Like Columbia, this was an example of short-cutting and not listening to nay-sayer engineers who turned out to be correct.
Well, as always - it's not quite that simple.
You see, the nay-saying engineers on the night of the 27th were the same engineers who'd been assuring management since the mid 1970's that even though they knew the design was flawed - it was safe to continue flying. (Yes, the mid 70's. The joint rotation problem was discovered in the earliest tests of the SRB's, that why they added the backup O-ring.) The engineers even produced a pretty infographic (the same one that would later be ripped by Edward Tufte) 'proving' that it was safe to continue to fly.
So, at least to me who isn't biased for or against either 'side', it's pretty understandable why management was more than a little confused when the engineers reversed their positions and were unable to provide hard evidence to support that reversal.
It's worrying to someone who is innocent, that they're going to get smeared all over the place with this data that may or may not be relevant to the case which is then going to be on the public record.
Which is why we have things like rules of evidence and rules of relevance. The defense attorney already has all the tools he needs to prevent this from happening.
What about using nuclear fission propulsion like Project Orion? We already have the material and technology to make one
Well, we might have the materials, but whether or not we have the 'technology' depends on the reflectivity of your mirrors and the density of your smoke.
Seriously, many people like to treat Orion as if it were more-or-less ready off the shelf - when it's anything but. Pretty much none of the concept has been tested above the laboratory bench prototype level, and pretty much none of the key hardware components have been tested even at that level. There's a great deal of hype about Orion, but no substance.
I have to say this is a positively brilliant move on the part of Facebook (and that's an admiring 'brilliant', not an ironic one).
The usual model on the 'net had been to charge the users for access. Facebook reverses this and now we have the same model that a shopping mall or retail store uses - they let the users in free, but charge the people who want to make money from the users.
Yes, before some 'brilliant' individual replies with the obvious... Shopping malls and retailers die all the time, but some show surprising lifespans.
If anyone came up to me and said that five months from now they'd be harvesting thirty percent of my revenue, I don't think that conversation would last very long.
Yep.
You: "that's ridiculous" Them "OK, as of midnight tonight you're cut off from our network" You: (calls his lawyer to start investigating bankruptcy)
Seriously, this is why people making physical goods work so hard to get their products onto store shelves, even though $RETAILER "harvests (marks up) thirty percent of their revenue" - without $RETAILER and it's proven and existing network of 'users', they likely wouldn't have any customers at all. Direct marketing (the rough equivalent of indie games) is a very tough row to hoe, you want to make the big bucks, you go where the people (and bucks) are. There's an old saying in retail - "Sell to the classes, live with the masses. Sell to the masses, live with the classes".
I understand these games would not have had the success they are enjoying without Facebook but surely there is some symbiotic relationship now that Zynga and other casual games have increased Facebook's crack-like effects.
If Facebook is smart, they'll do like Wal-Mart does to it's suppliers - someone like Proctor & Gamble gets a better rate because Wally World moves a lot of P&G merchandise. The higher rates are for the little guy who has yet to prove his track record and that his product will pay the rent on the shelf space it occupies.
There was a period(in retrospect, quite possibly a historical anomaly) where "blue-collar, single income" might have meant some hard physical labor and some risk; but it didn't mean that you had totally fallen off the bus compared to everyone else. People raised families, owned homes, that sort of thing. Thanks to a mixture of robots and offshoring, the number of such jobs has been sharply reduced(not to zero, at least during housing booms, skilled but 'blue collar' tradesmen often do ok or better); but job availability and pay across the highschool or less sector, as a whole have fallen like a rock and show no signs of ever recovering.
In fact, the fact that the ratio of high-school drop-out to BA/BS holder has only moved from 2.5 to 3 likely supports the pessimistic hypothesis. Despite the fact that the supply of good blue-collar jobs has been absolutely gutted, the ratio has only climbed slightly. That isn't "cognitive elite" money, that is "I'm white collar because I work in a cube, not a jiffy-lube" money. There is an elite in the US, possibly created in part by certain cognitive attributes; but it is so stratospherically above the dropout/BA/BS divide that it isn't even relevant.
Sorry for the long quote - but you're spot on here. The US has been in something of a bubble since the end of WWII when a period of high prosperity created the "(blue collar in the suburbs) middle class" and supported the "soft (non professional*) middle class". That period is drawing to a close - probably forever.
