Nope, it hasn't been in the air for seven months - it's been in orbit for seven months. Which isn't particularly noteworthy as far as orbital lifetimes goes.
Imagine the possibilities for an orbiter that is fully automated, can change orbit, and return to Earth & be refueled. Put a nice camera on that & you have a spy sat that can't be tracked easily.
We've had spy satellites with that capability for over thirty years - and much better ones than this spaceplane can ever be, since they have payloads considerably larger. (Think orders of magnitude.)
The ability to make an alternative Facebook is important in the ability to further control what I do with my own data
The only control you have over your data, regardless of which social network you use, is the choice to put it on the network or not. Once the data leaves your box, regardless of which social network you use, you no longer have any control over what happens to it.
If Diaspora has or will have support for open inter-operating service offerings then great, otherwise they're just building another Facebook wanna be to take over the world. Who cares if Diaspora's code is Open Source if my interaction with the system and my data is shackled behind a single company's vision of how social networking should work?
Unless you roll your own - you're always going to be shackled by somebody's vision of how social networking works.
As with your control over the data, the difference between Facebook and $SOME_OTHER_NETWORK is illusory.
I am guessing the FAA's jurisdiction only extends over USA territories rather than making a claim for global control over who lands on Earth?
No, it's not quite like that.
The US government is responsible (by treaty) for all launches and re-entries performed by it's citizens no matter where they originate or land - and the FAA is the body within the government delegated to exercise that oversight.
Non-SLR digital cameras have gotten very good in recent years. As an old-school 35mm SLR user, there are times I'd love to have a DSLR, but a 10MP non-reflex camera with a 10X optical zoom lens (such as the one I have) can take pretty much the exact same photos, albeit with marginally lower image quality due to the optics.
That's like saying a Honda Accord is pretty much exactly like a Formula One racer except for marginally lower performance due to the engine.
You're correct that within the range of pictures a decent point-and-shoot can take, the difference between them and a DSLR (with a single basic lens) is marginal. The problem is, that range is a pretty small subset of what a DSLR can really do. In low light, my consumer/prosumer crop-frame blows pretty much any point-and-shoot out of the water. Slap on my cheap-ass 55-250mm zoom, ditto. Etc.. etc... Compare that point-and-shoot to a full frame professional grade body and lens, and the differences become even more stark. (There's a reason why the pros carry $2000+ bodies and several grand worth of lenses rather than a $600-$1000 point and shoot.)
Maybe, just maybe it's about their culture? No... Then you would next recognize that a few of the US's larger cities are responsible for the vast majority of our so-called "gun crime", not because they have more guns, but because they are more prone to a culture of violence and lawlessness in general.
Worse yet for the OP's thesis - the vast majority of those crimes occur among a very limited demographic - whose sex, age, and race coincides with neither the stereotypical gun owner nor with the vast majority of legal gun owners. One of the huge roadblocks in fixing the problem lies in the fact that it's politically incorrect to point this out, particularly with regards to race.
Back when Wernher Von Braun created the Saturn 5, he was given the freedom to design the BEST rocket for the job.
Well, no. He was given the freedom to design the best rocket he could within the constraints placed on him. That resulted in a huge number of compromises in order to meet the various constraints of budget, schedule, performance, weight, etc... The overall result was a vehicle that was massively expensive and just barely met it's performance goals - resulting in severe constraints on the payload.
Particularly problematic was the S-II stage, whose contract was awarded late - which meant the S-I and S-IV stages had already consumed more than their shares of vehicles mass budget and were coming slightly under their performance budgets.
When they built the space shuttle, they made compromises in its design in order to ensure companies located in key congressional districts got contracts and as a result, the Shuttle Challenger blew up and killed 7 people.
