That makes it, at worst, a 50% success rate, which is hardly abysmal given that SpaceX launches cost less than half what their competitors charge.
That's fine for those who are willing to accept a 50/50 chance of having their payload not reach orbit, but that's going to be a very small niche market. (Assuming it even exists in the real world.) Those who spend millions of dollars on payloads generally aren't Wal-Mart shoppers who don't give a crap about quality so long as it's cheap. (Or at least they don't stay that way for long if they hope to continue getting funding and/or insurance.)
IOW, yes, a 50% failure rate is beyond abysmal. Of course, by the normal standards of engineering, the 98-99% failure rate considered 'acceptable' by the launch industry is also abysmal.
That marketese has gotten him a company successfully launching rockets into orbit.
That marketese has put more rockets into the drink than it has into orbit. With his current (abysmal) success rate, it's more than a wee bit premature to be talking about retiring to Mars.
Wow, so you're really saying that it is *impossible* for the astronauts on the ISS to fix anything?
No, I'm saying it's essentially impossible to make it self sufficient for a year. How can you possibly get that I said it was impossible for them to fix anything from what I wrote?
Oh, never mind, I fully understand how you can do that now. You've abundantly and repeatedly displayed your ignorance. And now it appears that such ignorance is not willful, but that you revel in it.
Finally, given the above, how can people POSSIBLY be responding "and nothing of value was lost" in an honest to goodness impressive attempt
Because most of your 'above' is either irrelevant or very selective comparing of features to existing systems.
Its a little disheartening to see so many people (even techies) who dismissed it out of hand given how much better it was (with no disadvantages that I can discern).
Other than being slow as hell, clunky as hell, counterintuitive as hell, having a crap UI, and not behaving in any way resembling the systems it was meant to replace - no, it didn't have any disadvantages.
But one would hope the prevailing attitude on slashdot would be "that looks interesting, lets test it and find out if its any good"
Well, the cool thing is is exactly the attitude Slashdot took - and when they got a chance to test it, they found that not only did it not live up to it's hype, it wasn't any good (at least not in the "dessert wax and a floor topping" sense Google kept insisting on). It simply didn't work beyond being a cool collaborative editing tool - and wiki's do that far better.
"Making the ISS self sufficient for that long is essentially impossible on two grounds: First, it wasn't designed to be so. Second, we lack the experience to know what level of spares and maintenance are required."
If that's not a can't do attitude I don't know what is.
No, it's a statement of fact on par with "the sun will rise in the East tomorrow". You mistake it for a "can't do attitude" because either you lack the intelligence or the education to understand this or because you're deliberately being obtuse.
Go study the Russian program someday, you'll discover what a real space program looks like. It's not "prefab everything and don't do anything in space without a 12 point plan".
Again with the empty attitude and sloganeering - as this has precisely nothing to do with anything under discussion other than your (groundless) definition of it being 'real'. (BTW, I've been studying the Russian space program for nearly twenty years.)
Or, in other words, once again you have nothing but empty attitude.
Since the Elo system is not designed to predict future performance (it's designed to capture current relative rankings), then is it really surprising that programs designed to predict future performance are better at it?
And if my current relative rank is higher than yours, doesn't that imply that if we play each other I should win?
That depends on the relative difference between the ranks. A narrow difference implies you might win, a wider difference implies you will win - and between the two lies a spectrum of gradual shifts from may to will. It's not an absolute quantitative measurement.
Had I said anything about "can't do", you'd have a point. And I notice you can't be bothered to either answer my questions or address my points.
And that's because you can't do either - because all you bring to the table is attitude and slogans.
Learn the difference between your fantasy world and the real one, or shut up.
I've lived in an environment much like ISS, I know how it feels when one of two systems your life depends on goes down - and what can and can't be done about it. I've lived through situations where a critical system went down and you don't have any more spares and have to bang the system back together with duct tape and baling wire. I know how hard logistical planning, and designing for maintenance is. Ive had the effin' t-shirt so long it's been worn to rags.
Since the Elo system is not designed to predict future performance (it's designed to capture current relative rankings), then is it really surprising that programs designed to predict future performance are better at it?
Now if publishers had actually grasped new technology by the horns and allowed bookstores to print (and bind) **on demand** titles
That assumes the technology existed in the first place - which it really doesn't.
Print on demand, until recently, has produced only low (reproduction) quality books. That is, you'd have been disappointed by the reproduction of the pictures in the book you sought - those wonderful color pictures (assuming you mean the Peter Follet book by that title) would have been blobby B&W blurs. Resolution is a bit better nowadays - but still B&W. (Print-on-demand machines are optimized for the high speed production of the typical book - which means black text on white pages.)
