The tone and substance of your reply tacitly admits that you deserved to be there (even if not 'fully').
So yeah, the GP is right - if you didn't want to go to prison, you shouldn't have done whatever it was that put you there. And when you did go there, you should have expected to be treated as a prisoner not as something 'special' because you have a dime-a-dozen MCSE.
Now, if we had ever gone ahead and build the interorbit taxi/transport as an adjunct to the space station (either robotic or manned), we would have a solution to the problem.
No we wouldn't have a solution - as the inter orbit taxi/transports proposed weren't GEO capable.
Even if the US would have such a capability they would not tip their hand to show it off. Why show your enemies what you can really do?
On the contrary, the US routinely tips their hand about (most of) the capabilities of its military equipment. If the other guys don't know what you can do, then they aren't deterred.
many little bits have much more surface area which increases friction to cause it to fall to Earth much quicker and have a much much higher chance of burning up completely on the way down.
The problem is, this bird and any resulting bits are way above the altitude where atmospheric friction has any significant effects. Orbital lifetime up in the geosynch belt is measured in (IIRC) hundreds of thousands of years whether you have One Big Bit or Many Little Bits.
Also, One Big Bit is generally easier to keep track of than Many Little Bits. One Big Bit can only be in one place, while Many Little Bits can threaten satellites across a vast swath of space at the same time.
it makes you wonder about nasa prices for each missions...
Why would it? The comparison isn't even apples and oranges. These companies are kids on bicycles riding up and down the driveway, while NASA is driving a semi across the country.
and also wonder why this has not happened before
Because there hasn't been sufficient people with sufficient disposable income until recently.
Except it's blatantly obvious you *don't* realize all those things when repeat the mistaken assumption that they are more physical capital heavy than human capital heavy.
The fact that the necessary resources in the case of printing involve a mix that is heavier on physical capital than human capital, while the resources in the case of software development is a mix that is heavier on human capital than physical capital is a difference, but its not a difference that is particularly relevant to the point of the analogy.
Except neither you, nor the author of the TFA, seems to realize that Government Printing Office isn't a printer (in the normal sense of the word, though it does print some things) - it' a publisher and book warehouse and a book distributor and a book seller. But that's not all - it's also sets standards, certifies vendors, and acts as an office supply closet (for government forms and such).
Even so, that doesn't mean something from the government with a GPO number on it was printed on a government owned press by federal workers as it has outsourced printing for years and years.
There are rock carvings being discovered in the Southern part of Africa that show very advanced understanding of astronomy, geography and time measurement that appear to be over twenty thousand years old which is much, much earlier than previously thought.
[[citation needed]] An academic one showing how they determined without question that they had 'advanced' knowledge and discussing how the carving were dated. Anything less gets you filed with von Däniken and Art Bell.
If we can ever get scientists to be able to really research the pyramids and nearby structures without the dictatorial control of the Egyptian government, there is reason to believe that there are references to sophisticated understanding of astronomy going back over fifty thousand years.
[[citation needed]] See the restriction above as to proving that there are actually reasons to believe such thing.
Finding those people is the hard part. Friends have to be cultivated. Your parent post was cultivating the wrong kind of friends, the superficial, but the same care needs to be applied to the good ones. But it shouldn't feel like a chore. Friendship is about reciprocity and you should be getting as much out of it as you're putting into it, otherwise it's called codependency. But it sounds like you've got some great friends. Whatever you're doing, you're doing it right.
Oh, no doubt it takes time. Though in my case, living in the same town for over twenty years no doubt helps greatly. I think people move around way too much nowadays to have real friends and deep attachments. (And I suspect that may play into our high divorce rates. When you live in four different states between kindergarten and high school graduation, that may (IMO) lead you to believe in people being 'disposable'.)
But there are two key things in my book. First, getting out and having a life and interaction with people (other than drinking oneself into a stupor with them). Second, if you want a friend - be a friend.
Livejournal? Does it still exist and is it still relevant?
Yeah, it still exists. Relevance is a matter of one's own point of view.
