Seems like several times a year now we are hearing about SpaceX successes - and few if any failures.
That's because most of things you hear about are things like this engine test that would simply be swept under the rug if they didn't go right. I.E. minor 'successes' spun for PR value. When it comes to real successes, like their launch record, the situation isn't nearly so pretty.
It will be able to launch cargo to the space station at about 1/10th the cost (around $50 million as opposed to nearly $500 million) as the space shuttle.
It'll also only lift a little under a quarter of the mass the Shuttle can. It also cannot deliver external cargo (I.E. cargo for the station exterior) any larger than a small suitcase. It can't reboost the station like the Shuttle can. It can't provide free water to the station like Shuttle can. It can't deliver modules. It can't deliver crew at the same time as it delivers cargo, which increases your total program risk because now you need five Dragon launches to (incompletely) replace one Shuttle flight. etc... etc...
Or, to put it in the terms of Slashdot's favorite form of analogy - the Dragon is a subcompact. The Shuttle is a full sized pickup truck. Nobody sober and in full possession of their senses would confuse a subcompact and a pickup truck.
Lose the goddamn Wal-Mart mentality, there's more to consider than just cost.
So, No you are quite wrong. Most of us geeks and techies completely understand the trend that Facebook is. When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".
No, he's quite right. You've built an elaborate justification for why you dislike it - but you've shown not on quanta of evidence that you get it.
If you believe it's only a marginal communications tool... Well, for it be a useful communications tool you've got to either want to communicate in the first place, or know people worth communicating with. (You and many other geeks keep blaming Facebook for your own failings.)
Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours:
Commiserated with friends, family, and high school classmates over the sudden (and much too young) death of a classmate on Sunday.
Got a status update from a friend whose newborn is still in the hospital and quite ill.
Continued planning, with a bunch of old shipmates, activities for our next re-union.
Shared with family and friends photographs from a photowalk last week. (I.E. not phone pictures, but serious pictures I took and uploaded to Flickr.)
Got tips from my sister (a professional chef) and some foodie friends on a new dish I'm trying to cook for the first time for tonite's dinner
Etc... etc...
Your comment about SPAM and marketing is utter hilarity considering what the Facebook experience was like for me for the short while that I had it. Marketing overload anyone........ I had less SPAM and useless information coming into my junkmail folder at Yahoo, and that is saying something.
Amount of Spam in my Facebook stream today - one. And with two clicks of a mouse, I'll never see spam from that game again. People in my contacts list who forward spam have either long since been silence or unfriended. As with the S/N ratio you complained about, the problem isn't Facebook, it's your ignorance or unwillingness to use the tools Facebook provides to control Spam and S/N.
Put your thinking cap on for a second. 75 billion. With a B. How can that possibly be true in reality? We are not talking Exxon here that makes something tangible that we are literally addicted too. This is based off credits and advertising revenue, both of which don't have a strong foundation, and can have a huge swing in profitability and volume.
Sounds like you'd have reccomended that people keep their money in good solid buggywhip and horse feed stocks rather than investing in that new fangled telephone invention. And do I really need to point out Google's stock prices - and that virtually their entire revenue stream depends on advertising? No, you're not insightful, you're just spiteful. You not only don't get it, you proudly revel in how little you get it.
I have my doubts that they will be able to have the early versions of this bullet adapt to the climate conditions that a sniper can do in his head or on instinct. Can the bullet take into account windage? Drop? Weather? The curve of the Earth (at extreme ranges)?
Umm... you don't actually understand how guided weapons work do you? They (duh) guide themselves to the target. If the wind moves them to the left, they steer themselves to the right, etc... all automatically. That's the whole point of the bullet being guided in the first place - for it to adapt to those conditions.
That's probably why the range is only 1 mile. That, and possibly the laser not being able to paint the target powerfully enough at that distance.
It's much more likely that the range limit comes from the projectile being fired by a smooth-bore weapon - it's not going to be very stable in flight. I suspect that while the current version can steer towards the target, it's limited in it's ability to maintain attitude.
I guess it has to be pretty steady for the time it takes to fire this bullet (and for it to reach target), and "shot" from relatively remote location, which seem to require sniper-type skill on behalf of the "painter", but not shooter.
It requires the high tech 'sniper' skill of "setting up a tripod, pointing the laser at the target, and then taking your hands off". Seriously, a sniper's skill lies not in putting the crosshairs on the target, but in putting the crosshairs off the target... such that wind, bullet drop due to gravity, etc.. etc.. ends up putting the bullet where the amateur would put the crosshairs - and miss. But wind, gravity, etc... don't effect the laser, so an amateur can place the crosshair by eye.
