It's assembled from orbital images, so they just matched up one image to an adjacent one. (OK, so it's not actually that simple, but that it the general idea.) Libration isn't an issue.
This just goes to prove that most users aren't sophisticated enough to do computing outside of a "walled garden". Sorry to say, but that's just the way it is. Sure many of us geeks on slashdot can handle it, but most users generally cannot
It has nothing to do with sophistication. Geeks regard computers as toys and hobbies, the general public regards them as tools. (And geeks mistakenly think that makes them 'better' than the general public.) You see the same thing with cars, gearheads regard them as toys, while the general public regards them as tools - and like most tools they expect them to 'just work'.
Which is why the general public love their video game consoles, iPhones, iPads, and other walled garden computing devices. Because it lets them use computers without having to think, and without having to worry about what applications might do hard to their computer.
No, they love them because they fulfill a need, or a want, or bolster their fashion conscious ego. (And again we see a repeat of the fallacy mentioned above.)
And isn't the Google app store *supposed* to be a "walled garden"? Isn't is *supposed* to be a trusted source? That's what everyone was insisting just a few days back.
Some of the comments here remind me of a post on a woodworking board a few months back. Essentially, the poster was lamenting because he had to fire a guy because he couldn't afford to keep him... Not because of the economy, but because the guy was an absolutely inflexible perfectionist. He'd spend $300 worth of time on what should have been a $60 job... The guy was a hell of a woodworker, at home in his own shop, but just couldn't adapt to a production environment.
This isn't about Windows vs. Unix. This is about admins not understanding their job is to get production rolling again, not to satisfy their obsessive need to understand every problem or their need to satisfy their ego. ("I'm a UNIX admin dammit, I refuse to use habits that make me look like a Windows admin" or it's equivalent is a refrain modded up again and again here on Slashdot.) If a reboot or a re-imaging fixes the problem, that's the right solution. If it doesn't, *then* you dig deeper.
Just the other day, Slashdot commenters were absolutely insisting that the only possible source of malware was 'untrusted' app stores. If only everyone got their apps from 'trusted' (read: "big corporate") websites then malware would never spread.
The only way relationships can get "dangerous" to your marriage is if you let them, whether online or not.
Yeah, it's always the victims fault. It's just not possible for things to happen unexpectedly or without the individual realizing the consequences of their actions.
Do they really think they have to spell this stuff out to people?
Well, maybe in your universe it's not necessary. Either that, or you're just another clueless wonder.
What is it with everyone trying to blame Facebook and Craigslist for all the ills of the world? They are tools, and nothing more. But they are new, and so I guess that makes them suspicious, doesn't it?
I'd have thought people interested in technology would be interested in examining how that technology interacts in the real world. I mean, you don't find it interesting that social media is so widely implicated and in what that implies for it's impact on society and the changes as the wired generation reaches adulthood? The positive effects of social media on the current Jasmine Revolution(s) are widely examined and praised here on Slashdot, one would think that the negative effects would be equally interesting.
The fundamental concept of the rocket plane, launch from an aircraft, performance, and design are quite similar. Google "X-15 spaceshipone", I'm not really presenting a unique idea here.
Just because it's not unique doesn't mean it's not an idiotic notion. 'Similar' and 'derived' are not synonyms.
The most significant costs of spacecraft development are the R&D costs -- don't you think Scaled Composites looked over what has been done in the past here and studied it quite carefully?
Oh, I have no doubt they did. But again, studying the past does not mean their design is derived from what gone before. In particular, SS1/SS2's success relies on something that has *not* gone before - the 'shuttlecock' re-entry mode which is passively stable (unlike the X-15) and leads to thermal loads much, much lower than the X-15's.
Are we looking at the same pictures here? They most certainly are not "aerodynamically identical"... their size, profile, performance, and characteristics are completely different.
Well, no, we aren't looking at the same pictures - because I'm not looking at pictures. I'm looking a specifications, flight performance, operational modes, etc... etc... All the hard stuff that goes into actually evaluating a design.
