it seems likely that a metal asteroid wouldn't explode in this manner but would instead impact and bury itself.
Well, you're technically correct that it wouldn't explode in this manner (ie, airburst). It instead impacts and buries itself while exploding.
Barringer aka Meteor Crater in Arizona was created by what's estimated to be a 150-foot nickel-iron meteorite (300,000 tons), impacting at 12 km/sec, with a "yield" estimated at 2.5 megatons.
(Oh, and your speed estimate is on the low side. Escape velocity is pretty much the minimum for something infalling. Combine solar orbital speeds with different direction vectors and you can get meteor speeds up to about 17 km/sec.)
All that said, your size estimate seems to be the right order of magnitude but a bit on the small side. I think you meant 30 meters in radius, or 60 m in diameter.
It appears that most asteroids are conglomerates of shale,
What!? I don't know which planetary system you're from, mate, but since shale is a sedimentary rock (formed by compression of layers of mud, clay and silt beneath a body of water), none of the asteroids in this solar system are composed of it.
Some asteroids may be loosely bound accretions of smaller bodies, but we know for a fact that other asteroids (particularly the bigger ones in the belt) are big enough to melt and differentiate, with metallic cores. Some of those in turn suffered impacts which broke off large chunks of pretty damn solid material. (The Barringer meteorite - a chunk of nickel-iron estimated at 150 feet across - left a mile-wide hole in the Arizona desert.)
No, copyright law doesn't work like that. Even in the improbable event of the GPL being found not to license what it clearly seems to license, the copyright holder would still have to take action to sue the accidental infringers. Presumably they wouldn't, since they intended to license the copying in the first place.
If some did (or more likely their avaricioius heirs and successors), one could likely argue that, at the time you made the copies, you and the copyright holder both believed the GPL to be a valid license and various doctrines (laches, estoppel, etc) hold.
The VAB was sized to be able to stack four Saturn V's in it simultaneously. The Shuttle of course is much wider, and things have been overhauled, but I can easily believe it could be made to stack both an Ares I and Ares V. One thing they did in Apollo and Skylab for the S-IB launches (Earth orbit, no LM) was stack the whole structure on a platform so that the upper stages were at the same level they'd be if stacked on a Saturn V.
Of course, if they need to reconfig the VAB (and/or launch pads) for Ares rather than Shuttle, (as they did between Saturn and Shuttle operations) that means there has to be an operational gap between the two to allow time for that reconfiguration.
Dr. Bell is an idiot, of the sort that said in the 1930s and 40s that rockets would never work in space because they had nothing to push against.
Actually I take that back, he may be right about NASP (National AeroSpace Plane, a hypersonic scramjet-powered transport) and VentureStar (with it's stupid Y-tank and worst-of-both-worlds vertical takeoff, horizontal landing). His complaints about DC-X though are ridiculous; the vehicle was a 1/3 scale prototype intended to test concepts, not make orbit.
But vertical takeoff and landing (or, probably, even horizontal takeoff and landing) is a different ball game. Single primary load paths means the overall structure is lighter.
That SSTO is possible is easily demonstrated by looking at past technology. The original Atlas booster was essentially SSTO, dropping only the two outboard engines during it's ascent to orbit. That was a kerosene burning, steel-tanked vehicle. Or take the Saturn II stage (LH2-LOX) and replace it's five J-2 engines with an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine); it'll make orbit. Or use the Shuttle External Tank with 6 SSMEs, that too would make orbit.
That puts the lie to what many were saying back in the day, that SSTO was impossible. The new argument is that reusable SSTO's are impossible because of the additional weight of the heat shielding. Well, perhaps, if you design your vehicle first then slap a heat shield on top of that. If you design the vehicle with reentry in mind in the first place, you can do a little better. This is where base-first reentry comes in. The back end of the rocket gets pretty darn hot on the way up (it's got those rockets firing), so you have to heat shield it anyway. Phil Bono had some ideas about using residual fuel (you need some for touchdown anyway) to cool the heat shield, Gary Hudson had a design for transpiration cooling (where water is forced out of an array of fine holes in the surface, soaking up heat as it's converted to steam). We've also come a ways in developing lightweight and highly insulating and/or temperature resistant materials.
