Smokescreen buzzwords.. They make assholes like you feel good, but are utterly fucking meaningless.
What will the US do if the other members of the ISS simply choose to keep resupplying and reboosting it?
The other members of the ISS can have at it - once the US shuts down the 90% of the power and the 90% of the life support they provide... Not to mention that if the countries do so, then it's *they* who are in violation of the treaties they signed.
No, I point out facts that people like you dislike, and you get all pissy about it.
ROTFLMAO. Handwaving and blowing smoke isn't "pointing out facts". Well, to the ignorant it is maybe.
What gives NASA (or more accurately, commentators on NASA) the impression, that with the shuttle retired and Orion only just getting going, they are going to have any real ability to dictate the fate of the ISS?
Other than the fact that we own something like 60% of the station?
Do Americans just assume they own and control everything without checking?
Coming from a guy that just makes shit, demonstrates essentially zero understanding of the issue, and throws around asinine accusations based on incomplete facts without bothering to check...
ISS is sectional - not modular. You can't break it apart and reassemble it in a different configuration, nor can modules be easily removed for use elsewhere. Though it was launched in pieces, effectively it is one-big-chunk.
if we're going to the moon and mars, the ISS seems like a pretty damn good staging/bailout option.
Other than the fact it's in the wrong orbit and essentially impossible to move to a useful one for that purpose, sure. Using the ISS to stage to the Moon or Mars is kinda like assembling a fleet in St. Louis for an expedition in the Gulf of Alaska.
Couldn't they just package it up and send it to the moon or Mars?
No. First, there is the enormous amount of fuel required (think thousands of Shuttle launches). Second, the ISS isn't shielded for the more intense radiation environment beyond the Van Allen belts (let alone the many times worse environment inside the Belts). Third, the ISS is designed for the (relatively) warm and benign thermal environment of LEO, not the frozen hell of Lunar orbit (let alone the even colder environment of Martian orbit).
You never know when you need it and having it parked in orbit for that time you wished you had, might be wiser than destroying it.
In it's current altitude band, it will reenter within a couple of years without constant (and expensive) reboosting. Boosting it to an altitude where it will have enough orbital life to keep it around for decade or two puts it above the altitude that any current or planned manned spacecraft can reach. Lastly, due to the large fuel requirements for changing orbital planes and altitudes, ISS is (regardless of orbit) essentially unreachable except for missions launched deliberately to it.
Sure they have plans - but like dozens of other 'plans' they've publicized over the last twenty years, this one too hasn't a snowballs chance of happening. They can't even come up with the money to meet their current commitments, let alone the considerably larger hardware/cash commitments required to support an independent station.
Remember all the talk about a permanent space station from which to stage lunar and martian missions?
Yes, I remember all that talk - because that's all it was, talk among people who haven't kept up with the times or don't know what they are talking about.
Being a base for staging missions was an early feature of Space Station Freedom. That feature was deferred during one of the rounds of redesign/down scoping (in the late 1980's) and removed completely when Freedom became ISS in the early 1990's. The change of orbital inclination to accommodate the Russians essentially made it impractical to stage missions from the station because of the resulting low altitude and lowered cargo capacity (because of the payload hit required for launches other than Russian to the new orbit).
your average laptop has considerably more computing power than the first shuttles had
Umm... So what? The computing horsepower available then was sufficient to perform the job needed. The Shuttle's systems and the equations behind orbital dynamics haven't changed greatly, so the Shuttle's software isn't going to behave like the typical marketplace driven software you are familiar with and suffer from feature creep and code bloat.
Not to mention that commercial PC's (Windows, Mac, and Linux alike) badly mislead you as to how much computing power is really needed.
the engineering behind the overall superstructure, propulsion, etc are equally dated
Again, so what? This isn't your average piece of hardware where upgrades and 'improvements' are driven more by marketing (which equates old with useless) rather than by requirements.
When last I heard, the proposals being considered represented a potential 30% cost reduction, and they were looking for better.
It's very, very easy to implement cost reductions in Power Point. It's rather more difficult in the real world.
Building those would create jobs across the board across the entire income and skill spread of the american populace
Not really. Ten thousand jobs, maybe twenty, virtually all of them concentrated in a handful of specialized companies and skilled engineers and tradesmen.
Seriously, these examples (from the far right hand side of the bell curve) say little about the general usefulness of of BMI in the general population.
Seriously.. what U.S. citizen carries their passport everywhere they go domestically?
Indeed. Mine lives in my safe unless actually required.
Well I am completely against the apparent weak encryption and their lack of shielding but I think the big brother concerns are a little overblown.
You're new here aren't you? Conjuring up complex big brother scenarios is practically the entire purpose of Slashdot. Seriously, I've seen less insane scenarios on actual tinfoil hat sites.
You don't have to pay $20 - as the cards themselves are shipped with such a shield. (At least mine, which I got a couple of weeks back, came with such a shield.)
Probably what happens is people leave the shield off as it is rather unwieldy with the shield installed and no longer fits properly into your wallet.
