Doesn't Obama have a Zune? Perhaps this is payback for the democratic staffers that popped the "W" keys off of keyboards at the White House during Clinton's last days in office.
Seriously though, what a giant black eye for a product that certainly didn't need one.
But even that assumes that "the seat inertial reel mechanisms on the crews' shoulder harnesses did not lock". I kinda thought that's what seat belts were *supposed* to do. So I can only assume that at least some of the unfortunate crew made it to phase three, which is awfully hard to make sound pretty. "Separation of the crew from the crew module and the seat" sounds almost gentle, but what it means is that the forces were eventually so great that their bodies were ripped apart by the very straps designed to hold them in place.
No, they didn't. Read the whole report for yourself, it'll change your POV pretty quickly.
If you look at the time lines the crew had, at the absolute most, 12 seconds before loss of consciousness once the cabin depressurized. The telling fact was this: None of the crew had closed the face shields of their helmets, which is a requirement to use supplemental oxygen supply (one of the crew didn't even have their helmet on when the problems started). The G load on the shuttle never really exceeded 3.5 G's (the roll rate was only 30-40 degrees per second initially) until the shit really hit the fan, which was long after loss of cabin pressure. The force on their bodies wasn't enough to prevent them from doing so, so they must not have been able to do so.
Based on the reconstruction of the flight deck, and the data gathered, the report lays out the last few seconds like this: Tire pressure sensors go off the scale. Ground control sees this, confirms with crew. Master alarm event goes of, Crew tries to communicate with ground control but is cutoff, likely due to a planned radio outage between comm centers. In their (unbeknownst to the crew) remaining few seconds of consciousness the flight crew begins to troubleshoot what appears to be a loss of hydraulic pressure issue which may be tied to what they are now seeing as a possible landing gear problem with the left gear. The nose pitches up, cabin depressurizes and the crew is almost certainly rapidly incapacitated, as evidenced by the stop in troubleshooting procedures. As compared to Challenger, where several members of the crew took deliberate steps to follow emergency procedures (turning on oxygen supplies, etc.)
Bottom line, even if they knew the cabin depressurized, they didn't have time to take even the first and most basic corrective step in their training before passing out. You'd think it'd be instinct. Maybe they didn't *die* due to a lack of oxygen, indeed they almost certainly died of blunt force trauma. The lack of oxygen just ensured that the deceased had no idea that they died of blunt force trauma. Like lethal injection. The first drug puts you out, the second drug paralyzes your heart.
The report is very morbidly interesting, and I think you'll see a lot of procedural and technical changes come out of this, just like with Challenger. There are a ton of "wow, yeah, that makes sense now" safety procedures that would've altered the outcome slightly. In this case, we'd have had astronauts ripped apart, burned to death, or killed on impact rather than asphyxiated / bludgeoned to death. Maybe next time, something we learned here will actually save a life. We can only hope.
Well that's easy. Because the only places states are allowed to trim money from the budget are from education spending, social programs, welfare, and health care. It's like, federal law or something. Why do you hate poor, uninsured, orphan, elementary school children?
Being stuck in an environment where opensource projects are rejected out of hand, and stuck in an environment where notes is the standard for "collaboration" (which is a funny way to spell "e-mail system that no one, anywhere within the company, can stand. Especially the people who implement and support it.") , I'm in a win-win. We either start looking at open source projects, or we ditch Notes.
If this actually happens (which it won't, but a girl can dream right?), I'll be the guy dancing in the streets.
The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous.
Benefits are a bit like civil rights. Once they go away, they usually don't come back. Pensions and retiree health care shouldn't be mocked and derided. They should be mourned. After all, we will retire one day, too. How's your post-retirement health care looking, hmmm? Medicare? Money from your 401k (currently about 50% of what it was six months ago?)