Even to the extent the technology does exist, it's out of the reach of non-chain store due to the high capital cost. You're average mom & pop simply can't afford a machine costing up to tens of thousands of dollars.
And, with this shift, we will see the resurgence of the mom and pop bookstore that sells new and used books in a loving environment which was previously squeezed out by the mega chains. And I'm fine with that.
That's roughly as likely as a supermodel wandering into your basement and offering to have carnal relations with you.
I don't know where you've been for the last fifteen years but Amazon has already destroyed the mom and pop new bookseller. Amazon and various used book networks online have encouraged the growth of garage and warehouse operators selling used books, all but destroying the mom and pop in that market as well. And the Wal-Mart mentality has sent people flocking to the online sellers in droves.
I'm sorry. But I buy almost nothing from them.... Except their clearance books, those are honest pricing.
I just love the mentality of the Wal-Mart shopper. "If it ain't cheap, they iz a' rippin' me off". No knowledge required, no hard thinking required, just blind dogma.
Seriously, scroll up a bit and you'll find the reasons for the price difference. (tl;dr version: Amazon == Microsoft.)
If this were a Russian failure they would have been out the airlock the same day. They're trained for that
OK, and? There's no particular need to rush, that's why they have redundant loops.
I think a better question is: what is NASA going to do when the ISS sized vehicle they want to go to Mars in has a similar issue? Spend a few days worrying about it and calling back to Earth then go replace it with a spare and hope the spare doesn't break?
Yep - because that's pretty much all they can do. What else do you expect them to do?
Sooner or later they're going to have to break their addiction with resupply and ground based mission control. I say, do it sooner. Make the ISS self sufficient for at least 12 months at a time.
Making the ISS self sufficient for that long is essentially impossible on two grounds: First, it wasn't designed to be so. Second, we lack the experience to know what level of spares and maintenance are required.
So if the pool had been licensed then the water wouldn't have done as much damage to your friends back yard when it collapsed?
Without knowing what went wrong, I'd wager the scenario could run like my what happened here a few years back...
A guy decided to put in a new driveway, and to keep it level carved away part of the foot of a hill. The hill started to slide a little bit, so he built his own six foot tall, thirty foot long retaining wall out of concrete blocks and without benefit of a permit or inspection. Problem was, not only did he not tie the courses together, he also didn't anchor the wall back into the hill, and he didn't provide drains behind the wall. All of which are required by code, should have been specified on the plans submitted for the permit he didn't have, approved by the county engineer as part of the approval process he didn't go through, certified as performed by the licensed contractor he didn't hire, and inspected by the county after completion...
Within a few weeks the county found out about this (I don't recall how) and yellow tagged the house. (Which means the house could not be occupied until the work noted on the tag, in this case replacing the wall, had been properly completed.) A few weeks later, in defiance of the yellow tag, the man moved back into the house because he "didn't want his family to spend Christmas in a hotel". Four days later, during a normal (for these parts) winter rainstorm, the weight of the hill and accumulated water collapsed the wall - and the ensuing mudslide wiped out the house and killed the man, his wife, and three of their children. The only survivor was a teen aged daughter who was at a friends Christmas party.
So the issue isn't that the water wouldn't have done as much damage when it collapsed, but that the odds are if the pool had been properly built it would have been less likely (much less likely) to collapse in the first place.
Not to mention, that most home insurance policies won't cover damages caused by un permitted construction. Nor are you left with any recourse - you'll be liable if you're party to a suit that arises subsequent to any damages caused by failures in such construction.
It's such a strain to wear an extra set of glasses for a couple of hours a few times a week (at most)? I think not. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about - I wear glasses every waking hour too.)
Plug-in electrics and hybrids will eventually replace straight hybrids - so a comparison with oil is not entirely unfounded. Premature maybe, but not far fetched.
The ISS uses a cooling system - not a refrigeration system. The ammonia is used merely as a working fluid to convey heat from the station's interior to radiators, were it is rejected.
The problem is that the ISS ultimately rejects heat by radiating it away through radiators mounted on the solar array wings - and water would freeze and plug up the radiators.
So instead, they use a water loop to cool the atmosphere and equipment, and then transfer that heat to the ammonia system which then circulates through the radiators. (It's pretty easy to design the system such that there is minimal ammonia piping (and thus a minimal chance of an accident) inside the manned spaces.) Since ammonia freezes at a much colder temperature than water, this means it's much easier to keep the coolant moving at a rate where it radiates enough heat to be useful but still stays warm enough to not freeze.