That's the urban legend version. The reality is that that Shuttle was going to get a segmented SRB regardless of whose congressional district it was manufactured in - because a monolithic SRB was far too expensive, extraordinarily difficult to produce, and hellishly difficult to transport. (It never occurred to you to wonder why three of the four SRB proposals were segmented?) On top of that, we had considerable flight experience with big segmented motors and precisely none with big monolithics.
The preferred design was a one-piece booster, built in Alabama, barged around to Florida
It was preferred until someone actually sat down and did the math on what it would take to pour and cast (with no errors) such a huge booster. Add that to the extreme difficulty of handling such a huge mass during transportation and processing... and the one piece booster began to look very unattractive indeed.
because it was built in Utah and could not travel by barge, it was instead built in segments
Segments have a lot of advantages - advantages that are not clear to the uninformed...
They're *much* easier and cheaper to pour and cast.
QA is *much* easier and cheaper.
It's *much* easier to make and match right and left boosters with almost exactly the same performance.
They're *much* easier to transport and handle.
with O-rings between the segments. O-rings, that get hard in the cold weather, and leak gasses.
*Sigh*. The problem with Challenger's boosters had almost nothing to do with the cold. This is an urban legend based on poor investigation and a certain amount of whitewashing by the Rogers Commission.
What caused the loss of Challenger was joint rotation - deformation of the motor casing under internal pressure. Even at non freezing temperatures the O rings could leak. (In fact, the worst damage to and leakage from the O-rings prior to the loss of Challenger was with temperatures in the 70's and 80's!) Cold exacerbated the damage and leakage, but did not cause it.
Worse yet, NASA (and SRB contractors Morton-Thiokol) *knew about this by the late 1970's* from ground firing tests.. But fixing the problem needed money, money NASA did not have. It also might have impacted the Shuttles already badly slipping schedule. So NASA did nothing.
When the Shuttle started flying, and the problem started getting worse (as flight stresses were somewhat higher than predicted) NASA finally started spending the money on a solution - even as their engineers (and those of contractor Morton-Thiokol) were telling them it was safe to continue flying while they came up with a solution. By the time Challenger was lost, the design was complete and they were ready to seek funding to implement it. (Really, it never occurred to you to wonder how NASA had a complete design ready for public release within a day of the Rogers Commission publicly fingering the O-ring?)
I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.
Even if you could find the quote, Aviation Week is very reliable in some places, extraordinarily unreliable in others - and it can be problematic to discern whether a given quote is one or the other as they were and are not above asserting editorial opinions as facts.
You refute your own argument! >> Modern designs >> More advanced
How old are the designs for the shuttle boosters? Shuttle boosters cant throttle or pulse.
The age of a design is roughly irrelevant to how advanced they are. (At least, outside of the IT and Madison Avenue driven consumer goods worlds.) At any rate, the 1970 era SRB's are very advanced designs even today.
That being said, the first production solid motors using vent ports for thrust termination was either the Polaris A-1 or the SUBROC back in the 1950's. (I forget which entered service first and am too lazy to look it up.)
NASA did look into using thrust termination devices on the SRB's, but discarded them due to the weight penalties involved.
I can see now why you can't understand why this is bad for Ireland. Not only are you fucking clueless, you can't be bothered to read and think about what you read.
I see how this is a bad thing for other countries, but how exactly is that bad for Ireland?
Because it means that there is nothing keeping foreign companies in Ireland (I.E. facilities, factories, etc...) and because while it makes the country's economy look great on paper it doesn't actually provide any jobs.
Yes that would add an extra layer but you could remove all the "inspector" and "auditor" because if all data is online, the population and journalism will do that job.
Sure, if you believe that having people look through the data looking for waste (and be assured they'll find it, everything is waste to someone) and journalists looking for sensationalism accomplishes the same job as an inspector or an auditor... Myself, I put that in the same category as believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.
So another data source that used to be open is now closed.
And I can't unequivocally convince myself that's a bad thing. I'm sick and damm tired of the phone listing spammers whose web pages are covered in ads and popups and who are often years out of date.
