Not being able to fly because their systems can't cope with the year changing a digit sounds like a truly pathetic excuse in that context.
If it were that simple - you'd have a point. But as I pointed out in the message you replied to - the Shuttle doesn't even know what year it is. You can imagine how highly I rate someones opinion of NASA who has the lack of reading comprehension you display.
n any case, they already need to contend with uneven numbers of days in each of the various months anyway, and have to contend with leapyears every February 29th. So they're already (successfully) dealing with incrementing days, and months.
Actually - they aren't. The Shuttle software has no conception of anything but $DaysSinceLastNewYear and $SecondsOfFlight. (Used mostly to support navigation and guidance functions.)
C'mon, this is NASA and it's not the 1970's any more.
Guess when the basic specifications of the Shuttle software were written and version 1.0 released? (That's right - the 1970'.) And utterly unlike virtually any other software house - NASA doesn't dick with code that works (as their date/time keeping does, except for this one minor limitation).
Once space travel approaches the speed of light I'll start to buy excuses about the difficulties of tracking time. Until then, sorry - No Sale.
That's a reflection of your level of knowledge, not of reality. Keeping time in a hard realtime RTOS is hard. Doing so in a distributed fashion is even harder. Doing so in a synchronized fashion is harder still.
because it's too damned hard to it in one on the ground and have it turned on that night.
Oh, it's trivially easy to have one on the ground (in the OPF or the VAB) and turned on that night - but that wouldn't prove anything. The problem is in the interface between the ground software and the shuttle software, and sitting in the OPF or VAB, the shuttle can't be hooked up to the computers in Mission Control. (I.E. the problem isn't that the shuttle computers will crash - but that they will start rejecting data and command uplinks from Mission Control.)
As should not come to a surprise to anyone, NASA is smarter than the average Slashdot poster. They have duplicated the problem in the SAIL and in the training simulators as JSC.
They even have a workaround - but it involves shutting down and restarting the Shuttle computers on orbit. This procedure isn't without risks however, as the Shuttle wasn't designed to be operated this way. There's a nonzero risk that the computer system will not restart entirely.
In this event, or in the event of a massive (PASS) computer failure on orbit, the backup (BFS) computer is engaged and they come home, so losing the computers on orbit isn't a death sentence. BFS is just smart enough to conduct a launch abort or to land the shuttle - a deliberate limitation since it means the hardware and software can be simpler and thus (in theory) easier to verify and more reliable.
That is absolutely insane that they do not know what will happen, so they have not bothered to take a few moments and find out over the past 18 years.
No, its absolutely insane to assume that you are smarter than NASA and that they haven't bothered to find out or that a mass media news story has all the details correct. They've known since the very early days what will happen (the computers in flight will not sync with the computers on the ground), what they don't know with certainty is whether the flight computers can be restarted sucesfully on orbit. (TFA, like many such, is somewhat misleading and sensationalized.)
Including Wikipedia makes sense. I now rely on Wikipedia way more than I rely on Google for my informational needs, because it isn't cluttered with pseudo-information that has no other purpose other than sell me something.
You are absolutely correct - Wikipedia is filled with virtually every kind of pseudo information except advertising.
(If she was implicated in a child pornography ring, and found with lolikon on her PC - I bet you'd be among the first frothing at the mouth to hang her high.)
Do you know the parent poster personally? Who are you to imply that the parents morals are so easily compromised that they would forget their stand on due process and hard evidence just because some hypothetical woman wanted to touch little boys (or girls or monkeys for that matter) in the hoo ha and make them put their mouth in her fish bowl?
Having watched the growing hysteria and general witch hunt mentality, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, it's a reasonably safe way to bet. Given the original posters utter ignorance of what the law is in the fist place, I'd just about bet the rent money on it.
For all you know, the parent poster will still demand that due process be followed and that we avoid arresting people for perfectly legal things on their computer.
And there is zero evidence (WRT to this article) that people are ebeing picked up for the 'crime' of having perfectly legal things on their computer. The person in question (in TFA) was picked up because she was connected to a terrorist plot - and in that context the 'perfectly legal' material is valuable circumstantial evidence. This is perfectly standard and happens on a daily basis in connection with all manner of crimes. (I.E. like the OP, you whine about the law and due process - but you are utterly clueless as to what the law actually allows. The woman in the article wasn't picked up sans warrant, or under some 'war on terror' act, or randomly - but using a perfectly method thats been on the books for decades.)
