The point is that those who bitch about the USA on/. are strangly silent when other countries do the same or worse.
Uhhh, ya know why that is? I'd have to say that it's probably because most of the people on/. are Americans, so we live in this country and are in a position, perhaps a small one, to actually do something about the acts of the US. I don't live in France, don't speak the language and am not a citizen of that country, meaning that my chances of influencing their foreign or domestic policies is nada, dick, fuck-all, if you know what I mean.
Also pointing at another country's wrongdoing is in no way a justification for country's wrongdoing despite what Republicans and other conservatives believe and say.
The interference pattern for the whole image is stored on every part of the image, from that part's perspective. In other words, if I had a true holographic photograph and cut it in four, I'd have four complete images. Just four complete images from four different angles.
Cool! This means that when holo displays come out I'll be able to take my chainsaw and cut my holo display into four smaller holo displays. I tried doing that with my CRT, but it was really messy, and I got to go to the hospital and learn a new medical term, "debridement".
So if it were possible to get an LCOS that was 14 inches across it would litteraly be like a red tinted glass porthole into another universe. Will all the detail and resolution of looking out side the window of your office!
You have a window? You have an office? Luxury! Sheer Luxury!
With luxuries like that who needs holograms? Of course if holograms get cheap enough they'll probably be used to develop the holocubicle. It's a 5' x 5' office cubicle that looks as if it's much, much larger.
You are so pathetic, and the evidence of this is contained in this sentence:
Can't you look things up for yourself? Almost Every Time the shuttle went to the manned ISS, it brought back the trash from the station. It was one of the mission critical roles. Trash won't just float back to earth; you need delta-V to get it back down. This is a critical role for which Soyuz has (poorly) been forced to adopt since. Of course, that's not all it's brought down - dozens of satellites have been retrieved, such as Spartan series, Wake Shield, Space Flyer, CRISTA, EURECA, etc. Through STS-72, the shuttle retrieved 21 payloads (exluding trash), with a total mass of 18.5 tons.
Wow, that's great, the Shuttle can retrieve trash from ISS (another huge waste of money). So the Shuttle can be used to bring back to earth the empty bottles of water (which we spend about $250,000 a day on for the ISS crew). Dude, can you say "pathetic attempt at reaching for justification"? Oh, and did we really need the Shuttle to bring all of that stuff back from orbit? Could missions have been designed to return things from orbit without using the Shuttle? Yep. They sure could have.
You've drank the NASA Kool-Aid you've bought the NASA party line and you obviously love the taste of Shuttle cock (nice little play on words there). For those of us who haven't bought into the Shuttle myth as you have the Shuttle is a program that is desperately in need of justification, it always has been.
Congratulations, with credulous tards like you around NASA will never have to actually go anywhere or do anything significant with the manned space program, they can just fly around in orbit, over and over again, feed lots of money to USA to make Boeing and Lock-Mart stockholders happy (Are you one of them perhaps, or do you work for NASA?).
I have a DirecTivo with the dual tuner option. Now, the DirectTivo picks up the satellite broadcast and tunes through it to the right frequency until it finds the right channel and then records the MPEG stream from that channel. How long before you can just have the Tivo record every stream off of every channel? It seems to me that there would be two limitations here, obviously storage space and also storage bandwidth. However if the storage bandwidth problem could be addressed how much storage would it take to buffer say 10 minutes of the entire feed into your Tivo so you could address the problem of shows that either deliberately or accidentally went over schedule?
Which Doesn't Exist (which doesn't have even a fraction of the shuttle's capabilities in the design, either). Perhaps you missed the "Status: Development" line? Want me to cite the predicted numbers for how much the shuttle was going to cost per kg during its development phase?
Bet you that the Delta IV heavy flies before the Shuttle does again. Hell, the Shuttle is in redevelopment because NASA doesn't want to lose another seven astronauts.
The Delta IV Medium does exist, mind you, but apart from not having the shuttle's capability (reentry of payloads, extensive maneuverability, man-capability, etc), its payload rate is 23k$/kg.
Most of the wonderful capabilities of the Shuttle are wasted. The extensive maneuverability? Totally unnecessary and unused, if the Shuttle were designed as originally proposed, something which you keep bleating about, it wouldn't have this unneeded capability. Bringing things back from orbit? How often has this been used? It's largely been written off because it's more effective to build a new satellite and launch it than it is to haul it back on the Shuttle, fix it and then launch it again. Man capability? Mostly unnecessary and an unnecessary risk on many flights and an added source of cost for the safety systems needed to insure crew safety.
