Falcon 9 might beat (well, equal) Proton for price/kg if, repeat IF, it ever flies. This joker has got the simplest possible liquid fueled rocket flying after blowing up three of them, it will at least take him a while to figure out how to cluster engines.
Yeah, I've been pondering that as well... Folks here pan the Shuttle for a failure rate in the range of 2%, while singing hosannas to Soyuz with it's slightly greater failure rate...
And here they are claiming the Falcon, with a failure rate almost an order of magnitude greater and a fraction of the performance of either, is the rocketship of their dreams.
I don't think it's that unusual for a press agency to write about events before they happen. They're expected to put out a release almost immediately to various wires (like AP), or they'll get scooped by other reporters and bloggers.
Horsehit. Reporters and bloggers, and the AP, get this kind of information from the press agencies.
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they wrote the release as I would expect, and it somehow got out before it should have.
Horseshit again. This wasn't a press release, but a complete and detailed article including descriptions of events and air to ground dialogue that had not happened yet.
It's rare to see a concept as technical as open-source software in a federal funding bill.
Open Source is a legal and business concept. You'd hope that a few hundred lawyers would be able to figure that one out.
I'm guessing the editors/writers (and maybe readers) of Government Computer News don't get out much. Federal funding and appropriations bills routinely address technical issues in the manner they do here.
No, they are probably realising that $700 needs to come from somewhere so they might as well use open source software instead of buying licenses.
Except that the kind of software in the bill in question is rarely licensed - it's tactical software, not admin software. Specialized tactical software is usually purchased outright. (Not to mention that the Federal Government undoubtedly gets significant discounts from vendors for per seat licenses and support.)
That being said, there's much less here than meets the eye. Like many other extremely specialized problem domains, there almost certainly isn't any FOSS to be considered for use. This goes double since this almost certainly is an embedded system, not a PC, with the operating hardware, computer hardware, OS, and applications tightly bound and integrated. (In the systems like this I worked on while I was in the Navy, the line between OS and application was a wide grey area - in some ways they were virtually the same.)
A hillbilly without his wrestling shows is a very dangerous individual. Well-armed and high on crystal meth, they are nigh unstoppable. The only way to save ourselves is to hole up at our universities and libraries. They're the only places hillbillies will never go.
Nice to see that racism and bigotry are still alive and well.
My favorite error message has probably never been seen by any other Slashdotter...
I worked on the FCS MK88/2 (Trident-I Backfit fire control) in the Navy - a room sized collection of computers, old fashioned hard drives the size of footlockers, and associated electronics. In normal operation is was medium noisy what with the disk drives clattering, dozen of power supplies humming (including two big 2kw 120VAC to 28VDC converters), the printer occasionally printing a status or system report, and sometimes a switch rolling as the system operated. It also looked somewhat like you'd think a computer looked like if all you had to go on was Hollywood... Though the lights didn't blink (except for one set on the MDF's), there were a couple of hundred indicator lights scattered across the system plus the console had a couple of dozen more usually lit.
One day, cruising along at [mumble] feet under the North Atlantic, the generator that provided power to the system ate itself... In an instant all that humming stopped and all the lights went dark.
Except one.
On the alarm and monitoring portion of the console (powered by a separate supply) one red light came on, the only light lit and the only portion of the whole massive pile of machinery that had power...
To describe your response as clueless is a grave insult to the existing legions of clueless people out there - as it implies their intelligence is even less that currently believed.
No matter how cheap small potatoes launchers get - they will never replace the Shuttle and its capabilities, any more than than skateboards and Yugos will replace F150s and semis. Even if larger launchers (like the Falcon 9) become cheap, you still lack many important capabilities.
Let me put it this way; if SpaceX gets to orbit successfully in Flight 98 it still will have spent 20 million dollars less than one Space Shuttle flight. ONE.
A skateboard costs less than a full size truck too... So what? You get what you pay for.
The proper response to your comment is "so the fuck what?". First world countries also used to work children into the grave. They also didn't have unions, or pensions, or health insurance (private or public), or any number of things.
