I like it because it's a good reminder of what you can accomplish without the latest and greatest technology. Sure you have to wind it every day or so, and sure your $5 Casio keeps better time, but it was good enough to help get people to the moon.
Not really. For serious timing and timekeeping they used the electronic and electromechanical clocks built into the spacecraft.
Astronauts literally trusted their lives with this thing - the watch was used to sequence maneuvers, estimate oxygen levels and time spacewalks walks.
I.E. short term relative time measurement, not long term timekeeping... which could have been accomplished with a much lesser watch. But being pilots raised in the manual navigation era they had the best available, because in fighters they *were* a matter of life and death because they were a key navigation tool - even though they were largely an anachronism.
You don't understand not because you're disconnected from the rest of the world - but because you're so disconnected you don't even realize the disconnect exists.
Seriously, how can you not realize that for most of the population, analog watches all but went the way of the dodo by the time you were ten or so?
No. Rather it's you who are confused as to the purpose of social networks.
I feel very good, have friends, work, hobbies and interest, and don't waste time on social networks trying to find new friends while leaving behind the old real ones.
Social networks aren't about trying to find new friends, they're about maintaining contacts with the ones you have. Yes, you can use them to find new ones (and I've met some great ones on Live Journal and Flickr), but that's not the primary purpose thereof. There is a small demographic of Friends - The Roleplaying Game players that use social networks to garner the most points by having the most 'friends', but they're a minority way the heck off on the edge of the bell curve. (And you're way the heck off on the other side.) It's a mistake to judge the whole system by the behavior of the edge cases.
If your Google profile was private (as you would expect from those who care about privacy issues)
No, I would expect that from those that are paranoid and shrill about privacy and who confuse privacy with anonymity. I want to have privacy (I.E. not everything is available to everyone), but I don't care about anonymity (not being available/visible/traceable at all) - so my profile is public.
I maintain privacy by not putting things I want to be kept private in publicly available places (E.G. Live Journal, Facebook, Google+). I know, it's an old fashioned concept to be responsible for one's own self, but I'm an old fashioned kind of guy.
Even though the Bonneville Power administration was running 100% with renewables already (without even using microhydro, solar thermal, or tidal), and is making money at it, it's important to notice that Slashdot's mod system says this can't be done.
BPA is able to run at a "profit" because they were goverment funded during their startup years and for their capital needs during their expansion years. Now that they have low capital needs and largely only parasitic maintenance and management costs (I.E. essentially no major new construction) - it's easy to be "profitable".
If you're happy to let a new friend see all of your old exploits then hey, more power to you.
And why wouldn't I be? Things I don't want people to know about I don't put online in the first place. My Live Journal works this way (new folks can see everything), and that has caused exactly zero problems... Because I'm careful what I talk about online. Because I have self control and common sense.
I think the boss or new girlfriend examples are good because people change and mature so she doesn't need to see what you did years ago before you moved on from being an emo teen or drunk college student to having some confidence and common sense.
Again, a long solved problem - you simply go back and edit/delete the problem posts. (Which, as I said above, are only a problem because you were stupid in the first place.)
The whole 'privacy issue' only exists with G+ because they're trying to provide complex technological tools to 'solve' a non-existent problem.
Reading through the list of known issues, and none of them are really show-stoppers, just bad housekeeping. Stuff like, when you block someone, their existing posts stick around.
And interestingly enough - a problem solved by Live Journal many years ago. Maybe they should have downloaded a copy of their (open source) source code and started from there rather than trying (once again) to (badly) re-invent the wheel. It sounds like Google is headed for it's usual destination, a weak second or distant third behind everyone else.
So if you create a group later on, you can't deny visibility of older posts to people in that group, and then you get into a complex mess of exceptions and multiple lists with different rules.
What I don't understand is why you'd want to hide older posts from newer members. Mailing lists (at least all the couple hundred I've been a member of over the years) work in exactly that way (join or be invited or added to the list and you get full access) and has never caused any problems.