X-30 and X-33 (NASP and VentureStar) were oversold technology development projects that would never have developed a flying vehicle. The hurdles are still way too high for hypersonic flight (and why bother, when rockets work just fine) and while VentureStar was closer and made some of the right noises (SSTO, aerospike, lithium-aluminum tanks) the actual design was a joke (horizontal landing, which means you need to lift wings and wheels; linear aerospike, which means dealing with end effects and limited vectoring; and V-shaped or Y-shaped tankage, which means the pressure stresses want to split it apart like a wishbone, and the crappy surface-area/volume ratio means more weight).
Don't worry too much about Dr. Bell. He does some handwaving and recites a few facts about X-30 and X-33 that we VTOVL supporters knew at the time. He doesn't actually show any math to "prove" SSTO impossible because he can't (ironic that in an article entitled "The Cold Equations of Spaceflight" there's not one single equation, or any math at all.)
Nobody (read, the existing big launcher establishment) really believed Phoenix, and to the extent they did, they realized it threatened their rice bowls. Phoenix saw some interest but never got sufficiently funded to build hardware.
Many of the people pushing Phoenix went on to get the SSX program started (with Jerry Pournelle and Max Hunter pitching such a program to Vice President Quayle), that got designs from McDonnell-Douglas (the Delta Clipper) and General Dynamics (the Millenium Express -- a design that I played a small part in naming). The GD design was closer to Phoenix, with an aerospike nozzle and base-first reentry. McD-D's design was chosen, with the DC-X being built as a 1/3 scale flying prototype. After a number of highly successful flights (most 'piloted' remotely by Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad) conducted by SDIO, the vehicle was turned over to NASA who managed to leave a hydraulic line to a landing strut disconnected on their first flight of it. On landing the gear collapsed, the vehicle fell over, caught fire, and was destroyed. There was no budget for repair or replacement. (The original DC-X was done on a shoestring, with avionics and engines pretty much off the shelf parts. The engines (P&W RL-10s) were modified by reducing the engine bell for operation at sea level, they were originally designed for vacuum operation).
Gary Hudson (who hadn't been part of the DC-X program) went on to found Rotan. Some ex-Rotan folks went on to create/work for XCOR Aerospace, which is doing rather well in its niche. I'm not sure what Hudson is doing currently, I've kind of lost touch with folks.
The Phoenix design itself lives on (in mutated form) in Blue Origin's New Shepard (note spelling - this is how Alan Shepard spells his name, the sheep herder is shepherd; I have no idea if this is significant). That's financed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
I've been fascinated by the design concept since I picked up a copy of Gatland & Bono's book as a teenager back in '69 or '70. I hope I live to see a version make orbit and back.
What are you talking about? Not only does the Shuttle have an abort mode for the entire ascent,
It has zero abort modes for the first two minutes of flight (while the solids are burning). After that it has the "return to launch site" mode for engine failure -- which nobody really expects to work -- followed by a transatlantic abort (might work, and it least it doesn't involve flying a 180 turn and trying to find the KSC landing strip); and abort-to-orbit (for a single engine failure late in the launch.
It has no abort modes for anything other than simple engine out, such as an SSME or OMS pod explosion.
it has used them SUCCESSFULLY!
It has only used abort-to-orbit, which wasn't even really an abort, more of a press to MECO.
And no vehicle that has ever flown has an abort mode once it commits to re-entry.
Gemini had ejection seats, as did the first couple of flights of Shuttle Columbia. Not much help if the heat shield fails, of course. It's possible that the Soviet shuttle (Buran) had a go-around capability if it missed its landing approach, certainly it did for its approach and landing test flights.
At least Shuttle has the option of bailing-out if they have insufficient glide energy to reach the landing strip.
Nobody really expects that to work, either, and of course the silly pole is totally useless if the vehicle is in anything other than a stable glide.
They could have designed (at an admitted weight penalty) the whole crew capsule to be separately ejectable complete with recovery parachutes. It's likely that the Challenger crew would have survived had that been the case, the crew compartment was pretty much intact until it hit the water.
Both Shuttle losses were due to the major design defect of mounting the damn Orbiter on the side of the ET/SRB stack.
There were a couple of STS missions planned and designated but not flown. To avoid confusion (hah) they didn't change the mission numbers when one was cancelled.