Once again, an unreferenced, detail lacking claim. Lets put some matter into this claim. Here's just life sciences (the type that you specifically derrided) experiments, which are just a small fraction of shuttle experiments:
I want you to go there and tell me which ones are a "joke". Don't try and weasel out of this, either.
I think they're all a joke. The Neurolab experiment is completely useless, as for studying the effects of zero gravity on lab rats we've got 30 plus years of studying the effects of zero gravity on human beings, which is somewhat more relevant. I want you to name ten major advancements in scientific knowledge that have come about because of the "science" done on the Space Shuttle. No fair counting the Hubble launch or repair missions or the Ulysses or Galileo launches. While you're at it find a reputable life scientist who thinks that the cost of each Shuttle mission and the risk of loss of life is worth it for the "scientific" results that the "experiments" on board produce.
What I said isn't idle speculation. It's fact. The shuttle was not to have SRBs, and was to have a titanium hot frame. Both shuttle accidents would have been avoided with such a design, along with many other "problems", and maintainance would have been vastly reduced due to the ability to accept higher reentry temperatures allowing much simpler TPS.
No, what you said is idle speculation because that vehicle wasn't built. If you can bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then I get to bring up any hypothetical vehicle that I want. Also if you're going to bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then you might want to read the Wikipedia article on the Shuttle. NASA's original design didn't have the cargo capacity of the current shuttle (which you cite as an advantage), didn't have the cross range and maneuverability, didn't have the crew capacity, didn't have single orbit abort, wasn't designed for polar orbit launch, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, the "Shuttle that might have been" based upon Max Faget's original designs or the Flyback F1 would have been a really good vehicle, it wasn't built. If you look at the history of the Shuttle's development NASA basically lied to Congress about the Shuttle's capabilities, lied to the Air Force to get them on board for more funding (which allowed the Air Force to insist on design changes such as single orbit abort, polar launch capability, a larger payload, 1500 nautical mile cross range capability, etc, etc) and delivered a vehicle which h
that says "Dear Governor Rendell. Thanks for being Verizon's bitch. We know that you just love the taste of the shit you lick out of the assholes of Verizon lobbyists and that you would belly crawl across the sticky floor of a gay bordello to suck their dicks like the slimy little whore you are."
It carries 27,500 kg payload to LEO. So, 16k$/kg. Compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5, and 7k$ for a Proton rocket. However, the shuttle has many advantages to them (much larger payload capacity for larger satellites, the best safety records of any manned rocket with a large number of launches under its belt, much greater in-orbit maneuverability and other in-orbit capabilities), etc, so the extra cost is justified in *some* circumstances. Also, the space shuttle itself doesn't really cost 450 million dollars per launch; that number is arrived at by looking at the annual budget to the shuttle, and dividing by the number of launches. However, the shuttle's budget also goes toward research on and improvement of the craft, among other things (some projects are even barely related to the shuttle). A more realistic number is around 13k$/kg.
You trust NASA's accounting figures? How charming. I have some great stock in Enron to sell you, it's going to make a big comeback. Firstly the Shuttle's capacity to LEO is only 24,400 kg (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm, this was reduced after the Challenger disaster). So if we use your numbers the cost is actually 18.4k$/kg. Secondly this still sucks compared to the Delta IV Large. The Delta IV Large can put 25,800kg into LEO for 170 million a launch, for a cost of 6.6k$/kg. (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm) So it would seem the sensible thing to do to use the Delta IV large to launch components of the ISS, except that if we did that the need for Shuttle launches would drop to zero since no one but NASA uses the Shuttle, which would pretty much eliminate the need for the Shuttle program.
As for the Shuttle's capabilities most of them are wasted. The capability to take satellites out of orbit is wasted, the cross range landing capability is unneeded and if you don't need to launch human beings then why are you risking them with Shuttle launches? An F-22 Raptor has a whole bunch of really neat capabilities that a 747 doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that it would be the right plane for FedEx or UPS to buy for their airfreight needs.
