I think the bigger factor is competition. Amazon and Hulu are competing for shows
This - in the world of streaming anime, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have gone from not even being on the radar to serious players in less that a year. There's a huge shakeup coming as a tipping point is reached with cord cutters, and of the Big Three are busy jockeying for market share.
Let's say he brought the rifle and maybe even shot the actual shuttle. The news report would be "shuttle engineer goes crazy, shoots at shuttle, launch delayed" And, for the sake of this story let's say that NASA never attempts a launch in kind of cold again.
All that would do is delay the inevitable. The cold did not cause the o-rings to fail entirely, it increased the chance that it would do so. In fact, the primary o-ring was regularly failing even at much more reasonable temperature conditions. (Even though it was not supposed to fail at all.) The problem wasn't the cold, the problem was a flawed SRB field joint design.
Either way, he seems like a great guy who tried to do the right thing.
Actually, he wasn't any such thing. When the field joint failed during ground testing, he didn't say anything. When the field joint routinely failed in flight, he didn't say anything.
He only "tried to do the right thing" when it became clear that the chickens were coming home to roost - much to late to believed.
The tires on your car are known to fail sometimes. The cases are well documented, we've known about tire blowouts for decades, and yet we continue to put cars on the road with tires that could fail on any given drive.
Tire blowouts (in terms of individual tires) are rare - the Shuttle primary o-rings suffered damage caused by leakage on nearly every flight. They suffered significant damage on (IIRC) twelve flights prior to Challenger. They suffered damage nearly to Challenger levels on two of those - with launch temperatures in the eighties. Let's break that down - on nearly 50% of the launches pre Challenger, the primary o-rings experienced some significant degree of failure. On 8% of the launches pre Challenger the primary o-ring suffered severe failure that resulted in severe damage. And Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
The odds that both the primary and backup could fail on a particular launch were estimated to be infinitesimally small
The primary o-ring wasn't supposed to fail at all (the specification was no leakage) - but it leaked significantly on almost half the launches prior to Challenger. Any responsible engineer would raise the roof when a component that wasn't supposed to fail did so routinely. (Fifty percent of all launches prior to Challenger!) Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
In fact, that the primary o-ring failed routinely was known during ground development and qualification tests of the SRB's. Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
In essence, there was no backup - one o-ring, which was supposedly the second line of defense, routinely served as the only line of defense because of a design flaw in the joint. This is completely and utterly inexcusable.
The SRB field joints were a deeply flawed design and a ticking time bomb in the Shuttle that could have gone off on STS-1 as easily as they did on STS-51L. Ebeling and Boisjoly had to have known that - but they said nothing or went with the party line that since the joints hadn't actually failed there wasn't a problem. Managers can't make proper decisions if their engineers fail to properly inform them or actively mislead them.
A few years back, I had the privilege of being seated next to Roger Boisjoly, another of the Morton Thiokol whistleblowers, who was to be a guest lecturer for 650 engineering ethics students at Texas A&M University the following day. It was fascinating to hear him describe his firsthand account of the conference calls and back-and-forth taking place the night before the disaster.
Did he tell you the part where the seal was unsafe at any temperature and he said nothing about it? About how the flaws were known almost a decade before Challenger and he said nothing about it?
Roger Boisjoly and the other Morton Thiokol engineers have no business lecturing anyone on ethics. They let a system with a known flaw enter service without comment, and when that flaw manifested itself in flight they continued to stand stood silent and let the flights continue. A last minute change of heart isn't ethical or whistleblowing, it's covering your ass.
You make it sound as if Facebook invented group communication.
Only if you're a clueless idiot with an axe to grind.
Judging by your/. ID, you've been around at least as long as I have -- or well before the internet, so you must be well aware that there are any number of other ways to accomplish exactly what you carried out on your busy Sunday afternoon equally well. Oh, I get it: it's just so much more convenient doing it all in Facebook. Fine, but don't try to pretend that there's nothing else and no other way.
Not being a clueless idiot, yes, I am quite aware that there any number of ways - almost none of them with the simple utility and clear UI that Facebook offers. And certainly none of them offering the diversity on a single site that Facebook offers. Nor did I ever pretend there weren't other ways - you asked what Facebook provided and I answered.
So the whole "quest to engineer meaningful solutions... is not just about math and science, it's about making amazing solutions for real people in the real world. It's about pushing mankind to its outer limits by inspiring the world to imagine bigger solutions than our hands can hold" is just so much meaningless nauseating babble.