And when you do that, the SS2 is virtually identical to SS1. That's why they built SS1 in the first place - to test and prove those concepts.
Commercial spaceplanes aren't a substitute for the Space Shuttle.
No shit Sherlock. And unsurprisingly any one with a clue knows they aren't intended to be.
And given the fact that the design and performance has not changed a whole lot, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect huge innovation here that can replace the ISS for orbital research.
Again, no shit Sherlock. Anyone with a clue knows they aren't intended to do so.
Among your many other intellectual failings, it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that there are classes of experiments that need microgravity but that *don't* need to be on the ISS and for which sounding rockets are unsuitable.
Somebody actually familiar with microgravity research (which you aren't) knows this is why NASA does research in the Vomit Comet (and numerous other countries and commercial operators have their own versions). This is also why NASA and others operate zero-G drop tubes.
You know what happened the last time our manned space program lapsed and we had a neglected space station, Skylab? It de-orbited and crashed into the ocean. Oops.
Someone who is actually familiar with the history of Skylab knows a few things you don't. Like the fact that it wasn't neglected - it was *dead*. There was no further use for it. Like the fact that it was intended to be raised into a graveyard orbit, but we didn't not because it was neglected but because we couldn't be back in time.
So yeah, maybe I'm just jaded, but the prospect of orbital research being something that zee Germans could've done on a Me-163 back in 1941 doesn't really impress me.
If the Germans could have done it back in 1943, you'd have a point. But they didn't have the engines, didn't have the materials for the thermal protection system, didn't have the electronics for the guidance system, etc... etc... You're jaded because you're operating under the mistaken notion that you a clue as to what you're talking about.
The earlier SpaceShipOne was derivative of the Bell X-15.
Other than having a completely different engine, completely different electronics, completely different thermal protection, completely different aerodynamics, completely different... Well, you get the picture. SS1 is no more 'derived' from the X-15 than my PC is 'derived' from the Difference Engine. And the same goes for your other 'derivations' - how can the SS1 be 'derived' from the X-15, but the aerodynamically identical SS2 be 'derived' from the X-20, which is radically different from the X-15?
The rocket plane design is cheap, but I'm not sure it's possible to actually get the necessary altitude with it. I don't know if the X-20 would've gotten that altitude or not, but Scaled Composite's estimate of 110km seems more sane given their design carries 7 more people than the X-20.
The Space Shuttle reaches it's designed orbital altitude - what makes you think the X-20 wouldn't have been able to?
But if nothing else, it goes to show that Germany had some damn fine rocket engineers in the 1940s.
For the 1940's, yeah. But they're no more responsible for the current craft than James Watt is for nuclear power plant.
The people getting these infected apps knew damn well what they were doing. They had to make at lease one nonstandard setting, download in a nonstandard way, and launch the installation in a nonstandard way.
The funny part is - this is exactly what many Slashdotters have been howling for ever since, well, forever. That users be able to get apps from whoever they want without being tethered, forced, or locked in. But as soon as that freedom exists, and (quite predictably) something goes wrong - the cry goes out "it's the users fault - they should have gotten their apps from $MEGACORP rather than exercising their freedom!".
That still doesn't things that much - because it still takes two crew to fly *up*. Even if you fly two Shuttle crew down, you still leave one extra behind for a net gain of only one down. The station crew rotation is still hosed.
Such a spacecraft would not have a problem carrying enough fuel to make the return trip.
It does have the problem of not having enough thrust to make the trip at all in a reasonable time frame.
It would drop a module down to Mars (which uses parachutes and the "beachball" technique to land safely).
Which is a great idea... except there isn't enough air for parachutes to slow a payload the size of the lander down enough, and airbags produce G and shock loads way above what a human can tolerate... Not that the latter really matters all that much, as with current materials airbags are only strong enough to handle a payload roughly.001% the weight of a manned lander or a mere 1% or so of an unmanned lander capable of returning to orbit with any significant amount of samples.