It's going to be a complex trade off to choose a coolant, and few people seem to realize that NASA does take into consideration cost and availability when making their choices. They aren't so good at controlling costs as they might be, which is understandable since overall they're working at the bleeding edge of engineering, but that doesn't mean they don't try.
And really, there's isn't much of a difference between ammonia or anything more exotic because even something 'safe' (like nitrogen for example) is still going to rapidly displace the oxygen from the air (that is, reduce the effective partial pressure) if there's a leak because of the small volume of the breathable atmosphere.
Selective quoting doesn't get you far when I've addressed the issue in the same comment.
I might as well selectively quote since you're selectively reading.
But the point still stands: accessibility matters, artificial barriers are bad.
If there was an artificial barrier - you'd have a point. But there isn't, you've created the whole thing out of thin are. So all you have is confused flailing and ever more strained and bizarre analogies in order to create the impression that there is one.
There's no logical place for a smiley in your post, nor humorous tone.
We value sticking together... we value it in our mutual decision
Except you aren't making a mutual decision with your children - you've already made the decision. You've already decided they're living by your values - regardless of what their turn out to be.
we raise our children under the guidance of the always apt maxim "be nice to your children, they may be picking your nursing home... or deciding whether you can live next door or in their house."
Except, again, you aren't allowing them to make the decision - you've already made it for them.
Choice is very much dependent on perspective. It's hardly valid to claim that it's your fault if you chose not to own a Ferrari.
If the technology in question was like a Ferrari - rare, expensive, and available only to a few... you'd have a point. But the technology in question is more like a Kia - widely available and relatively cheap.
The only way not to be able to view is to be in one of two minorities.
The first are those too poor to afford a computer able to view the image. (Which by your own admission you are not - because if you bought a copy of Windows you admit to being able to set it up.) I'll give and grant this minority, unlikely to be present on Slashdot, has no choice in the matter.
The second minority (and the one prevalent on Slashdot) is those who choose to run an operating system other than Windows. They made their choice (for whatever reason) and now must live with the consequences.
It makes me sad that you had to explain that here.
You must be new around these parts. Despite Slashdot's self image as a haven of the extremely smart and well educated... it's really not much better than any other random collection of people. A few at one end of the bell curve, a few at the other, and the bulk huddled comfortably under the hump in the middle. Only nowadays, with education (both formal and self) being rare - what's under the hump isn't all that remarkable.
Somehow there has arisen here the belief that being a techie or a soi-disant geek/nerd means you're automagically above average intelligence and thus smarter than the general run of the populace. (Though how knowing all the characters and plotlines of all the 'right' and most popular anime make you 'smarter' than the guy who knows all the stats for all the major Red Sox players for the last fifty years escapes me - but that's what is commonly believed here.) They don't recognize the existence of a difference between being smart and being educated - and being wise enough to know what you don't know.
Be thankful it was posed in the form of a question though. Because the corollary to that self image is the steadfast belief that any random Slashdotter knows more about the topic than experts on the topic - no matter what the topic. All manner of arrant nonsense, urban legends, and utter bilge gets moderated up because the moderators (drawn from the same pool as the posters) hold the same self image and thus hold the corollary as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine for those who are willing to accept a 50/50 chance of having their payload not reach orbit, but that's going to be a very small niche market. (Assuming it even exists in the real world.) Those who spend millions of dollars on payloads generally aren't Wal-Mart shoppers who don't give a crap about quality so long as it's cheap. (Or at least they don't stay that way for long if they hope to continue getting funding and/or insurance.)
IOW, yes, a 50% failure rate is beyond abysmal. Of course, by the normal standards of engineering, the 98-99% failure rate considered 'acceptable' by the launch industry is also abysmal.
That marketese has put more rockets into the drink than it has into orbit. With his current (abysmal) success rate, it's more than a wee bit premature to be talking about retiring to Mars.
I don't think they're even as high as the tenth... There's been a pretty steady stream of attempts since the 1960's.
Of course, the lack of airships tooling about the skies should tell you much.
No, I'm saying it's essentially impossible to make it self sufficient for a year. How can you possibly get that I said it was impossible for them to fix anything from what I wrote?
Oh, never mind, I fully understand how you can do that now. You've abundantly and repeatedly displayed your ignorance. And now it appears that such ignorance is not willful, but that you revel in it.
Because most of your 'above' is either irrelevant or very selective comparing of features to existing systems.