The big three have seen the writing on the wall for literally the last 5-10 years. People complain about labor costs, yet you don't hear about the buyouts. Every single UAW employee with the big three has had at least two, and as many as five in some cases, offers to leave the company. Either early in the form of early retirement (eh, you've got 28 years. here's 90% of your pension. Hit the road), retirement incentives (there's 30 grand pre-tax if you hit the road now), or just an outright buyout (here's a pre-tax check for 80 grand, GTFO and leave your pension and health care at the door when you leave.) All three have been shedding employees an an unbelievable rate over the past few years, and haven't been hiring. We're talking in the tens of thousands. But, in the zietgiest world of TV news, that fact never seems to come up. Neither does GM and Ford's spinoff of their Delphi and Visteon parts units. Both companies were turned loose knowing full well that they'd never stand on their own. In return, GM and Ford dumped a ton of UAW assembly-level jobs. Sure, some of those factories were bought back, and some of the workers were put back under the GM and Ford umbrella, but many weren't. In the end, GM and Ford got what they needed. They got out of the parts business in favor of dealing with third party, 13 dollar an hour suppliers. As for benefits...Retiree health care is officially the UAW's problem. That was agreed to in 2007, and they will take over all costs as of 2010. The big three have been aggressively (well, as aggressive as a US automaker can be) going after their labor costs.
After living in SE Michigan for nearly my entire life and seeing what the big three have done to their labor costs compared with ten years ago, I honestly believe that if GM and Ford can at least make it through the next 18 months, they will be just fine. Chrysler OTOH is walking dead. Daimler beat and raped that company like a cheap hooker then dumped the still breathing corpse on Cerberus capital. A bit ironic, since Chrysler built itself as the catch-all for most of the already deceased names in American auto manufacturing. Plymouth, DeSoto, Nash, Hudson, Eagle, AMC. All are somehow affiliated with Chrysler. Any bridge loan money they get will end up softening the blow when that company hits the ground. Jeep will get bought out, but beyond that....
The belief is that UAW auto workers are overpaid. True, to an extent. So are CEO's, Actors, Pro Athletes. So are IT workers, McDonald's employees, and ditch diggers. The difference is that when "workers" are overpaid, it creates what's called a "standard of living." I have no idea what you do for a living, but I'm sure you're overpaid. Compared Ngyuen the Laotian rice paddy farmer, you are a prime example of everything that's wrong with America today. With your fancy "house" or "apartment" with its "electricity" and "indoor plumbing." That sort of opulence makes me sick!
Honestly, What's more out of line? An autoworker who spends every waking hour and holiday in a factory to bust out 120-130k on the year (which is what it would take)? Or a WaMu Vice President getting a 120k bonus? Why are we focusing on "bringing [auto workers] pay in line"? What's productive about that? Somewhere someone is making half as much as you are and doing the exact same job. Who's making the mistake in that case? How would you feel about taking a pay cut and doing the same job you did yesterday?
But honestly, why? The US has demonstrated that there is little to no interest in pubic rail. Well, there may be interest, but when it comes down to the "money where your mouth is" part of the argument, rail measures have traditionally fallen short (and yes, sometimes at the hands of automakers trying to push their evil agenda of....selling their products). California and Hawaii have made gains on rail projects, but even those are years away from laying track.
Looking at this from the 500 mile view may make this absurd enough to clarify your point: You're saying that the Big 3, a group of companies that have either A. Inepted themselves to bankruptcy at the hands of idiotic management and/or greedy workers or B. collapsed as lines of credit disappeared and their customers easy access to the means to purchase their respective products vanished should.........completely leave the industry they created and rebuild themselves as the primary suppliers of a product that is:
1. Already dominated by foreign (or domestic. Hi GE!) suppliers who are already producing fine products 2. Outside the scope of what these companies have built in the last 50-ish years 3. So limited in demand there is a market for at most a few thousand of these items over the next decade, for companies that have been producing millions of a particular product, 4. Not a priority for a nation whose infrastructure is dominated by products these companies currently produce.