NASA has never been able to come up with a consistent mission numbering system. (Remember the STS numbering systems up to Challenger (51L - '5' for 1985, although it actually launched in '86; '1' for launch from Kennedy vs Vandenberg (which would have been '2' except the lauach pad was decertified for Shuttle ops before ever used) and the 'L' as an alphabetic sequential designator for missions in a calendar year)). They did something similar with Apollo - the first actual manned Apollo was Apollo 7, since it was the 7th launch of the Apollo stack (earlier launches were tests), but they retro-designated as Apollo 1 the Grissom-White-Chaffee mission which burned on the pad (it's original designation was Apollo 204 after the designation for the capsule).
Gemini 3 was the first manned Gemini, and Gemini 7 launched before Gemini 6 (because of an earlier launch abort by 6). With the Mercury series, they just designated all the capsules -7 (Friendship-7, Freedom-7, Sigma-7, etc) after the "Mercury 7" astronauts. (Technically those were the call signs, the actual mission designators also specified the booster, eg Shepard's flight (the first) was "Mercury-Redstone 3", Glenn's flight was "Mercury-Atlas 6", etc. Mercury-Redstone 4 was Grissom's flight, Mercury-Atlas 4 was an unmanned test, Mercury-Atlas 5 carried Enos the chimp)
So, don't get hung up on NASA mission designations. The numbers only bear an approximate relation to actual mission sequence.
Geez, that manager would have had my resignation on his desk within the hour. Fortunately I've never worked for anyone that stupid, they don't usually make it past the interview process. (You do realize that interviews are a two-way process, right?)
That said, there are a couple of necessary-evil apps at work that work better in IE, and for those I use it. For everything else, there's Firefox.
The student owes the teacher an apology for being disrespectful
No he doesn't. The teacher clearly demonstrated that - in that domain at least - they were not worthy of respect. The teacher owes the student an apology for being an ignorant martinet.
The principal owes the teacher an apology for not giving her adequate IT training.
Nonsense. The teacher owes the principal an apology for bringing shame upon the whole school, and failing to keep up to date with technologies likely to be used in the classroom. If she's giving assignments that rely on a browser, it's her duty to know at least something about browsers.
Unless it's something you are willing to get into trouble over or it violates company policy or the law, you obey the request and ask questions later.
Clearly, this is something the kid was willing to get into trouble over. Good for him. (NB I'm not generally lauding getting into trouble -- too many kids get there for the wrong reasons. This case isn't one of those.)
the student refused to do what the teacher said, which was a reasonable request.
It was NOT a reasonable request. If the assignment was to do or look at something on a website, who gives a rat's ass what browser the kid is using as long as it's connected to the website?
Besides, asking someone to run IE is never a reasonable request.
rather it's low current wire crossed a high voltage line somewhere in the plane
Which is why if you're designing it right, you protect the low voltage sensor with something like a zener at a point just before the wires enter the tank. Any excess voltage gets shorted to ground before entering the tank.
I wonder how well optical fibre stands up to the vibration, flexing and thermal cycling in a typical aircraft wing.
The reason for that is that the GPL is a license which lets you make copies.
If somebody infringes it, the copyright holder sues the copier, and the copier's only defense is the license granted by the GPL, otherwise he has no license to copy and is in violation of copyright laws. The GPL hasn't been "tested in court" because if the case goes to court, it is in the defendant's interest to show that the GPL is valid and that he's been following it. (The only other option would be to somehow try to prove that the GPL is equivalent to putting something in the public domain, and that argument just won't fly.)
Usually it doesn't take long for the plaintiff's lawyers to point this out to the defendant's lawyers, and the defentdant's lawyers to point this out to the defendant, and for them all to quickly come to some settlement.
And actually, the GPL has been tested in court in Germany, and found to be perfectly valid.
Why the frack does the airbag system weigh 3/4 ton? The whole Mercury spacecraft didn't weigh much more than that (about 1100 kg). It's just a bunch of balloons.
Are they trying to make the airbags reusable? Make them disposable, there's a weight saving. Heck, the "Aviva 20' Inflatable Floating Trampoline" from Target has a ship weight of just over 400 lbs, the 15' version is only 257 pounds. Add 100 pounds for the inflation system. There, I just shaved 1100+ pounds off the design.
Actually your explanation is mostly right -- you just omitted the fact that the gravitational force of a large body (the Earth, Moon, or Jupiter for outer solar system missions) can be used to change velocity (either direction or speed) too, as can aerobraking.