I think you're missing the point that, if they constructed their claim to legitimacy before the territorial waters expanded, the expansion can't ex-post facto remove that legitimacy.
Only if their claim to legitimacy is itself legitimate - and that doesn't appear to be the case.
If they were sovereign
That's a mighty big if - because their whole claim rests on the decision of a Court that is neither competent (in the legal sense of the word) nor has the standing to rule on the sovereignty claim. Not that the Court ruled on the sovereignty issue anyhow... not having jurisdiction over a person or the location a crime was committed is not the same as pronouncing their soi disant 'nation' sovereign. Sealand's whole claim is based on the wistful hope that nobody ever notices that.
Oh, wait, that already happened? The British courts ruled that it was outside of their jurisdiction?
It's not quite that simple. They were hauled before Crown Court when the comic opera 'nation' was outside British waters. Now, not only are they inside British waters, the finding of the Crown Court is not binding on an Admiralty Court anyhow.
there are international laws pertaining to how territorial waters work if two nations are within 12 miles of each other.
Since Sealand is not a signatory to any of those instruments, and is not recognized as a sovereign state by any signatory, and there is no binding decision, precedent, or principle to provide them with de jure or de facto recognition... My guess (though IANAL) is those laws don't apply.
tl;dr version: you can't both claim to not be bound by the law *and* seeks it's protection. Not to mention that if you don't understand the difference between different types of courts and laws and their jurisdictions, you shouldn't be parroting crap you patently don't understand.
Indeed. Both the questioner and especially the poster to whom you replied have taken the stance that "education" is merely a synonym/thin disguise for propaganda and spin of a very particular and very narrow viewpoint.
One which, as you so ably illustrate, is not a universal one among "techies". (Making the shaky assumption that "Slashdot reader/poster"=="techie".)
As an amateur historian - If I were a future historian (say 500 years from now), I'd just about commit genocide to get access to a couple of days worth of Facebook posts. That kind of access to the records of the daily concerns and activities of the masses is a pearl beyond price. Yes, there's a lot of dreck and minutiae to sort through - but there's also things like current political activities, current daily activities, etc... etc... for millions of people.
In the 70's we demonstrated that we could build a completely self sufficient colony? (Because nothing less will suffice to avoid eggs-in-one-basket.) Please, provide the details.
Most of NASA's budget in the early days wasn't about scientific experiments It was about developing spy satellite capabilities. The US wanted heavy lift rockets that could boost remote sensing and relay satellites into orbit.
Which would be why the USAF used a completely different family of rockets than NASA.
That's also why the shuttle was it size it was
Nope. Once NASA realized that it wasn't going to get the Saturn V back to lift heavy cargo to provide a destination for the Shuttle... The Shuttle became a free flying mini space station rather than taxicab and thus started growing like a weed. While it's true the exact dimensions were because of DoD needs, the overall size was already pretty damn close.
Satellite communications is the only potential of space that has developed in a commercially reasonable manner.
On the backs of boosters that wouldn't exist without NASA and USAF money.
If the Apollo program had never happened -- indeed if NASA had been disbanded entirely in 1962: [drivel snipped]
You're delusional. Communications developed because, along with the subsidies it indirectly received from NASA and the USAF, it was profitable. Other than that, there's pretty much nothing.
You're absolutely bang on correct. But you're preaching to the wrong crowd, as between the space nuts, the space revisionists, and the utterly clueless about space*, there's maybe me, you, and one or two others with enough sense and knowledge to understand what you wrote.
* There is considerable overlap between the three sets.
Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache.
And thus replaced the ceramic heartache with a titanium heartache. A titanium based system is *heavy*, much heavier than a ceramic one. A titanium system conducts heat like copper conducts electricity, meaning the peak heating for internal systems is during re-entry (when there is no cooling available) rather than after landing when air conditioning is available. A titanium system also oxidizes when heated in the presence of atomic oxygen (I.E. during re-entry). A titanium system expands and contracts significantly more than a ceramic system, both during on-orbit heating/cooling cycles and especially during re-entry. Titanium thin enough to be light enough is just as fragile as ceramic. Etc... etc...
The ceramic tile system sucks, there's no debate about that. But a metallic TPS sucks *even worse*. (And would have required about fifteen times the development budget, it was then and now largely terra incognita, just to get to that level.) NASA didn't choose the ceramic tile system capriciously. Titanium is only "better" in the minds of clueless nutter fanboy revisionists.
Because computers would still take up an entire floor of a building. Without the size and weight restrictions of space travel, why bother building them small and cool enough to fit in a desk-sized unit?
Ever wonder why the Apollo CM and LM systems were based on the guidance systems for the Polaris A-3?