As for the Shuttle's scientific missions most of them are a joke. The Russians learned more about the effects of weightlessness on human beings on Mir than the Shuttle will ever teach us (Hell, we learned more about the effects of weightlessness from Skylab) and most of the experiments that are done on the Shuttle are the kind of thing you'd find at a junior high school science fair.
A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.
As opposed to the Saturn V which had a failure rate of zero percent in flight.
We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.
No, we could actually make something better, instead we're stuck funding the Shuttle, which is used to launch stuff to ISS. And we need ISS because if we didn't have ISS then the Shuttle wouldn't have anywhere to go and a bunch of aerospace contractors would be out some large sums of cash.
Addendum: If we'd given the shuttle development the budget that it needed (instead of *halving it* without cutting scope), it'd be a titanium hot frame craft with no SRBs, and consequently not had any of the problems that have plagued it and increased its maintainence costs.
Yes, and if frogs had pockets they'd carry.38 specials and wouldn't get eaten by snakes. Fantasizing about what the Shuttle might have been has nothing to do with what it is, a bloated, wasteful, stupid means of getting things into orbit that should be replaced immediately.
Sure, now it might be time for a change, but I'd say the current shuttle has served it's intended purpose pretty damn well.
Well you'd only say that if you were ignorant. It costs almost 500 million dollars to launch a shuttle, hardly affordable. The shuttle isn't really reusable as it has to be reassembled by a team of thousands of technicians every time it comes back to earth in preparation for the next launch. NASA was originally talking about seven day turnarounds for the shuttle, that never happened and if the shuttle is so fucking great then why is it that we started building Titans and Deltas again after the Challenger disaster?
The shuttle is a piece of shit, it should be cancelled immediately and the money should be used to build something that doesn't suck, doesn't cost an arm and a leg and isn't quite so good at killing astronauts. If that means that we go back to expendable vehicles such as the Saturn V, fine, let's do it. But let's scuttle the shuttle now!
But I'm not allowed to talk about it at work any more because HR says that it creates a "hostile
workplace environment". Funny, I thought I was dead sexy wearing the fishnets and a pair of Manolo Blahnik fuck me shoes.
Long answer: over the years I find myself hating the resentless breeding of humans, and their need to fill every last bit, nook and cranny, stumping over and destroying everything in their path. And while I realize I'm part of them too, short of wishing I'd never been born at all there's nothing practical I can do about that now. Mind you, I enjoy living but the fact is that the world would have been a better place without me, just because overpopulation would have been, however infinitesimally, reduced.
There is something you can do: kill yourself. By your standards it's the only moral thing for you to do. By your standards while you're alive you're not significantly better than someone who lives in a McMansion on recently clear-cut land and who drives a Hummer to work. Take that first step towards the better, less populated world and kill yourself ASAP.
Between the ultra high pressures needed to produce the very high temperature water and the associated nuclear (nucular for Dubya types) energy, I'm afraid we'd be inviting disaster and a sitting target for terrorists. And how is the hydrogen fuel to be transported? Has everyone forgotten the Three Mile Island and Hindenburg accidents?
No, you're not the only one who's worried, but you also don't have a clue. TMI was 25 years ago, presumably we've learned a few things about nuclear power since then. Also let's look at what happened at TMI, there was an accident, and the reactor containment worked. End of story.
As for the Hindenburg, puhleeeze, could you pull your frickin head out of your ass for one frickin second here? Firstly do you have any natural gas powered appliances in your house (stove, dryer, gas fireplace, furnace)? If you do then you might be shocked to know that they burn methane gas, which is made largely of gasp hydrogen. Has your house exploded yet? No? OK. Let's also look at the fact that recent analyses (you can find one here) have shown that while the hydrogen in the Hindenburg contributed to the fire the proximate cause was the doping on the dirigible's fabric skin, which was composed of aluminum, iron oxide and cellulose nitrate, all of which are flammable. Hell, NASA has been handling liquid hydrogen for nearly 50 years, how many rockets have they had explode because of an accident with it? Not any that I can think of (the Challenger went down because the Solid Rocket Boosters, which contain aluminum powder similar to that used to coat the skin of the Hindenburg, burned through).
Finally, if you want to see some really nasty and horrific burns just head down to your local hospital burn ward and check out the guys who have burned themselves with gasoline. That's right, gasoline, that stuff you pump into your car every day is really, really, really flammable and nasty and if you get some burning gasoline on your skin you're pretty much guaranteed at least a second degree burn, if not worse. Yet despite this we manage to fuel millions of cars which drive millions of miles every day without having too many flaming wrecks along our roads and highways.