Now with Google+ these visibility settings are not retroactive either, however until you place someone in a group that a post is visible to they cannot see any posts. They are in a limbo-like "unclassified" state, only able to see public posts. As you place them into groups, their post visibility increases. Then if you want to really get complex you can create different circles, which are much easier to target with posts than general posts with lots of visibility rules that have to be applied.
No wonder that Google is having problems... It sounds like G+ is going to be like Wave, complex and idiosyncratic - and a massive turnoff to the average user.
Had I mentioned physics, you'd have a point. But since I didn't you're once again an idiot spouting bullshit. (Most notably in your hilariously stereotyped, and wrong, final sentence.)
Yet somehow, people insist on disbelieving the equations and keep trying anyhow.
And thank god they do. Progress doesn't come from textbooks, it comes from trying.
I suppose you think that perpetual motion will become practical some day soon too?
Or to put it less politely, you're an ignorant fool parroting bullshit. I said nothing about textbooks, and only an idiot would confuse equations with textbooks - because those equations lie at the foundations of all engineering.
Those unaware of history are doomed to make stupid statements...
Remember back when companies actually owned their own factories, made their own parts, and assembled them?
This outsourcing of all production is a new thing which was brought on by globalization and the availability of cheap labor in places like China and South Korea.
I remember when some did. Contrary to popular belief, it's never been universal.
Nor is outsourcing as new as you think. Across the 20th century and right down to today production in the US was 'outsourced' to places like the West and the South because land and labor there was cheaper than in the East (especially the Northeast). (That's one of the reasons there are so many abandoned textile and lumber mills from the late 19th and early 20th centuries scattered across the Northeast.) Another key that most people miss is cheap bulk transportation - railroads through the 20th century to now, and container ships from the late 20th century. (Arguably, without containers, the whole 'globalization' things falls apart due to the high labor costs of handling individual boxes multiple times as they switch transportation modes.)
Not that I like Apple doing this, but they have really figured out how to get the best of both worlds. They get the cheap prices of globalization, and the competitive edge of controlling their own production.
Sears & Roebuck was doing the same thing with production 'outsourced' to the (American) Midwest and the South as early as the 1920's.
1950 called and it wants it's "amazing flying car of the future" back.
Seriously, just like jetpacks with more than a few minutes endurace, hovercars with any real range and performance just aren't in the cards. It's all about the physics, and the physics say that the materials, powerplants, and fuels needed are all unobtanium.
Yet somehow, people insist on disbelieving the equations and keep trying anyhow.
NASA has some serious problems right now, mostly due to lack of a strong vision
NASA ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAVE 'VISION'.
Yes, I'm shouting - because I'm good and G-d d-mmed tired of this bullshit about NASA's vision. NASA is an arm of the Executive Branch - it doesn't have 'vision', it carries out *policies*. And for forty years now, it's been largely benignly ignored except when an Administration needs some future technological triumph (a la Kennedy) to trumpet or Congress needs to siphon money to those who donated to their campaigns.
For example. Do you know why the shuttle has large wings? It's largely so that it can take off, launch a military satellite into a polar orbit, and land back in the continental united states, without overflying russian territory.
I do. It's obvious you don't - The Shuttle has wings because it's a friggin' aircraft. Period.
Nor, contrary to urban legend, are the wings only as big as they are to support DoD missions. By the time the DoD came onboard, the wings of the Shuttle-to-be were already growing because crossrange capability increases safety dramatically by increasing abort options and increasing the number of landing opportunities available on any given orbit.
But the requirement to do so meant the need for SRBs, and the complex thermal protection system. This was so that the DOD would kick in some funding into the project early on.
The DoD, across the history of the Shuttle, has kicked in precisely zero dollars. SRB's and the thermal tiles were already part of the design baseline by the time the DoD came onboard. Liquid boosters, disposable or flyback, were too expensive. The metallic thermal protection system considered as an alternate was too heavy, had considerable problems, and was seen to pose severe development risks.
A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.