Sometimes a closed, trusted, central source is a good thing.
To the extent that CGI has anything to do with this, it's the fact that action-heavy movies are assembled like cartoons. Traditionally, film directors came from the theater. Production started with a script and a group of actors, sitting around a table and doing a reading.
That's what film directors would like you to believe, it lends them an air of legitimacy. It's not true, and hasn't been since the earliest days of film when there weren't film schools or assistant directors, etc...
Cartoons, on the other hand, started with a storyboard, a real board filled with rows of cards with sketches. Dialogue was made to fit the action.
That's one way of using storyboards, but it's not the only one. I've seen story boards for Disney live action films as far back as the 50's - and those films were neither action movie nor effects heavy. (Not all of them anyhow.)
This style of production favors short shots, which are assembled in post-production. Action scenes are assembled one bit at a time, pacing can be adjusted in post, and dialogue is re-added using automated dialogue replacement. But that only drives shot lengths down to the 3-5 second range. Below that, it's forced pacing.
Storyboards are a tool, and like any tool they can be used both properly and improperly. They don't force the movie into short takes, that's a deliberate choice on the part of the production staff.
Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you didn't keep swapping between and confusing action movies and effects heavy movies - they aren't the same thing. The linked article makes the same mistake - there are movies where long shots are appropriate (and movies where they are merely the director showing off). There are movies where complex CGI is appropriate. There are movies where a mix is appropriate... He confuses various types of movies because he worked backwards from his pre-ordained conclusion that "CGI suks cuz it ain't l33t art".
How much tax increase are you willing to endure (and convince others to endure) to accomplish this?
Which is exactly why, despite being proposes pretty regularly (read: practically on an annual basis) since the late 60's - no airborne probe has yet been sent to Mars. They're hellishly expensive for very little science return.
Later, GNU/Linux became so ubiquitous in geekdom that knowing the answers for this test is actually a hint that you are not a real geek.
ROTFLMAO. Only if you're shallow enough to believe that your choice of OS's determines if you are a geek or not. Actual Real Geeks, laugh at such pretenders.
The headline is, as usual, misleading. These aren't Turing's papers (which usually means personal papers and notes belonging to the person named), they're copies of [professional] papers he wrote.
I would hope that we would rather consider the meaning of the fact that the general public has an interest in reaching space again, and by doing it themselves.
The problem is, that's not a fact - it's an opinion.
Didn't fool me for a second - because it looked pretty much like a contrail and exactly nothing like a rocket launch.
What we have here is a classic case of sensationalism and the power of suggestion and preconceived notions over common sense and stopping to think. The news said it was a missile - and a lot of people became convinced it was a missile rather than asking themselves whether the news was right or not. Even a lot of otherwise intelligent people went along with that conclusion because it agreed with their anti-government/pro-government-conspiracy beliefs.
If anything, Slashdot's angle here isn't "it's interesting because it's on Facebook", but interest in how society has trouble adapting to technology.
That's Slashdot's angle. The OP was coming from the "oh look, it's popular with the masses and as a Slashdotter I'm too cool for stuff popular with the masses" angle. The Slashdot hivemind positively loathes anything popular with the unwashed, uncool, ungeeky masses.
The Slashdot editors are correct in posting these stories, because Facebook (and MySpace, and Live Journal, and other such sites) are part and parcel of the 'net and are technology... The OP is an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it hasn't been in the air for seven months - it's been in orbit for seven months. Which isn't particularly noteworthy as far as orbital lifetimes goes.
We've had spy satellites with that capability for over thirty years - and much better ones than this spaceplane can ever be, since they have payloads considerably larger. (Think orders of magnitude.)
The truth is color blind. Political correctness is not. :(
The only control you have over your data, regardless of which social network you use, is the choice to put it on the network or not. Once the data leaves your box, regardless of which social network you use, you no longer have any control over what happens to it.
Unless you roll your own - you're always going to be shackled by somebody's vision of how social networking works.