The problem is, your cite doesn't support your claim. Not only is there no evidence that NASA wanted to shut it down (the act in question being an unsupported act by a mid grade administrator), there is no evidence that public outcry had any effect on the outcome. Nor does it support the claim that this happened repeatedly. Nor does it support the claim that it was to done so NASA could build a better rover - as that process was already in progress regardless of what happened to the MER program.
In short, your claims remain unsupported tinfoil hat mutterings.
This is a suicide mission, NASA wanted to shut down the rovers years ago, and the public outcry repeatedly stopped it.
Huh? [[Citation Needed]]
Now, if the rover goes on a 2 year drive and dies, what a poor little heroic guy, finally succumbed to the elements. And NASA gets to free all the funds to build newer and bigger and better and...
As above, huh? NASA is already building a bigger, better rover, one that's just under a year from launch
Don't forget, these are the guys that canceled the last Apollo missions for the fuel bill; they already had the rockets, trained astronauts and everything else in place.
Again, the facts are at variance with your claims - Congress capped Saturn V production in 1967, after have having already steeply cut NASA's budget in 1966. Few people realize that by the time Apollo 11 lifted off, Congress had already cut four missions from the schedule NASA proposed and the program in general was running mostly on inertia and fumes.
If anything NASA ("these guys") is at fault for wanting to exceed the task set before them.
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Yep. The grandparent forgets that the gold sellers are generally professional - you can bet they've thought about it.
There's lots of ways to move money around in an MMO to disguise where it's coming from and who it's going to. At the end of the day, after you've banned the mules, the bosses are still there.
Those familiar with space operations know that LEO (where 99% of the birds you refer to are located), which is difficult and dangerous to reach from the GEO position of the space elevator terminus.
Equally, those familiar with space operations will note the low demand for launch capacity and that while the space elevator provides increased acess to space, it does not provide an increase in demand for services already met.
Folks ignorant of the issues link to pages somebody else wrote in the false belief that such linkage makes them seem intelligent.
Those familiar with space operations will note that 99% of those are in LEO - which is difficult to reach from GEO (the terminus of the elevator), and which requires transiting the high radiation levels of the Van Allen belt.
If the cost to get away from earths gravity, and back into it can be reduced greatly you can suddenly start sending small unmanned craft to do things. It could pay for itself (in savings) very quickly, and perhaps in real money by charging to use it.
It's not clear that the costs will be greatly reduced. There simply isn't that much demand (or foreseeable need for) "sending small unmanned craft to do [unspecified] things". Even with tourism (the likely largest market in the near term), you'll have a hard time charging enough to recoup your costs as well as operating expenses.
Not to mention that cost specified is almost certainly laughably low.
Absent any stunning advances in material sciences,
The TFA states that carbon nanotubes would require a 4x increase in strength compared to present-day materials, and that the past 5 years of research have already brought about a 100-fold improvement... sounds to me like many stunning advances have already happened and we're well on track to fully-stunned status.
What the TFA doesn't tell you is that those 100x better nanotubes have only been produced in lots of less than a gram (millions of tonnes will be needed) and with fiber lengths down in the microscopic range (as opposed to the kilometers long required). We are barely out of the 'that could be cool' status and nowhere near 'fully-stunned'.
This is just a Popular Science article, i.e. "hey wouldn't it be neat if but it ain't happening so we're really just jerking your chain."
"Japan is hosting an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for the machine."
There is more to the internet than websites and email you know. Ever heard of VOIP for just one example? And just how do you think that the branches of a modern bank communicate account [financial] data with the central branch?
I'm done here I think. With each message you only dig yourself deeper.
Not to mention - this decision is neither final nor binding. It can, and being critical of Wikipedia, probably will be proposed for deletion again, and again, and again.
Shortly thereafter, the Industry Standard again turned its attention to Deletionpedia, reporting that deletion of the article in Wikipedia about Deletionpedia was itself under discussion, suggesting that the article was not being considered for deletion based on "insignificance of the site" but rather "due to perceived criticism of Wikipedia itself."
If the highlighted phrase is true, then it indicates that the high priests at Wikipedia are totally beyond control and beyond the pale.