As for the threat from terrorism we've already seen what terrorists can do. Did we stop flying airplanes? No, we just put largely ineffective security measures in place. But if a terrorist ever tries to hijack a plane with a box cutter again he's going to find himself head first up to his shoulders in that blue liquid they put in the airplane toilets while hordes of angry passengers pound that box cutter right up his ass. Terrorism is a risk, but it really pisses me off how many people just throw it up as an excuse not to do something rather than as a risk that needs to be taken into account as part of the overall cost / benefit analysis of a specific action.
I wonder why they didn't use a DU bullet?
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NASA's Deep Impact
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DU is denser than copper, so the bullet could be smaller and thus easier to launch. It would be more difficult to machine a DU bullet because of the material's pyrophoric properties, but on the other hand it would be easy to filter the uranium lines out of the spectrograph from the resulting explosion on impact.
Sure, it might be impossible for them to build a card that is the equal of the Radeon x800 or nVidia GT chipsets but on the other hand these guys are trying to broaden the frontiers of open source software by building some open source hardware. People should be encouraged to do this kind of thing.
I don't mind paying an extra buck or so a month so that people in rural areas can have phone service. If it weren't for this fund, they'd have to pay $THOUSANDS of dollars to get phone lines run out to their location.
Universal Service is a good thing. You wouldn't be whining if you moved out to the country and discovered getting a phone out there costs $8 grand.
You know what I say to those people who would move out to the country and find that their phone is going to cost eight grand? "Fuck em!". Why should someone's country house be subsidized by urban dwellers? People move out to the country to get benefits such as more land, a quieter environment, better views, etc, but then they also want to keep all of the benefits they would have had had they stayed in the city (cheaper access to infrastructure). Fuck those people, they made a choice that has certain benefits and certain costs, asking the rest of us to pay the tab for those costs, while they enjoy the benefits, is something that only a complete asshole would do. Unfortunately a lot of people who move out of the cities to rural areas are complete assholes who think they have a right to make the rest of us subsidize their lifestyle.
but I've always thought that the whole lunar Helium 3 mining scheme was reaching. I have no doubt that we could, if funding were put into it, develop a lunar He3 mining system, a lot of good ideas have been kicking around in the 35 years since the Apollo 11 landing, but there's the little matter of the reactor. The He3/Deuterium reaction requires higher temperatures than does Tritium/Deuterium, which we haven't gotten working yet either. So if someone made some massive breakthrough in fusion research that promised a power generating Helium3 fusion reactor tomorrow that would be great, but since no one has the whole lunar He3 mining thing comes off like a dot.com profit plan.
Phase 1) Mine He3 from the moon
Phase 2).........
Phase 3) Profit
That whole phase 2 thing is inventing and debugging a power generating He3 reactor and MHD power generating system, a pretty big step.
enforce IP, NIPLAC. OK, I'm going to have a hard time taking anyone from an agency called "NIPLAC" seriously even if they are carrying a gun and have a shiny badge.
No shit! The czars were a bunch of useless, tyrannical, stupid, lazy inbred bastards (sort of like our current president). Now we have a drug czar (who is a good guy, as opposed to the drug "lords" who are bad guys) and are going to get an IP "czar". I'd love to see a meme get started where, whenever the government appoints someone as "czar" of something we just start calling them "fuerher" instead. So instead of having a drug czar we would have a drug fuehrer, IP fuerher, etc, etc.
It's like finding a new way to make lasers on a broad scale instead of slowly making them by hand like in 1960. What you do with the plethora of nanotubes or lasers or what have you is up to you.
I don't know about you, but I'm going to take my plethora of lasers and mount them on the heads of some friggin sharks. And I'll use a carbon nanotube yarn strap to hold them on!
Oh sure, go ahead and actually READ the article and then post a summary thus bumming the bulletproof, electrically conducting, TEMPEST certified, smart carbon nanotube sweater for Christmas high of everyone who reads/.
I commute between 40 and 50 kilometers a day depending upon what errands I have to run, and my car sits in a a garage at work for hours at a time. If the charging stations could be made cheaply enough you could park your car in a garage and pay for a charge up, and when I come home at night the car is in the driveway for 10 or 12 hours. So that means that doing a full charge every night wouldn't be that much of a problem. I'll bet that I'm not the only person that this is true for. Now we just need to drive the price down on cars like this and improve the life of the batteries.
