a rather large mechanical engineering problem.
Rather, one assumes that it utilizes an interially stabilized gyroscopic platform (similar to aeronavigation INS), which is essentially just a couple of gyros mounted on a platform with accelerometers to detect responses to inertial forces on the entire platform. Thus, a computer can make rapid adjustments to some sort of servo mechanism which keeps the actual riding assembly at the correct horizontal and vertical attitude.
which was never done, nor even contemplated, during an actual mission and which many had advised against even in ground tests
Incorrect. Prior to the accident, gemini missions used a pure oxygen environment. Additionally, apollo missions were intended to be flown in a pure oxygen environment, albeit at signficantly less pressure than sea-level. The issue with apollo one was positive pressurization of O2 beyond sea-level in order to simulate the correct ratio of capsule to near-vacuum pressure which would occur during an actual mission.
Obviously, after the accident, the support systems were modified to use mixed gas during ascent. High O2 content is key to sustaining life in low pressure environments.
Re:Orwell's vision was true!
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Then why did he timestamp it?
He didn't. The novel's setting was in some future time, however it was not intended to be specific but rather allegorical for all totalitarian regimes. In order to come up with this completely arbitrary future time period, Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of the year he wrote it: 1948.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
The piano analogy works. Your dissection of it does not.
Does it? Not universally.
Let's hypothesize that I am a concert pianist. I started learning piano on a baby grand when I was five years old. I was quite talented and continued playing and learning for the next 20 years, becoming a established and well known pianist. I've played on just about every type of grand or baby grand there is, but had no interest in technological developments (i.e. no synth experience). What value to I have to a concert hall promoter given my incredible skill and experience with a small selection of instruments? Quite a good deal, I would bet.
Now, compare this to an gifted programmer, one who also started at at the age of five on 8088 architecture systems. Again, over the period of twenty years, I've learned every possible 8088 system, peripheral, machine internal and available programming language. What value do I have to an IT department or development house?
Not to be a wiseass, but glass technically isn't a solid. It's a REALLY slow flowing liquid.
That's an urban myth. Glass is probably most accurately described as an "amorphous solid", i.e. non-crystaline in structure but rigid. There is a second-order phase transition that occurs between the supercooled liquid state and the amorphous solid state, although not a dramatic change.
Actually, it's not outside the realm of possibility to consider glasses to actually be a distinctly different form of matter, neither liquid nor solid; owing largely to the fact that glasses combine the properties of both traditional solids and liquids. Disordered molecules, but rigidly bound.
Regardless, the urban myth that non-molten glass can "flow" is incorrect; in that respect it behaves like a solid.
More information, including cites, can be found here.
BTW, I hope they launch an *extensive* investigation into NASA's current MO, and upgrade the whole shebang for more safety and efficiency. They need some kind of failsafe to preserve these people's lives if disaster strikes.
You know what, I'll just go ahead and say what I've been wanting to say for AGES about manned space flight. It's fucking dangerous. It's one of the most dangerous operations that any human can be involved with. No amount of investigation, upgrading, efficiency, or what not is going to change that basic nature of the equation. The energy involved at certain critical points (launch, reentry) is of such a high order that it simply isn't feasibly to introduce life-saving components. When something occurs at such critical points (which of course, is when it is most likely that something WILL go wrong), everyone is going to die. Period.
The Russian and US space programs have known this for ages, but the US public just doesn't want to accept the fact that their are serious risks involved with putting human beings in orbit and getting them home safely. The complexity of the systems required to do such is of such an order of magnitude that it's just impossible to create any orbital delivery system that is completely failsafe.
This isn't, by any account, to say that NASA shouldn't attempt to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening in the future. Of course they should, that's their job. But to expect that accidents will never occur is naive beyond reason.
We need to either accept the inherent risks or quit putting people in orbit.
The only point of the shuttle in actual perfect free fall (and thus zero-G) is the exact center of gravity. All other points experience tidal forces, which, while minute, are measurable and may (or may not) affect experiments.
Thus the term "microgravity." It's not bad science at all, you just don't know what you are talking about.