NB: as far as I know it is perfectly legal to have the documents listed in TFA on your computer.
Nobody ever claimed otherwise - but even completely legal items can serve as circumstantial evidence of participation in planning a criminal act.
I think the most terrifying aspect of this whole thing is that she was arrested not because of anything she did, but rather because of her association with others the government doesn't like.
You act as if this is a new thing - but its not. She could just as easily been implicated in a group plotting a murder, or a bank heist, or an insurance fraud scheme - and still be picked up questioning and possible charged if she was found in possesion of circumstantial evidence linked to that type of crime. Its pretty much routine.
Democracy in Britain is officially dead.
Nah. Nothing much has changed (at least in this particular case) except it made the media. (If she was implicated in a child pornography ring, and found with lolikon on her PC - I bet you'd be among the first frothing at the mouth to hang her high.)
Mostly because there aren't any comparable structures to compare it to.
Oil drilling platforms sometimes have a lot of very heavy gear in the water and winch it up or lower it down when storms approach.
Oil platforms are not even remotely comparable - because their heavy gear isn't moving in the seaway, unlike the 'ducks'.
Also something that is mechanically complex to you may not be mechanically complex to a civil engineer, marine engineer, fitter, rigger etc etc.
That's assuming I've no experience in those professions, or similiar experience. (Which I do.)
These things are not even really that big and don't have to go in deep water - they may even go where you already have structures like wooden houses on stilts in the water surviving for decades or spindly old jetties.
Not having to go in deep water means they have to go into a place thats even more difficult to be - the shallows. Wooden houses on stilts are rarely where there are significant wave action, and jetties don't have moving joints between the supporting and supported structures like the 'ducks' do.
Can't do it because we don't have a retail price tag yet is a common argument of polititions who wish to avoid action or kill projects - but don't get sucked in and use it yourself.
Had I made that argument - you'd have a point. But I didn't.
The place to use this argument is against people who have complex costing based upon fantasy that they treats as reality - but gently.
The costing by the 'duck' proponents *is* an fantasy - because they don't even know if the damm thing will work (they haven't built anything resembling a prototype).
This isn't a plan by 'India' - it's a pipe dream (and an unfunded one at that) by the head of the Indian equivalent of NASA. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
You can't build a wave energy capture device that's rugged enough to survicve the storm, corrosion and other hazards at a reasonable cost.
It may be possible that is true but it is a pretty wild claim to make - what do you have to back this up? Why don't you think it is likely that the designer has considered existing structures that are built to survive for decades in waters with very powerful storms?
Mostly because there aren't any comparable structures to compare it to. Mostly because existing structures that can survive storms (even when they aren't mechanically complex like these ducks) are fairly expensive. Etc... Etc... The sea is a harsh and cruel mistress.
Every once in a while, Microsoft does something right... or at least releases something cool. When I plugged in my address (which is kind of in the middle of nowhere), up popped 3 different viewing angles of my house. Pretty detailed shots too, and in one you could even see me mowing the lawn in the backyard! I had lots of fun with this one.
Well, when I plugged in my adress; The location it put the pushpin is two houses down and across the street (Google's is precisely in the middle of my porch), and the imagery is the same 8+ year old images of my area that Terraserver has. (OTOH, Google's imagery is about 4+ years old.)
Target ought to flog whoever designed their website. If it only works properly in modern IE browsers, then it's alienating maybe 20% of their consumers.
No. They are alienating 20% of web users - how much that set overlaps with the set 'potential users' is open to debate. (I bet it's not much overlap - as Target aims at the middle-class market who want to think of themselves as being a cut above the Wal-mart crowd. Guess which market is most likely to be 'someone running IE6/7 on Windows XP and a modern PC'?)
The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover
Sorry to sonud so skeptical....but am I the only one who is worried about capability of missiles (and other defence systems) to handle war through a year-end changeover?
I can't speak to other systems - but I worked with three generations of US SLBMs, and yes - they'd function across the end of year changeover.
Granted, the work they do is very impressive and the process is very exacting. But come on...they haven't been able to fix a simple year rollover event in 30 years?!?
It's not that they haven't been *able* to fix, but that they don't *want* to fix it. Plus, it's not really 'simple' code - Guidance and Navigation both depend on the calendar date *and* Mission Elapsed Time. Thus, you need to rework that code, or plug in an emulator that will translate.
As a professional software developer, I have heard on countless occasions about how the Space Shuttle software development process is so incredible, and how all other developers should try to live up their high standards.