Yeah...Not gonna happen.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems. Every manufacturer of automobiles has seen the sales numbers drop (at best) by 20% a month for the last three months. Even the industry's anointed "do-no-wrong, their shit smells like fresh cinnamon buns" companies Toyota and Honda are taking beatings. Hell, Toyota is going to take their first loss EVER. EVER. The Big 3 were in a bad spot because they were left holding the bag when gas prices skyrocketed. They were making what the public wanted, and were getting fat. Shame on them. Toyota and Honda benefited from their innovations, and the Big 3 have now gone into full chase mode. For the previous years, Toyota was chasing the Big 3 in the SUV and Truck market, and were getting their asses handed to them.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses....
(I'm not too interested in the debate about wage disparity and the cost of labor vs the cost a car, I just find it funny that when a company doesn't provide something, the company sucks, but when a union bargins for that same thing for employees, they're being greedy assholes.)
Yes, because the ocean drops immediately to 20,000 feet deep approximately 50 feet from the coast of every nation that borders water.
Intelligence Submarines are supposed to be stealthy for a reason...that whole "violating the territorial waters of a sovereign nation" would be a bit of a problem.
Asteroid hunting doesn't really have anything to do with blue or red shifting. You're not looking to see whether a distant object is moving towards or away form you. More likely, they're looking at dots. Specifically, which dots in picture A moved in comparison to picture B and which one didn't.
Think of it this way: Step out at night and look at the stars and whatever planet happens to be in view. Now, step out the next night at precisely the same time (ok, to be fair, a couple minutes later) and look again. The stars are in the same spot, but the planet has moved.
With high-res digital cameras you can take very precise pictures, then let software pick out which of the faint dots are distant stars, and which maybe be asteroids. It's a pretty standard way of discovering and plotting the course of the various odds and ends floating around our solar system.
What's left to do? Here's some short-term ideas, many cribbed from The High Frontier.
It's not "what is left..." it's "what was left..." NASA probably went in a bad direction with the shuttles, but we still kept plugging forward.
NASA has gone a lot farther than they get credit for, and to compare the accomplishments of nations today to what NASA (and the USSR. We spent a great deal of time just trying to catch them.) did literally 40 years ago is almost insulting.
NASA peaked as Apollo and has been underachieving ever since.
I see that line of thinking as somewhat skewed. We went to the moon, what was left to do? Mars? Not with 1975 tech. I just don't see that being feasible. Sure, we sidetracked ourselves in terms of long distance exploration with the Shuttle, but does the communications revolution that has taken place since the mid 70's happen without NASA trucking up the school-bus sized satellites of the late 70s and early 80's? Sure you can throw those up with rockets, but the shuttle doesn't do a *bad* job of moving big-ass cargo into space.
NASA gets hounded because countries like India and China are now doing things like sending probes to the moon in India's case, and manned spacewalks in China's case. While those are great accomplishments, we were doing those things with slide rules and navigation computers that has 4k of memory and a few hundred lines of code.
China and India pulling off these "stunning accomplishments" while standing firmly on the shoulders of giants. They're booking plane tickets to Cleveland online and being treated like true aviation pioneers, and NASA is being told "What have you done lately Orville and Wilbur? That stupid little biplane thingie? who cares about that anymore. You guys suck."
Where are the Japanese Mars rovers? Where is the Indian Space agency's ISS module? Gosh, it's awfully nice that India has managed to bounce a glorified digital camera off of the moon. That's awesome. Maybe NASA can budget for something cool like that once they're done with that whole "New Horizons" probe that's on its way to Pluto.
Yeah, there are a ton of bureaucratic nightmares in the NASA that weigh down our successes. Mind blowing awesomeness gets shouted down because someone forgot to do a metric-imperial conversion. But NASA is helping *private industry* do things that other nations space programs are trying to get a handle on. (X-prize anyone?)