I can easily see how a clueless idiot with an axe to grind could believe that.
How is mankind's lot significantly improved by the presence of Facebook?
Let's see what I've accomplished on Facebook today...
- Corresponded with my sister on a medieval recipe recreation we're both working on.
- Took part in a discussion in a group dedicated to Food and Society on the relationship between geography and food choices.
- Helped someone in the KSP group with the design of a new lifter.
- Voted on the anime we'll be watching at next month's meeting of our local anime club.
- Helped a fellow photographer troubleshoot a problem he had in processing an image.
- Commented on a restaurant review in a group about local restaurants. (The reviewer had gotten the hours wrong.)
- Commented on an analysis of SpaceX's landing attempts that was posted to a group dedicated to discussion of space related businesses.
- Helped someone new to our local SCA branch hook up with the local expert on a topic he's interested in.
All that - and it's only quarter to four in the afternoon on a slow Sunday.
You may not find communicating with your fellows useful, but I certainly do. Contrary to the ignorant and idiotic position often seen here on/. (and one continues to be held in defiance of repeated corrections on the matter), there's a lot more to Facebook than playing Farmville and posting inane photographs.
a heat seeking anti air missile locks on to the hot exhaust of a jet engine. It needs to fly faster than the target since its coming from behind.
Back in the 1950's, sure. But it's not the 1950's anymore, and IR sensors have evolved a long way... Modern IR AAM's are 'all aspect' - they can lock onto the aircraft's skin (which is heated by friction).
I only hoped to put this in the perspective of someone that did sign on that line.
The problem is, your perspective is irrelevant because you have no experience and less knowledge of the issue - and your attitude toward your brothers ("eff 'em they signed up for this") repugnant.
These sailors served on a nuclear powered ship, it would not be inconceivable that they'd be exposed to radiation while on that vessel. Granted, and fortunately, the radiation did not come from the ship's power plant.
Well, since you served in the Army (and I served in the Navy on a nuclear powered vessel, but not in the engineering department) - let me clear up a few things you are completely wrong about. If you aren't in the engineering divisions that work in and around the reactor, it's nearly completely inconceivable that they'd be exposed to significant radiation from the power plant. (And even the tiny amount I got was orders of magnitude more than a carrier sailor gets - because non engineering people on a submarine are allowed in the reactor tunnel and engineering spaces. This is not true on a carrier.) The Navy goes to great lengths to essentially eliminate exposure to non reactor crew members and to sharply reduce and control the exposure of reactor crew members. The problem with the contamination is that it's outside of the reactor shielding and people who wouldn't normally be exposed are being exposed. (And there are limits on annual and total lifetime exposure, these cannot be exceeded or waived.)
These sailors were undoubtedly trained in the handling of radioactive material and in the methods to protect themselves from it.
There's almost no radioactive material handled aboard ship, and what handling is done is limited to a very small number of specially trained and qualified people. The area they're handled in is equally limited. The problem with the contamination is that it's outside these boundaries.
It used to be that if you served in the US Navy you were almost certain to have damaged hearing. I know a few old sailors that can't hear so well. It was common for such people to get disability pay for this but no more. Why is that? Because the US DOD figured out that they could give their sailors, and all that serve, training in how to protect their ears and the gear to save their hearing. If they end up deaf then it's on them now.
Um, no. If your hearing loss can be shown to be service related, you can get disability, even today.
A common claim is, "I didn't sign up for this." Well, I believe you did.
None of us walked around feeling insecure because 911 wasn't a keypress away.
That's because you didn't know any better, like the folks pre-vaccines that simply accepted that a lot of kids would die from childhood illnesses. Today, we do know better.
If samples stored in nitrogen may be compromised the what samples are definitely not compromised?
The operative words here are MAY BE, where you pronounced the definitely are.
From the second reference:
Although this material has been isolated in vacuum-packed bottles, it is now unusable for detailed chemical or mechanical analysis â" the gritty particles deteriorated the knife-edge indium seals of the vacuum bottles; air has slowly leaked in.
It does not matter what gas the samples were stored in if air leaks in. The air will mil with the gas and contaminate the sample.
Yes, it does matter - because nitrogen isn't air, it's inert. It can't contaminate the sample.