I wish I hadn't commented early in the story so I could mod you up.
* That is, folks who hold degrees outside of the traditional professional classes - I.E. 'marketing' and 'communications' rather than 'engineer', 'accountant', 'doctor', or 'lawyer'.
That's so true it can usefully be treated as a natural law - on par with the Theory of Gravity or the speed of light. But the problem is, kids are now raised on a steady diet "everyone is equal", "everyone is special - in their own way". They grow up believing life is fair because they've been raised in a protective little bubble where fairness is ruthlessly enforced. Then they encounter the real world...
Once upon a time, skilled labor was the middle class.
Um, not even close. You don't even get a copy of the home game.
Historically the middle class was the degreed professional - lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like. (I.E. they were 'in the middle' between the nobility/elite and the peasants/masses.) Skilled labor was the working class.
Also, if reliability is an issue, a voting cluster of hundreds of small, cheap CPUs may be both cheaper and more reliable than a few expensive mil-spec CPUs...
Cheaper and more reliable maybe... but what about power consumption, heat dissipation, and volume? There's a lot of dimensions to that trade space.
especially since MIL-spec are generally 10 years behind state-of-the-art by the time they are approved.
So what? I haven't seen a shred of evidence that this has held back space exploration even a millisecond. Sometime 'ten years behind the state of the art' really is 'more than good enough'. (Not to mention 'proven' and 'well understood'.)
Yep. As I pointed in another post, the details matter - a great deal. If the stealth fighter (which I have no experience with) is anything like nuclear submarines (which I do have experience with), what's on the web and other places isn't actually all that detailed or informative. (Not to anyone who actually knows the details that is, though it may impress the less well informed.)
I'm pretty skeptical that these pieces could really have led to a stealth fighter. Stealth tech isn't that tough to figure out
No, it's not tough to figure out stealth. But it is a stone cold bitch to design, engineer, produce, and maintain.
I'm sure the most you can gain from these pieces is what materials were used
Which, in and of itself, is pretty valuable information. We all know it's skin is made of "carbon composite", but that's kinda like saying the body of an automobile is made of "metal". (Details matter.) Also, if the pieces are big enough, you can learn other valuable information like how the skin was attached to the airframe, or how gaps like those for the canopy or landing gear doors were handled. (Again, details matter.)
The funny part is - you seem to honestly believe this is new and recent. In reality, it's been that way since roughly forever. The 'elite' in America have focused mainly on money and sports since at *least* the mid-late 1800's.
I think a better example of the changes can be seen by recalling how much astronauts were admired and their pursuits followed by every man, woman, and child in the country (and outside of it), when my mom was growing up. The names and accomplishments stick with us today. Their generation watched it live on television in absolute awe.
The same was once true of [aircraft] pilots.
What's you're seeing is something that has happened before - it's the price of something becoming commonplace. Don't read into it something that isn't there.
In reality, it's the celebrity culture surrounding the astronauts that's lead directly to problems our space program has to today... Because of it fools like you believe that if it's Boldly Going, it's not worth it. Lewis & Clark got all the press - but the real work of exploring and mapping the continent was done by thousands of workaday surveyors and geologists and naturalists, almost none of whom ever made the press. (Unless they died horribly, and not even always then.) The same is true of the Arctic and Antarctic, everyone remembers the names of the Bold Explorers - but can you name the heads of the Antarctic research stations without Google?
The difficulty is in trying to get an accurate angle measurement, even taking pictures from both sides of the earth we only get a ~13000 km wide angle which is small when you're trying to see an object ~5000000000000000 km away.
We don't take pictures from both sides of the Earth - we take pictures from each side of the Earth's orbit. (I.E. six months apart.) Thus the baseline is (roughly) 300,000,000 km, not 13,000 km.
Maybe somebody who's been in the military or similar positions can comment: What's it like to be in a life and death situation with a team member you really hate? Do people put aside the personal conflicts until the task gets done?
It's not much different than being in a life-or-death situation with someone you really like. Seriously, you learn to put the team and the mission ahead of yourself.
As the poster above says, why do you (and many other Slashdot posters) believe the experimenters are morons?
What's they're doing is how science and research is done - when done properly. You start out with basic, simple, experiments and use the results to design the next experiment.