To repeat something I've said before about LJ/Facebook/Twitter:
LJ is like a weekend at a mountain cabin with friends - plenty of time to talk, work on things, and hang out, but it takes some effort to get there and plumbing is a bit dodgy. But it's worth it if you wish to spend some quality time with friends and other like minded people.
Facebook is like an evening at a VERY LOUD COLLEGE PUB. Lots of bright flashing disco lights, everybody is buying everybody else shots, AND LOTS OF LOUD MUSIC. But it's a popular spot and easy to get to. Nevermind you can't actually have a conversation among the noise and distractions... After all, isn't the club scene about seen in cool places with cool people?
Twitter is like Facebook, but the party is being held in an church basement. There's no booze, no music, no disco lights... All the ambiance of cold pancakes with no syrup. But the party is being hosted by the kewlest kid in town so everyone wants to be there - but the main activity at the 'party' is calling everyone else on your cell phones speed dial and holding 20 second conversations about what a wonderful time they are having. In between your own conversations, you endlessly overhear one end of the conversation of everyone standing close to you. When you get to the end of your speed dial, you start again from the top.
So yeah, among me and my friends who care more about community and communication than cool, LJ is still relevant.
Sounds like you need a better grade of friend more than you need a social network.
Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!
Seriously, if you're working so hard to appear 'cool' so you can be invited to parties so you have a higher chance of 'hooking up [for sex]', just hire a prostitute already. Spend the time saved getting out and having a life and finding friends who'll actually be there when it really matters.
Well, the problem with cheap probes is that NASA doesn't want cheap. NASA wants a mission to be expensive, as high as they can get "without going over" to the point where Congress will cancel it.
Well, no. NASA (at least the guys in charge of planetary science, to which the rest of this reply largely refers to) wants cheap because cheap increases the chances of Congress approving it in the first place and increases the number of probes they can fly.
The real problem is that probes with a high chance of surviving and returning useful science don't come cheap. NASA could build cheap probes, and has toyed with it in the past, but Congress, the media, and the ignorant man in the street/taxpayers (which includes virtually all American Slashdotters) are viciously intolerant of mistakes and failure. The loss of a cheap probe isn't treated any differently from the loss of an expensive probe. NASA is simply (in the public mind) not allowed to fail.
So NASA has been repeatedly conditioned to set their bar low and spare no expense to ensure that the mission will not only be spectacular but it will be almost certain to be a success.
Somebody besides NASA could certainly do cheap space probes, but it won't be American.
There's several countries quite capable of doing so. That there have been few attempts should tell you something if you lay off the kneejerk bias and actually think about it for a few minutes.
That takes memory and processor cycles - which they had not nearly enough of to do the job, let alone enough to guard against a small class of failures which may or may not happen.
Wrong again. Polygraphs can only tell when the subject is showing physical signs of stress through pulse, blood ox, temperature readings, and galvanic skin response.
Maybe I am stressed, I had a bad burrito and I'm terrified that the next fart won't be silent or dry.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this has been known to polygraph operators for roughly forever. That's why they ask seemingly innocuous questions, questions to which they know the answer, and questions with obvious answers - to calibrate the readings against the background. If you're already stressed, and they can determine the background level, then they can interpret the readings that occur during the questions they're actually interested in the answers to.
An FMRI "lie detector" only shows you what parts of the brain are active on the assumption that certain parts lighting up mean someone is thinking too much and thus making it up.
No, they use the same procedures as a traditional polygraph - calibration questions to start the procedure and interspersed with the questions they're actually interested in knowing the answers to.
IANARS, but "extract water in an environment lacking gravity" doesn't seem like that hard of a problem.
[snippage 'its so easy to do'.]
What am I missing?
Among other things? Dealing with the waste once you've extracted the water. What if it's abrasive? Or chemically reactive? Or what if there is outgassing that dissolves in the water? Heck, what if there are solids that dissolve in the water? Etc.. Etc..
That's just some of the potential problems in the centrifuging step alone. No obvious showstoppers, just a lot of known unknowns with no way of evaluating for the presence of unknown unknowns. And no, 'just distill the water' isn't much of an answer - you still have to deal with the waste from that process. Producing pure water is a bit of a black art and depends heavily on the composition of the input.