Because the space program didn't pay to shrink those computers - the DoD did.
Sure it'd be cool to have tiny pocket-sized computers, but who has the budget to build them?
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
Ahhh, so he wants to just institute incredibly ineffective policies. Alright, that makes more sense.
I mentioned the X-Prize because that showed the approach was sound. That was the seed for a lot of companies making great and innovative advances in space flight, to the point where one of the competitors will be taking over where the shuttle left off shortly.
Huh? The reason why one of those competitors will be taking over shortly has absolutely nothing to do with prizes. The whole acquisition process has been the same as the traditional one (we'll pay you to do research and make proposals, then downselect among those proposals, lather, rinse, repeat) NASA has used since roughly forever. They've gussied up the rhetoric and rigged the game differently than before, but it's really just the same old game.
That's not exactly true. The true answer is "Have a marketable sequel planned out"
Which NASA had - in the Apollo Applications project. Only it was cancelled in 65/66. NASA's response was to come up with an even more ambitious and expensive sequel. (As outlined by another poster.)
If NASA had said "We're getting to Mars in 15 years. The moon will be merely remembered as our first baby steps by the year 2000."
Actually, that's pretty much what NASA did say in the second go 'round of planning for a sequel. They got shot down.
The Apollo program taught a lot of lessons, but one of them was "If you're a government-funded research program, DO NOT SUCCEED." Congress began axing the budget for space exploration about ten minutes after Armstrong's "One small step for a man..."
Actually, Congress axed Apollo's budget in 65/66. By the time Armstrong stepped on the surface, Apollo was already running on fumes.
Something else few people realize... the basic contracts for the Space Shuttle were signed while Apollo 11 was in transit to the Moon.
No, the only reason the US sent *people* to the Moon was because the Russians had already beaten them to the punch regarding both farside orbit and robotic softlanding. Manned landing was the only milestone left.
Um, no. In 1962, when Kennedy decided to go to the moon, the Russians had done neither.
So if the USSR hadn't been all "hey, check it, we're gonna land on the freakin' MOON!", the USA wouldn't have had a reason to go "Screw you, we're better than you, we'll dump more money than you ever thought existed JUST to beat you."
That's the funny part - the Russians never said anything about going to the Moon. The whole "we're racing to the Moon" was a creation from whole cloth by the politicians and the pundits. The Russian's didn't even start to try to go to the moon until around 65/66 when they realized that the US was actually serious and was actually going to try and go. (And the politicians knew this, and how far behind they were, and hid that knowledge from the public for decades.)
Huh? The O-rings were in the news within a week of of the accident. There were on the minds of a number of the committee weeks before one of them told Richard Feynman about their suspicions, leading to his parlor trick.
Feynman pulled a cute stunt, but it was an effect of the focus and discoveries of the investigation - not the cause. (And if you read his book rather than spouting urban legends, you'll find that for yourself.) Despite public perception from his largely self serving book, it's not clear at all that he contributed anything useful to the investigation.
I think masternerdguy was getting more at the idea that humans have always endeavored to explore the unexplored. It is why people eventually left Africa, some type of instinct to go the distance, risking everything in pursuit of knowing what lie just a little further away.
The problem with that idea, is that there's zero evidence of an innate human desire to "explore the unexplored" and abundant evidence of a human desire to "stick pretty much to where our forefathers lived and do things pretty much the way they did". People almost certainly left Africa for the same reason a tiny number left Europe or crossed the Appalachians in recent history - population pressure, or for profit, or to stay ahead of the law, or because too many people back home disliked them, or because they disliked the people back home...
how very sad it is to know that once upon a time, we were able and willing to fund an adventure dreamt for thousands of years
In a world where we funded an "adventure dreamt [sic] for thousands of years", you'd have a point. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where we funded a dick size contest with the Soviet Union and dressed it up in fancy rhetoric. The sad part is that people are stupid enough to buy the rhetoric despite abundant evidence otherwise.
yet in a more modern era, we can't even decide whether scientific research, which could and will benefit everyone around the world, is worth the public dollars
If by "modern era" you mean "ever since we started spending public money for the public good" (I.E. going back pretty much as as far as civilization itself), sure. But since it's quite clear that you don't mean that, you're not only abysmally ignorant of history - you're pathetically deluded.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because most of things you hear about are things like this engine test that would simply be swept under the rug if they didn't go right. I.E. minor 'successes' spun for PR value. When it comes to real successes, like their launch record, the situation isn't nearly so pretty.