I think knowing you can walk out at any time makes the reality of this experiment far less stressful on those inside the test capsule than if they were actually traveling through space and had no opportunity to leave.
Having done something like this (mine was simulating a submarine underway while pierside), no it doesn't.
As long as you merely repeat some version of the official story -- which people assume is greatly exaggerated because they hate being told what to do -- it's never going to stick.
Given the general unreliability of GPS when it hasn't a clear view of the sky, and it's specific unreliability in altitude... If you're finding they're always doing at 10,000 feet that pretty much means they give it at a wide variety of altitudes and that something else is the trigger for the announcement.
I doubt it's the cloud level though, as it's not always cloudy nor are clouds always at the same altitude. The grandparent is full of it.
My impression(not speaking as an expert shipwright or anything) is that if you want to take a land-based system and get it going for reliable marine use, you'll be lucky if the cost doubles
No duh.
Seriously, you're not only not an expert shipright, you seemingly aren't even bright enough to read the effin' summary if you can't be bothered to read TFA.
They aren't using land based systems you dimbulb. They're using submarine systems - which (drum roll please), are already designed for use at sea and at depth.
China won't need to - even relatively crude ELINT gear will more than suffice to locate the transmitters on the ground. That's the great weakness in such a scheme for providing uncensored internet, it's anything but stealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as always - it's not quite that simple.
You see, the nay-saying engineers on the night of the 27th were the same engineers who'd been assuring management since the mid 1970's that even though they knew the design was flawed - it was safe to continue flying. (Yes, the mid 70's. The joint rotation problem was discovered in the earliest tests of the SRB's, that why they added the backup O-ring.) The engineers even produced a pretty infographic (the same one that would later be ripped by Edward Tufte) 'proving' that it was safe to continue to fly.
So, at least to me who isn't biased for or against either 'side', it's pretty understandable why management was more than a little confused when the engineers reversed their positions and were unable to provide hard evidence to support that reversal.
Or maybe your assumptions are incorrect.
That's easy when you can use visual representation. It's not nearly so easy when using a stream of binary data.
Which is why we have things like rules of evidence and rules of relevance. The defense attorney already has all the tools he needs to prevent this from happening.
Well, we might have the materials, but whether or not we have the 'technology' depends on the reflectivity of your mirrors and the density of your smoke.
Seriously, many people like to treat Orion as if it were more-or-less ready off the shelf - when it's anything but. Pretty much none of the concept has been tested above the laboratory bench prototype level, and pretty much none of the key hardware components have been tested even at that level. There's a great deal of hype about Orion, but no substance.
I have to say this is a positively brilliant move on the part of Facebook (and that's an admiring 'brilliant', not an ironic one).
The usual model on the 'net had been to charge the users for access. Facebook reverses this and now we have the same model that a shopping mall or retail store uses - they let the users in free, but charge the people who want to make money from the users.
Yes, before some 'brilliant' individual replies with the obvious... Shopping malls and retailers die all the time, but some show surprising lifespans.
Yep.
You: "that's ridiculous"
Them "OK, as of midnight tonight you're cut off from our network"
You: (calls his lawyer to start investigating bankruptcy)
Seriously, this is why people making physical goods work so hard to get their products onto store shelves, even though $RETAILER "harvests (marks up) thirty percent of their revenue" - without $RETAILER and it's proven and existing network of 'users', they likely wouldn't have any customers at all. Direct marketing (the rough equivalent of indie games) is a very tough row to hoe, you want to make the big bucks, you go where the people (and bucks) are. There's an old saying in retail - "Sell to the classes, live with the masses. Sell to the masses, live with the classes".
If Facebook is smart, they'll do like Wal-Mart does to it's suppliers - someone like Proctor & Gamble gets a better rate because Wally World moves a lot of P&G merchandise. The higher rates are for the little guy who has yet to prove his track record and that his product will pay the rent on the shelf space it occupies.
Sorry for the long quote - but you're spot on here. The US has been in something of a bubble since the end of WWII when a period of high prosperity created the "(blue collar in the suburbs) middle class" and supported the "soft (non professional*) middle class". That period is drawing to a close - probably forever.
I wish I hadn't commented early in the story so I could mod you up.
