Now, to get such a precise landing requires mass. If you use wings, they are heavy. If you insist on a capsule then you'll either have to have a big para-wing (heavy, complex to deploy, perhaps not so reliable), or landing rockets (heavy, and definitiely complex). Either way, you pay a mass penalty.
Well, unless you don't care if the occupants survive the landing (rather defeating the purpose of reentry), you need something to soften the landing. Parafoils aren't much heavier than plain old parachutes.
The point I want to make is that you shouldn't be arguing over wings (at this point in the deisgn process), you should be deicing whether or not you need controlled landings.
I agree up to a point: I think you should be deciding on how controlled you want the landing -- I don't think anyone really wants a totally uncontrolled landing!
How you you rather land back on Earth: parachuting into the ocean or landing smoothly like an airplane?
Those aren't the only two options. Russian and Chinese spacecraft parachute onto land. One could land smoothly like an airplane, without the ridiculous wings, by using a parafoil (indeed, such was seriously studied -- well, a similar idea Rogallo wing -- for the Gemini program). Or one could land smoothly yet vertically like a helicopter, Harrier jet, or Bell rocket pack.
Not in space, no. We lost Grissom, White and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 capsule fire on the pad. 16 PSI pure O2 atmosphere (for ground test) and a hatch designed to open inward didn't help. (And yes, they changed both of those, and much else.)
I believe they reused gemini and appollo capsules with minimal retrofitting.
Uh, no. Each Gemini and Apollo (and Mercury) mission flew with a different spacecraft. They were somewhat customized to each mission (eg during the Apollo series, weight reductions were incorporated in successive model series to allow more payload, etc.) Various parts were only meant to be used for one flight -- and a good many such parts never returned to Earth. The modules that did are all in museums now.
As it stands the cost to "re-use" a space shuttle is rediculous because of the area of the heat shield.
Actually, aside from minor problems with being hit by ET foam at 500 mph, the Shuttle heat shield is one of the few parts that pretty well works as advertized. The Apollo era heat shields were an ablative material that worked by burning off (slowly!), the Shuttle "TPS" (thermal protection system) is pretty reuasable.
It's just about everything else on the Shuttle that has to be refurbished or disassembled and inspected before the next flight. (As for the so-called reusable solid boosters, that operation has been described as "more crash-and-salvage rather than recover-and-reuse".
That reminds me of Martin-Marietta's (now Lockheed-Martin) submission of their original bid for Space Station, way back when. They very proudly showed off the truck loaded with boxes and boxes of the documents of their proposal.
Boeing submitted its proposal on a CD-ROM.
I don't think Martin has ever submitted a proposal on paper since.
using deadly force is an appropriate response to a simple trespass
Walking across the guy's lawn is simple trespass. Showing up in his house and searching for stuff is unlawful entry, probably breaking and entering, and no doubt a few other things besides.
Cybernetics is the application of control processes from biological systems to artificial systems.
You're thinking of bionics. (Although the definition you give isn't exact for that, either). Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in both living and non-living systems.
For some reason US raw surgar prices seem to be about triple the "world" price.
Tarrifs.
IIRC, the US has some pretty high tarrifs on cane sugar. Not that there's a domestic sugar industry to protect, but there is a huge corn syrup (and other corn products) industry. Think Archer Daniels Midland. Think lobbying groups.
And yeah, it's the reason that drinks like Coca-Cola use corn syrup instead of real sugar as the sweetener.
Yeah, a lot of the info, camera snapshots, etc gets posted to the web. Most of is linked from the COTRIP page (Colorado Transportation Resource and Information Partnership). You can also check out the links from CDOT's main page. Part of the project was to deploy web-based information kiosks to places like DIA.
Of course the cool stuff -- like live video feeds from the cameras and remote controls for the ones that can pan, tilt and zoom, or to reprogram the signs -- is of course restricted to the operations center (or the backup center that Lockheed maintains).
The trick is getting there from here in the current system. The Demopublicans and Republicrats would be thrilled at the prospect of eliminating all funding to those pesky vote-siphoning third parties by placing requirements, which happen to exclude everyone but themselves, on getting that public funding.
Speaking of election reform -- and this isn't likely to happen either -- I'd love to see "truth in advertising" laws applied to campaign ads.
Well, no, that only happens to companies (or rather, company) lucky enough to get a deal to supply the OS for IBM's PC line that doesn't exclude them from also supplying other PC makers, at a time when the PC industry is young and just waiting for a player like IBM to enter it.
Think of all the other OS's out there (or formerly out there) to which your addendum doesn't apply.
It's the ongoing battle of special interests vs general or diffuse interest. On the whole, the general interest of the population to be able to copy databases is probably worth more than the money that a few companies can make from copyrighting them.
Let's say (to pull some numbers out of the air) that DB copying is worth about $1 apiece to everyone in the country (total nearly $300M), but only $50M apiece to three companies to prevent it. $300M beats $150M, right?
Alas, those three companies might be willing to put up $1M each ($3M) in lobbying efforts, but only a tiny fraction of the general population would be willing to give up the 1 cent each to match that (besides which, overhead on trying to collect that would kill it).
