Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016
Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.
I'm not sure if you have to be an idiot to believe that, but I imagine it helps.
There's loads of historical data on the "slip factor", enough to know that no such "factor" exists. If you were a complete idiot, you might average the amount of slippage that has occurred in the past, call it the "slip factor" (ignore the fact that when you then go and apply this "factor" to all the previous projects, you end up wrong most of the time), multiply this by the estimate, and, if you're really really really stupid, actually expect this new prediction to be accurate.
Most successful project leaders aren't this stupid. That's why they don't do it. It's not that they aren't capable of doing it, it's just they aren't stupid enough to expect that would yield anything approaching an accurate prediction.
I can't believe that NASA would even float such a concept right now.
You would prefer they keep quiet about it until they actually run out of money, then deorbit it without telling anyone? Or do you have some magical plan they should be following where they plan on keeping the ISS up without spending a dime on it? Alas, NASA has to deal with the real world of facts. The station can't be kept in orbit with good intentions alone. When the money runs out, the station comes down. The only question is, whether it comes down in a controlled or an uncontrolled manner. It's good that they plan to bring it down in a controlled manner.
Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary."
Because they live in the real world, where hopes and dreams don't keep things flying. In the real world, you can't keep something running when you can't pay the upkeep necessary to keep it running. They run out of money for the project in 2015. Regardless of whether it's too cumbersome or not, or scientifically necessary or not. They have to deal with reality as it is.
Article implies they are planning on trashing it in 2016 unless they get more funding.. This is a political move, and the ISS will probably be kept in service longer then that.
The plan, or the announcement of it? The plan isn't a political move. They can't keep it up when they no longer have any money to keep it up; simple fact of life. The plan is simply dealing with reality as it is. The announcement? Certainly that's a political move, but a good one. If they want to keep the ISS up longer (and they do), they need to get more money, they can't keep it up without more money. And they live in a democratic society. If they want money, they need to appeal dramatically to congress and the public to get it. No public agency in a democracy can succeed at its job without making "political moves" -- this is by design, and it's a good thing. Let the debating begin...
... or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.
That would be NASA's first choice, if they had the ability to do so. Alas, they can't do this without money. As things stand right now, they must cease operations in 2015. It's not a "choice", it's a fact that they need to deal with and have absolutely no control over. They don't control the purse strings, they can only do what their funding allows, and their funding doesn't allow for that option both you and they would prefer.
There's tons of man-made waste discarded in space. From big pieces of Saturn V rockets to small pieces of smashed up Chinese satellite.
Yes, and this is a serious problem of great concern to NASA.
So NASA and and friends aren't too bothered about leaving useless bits of metal in space,
They're extremely bothered by this.
.... but a multi-billion dollar space station of obvious advantage to future manned space flight must be destroyed?
Not if they can help it, but if no one comes up with the money to keep it up, then their own choices are to deorbit it in a controlled manner or watch it deorbit of its own accord in a possibly disastrous and even life-threatening manner. Oddly enough, they've chosen the most safe option of the ones that they have available to them.
Nothing gives them the right, unfortunately. If it were up to them, they'd keep it up there. But since they don't have the right to do that, they'll be forced to bring it down. From TFA:
"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.
Suffredini [the NASA head who was there announcing the plan] agrees.
It's a bad idea. NASA agrees it's a good idea. NASA doesn't want to shut it down in 2015. But if no one comes up with the money to keep it going, it'll have to be shut down in 2015. If you don't want it shut down, come up with the money.
Well, there's "story" and then there's "story". I believe the GP would refer to what you're referring to as "setting" or "backstory". Lore is an important part of the setting, but it is not itself a storyline. It's the backdrop behind the main plot, but it's not the main plot.
Nearly all MMORPG's (and some non-MMO RPG's, e.g. Morrowind), suffer from having a fabulously well developed setting and rich lore, but almost no actual story. If you're used to playing traditional RPG's, where there's an actual plot that you progress through and are an active part of, WoW will definitely leave you flat. Diablo, simplistic as it was, had a richer storyline than WoW...
If you're looking for an MMO with a decent storyline, I'd recommend Guild Wars. It's not exactly high art, but it's a great deal better than any other MMO I've ever seen in placing you at the center of events that actually move and change the world as you go along.
1) The text was syntactically and grammatically near perfect....
From the message, I'm absolutey certain they're in America
Huh? You've got to be kidding. Syntactically and grammatically near perfect English almost rules out the author being American. The number of Americans who can speak or write English with the skill of a well-educated non-native speaker is vanishingly small. The non-native speaker is not disadvantaged from having spent a lifetime listening to what passes for English in America. The poor American has to first unlearn much of his or her speech patterns before they can being to learn proper English syntax and grammar.