Approaching the Earth from the Moon at a slight angle, ie aiming toward one pole or another rather than the equator, lets you use Earth's gravity to help change the orbital plane. You still need to shed a lot of velocity to establish Earth orbit, but can use some of that to change the orbital plane.
Going the other way (ISS to Moon) you have the opposite problem, you have to add energy to change the orbit and add more to extend that orbit to the Moon, and that all requires fuel. So ISS may be okay for returns (except that it's easier to just do a direct entry anyway) but is in wrong orbit for departure.
Places like Ars Technica and others are going to deliberately change the theme to use huge icons and fonts so that when they reduce the image for embedding in the article, it's still legible.
If they'd shrunk a 1600x1200 screen with normal size icons/fonts down to the size they're using on the web page, you'd be complaining that the thing was too tiny to be usable.
And the battery "widget" looks more like an applet window to me, and probably resizable.
(Myself, I like the idea of window buttons on the side rather than along the top, makes better use of screen real estate especially on widescreens. Although I'd put it on the right, not the left. I put my main menu bar up against the right edge of my desktop rather than on the bottom, too.)
Go to the KDE Control Center ("Personal Settings" under the main menu button (the chameleon) on Suse (try the K button on vanilla KDE)), select "Appearance & Themes", then "Icons", then the "Advanced" tab, and set your icon size(s).
Other animals leave the unfittest behind because otherwise the ENTIRE group will perish
Other species don't, for the most part, communicate learned skills for dealing with the environment from one generation to the next. (There do appear to be some counter examples in other higher primates.)
When a species does this, there's some evolutionary advantage to keeping the greybeards around because they're the ones that know certain tricks for dealing with once in a couple of decades events, such as droughts or odd animal migrations, or what herbs to put on that mammoth-tusk wound, or how to reboot that old Ultrix server.
Well no, none of us are evolving. We're just individuals, we'll either reproduce (producing offspring that will themselves reproduce, etc) or we won't.
Yeah, those of us that better tolerate artificial estrogens, or GM food, or a starch centric diet are more likely to produce kids and survive to raise them, etc.
OTOH, in some groups where artificial estrogens produce very early onset puberty in females and males tend to indiscriminately father kids without concern for their later welfare, that may also be an evolutionary advantage. Evolution doesn't care about quality if it can make it up in quantity, all it cares about is lasting long enough to produce kids that will produce kids.
Tell me - why would Apple accept Microsoft's money unless they ***NEEDED*** it? Supposedly, they were deadly enemies. Answer that one.
I answered it about 10 messages back, in my original response.
They accepted it because it was in settlement of lawsuits for IP infringement that Apple had filed against Microsoft (and looked to be winning). This settlement didn't commit Apple to anything (other than dropping the lawsuits), since it wasn't even voting or dividend-bearing stock (essentially it was just paper).
Even if you had a few $billion in the bank, would you turn down another $128 million? Somebody comes up and offers you $128 M for a piece of piece of paper that's essentially worthless, are you going to say "no thanks"? There's deadly enemies, and then there's stupid.
I guess what MSFT got out of the deal is twits like you getting confused over the details and defending them, instead of pointing at them and laughing because MSFT lost yet another IP lawsuit.
MS pumped in a whole heap of money into Apple at one point to basically keep them solvent
Uh, if you mean the paltry $128M or so that Microsoft paid Apple for some non-voting, non-dividend stock back in the 90s, Apple had a couple of $Billion in the bank at the time. AAPL stock price was tanking because of lousy management, not lack of cash.
The money was actually a settlement of some lawsuits by Apple at the time, the "investment" thing was a face-saving figleaf that Gates required if Apple ever wanted to see another version of Office for Mac.
And yes, there were plenty of Apple fanbois moaning about it and accusing Apple of selling out.
The Aegis doesn't use a mechanically sweeping radar. It uses a phased array, where the beam is steered electronically. It's still swept. Nor does the story go into specifics of what the radar array looks like.
I still have my doubts about the story, but the point you raise is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
it seems likely that a metal asteroid wouldn't explode in this manner but would instead impact and bury itself.
Well, you're technically correct that it wouldn't explode in this manner (ie, airburst). It instead impacts and buries itself while exploding.
Barringer aka Meteor Crater in Arizona was created by what's estimated to be a 150-foot nickel-iron meteorite (300,000 tons), impacting at 12 km/sec, with a "yield" estimated at 2.5 megatons.