Thus the political power tends to accrue to the special interests -- however diverse those special interests might be -- to the detriment of the general interest.
Actually that Denver area system goes back to a CDOT initiative five or six years ago. Traffic speed sensors in the highways will trip an alarm if the average speed goes out of range (adjustable to allow for known factors) and a traffic engineer can bring up a view on one of the nearby cameras. There are a bunch of other inputs (including weather sensors, etc) and outputs (the changeable text signs over some of the highways, low power AM broadcast systems near the Eisenhower Tunnel, Vail Pass, etc...).
I worked on some of the overall software design and some of the implementation back in '98.
if, by modifying the software with a $200 card I can get the same functionality as a $400 one, then there should not be any law stopping me from doing so.
My first port of call was Oracle because I thought they'd surely give out a free demo version I could play with and installation would be easy. Unfortunately I couldn't find such a beast
Did you try their web site? The little "Downloads" link on their main web page?
Seriously, both 8i and 9i are available as downloads, as long with a ton of other stuff. You'll want a fast link, 9i is a couple or 3 CDs. (I DL'd the developer version with a lot of extra stuff)
installation would be easy.
Well, that's a relative term. I had problems with 8i (because of my configuration) but 9i worked fine.
Until it does, my C-with-embedded-SQL code will contine to run fine with Postgres, Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and other real datatabase servers, but not mySQL.
(Okay, there are a couple of very minor differences between some of the above, in particular slight variations on the EXEC SQL CONNECT syntax between Oracle and Postgres, but that's easy to code around. The rest is the same.)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, to get such a precise landing requires mass. If you use wings, they are heavy. If you insist on a capsule then you'll either have to have a big para-wing (heavy, complex to deploy, perhaps not so reliable), or landing rockets (heavy, and definitiely complex). Either way, you pay a mass penalty.
Well, unless you don't care if the occupants survive the landing (rather defeating the purpose of reentry), you need something to soften the landing. Parafoils aren't much heavier than plain old parachutes.
The point I want to make is that you shouldn't be arguing over wings (at this point in the deisgn process), you should be deicing whether or not you need controlled landings.
I agree up to a point: I think you should be deciding on how controlled you want the landing -- I don't think anyone really wants a totally uncontrolled landing!
Oh, agreed absolutely. We probably lose more people in traffic accidents every day than we have in the whole history of NASA.
The test pilots of the 1950s -- the real "right stuff" -- understood that. They just named another street at Edwards after the lost pilot and went on.
How you you rather land back on Earth: parachuting into the ocean or landing smoothly like an airplane?
Those aren't the only two options. Russian and Chinese spacecraft parachute onto land. One could land smoothly like an airplane, without the ridiculous wings, by using a parafoil (indeed, such was seriously studied -- well, a similar idea Rogallo wing -- for the Gemini program). Or one could land smoothly yet vertically like a helicopter, Harrier jet, or Bell rocket pack.
The US never lost a space crew in a capsule.
Not in space, no. We lost Grissom, White and Chaffee in the Apollo 1 capsule fire on the pad. 16 PSI pure O2 atmosphere (for ground test) and a hatch designed to open inward didn't help. (And yes, they changed both of those, and much else.)
I believe they reused gemini and appollo capsules with minimal retrofitting.
Uh, no. Each Gemini and Apollo (and Mercury) mission flew with a different spacecraft. They were somewhat customized to each mission (eg during the Apollo series, weight reductions were incorporated in successive model series to allow more payload, etc.) Various parts were only meant to be used for one flight -- and a good many such parts never returned to Earth. The modules that did are all in museums now.
As it stands the cost to "re-use" a space shuttle is rediculous because of the area of the heat shield.
Actually, aside from minor problems with being hit by ET foam at 500 mph, the Shuttle heat shield is one of the few parts that pretty well works as advertized. The Apollo era heat shields were an ablative material that worked by burning off (slowly!), the Shuttle "TPS" (thermal protection system) is pretty reuasable.
It's just about everything else on the Shuttle that has to be refurbished or disassembled and inspected before the next flight. (As for the so-called reusable solid boosters, that operation has been described as "more crash-and-salvage rather than recover-and-reuse".
Yes, Frazz is very good.
I also detect a strong Watterson influence in the style of Zits which could almost be Calvin as a teenager.
That reminds me of Martin-Marietta's (now Lockheed-Martin) submission of their original bid for Space Station, way back when. They very proudly showed off the truck loaded with boxes and boxes of the documents of their proposal.
Boeing submitted its proposal on a CD-ROM.
I don't think Martin has ever submitted a proposal on paper since.
simply because one individual chooses to act in discordance with the group's stated goals doesn't at all reflect on the group.
Larry Niven puts it a little more succinctly, if slightly differently: "there is no cause so noble that it will not attract fuggheads".
using deadly force is an appropriate response to a simple trespass
Walking across the guy's lawn is simple trespass. Showing up in his house and searching for stuff is unlawful entry, probably breaking and entering, and no doubt a few other things besides.
Cybernetics is the application of control processes from biological systems to artificial systems.