But I'm not sure it's much better only having a few experts able to steal money and run bot nets over a longer period of time or a lot of clueless script kiddies doing it within a shorter period.
I'm sure. I'd rather have some idiot punk walk into my house and steal the TV than some knowledgeable professional come in, empty the contents of my safe, and steal the far more valuable painting on the wall while leaving the relatively worthless TV alone.
If the argument is it reduces the number of idiot punks running around, so I don't find out about the defect in my security system until the professional comes along, it's fairly easy to see why it's a bad thing, even if it does in fact reduce the number of idiot punks running around stealing TVs.
They are pushing for change in the whitehat security industry itself, so that script kiddies and security companies stop exploiting the consequences of full disclosure.
You weren't doing too badly until you got to the "so..." part. The reasons why they're doing this are fairly obvious, it's the same reason drug runners would oppose drug legalization -- it would devalue the product. These are clearly people who engage in black-hat activity (witness the fact that they just did -- any argument that they aren't is in stark contradiction to the known facts). The "so..." part of your above sentence should say, "... so that script kiddies can no longer do what we do more cheaply." You can buy access to botnets and such from people like this. They are selling a product. This is BIG business. Ending full disclosure will (they believe) reduce the number of script kiddies with access to the same information and exploits as they have. This will increase the value of the product they sell, and make them even more money than they already rake in. Any other reason they give is just an attempt to convince other people who would be compelled with the "it'll make us richer" reason.
Ah, yet another person who mistakenly assumes what they do on the Internet is anonymous and therefore risk-free. If you're just being an annoying troll, you're relatively safe, but if you get the law and security experts involved, the supposed anonymity drops away pretty quickly most of the time.
They clearly don't believe this. If they did, they wouldn't have bothered to do this anonymously. They'd sign the names to their work and show how 'gutsy' they really are. The fact that they didn't reveal this information indicated that they believe it can be effectively hidden. And, in fact, it can, if you know what you're doing. The "supposed anonymity" drops way pretty quickly most of the time because most of the time, the people making the supposition don't know what they're doing.
Yeah... I find the attitude of "why would he be flying there?" as if it were some great mystery why someone would want to fly in the area kinda baffling. More baffling to me would be why anyone would avoid flying through the area given an opportunity to. The answer to that, of course, is because it creates dangerous flying conditions, but Fosset was an experienced pilot. If he figured he could do it and live, it would make sense that he would, even if it was a slight detour from his eventual planned destination. Alas, luck was not with him, and on that particular day, the presumption that he could do it and live turned out to be wrong...:(
Can you rephrase that as a car analogy? I'm not sure what this "basketball" thing is.
Car A isn't necessarily better than car B simply because car A's stereo has bluetooth support and car B's does not.
Of course, the original submission contains no such assertion. Cornflake invents an invalid argument, then points out it's invalid. Apparently slaying strawmen is his idea of a fun game...:p
Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides.
Hmm. I always enjoyed the descriptions of the hellrides. What I always found myself skimming was the blow-by-blow descriptions over several pages of hand-to-hand combat. (Sword fights, too, although those tended to be quicker and more interesting. It's the long wrestling matches I couldn't stay awake through...)
All true, but to be fair, the GP was mostly focused on 80's style "social media", and the kind of posts you would find, or chats you would have. YMMV, but really good, quality posting and discussion that's extremely rare on today's discussion boards and tweets and such were the norm back then.
On the other hand, I don't believe there's less of it today than there was then. I think, in fact, there's a lot more. But that's kinda hard to see or keep in mind sometimes when back in the day, it was >50% of the time, whereas today, it's <1% of the whole. There may be more quality in terms of KB, but there's a lot less in terms of % of the whole. Which makes finding that quality place to engage with people much more difficult. Before, you had a good change when dialing any random BBS that it would be a hit on a great place to discuss things with an interesting community of intelligent thinkers and responders. Now you have to sift through a thousand forums to find one of the same...
I won't comment on whether global warming is caused by mankind or not. I have my opinions but I don't consider it something that I can unambiguously prove or anything like that...
It's also irrelevant.
Imagine the boat is sinking and you have people with buckets, but they're using them to take water out of the sea and put it into the boat rather than the reverse. You tell them to stop, but they claim their actions are defensible because, although they're adding to the water in the boat, the main reason it's sinking is due to the rock that the boat hit earlier and the hole in the bottom of the boat.