(Oh, and your speed estimate is on the low side. Escape velocity is pretty much the minimum for something infalling. Combine solar orbital speeds with different direction vectors and you can get meteor speeds up to about 17 km/sec.)
All that said, your size estimate seems to be the right order of magnitude but a bit on the small side. I think you meant 30 meters in radius, or 60 m in diameter.
It appears that most asteroids are conglomerates of shale,
What!? I don't know which planetary system you're from, mate, but since shale is a sedimentary rock (formed by compression of layers of mud, clay and silt beneath a body of water), none of the asteroids in this solar system are composed of it.
Some asteroids may be loosely bound accretions of smaller bodies, but we know for a fact that other asteroids (particularly the bigger ones in the belt) are big enough to melt and differentiate, with metallic cores. Some of those in turn suffered impacts which broke off large chunks of pretty damn solid material. (The Barringer meteorite - a chunk of nickel-iron estimated at 150 feet across - left a mile-wide hole in the Arizona desert.)
No, copyright law doesn't work like that. Even in the improbable event of the GPL being found not to license what it clearly seems to license, the copyright holder would still have to take action to sue the accidental infringers. Presumably they wouldn't, since they intended to license the copying in the first place.
If some did (or more likely their avaricioius heirs and successors), one could likely argue that, at the time you made the copies, you and the copyright holder both believed the GPL to be a valid license and various doctrines (laches, estoppel, etc) hold.
The VAB was sized to be able to stack four Saturn V's in it simultaneously. The Shuttle of course is much wider, and things have been overhauled, but I can easily believe it could be made to stack both an Ares I and Ares V. One thing they did in Apollo and Skylab for the S-IB launches (Earth orbit, no LM) was stack the whole structure on a platform so that the upper stages were at the same level they'd be if stacked on a Saturn V.
Of course, if they need to reconfig the VAB (and/or launch pads) for Ares rather than Shuttle, (as they did between Saturn and Shuttle operations) that means there has to be an operational gap between the two to allow time for that reconfiguration.
Dr. Bell is an idiot, of the sort that said in the 1930s and 40s that rockets would never work in space because they had nothing to push against.
Actually I take that back, he may be right about NASP (National AeroSpace Plane, a hypersonic scramjet-powered transport) and VentureStar (with it's stupid Y-tank and worst-of-both-worlds vertical takeoff, horizontal landing). His complaints about DC-X though are ridiculous; the vehicle was a 1/3 scale prototype intended to test concepts, not make orbit.
But vertical takeoff and landing (or, probably, even horizontal takeoff and landing) is a different ball game. Single primary load paths means the overall structure is lighter.
That SSTO is possible is easily demonstrated by looking at past technology. The original Atlas booster was essentially SSTO, dropping only the two outboard engines during it's ascent to orbit. That was a kerosene burning, steel-tanked vehicle. Or take the Saturn II stage (LH2-LOX) and replace it's five J-2 engines with an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine); it'll make orbit. Or use the Shuttle External Tank with 6 SSMEs, that too would make orbit.
That puts the lie to what many were saying back in the day, that SSTO was impossible. The new argument is that reusable SSTO's are impossible because of the additional weight of the heat shielding. Well, perhaps, if you design your vehicle first then slap a heat shield on top of that. If you design the vehicle with reentry in mind in the first place, you can do a little better. This is where base-first reentry comes in. The back end of the rocket gets pretty darn hot on the way up (it's got those rockets firing), so you have to heat shield it anyway. Phil Bono had some ideas about using residual fuel (you need some for touchdown anyway) to cool the heat shield, Gary Hudson had a design for transpiration cooling (where water is forced out of an array of fine holes in the surface, soaking up heat as it's converted to steam). We've also come a ways in developing lightweight and highly insulating and/or temperature resistant materials.
X-30 and X-33 (NASP and VentureStar) were oversold technology development projects that would never have developed a flying vehicle. The hurdles are still way too high for hypersonic flight (and why bother, when rockets work just fine) and while VentureStar was closer and made some of the right noises (SSTO, aerospike, lithium-aluminum tanks) the actual design was a joke (horizontal landing, which means you need to lift wings and wheels; linear aerospike, which means dealing with end effects and limited vectoring; and V-shaped or Y-shaped tankage, which means the pressure stresses want to split it apart like a wishbone, and the crappy surface-area/volume ratio means more weight).