After collecting samples, it would lift off Mars using a conventional rocket and rendezvous with the nuclear-powered craft in orbit, which would return to earth (but stay in orbit).
Other than the fact that ion engines don't have the thrust to brake the spacecraft into Earth orbit - this sounds like a *great* idea.
For sufficiently fuzzy values of "affordable", "credible", and "realistic" - sure. In the real world, not so much.
Zubrin consistently treats things that exist as laboratory prototypes as if they were ready to be deployed off-the-shelf. He consistently treats questions that we don't even know enough about to quantify the known unknowns clearly as if they are long solved and well understood. Etc... etc...
Not *a* Soyuz, but rather *six* of them because a Soyuz can only take one passenger at a time. Given the current production and flight rate that means it'll take two and a half to three years to return all the Shuttle crew to Earth - and in the meantime, you're reducing the Station's effective crew from three to two. (As you can't boost a crewman for which there is no downbound seat and none of the Shuttle's crew is qualified to fly the Soyuz.)
"This tells us the Obama administration will do almost anything to figure out who is leaking government information."
You have to be kidding me. What planet is Ms. Dalglish from, or what is she smoking? Obtaining the telephone, credit, and bank records is pretty much standard procedure for any criminal investigation of any significance. That the administration is doing so as part of a criminal investigation tells us nothing.
I'm not really as inclined to answer that until you can show me the source of your numbers as IMO, the type of estimate you're talking about crosses the line from hypothetically plausible in a debate setting, to involving so many different factors as to be completely unprovable.
Then frankly, as so much else in your reply plainly shows - you're not worth debating. You haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
ELVs to this day remain a far more flexible, reliable and cost effective means of getting payloads into orbit and beyond than the Shuttle has ever been.
Flexible? Not even close - pretty much all an ELV can do is send things up, it cannot bring things back. Consider the Hubble servicing missions, impossible without either the Shuttle or throwing away the tools and servicing equipment after each flight. (Or spending hundreds of millions into making the servicing platform into a survivable free flyer - but you'd still have to carry the spares and specialized tools for that mission with you and then throw the tools away.) Consider Spacelab - each launch of which would have required a quarter of a billion dollars for the lab, and yet more for the crew. (Which wouldn't have been very flexible at all because it's configuration would be fixed, rather than being modified/upgraded after each flight. It also would have been extremely expensive when you figure in the lab itself, as a free flyer, would have clocked in somewhere between a quarter and a half a billion dollars.)
Reliable? The difference in reliability between the Shuttle and any other booster that's even close in reliability is statistically insensible. Ditto between the Shuttle and any manned capsule.
Cost effective? Well, that depends on how you define it. You certainly can launch *cheaper*, but a Yugo is cheaper than a pickup truck or a minivan and is also much less capable. You get what you pay for.
To be fair, the loss of both shuttles can be attributed a great deal to the culture shift at NASA, as there was a time when the organization prided itself on having the best engineers in the world, however all too often they have now been ignored in favor of the overly unrealistic views of scientists and management, the latter have shown a clear trend over the past several decades of ignoring safety concerns in favor of maintaining launch dates despite the inevitably fatal consequences of such an attitude.
Yeah. It's not like the engineers never told the managers that the O-rings were safe (despite multiple failures of the same) or that foam shedding wasn't an issue (despite serious tile damage). Oh, wait. That's exactly what happened - the engineers insisted there was no problems with the current set up, it was safe to continue to fly until the engineers came up with a fix.
We have three lights on our porch (which runs the length of the front of the house) - the one over the door is incandescent, while the others are CFL, for just this reason.
I don't think it's shady at all. Canonical build a complete operating environment.
How exactly is it not shady to divert funds from their intended destination for your own use? That Canonical builds a complete environment vice burns a CD from the web is mere spin, irrelevant to this.