Whether these people are idiots or not has nothing to do with whether their actions are the reason the boat is sinking or not. It may very well be true that the main source of the water rising inside the boat is a hole in the bottom, but even so, if they insist they should be allowed continue putting more water into the boat instead of taking water out, they're idiots who should be shot and thrown overboard and their buckets given to people with a clue on how to bail water properly.
If the planet is getting hotter, we should not be doing things ourselves to exacerbate the problem. We should be doing things to combat the problem. Whether we're the primary cause of the problem or not is irrelevant to this point!
Isn't it more like if someone threw away the printing press used to make the book, rather than the book itself?
Um, no. The equivalent to throwing away the printing press would be throwing away the disk drive.
If they had thrown away the binaries, I would agree with your analogy.
Let's refrain from using analogies then and stick to the facts. If you throw away a piece of media, that piece of media becomes available to whoever wants to fish it out of the trash. However, copyright for any intellectual property on said media is unaffected. This is the actual legal fact, and it makes no difference whether we're talking about a novel printed on the pages of a book or source code recorded on a floppy disk. You own the book or the disk, but the author retains the copyright of the novel or program. Neither situation is an analogy for the other, both are specific instances of the legal rule.
And it goes well beyond fishing out of the trash. I can explicitly give you the source code for a program on a disk, and I still retain copyright. Unless I also give you a licensing agreement, I can sue your ass off if you publish what's on the disk I gave you.
Okay, curse my failing memory, I believe I just "misremembered" that factoid. On the 6502, you couldn't push or pull X or Y from the stack, necessitating the cumbersome txa, push or pull, tax instead of simply pullings into the desired register. I don't recall now if loading immediate into X or Y worked on the 6502.
The scary thing is that I remember ANY of this shit over 25 years later...
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...
Slashdot Mirror
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016
Here's the question, though: why are American project planners so completely incompetent? Since everyone knows that this kind of project will probably slip, and there's loads of historical data on the slip factor, predicting the correct schedule pretty accurately is a matter of simple multiplication. You'd have to be an idiot not to do it.
I'm not sure if you have to be an idiot to believe that, but I imagine it helps.
There's loads of historical data on the "slip factor", enough to know that no such "factor" exists. If you were a complete idiot, you might average the amount of slippage that has occurred in the past, call it the "slip factor" (ignore the fact that when you then go and apply this "factor" to all the previous projects, you end up wrong most of the time), multiply this by the estimate, and, if you're really really really stupid, actually expect this new prediction to be accurate.
Most successful project leaders aren't this stupid. That's why they don't do it. It's not that they aren't capable of doing it, it's just they aren't stupid enough to expect that would yield anything approaching an accurate prediction.
I can't believe that NASA would even float such a concept right now.
You would prefer they keep quiet about it until they actually run out of money, then deorbit it without telling anyone? Or do you have some magical plan they should be following where they plan on keeping the ISS up without spending a dime on it? Alas, NASA has to deal with the real world of facts. The station can't be kept in orbit with good intentions alone. When the money runs out, the station comes down. The only question is, whether it comes down in a controlled or an uncontrolled manner. It's good that they plan to bring it down in a controlled manner.
Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary."
Because they live in the real world, where hopes and dreams don't keep things flying. In the real world, you can't keep something running when you can't pay the upkeep necessary to keep it running. They run out of money for the project in 2015. Regardless of whether it's too cumbersome or not, or scientifically necessary or not. They have to deal with reality as it is.
Article implies they are planning on trashing it in 2016 unless they get more funding.. This is a political move, and the ISS will probably be kept in service longer then that.
The plan, or the announcement of it? The plan isn't a political move. They can't keep it up when they no longer have any money to keep it up; simple fact of life. The plan is simply dealing with reality as it is. The announcement? Certainly that's a political move, but a good one. If they want to keep the ISS up longer (and they do), they need to get more money, they can't keep it up without more money. And they live in a democratic society. If they want money, they need to appeal dramatically to congress and the public to get it. No public agency in a democracy can succeed at its job without making "political moves" -- this is by design, and it's a good thing. Let the debating begin...
... or keep it up there for a lot longer, if only to do experiments on long-term living in space.
That would be NASA's first choice, if they had the ability to do so. Alas, they can't do this without money. As things stand right now, they must cease operations in 2015. It's not a "choice", it's a fact that they need to deal with and have absolutely no control over. They don't control the purse strings, they can only do what their funding allows, and their funding doesn't allow for that option both you and they would prefer.
That makes no sense at all.
There's tons of man-made waste discarded in space. From big pieces of Saturn V rockets to small pieces of smashed up Chinese satellite.
Yes, and this is a serious problem of great concern to NASA.
So NASA and and friends aren't too bothered about leaving useless bits of metal in space,
They're extremely bothered by this.