Notice this NASA paper also makes no mention of nitrogen.
Because NASA presumes that you've read the rest of the document and know relevant the storage and handling environment.
How about this one;
Another indicator is that all of the environmental sample and gas sample seals failed because of dust. By the time they reached earth the samples were so contaminated as to be worthless.
A single unsupported statement at odds with other statements - something to be viewed with suspicion.
Maybe you should learn to use Google before attacking someone.
Understanding a subject takes far more effort than a simple web search. And pronouncing the truth (that you're a clueless moron whose made no effort to research the situation or grasp the relevance and reliability of your quotes) is not an attack.
Did you actually read your references? Do you know how to evaluate claims against other evidence?
The first reference completely fails to support your claim. The second (when you follow the footnote) fails to mention that the samples are stored in nitrogen and thus it's claims are highly suspect.
Try again when you have an actual reference that supports your claim, and in the meantime learn basic reading comprehension and analysis skills.
Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.
Since the Lunar samples are stored under nitrogen to prevent exactly this occurrence, not buying it. Got a reference?
It's not just about the even being unlikely - it's also about the consequences when it does happen. A one in a million event that dents someone's pride? No biggie. A one in million event that can result in multiple deaths or a mass casualty event? That's something to be concerned about.
So I wonder if that Gateway Liberty 2000 is actually still sitting on someone's desk where the toil away with WordPerfect and Windows 3.1 every day, or if it got tossed/walked out of the building in the late 90s and no one bothered to update the records.
Or somebody set it on a shelf in case his 'new fangled' machine died and a backup was needed - and it's simply been handed down from one custodian to the next even since. Nobody cares that it's not needed and probably doesn't work anymore, the paperwork says we have it, and there it is on that self over there... and that's good enough.
When I took over the department test equipment locker at TTF in the late 80's, I had a ton of stuff like that - old and obsolescent equipment squirreled away by previous custodians because "we might need it again some day". The bosses were OK with that because there was no penalty for having excess gear, and it was a massive pain in the ass to get rid of gear. (There's a lot of hoops to jump through to make sure that was in fact excess to requirements and that the person getting rid of it and his chain of command weren't simply trying to take it home themselves or sell it for their own profit or whatever.)
Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it only had a few routes it could service due to the sonic boom restrictions.
Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it was a fuel hog - it used a turbojet which is much less efficient than a turbofan, and it required afterburners (which are hideously inefficient) to take off and to accelerate through the transonic regime. If it couldn't make money on the heavily traveled transatlantic route, it pretty much couldn't make money anywhere,
Surprised they haven't just gone with 2X or 4X height 2.5" drives. Same connectors, same platters, easy retrofit. You just need a different bracket.
I'm not (surprised). The case size of a PC tower has been trending steadily downwards for the better part of a decade. There's not room for an additional drive of that size in the common consumer tower anymore.
China, Europe or India have to put people on the moon to relight US population's push to get back to the head of the race.
No, it won't. Not only is the Space Race long over, the political conditions that lead to it no longer exist, and the general public of the US never supported the race that much in the first place.
Until then, it seems simply too hard to get enough political support.
Apollo only had political support because JFK took a bullet to the head in Dallas. And even then that support barely lasted two years before the budgets started getting slashed - by the time we actually landed, the program was already running on vapors.
There was simply never going to be a scenario in which governments went "well, dammit, it's digital and they say it's exempt from us, guess there's nothing we can do".
Anybody who believed that was delusional.
Delusion is practically part of the Bitcoin spec it's so deeply embedded in the True Believer.
And it's really amusing to see someone (the grandparent) who thinks the idea was to be free of governments, when we have been subjected to so many articles where the True Believers were trying to convince us that governments regarded Bitcoin as Really Truly Money.
It seems clear that the whole need for a set top box is artificial, and that it s actually just another mechanism to justify the cable company adding another fee to your cable bill.
All TVs already come with digital tuners, so serious question: Why can't they just legislate that cable companies have to supply standard QAM to the consumer, then we can do away with the whole stupid intermediate box thing entirely, and all the extra power/heat/cables/remotes that it requires and consumes too.
This is 2016 - and cable company set top boxes are much more than just tuners. They're DVR's, pay-per-view access devices, portals to streaming media, etc... etc... Not all TV's provide these services, so until they do (unlikely) you'll still need a box to act as an intermediary.