A Shuttle launch costs around $100 million per launch. That's how much it costs to add a flight to the manifest - the balance are fixed costs that are paid no matter how many times you fly.
And you need a bit more payload sacrificed if you actually want anything of significant weight recovered. But the shuttle has only done that task perhaps half a dozen times, for payloads where in many cases it was debatable as to the value of doing so.
Half a dozen times? Heck, it returned significant payload five times just for Hubble. Another 25 times for Spacelab...
Replacing it with something like the Dragon capsule (and the other lifting capabilities in development by private companies) would only be an improvement. It's going to be more efficient
That's like saying it's 'more efficient' to replace a pickup truck with a subcompact. Sure, you burn less gas and have a smaller payment - but you also lose a hell of a lot of capability.
it will allow for more space project to be done with the money that would be saved
Not really. You still have to pay for cargo and module delivery - but in the future they'll require single use (and quite expensive) support systems rather than being able to ride in the Shuttle's cargo bay. Now, instead of being able to toss a sheet of plywood or a couch into the back of the pickup, you'll have to rent one - and they don't come cheap. At the costs the Russians charge, a fraction of what providers in the West charge, you end up paying about 110% of the cost of a Shuttle mission - to get about 80% of the capacity. (It only costs $100 million to add a shuttle flight to the manifest.)
it will fund the private industry to develop space-faring technologies.
The problem is finding buyers for those technologies that aren't the government.
And if you live in a cold climate like I do, gasoline engines are really quite efficient in the winter since the "waste" heat is not wasted at all; it heats the cabin.
You waste *less* heat, in that you're only tossing 99.99% of it away.
You can never make systems fully foolproof through technology, and Bruce of all people should know this.
But non sensationalist headlines don't get page hits or sell books and the resulting publicity that justifies charging people for speaking gigs and charging megabucks for consulting services.
Seriously, I get really tired of these dumbshit activists that think that pets somehow have a horrible life and if all animals just roamed free they would be so much better off.
Do pay attention to TFA rather than just displaying your ignorance.
This proposal doesn't ban pets. It doesn't even try.
What it does do is try and curb, if not end, the excesses of puppy and kitten mills and the breeders that turn out animals by the gross lot for the big box pet stores.
.. who then sell/lease them to their consumers with the myth that "If you want cable, you must use this box".
I am not sure if this is a myth... I am pretty sure that cable co's scramble most of their digital channels, requiring their descrambling equipment.
However, "descrambling equipment" != "cable co provided set top box", so yes - this is a myth. With a card from the cable co installed in the appropriate slot, my Tivo box does the descrambling itself.
Hell, it even helped out in my eng. classes. Proof? Researching why RMS Titanic's electrical systems held out for so long in spite of all that seawater coming in made for one of the most kick-ass papers I'd ever written, and it gave me an incredible respect for electrical technology back then. I wouldn't have given a shit if I wasn't interested in history, and my classmates were too busy analyzing and making shallow papers on the tech-du-jour (mostly centering on what they thought about the upcoming 1993 NEC).
You wouldn't happen to have a link would you? That sounds like a fascinating paper.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about "Mars Bottles" in his Mars Trilogy 20 years ago. I'm glad someone is finally trying it!
I read about the first "Mars Bottles" being built and used by NASA nearly 40 years ago.
(Creaky first-cup-of-coffee synapses send me off to my bookshelves...)
The earliest published reference to "Mars Jars" (the actual term Robinson used) I could find in a quick search of my hardcopy collection is from 1972. A brief Google search turns up Carl Sagan using "Mars Jars" in the 1960's. The earliest reference I can find in a Google Books search shows them being built as early as 1956.
They've been a standard tool for exobiology research in general, and Mars research in specific, for a long time. They're why the Viking landers were proposed and built in the first place - we already had experimental evidence that unicellular life on Mars was possible.
Slashdot Mirror
That means you're not part of "most of the population" Thank goodness!
Not really. For serious timing and timekeeping they used the electronic and electromechanical clocks built into the spacecraft.