And I haven't addressed the issue of maintenance yet...
At least to my ignorance, this seems at least an order of magnitude LESS difficult/dangerous than electrolysis in zero-g, something we've (AFAIK) got a pretty solid grasp of.
For limited values of 'solid grasp'. Elektron (the Russian electrolysis unit used on MIR and ISS to generate O2 from water) has been problematic. It has also regularly required extensive maintenance, on top of which it's essentially a rowboat compared the supertanker an industrial scale extraction process will require. (I tried to come up with a car analogy and failed.) It's unknown what issues will be encountered in scaling it up, the only certainty is that there will be issues.
My big problem was the military requirement for a 1000nm cross range capability which drove up the cost and was never used.
Cross range makes life so much simpler as it increases both the availability of abort landing fields and landing opportunities. Hence, the cross range capability of the Shuttle was steadily increasing over time even before the DoD came on board.
Nor is true it's never been used according to NASA references [PDF link]. That listing is not up to date, I believe the record cross range is 812NM on STS-117.
Slashdot Mirror
The tone and substance of your reply tacitly admits that you deserved to be there (even if not 'fully').
So yeah, the GP is right - if you didn't want to go to prison, you shouldn't have done whatever it was that put you there. And when you did go there, you should have expected to be treated as a prisoner not as something 'special' because you have a dime-a-dozen MCSE.
No we wouldn't have a solution - as the inter orbit taxi/transports proposed weren't GEO capable.
On the contrary, the US routinely tips their hand about (most of) the capabilities of its military equipment. If the other guys don't know what you can do, then they aren't deterred.
The problem is, this bird and any resulting bits are way above the altitude where atmospheric friction has any significant effects. Orbital lifetime up in the geosynch belt is measured in (IIRC) hundreds of thousands of years whether you have One Big Bit or Many Little Bits.
Also, One Big Bit is generally easier to keep track of than Many Little Bits. One Big Bit can only be in one place, while Many Little Bits can threaten satellites across a vast swath of space at the same time.
Why would it? The comparison isn't even apples and oranges. These companies are kids on bicycles riding up and down the driveway, while NASA is driving a semi across the country.
Because there hasn't been sufficient people with sufficient disposable income until recently.
Except it's blatantly obvious you *don't* realize all those things when repeat the mistaken assumption that they are more physical capital heavy than human capital heavy.
Except neither you, nor the author of the TFA, seems to realize that Government Printing Office isn't a printer (in the normal sense of the word, though it does print some things) - it' a publisher and book warehouse and a book distributor and a book seller. But that's not all - it's also sets standards, certifies vendors, and acts as an office supply closet (for government forms and such).
Even so, that doesn't mean something from the government with a GPO number on it was printed on a government owned press by federal workers as it has outsourced printing for years and years.
Nudist?
Some bombs were in the 25 megaton range, but they were way the heck out on one side of the bell curve.
[[citation needed]] An academic one showing how they determined without question that they had 'advanced' knowledge and discussing how the carving were dated. Anything less gets you filed with von Däniken and Art Bell.
[[citation needed]] See the restriction above as to proving that there are actually reasons to believe such thing.
Oh, no doubt it takes time. Though in my case, living in the same town for over twenty years no doubt helps greatly. I think people move around way too much nowadays to have real friends and deep attachments. (And I suspect that may play into our high divorce rates. When you live in four different states between kindergarten and high school graduation, that may (IMO) lead you to believe in people being 'disposable'.)
But there are two key things in my book. First, getting out and having a life and interaction with people (other than drinking oneself into a stupor with them). Second, if you want a friend - be a friend.
Grandstands and performs comic routines that add essentially nothing to advance the inquiry or public understanding of the issues?
If you think the two aren't interchangeable, you're out of touch with the human race. (Hint: Blogging and commenting on blogs is social interaction.)
I think you'd find you and I agree on that. It's not just Facebook, it's LiveJournal too..., and half a zillion other places on the 'net.
But even so, the OP's problem isn't Facebook's dilution of the term 'Friend' it's the shallowness of his acquaintances.
Yeah, it still exists. Relevance is a matter of one's own point of view.