NASA isn't hanging around the high school parking lot. They're the kid that's easy to pick on because he moved out of town and got his masters degree....while the rest of the world is still talking about how cool it has to have a diploma. We don't have a perfect space agency, but in the face of a red-tape, agenda driven, too-screwed-up-to-be-a-dilbert-cartoon middle management nightmare, we are still doing things that no other space agency in the world is doing. The only group that is even close is a consortium of TEN other nations.
You could just remove it and scan for changes that way. I removed mine. The easy part was getting the brain out. The hard part was getting the brain out.....ahahahahahaha.
Google Earth is good for seeing where salt flats are located, but not what condition they're in. A damp dry lake bed isn't very useful as a test track.
Chuck Yeager had a humorous story in his autobiography about an argument he had with John Glenn. Glenn insisted that a particular salt flat was safe for use as an emergency landing site, while Yeager said he flown over the site in the past week or so, and knew the site was still damp and unsafe.
So to settle the argument, he and Glenn take a trainer out to the salt flat with Glenn at the controls to do a "touch and go." In Yeager's words "we touched, but we sure as well didn't go." The airplane immediately bogged down in the mud, and wasn't moving even under full throttle. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence on the radio, Yeager said to Glenn "You may as well shut it off, you're not doing anybody any good."
I remember hearing a story about several of the Apollo astronauts experiencing problems with depression. I guess after walking on the freaking moon, making gravy train money on the lecture circuit doesn't give you the same sense of accomplishment.
I guess in this case Willy Wonka was full of shit. Getting everything you want in life doesn't always lead to "happily ever after"
IIRC, the 486 was chosen specifically for the physical size of the data paths? Or the dies that cast the chips themselves? Either way, they were large enough that passing radation would be less likely to corrupt data that it would on the newer, smaller pentium based chips.
Purchasing through an LLC isn't that big of a deal. It just gives an easier way to split ownership, liability, maintenance, etc.
Bob Lutz has owned two Czech built L-39's. One was damaged in a landing accident and donated to the Yankee Air Museum. It was destroyed by fire in 2004. His current L-39 is in Marine corps livery. I don't believe he's ever owned a Mig, though the original L-39 was in Czech colors.
Jack Roush currently owns two P-51's. "Gentleman Jim" a P-51D that is for lack of a better term, his 'daily driver.' He flies this aircraft to some of the Nascar races, when he's got time. His 2nd P-51 is a gorgeous, freshly restored B model "Old Crow." At one point he had three mustangs, the other being another D Model P-51 semi-incorrectly painted as "Old Crow", formerly "Rascal." This has since been sold to the founder of Scotts lawn care. Roush also owns a T-6, and several other non-military jets.
These are all housed at, or are frequent visitors to, Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti / Belleville, MI. In addition, there are a Mig-17, Mig-21, and Alpha Jet (in luftwaffe markings), and a Stinson L-2 that are based out of Willow Run, where we house our B-25, B-17, and C-47.
Suffice to say, being the admin for Yankee Air Museum (check the homepage) affords the opportunity to see some pretty interesting day-to-day air traffic.
It's been years since I've tried, but doesn't SMB get dropped by some / all of the major residential carriers at this point? I know AT&T was dropping port 139 last time I tried leaving a machine wide open and exposed.
It's a nasty vulnerability and all, I'm just wondering if this could go all blaster / sasser.
Sure, right now. The first hard drive I ever bought was 8 megabytes and cost 600 dollars.
So...regarding your lawn. Does it bother you that I'm on it? Does the very thought of my intrusion seethe you? Are you consumed in the middle of the night by the thought that something...someone could be within its confines and you would be unaware?
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't Obama have a Zune? Perhaps this is payback for the democratic staffers that popped the "W" keys off of keyboards at the White House during Clinton's last days in office.
Seriously though, what a giant black eye for a product that certainly didn't need one.