I.E. short term relative time measurement, not long term timekeeping... which could have been accomplished with a much lesser watch. But being pilots raised in the manual navigation era they had the best available, because in fighters they *were* a matter of life and death because they were a key navigation tool - even though they were largely an anachronism.
You don't understand not because you're disconnected from the rest of the world - but because you're so disconnected you don't even realize the disconnect exists.
Seriously, how can you not realize that for most of the population, analog watches all but went the way of the dodo by the time you were ten or so?
No. Rather it's you who are confused as to the purpose of social networks.
Social networks aren't about trying to find new friends, they're about maintaining contacts with the ones you have. Yes, you can use them to find new ones (and I've met some great ones on Live Journal and Flickr), but that's not the primary purpose thereof. There is a small demographic of Friends - The Roleplaying Game players that use social networks to garner the most points by having the most 'friends', but they're a minority way the heck off on the edge of the bell curve. (And you're way the heck off on the other side.) It's a mistake to judge the whole system by the behavior of the edge cases.
No, I would expect that from those that are paranoid and shrill about privacy and who confuse privacy with anonymity. I want to have privacy (I.E. not everything is available to everyone), but I don't care about anonymity (not being available/visible/traceable at all) - so my profile is public.
I maintain privacy by not putting things I want to be kept private in publicly available places (E.G. Live Journal, Facebook, Google+). I know, it's an old fashioned concept to be responsible for one's own self, but I'm an old fashioned kind of guy.
Ahem....council versus counsel.
BPA is able to run at a "profit" because they were goverment funded during their startup years and for their capital needs during their expansion years. Now that they have low capital needs and largely only parasitic maintenance and management costs (I.E. essentially no major new construction) - it's easy to be "profitable".
And why wouldn't I be? Things I don't want people to know about I don't put online in the first place. My Live Journal works this way (new folks can see everything), and that has caused exactly zero problems... Because I'm careful what I talk about online. Because I have self control and common sense.
Again, a long solved problem - you simply go back and edit/delete the problem posts. (Which, as I said above, are only a problem because you were stupid in the first place.)
The whole 'privacy issue' only exists with G+ because they're trying to provide complex technological tools to 'solve' a non-existent problem.
And interestingly enough - a problem solved by Live Journal many years ago. Maybe they should have downloaded a copy of their (open source) source code and started from there rather than trying (once again) to (badly) re-invent the wheel. It sounds like Google is headed for it's usual destination, a weak second or distant third behind everyone else.
What I don't understand is why you'd want to hide older posts from newer members. Mailing lists (at least all the couple hundred I've been a member of over the years) work in exactly that way (join or be invited or added to the list and you get full access) and has never caused any problems.
No wonder that Google is having problems... It sounds like G+ is going to be like Wave, complex and idiosyncratic - and a massive turnoff to the average user.
Had I mentioned physics, you'd have a point. But since I didn't you're once again an idiot spouting bullshit. (Most notably in your hilariously stereotyped, and wrong, final sentence.)
I suppose you think that perpetual motion will become practical some day soon too?
Or to put it less politely, you're an ignorant fool parroting bullshit. I said nothing about textbooks, and only an idiot would confuse equations with textbooks - because those equations lie at the foundations of all engineering.
No argument there, Apple is a master of the tactic. I was just addressing the OP's incorrect belief that this was somehow new.
Those unaware of history are doomed to make stupid statements...
I remember when some did. Contrary to popular belief, it's never been universal.
Nor is outsourcing as new as you think. Across the 20th century and right down to today production in the US was 'outsourced' to places like the West and the South because land and labor there was cheaper than in the East (especially the Northeast). (That's one of the reasons there are so many abandoned textile and lumber mills from the late 19th and early 20th centuries scattered across the Northeast.) Another key that most people miss is cheap bulk transportation - railroads through the 20th century to now, and container ships from the late 20th century. (Arguably, without containers, the whole 'globalization' things falls apart due to the high labor costs of handling individual boxes multiple times as they switch transportation modes.)