Other than being slow as hell, clunky as hell, counterintuitive as hell, having a crap UI, and not behaving in any way resembling the systems it was meant to replace - no, it didn't have any disadvantages.
Well, the cool thing is is exactly the attitude Slashdot took - and when they got a chance to test it, they found that not only did it not live up to it's hype, it wasn't any good (at least not in the "dessert wax and a floor topping" sense Google kept insisting on). It simply didn't work beyond being a cool collaborative editing tool - and wiki's do that far better.
No, it's a statement of fact on par with "the sun will rise in the East tomorrow". You mistake it for a "can't do attitude" because either you lack the intelligence or the education to understand this or because you're deliberately being obtuse.
Again with the empty attitude and sloganeering - as this has precisely nothing to do with anything under discussion other than your (groundless) definition of it being 'real'. (BTW, I've been studying the Russian space program for nearly twenty years.)
Or, in other words, once again you have nothing but empty attitude.
That's a damm good question, and one I don't know the answer to.
That depends on the relative difference between the ranks. A narrow difference implies you might win, a wider difference implies you will win - and between the two lies a spectrum of gradual shifts from may to will. It's not an absolute quantitative measurement.
Had I said anything about "can't do", you'd have a point. And I notice you can't be bothered to either answer my questions or address my points.
And that's because you can't do either - because all you bring to the table is attitude and slogans.
Learn the difference between your fantasy world and the real one, or shut up.
I've lived in an environment much like ISS, I know how it feels when one of two systems your life depends on goes down - and what can and can't be done about it. I've lived through situations where a critical system went down and you don't have any more spares and have to bang the system back together with duct tape and baling wire. I know how hard logistical planning, and designing for maintenance is. Ive had the effin' t-shirt so long it's been worn to rags.
You have nothing.
Since the Elo system is not designed to predict future performance (it's designed to capture current relative rankings), then is it really surprising that programs designed to predict future performance are better at it?
That assumes the technology existed in the first place - which it really doesn't.
Print on demand, until recently, has produced only low (reproduction) quality books. That is, you'd have been disappointed by the reproduction of the pictures in the book you sought - those wonderful color pictures (assuming you mean the Peter Follet book by that title) would have been blobby B&W blurs. Resolution is a bit better nowadays - but still B&W. (Print-on-demand machines are optimized for the high speed production of the typical book - which means black text on white pages.)
Even to the extent the technology does exist, it's out of the reach of non-chain store due to the high capital cost. You're average mom & pop simply can't afford a machine costing up to tens of thousands of dollars.
That's roughly as likely as a supermodel wandering into your basement and offering to have carnal relations with you.
I don't know where you've been for the last fifteen years but Amazon has already destroyed the mom and pop new bookseller. Amazon and various used book networks online have encouraged the growth of garage and warehouse operators selling used books, all but destroying the mom and pop in that market as well. And the Wal-Mart mentality has sent people flocking to the online sellers in droves.
I just love the mentality of the Wal-Mart shopper. "If it ain't cheap, they iz a' rippin' me off". No knowledge required, no hard thinking required, just blind dogma.
Seriously, scroll up a bit and you'll find the reasons for the price difference. (tl;dr version: Amazon == Microsoft.)
OK, and? There's no particular need to rush, that's why they have redundant loops.
Yep - because that's pretty much all they can do. What else do you expect them to do?
Making the ISS self sufficient for that long is essentially impossible on two grounds: First, it wasn't designed to be so. Second, we lack the experience to know what level of spares and maintenance are required.
Bad.
Without knowing what went wrong, I'd wager the scenario could run like my what happened here a few years back...
A guy decided to put in a new driveway, and to keep it level carved away part of the foot of a hill. The hill started to slide a little bit, so he built his own six foot tall, thirty foot long retaining wall out of concrete blocks and without benefit of a permit or inspection. Problem was, not only did he not tie the courses together, he also didn't anchor the wall back into the hill, and he didn't provide drains behind the wall. All of which are required by code, should have been specified on the plans submitted for the permit he didn't have, approved by the county engineer as part of the approval process he didn't go through, certified as performed by the licensed contractor he didn't hire, and inspected by the county after completion...
Within a few weeks the county found out about this (I don't recall how) and yellow tagged the house. (Which means the house could not be occupied until the work noted on the tag, in this case replacing the wall, had been properly completed.) A few weeks later, in defiance of the yellow tag, the man moved back into the house because he "didn't want his family to spend Christmas in a hotel". Four days later, during a normal (for these parts) winter rainstorm, the weight of the hill and accumulated water collapsed the wall - and the ensuing mudslide wiped out the house and killed the man, his wife, and three of their children. The only survivor was a teen aged daughter who was at a friends Christmas party.