But even that assumes that "the seat inertial reel mechanisms on the crews' shoulder harnesses did not lock". I kinda thought that's what seat belts were *supposed* to do. So I can only assume that at least some of the unfortunate crew made it to phase three, which is awfully hard to make sound pretty. "Separation of the crew from the crew module and the seat" sounds almost gentle, but what it means is that the forces were eventually so great that their bodies were ripped apart by the very straps designed to hold them in place.
No, they didn't. Read the whole report for yourself, it'll change your POV pretty quickly.
If you look at the time lines the crew had, at the absolute most, 12 seconds before loss of consciousness once the cabin depressurized. The telling fact was this: None of the crew had closed the face shields of their helmets, which is a requirement to use supplemental oxygen supply (one of the crew didn't even have their helmet on when the problems started). The G load on the shuttle never really exceeded 3.5 G's (the roll rate was only 30-40 degrees per second initially) until the shit really hit the fan, which was long after loss of cabin pressure. The force on their bodies wasn't enough to prevent them from doing so, so they must not have been able to do so.
Based on the reconstruction of the flight deck, and the data gathered, the report lays out the last few seconds like this: Tire pressure sensors go off the scale. Ground control sees this, confirms with crew. Master alarm event goes of, Crew tries to communicate with ground control but is cutoff, likely due to a planned radio outage between comm centers. In their (unbeknownst to the crew) remaining few seconds of consciousness the flight crew begins to troubleshoot what appears to be a loss of hydraulic pressure issue which may be tied to what they are now seeing as a possible landing gear problem with the left gear. The nose pitches up, cabin depressurizes and the crew is almost certainly rapidly incapacitated, as evidenced by the stop in troubleshooting procedures. As compared to Challenger, where several members of the crew took deliberate steps to follow emergency procedures (turning on oxygen supplies, etc.)
Bottom line, even if they knew the cabin depressurized, they didn't have time to take even the first and most basic corrective step in their training before passing out. You'd think it'd be instinct. Maybe they didn't *die* due to a lack of oxygen, indeed they almost certainly died of blunt force trauma. The lack of oxygen just ensured that the deceased had no idea that they died of blunt force trauma. Like lethal injection. The first drug puts you out, the second drug paralyzes your heart.
The report is very morbidly interesting, and I think you'll see a lot of procedural and technical changes come out of this, just like with Challenger. There are a ton of "wow, yeah, that makes sense now" safety procedures that would've altered the outcome slightly. In this case, we'd have had astronauts ripped apart, burned to death, or killed on impact rather than asphyxiated / bludgeoned to death. Maybe next time, something we learned here will actually save a life. We can only hope.
Well that's easy. Because the only places states are allowed to trim money from the budget are from education spending, social programs, welfare, and health care. It's like, federal law or something. Why do you hate poor, uninsured, orphan, elementary school children?
Being stuck in an environment where opensource projects are rejected out of hand, and stuck in an environment where notes is the standard for "collaboration" (which is a funny way to spell "e-mail system that no one, anywhere within the company, can stand. Especially the people who implement and support it.") , I'm in a win-win. We either start looking at open source projects, or we ditch Notes.
If this actually happens (which it won't, but a girl can dream right?), I'll be the guy dancing in the streets.
Why didn't I think of it before? What the US auto industry needs is.....A genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[big finish]
Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!
The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous.
Benefits are a bit like civil rights. Once they go away, they usually don't come back. Pensions and retiree health care shouldn't be mocked and derided. They should be mourned. After all, we will retire one day, too. How's your post-retirement health care looking, hmmm? Medicare? Money from your 401k (currently about 50% of what it was six months ago?)