To put one of these clocks on a spaceprobe and launch it out to the depths of the solar system, combined with some kind of torsion balance to measure g they could accurately measure g in deep space, thus providing proof or disproof of this anomaly they could measure whether or not this really exists.
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Uhhh, ya know why that is? I'd have to say that it's probably because most of the people on /. are Americans, so we live in this country and are in a position, perhaps a small one, to actually do something about the acts of the US. I don't live in France, don't speak the language and am not a citizen of that country, meaning that my chances of influencing their foreign or domestic policies is nada, dick, fuck-all, if you know what I mean.
Also pointing at another country's wrongdoing is in no way a justification for country's wrongdoing despite what Republicans and other conservatives believe and say.
Cool! This means that when holo displays come out I'll be able to take my chainsaw and cut my holo display into four smaller holo displays. I tried doing that with my CRT, but it was really messy, and I got to go to the hospital and learn a new medical term, "debridement".
You have a window ? You have an office ? Luxury! Sheer Luxury! With luxuries like that who needs holograms? Of course if holograms get cheap enough they'll probably be used to develop the holocubicle. It's a 5' x 5' office cubicle that looks as if it's much, much larger.
Can't you look things up for yourself? Almost Every Time the shuttle went to the manned ISS, it brought back the trash from the station. It was one of the mission critical roles. Trash won't just float back to earth; you need delta-V to get it back down. This is a critical role for which Soyuz has (poorly) been forced to adopt since. Of course, that's not all it's brought down - dozens of satellites have been retrieved, such as Spartan series, Wake Shield, Space Flyer, CRISTA, EURECA, etc. Through STS-72, the shuttle retrieved 21 payloads (exluding trash), with a total mass of 18.5 tons.
Wow, that's great, the Shuttle can retrieve trash from ISS (another huge waste of money). So the Shuttle can be used to bring back to earth the empty bottles of water (which we spend about $250,000 a day on for the ISS crew). Dude, can you say "pathetic attempt at reaching for justification"? Oh, and did we really need the Shuttle to bring all of that stuff back from orbit? Could missions have been designed to return things from orbit without using the Shuttle? Yep. They sure could have.
You've drank the NASA Kool-Aid you've bought the NASA party line and you obviously love the taste of Shuttle cock (nice little play on words there). For those of us who haven't bought into the Shuttle myth as you have the Shuttle is a program that is desperately in need of justification, it always has been.
Congratulations, with credulous tards like you around NASA will never have to actually go anywhere or do anything significant with the manned space program, they can just fly around in orbit, over and over again, feed lots of money to USA to make Boeing and Lock-Mart stockholders happy (Are you one of them perhaps, or do you work for NASA?).
Bet you that the Delta IV heavy flies before the Shuttle does again. Hell, the Shuttle is in redevelopment because NASA doesn't want to lose another seven astronauts.
The Delta IV Medium does exist, mind you, but apart from not having the shuttle's capability (reentry of payloads, extensive maneuverability, man-capability, etc), its payload rate is 23k$/kg.
Most of the wonderful capabilities of the Shuttle are wasted. The extensive maneuverability? Totally unnecessary and unused, if the Shuttle were designed as originally proposed, something which you keep bleating about, it wouldn't have this unneeded capability. Bringing things back from orbit? How often has this been used? It's largely been written off because it's more effective to build a new satellite and launch it than it is to haul it back on the Shuttle, fix it and then launch it again. Man capability? Mostly unnecessary and an unnecessary risk on many flights and an added source of cost for the safety systems needed to insure crew safety.
Once again, an unreferenced, detail lacking claim. Lets put some matter into this claim. Here's just life sciences (the type that you specifically derrided) experiments, which are just a small fraction of shuttle experiments:
http://lifesci.arc.nasa.gov/lis2/Chapter5_Post_199 5_Payloads/Shuttle_Post95/Shuttle_Profiles_Intro.h tml
I want you to go there and tell me which ones are a "joke". Don't try and weasel out of this, either.