I'm not particularly enthused about the way the article writer spun this. It sounds like somebody at Canonical overstepped his bounds and made a mistake. But the article author keeps saying Canonical shouldn't have... Canonical shouldn't have... Canonical shouldn't have...
Again, the spin isn't by the author - who has used the standard method of phrasing such things. The spin is on your part trying to divert attention from the matter at hand in order to excuse Canonical.
And here come the Google fanboy's explaining how it's not Google's fault that Google search results are getting worse over time...
Google didn't get any worse, the spammers are the ones who got better.
If Google's search results have gotten worse, then yes - Google has gotten worse.
I understand them if they are rather slow in making significant changes to their algorithm. In this sue-happy society they have to keep any collateral damage as low as possible (i.e. valid sites that move only a few spots down the ranking - can you imagine the outcry?).
The problem isn't valid sites - it's invalid sites. It's searches where the top two or three results are domains for sale. It's searches where the top ten results are all links pointing to the same page - which hasn't been updated since 2004. (Meanwhile, active pages on the same topic are on pages three and four behind all the linkspammers.)
Seriously... It surprises more to hear about people successfully getting their money out, than stories like the FP.
That's because all you hear is the squeaky wheel. By some weird thought process that has lead you to believe that there are no wheels that aren't squeaking.
Old growth forest trees for... where? I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the climax forest is very different from where I grew up in the Carolina Piedmont. New England is different from both, and much of the Midwest was prairie rather than forest... And that's just here in the United States!
Nor can you just plant an old growth forest, as often they go through multiple cycles with different tree and plant species mixing before reaching the metastable climax state.
Slashdot Mirror
"Firefox 4 is almost here, and comes with a huge list of awesome features for web developers."
How about fewer features for web developers - and more for web users? Remember us? They guys who are the reason for all those web developers?
It's assembled from orbital images, so they just matched up one image to an adjacent one. (OK, so it's not actually that simple, but that it the general idea.) Libration isn't an issue.
Except that 'optical' doesn't mean 'uses lenses', it means 'uses light'. So no, they couldn't all be called optical microscopes.
It has nothing to do with sophistication. Geeks regard computers as toys and hobbies, the general public regards them as tools. (And geeks mistakenly think that makes them 'better' than the general public.) You see the same thing with cars, gearheads regard them as toys, while the general public regards them as tools - and like most tools they expect them to 'just work'.
No, they love them because they fulfill a need, or a want, or bolster their fashion conscious ego. (And again we see a repeat of the fallacy mentioned above.)
And isn't the Google app store *supposed* to be a "walled garden"? Isn't is *supposed* to be a trusted source? That's what everyone was insisting just a few days back.
Some of the comments here remind me of a post on a woodworking board a few months back. Essentially, the poster was lamenting because he had to fire a guy because he couldn't afford to keep him... Not because of the economy, but because the guy was an absolutely inflexible perfectionist. He'd spend $300 worth of time on what should have been a $60 job... The guy was a hell of a woodworker, at home in his own shop, but just couldn't adapt to a production environment.
This isn't about Windows vs. Unix. This is about admins not understanding their job is to get production rolling again, not to satisfy their obsessive need to understand every problem or their need to satisfy their ego. ("I'm a UNIX admin dammit, I refuse to use habits that make me look like a Windows admin" or it's equivalent is a refrain modded up again and again here on Slashdot.) If a reboot or a re-imaging fixes the problem, that's the right solution. If it doesn't, *then* you dig deeper.
Just the other day, Slashdot commenters were absolutely insisting that the only possible source of malware was 'untrusted' app stores. If only everyone got their apps from 'trusted' (read: "big corporate") websites then malware would never spread.
Yeah, it's always the victims fault. It's just not possible for things to happen unexpectedly or without the individual realizing the consequences of their actions.
Well, maybe in your universe it's not necessary. Either that, or you're just another clueless wonder.