Folks like to blame the nebulous 'Admins' [high priests] for Wikipedia's problems, but there's no shortage of rank-and-file editors who've drunk deeply of the kool-aid. And that rank-and-file have long been willing to send anything that smacks of the Wikipedia criticism down the memory hole without any commandments from the high priests.
There is no more important function in a community encyclopedia than self-criticism. It is part of its foundation, a self-referential examination of its integrity and transparency.
None of the community encyclopedia's to date exhibit that trait to any extent.
Wikipedia has competition. The problem is pagerank. Google calculates pagerank on the basis of the site, not individual pages. Wikipedia has a ridiculously overinflated page rank -- especially when you consider many individual entries are total crap.
In most cases there are better quality pages available, however the Wikipedia page will be in the top 10 of search results, no matter how good or bad it is.
Amen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - you couldn't design a site to spam Google better than Wikipedia. Lots of offsite links, rapid updates, constant changes, and highly internally linked via keywords.
Even if, according to Google itself, the page isn't linked to from offsite - it still receives a high PageRank score.
Which is an amusing claim - as I don't now and haven't ever worked in IT. It's also noted that in the face of facts presented on my part, all you present is personal comments.
I don't think that you have a basis to accuse me of believing "that she does not rate equal treatment under the law".
Do you even read your own messages? Or merely use your kneejerks to operate the keyboard?
Counter to what you postulate I do not begrudge her her legal rights. What I do is, on balance, to condone a transgression that infringes on her legal rights, i.e. hacking into her email account. That is something different. In itself that's also wrong, and I admit it.
When you condone it, that renders your admission that the act was wrong utterly and completely meaningless, and supports my contention that you believe she does not rate equal treatment. Period.
What you are pleased to call "nebulous and handwaving reasons, mostly extreme bias" are in my opinion very good reasons to scrutinise this candidate for high office, who has been sprung on us a mere 50 days before election day and who may be hiding serious flaws.
In other words, you believe she should be judged in the court of your opinion - rather than in a court of law and without regard for the law. I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" in that anyone who can level the charge of lack of experience at her with a straight face, especially compared with the experience of the other three candidates, to be simply astounding. (Disclaimer: I'm not fond of or voting for any of 'em.) I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" because she is under investigation, not convicted. In America, there is a difference between the two. As before, there are words for those who don't believe or support this - and they aren't complementary.
What you would call significant is hardly relevant. What matters is what constitutes significant from an engineering standpoint - and with the current probability vastly reduced from original low probability of an ice/tile event...
The consider that across the life of the Shuttle, submarines have suffered one two loss-of-hull accidents (rammed the bottom of the Irish Sea hard enough to damage beyond repair, significant fire damage) and multiple significant damage incidents (ramming the ocean floor, ramming other vessels, fire, flooding)... Consider that in approximately the same time frame as since the loss of Columbia the Submarine Service has had both Dolphin and San Francisco seriously damaged and nearly lost. San Francisco was particularly frightening, I figure had the bulkhead between ballast tanks 3A and 3B been torn (vertically) only six more inches she'd have never made the surface. Had she hit as little as a foot closer inboard, vertically, or both... the torpedo tubes would have been driven into the hull, flooding her instantly.
And yes, I served in the USN Submarine service and have studied them for over twenty years. Additionally, I've studied the Shuttle (not just read what's in the papers) for roughly the same period.
I think your assessment of my reasoning is off by a wide margin.
Maybe 'dislike' is too strong a word - but my basic assessment is sound, you believe (I see now for nebulous and handwaving reasons, mostly extreme bias, which makes things worse) that she does not rate equal treatment under the law. There's a word for that kind of belief, several of them, and they aren't considered compliments.
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Yeah, I've been pondering that as well... Folks here pan the Shuttle for a failure rate in the range of 2%, while singing hosannas to Soyuz with it's slightly greater failure rate...
And here they are claiming the Falcon, with a failure rate almost an order of magnitude greater and a fraction of the performance of either, is the rocketship of their dreams.
Horsehit. Reporters and bloggers, and the AP, get this kind of information from the press agencies.