It'll also only lift a little under a quarter of the mass the Shuttle can. It also cannot deliver external cargo (I.E. cargo for the station exterior) any larger than a small suitcase. It can't reboost the station like the Shuttle can. It can't provide free water to the station like Shuttle can. It can't deliver modules. It can't deliver crew at the same time as it delivers cargo, which increases your total program risk because now you need five Dragon launches to (incompletely) replace one Shuttle flight. etc... etc...
Or, to put it in the terms of Slashdot's favorite form of analogy - the Dragon is a subcompact. The Shuttle is a full sized pickup truck. Nobody sober and in full possession of their senses would confuse a subcompact and a pickup truck.
Lose the goddamn Wal-Mart mentality, there's more to consider than just cost.
No, he's quite right. You've built an elaborate justification for why you dislike it - but you've shown not on quanta of evidence that you get it.
If you believe it's only a marginal communications tool... Well, for it be a useful communications tool you've got to either want to communicate in the first place, or know people worth communicating with. (You and many other geeks keep blaming Facebook for your own failings.)
Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours:
Etc... etc...
Amount of Spam in my Facebook stream today - one. And with two clicks of a mouse, I'll never see spam from that game again. People in my contacts list who forward spam have either long since been silence or unfriended. As with the S/N ratio you complained about, the problem isn't Facebook, it's your ignorance or unwillingness to use the tools Facebook provides to control Spam and S/N.
Sounds like you'd have reccomended that people keep their money in good solid buggywhip and horse feed stocks rather than investing in that new fangled telephone invention. And do I really need to point out Google's stock prices - and that virtually their entire revenue stream depends on advertising? No, you're not insightful, you're just spiteful. You not only don't get it, you proudly revel in how little you get it.
I suspect it will actually end up being either a mortar round, or launched like a rifle grenade (to avoid recoil issues).
Yeah, I messed up my description some, but I was in a hurry and trying to be brief. I did get the general idea across though. (I hope.)
Umm... you don't actually understand how guided weapons work do you? They (duh) guide themselves to the target. If the wind moves them to the left, they steer themselves to the right, etc... all automatically. That's the whole point of the bullet being guided in the first place - for it to adapt to those conditions.
It's much more likely that the range limit comes from the projectile being fired by a smooth-bore weapon - it's not going to be very stable in flight. I suspect that while the current version can steer towards the target, it's limited in it's ability to maintain attitude.
It requires the high tech 'sniper' skill of "setting up a tripod, pointing the laser at the target, and then taking your hands off". Seriously, a sniper's skill lies not in putting the crosshairs on the target, but in putting the crosshairs off the target... such that wind, bullet drop due to gravity, etc.. etc.. ends up putting the bullet where the amateur would put the crosshairs - and miss. But wind, gravity, etc... don't effect the laser, so an amateur can place the crosshair by eye.
ROTFL.... Oh, wait - you're serious.
Sad but true.
Only if their claim to legitimacy is itself legitimate - and that doesn't appear to be the case.
That's a mighty big if - because their whole claim rests on the decision of a Court that is neither competent (in the legal sense of the word) nor has the standing to rule on the sovereignty claim. Not that the Court ruled on the sovereignty issue anyhow... not having jurisdiction over a person or the location a crime was committed is not the same as pronouncing their soi disant 'nation' sovereign. Sealand's whole claim is based on the wistful hope that nobody ever notices that.
It's not quite that simple. They were hauled before Crown Court when the comic opera 'nation' was outside British waters. Now, not only are they inside British waters, the finding of the Crown Court is not binding on an Admiralty Court anyhow.
Since Sealand is not a signatory to any of those instruments, and is not recognized as a sovereign state by any signatory, and there is no binding decision, precedent, or principle to provide them with de jure or de facto recognition... My guess (though IANAL) is those laws don't apply.
tl;dr version: you can't both claim to not be bound by the law *and* seeks it's protection. Not to mention that if you don't understand the difference between different types of courts and laws and their jurisdictions, you shouldn't be parroting crap you patently don't understand.
Indeed. Both the questioner and especially the poster to whom you replied have taken the stance that "education" is merely a synonym/thin disguise for propaganda and spin of a very particular and very narrow viewpoint.
One which, as you so ably illustrate, is not a universal one among "techies". (Making the shaky assumption that "Slashdot reader/poster"=="techie".)
As an amateur historian - If I were a future historian (say 500 years from now), I'd just about commit genocide to get access to a couple of days worth of Facebook posts. That kind of access to the records of the daily concerns and activities of the masses is a pearl beyond price. Yes, there's a lot of dreck and minutiae to sort through - but there's also things like current political activities, current daily activities, etc... etc... for millions of people.
In the 70's we demonstrated that we could build a completely self sufficient colony? (Because nothing less will suffice to avoid eggs-in-one-basket.) Please, provide the details.