The big three have seen the writing on the wall for literally the last 5-10 years. People complain about labor costs, yet you don't hear about the buyouts. Every single UAW employee with the big three has had at least two, and as many as five in some cases, offers to leave the company. Either early in the form of early retirement (eh, you've got 28 years. here's 90% of your pension. Hit the road), retirement incentives (there's 30 grand pre-tax if you hit the road now), or just an outright buyout (here's a pre-tax check for 80 grand, GTFO and leave your pension and health care at the door when you leave.) All three have been shedding employees an an unbelievable rate over the past few years, and haven't been hiring. We're talking in the tens of thousands. But, in the zietgiest world of TV news, that fact never seems to come up. Neither does GM and Ford's spinoff of their Delphi and Visteon parts units. Both companies were turned loose knowing full well that they'd never stand on their own. In return, GM and Ford dumped a ton of UAW assembly-level jobs. Sure, some of those factories were bought back, and some of the workers were put back under the GM and Ford umbrella, but many weren't. In the end, GM and Ford got what they needed. They got out of the parts business in favor of dealing with third party, 13 dollar an hour suppliers. As for benefits...Retiree health care is officially the UAW's problem. That was agreed to in 2007, and they will take over all costs as of 2010. The big three have been aggressively (well, as aggressive as a US automaker can be) going after their labor costs.
After living in SE Michigan for nearly my entire life and seeing what the big three have done to their labor costs compared with ten years ago, I honestly believe that if GM and Ford can at least make it through the next 18 months, they will be just fine. Chrysler OTOH is walking dead. Daimler beat and raped that company like a cheap hooker then dumped the still breathing corpse on Cerberus capital. A bit ironic, since Chrysler built itself as the catch-all for most of the already deceased names in American auto manufacturing. Plymouth, DeSoto, Nash, Hudson, Eagle, AMC. All are somehow affiliated with Chrysler. Any bridge loan money they get will end up softening the blow when that company hits the ground. Jeep will get bought out, but beyond that....
The belief is that UAW auto workers are overpaid. True, to an extent. So are CEO's, Actors, Pro Athletes. So are IT workers, McDonald's employees, and ditch diggers. The difference is that when "workers" are overpaid, it creates what's called a "standard of living." I have no idea what you do for a living, but I'm sure you're overpaid. Compared Ngyuen the Laotian rice paddy farmer, you are a prime example of everything that's wrong with America today. With your fancy "house" or "apartment" with its "electricity" and "indoor plumbing." That sort of opulence makes me sick!
Honestly, What's more out of line? An autoworker who spends every waking hour and holiday in a factory to bust out 120-130k on the year (which is what it would take)? Or a WaMu Vice President getting a 120k bonus? Why are we focusing on "bringing [auto workers] pay in line"? What's productive about that? Somewhere someone is making half as much as you are and doing the exact same job. Who's making the mistake in that case? How would you feel about taking a pay cut and doing the same job you did yesterday?
The rest of their operations ar
But honestly, why? The US has demonstrated that there is little to no interest in pubic rail. Well, there may be interest, but when it comes down to the "money where your mouth is" part of the argument, rail measures have traditionally fallen short (and yes, sometimes at the hands of automakers trying to push their evil agenda of....selling their products). California and Hawaii have made gains on rail projects, but even those are years away from laying track.
Looking at this from the 500 mile view may make this absurd enough to clarify your point: You're saying that the Big 3, a group of companies that have either A. Inepted themselves to bankruptcy at the hands of idiotic management and/or greedy workers or B. collapsed as lines of credit disappeared and their customers easy access to the means to purchase their respective products vanished should.........completely leave the industry they created and rebuild themselves as the primary suppliers of a product that is:
1. Already dominated by foreign (or domestic. Hi GE!) suppliers who are already producing fine products
2. Outside the scope of what these companies have built in the last 50-ish years
3. So limited in demand there is a market for at most a few thousand of these items over the next decade, for companies that have been producing millions of a particular product,
4. Not a priority for a nation whose infrastructure is dominated by products these companies currently produce.
Yeah...Not gonna happen.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems. Every manufacturer of automobiles has seen the sales numbers drop (at best) by 20% a month for the last three months. Even the industry's anointed "do-no-wrong, their shit smells like fresh cinnamon buns" companies Toyota and Honda are taking beatings. Hell, Toyota is going to take their first loss EVER. EVER. The Big 3 were in a bad spot because they were left holding the bag when gas prices skyrocketed. They were making what the public wanted, and were getting fat. Shame on them. Toyota and Honda benefited from their innovations, and the Big 3 have now gone into full chase mode. For the previous years, Toyota was chasing the Big 3 in the SUV and Truck market, and were getting their asses handed to them.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses....