Hubble is limited by its diffraction resolution, which is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds; this works out to about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. Groundbased telescopes are even worse.
This means that while magnification may be extensive, one cannot resolve details smaller than 90 meters. Clearly, the LM descent stage and other debris would be significantly smaller.
IIRC, the LM descent stage area is about 10 meters across. To image that with any visual accuity, you would need resolution at the order of two or three meters.
I cannot get a bunch of sand and make my own computer chips. Since these so-called chip-manufacturers have not left any reproducible evidence of their methodologies, I must assume that computer chips are the result of random reactions in nature.
Flawed logic. Given the correct elements (some of which may or may not come from sand), procedures and equipment, one can in fact manufacture computer chips. The reason this is so is that reproducible evidence, which you claim does not exist, actually does.
I'm attacking your belief system, only your logic.
You're forgetting something: The illicit drug trade is the biggest and most successful pyramid scheme ever, comprising a full 8% of the global economy. Imagine if you discovered a new drug that is so good that it makes cocaine and heroin look like caffeine pills and could be made in minutes with common ingredients found at any grocery store, 7-11, Wal-Mart or whatever. Imagine all the drug cartels collapsing and then the CIA folding up because there are no more drug cartels to get in bed with. Would you keep it a secret, or tell the world?
Illicit drug trade is most certainly NOT a pyramid scheme, it's functionally much like a legit business (although completely underground). Drug trafficers are NOT attempting to build "mini-pyramids" underneath them, nor do they care about how many levels exist. They have specific functions to perform (i.e. production, distribution, end-sales), just like a regular business.
And like any business, the following distribution rules apply: the fewer distribution layers that exist, the better (i.e. cheaper, better quality, etc).
The analogy also falls apart because illict drug trade is NOT a single organization, by far. The dealer on the street selling to end users does not work for the cartel that is producing the product, in fact he probably doesn't even know who they are.
All MLMs are pyramid schemes, in sheep's clothing. They can never work because they ignore the single most important business factor: suppy and demand, specifically market saturation.
In order to for a business venture to be successful, it must determine with *enough accuracy* (enough depending on competition, profit margin, etc) how much product the market will bear in a given sales cycle. Product produced (or procured) over and above this magic number is loss (i.e. you're oversaturating the market). This magic number is never infinite, because in any given market it can be guaranteed that not everyone will buy the product.
MLMs pay no heed to this, and have no control or decision making process which determines where the market saturation point is. Thus they all inherently oversaturate and fail, at least for all except the top levels of the pyramid.
That works real well until you realized that many players cheat by unfairly reading information with a different application or proxy.
A good example of this is the 'aiming' proxy, which is a proxy application that sits between your FPS client and the server. The proxy parses the packets sent beteen client and server. Since the client is responsible for telling the server what actions you make and the server is responsible for telling the client what all the other players are doing, the proxy applies a little bit of math to the two pieces of information and 'corrects' your shot so that it hits another player despite where you really aimed.
This could be solved via encryption. You state that encryption is too processor intensive, but that isn't necessarily true. Certainly, on the client side there isn't too much of an issue because you only have to deal with one "connection." Server-side is more of a problem, however this could be overcome via the use of special purpose encryption hardware as opposed to general purpose computing. This issue becomes less and less substantial as computing power increases.
With encryption in place, man-in-the-middle is avoided, however there is still the issue of client-side application tampering. This can be partially dealt with by proper protocol design, as someone else mentioned, and everyone has known in the kerberos world for ages: don't trust the client, it resides on an untrusted network. Don't send the client more information than it absolutely needs, and make sure complete sanity checking is performed on any data received from it. Unfortunately, due to shoddy security software development procedures, such security is often overlooked in favor of server performance (i.e. why take the cpu to bounds/sanity check when you can get more clients on the server if you don't). Current MMORPGs are the prime example of this.