.... but a multi-billion dollar space station of obvious advantage to future manned space flight must be destroyed?
Not if they can help it, but if no one comes up with the money to keep it up, then their own choices are to deorbit it in a controlled manner or watch it deorbit of its own accord in a possibly disastrous and even life-threatening manner. Oddly enough, they've chosen the most safe option of the ones that they have available to them.
ugh s/good/bad/
Nothing gives them the right, unfortunately. If it were up to them, they'd keep it up there. But since they don't have the right to do that, they'll be forced to bring it down. From TFA:
"If we've spent a hundred billion dollars, I don't think we want to shut it down in 2015," Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told Augustine's committee.
Suffredini [the NASA head who was there announcing the plan] agrees.
It's a bad idea. NASA agrees it's a good idea. NASA doesn't want to shut it down in 2015. But if no one comes up with the money to keep it going, it'll have to be shut down in 2015. If you don't want it shut down, come up with the money.
Well, there's "story" and then there's "story". I believe the GP would refer to what you're referring to as "setting" or "backstory". Lore is an important part of the setting, but it is not itself a storyline. It's the backdrop behind the main plot, but it's not the main plot.
Nearly all MMORPG's (and some non-MMO RPG's, e.g. Morrowind), suffer from having a fabulously well developed setting and rich lore, but almost no actual story. If you're used to playing traditional RPG's, where there's an actual plot that you progress through and are an active part of, WoW will definitely leave you flat. Diablo, simplistic as it was, had a richer storyline than WoW...
If you're looking for an MMO with a decent storyline, I'd recommend Guild Wars. It's not exactly high art, but it's a great deal better than any other MMO I've ever seen in placing you at the center of events that actually move and change the world as you go along.
1) The text was syntactically and grammatically near perfect....
From the message, I'm absolutey certain they're in America
Huh? You've got to be kidding. Syntactically and grammatically near perfect English almost rules out the author being American. The number of Americans who can speak or write English with the skill of a well-educated non-native speaker is vanishingly small. The non-native speaker is not disadvantaged from having spent a lifetime listening to what passes for English in America. The poor American has to first unlearn much of his or her speech patterns before they can being to learn proper English syntax and grammar.
But I'm not sure it's much better only having a few experts able to steal money and run bot nets over a longer period of time or a lot of clueless script kiddies doing it within a shorter period.
I'm sure. I'd rather have some idiot punk walk into my house and steal the TV than some knowledgeable professional come in, empty the contents of my safe, and steal the far more valuable painting on the wall while leaving the relatively worthless TV alone.
If the argument is it reduces the number of idiot punks running around, so I don't find out about the defect in my security system until the professional comes along, it's fairly easy to see why it's a bad thing, even if it does in fact reduce the number of idiot punks running around stealing TVs.
They are pushing for change in the whitehat security industry itself, so that script kiddies and security companies stop exploiting the consequences of full disclosure.
You weren't doing too badly until you got to the "so..." part. The reasons why they're doing this are fairly obvious, it's the same reason drug runners would oppose drug legalization -- it would devalue the product. These are clearly people who engage in black-hat activity (witness the fact that they just did -- any argument that they aren't is in stark contradiction to the known facts). The "so..." part of your above sentence should say, "... so that script kiddies can no longer do what we do more cheaply." You can buy access to botnets and such from people like this. They are selling a product. This is BIG business. Ending full disclosure will (they believe) reduce the number of script kiddies with access to the same information and exploits as they have. This will increase the value of the product they sell, and make them even more money than they already rake in. Any other reason they give is just an attempt to convince other people who would be compelled with the "it'll make us richer" reason.
Ah, yet another person who mistakenly assumes what they do on the Internet is anonymous and therefore risk-free. If you're just being an annoying troll, you're relatively safe, but if you get the law and security experts involved, the supposed anonymity drops away pretty quickly most of the time.
They clearly don't believe this. If they did, they wouldn't have bothered to do this anonymously. They'd sign the names to their work and show how 'gutsy' they really are. The fact that they didn't reveal this information indicated that they believe it can be effectively hidden. And, in fact, it can, if you know what you're doing. The "supposed anonymity" drops way pretty quickly most of the time because most of the time, the people making the supposition don't know what they're doing.
Yeah... I find the attitude of "why would he be flying there?" as if it were some great mystery why someone would want to fly in the area kinda baffling. More baffling to me would be why anyone would avoid flying through the area given an opportunity to. The answer to that, of course, is because it creates dangerous flying conditions, but Fosset was an experienced pilot. If he figured he could do it and live, it would make sense that he would, even if it was a slight detour from his eventual planned destination. Alas, luck was not with him, and on that particular day, the presumption that he could do it and live turned out to be wrong... :(
It's a bit more like complaining that somebody went through your luggage when you never changed the code on the lock from the default 1234.