Part of those high standards is to not dig into working code *unless absolutely needed*. Given that there are 342 possible launch dates for a two week shuttle mission that don't violate the end-of-year constraint, and only 13 that do... The extreme conservatism of those standards dicates that you don't mess will the calendar/timekeeping code, and take extreme measures to avoid messing with the vital navigation and guidance code given the low percentage of the time the constraint will actually effect flight planning.
Hmmm. I'm not certain how dozens of hours of unpaid labour cleaning up the *same* problem, time after time, could be considered "selfish behavior".
No, the selfish behavior is the belief that your needs and beliefs overrule those of other people.
Addictive behavior that that leads to bad decisions and yields poor results, whether it is poor eating decisions, poor exercise habits, self-destructive computer software decisions, are often blamed on those who are expected to "fix" the mess (parents, educators, government, computer-savvy people).
Again, your logic fails utterly - because the blame in many of those instances isn't placed on those responsible for 'fix', but those responsible for 'creating' (or 'enabling'). (These may or may not be the same people.)
Perhaps this is simply another example?
No, it's an example of a zealot hurling FUD to explain why he is better than others and justifying his ego driven choice to bring light to their lives.
Well, if I had to clean up the mess every time you got sick and puked on my doorstep, then I'd probably want to influence your dietary decisions.
If that were true, sure. But your analogy fails right out of gate - as users tend to 'puke' on their own doorsteps rather than the maintainers. (And nothing of this sort was noted in TFA, you merely assume it exists - which is not a given.)
*That* is why there is Linux zealotry. Because we are expected to clean up your (Windows virus-ridden, crashing) mess, but keep our noses out of your (poor) decision making.
Given the failure of the internal logic of your analogy - your excuse for zealotry fails as well. (Which doesn't surprise me - because selfish behavior is rarely logical.)
I'd say it's more like proof that the system works.
Sure it works - but not even remotely to specs. Wikipedia consistently claims that 'problem articles' are (supposedly) caught and fixed in fairly short order. (Minutes to hours is the figure most often bandied about.) Yet here, and in the Siegenthaler Affair, is a case of a problem article that persisted for months.
I mean, 'cmon... We've been doing ejection seat type systems for what, 40 to 50 years now? These kinds of systems are very, very reliable.
Not particularly. It's not unheard to fail to eject, or to have the ejector fire without being commanded to do so.
Other spacecraft have used similar systems. The F-111 had/has such a system if I remember correctly.
The FB-111 capsule escape system has been used (IIRC) 20-25 times across its history in US service - and one or both of the crew was severely injured each and every time. In the aviation community ejecting from an aircraft is reffered to as "attempting suicide to avoid being killed".
Seems to me that such an ejection system is safer (ie: you stay in the well protected capsule) and pretty much makes a roller coaster redundant, the later would only be of use if the crew is on the tower but not in the capsule yet.
Simply using the LES (Launch Escape System) is not a complete solution - because during test countdowns the full air-sea rescue teams are not deployed (and the white room is still in place), but there is still a possibility of an accident requiring the astronauts to evacuate.
Even during a real countdown - riding the LES isn't always the best option. The white room may still be in place blocking the capsule from departing. If the white room is still in place - there may be personnel there who need evacuation, and *they* can't ride the LES. The incident may be threatening enough to require crew evacation - but not threatening enough to destroy the vehicle. (Firing the LES is pretty much an irrevocable step.)
If I were your friend, I'd not thank you for imposing your [religious|political] beliefs on me. *Especially* when such beliefs mean I have to change out virtually everything familiar to me on my computer, and limits my choices in the future of games and applications. (Seriously, would you walk into your friends house and dump all of his food in the trash, or all his books or clothes? Because emotionally - that's what you are doing.)
What is it about Linux that leads people to such acts of zealotry?
Designing an Atomic weapons isn't that hard. Just get a bullet with appropriate fission material and shoot it at a core of enriched Uranium or for you hydrogen bomb... Get some plutonium and put it in a sphere and detonate with appropriate explosives to get it to implode.
At that level of description - building a computer isn't too hard. Just wire yourself a bunch of transistors, lights, and power supplies together. (I.E. no, contrary to popular belief, its not that easy. Its not all that hard - but there much more to it than the OP seems to believe.)
These would be fascinating to look it and I'm sure anyone who could get the raw materials already has this knowledge.