Personally, I suspect the latter.
I'd have thought people interested in technology would be interested in examining how that technology interacts in the real world. I mean, you don't find it interesting that social media is so widely implicated and in what that implies for it's impact on society and the changes as the wired generation reaches adulthood? The positive effects of social media on the current Jasmine Revolution(s) are widely examined and praised here on Slashdot, one would think that the negative effects would be equally interesting.
Just because it's not unique doesn't mean it's not an idiotic notion. 'Similar' and 'derived' are not synonyms.
Oh, I have no doubt they did. But again, studying the past does not mean their design is derived from what gone before. In particular, SS1/SS2's success relies on something that has *not* gone before - the 'shuttlecock' re-entry mode which is passively stable (unlike the X-15) and leads to thermal loads much, much lower than the X-15's.
Well, no, we aren't looking at the same pictures - because I'm not looking at pictures. I'm looking a specifications, flight performance, operational modes, etc... etc... All the hard stuff that goes into actually evaluating a design.
And when you do that, the SS2 is virtually identical to SS1. That's why they built SS1 in the first place - to test and prove those concepts.
No shit Sherlock. And unsurprisingly any one with a clue knows they aren't intended to be.
Again, no shit Sherlock. Anyone with a clue knows they aren't intended to do so.
Among your many other intellectual failings, it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that there are classes of experiments that need microgravity but that *don't* need to be on the ISS and for which sounding rockets are unsuitable.
Somebody actually familiar with microgravity research (which you aren't) knows this is why NASA does research in the Vomit Comet (and numerous other countries and commercial operators have their own versions). This is also why NASA and others operate zero-G drop tubes.
Someone who is actually familiar with the history of Skylab knows a few things you don't. Like the fact that it wasn't neglected - it was *dead*. There was no further use for it. Like the fact that it was intended to be raised into a graveyard orbit, but we didn't not because it was neglected but because we couldn't be back in time.
If the Germans could have done it back in 1943, you'd have a point. But they didn't have the engines, didn't have the materials for the thermal protection system, didn't have the electronics for the guidance system, etc... etc... You're jaded because you're operating under the mistaken notion that you a clue as to what you're talking about.
Other than having a completely different engine, completely different electronics, completely different thermal protection, completely different aerodynamics, completely different... Well, you get the picture. SS1 is no more 'derived' from the X-15 than my PC is 'derived' from the Difference Engine. And the same goes for your other 'derivations' - how can the SS1 be 'derived' from the X-15, but the aerodynamically identical SS2 be 'derived' from the X-20, which is radically different from the X-15?
The Space Shuttle reaches it's designed orbital altitude - what makes you think the X-20 wouldn't have been able to?
For the 1940's, yeah. But they're no more responsible for the current craft than James Watt is for nuclear power plant.
The funny part is - this is exactly what many Slashdotters have been howling for ever since, well, forever. That users be able to get apps from whoever they want without being tethered, forced, or locked in. But as soon as that freedom exists, and (quite predictably) something goes wrong - the cry goes out "it's the users fault - they should have gotten their apps from $MEGACORP rather than exercising their freedom!".
Actually, it's not funny. It's pathetic.
That still doesn't things that much - because it still takes two crew to fly *up*. Even if you fly two Shuttle crew down, you still leave one extra behind for a net gain of only one down. The station crew rotation is still hosed.
It does have the problem of not having enough thrust to make the trip at all in a reasonable time frame.
Which is a great idea... except there isn't enough air for parachutes to slow a payload the size of the lander down enough, and airbags produce G and shock loads way above what a human can tolerate... Not that the latter really matters all that much, as with current materials airbags are only strong enough to handle a payload roughly .001% the weight of a manned lander or a mere 1% or so of an unmanned lander capable of returning to orbit with any significant amount of samples.
Other than the fact that ion engines don't have the thrust to brake the spacecraft into Earth orbit - this sounds like a *great* idea.