(I'm not too interested in the debate about wage disparity and the cost of labor vs the cost a car, I just find it funny that when a company doesn't provide something, the company sucks, but when a union bargins for that same thing for employees, they're being greedy assholes.)
2 2/3s libraries of congress.
Wrong answer, Hans. Care to try for double jeopardy?
It reads: ALWAYS DRINK YOUR OVALTINE
Duh.
mental note: h4rm0ny - possible octopus sympathizer.
How about "exclusive to us, iTunes, rather than the umpteen brazillion other online outlets."
If only one store is offering the product or service, that makes it exclusive to the store.
I got yer lightbulb right here, pal.
Yes, because the ocean drops immediately to 20,000 feet deep approximately 50 feet from the coast of every nation that borders water.
Intelligence Submarines are supposed to be stealthy for a reason...that whole "violating the territorial waters of a sovereign nation" would be a bit of a problem.
Asteroid hunting doesn't really have anything to do with blue or red shifting. You're not looking to see whether a distant object is moving towards or away form you. More likely, they're looking at dots. Specifically, which dots in picture A moved in comparison to picture B and which one didn't.
Think of it this way: Step out at night and look at the stars and whatever planet happens to be in view. Now, step out the next night at precisely the same time (ok, to be fair, a couple minutes later) and look again. The stars are in the same spot, but the planet has moved.
With high-res digital cameras you can take very precise pictures, then let software pick out which of the faint dots are distant stars, and which maybe be asteroids. It's a pretty standard way of discovering and plotting the course of the various odds and ends floating around our solar system.
What's left to do? Here's some short-term ideas, many cribbed from The High Frontier.
It's not "what is left..." it's "what was left..." NASA probably went in a bad direction with the shuttles, but we still kept plugging forward.
NASA has gone a lot farther than they get credit for, and to compare the accomplishments of nations today to what NASA (and the USSR. We spent a great deal of time just trying to catch them.) did literally 40 years ago is almost insulting.
What'll really blow your mind is the amount of recycled T-rex farts you breath on a daily basis.
NASA peaked as Apollo and has been underachieving ever since.
I see that line of thinking as somewhat skewed. We went to the moon, what was left to do? Mars? Not with 1975 tech. I just don't see that being feasible. Sure, we sidetracked ourselves in terms of long distance exploration with the Shuttle, but does the communications revolution that has taken place since the mid 70's happen without NASA trucking up the school-bus sized satellites of the late 70s and early 80's? Sure you can throw those up with rockets, but the shuttle doesn't do a *bad* job of moving big-ass cargo into space.
NASA gets hounded because countries like India and China are now doing things like sending probes to the moon in India's case, and manned spacewalks in China's case. While those are great accomplishments, we were doing those things with slide rules and navigation computers that has 4k of memory and a few hundred lines of code.
China and India pulling off these "stunning accomplishments" while standing firmly on the shoulders of giants. They're booking plane tickets to Cleveland online and being treated like true aviation pioneers, and NASA is being told "What have you done lately Orville and Wilbur? That stupid little biplane thingie? who cares about that anymore. You guys suck."
Where are the Japanese Mars rovers? Where is the Indian Space agency's ISS module? Gosh, it's awfully nice that India has managed to bounce a glorified digital camera off of the moon. That's awesome. Maybe NASA can budget for something cool like that once they're done with that whole "New Horizons" probe that's on its way to Pluto.
Yeah, there are a ton of bureaucratic nightmares in the NASA that weigh down our successes. Mind blowing awesomeness gets shouted down because someone forgot to do a metric-imperial conversion. But NASA is helping *private industry* do things that other nations space programs are trying to get a handle on. (X-prize anyone?)