I'm not so sure about that, the basic design of a weapon is pretty straightforward and can be derived directly from the laws of physics. The *hard* part is converting that basic design into an actual engineering design - and the though in the nuclear weapons study community is that there is likely to be one or more nonobvious tricks to creating a working design. (This viewpoint is reinforced by the recent failure of the NK test.) Another issue is that preparing the raw materials is pretty straightforward chemistry - while designing a weapon requires a whole host of other disciplines.
This only partially true - because any archeologist/sociologist worth his salt will quickly realize that Wikipedia reflects only a small subset of the population at large, and via its editorial policies its coverage of various topics is decidely warped. (POV is vital in analyzing literary sources - and Wikipedia's NPOV bias removes traditional POV bias and substitutes a new form.)
My "argument" is that money spent on Hubble is better spent on other, newer telescopes.
Hubble will be a (partially) newer telescope with the installation of newer instruments, as the instruments as as important (if not more important) that the mirror. (The is why dozens of scopes. smaller than Palomar for example, are still in daily use.)
Furthermore, cancelling Hubble does not mean that the money can be spent on better telescopes - because Federal budgeting doesn't work that way. The Webb is budgeted (by Congress) independently of Hubble. In fact, a compelling arguement can be made that without an existing scope to compare to - the chances of the JWST being funded to completetion *decrease*. (And thats a key point to understand - it's easier to get money for something that exists and is in operation, than something that doesn't and isn't.)
How does pointing out that Webb will be able to do work that ground based scopes can't, and will have greater light gathering power than Hubble, "refute" that?
Because your original arguement was the Webb was a replacement for Hubble (which as I pointed out, and you subsequently agreed, it is not).
I suggest you rethink the rest of your replies as well, since you obviously never got that.
I have no need to rethink my replies - because mine have been consistent from the start. You are slinging mud and FUD about and hoping it impresses someone.
Apparently you aren't considering the use of multiple scopes to get far, far higher resolution from groups of ground based scopes - like Keck - than you can get from Hubble's small mirror. There's reason Hubble isn't being used to look for extrasolar planets.
What makes you think I haven't considered it? Resolution is but one metric for comparing one telescope to another. (Just as hunting for extrasolar planets is but one research path being followed by astronomers.)
Yes Webb works in a different band. Sorry, you won't get pictures as pretty. But you *will* get a much larger light gathering system than Hubble has, and you will get long term access to a band of light that... how did you put it? "Doesn't penetrate Earth's atmosphere".
This is a very confusing paragraph because it merely repeats my own arguments back at me - and refutes your own earlier argument...
Here's a hint. Visible light is the least useful of Hubble's cameras, because visible light penetrates the atmosphere.
Here's a hint: Hubble can see objects in the visible band that cannot be seen from the ground - because they are too faint.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were that simple - you'd have a point. But as I pointed out in the message you replied to - the Shuttle doesn't even know what year it is. You can imagine how highly I rate someones opinion of NASA who has the lack of reading comprehension you display.
Actually - they aren't. The Shuttle software has no conception of anything but $DaysSinceLastNewYear and $SecondsOfFlight. (Used mostly to support navigation and guidance functions.)
Guess when the basic specifications of the Shuttle software were written and version 1.0 released? (That's right - the 1970'.) And utterly unlike virtually any other software house - NASA doesn't dick with code that works (as their date/time keeping does, except for this one minor limitation).
That's a reflection of your level of knowledge, not of reality. Keeping time in a hard realtime RTOS is hard. Doing so in a distributed fashion is even harder. Doing so in a synchronized fashion is harder still.
Oh, it's trivially easy to have one on the ground (in the OPF or the VAB) and turned on that night - but that wouldn't prove anything. The problem is in the interface between the ground software and the shuttle software, and sitting in the OPF or VAB, the shuttle can't be hooked up to the computers in Mission Control. (I.E. the problem isn't that the shuttle computers will crash - but that they will start rejecting data and command uplinks from Mission Control.)
As should not come to a surprise to anyone, NASA is smarter than the average Slashdot poster. They have duplicated the problem in the SAIL and in the training simulators as JSC.
They even have a workaround - but it involves shutting down and restarting the Shuttle computers on orbit. This procedure isn't without risks however, as the Shuttle wasn't designed to be operated this way. There's a nonzero risk that the computer system will not restart entirely.