Which would be why the USAF used a completely different family of rockets than NASA.
Nope. Once NASA realized that it wasn't going to get the Saturn V back to lift heavy cargo to provide a destination for the Shuttle... The Shuttle became a free flying mini space station rather than taxicab and thus started growing like a weed. While it's true the exact dimensions were because of DoD needs, the overall size was already pretty damn close.
On the backs of boosters that wouldn't exist without NASA and USAF money.
You're delusional. Communications developed because, along with the subsidies it indirectly received from NASA and the USAF, it was profitable. Other than that, there's pretty much nothing.
You're absolutely bang on correct. But you're preaching to the wrong crowd, as between the space nuts, the space revisionists, and the utterly clueless about space*, there's maybe me, you, and one or two others with enough sense and knowledge to understand what you wrote.
* There is considerable overlap between the three sets.
And thus replaced the ceramic heartache with a titanium heartache. A titanium based system is *heavy*, much heavier than a ceramic one. A titanium system conducts heat like copper conducts electricity, meaning the peak heating for internal systems is during re-entry (when there is no cooling available) rather than after landing when air conditioning is available. A titanium system also oxidizes when heated in the presence of atomic oxygen (I.E. during re-entry). A titanium system expands and contracts significantly more than a ceramic system, both during on-orbit heating/cooling cycles and especially during re-entry. Titanium thin enough to be light enough is just as fragile as ceramic. Etc... etc...
The ceramic tile system sucks, there's no debate about that. But a metallic TPS sucks *even worse*. (And would have required about fifteen times the development budget, it was then and now largely terra incognita, just to get to that level.) NASA didn't choose the ceramic tile system capriciously. Titanium is only "better" in the minds of clueless nutter fanboy revisionists.
Ever wonder why the Apollo CM and LM systems were based on the guidance systems for the Polaris A-3?
Because the space program didn't pay to shrink those computers - the DoD did.
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
Huh? The reason why one of those competitors will be taking over shortly has absolutely nothing to do with prizes. The whole acquisition process has been the same as the traditional one (we'll pay you to do research and make proposals, then downselect among those proposals, lather, rinse, repeat) NASA has used since roughly forever. They've gussied up the rhetoric and rigged the game differently than before, but it's really just the same old game.
Which NASA had - in the Apollo Applications project. Only it was cancelled in 65/66. NASA's response was to come up with an even more ambitious and expensive sequel. (As outlined by another poster.)
Actually, that's pretty much what NASA did say in the second go 'round of planning for a sequel. They got shot down.
Actually, Congress axed Apollo's budget in 65/66. By the time Armstrong stepped on the surface, Apollo was already running on fumes.
Something else few people realize... the basic contracts for the Space Shuttle were signed while Apollo 11 was in transit to the Moon.
Um, no. In 1962, when Kennedy decided to go to the moon, the Russians had done neither.
That's the funny part - the Russians never said anything about going to the Moon. The whole "we're racing to the Moon" was a creation from whole cloth by the politicians and the pundits. The Russian's didn't even start to try to go to the moon until around 65/66 when they realized that the US was actually serious and was actually going to try and go. (And the politicians knew this, and how far behind they were, and hid that knowledge from the public for decades.)
Huh? The O-rings were in the news within a week of of the accident. There were on the minds of a number of the committee weeks before one of them told Richard Feynman about their suspicions, leading to his parlor trick.
Feynman pulled a cute stunt, but it was an effect of the focus and discoveries of the investigation - not the cause. (And if you read his book rather than spouting urban legends, you'll find that for yourself.) Despite public perception from his largely self serving book, it's not clear at all that he contributed anything useful to the investigation.
The problem with that idea, is that there's zero evidence of an innate human desire to "explore the unexplored" and abundant evidence of a human desire to "stick pretty much to where our forefathers lived and do things pretty much the way they did". People almost certainly left Africa for the same reason a tiny number left Europe or crossed the Appalachians in recent history - population pressure, or for profit, or to stay ahead of the law, or because too many people back home disliked them, or because they disliked the people back home...
In a world where we funded an "adventure dreamt [sic] for thousands of years", you'd have a point. But we don't live in such a world. We live in a world where we funded a dick size contest with the Soviet Union and dressed it up in fancy rhetoric. The sad part is that people are stupid enough to buy the rhetoric despite abundant evidence otherwise.
If by "modern era" you mean "ever since we started spending public money for the public good" (I.E. going back pretty much as as far as civilization itself), sure. But since it's quite clear that you don't mean that, you're not only abysmally ignorant of history - you're pathetically deluded.