I think they're all a joke. The Neurolab experiment is completely useless, as for studying the effects of zero gravity on lab rats we've got 30 plus years of studying the effects of zero gravity on human beings, which is somewhat more relevant. I want you to name ten major advancements in scientific knowledge that have come about because of the "science" done on the Space Shuttle. No fair counting the Hubble launch or repair missions or the Ulysses or Galileo launches. While you're at it find a reputable life scientist who thinks that the cost of each Shuttle mission and the risk of loss of life is worth it for the "scientific" results that the "experiments" on board produce.
What I said isn't idle speculation. It's fact. The shuttle was not to have SRBs, and was to have a titanium hot frame. Both shuttle accidents would have been avoided with such a design, along with many other "problems", and maintainance would have been vastly reduced due to the ability to accept higher reentry temperatures allowing much simpler TPS.
No, what you said is idle speculation because that vehicle wasn't built. If you can bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then I get to bring up any hypothetical vehicle that I want. Also if you're going to bring up the hypothetical "Shuttle that might have been" then you might want to read the Wikipedia article on the Shuttle. NASA's original design didn't have the cargo capacity of the current shuttle (which you cite as an advantage), didn't have the cross range and maneuverability, didn't have the crew capacity, didn't have single orbit abort, wasn't designed for polar orbit launch, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, the "Shuttle that might have been" based upon Max Faget's original designs or the Flyback F1 would have been a really good vehicle, it wasn't built. If you look at the history of the Shuttle's development NASA basically lied to Congress about the Shuttle's capabilities, lied to the Air Force to get them on board for more funding (which allowed the Air Force to insist on design changes such as single orbit abort, polar launch capability, a larger payload, 1500 nautical mile cross range capability, etc, etc) and delivered a vehicle which h
You trust NASA's accounting figures? How charming. I have some great stock in Enron to sell you, it's going to make a big comeback. Firstly the Shuttle's capacity to LEO is only 24,400 kg (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/shuttle.htm, this was reduced after the Challenger disaster). So if we use your numbers the cost is actually 18.4k$/kg. Secondly this still sucks compared to the Delta IV Large. The Delta IV Large can put 25,800kg into LEO for 170 million a launch, for a cost of 6.6k$/kg. (http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/dellarge.htm) So it would seem the sensible thing to do to use the Delta IV large to launch components of the ISS, except that if we did that the need for Shuttle launches would drop to zero since no one but NASA uses the Shuttle, which would pretty much eliminate the need for the Shuttle program.
As for the Shuttle's capabilities most of them are wasted. The capability to take satellites out of orbit is wasted, the cross range landing capability is unneeded and if you don't need to launch human beings then why are you risking them with Shuttle launches? An F-22 Raptor has a whole bunch of really neat capabilities that a 747 doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that it would be the right plane for FedEx or UPS to buy for their airfreight needs.
As for the Shuttle's scientific missions most of them are a joke. The Russians learned more about the effects of weightlessness on human beings on Mir than the Shuttle will ever teach us (Hell, we learned more about the effects of weightlessness from Skylab) and most of the experiments that are done on the Shuttle are the kind of thing you'd find at a junior high school science fair.
A less than 2% failure rate on man-capable craft is pretty damn good for the space industry.
As opposed to the Saturn V which had a failure rate of zero percent in flight.
We can't make Saturn V's any more, end of story.
No, we could actually make something better, instead we're stuck funding the Shuttle, which is used to launch stuff to ISS. And we need ISS because if we didn't have ISS then the Shuttle wouldn't have anywhere to go and a bunch of aerospace contractors would be out some large sums of cash.
Addendum: If we'd given the shuttle development the budget that it needed (instead of *halving it* without cutting scope), it'd be a titanium hot frame craft with no SRBs, and consequently not had any of the problems that have plagued it and increased its maintainence costs.
Yes, and if frogs had pockets they'd carry .38 specials and wouldn't get eaten by snakes. Fantasizing about what the Shuttle might have been has nothing to do with what it is, a bloated, wasteful, stupid means of getting things into orbit that should be replaced immediately.
Well you'd only say that if you were ignorant. It costs almost 500 million dollars to launch a shuttle, hardly affordable. The shuttle isn't really reusable as it has to be reassembled by a team of thousands of technicians every time it comes back to earth in preparation for the next launch. NASA was originally talking about seven day turnarounds for the shuttle, that never happened and if the shuttle is so fucking great then why is it that we started building Titans and Deltas again after the Challenger disaster?