In this event, or in the event of a massive (PASS) computer failure on orbit, the backup (BFS) computer is engaged and they come home, so losing the computers on orbit isn't a death sentence. BFS is just smart enough to conduct a launch abort or to land the shuttle - a deliberate limitation since it means the hardware and software can be simpler and thus (in theory) easier to verify and more reliable.
No, its absolutely insane to assume that you are smarter than NASA and that they haven't bothered to find out or that a mass media news story has all the details correct. They've known since the very early days what will happen (the computers in flight will not sync with the computers on the ground), what they don't know with certainty is whether the flight computers can be restarted sucesfully on orbit. (TFA, like many such, is somewhat misleading and sensationalized.)
You are absolutely correct - Wikipedia is filled with virtually every kind of pseudo information except advertising.
Having watched the growing hysteria and general witch hunt mentality, both on Slashdot and elsewhere, it's a reasonably safe way to bet. Given the original posters utter ignorance of what the law is in the fist place, I'd just about bet the rent money on it.
And there is zero evidence (WRT to this article) that people are ebeing picked up for the 'crime' of having perfectly legal things on their computer. The person in question (in TFA) was picked up because she was connected to a terrorist plot - and in that context the 'perfectly legal' material is valuable circumstantial evidence. This is perfectly standard and happens on a daily basis in connection with all manner of crimes. (I.E. like the OP, you whine about the law and due process - but you are utterly clueless as to what the law actually allows. The woman in the article wasn't picked up sans warrant, or under some 'war on terror' act, or randomly - but using a perfectly method thats been on the books for decades.)
Nobody ever claimed otherwise - but even completely legal items can serve as circumstantial evidence of participation in planning a criminal act.
You act as if this is a new thing - but its not. She could just as easily been implicated in a group plotting a murder, or a bank heist, or an insurance fraud scheme - and still be picked up questioning and possible charged if she was found in possesion of circumstantial evidence linked to that type of crime. Its pretty much routine.
Nah. Nothing much has changed (at least in this particular case) except it made the media. (If she was implicated in a child pornography ring, and found with lolikon on her PC - I bet you'd be among the first frothing at the mouth to hang her high.)
Oil platforms are not even remotely comparable - because their heavy gear isn't moving in the seaway, unlike the 'ducks'.
That's assuming I've no experience in those professions, or similiar experience. (Which I do.)
Not having to go in deep water means they have to go into a place thats even more difficult to be - the shallows. Wooden houses on stilts are rarely where there are significant wave action, and jetties don't have moving joints between the supporting and supported structures like the 'ducks' do.
Had I made that argument - you'd have a point. But I didn't.
The costing by the 'duck' proponents *is* an fantasy - because they don't even know if the damm thing will work (they haven't built anything resembling a prototype).
As is typical - Slashdot leaps before it reads.
This isn't a plan by 'India' - it's a pipe dream (and an unfunded one at that) by the head of the Indian equivalent of NASA. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Mostly because there aren't any comparable structures to compare it to. Mostly because existing structures that can survive storms (even when they aren't mechanically complex like these ducks) are fairly expensive. Etc... Etc... The sea is a harsh and cruel mistress.
Well, when I plugged in my adress; The location it put the pushpin is two houses down and across the street (Google's is precisely in the middle of my porch), and the imagery is the same 8+ year old images of my area that Terraserver has. (OTOH, Google's imagery is about 4+ years old.)
No. They are alienating 20% of web users - how much that set overlaps with the set 'potential users' is open to debate. (I bet it's not much overlap - as Target aims at the middle-class market who want to think of themselves as being a cut above the Wal-mart crowd. Guess which market is most likely to be 'someone running IE6/7 on Windows XP and a modern PC'?)
I can't speak to other systems - but I worked with three generations of US SLBMs, and yes - they'd function across the end of year changeover.
It's not that they haven't been *able* to fix, but that they don't *want* to fix it. Plus, it's not really 'simple' code - Guidance and Navigation both depend on the calendar date *and* Mission Elapsed Time. Thus, you need to rework that code, or plug in an emulator that will translate.
Part of those high standards is to not dig into working code *unless absolutely needed*. Given that there are 342 possible launch dates for a two week shuttle mission that don't violate the end-of-year constraint, and only 13 that do... The extreme conservatism of those standards dicates that you don't mess will the calendar/timekeeping code, and take extreme measures to avoid messing with the vital navigation and guidance code given the low percentage of the time the constraint will actually effect flight planning.
No, the selfish behavior is the belief that your needs and beliefs overrule those of other people.