* That is, folks who hold degrees outside of the traditional professional classes - I.E. 'marketing' and 'communications' rather than 'engineer', 'accountant', 'doctor', or 'lawyer'.
That's so true it can usefully be treated as a natural law - on par with the Theory of Gravity or the speed of light. But the problem is, kids are now raised on a steady diet "everyone is equal", "everyone is special - in their own way". They grow up believing life is fair because they've been raised in a protective little bubble where fairness is ruthlessly enforced. Then they encounter the real world...
Um, not even close. You don't even get a copy of the home game.
Historically the middle class was the degreed professional - lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like. (I.E. they were 'in the middle' between the nobility/elite and the peasants/masses.) Skilled labor was the working class.
Cheaper and more reliable maybe... but what about power consumption, heat dissipation, and volume? There's a lot of dimensions to that trade space.
So what? I haven't seen a shred of evidence that this has held back space exploration even a millisecond. Sometime 'ten years behind the state of the art' really is 'more than good enough'. (Not to mention 'proven' and 'well understood'.)
Yep. As I pointed in another post, the details matter - a great deal. If the stealth fighter (which I have no experience with) is anything like nuclear submarines (which I do have experience with), what's on the web and other places isn't actually all that detailed or informative. (Not to anyone who actually knows the details that is, though it may impress the less well informed.)
No, it's not tough to figure out stealth. But it is a stone cold bitch to design, engineer, produce, and maintain.
Which, in and of itself, is pretty valuable information. We all know it's skin is made of "carbon composite", but that's kinda like saying the body of an automobile is made of "metal". (Details matter.) Also, if the pieces are big enough, you can learn other valuable information like how the skin was attached to the airframe, or how gaps like those for the canopy or landing gear doors were handled. (Again, details matter.)
The funny part is - you seem to honestly believe this is new and recent. In reality, it's been that way since roughly forever. The 'elite' in America have focused mainly on money and sports since at *least* the mid-late 1800's.
The same was once true of [aircraft] pilots.
What's you're seeing is something that has happened before - it's the price of something becoming commonplace. Don't read into it something that isn't there.
In reality, it's the celebrity culture surrounding the astronauts that's lead directly to problems our space program has to today... Because of it fools like you believe that if it's Boldly Going, it's not worth it. Lewis & Clark got all the press - but the real work of exploring and mapping the continent was done by thousands of workaday surveyors and geologists and naturalists, almost none of whom ever made the press. (Unless they died horribly, and not even always then.) The same is true of the Arctic and Antarctic, everyone remembers the names of the Bold Explorers - but can you name the heads of the Antarctic research stations without Google?
We don't take pictures from both sides of the Earth - we take pictures from each side of the Earth's orbit. (I.E. six months apart.) Thus the baseline is (roughly) 300,000,000 km, not 13,000 km.
If you don't have any related experience, then you have nothing useful to add. Keep your platitudes to yourself.
It's not much different than being in a life-or-death situation with someone you really like. Seriously, you learn to put the team and the mission ahead of yourself.
As the poster above says, why do you (and many other Slashdot posters) believe the experimenters are morons?
What's they're doing is how science and research is done - when done properly. You start out with basic, simple, experiments and use the results to design the next experiment.
Having done something like this (mine was simulating a submarine underway while pierside), no it doesn't.
There, fixed that for you.
Given the general unreliability of GPS when it hasn't a clear view of the sky, and it's specific unreliability in altitude... If you're finding they're always doing at 10,000 feet that pretty much means they give it at a wide variety of altitudes and that something else is the trigger for the announcement.
I doubt it's the cloud level though, as it's not always cloudy nor are clouds always at the same altitude. The grandparent is full of it.
Sounds like he'd be a shoe-in for a ton of 'insightful' moderations on Slashdot.
No duh.
Seriously, you're not only not an expert shipright, you seemingly aren't even bright enough to read the effin' summary if you can't be bothered to read TFA.
They aren't using land based systems you dimbulb. They're using submarine systems - which (drum roll please), are already designed for use at sea and at depth.
So, since the tech is available *now*, what are we supposed to do?
China won't need to - even relatively crude ELINT gear will more than suffice to locate the transmitters on the ground. That's the great weakness in such a scheme for providing uncensored internet, it's anything but stealthy.