Don't worry too much about Dr. Bell. He does some handwaving and recites a few facts about X-30 and X-33 that we VTOVL supporters knew at the time. He doesn't actually show any math to "prove" SSTO impossible because he can't (ironic that in an article entitled "The Cold Equations of Spaceflight" there's not one single equation, or any math at all.)
Nobody (read, the existing big launcher establishment) really believed Phoenix, and to the extent they did, they realized it threatened their rice bowls. Phoenix saw some interest but never got sufficiently funded to build hardware.
Many of the people pushing Phoenix went on to get the SSX program started (with Jerry Pournelle and Max Hunter pitching such a program to Vice President Quayle), that got designs from McDonnell-Douglas (the Delta Clipper) and General Dynamics (the Millenium Express -- a design that I played a small part in naming). The GD design was closer to Phoenix, with an aerospike nozzle and base-first reentry. McD-D's design was chosen, with the DC-X being built as a 1/3 scale flying prototype. After a number of highly successful flights (most 'piloted' remotely by Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad) conducted by SDIO, the vehicle was turned over to NASA who managed to leave a hydraulic line to a landing strut disconnected on their first flight of it. On landing the gear collapsed, the vehicle fell over, caught fire, and was destroyed. There was no budget for repair or replacement. (The original DC-X was done on a shoestring, with avionics and engines pretty much off the shelf parts. The engines (P&W RL-10s) were modified by reducing the engine bell for operation at sea level, they were originally designed for vacuum operation).
Gary Hudson (who hadn't been part of the DC-X program) went on to found Rotan. Some ex-Rotan folks went on to create/work for XCOR Aerospace, which is doing rather well in its niche. I'm not sure what Hudson is doing currently, I've kind of lost touch with folks.
The Phoenix design itself lives on (in mutated form) in Blue Origin's New Shepard (note spelling - this is how Alan Shepard spells his name, the sheep herder is shepherd; I have no idea if this is significant). That's financed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
I've been fascinated by the design concept since I picked up a copy of Gatland & Bono's book as a teenager back in '69 or '70. I hope I live to see a version make orbit and back.
What are you talking about? Not only does the Shuttle have an abort mode for the entire ascent,
It has zero abort modes for the first two minutes of flight (while the solids are burning). After that it has the "return to launch site" mode for engine failure -- which nobody really expects to work -- followed by a transatlantic abort (might work, and it least it doesn't involve flying a 180 turn and trying to find the KSC landing strip); and abort-to-orbit (for a single engine failure late in the launch.
It has no abort modes for anything other than simple engine out, such as an SSME or OMS pod explosion.
it has used them SUCCESSFULLY!
It has only used abort-to-orbit, which wasn't even really an abort, more of a press to MECO.
And no vehicle that has ever flown has an abort mode once it commits to re-entry.
Gemini had ejection seats, as did the first couple of flights of Shuttle Columbia. Not much help if the heat shield fails, of course. It's possible that the Soviet shuttle (Buran) had a go-around capability if it missed its landing approach, certainly it did for its approach and landing test flights.
At least Shuttle has the option of bailing-out if they have insufficient glide energy to reach the landing strip.
Nobody really expects that to work, either, and of course the silly pole is totally useless if the vehicle is in anything other than a stable glide.
They could have designed (at an admitted weight penalty) the whole crew capsule to be separately ejectable complete with recovery parachutes. It's likely that the Challenger crew would have survived had that been the case, the crew compartment was pretty much intact until it hit the water.
Both Shuttle losses were due to the major design defect of mounting the damn Orbiter on the side of the ET/SRB stack.
There were a couple of STS missions planned and designated but not flown. To avoid confusion (hah) they didn't change the mission numbers when one was cancelled.
NASA has never been able to come up with a consistent mission numbering system. (Remember the STS numbering systems up to Challenger (51L - '5' for 1985, although it actually launched in '86; '1' for launch from Kennedy vs Vandenberg (which would have been '2' except the lauach pad was decertified for Shuttle ops before ever used) and the 'L' as an alphabetic sequential designator for missions in a calendar year)). They did something similar with Apollo - the first actual manned Apollo was Apollo 7, since it was the 7th launch of the Apollo stack (earlier launches were tests), but they retro-designated as Apollo 1 the Grissom-White-Chaffee mission which burned on the pad (it's original designation was Apollo 204 after the designation for the capsule).