Horseshit again. This wasn't a press release, but a complete and detailed article including descriptions of events and air to ground dialogue that had not happened yet.
And which weapons or tactical systems use Zircon? On which weapons or tactical systems do you use RHEL?
I'm guessing the editors/writers (and maybe readers) of Government Computer News don't get out much. Federal funding and appropriations bills routinely address technical issues in the manner they do here.
Except that the kind of software in the bill in question is rarely licensed - it's tactical software, not admin software. Specialized tactical software is usually purchased outright. (Not to mention that the Federal Government undoubtedly gets significant discounts from vendors for per seat licenses and support.)
That being said, there's much less here than meets the eye. Like many other extremely specialized problem domains, there almost certainly isn't any FOSS to be considered for use. This goes double since this almost certainly is an embedded system, not a PC, with the operating hardware, computer hardware, OS, and applications tightly bound and integrated. (In the systems like this I worked on while I was in the Navy, the line between OS and application was a wide grey area - in some ways they were virtually the same.)
Nice to see that racism and bigotry are still alive and well.
My favorite error message has probably never been seen by any other Slashdotter...
I worked on the FCS MK88/2 (Trident-I Backfit fire control) in the Navy - a room sized collection of computers, old fashioned hard drives the size of footlockers, and associated electronics. In normal operation is was medium noisy what with the disk drives clattering, dozen of power supplies humming (including two big 2kw 120VAC to 28VDC converters), the printer occasionally printing a status or system report, and sometimes a switch rolling as the system operated. It also looked somewhat like you'd think a computer looked like if all you had to go on was Hollywood... Though the lights didn't blink (except for one set on the MDF's), there were a couple of hundred indicator lights scattered across the system plus the console had a couple of dozen more usually lit.
One day, cruising along at [mumble] feet under the North Atlantic, the generator that provided power to the system ate itself... In an instant all that humming stopped and all the lights went dark.
Except one.
On the alarm and monitoring portion of the console (powered by a separate supply) one red light came on, the only light lit and the only portion of the whole massive pile of machinery that had power...
"Input Power Fault".
Well, duh...
To describe your response as clueless is a grave insult to the existing legions of clueless people out there - as it implies their intelligence is even less that currently believed.
No matter how cheap small potatoes launchers get - they will never replace the Shuttle and its capabilities, any more than than skateboards and Yugos will replace F150s and semis. Even if larger launchers (like the Falcon 9) become cheap, you still lack many important capabilities.
A skateboard costs less than a full size truck too... So what? You get what you pay for.
The proper response to your comment is "so the fuck what?". First world countries also used to work children into the grave. They also didn't have unions, or pensions, or health insurance (private or public), or any number of things.
The problem is, your cite doesn't support your claim. Not only is there no evidence that NASA wanted to shut it down (the act in question being an unsupported act by a mid grade administrator), there is no evidence that public outcry had any effect on the outcome. Nor does it support the claim that this happened repeatedly. Nor does it support the claim that it was to done so NASA could build a better rover - as that process was already in progress regardless of what happened to the MER program.
In short, your claims remain unsupported tinfoil hat mutterings.
Huh? [[Citation Needed]]
As above, huh? NASA is already building a bigger, better rover, one that's just under a year from launch
Again, the facts are at variance with your claims - Congress capped Saturn V production in 1967, after have having already steeply cut NASA's budget in 1966. Few people realize that by the time Apollo 11 lifted off, Congress had already cut four missions from the schedule NASA proposed and the program in general was running mostly on inertia and fumes.
If anything NASA ("these guys") is at fault for wanting to exceed the task set before them.
Yep. The grandparent forgets that the gold sellers are generally professional - you can bet they've thought about it.
There's lots of ways to move money around in an MMO to disguise where it's coming from and who it's going to. At the end of the day, after you've banned the mules, the bosses are still there.
Those familiar with space operations know that LEO (where 99% of the birds you refer to are located), which is difficult and dangerous to reach from the GEO position of the space elevator terminus.
Equally, those familiar with space operations will note the low demand for launch capacity and that while the space elevator provides increased acess to space, it does not provide an increase in demand for services already met.