I've been part of two large, high-profile projects that cratered spectacularly (as I knew they would) and I consider it some of the most valuable experience of my career as a software developer.
Yep, and the same thing applies to the executives the questioner slams.
It would be interesting to hear from someone with some legal expertise on whether there would be any practical effect on WP or Dcoetzee if they just ignored the threat and allowed a default judgment to be entered against Dcoetzee in the UK. If Dcoetzee or Jimmy Wales take a vacation in Scotland, do jackbooted thugs meet them at the airport terminal and take them away to Euro-Copyright Prison, where they'll have to spend a 20-year sentence wearing black turtlenecks and listening to French pop music?
IANAL - but I have heard of similiar cases. It's quite possible for a judgement to be entered against Dcoetzee, Wales, etc... and for them to be liable if they ever enter the UK, or to be denied entry to the UK.
The NPG will be getting radioactive publicity from this. Imagine the NPG being known to American tourists as somewhere that sues Americans just because it thinks it can.
Assuming the 'average' American tourist knows about this tempest-in-a-teapot. Or even cares.
Myself, I'll gladly visit the NPG - because under UK law they are within their rights to take the action they are. It's the Wikipedia editor that's in the wrong, for site scraping, for violating their (UK) copyrights, for failing to work with the NPG, etc... etc...
I can't entirely see that they are wrong. Yes, the paintings themselves are in the public domain, but that does not mean that the photographs (a derivative work) are automatically in the public domain. It's no different than if I rewrote a work of fiction that's in the public domain, my work is still covered by copyright.
And yet, for all the dissing you and other posters give COBOL - you can't ignore one salient fact: It's powered some pretty high power systems for decades. As the commercial says - "like a rock".
If the city I lived in started doing this, I'd move and take my tax revenue with me (paltry as it may be).
Why don't we hear of more people fleeing the state in droves? I've never lived in CA, but if I did the decision to move would be a simple one.
When you move out of your parent's basement, you'll find the world a bit less black and white and that Brave Words (while free and easy to make on the 'net) cost money and are sometimes hard to implement.
No, it only confuses pedantic old timers who are unable to keep straight the difference between a project long dead and an active project. The rest of us old timers have no problems at all.
I just watched the video - and while it definitely is a cool concept, what immediately came to mind is the increased complexity of the system. I counted five separations (the launch itself would be a separation in reality) of some piece or another and multiple chute deployments before the crew capsule was safely floating down on its main parachutes.
What the video and accompanying article doesn't make clear is that most of those separation events were part of the test vehicle, not part of the proposed flight configuration.
The GPS market, meanwhile, has a lot of people who either need and/or are conditioned to believe they need a specialized device rather than an add-on feature to a generic electronic gadget.
It also serves the market of those of us who have balanced the one-time cost of a GPS navigator that operates everywhere with the ongoing cost of a wireless connection that may or may not be available and may or may not be subject to roaming charges.
In my case, there would also be the one time cost of upgrading my phone and the ongoing cost of the more expensive plan required to support the features. My recently purchased Nuvi will 'pay' for itself in a little over a year by not having to pay the one time and ongoing costs associated with upgrading my phone and service - even without considering roaming charges.
During the 6 years that this has been banned how much research into life saving treatments has been delayed? How many living, breathing, people have been denied these treatments? How many more will die over the next 10 years that could have been saved?
If stem cell research had been banned - those would be valid questions. But stem cell research was never banned - rather, the uses to which Federal funds could be applied were limited.
And all to placate the extreme pro-life fringe, who count fertilized embryos (that would be destroyed anyway) as sacred, and the ignorant who continually refer to "aborted fetuses" whenever the subject comes up.
Someone who repeats the outright lie about stem cell research being banned should ponder very carefully before calling other people ignorant.
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Smokescreen buzzwords.. They make assholes like you feel good, but are utterly fucking meaningless.
The other members of the ISS can have at it - once the US shuts down the 90% of the power and the 90% of the life support they provide... Not to mention that if the countries do so, then it's *they* who are in violation of the treaties they signed.
ROTFLMAO. Handwaving and blowing smoke isn't "pointing out facts". Well, to the ignorant it is maybe.
Other than the fact that we own something like 60% of the station?
Coming from a guy that just makes shit, demonstrates essentially zero understanding of the issue, and throws around asinine accusations based on incomplete facts without bothering to check...
The same reason I installed a new stereo in the car that I'll junk in four years or so - because there's lot of time between now and then.
ISS is sectional - not modular. You can't break it apart and reassemble it in a different configuration, nor can modules be easily removed for use elsewhere. Though it was launched in pieces, effectively it is one-big-chunk.
Other than the fact it's in the wrong orbit and essentially impossible to move to a useful one for that purpose, sure. Using the ISS to stage to the Moon or Mars is kinda like assembling a fleet in St. Louis for an expedition in the Gulf of Alaska.
No. First, there is the enormous amount of fuel required (think thousands of Shuttle launches). Second, the ISS isn't shielded for the more intense radiation environment beyond the Van Allen belts (let alone the many times worse environment inside the Belts). Third, the ISS is designed for the (relatively) warm and benign thermal environment of LEO, not the frozen hell of Lunar orbit (let alone the even colder environment of Martian orbit).