As with your control over the data, the difference between Facebook and $SOME_OTHER_NETWORK is illusory.
No, it's not quite like that.
The US government is responsible (by treaty) for all launches and re-entries performed by it's citizens no matter where they originate or land - and the FAA is the body within the government delegated to exercise that oversight.
That's like saying a Honda Accord is pretty much exactly like a Formula One racer except for marginally lower performance due to the engine.
You're correct that within the range of pictures a decent point-and-shoot can take, the difference between them and a DSLR (with a single basic lens) is marginal. The problem is, that range is a pretty small subset of what a DSLR can really do. In low light, my consumer/prosumer crop-frame blows pretty much any point-and-shoot out of the water. Slap on my cheap-ass 55-250mm zoom, ditto. Etc.. etc... Compare that point-and-shoot to a full frame professional grade body and lens, and the differences become even more stark. (There's a reason why the pros carry $2000+ bodies and several grand worth of lenses rather than a $600-$1000 point and shoot.)
Worse yet for the OP's thesis - the vast majority of those crimes occur among a very limited demographic - whose sex, age, and race coincides with neither the stereotypical gun owner nor with the vast majority of legal gun owners. One of the huge roadblocks in fixing the problem lies in the fact that it's politically incorrect to point this out, particularly with regards to race.
Well, no. He was given the freedom to design the best rocket he could within the constraints placed on him. That resulted in a huge number of compromises in order to meet the various constraints of budget, schedule, performance, weight, etc... The overall result was a vehicle that was massively expensive and just barely met it's performance goals - resulting in severe constraints on the payload.
Particularly problematic was the S-II stage, whose contract was awarded late - which meant the S-I and S-IV stages had already consumed more than their shares of vehicles mass budget and were coming slightly under their performance budgets.
That's the urban legend version. The reality is that that Shuttle was going to get a segmented SRB regardless of whose congressional district it was manufactured in - because a monolithic SRB was far too expensive, extraordinarily difficult to produce, and hellishly difficult to transport. (It never occurred to you to wonder why three of the four SRB proposals were segmented?) On top of that, we had considerable flight experience with big segmented motors and precisely none with big monolithics.
It was preferred until someone actually sat down and did the math on what it would take to pour and cast (with no errors) such a huge booster. Add that to the extreme difficulty of handling such a huge mass during transportation and processing... and the one piece booster began to look very unattractive indeed.
Segments have a lot of advantages - advantages that are not clear to the uninformed...
*Sigh*. The problem with Challenger's boosters had almost nothing to do with the cold. This is an urban legend based on poor investigation and a certain amount of whitewashing by the Rogers Commission.
What caused the loss of Challenger was joint rotation - deformation of the motor casing under internal pressure. Even at non freezing temperatures the O rings could leak. (In fact, the worst damage to and leakage from the O-rings prior to the loss of Challenger was with temperatures in the 70's and 80's!) Cold exacerbated the damage and leakage, but did not cause it.
Worse yet, NASA (and SRB contractors Morton-Thiokol) *knew about this by the late 1970's* from ground firing tests.. But fixing the problem needed money, money NASA did not have. It also might have impacted the Shuttles already badly slipping schedule. So NASA did nothing.
When the Shuttle started flying, and the problem started getting worse (as flight stresses were somewhat higher than predicted) NASA finally started spending the money on a solution - even as their engineers (and those of contractor Morton-Thiokol) were telling them it was safe to continue flying while they came up with a solution. By the time Challenger was lost, the design was complete and they were ready to seek funding to implement it. (Really, it never occurred to you to wonder how NASA had a complete design ready for public release within a day of the Rogers Commission publicly fingering the O-ring?)
Even if you could find the quote, Aviation Week is very reliable in some places, extraordinarily unreliable in others - and it can be problematic to discern whether a given quote is one or the other as they were and are not above asserting editorial opinions as facts.