Still, there remains a small conceptual hole. What can the client do with the bare minimum of information it must have to operate? For example, FPS gaming: The client must, at minimum, know the precise location of other players that are currently visible. It needs this data in order to correctly render, there just isn't any way around that. Someone can, at least theoretically, alter the client in such a way as to use that information to perform in a super-human fashion.
Technological solutions, such as application CRC checking, make this more difficult, but because the client lives in an untrusted realm, there isn't any perfect way to prevent this from happening.
Slashdot Mirror
No if you're going very a geo sync orbit, which has a very high altitute mind you, but you don't have to get up much horizontal speed. Takes a bit to get up there I assume though..
In fact, it takes so many bits to get up there that it ends up being significantly more efficient to achieve LOE, and then perform two burns to effectively trade your horizontal component kenetic energy for "height." The vast majority of the earth's atmosphere is packed in around sea-level; doesn't take much altitude to negate drag effects w.r.t. horizontal acceleration.
Good god, if you can't tell the difference between 128k aac and uncompressed pcm, you really need to have your hearing checked.
Of course, in a sanely designed backbone, ingress filtering should be in place to filter source ips from BGP peers that aren't specifically on the interface matching the peer (yes, there's multi-hop BGP, but ignoring that for the moment...).
I do realize this likely isn't the case on many networks, but perhaps this will push such sanity (and very simple) filtering to become more widespread.
Ahh, yes, "the poor children" strawman argument. But did you notice how my post didn't mention minors? Blaim for addiction always rests on the one who is addicted. Anything less is simply lack of personal responsibility. If you don't know whether you can control yourself or not, perhaps you need to do some personal development in the self-awareness arena. It sounds like you may be running through life without performing any reality testing, which can be a highly self-destructive path. There are many, many addictions; most all of them are not nearly as obvious as cocaine.
Guess you've never heard of "The first one's free!". You're telling me that no dealer would EVER, EVER give away free X or rock just so the hosebag taking it would come back for more? I can't believe that. People get themselves hooked by making just one mistake. Crack is HIGHLY addictive. One hit is all it takes to make you start thinking about wanting more and how you're going to get it. Two free hits would probably be enough to give you a lifetime customer. And around here, they wonder how to get repeat customers. Their problem is they need more addictive products.
Oh, please. You're just regurgitating prohibitionist propoganda. Yes, cocaine is addictive. Yes, people with addictive personalities who respond well to cocaine can become quite rapidly addicted, especially in its purer form ("crack").
Many, many, many people have tried both cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine ("freebase", and to some extent "crack") more than one time yet are somehow not addicted for life. Most people who are capable of reality testing, can logically decide, after the experience is over, that the risk of addiction (and cost) is just too high. People get themselves hooked by making the same mistake over and over again, until they have reached the point where they feel they no longer have a choice.
To parrot this "the first one's free"/"try it once and you're hooked" excrement is an insult to the intelligence of any rational person. Maybe YOU can't control your impulses, but most of us can.
I understand that. :)
I was merely pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of many who insist that downloading music isn't "theft", yet GPL violations somehow are. Legally, neither is theft; they are all just copyright violations.
You can't. Release under the GPL or don't use GPL code at all. RMS, Linus, ESR et al did not write their code so some selfish tosser could take it and lock it away in a piece of closed-source proprietary software. It was their intention that the code should remain out in the open, where anyone can study it and make changes. And that's the way it should be: not sharing is theft.
Would that be "theft" as in "downloading mp3s for music I don't own (and don't have the artist's permission) from Kazaa style theft?" Or are we talking about two different types of theft here?
If music copyright violation isn't theft, how can this be?
Also, there is no "stop along the way". The kinetic energy of the spacecraft on the LEO is reused quite effectively.
True, but just to be fair, the same is true of an earth-based launch. Apollo/Saturn launched into a very low "parking orbit" and then used all the kinetic energy from this to help perform TLI at just the right moment.
Now, the most wasteful would be to attempt to rendezvous at some intermediate station (say in a clarksian geo-sync orbit), because it requires at least four major burns (probably more, with corrections) to get enroute:
Burn #1: Establish nominal eccentricity on initial orbit (so we don't come right back into the atmosphere) [ok, this may not actually be a major burn, depends on launch]
Burn #2: Rendezvous orbit for intersection with geo-sync station.