Slashdot Mirror
This - in the world of streaming anime, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have gone from not even being on the radar to serious players in less that a year. There's a huge shakeup coming as a tipping point is reached with cord cutters, and of the Big Three are busy jockeying for market share.
I was about to say the same thing, words mean things - and a fad isn't a bubble. Even a small one.
That's one reason I hate the culture of hype/clickbait journalism, it's dumbing us down and reducing our vocabulary. That's doubleplusungood.
You do realize the two statements are mutually exclusive?
NASA didn't dump Transhab - Congress passed a law zeroing it's budget specifically forbidding NASA from continuing work on it.
All that would do is delay the inevitable. The cold did not cause the o-rings to fail entirely, it increased the chance that it would do so. In fact, the primary o-ring was regularly failing even at much more reasonable temperature conditions. (Even though it was not supposed to fail at all.) The problem wasn't the cold, the problem was a flawed SRB field joint design.
Actually, he wasn't any such thing. When the field joint failed during ground testing, he didn't say anything. When the field joint routinely failed in flight, he didn't say anything.
He only "tried to do the right thing" when it became clear that the chickens were coming home to roost - much to late to believed.
Tire blowouts (in terms of individual tires) are rare - the Shuttle primary o-rings suffered damage caused by leakage on nearly every flight. They suffered significant damage on (IIRC) twelve flights prior to Challenger. They suffered damage nearly to Challenger levels on two of those - with launch temperatures in the eighties. Let's break that down - on nearly 50% of the launches pre Challenger, the primary o-rings experienced some significant degree of failure. On 8% of the launches pre Challenger the primary o-ring suffered severe failure that resulted in severe damage. And Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
The primary o-ring wasn't supposed to fail at all (the specification was no leakage) - but it leaked significantly on almost half the launches prior to Challenger. Any responsible engineer would raise the roof when a component that wasn't supposed to fail did so routinely. (Fifty percent of all launches prior to Challenger!) Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
In fact, that the primary o-ring failed routinely was known during ground development and qualification tests of the SRB's. Ebeling and Boisjoly stood silent.
In essence, there was no backup - one o-ring, which was supposedly the second line of defense, routinely served as the only line of defense because of a design flaw in the joint. This is completely and utterly inexcusable.
The SRB field joints were a deeply flawed design and a ticking time bomb in the Shuttle that could have gone off on STS-1 as easily as they did on STS-51L. Ebeling and Boisjoly had to have known that - but they said nothing or went with the party line that since the joints hadn't actually failed there wasn't a problem. Managers can't make proper decisions if their engineers fail to properly inform them or actively mislead them.
Did he tell you the part where the seal was unsafe at any temperature and he said nothing about it? About how the flaws were known almost a decade before Challenger and he said nothing about it?
Roger Boisjoly and the other Morton Thiokol engineers have no business lecturing anyone on ethics. They let a system with a known flaw enter service without comment, and when that flaw manifested itself in flight they continued to stand stood silent and let the flights continue. A last minute change of heart isn't ethical or whistleblowing, it's covering your ass.
Only if you're a clueless idiot with an axe to grind.
Not being a clueless idiot, yes, I am quite aware that there any number of ways - almost none of them with the simple utility and clear UI that Facebook offers. And certainly none of them offering the diversity on a single site that Facebook offers. Nor did I ever pretend there weren't other ways - you asked what Facebook provided and I answered.
I can easily see how a clueless idiot with an axe to grind could believe that.
Let's see what I've accomplished on Facebook today...
All that - and it's only quarter to four in the afternoon on a slow Sunday.
You may not find communicating with your fellows useful, but I certainly do. Contrary to the ignorant and idiotic position often seen here on /. (and one continues to be held in defiance of repeated corrections on the matter), there's a lot more to Facebook than playing Farmville and posting inane photographs.
Back in the 1950's, sure. But it's not the 1950's anymore, and IR sensors have evolved a long way... Modern IR AAM's are 'all aspect' - they can lock onto the aircraft's skin (which is heated by friction).
The problem is, your perspective is irrelevant because you have no experience and less knowledge of the issue - and your attitude toward your brothers ("eff 'em they signed up for this") repugnant.