In it's current altitude band, it will reenter within a couple of years without constant (and expensive) reboosting. Boosting it to an altitude where it will have enough orbital life to keep it around for decade or two puts it above the altitude that any current or planned manned spacecraft can reach. Lastly, due to the large fuel requirements for changing orbital planes and altitudes, ISS is (regardless of orbit) essentially unreachable except for missions launched deliberately to it.
Sure they have plans - but like dozens of other 'plans' they've publicized over the last twenty years, this one too hasn't a snowballs chance of happening. They can't even come up with the money to meet their current commitments, let alone the considerably larger hardware/cash commitments required to support an independent station.
Yes, I remember all that talk - because that's all it was, talk among people who haven't kept up with the times or don't know what they are talking about.
Being a base for staging missions was an early feature of Space Station Freedom. That feature was deferred during one of the rounds of redesign/down scoping (in the late 1980's) and removed completely when Freedom became ISS in the early 1990's. The change of orbital inclination to accommodate the Russians essentially made it impractical to stage missions from the station because of the resulting low altitude and lowered cargo capacity (because of the payload hit required for launches other than Russian to the new orbit).
Actually, if you read your own reference, you'll find that the ISS does have it's own reboost capability - thrusters located on the Zvezda module.
Umm... So what? The computing horsepower available then was sufficient to perform the job needed. The Shuttle's systems and the equations behind orbital dynamics haven't changed greatly, so the Shuttle's software isn't going to behave like the typical marketplace driven software you are familiar with and suffer from feature creep and code bloat.
Not to mention that commercial PC's (Windows, Mac, and Linux alike) badly mislead you as to how much computing power is really needed.
Again, so what? This isn't your average piece of hardware where upgrades and 'improvements' are driven more by marketing (which equates old with useless) rather than by requirements.
It's very, very easy to implement cost reductions in Power Point. It's rather more difficult in the real world.
Not really. Ten thousand jobs, maybe twenty, virtually all of them concentrated in a handful of specialized companies and skilled engineers and tradesmen.
Seriously, these examples (from the far right hand side of the bell curve) say little about the general usefulness of of BMI in the general population.
Indeed. Mine lives in my safe unless actually required.
You're new here aren't you? Conjuring up complex big brother scenarios is practically the entire purpose of Slashdot. Seriously, I've seen less insane scenarios on actual tinfoil hat sites.
You don't have to pay $20 - as the cards themselves are shipped with such a shield. (At least mine, which I got a couple of weeks back, came with such a shield.)
Probably what happens is people leave the shield off as it is rather unwieldy with the shield installed and no longer fits properly into your wallet.
Yep, and the same thing applies to the executives the questioner slams.
IANAL - but I have heard of similiar cases. It's quite possible for a judgement to be entered against Dcoetzee, Wales, etc... and for them to be liable if they ever enter the UK, or to be denied entry to the UK.
Assuming the 'average' American tourist knows about this tempest-in-a-teapot. Or even cares.
Myself, I'll gladly visit the NPG - because under UK law they are within their rights to take the action they are. It's the Wikipedia editor that's in the wrong, for site scraping, for violating their (UK) copyrights, for failing to work with the NPG, etc... etc...
Do pay the fuck attention - the images are from the UK, and thus US law does not apply you ignorant dipshit.
I can't entirely see that they are wrong. Yes, the paintings themselves are in the public domain, but that does not mean that the photographs (a derivative work) are automatically in the public domain. It's no different than if I rewrote a work of fiction that's in the public domain, my work is still covered by copyright.
And yet, for all the dissing you and other posters give COBOL - you can't ignore one salient fact: It's powered some pretty high power systems for decades. As the commercial says - "like a rock".
When you move out of your parent's basement, you'll find the world a bit less black and white and that Brave Words (while free and easy to make on the 'net) cost money and are sometimes hard to implement.
No, it only confuses pedantic old timers who are unable to keep straight the difference between a project long dead and an active project. The rest of us old timers have no problems at all.
What the video and accompanying article doesn't make clear is that most of those separation events were part of the test vehicle, not part of the proposed flight configuration.
It also serves the market of those of us who have balanced the one-time cost of a GPS navigator that operates everywhere with the ongoing cost of a wireless connection that may or may not be available and may or may not be subject to roaming charges.
In my case, there would also be the one time cost of upgrading my phone and the ongoing cost of the more expensive plan required to support the features. My recently purchased Nuvi will 'pay' for itself in a little over a year by not having to pay the one time and ongoing costs associated with upgrading my phone and service - even without considering roaming charges.
If stem cell research had been banned - those would be valid questions. But stem cell research was never banned - rather, the uses to which Federal funds could be applied were limited.
Someone who repeats the outright lie about stem cell research being banned should ponder very carefully before calling other people ignorant.
Yeah, but all too often the /. hivemnind defines "innovator" strictly as "someone I [like|agree with}approve of|all of the above]".