Burn #3: Apoapsis burn at/near station rendezvous to match station's eccentricity.
(note, now we have significantly less kinetic energy than we had at LEO because geo-sync is such a high orbit)
Burn #4: TLI burn from station.
The whole "stop along the way" bit was pretty amusing, but I originally chose to ignore it, just because space travel is all about orbital mechanics, and there is no "stopping" when you are in orbit: just transfering from one orbit to another.
Bunk. GPS uses atomic clocks and trilateration, not the earth's magnetic field. A GPS system would work just fine on the moon. You'd need a constellation of lunar GPS sats and a lunar-based GPS receiver, though, so I guess you would be more correct in stating "YOUR CURRENT GPS WON'T WORK"
While that's a nice idea, the problem lays in the simple physics of it. It takes an enormous amount of energy to break the earth's gravitational pull, and once you've expended that much energy(read:fuel) you're just as well off coasting the rest of the way to the moon until you get picked up by the moon's gravity, rather than stop along the way.
This is true, but there are other benefits to TLI (trans-lunar-injection) orbits that are based on an existing LEO (low earth orbit) station, rather than an earth-based launch:
1. Orbital inclination. If the station is at the same inclination (which a station used exclusively for TLI would be) as the moon's orbit, it's a very very easy shot. No inclination burns/azimuth adjustments at launch.
2. Orbital windows. TLI windows based on LEO are "wider" and there is no chance of atmospheric/meterological conditions screwing the window up.
3. Large payloads. As you indicated, the bulk of spent energy is to get into LEO. However, for large mass projects, they can be ferried to an LEO station, assembled, and then (relatively) cheaply injected to the moon. Currently, delivering large-mass to a lunar orbit is impossible, we don't have a rocket or "space transport system" large enough to deliver both payload and TLI/Lunar Orbit/Descent propellent from an earth based launch site in one go.
Well, if it's not an IT company, there's no reason not to do it. Why deal with having your own IT department, where you might not be able to hire the best people, when you could let someone else, with more infrastructure to deal with that kind of thing, do it?
The problem is that a cultural disconnect occurs between the employees of the main company and the employees of the out-sourcing company. The main company employees should be focused (at whatever level) on the products and services offered by the main, while the outsourced employees are more interested in keeping *their* employer happy and thus typically have little "buy-in" to the goals of the primary company. The end result of this disconnect is a breakdown in communication and IT infrastructure.
One needs to weigh the benefits of the cost savings versus the IT degradation that will occur with out-sourcing. As a company continues to grow, there will inevitably be some point at which the cost savings simply no longer make sense. It's my belief that a common management error is to not take this cultural disconnect into consideration.
No. People like you REALLY need to stop parroting RIAA propoganda.
She did NOT steal. She did NOT deprive anyone of their property. Theft is a crime, and if she was accused of committing it, she would have been arrested. The RIAA is alleging that she infringed upon the copyright of one or more of their clients. This is a civil matter, and is NOT the same as theft.
Accidentally lean on a motorcycle or bicycle and you'll turn too. It's using gyroscopic progression to turn, just like a bike. When it's stationary I don't know how you'd do that though, unless it's got a flywheel spinning the same direction as the wheel does when it's moving forward (dual-use for regenerative brakeing too, perhaps).
I presume that the device is not stabilized via direct mechanical gyroscopic precession as a motorcycle or bicycle is, because that would obviously be a rather large mechanical engineering problem.
Rather, one assumes that it utilizes an interially stabilized gyroscopic platform (similar to aeronavigation INS), which is essentially just a couple of gyros mounted on a platform with accelerometers to detect responses to inertial forces on the entire platform. Thus, a computer can make rapid adjustments to some sort of servo mechanism which keeps the actual riding assembly at the correct horizontal and vertical attitude.
which was never done, nor even contemplated, during an actual mission and which many had advised against even in ground tests
Incorrect. Prior to the accident, gemini missions used a pure oxygen environment. Additionally, apollo missions were intended to be flown in a pure oxygen environment, albeit at signficantly less pressure than sea-level. The issue with apollo one was positive pressurization of O2 beyond sea-level in order to simulate the correct ratio of capsule to near-vacuum pressure which would occur during an actual mission.