The fact that person A was stupid and made it easy for person B doesn't make person B any less a scumbag who should be taken out back and shot.
Can you rephrase that as a car analogy? I'm not sure what this "basketball" thing is.
Car A isn't necessarily better than car B simply because car A's stereo has bluetooth support and car B's does not.
Of course, the original submission contains no such assertion. Cornflake invents an invalid argument, then points out it's invalid. Apparently slaying strawmen is his idea of a fun game... :p
Gee, let's describe a trip on a miniature railroad in even more detail than Zelazny's descriptions of hellrides.
Hmm. I always enjoyed the descriptions of the hellrides. What I always found myself skimming was the blow-by-blow descriptions over several pages of hand-to-hand combat. (Sword fights, too, although those tended to be quicker and more interesting. It's the long wrestling matches I couldn't stay awake through...)
s/change/chance/
All true, but to be fair, the GP was mostly focused on 80's style "social media", and the kind of posts you would find, or chats you would have. YMMV, but really good, quality posting and discussion that's extremely rare on today's discussion boards and tweets and such were the norm back then.
On the other hand, I don't believe there's less of it today than there was then. I think, in fact, there's a lot more. But that's kinda hard to see or keep in mind sometimes when back in the day, it was >50% of the time, whereas today, it's <1% of the whole. There may be more quality in terms of KB, but there's a lot less in terms of % of the whole. Which makes finding that quality place to engage with people much more difficult. Before, you had a good change when dialing any random BBS that it would be a hit on a great place to discuss things with an interesting community of intelligent thinkers and responders. Now you have to sift through a thousand forums to find one of the same...
I won't comment on whether global warming is caused by mankind or not. I have my opinions but I don't consider it something that I can unambiguously prove or anything like that...
It's also irrelevant.
Imagine the boat is sinking and you have people with buckets, but they're using them to take water out of the sea and put it into the boat rather than the reverse. You tell them to stop, but they claim their actions are defensible because, although they're adding to the water in the boat, the main reason it's sinking is due to the rock that the boat hit earlier and the hole in the bottom of the boat.
Whether these people are idiots or not has nothing to do with whether their actions are the reason the boat is sinking or not. It may very well be true that the main source of the water rising inside the boat is a hole in the bottom, but even so, if they insist they should be allowed continue putting more water into the boat instead of taking water out, they're idiots who should be shot and thrown overboard and their buckets given to people with a clue on how to bail water properly.
If the planet is getting hotter, we should not be doing things ourselves to exacerbate the problem. We should be doing things to combat the problem. Whether we're the primary cause of the problem or not is irrelevant to this point!
s/intelligible/unintelligible/
(Senility is already setting in...)
What's the "get off my lawn" equivalent for young->old
We wouldn't know -- it would be something utterly intelligible to us, but we'd recognize the word "fossil" in it somewhere...
Isn't it more like if someone threw away the printing press used to make the book, rather than the book itself?
Um, no. The equivalent to throwing away the printing press would be throwing away the disk drive.
If they had thrown away the binaries, I would agree with your analogy.
Let's refrain from using analogies then and stick to the facts. If you throw away a piece of media, that piece of media becomes available to whoever wants to fish it out of the trash. However, copyright for any intellectual property on said media is unaffected. This is the actual legal fact, and it makes no difference whether we're talking about a novel printed on the pages of a book or source code recorded on a floppy disk. You own the book or the disk, but the author retains the copyright of the novel or program. Neither situation is an analogy for the other, both are specific instances of the legal rule.
And it goes well beyond fishing out of the trash. I can explicitly give you the source code for a program on a disk, and I still retain copyright. Unless I also give you a licensing agreement, I can sue your ass off if you publish what's on the disk I gave you.
Okay, curse my failing memory, I believe I just "misremembered" that factoid. On the 6502, you couldn't push or pull X or Y from the stack, necessitating the cumbersome txa, push or pull, tax instead of simply pullings into the desired register. I don't recall now if loading immediate into X or Y worked on the 6502.
The scary thing is that I remember ANY of this shit over 25 years later...
Looks like 6502.
Actually, it would have to be 65C02 or better. You couldn't do "ldx #$FF" on a 6502, you had to do "lda #$FF" and then "tax" (transfer A to X). The ability to load immediate into the X or Y registers was added on the 65C02. And, don't quote my on this, but I think the 7800 predated the 65816, so I suspect 65C02 is the right answer...