The age of a design is roughly irrelevant to how advanced they are. (At least, outside of the IT and Madison Avenue driven consumer goods worlds.) At any rate, the 1970 era SRB's are very advanced designs even today.
That being said, the first production solid motors using vent ports for thrust termination was either the Polaris A-1 or the SUBROC back in the 1950's. (I forget which entered service first and am too lazy to look it up.)
NASA did look into using thrust termination devices on the SRB's, but discarded them due to the weight penalties involved.
I can see now why you can't understand why this is bad for Ireland. Not only are you fucking clueless, you can't be bothered to read and think about what you read.
Because it means that there is nothing keeping foreign companies in Ireland (I.E. facilities, factories, etc...) and because while it makes the country's economy look great on paper it doesn't actually provide any jobs.
Which means they'll find it - even if they have to create it.
Sure, if you believe that having people look through the data looking for waste (and be assured they'll find it, everything is waste to someone) and journalists looking for sensationalism accomplishes the same job as an inspector or an auditor... Myself, I put that in the same category as believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus.
And I can't unequivocally convince myself that's a bad thing. I'm sick and damm tired of the phone listing spammers whose web pages are covered in ads and popups and who are often years out of date.
Sometimes a closed, trusted, central source is a good thing.
That's what film directors would like you to believe, it lends them an air of legitimacy. It's not true, and hasn't been since the earliest days of film when there weren't film schools or assistant directors, etc...
That's one way of using storyboards, but it's not the only one. I've seen story boards for Disney live action films as far back as the 50's - and those films were neither action movie nor effects heavy. (Not all of them anyhow.)
Storyboards are a tool, and like any tool they can be used both properly and improperly. They don't force the movie into short takes, that's a deliberate choice on the part of the production staff.
Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you didn't keep swapping between and confusing action movies and effects heavy movies - they aren't the same thing. The linked article makes the same mistake - there are movies where long shots are appropriate (and movies where they are merely the director showing off). There are movies where complex CGI is appropriate. There are movies where a mix is appropriate... He confuses various types of movies because he worked backwards from his pre-ordained conclusion that "CGI suks cuz it ain't l33t art".
Which is exactly why, despite being proposes pretty regularly (read: practically on an annual basis) since the late 60's - no airborne probe has yet been sent to Mars. They're hellishly expensive for very little science return.
ROTFLMAO. Only if you're shallow enough to believe that your choice of OS's determines if you are a geek or not. Actual Real Geeks, laugh at such pretenders.
The headline is, as usual, misleading. These aren't Turing's papers (which usually means personal papers and notes belonging to the person named), they're copies of [professional] papers he wrote.
The problem is, that's not a fact - it's an opinion.
Right - it looked like a missile launch, except that it didn't.
Didn't fool me for a second - because it looked pretty much like a contrail and exactly nothing like a rocket launch.
What we have here is a classic case of sensationalism and the power of suggestion and preconceived notions over common sense and stopping to think. The news said it was a missile - and a lot of people became convinced it was a missile rather than asking themselves whether the news was right or not. Even a lot of otherwise intelligent people went along with that conclusion because it agreed with their anti-government/pro-government-conspiracy beliefs.
LOL ;)
In other words, you've made up your mind and facts need not apply.
Get the fuck over yourself. Grow the fuck up.
Congratulations on waking up from your coma (and to the people who modded you up too).
When you've had a chance to actually catch up on the events of the Bush years, you'll find many people in fact *did* call for such inquiries.
That's Slashdot's angle. The OP was coming from the "oh look, it's popular with the masses and as a Slashdotter I'm too cool for stuff popular with the masses" angle. The Slashdot hivemind positively loathes anything popular with the unwashed, uncool, ungeeky masses.
The Slashdot editors are correct in posting these stories, because Facebook (and MySpace, and Live Journal, and other such sites) are part and parcel of the 'net and are technology... The OP is an idiot.