Obviously, after the accident, the support systems were modified to use mixed gas during ascent. High O2 content is key to sustaining life in low pressure environments.
Then why did he timestamp it?
He didn't. The novel's setting was in some future time, however it was not intended to be specific but rather allegorical for all totalitarian regimes. In order to come up with this completely arbitrary future time period, Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of the year he wrote it: 1948.
The piano analogy works. Your dissection of it does not.
Does it? Not universally.
Let's hypothesize that I am a concert pianist. I started learning piano on a baby grand when I was five years old. I was quite talented and continued playing and learning for the next 20 years, becoming a established and well known pianist. I've played on just about every type of grand or baby grand there is, but had no interest in technological developments (i.e. no synth experience). What value to I have to a concert hall promoter given my incredible skill and experience with a small selection of instruments? Quite a good deal, I would bet.
Now, compare this to an gifted programmer, one who also started at at the age of five on 8088 architecture systems. Again, over the period of twenty years, I've learned every possible 8088 system, peripheral, machine internal and available programming language. What value do I have to an IT department or development house?
Almost none.
Not to be a wiseass, but glass technically isn't a solid. It's a REALLY slow flowing liquid.
That's an urban myth. Glass is probably most accurately described as an "amorphous solid", i.e. non-crystaline in structure but rigid. There is a second-order phase transition that occurs between the supercooled liquid state and the amorphous solid state, although not a dramatic change.
Actually, it's not outside the realm of possibility to consider glasses to actually be a distinctly different form of matter, neither liquid nor solid; owing largely to the fact that glasses combine the properties of both traditional solids and liquids. Disordered molecules, but rigidly bound.
Regardless, the urban myth that non-molten glass can "flow" is incorrect; in that respect it behaves like a solid.
More information, including cites, can be found here.
I'm interested in why it is that cats seem to yawn so very much. More so, from my observations, than other animals.
BTW, I hope they launch an *extensive* investigation into NASA's current MO, and upgrade the whole shebang for more safety and efficiency. They need some kind of failsafe to preserve these people's lives if disaster strikes.
You know what, I'll just go ahead and say what I've been wanting to say for AGES about manned space flight. It's fucking dangerous. It's one of the most dangerous operations that any human can be involved with. No amount of investigation, upgrading, efficiency, or what not is going to change that basic nature of the equation. The energy involved at certain critical points (launch, reentry) is of such a high order that it simply isn't feasibly to introduce life-saving components. When something occurs at such critical points (which of course, is when it is most likely that something WILL go wrong), everyone is going to die. Period.
The Russian and US space programs have known this for ages, but the US public just doesn't want to accept the fact that their are serious risks involved with putting human beings in orbit and getting them home safely. The complexity of the systems required to do such is of such an order of magnitude that it's just impossible to create any orbital delivery system that is completely failsafe.
This isn't, by any account, to say that NASA shouldn't attempt to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening in the future. Of course they should, that's their job. But to expect that accidents will never occur is naive beyond reason.
We need to either accept the inherent risks or quit putting people in orbit.
The only point of the shuttle in actual perfect free fall (and thus zero-G) is the exact center of gravity. All other points experience tidal forces, which, while minute, are measurable and may (or may not) affect experiments.
Thus the term "microgravity." It's not bad science at all, you just don't know what you are talking about.
You don't understand how telescopes work.
Hubble is limited by its diffraction resolution, which is a little less than 0.05 arcseconds; this works out to about 90 meters at the distance of the moon. Groundbased telescopes are even worse.
This means that while magnification may be extensive, one cannot resolve details smaller than 90 meters. Clearly, the LM descent stage and other debris would be significantly smaller.
IIRC, the LM descent stage area is about 10 meters across. To image that with any visual accuity, you would need resolution at the order of two or three meters.