Again, your logic fails utterly - because the blame in many of those instances isn't placed on those responsible for 'fix', but those responsible for 'creating' (or 'enabling'). (These may or may not be the same people.)
No, it's an example of a zealot hurling FUD to explain why he is better than others and justifying his ego driven choice to bring light to their lives.
If that were true, sure. But your analogy fails right out of gate - as users tend to 'puke' on their own doorsteps rather than the maintainers. (And nothing of this sort was noted in TFA, you merely assume it exists - which is not a given.)
Given the failure of the internal logic of your analogy - your excuse for zealotry fails as well. (Which doesn't surprise me - because selfish behavior is rarely logical.)
Sure it works - but not even remotely to specs. Wikipedia consistently claims that 'problem articles' are (supposedly) caught and fixed in fairly short order. (Minutes to hours is the figure most often bandied about.) Yet here, and in the Siegenthaler Affair, is a case of a problem article that persisted for months.
Not particularly. It's not unheard to fail to eject, or to have the ejector fire without being commanded to do so.
The FB-111 capsule escape system has been used (IIRC) 20-25 times across its history in US service - and one or both of the crew was severely injured each and every time. In the aviation community ejecting from an aircraft is reffered to as "attempting suicide to avoid being killed".
Simply using the LES (Launch Escape System) is not a complete solution - because during test countdowns the full air-sea rescue teams are not deployed (and the white room is still in place), but there is still a possibility of an accident requiring the astronauts to evacuate.
Even during a real countdown - riding the LES isn't always the best option. The white room may still be in place blocking the capsule from departing. If the white room is still in place - there may be personnel there who need evacuation, and *they* can't ride the LES. The incident may be threatening enough to require crew evacation - but not threatening enough to destroy the vehicle. (Firing the LES is pretty much an irrevocable step.)
If I were your friend, I'd not thank you for imposing your [religious|political] beliefs on me. *Especially* when such beliefs mean I have to change out virtually everything familiar to me on my computer, and limits my choices in the future of games and applications. (Seriously, would you walk into your friends house and dump all of his food in the trash, or all his books or clothes? Because emotionally - that's what you are doing.)
What is it about Linux that leads people to such acts of zealotry?
At that level of description - building a computer isn't too hard. Just wire yourself a bunch of transistors, lights, and power supplies together. (I.E. no, contrary to popular belief, its not that easy. Its not all that hard - but there much more to it than the OP seems to believe.)
I'm not so sure about that, the basic design of a weapon is pretty straightforward and can be derived directly from the laws of physics. The *hard* part is converting that basic design into an actual engineering design - and the though in the nuclear weapons study community is that there is likely to be one or more nonobvious tricks to creating a working design. (This viewpoint is reinforced by the recent failure of the NK test.) Another issue is that preparing the raw materials is pretty straightforward chemistry - while designing a weapon requires a whole host of other disciplines.
For very small values of 'well-documented', yah.
This only partially true - because any archeologist/sociologist worth his salt will quickly realize that Wikipedia reflects only a small subset of the population at large, and via its editorial policies its coverage of various topics is decidely warped. (POV is vital in analyzing literary sources - and Wikipedia's NPOV bias removes traditional POV bias and substitutes a new form.)
Hubble will be a (partially) newer telescope with the installation of newer instruments, as the instruments as as important (if not more important) that the mirror. (The is why dozens of scopes. smaller than Palomar for example, are still in daily use.)
Furthermore, cancelling Hubble does not mean that the money can be spent on better telescopes - because Federal budgeting doesn't work that way. The Webb is budgeted (by Congress) independently of Hubble. In fact, a compelling arguement can be made that without an existing scope to compare to - the chances of the JWST being funded to completetion *decrease*. (And thats a key point to understand - it's easier to get money for something that exists and is in operation, than something that doesn't and isn't.)
Because your original arguement was the Webb was a replacement for Hubble (which as I pointed out, and you subsequently agreed, it is not).
I have no need to rethink my replies - because mine have been consistent from the start. You are slinging mud and FUD about and hoping it impresses someone.
What makes you think I haven't considered it? Resolution is but one metric for comparing one telescope to another. (Just as hunting for extrasolar planets is but one research path being followed by astronomers.)
This is a very confusing paragraph because it merely repeats my own arguments back at me - and refutes your own earlier argument...
Here's a hint: Hubble can see objects in the visible band that cannot be seen from the ground - because they are too faint.