Folks ignorant of the issues link to pages somebody else wrote in the false belief that such linkage makes them seem intelligent.
Those familiar with space operations will note that 99% of those are in LEO - which is difficult to reach from GEO (the terminus of the elevator), and which requires transiting the high radiation levels of the Van Allen belt.
It's not clear that the costs will be greatly reduced. There simply isn't that much demand (or foreseeable need for) "sending small unmanned craft to do [unspecified] things". Even with tourism (the likely largest market in the near term), you'll have a hard time charging enough to recoup your costs as well as operating expenses.
Not to mention that cost specified is almost certainly laughably low.
What the TFA doesn't tell you is that those 100x better nanotubes have only been produced in lots of less than a gram (millions of tonnes will be needed) and with fiber lengths down in the microscopic range (as opposed to the kilometers long required). We are barely out of the 'that could be cool' status and nowhere near 'fully-stunned'.
Ok... And? Anyone else remember the much hyped Fifth Generation Computer Systems project?
There is more to the internet than websites and email you know. Ever heard of VOIP for just one example? And just how do you think that the branches of a modern bank communicate account [financial] data with the central branch?
I'm done here I think. With each message you only dig yourself deeper.
Not to mention - this decision is neither final nor binding. It can, and being critical of Wikipedia, probably will be proposed for deletion again, and again, and again.
Folks like to blame the nebulous 'Admins' [high priests] for Wikipedia's problems, but there's no shortage of rank-and-file editors who've drunk deeply of the kool-aid. And that rank-and-file have long been willing to send anything that smacks of the Wikipedia criticism down the memory hole without any commandments from the high priests.
None of the community encyclopedia's to date exhibit that trait to any extent.
Amen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - you couldn't design a site to spam Google better than Wikipedia. Lots of offsite links, rapid updates, constant changes, and highly internally linked via keywords.
Even if, according to Google itself, the page isn't linked to from offsite - it still receives a high PageRank score.
Which is an amusing claim - as I don't now and haven't ever worked in IT. It's also noted that in the face of facts presented on my part, all you present is personal comments.
Do you even read your own messages? Or merely use your kneejerks to operate the keyboard?
When you condone it, that renders your admission that the act was wrong utterly and completely meaningless, and supports my contention that you believe she does not rate equal treatment. Period.
In other words, you believe she should be judged in the court of your opinion - rather than in a court of law and without regard for the law. I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" in that anyone who can level the charge of lack of experience at her with a straight face, especially compared with the experience of the other three candidates, to be simply astounding. (Disclaimer: I'm not fond of or voting for any of 'em.) I call it "nebulous and handwaving" and "biased" because she is under investigation, not convicted. In America, there is a difference between the two. As before, there are words for those who don't believe or support this - and they aren't complementary.
What you would call significant is hardly relevant. What matters is what constitutes significant from an engineering standpoint - and with the current probability vastly reduced from original low probability of an ice/tile event...
The consider that across the life of the Shuttle, submarines have suffered one two loss-of-hull accidents (rammed the bottom of the Irish Sea hard enough to damage beyond repair, significant fire damage) and multiple significant damage incidents (ramming the ocean floor, ramming other vessels, fire, flooding)... Consider that in approximately the same time frame as since the loss of Columbia the Submarine Service has had both Dolphin and San Francisco seriously damaged and nearly lost. San Francisco was particularly frightening, I figure had the bulkhead between ballast tanks 3A and 3B been torn (vertically) only six more inches she'd have never made the surface. Had she hit as little as a foot closer inboard, vertically, or both... the torpedo tubes would have been driven into the hull, flooding her instantly.
And yes, I served in the USN Submarine service and have studied them for over twenty years. Additionally, I've studied the Shuttle (not just read what's in the papers) for roughly the same period.
Maybe 'dislike' is too strong a word - but my basic assessment is sound, you believe (I see now for nebulous and handwaving reasons, mostly extreme bias, which makes things worse) that she does not rate equal treatment under the law. There's a word for that kind of belief, several of them, and they aren't considered compliments.