The shuttle is a piece of shit, it should be cancelled immediately and the money should be used to build something that doesn't suck, doesn't cost an arm and a leg and isn't quite so good at killing astronauts. If that means that we go back to expendable vehicles such as the Saturn V, fine, let's do it. But let's scuttle the shuttle now!
There is something you can do: kill yourself. By your standards it's the only moral thing for you to do. By your standards while you're alive you're not significantly better than someone who lives in a McMansion on recently clear-cut land and who drives a Hummer to work. Take that first step towards the better, less populated world and kill yourself ASAP.
No, you're not the only one who's worried, but you also don't have a clue. TMI was 25 years ago, presumably we've learned a few things about nuclear power since then. Also let's look at what happened at TMI, there was an accident, and the reactor containment worked. End of story.
As for the Hindenburg, puhleeeze, could you pull your frickin head out of your ass for one frickin second here? Firstly do you have any natural gas powered appliances in your house (stove, dryer, gas fireplace, furnace)? If you do then you might be shocked to know that they burn methane gas, which is made largely of gasp hydrogen. Has your house exploded yet? No? OK. Let's also look at the fact that recent analyses (you can find one here) have shown that while the hydrogen in the Hindenburg contributed to the fire the proximate cause was the doping on the dirigible's fabric skin, which was composed of aluminum, iron oxide and cellulose nitrate, all of which are flammable. Hell, NASA has been handling liquid hydrogen for nearly 50 years, how many rockets have they had explode because of an accident with it? Not any that I can think of (the Challenger went down because the Solid Rocket Boosters, which contain aluminum powder similar to that used to coat the skin of the Hindenburg, burned through).
Finally, if you want to see some really nasty and horrific burns just head down to your local hospital burn ward and check out the guys who have burned themselves with gasoline. That's right, gasoline, that stuff you pump into your car every day is really, really, really flammable and nasty and if you get some burning gasoline on your skin you're pretty much guaranteed at least a second degree burn, if not worse. Yet despite this we manage to fuel millions of cars which drive millions of miles every day without having too many flaming wrecks along our roads and highways.
As for the threat from terrorism we've already seen what terrorists can do. Did we stop flying airplanes? No, we just put largely ineffective security measures in place. But if a terrorist ever tries to hijack a plane with a box cutter again he's going to find himself head first up to his shoulders in that blue liquid they put in the airplane toilets while hordes of angry passengers pound that box cutter right up his ass. Terrorism is a risk, but it really pisses me off how many people just throw it up as an excuse not to do something rather than as a risk that needs to be taken into account as part of the overall cost / benefit analysis of a specific action.
Universal Service is a good thing. You wouldn't be whining if you moved out to the country and discovered getting a phone out there costs $8 grand.
You know what I say to those people who would move out to the country and find that their phone is going to cost eight grand? "Fuck em!". Why should someone's country house be subsidized by urban dwellers? People move out to the country to get benefits such as more land, a quieter environment, better views, etc, but then they also want to keep all of the benefits they would have had had they stayed in the city (cheaper access to infrastructure). Fuck those people, they made a choice that has certain benefits and certain costs, asking the rest of us to pay the tab for those costs, while they enjoy the benefits, is something that only a complete asshole would do. Unfortunately a lot of people who move out of the cities to rural areas are complete assholes who think they have a right to make the rest of us subsidize their lifestyle.
Phase 1) Mine He3 from the moon
Phase 2).........
Phase 3) Profit
That whole phase 2 thing is inventing and debugging a power generating He3 reactor and MHD power generating system, a pretty big step.
No shit! The czars were a bunch of useless, tyrannical, stupid, lazy inbred bastards (sort of like our current president). Now we have a drug czar (who is a good guy, as opposed to the drug "lords" who are bad guys) and are going to get an IP "czar". I'd love to see a meme get started where, whenever the government appoints someone as "czar" of something we just start calling them "fuerher" instead. So instead of having a drug czar we would have a drug fuehrer, IP fuerher, etc, etc.
Click here for the website of dead, gay porn icon Casey Donovan.
I don't know about you, but I'm going to take my plethora of lasers and mount them on the heads of some friggin sharks. And I'll use a carbon nanotube yarn strap to hold them on!
Second rule about GPL version 3.
Don't talk about GPL version 3.