Gemini 3 was the first manned Gemini, and Gemini 7 launched before Gemini 6 (because of an earlier launch abort by 6). With the Mercury series, they just designated all the capsules -7 (Friendship-7, Freedom-7, Sigma-7, etc) after the "Mercury 7" astronauts. (Technically those were the call signs, the actual mission designators also specified the booster, eg Shepard's flight (the first) was "Mercury-Redstone 3", Glenn's flight was "Mercury-Atlas 6", etc. Mercury-Redstone 4 was Grissom's flight, Mercury-Atlas 4 was an unmanned test, Mercury-Atlas 5 carried Enos the chimp)
So, don't get hung up on NASA mission designations. The numbers only bear an approximate relation to actual mission sequence.
Geez, that manager would have had my resignation on his desk within the hour. Fortunately I've never worked for anyone that stupid, they don't usually make it past the interview process. (You do realize that interviews are a two-way process, right?)
That said, there are a couple of necessary-evil apps at work that work better in IE, and for those I use it. For everything else, there's Firefox.
We've got some loony moderators today. Insightful?
In the first case the kid is making an informed decision that doesn't really affect the outcome of the homework. It's just a browser for pete's sake.
In the second case we've got a kid making a stupid decision that could affect his personal safety.
All the difference in the world.
The student owes the teacher an apology for being disrespectful
No he doesn't. The teacher clearly demonstrated that - in that domain at least - they were not worthy of respect. The teacher owes the student an apology for being an ignorant martinet.
The principal owes the teacher an apology for not giving her adequate IT training.
Nonsense. The teacher owes the principal an apology for bringing shame upon the whole school, and failing to keep up to date with technologies likely to be used in the classroom. If she's giving assignments that rely on a browser, it's her duty to know at least something about browsers.
Unless it's something you are willing to get into trouble over or it violates company policy or the law, you obey the request and ask questions later.
Clearly, this is something the kid was willing to get into trouble over. Good for him. (NB I'm not generally lauding getting into trouble -- too many kids get there for the wrong reasons. This case isn't one of those.)
the student refused to do what the teacher said, which was a reasonable request.
It was NOT a reasonable request. If the assignment was to do or look at something on a website, who gives a rat's ass what browser the kid is using as long as it's connected to the website?
Besides, asking someone to run IE is never a reasonable request.
Their beans are not particularly high quality, and they roast them too long.
That's why they roast them too long. One burned coffee bean tastes just like another.
A classic demonstration of how good marketing and branding can move a worthless product.
Well, look where Starbucks got started (Seattle). They learned from the masters (a certain software company located in a Seattle suburb).
rather it's low current wire crossed a high voltage line somewhere in the plane
Which is why if you're designing it right, you protect the low voltage sensor with something like a zener at a point just before the wires enter the tank. Any excess voltage gets shorted to ground before entering the tank.
I wonder how well optical fibre stands up to the vibration, flexing and thermal cycling in a typical aircraft wing.
The reason for that is that the GPL is a license which lets you make copies.
If somebody infringes it, the copyright holder sues the copier, and the copier's only defense is the license granted by the GPL, otherwise he has no license to copy and is in violation of copyright laws. The GPL hasn't been "tested in court" because if the case goes to court, it is in the defendant's interest to show that the GPL is valid and that he's been following it. (The only other option would be to somehow try to prove that the GPL is equivalent to putting something in the public domain, and that argument just won't fly.)
Usually it doesn't take long for the plaintiff's lawyers to point this out to the defendant's lawyers, and the defentdant's lawyers to point this out to the defendant, and for them all to quickly come to some settlement.
And actually, the GPL has been tested in court in Germany, and found to be perfectly valid.
Why the frack does the airbag system weigh 3/4 ton? The whole Mercury spacecraft didn't weigh much more than that (about 1100 kg). It's just a bunch of balloons.
;-)
Are they trying to make the airbags reusable? Make them disposable, there's a weight saving. Heck, the "Aviva 20' Inflatable Floating Trampoline" from Target has a ship weight of just over 400 lbs, the 15' version is only 257 pounds. Add 100 pounds for the inflation system. There, I just shaved 1100+ pounds off the design.