For sufficiently fuzzy values of "affordable", "credible", and "realistic" - sure. In the real world, not so much.
Zubrin consistently treats things that exist as laboratory prototypes as if they were ready to be deployed off-the-shelf. He consistently treats questions that we don't even know enough about to quantify the known unknowns clearly as if they are long solved and well understood. Etc... etc...
Not *a* Soyuz, but rather *six* of them because a Soyuz can only take one passenger at a time. Given the current production and flight rate that means it'll take two and a half to three years to return all the Shuttle crew to Earth - and in the meantime, you're reducing the Station's effective crew from three to two. (As you can't boost a crewman for which there is no downbound seat and none of the Shuttle's crew is qualified to fly the Soyuz.)
You have to be kidding me. What planet is Ms. Dalglish from, or what is she smoking? Obtaining the telephone, credit, and bank records is pretty much standard procedure for any criminal investigation of any significance. That the administration is doing so as part of a criminal investigation tells us nothing.
Then frankly, as so much else in your reply plainly shows - you're not worth debating. You haven't the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
Flexible? Not even close - pretty much all an ELV can do is send things up, it cannot bring things back. Consider the Hubble servicing missions, impossible without either the Shuttle or throwing away the tools and servicing equipment after each flight. (Or spending hundreds of millions into making the servicing platform into a survivable free flyer - but you'd still have to carry the spares and specialized tools for that mission with you and then throw the tools away.) Consider Spacelab - each launch of which would have required a quarter of a billion dollars for the lab, and yet more for the crew. (Which wouldn't have been very flexible at all because it's configuration would be fixed, rather than being modified/upgraded after each flight. It also would have been extremely expensive when you figure in the lab itself, as a free flyer, would have clocked in somewhere between a quarter and a half a billion dollars.)
Reliable? The difference in reliability between the Shuttle and any other booster that's even close in reliability is statistically insensible. Ditto between the Shuttle and any manned capsule.
Cost effective? Well, that depends on how you define it. You certainly can launch *cheaper*, but a Yugo is cheaper than a pickup truck or a minivan and is also much less capable. You get what you pay for.
Yeah. It's not like the engineers never told the managers that the O-rings were safe (despite multiple failures of the same) or that foam shedding wasn't an issue (despite serious tile damage). Oh, wait. That's exactly what happened - the engineers insisted there was no problems with the current set up, it was safe to continue to fly until the engineers came up with a fix.
This.
We have three lights on our porch (which runs the length of the front of the house) - the one over the door is incandescent, while the others are CFL, for just this reason.
How exactly is it not shady to divert funds from their intended destination for your own use? That Canonical builds a complete environment vice burns a CD from the web is mere spin, irrelevant to this.
Again, the spin isn't by the author - who has used the standard method of phrasing such things. The spin is on your part trying to divert attention from the matter at hand in order to excuse Canonical.
And here come the Google fanboy's explaining how it's not Google's fault that Google search results are getting worse over time...
If Google's search results have gotten worse, then yes - Google has gotten worse.
The problem isn't valid sites - it's invalid sites. It's searches where the top two or three results are domains for sale. It's searches where the top ten results are all links pointing to the same page - which hasn't been updated since 2004. (Meanwhile, active pages on the same topic are on pages three and four behind all the linkspammers.)
That's because all you hear is the squeaky wheel. By some weird thought process that has lead you to believe that there are no wheels that aren't squeaking.
True, but irrelevant here.
Untrue histrionics. Paypal is a private entity and is not required to support or refuse to support any particular cause, issue, or individual.
Old growth forest trees for... where? I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the climax forest is very different from where I grew up in the Carolina Piedmont. New England is different from both, and much of the Midwest was prairie rather than forest... And that's just here in the United States!
Nor can you just plant an old growth forest, as often they go through multiple cycles with different tree and plant species mixing before reaching the metastable climax state.
In a market well supplied? You're going broke if you think it's that simple.