NASA isn't hanging around the high school parking lot. They're the kid that's easy to pick on because he moved out of town and got his masters degree....while the rest of the world is still talking about how cool it has to have a diploma. We don't have a perfect space agency, but in the face of a red-tape, agenda driven, too-screwed-up-to-be-a-dilbert-cartoon middle management nightmare, we are still doing things that no other space agency in the world is doing. The only group that is even close is a consortium of TEN other nations.
Explain to me again why that isn't cool?
You could just remove it and scan for changes that way. I removed mine. The easy part was getting the brain out. The hard part was getting the brain out.....ahahahahahaha.
Google Earth is good for seeing where salt flats are located, but not what condition they're in. A damp dry lake bed isn't very useful as a test track.
Chuck Yeager had a humorous story in his autobiography about an argument he had with John Glenn. Glenn insisted that a particular salt flat was safe for use as an emergency landing site, while Yeager said he flown over the site in the past week or so, and knew the site was still damp and unsafe.
So to settle the argument, he and Glenn take a trainer out to the salt flat with Glenn at the controls to do a "touch and go." In Yeager's words "we touched, but we sure as well didn't go." The airplane immediately bogged down in the mud, and wasn't moving even under full throttle. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence on the radio, Yeager said to Glenn "You may as well shut it off, you're not doing anybody any good."
You've never heard of "Hangar Rash" have you?
I remember hearing a story about several of the Apollo astronauts experiencing problems with depression. I guess after walking on the freaking moon, making gravy train money on the lecture circuit doesn't give you the same sense of accomplishment.
I guess in this case Willy Wonka was full of shit. Getting everything you want in life doesn't always lead to "happily ever after"
It's already running on an upgrade. The 486 was installed in 1999 as part of STS-103.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servicing_Mission_3A
IIRC, the 486 was chosen specifically for the physical size of the data paths? Or the dies that cast the chips themselves? Either way, they were large enough that passing radation would be less likely to corrupt data that it would on the newer, smaller pentium based chips.
Purchasing through an LLC isn't that big of a deal. It just gives an easier way to split ownership, liability, maintenance, etc.
Bob Lutz has owned two Czech built L-39's. One was damaged in a landing accident and donated to the Yankee Air Museum. It was destroyed by fire in 2004. His current L-39 is in Marine corps livery. I don't believe he's ever owned a Mig, though the original L-39 was in Czech colors.
Jack Roush currently owns two P-51's. "Gentleman Jim" a P-51D that is for lack of a better term, his 'daily driver.' He flies this aircraft to some of the Nascar races, when he's got time. His 2nd P-51 is a gorgeous, freshly restored B model "Old Crow." At one point he had three mustangs, the other being another D Model P-51 semi-incorrectly painted as "Old Crow", formerly "Rascal." This has since been sold to the founder of Scotts lawn care. Roush also owns a T-6, and several other non-military jets.
These are all housed at, or are frequent visitors to, Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti / Belleville, MI. In addition, there are a Mig-17, Mig-21, and Alpha Jet (in luftwaffe markings), and a Stinson L-2 that are based out of Willow Run, where we house our B-25, B-17, and C-47.
Suffice to say, being the admin for Yankee Air Museum (check the homepage) affords the opportunity to see some pretty interesting day-to-day air traffic.
It's been years since I've tried, but doesn't SMB get dropped by some / all of the major residential carriers at this point? I know AT&T was dropping port 139 last time I tried leaving a machine wide open and exposed.
It's a nasty vulnerability and all, I'm just wondering if this could go all blaster / sasser.
Sure, right now. The first hard drive I ever bought was 8 megabytes and cost 600 dollars.
So...regarding your lawn. Does it bother you that I'm on it? Does the very thought of my intrusion seethe you? Are you consumed in the middle of the night by the thought that something...someone could be within its confines and you would be unaware?