I cannot get a bunch of sand and make my own computer chips. Since these so-called chip-manufacturers have not left any reproducible evidence of their methodologies, I must assume that computer chips are the result of random reactions in nature.
Flawed logic. Given the correct elements (some of which may or may not come from sand), procedures and equipment, one can in fact manufacture computer chips. The reason this is so is that reproducible evidence, which you claim does not exist, actually does.
I'm attacking your belief system, only your logic.
You're forgetting something: The illicit drug trade is the biggest and most successful pyramid scheme ever, comprising a full 8% of the global economy. Imagine if you discovered a new drug that is so good that it makes cocaine and heroin look like caffeine pills and could be made in minutes with common ingredients found at any grocery store, 7-11, Wal-Mart or whatever. Imagine all the drug cartels collapsing and then the CIA folding up because there are no more drug cartels to get in bed with. Would you keep it a secret, or tell the world?
Illicit drug trade is most certainly NOT a pyramid scheme, it's functionally much like a legit business (although completely underground). Drug trafficers are NOT attempting to build "mini-pyramids" underneath them, nor do they care about how many levels exist. They have specific functions to perform (i.e. production, distribution, end-sales), just like a regular business.
And like any business, the following distribution rules apply: the fewer distribution layers that exist, the better (i.e. cheaper, better quality, etc).
The analogy also falls apart because illict drug trade is NOT a single organization, by far. The dealer on the street selling to end users does not work for the cartel that is producing the product, in fact he probably doesn't even know who they are.
Amway doesn't work, never has and never will.
All MLMs are pyramid schemes, in sheep's clothing. They can never work because they ignore the single most important business factor: suppy and demand, specifically market saturation.
In order to for a business venture to be successful, it must determine with *enough accuracy* (enough depending on competition, profit margin, etc) how much product the market will bear in a given sales cycle. Product produced (or procured) over and above this magic number is loss (i.e. you're oversaturating the market). This magic number is never infinite, because in any given market it can be guaranteed that not everyone will buy the product.
MLMs pay no heed to this, and have no control or decision making process which determines where the market saturation point is. Thus they all inherently oversaturate and fail, at least for all except the top levels of the pyramid.
That works real well until you realized that many players cheat by unfairly reading information with a different application or proxy.
A good example of this is the 'aiming' proxy, which is a proxy application that sits between your FPS client and the server. The proxy parses the packets sent beteen client and server. Since the client is responsible for telling the server what actions you make and the server is responsible for telling the client what all the other players are doing, the proxy applies a little bit of math to the two pieces of information and 'corrects' your shot so that it hits another player despite where you really aimed.
This could be solved via encryption. You state that encryption is too processor intensive, but that isn't necessarily true. Certainly, on the client side there isn't too much of an issue because you only have to deal with one "connection." Server-side is more of a problem, however this could be overcome via the use of special purpose encryption hardware as opposed to general purpose computing. This issue becomes less and less substantial as computing power increases.
With encryption in place, man-in-the-middle is avoided, however there is still the issue of client-side application tampering. This can be partially dealt with by proper protocol design, as someone else mentioned, and everyone has known in the kerberos world for ages: don't trust the client, it resides on an untrusted network. Don't send the client more information than it absolutely needs, and make sure complete sanity checking is performed on any data received from it. Unfortunately, due to shoddy security software development procedures, such security is often overlooked in favor of server performance (i.e. why take the cpu to bounds/sanity check when you can get more clients on the server if you don't). Current MMORPGs are the prime example of this.
Still, there remains a small conceptual hole. What can the client do with the bare minimum of information it must have to operate? For example, FPS gaming: The client must, at minimum, know the precise location of other players that are currently visible. It needs this data in order to correctly render, there just isn't any way around that. Someone can, at least theoretically, alter the client in such a way as to use that information to perform in a super-human fashion.
Technological solutions, such as application CRC checking, make this more difficult, but because the client lives in an untrusted realm, there isn't any perfect way to prevent this from happening.