Well, since you served in the Army (and I served in the Navy on a nuclear powered vessel, but not in the engineering department) - let me clear up a few things you are completely wrong about. If you aren't in the engineering divisions that work in and around the reactor, it's nearly completely inconceivable that they'd be exposed to significant radiation from the power plant. (And even the tiny amount I got was orders of magnitude more than a carrier sailor gets - because non engineering people on a submarine are allowed in the reactor tunnel and engineering spaces. This is not true on a carrier.) The Navy goes to great lengths to essentially eliminate exposure to non reactor crew members and to sharply reduce and control the exposure of reactor crew members. The problem with the contamination is that it's outside of the reactor shielding and people who wouldn't normally be exposed are being exposed. (And there are limits on annual and total lifetime exposure, these cannot be exceeded or waived.)
There's almost no radioactive material handled aboard ship, and what handling is done is limited to a very small number of specially trained and qualified people. The area they're handled in is equally limited. The problem with the contamination is that it's outside these boundaries.
Um, no. If your hearing loss can be shown to be service related, you can get disability, even today.
No, they didn't.
No, I didn't equate them, and you'd have to an idiot with the reading comprehension of a wad of used bubble gum to believe so.
That's because you didn't know any better, like the folks pre-vaccines that simply accepted that a lot of kids would die from childhood illnesses. Today, we do know better.
Presuming you can afford the increased taxes as property values around you rise, sure.
The operative words here are MAY BE , where you pronounced the definitely are.
Yes, it does matter - because nitrogen isn't air, it's inert. It can't contaminate the sample.
Because NASA presumes that you've read the rest of the document and know relevant the storage and handling environment.
A single unsupported statement at odds with other statements - something to be viewed with suspicion.
Understanding a subject takes far more effort than a simple web search. And pronouncing the truth (that you're a clueless moron whose made no effort to research the situation or grasp the relevance and reliability of your quotes) is not an attack.
Did you actually read your references? Do you know how to evaluate claims against other evidence?
The first reference completely fails to support your claim. The second (when you follow the footnote) fails to mention that the samples are stored in nitrogen and thus it's claims are highly suspect.
Try again when you have an actual reference that supports your claim, and in the meantime learn basic reading comprehension and analysis skills.
Since the Lunar samples are stored under nitrogen to prevent exactly this occurrence, not buying it. Got a reference?
It's not just about the even being unlikely - it's also about the consequences when it does happen. A one in a million event that dents someone's pride? No biggie. A one in million event that can result in multiple deaths or a mass casualty event? That's something to be concerned about.
Or somebody set it on a shelf in case his 'new fangled' machine died and a backup was needed - and it's simply been handed down from one custodian to the next even since. Nobody cares that it's not needed and probably doesn't work anymore, the paperwork says we have it, and there it is on that self over there... and that's good enough.
When I took over the department test equipment locker at TTF in the late 80's, I had a ton of stuff like that - old and obsolescent equipment squirreled away by previous custodians because "we might need it again some day". The bosses were OK with that because there was no penalty for having excess gear, and it was a massive pain in the ass to get rid of gear. (There's a lot of hoops to jump through to make sure that was in fact excess to requirements and that the person getting rid of it and his chain of command weren't simply trying to take it home themselves or sell it for their own profit or whatever.)
Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it was a fuel hog - it used a turbojet which is much less efficient than a turbofan, and it required afterburners (which are hideously inefficient) to take off and to accelerate through the transonic regime. If it couldn't make money on the heavily traveled transatlantic route, it pretty much couldn't make money anywhere,
I'm not (surprised). The case size of a PC tower has been trending steadily downwards for the better part of a decade. There's not room for an additional drive of that size in the common consumer tower anymore.
No, it won't. Not only is the Space Race long over, the political conditions that lead to it no longer exist, and the general public of the US never supported the race that much in the first place.
Apollo only had political support because JFK took a bullet to the head in Dallas. And even then that support barely lasted two years before the budgets started getting slashed - by the time we actually landed, the program was already running on vapors.
Delusion is practically part of the Bitcoin spec it's so deeply embedded in the True Believer.
And it's really amusing to see someone (the grandparent) who thinks the idea was to be free of governments, when we have been subjected to so many articles where the True Believers were trying to convince us that governments regarded Bitcoin as Really Truly Money.
This is 2016 - and cable company set top boxes are much more than just tuners. They're DVR's, pay-per-view access devices, portals to streaming media, etc... etc... Not all TV's provide these services, so until they do (unlikely) you'll still need a box to act as an intermediary.