Sears & Roebuck was doing the same thing with production 'outsourced' to the (American) Midwest and the South as early as the 1920's.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
1950 called and it wants it's "amazing flying car of the future" back.
Seriously, just like jetpacks with more than a few minutes endurace, hovercars with any real range and performance just aren't in the cards. It's all about the physics, and the physics say that the materials, powerplants, and fuels needed are all unobtanium.
Yet somehow, people insist on disbelieving the equations and keep trying anyhow.
NASA ISN'T SUPPOSED TO HAVE 'VISION'.
Yes, I'm shouting - because I'm good and G-d d-mmed tired of this bullshit about NASA's vision. NASA is an arm of the Executive Branch - it doesn't have 'vision', it carries out *policies*. And for forty years now, it's been largely benignly ignored except when an Administration needs some future technological triumph (a la Kennedy) to trumpet or Congress needs to siphon money to those who donated to their campaigns.
I do. It's obvious you don't - The Shuttle has wings because it's a friggin' aircraft. Period.
Nor, contrary to urban legend, are the wings only as big as they are to support DoD missions. By the time the DoD came onboard, the wings of the Shuttle-to-be were already growing because crossrange capability increases safety dramatically by increasing abort options and increasing the number of landing opportunities available on any given orbit.
The DoD, across the history of the Shuttle, has kicked in precisely zero dollars. SRB's and the thermal tiles were already part of the design baseline by the time the DoD came onboard. Liquid boosters, disposable or flyback, were too expensive. The metallic thermal protection system considered as an alternate was too heavy, had considerable problems, and was seen to pose severe development risks.
A Shuttle launch costs around $100 million per launch. That's how much it costs to add a flight to the manifest - the balance are fixed costs that are paid no matter how many times you fly.
Half a dozen times? Heck, it returned significant payload five times just for Hubble. Another 25 times for Spacelab...
That's like saying it's 'more efficient' to replace a pickup truck with a subcompact. Sure, you burn less gas and have a smaller payment - but you also lose a hell of a lot of capability.
Not really. You still have to pay for cargo and module delivery - but in the future they'll require single use (and quite expensive) support systems rather than being able to ride in the Shuttle's cargo bay. Now, instead of being able to toss a sheet of plywood or a couch into the back of the pickup, you'll have to rent one - and they don't come cheap. At the costs the Russians charge, a fraction of what providers in the West charge, you end up paying about 110% of the cost of a Shuttle mission - to get about 80% of the capacity. (It only costs $100 million to add a shuttle flight to the manifest.)
The problem is finding buyers for those technologies that aren't the government.
You waste *less* heat, in that you're only tossing 99.99% of it away.
But non sensationalist headlines don't get page hits or sell books and the resulting publicity that justifies charging people for speaking gigs and charging megabucks for consulting services.
Do pay attention to TFA rather than just displaying your ignorance.
This proposal doesn't ban pets. It doesn't even try.
What it does do is try and curb, if not end, the excesses of puppy and kitten mills and the breeders that turn out animals by the gross lot for the big box pet stores.
However, "descrambling equipment" != "cable co provided set top box", so yes - this is a myth. With a card from the cable co installed in the appropriate slot, my Tivo box does the descrambling itself.
Because Wikipedia: The Encyclopedia has long since been replaced with Wikipedia: The Role Playing Game.
You wouldn't happen to have a link would you? That sounds like a fascinating paper.
I read about the first "Mars Bottles" being built and used by NASA nearly 40 years ago.
(Creaky first-cup-of-coffee synapses send me off to my bookshelves...)
The earliest published reference to "Mars Jars" (the actual term Robinson used) I could find in a quick search of my hardcopy collection is from 1972. A brief Google search turns up Carl Sagan using "Mars Jars" in the 1960's. The earliest reference I can find in a Google Books search shows them being built as early as 1956.
They've been a standard tool for exobiology research in general, and Mars research in specific, for a long time. They're why the Viking landers were proposed and built in the first place - we already had experimental evidence that unicellular life on Mars was possible.