Or just pave the landing area with bubble wrap
Actually your explanation is mostly right -- you just omitted the fact that the gravitational force of a large body (the Earth, Moon, or Jupiter for outer solar system missions) can be used to change velocity (either direction or speed) too, as can aerobraking.
Approaching the Earth from the Moon at a slight angle, ie aiming toward one pole or another rather than the equator, lets you use Earth's gravity to help change the orbital plane. You still need to shed a lot of velocity to establish Earth orbit, but can use some of that to change the orbital plane.
Going the other way (ISS to Moon) you have the opposite problem, you have to add energy to change the orbit and add more to extend that orbit to the Moon, and that all requires fuel. So ISS may be okay for returns (except that it's easier to just do a direct entry anyway) but is in wrong orbit for departure.
Maybe, but who are they releasing it to?
In this case, it looks like a candidate for releasing to testers. Now, if they'd said "production release candidate", you'd have a solid case.
Places like Ars Technica and others are going to deliberately change the theme to use huge icons and fonts so that when they reduce the image for embedding in the article, it's still legible.
If they'd shrunk a 1600x1200 screen with normal size icons/fonts down to the size they're using on the web page, you'd be complaining that the thing was too tiny to be usable.
And the battery "widget" looks more like an applet window to me, and probably resizable.
(Myself, I like the idea of window buttons on the side rather than along the top, makes better use of screen real estate especially on widescreens. Although I'd put it on the right, not the left. I put my main menu bar up against the right edge of my desktop rather than on the bottom, too.)
What GUI options are those?
Go to the KDE Control Center ("Personal Settings" under the main menu button (the chameleon) on Suse (try the K button on vanilla KDE)), select "Appearance & Themes", then "Icons", then the "Advanced" tab, and set your icon size(s).
Yeah, I know, rocket science.
Other animals leave the unfittest behind because otherwise the ENTIRE group will perish
Other species don't, for the most part, communicate learned skills for dealing with the environment from one generation to the next. (There do appear to be some counter examples in other higher primates.)
When a species does this, there's some evolutionary advantage to keeping the greybeards around because they're the ones that know certain tricks for dealing with once in a couple of decades events, such as droughts or odd animal migrations, or what herbs to put on that mammoth-tusk wound, or how to reboot that old Ultrix server.
Well no, none of us are evolving. We're just individuals, we'll either reproduce (producing offspring that will themselves reproduce, etc) or we won't.
Yeah, those of us that better tolerate artificial estrogens, or GM food, or a starch centric diet are more likely to produce kids and survive to raise them, etc.
OTOH, in some groups where artificial estrogens produce very early onset puberty in females and males tend to indiscriminately father kids without concern for their later welfare, that may also be an evolutionary advantage. Evolution doesn't care about quality if it can make it up in quantity, all it cares about is lasting long enough to produce kids that will produce kids.
Tell me - why would Apple accept Microsoft's money unless they ***NEEDED*** it? Supposedly, they were deadly enemies. Answer that one.
I answered it about 10 messages back, in my original response.
They accepted it because it was in settlement of lawsuits for IP infringement that Apple had filed against Microsoft (and looked to be winning). This settlement didn't commit Apple to anything (other than dropping the lawsuits), since it wasn't even voting or dividend-bearing stock (essentially it was just paper).
Even if you had a few $billion in the bank, would you turn down another $128 million? Somebody comes up and offers you $128 M for a piece of piece of paper that's essentially worthless, are you going to say "no thanks"? There's deadly enemies, and then there's stupid.
I guess what MSFT got out of the deal is twits like you getting confused over the details and defending them, instead of pointing at them and laughing because MSFT lost yet another IP lawsuit.
MS pumped in a whole heap of money into Apple at one point to basically keep them solvent
Uh, if you mean the paltry $128M or so that Microsoft paid Apple for some non-voting, non-dividend stock back in the 90s, Apple had a couple of $Billion in the bank at the time. AAPL stock price was tanking because of lousy management, not lack of cash.
The money was actually a settlement of some lawsuits by Apple at the time, the "investment" thing was a face-saving figleaf that Gates required if Apple ever wanted to see another version of Office for Mac.
And yes, there were plenty of Apple fanbois moaning about it and accusing Apple of selling out.
The Aegis doesn't use a mechanically sweeping radar. It uses a phased array, where the beam is steered electronically. It's still swept. Nor does the story go into specifics of what the radar array looks like.
I still have my doubts about the story, but the point you raise is irrelevant.