You're thinking of bionics. (Although the definition you give isn't exact for that, either). Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in both living and non-living systems.
Here are the dictionary links:
bionics
cybernetics
(Triva note: the term "cybernetics" was coined by Norbert Wiener, "bionics" was coined by Dr. Jack Steele -- my father-in-law)
For some reason US raw surgar prices seem to be about triple the "world" price.
Tarrifs.
IIRC, the US has some pretty high tarrifs on cane sugar. Not that there's a domestic sugar industry to protect, but there is a huge corn syrup (and other corn products) industry. Think Archer Daniels Midland. Think lobbying groups.
And yeah, it's the reason that drinks like Coca-Cola use corn syrup instead of real sugar as the sweetener.
Yeah, a lot of the info, camera snapshots, etc gets posted to the web. Most of is linked from the COTRIP page (Colorado Transportation Resource and Information Partnership). You can also check out the links from CDOT's main page. Part of the project was to deploy web-based information kiosks to places like DIA.
Of course the cool stuff -- like live video feeds from the cameras and remote controls for the ones that can pan, tilt and zoom, or to reprogram the signs -- is of course restricted to the operations center (or the backup center that Lockheed maintains).
why don't we finance elections with public money?
The trick is getting there from here in the current system. The Demopublicans and Republicrats would be thrilled at the prospect of eliminating all funding to those pesky vote-siphoning third parties by placing requirements, which happen to exclude everyone but themselves, on getting that public funding.
Speaking of election reform -- and this isn't likely to happen either -- I'd love to see "truth in advertising" laws applied to campaign ads.
Well, no, that only happens to companies (or rather, company) lucky enough to get a deal to supply the OS for IBM's PC line that doesn't exclude them from also supplying other PC makers, at a time when the PC industry is young and just waiting for a player like IBM to enter it.
Think of all the other OS's out there (or formerly out there) to which your addendum doesn't apply.
It seems to me that all non-Microsoft operating systems are converging on Unix.
Well, as Henry Spencer put it: "those who fail to understand Unix are destined to reimplement it -- poorly."
Which probably also explains why Microsoft is doing such a lousy job of it.
It's the ongoing battle of special interests vs general or diffuse interest. On the whole, the general interest of the population to be able to copy databases is probably worth more than the money that a few companies can make from copyrighting them.
Let's say (to pull some numbers out of the air) that DB copying is worth about $1 apiece to everyone in the country (total nearly $300M), but only $50M apiece to three companies to prevent it. $300M beats $150M, right?
Alas, those three companies might be willing to put up $1M each ($3M) in lobbying efforts, but only a tiny fraction of the general population would be willing to give up the 1 cent each to match that (besides which, overhead on trying to collect that would kill it).
Thus the political power tends to accrue to the special interests -- however diverse those special interests might be -- to the detriment of the general interest.
Actually that Denver area system goes back to a CDOT initiative five or six years ago. Traffic speed sensors in the highways will trip an alarm if the average speed goes out of range (adjustable to allow for known factors) and a traffic engineer can bring up a view on one of the nearby cameras. There are a bunch of other inputs (including weather sensors, etc) and outputs (the changeable text signs over some of the highways, low power AM broadcast systems near the Eisenhower Tunnel, Vail Pass, etc...).
I worked on some of the overall software design and some of the implementation back in '98.
So, what were you doing at mannotincluded.com? ;)
Perhaps he was checking out the "Join as Donor" link?
Customs has been advised that the servers did not contain personal, business-related or national security information.
Okayy.... So just what was on them, then? Somebody's pr0n collection?
One thing at a time. Windows needs to die first, then Samba will wither away through lack of interest.
if, by modifying the software with a $200 card I can get the same functionality as a $400 one, then there should not be any law stopping me from doing so.
That, I'll agree with.
When you select data of of your database, you just make sure that you don't pull any data that's dirty.
To reiterate what an earlier poster asked -- how do you stop somebody else from pulling dirty data?
If you and your app are the only client the DB has, that might be okay. It's hardly a general solution though.
My first port of call was Oracle because I thought they'd surely give out a free demo version I could play with and installation would be easy. Unfortunately I couldn't find such a beast
Did you try their web site? The little "Downloads" link on their main web page?
Seriously, both 8i and 9i are available as downloads, as long with a ton of other stuff. You'll want a fast link, 9i is a couple or 3 CDs. (I DL'd the developer version with a lot of extra stuff)
installation would be easy.
Well, that's a relative term. I had problems with 8i (because of my configuration) but 9i worked fine.
Oh, and that download link goes to here.
Does mySQL have an embedded SQL preprocessor yet?
Until it does, my C-with-embedded-SQL code will contine to run fine with Postgres, Oracle, Sybase, DB2 and other real datatabase servers, but not mySQL.
(Okay, there are a couple of very minor differences between some of the above, in particular slight variations on the EXEC SQL CONNECT syntax between Oracle and Postgres, but that's easy to code around. The rest is the same.)
Even though PostgreSQL has more features and is more promising and powerful, mySQL gets more publicity.
That's because "mySQL" is easier to pronounce than "PostgreSQL". Fewer syllables.