To repeat something I've said before about LJ/Facebook/Twitter:
So yeah, among me and my friends who care more about community and communication than cool, LJ is still relevant.
Sounds like you need a better grade of friend more than you need a social network.
Friends aren't about sex, or cool parties. Friends are those people who, when your father-in-law dies unexpectedly, walk out on the preps for their own Christmas party to come help you. Friends are those who read the note on the door the first couple left and call you to see if you need help. Friends are those who'll drive and hour and a half to the airport at three o'clock in the morning to pick up your wife (who was out of town on business when her father died). I'd have needed a bus just to haul those who volunteered to go pick her up!
Seriously, if you're working so hard to appear 'cool' so you can be invited to parties so you have a higher chance of 'hooking up [for sex]', just hire a prostitute already. Spend the time saved getting out and having a life and finding friends who'll actually be there when it really matters.
Folks seem to be forgetting that a (mostly) open source alternative already exists - Live Journal.
Except - doing nothing is doing nothing, not defending.
Probably not. The folks who want a wall of 'impressive' books want hardbacks, leathers, fashionable/notable authors &/or titles, etc..., etc...
Not cheap paperbacks.
Well, no. NASA (at least the guys in charge of planetary science, to which the rest of this reply largely refers to) wants cheap because cheap increases the chances of Congress approving it in the first place and increases the number of probes they can fly.
The real problem is that probes with a high chance of surviving and returning useful science don't come cheap. NASA could build cheap probes, and has toyed with it in the past, but Congress, the media, and the ignorant man in the street/taxpayers (which includes virtually all American Slashdotters) are viciously intolerant of mistakes and failure. The loss of a cheap probe isn't treated any differently from the loss of an expensive probe. NASA is simply (in the public mind) not allowed to fail.
So NASA has been repeatedly conditioned to set their bar low and spare no expense to ensure that the mission will not only be spectacular but it will be almost certain to be a success.
There's several countries quite capable of doing so. That there have been few attempts should tell you something if you lay off the kneejerk bias and actually think about it for a few minutes.
That takes memory and processor cycles - which they had not nearly enough of to do the job, let alone enough to guard against a small class of failures which may or may not happen.
Only eleven keys? Get a keyring and buy a better brand of clothes that use sterner stuff for the pockets. (Or learn to sew and patch.)
Seriously, eleven keys aren't all that much.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this has been known to polygraph operators for roughly forever. That's why they ask seemingly innocuous questions, questions to which they know the answer, and questions with obvious answers - to calibrate the readings against the background. If you're already stressed, and they can determine the background level, then they can interpret the readings that occur during the questions they're actually interested in the answers to.
No, they use the same procedures as a traditional polygraph - calibration questions to start the procedure and interspersed with the questions they're actually interested in knowing the answers to.
[snippage 'its so easy to do'.]
Among other things? Dealing with the waste once you've extracted the water. What if it's abrasive? Or chemically reactive? Or what if there is outgassing that dissolves in the water? Heck, what if there are solids that dissolve in the water? Etc.. Etc..
That's just some of the potential problems in the centrifuging step alone. No obvious showstoppers, just a lot of known unknowns with no way of evaluating for the presence of unknown unknowns. And no, 'just distill the water' isn't much of an answer - you still have to deal with the waste from that process. Producing pure water is a bit of a black art and depends heavily on the composition of the input.
And I haven't addressed the issue of maintenance yet...
For limited values of 'solid grasp'. Elektron (the Russian electrolysis unit used on MIR and ISS to generate O2 from water) has been problematic. It has also regularly required extensive maintenance, on top of which it's essentially a rowboat compared the supertanker an industrial scale extraction process will require. (I tried to come up with a car analogy and failed.) It's unknown what issues will be encountered in scaling it up, the only certainty is that there will be issues.
Cross range makes life so much simpler as it increases both the availability of abort landing fields and landing opportunities. Hence, the cross range capability of the Shuttle was steadily increasing over time even before the DoD came on board.
Nor is true it's never been used according to NASA references [PDF link]. That listing is not up to date, I believe the record cross range is 812NM on STS-117.