So the issue isn't that the water wouldn't have done as much damage when it collapsed, but that the odds are if the pool had been properly built it would have been less likely (much less likely) to collapse in the first place.
Not to mention, that most home insurance policies won't cover damages caused by un permitted construction. Nor are you left with any recourse - you'll be liable if you're party to a suit that arises subsequent to any damages caused by failures in such construction.
These kinds of (defense) motions are pretty much rote - and for that reason rarely granted. Don't make too much of the fact that they weren't granted.
It's such a strain to wear an extra set of glasses for a couple of hours a few times a week (at most)? I think not. (Yes, I know what I'm talking about - I wear glasses every waking hour too.)
Take your karma whore drama queen act elsewhere.
Plug-in electrics and hybrids will eventually replace straight hybrids - so a comparison with oil is not entirely unfounded. Premature maybe, but not far fetched.
The ISS uses a cooling system - not a refrigeration system. The ammonia is used merely as a working fluid to convey heat from the station's interior to radiators, were it is rejected.
The problem is that the ISS ultimately rejects heat by radiating it away through radiators mounted on the solar array wings - and water would freeze and plug up the radiators.
So instead, they use a water loop to cool the atmosphere and equipment, and then transfer that heat to the ammonia system which then circulates through the radiators. (It's pretty easy to design the system such that there is minimal ammonia piping (and thus a minimal chance of an accident) inside the manned spaces.) Since ammonia freezes at a much colder temperature than water, this means it's much easier to keep the coolant moving at a rate where it radiates enough heat to be useful but still stays warm enough to not freeze.
It's going to be a complex trade off to choose a coolant, and few people seem to realize that NASA does take into consideration cost and availability when making their choices. They aren't so good at controlling costs as they might be, which is understandable since overall they're working at the bleeding edge of engineering, but that doesn't mean they don't try.
And really, there's isn't much of a difference between ammonia or anything more exotic because even something 'safe' (like nitrogen for example) is still going to rapidly displace the oxygen from the air (that is, reduce the effective partial pressure) if there's a leak because of the small volume of the breathable atmosphere.
I might as well selectively quote since you're selectively reading.
If there was an artificial barrier - you'd have a point. But there isn't, you've created the whole thing out of thin are. So all you have is confused flailing and ever more strained and bizarre analogies in order to create the impression that there is one.
There's no logical place for a smiley in your post, nor humorous tone.
Except you aren't making a mutual decision with your children - you've already made the decision. You've already decided they're living by your values - regardless of what their turn out to be.
Except, again, you aren't allowing them to make the decision - you've already made it for them.
If the technology in question was like a Ferrari - rare, expensive, and available only to a few... you'd have a point. But the technology in question is more like a Kia - widely available and relatively cheap.
The only way not to be able to view is to be in one of two minorities.
The first are those too poor to afford a computer able to view the image. (Which by your own admission you are not - because if you bought a copy of Windows you admit to being able to set it up.) I'll give and grant this minority, unlikely to be present on Slashdot, has no choice in the matter.
The second minority (and the one prevalent on Slashdot) is those who choose to run an operating system other than Windows. They made their choice (for whatever reason) and now must live with the consequences.
Which minority are you in?
You must be new around these parts. Despite Slashdot's self image as a haven of the extremely smart and well educated... it's really not much better than any other random collection of people. A few at one end of the bell curve, a few at the other, and the bulk huddled comfortably under the hump in the middle. Only nowadays, with education (both formal and self) being rare - what's under the hump isn't all that remarkable.
Somehow there has arisen here the belief that being a techie or a soi-disant geek/nerd means you're automagically above average intelligence and thus smarter than the general run of the populace. (Though how knowing all the characters and plotlines of all the 'right' and most popular anime make you 'smarter' than the guy who knows all the stats for all the major Red Sox players for the last fifty years escapes me - but that's what is commonly believed here.) They don't recognize the existence of a difference between being smart and being educated - and being wise enough to know what you don't know.
Be thankful it was posed in the form of a question though. Because the corollary to that self image is the steadfast belief that any random Slashdotter knows more about the topic than experts on the topic - no matter what the topic. All manner of arrant nonsense, urban legends, and utter bilge gets moderated up because the moderators (drawn from the same pool as the posters) hold the same self image and thus hold the corollary as well.