Umbilicals provide power and such to the shuttle while it is on the pad. The shuttle's batteries/fuel cells provide enough power for the mission, but they like to run it on Earth-based power for as long as possible before setting it on its own power.
Just think of "Demate the orbiter's midbody umbilical unit" as "Unplug laptop" before taking it off your desk.
Mostly correct. Power to the Shuttle systems comes in via the tail service masts (the big white boxes on either side of the rudder when the Shuttle is on the pad). The midbody umbilical probably applies power and support to payloads prior to the payloads being shifted to the Shuttle's systems.
What's great is $60 oil, electric grid going out, router down... it just does not matter. They are totally independent.
Except - they aren't. Their independence is as much as myth as their technophobia. They need steel and iron for tools, etc... Which they've bought from the English since the day they arrived. Ditto for glass (both windows and canning jars), and for ceramics.
This flies in the face with todays elite trying to make everyone 'interdependent'. I find it fascinating.
A claim that flies in the face of the fact that Western civilization has been interdependent since we started coming out of the Dark Ages.
After reading the entirety of the article, it would be hard to dismiss this as an isolated case,
Hmm... The article discusses two cases of incest/rape - so there is no justification to assume that they represent anything other than isolated cases.
but if you do and still consider that they represent some noble return-to-basics society and that their rejection of technology is somehow endearing, there are other sources, and a dedicated blog that may help to change your mind.
The problem is this - these additional sources, and the dedicated blog, are all accounts of the same incident recounted in your first source. They provide no significant additional information (being largely copies of the first source) and no more justification to assume that they are reporting other than isolated incidents.
For example - there were hundreds of news stories across thousands of news source about the London bomb attacks a few days ago, but there was only one series of attacks. The same is true in the evidence you provide - despite it's volume, they all describe one incident.
I appreciate the Make post on how it works, but this product is taking throw away culture to an extreme. The convenience can't possibly be worth all the manufacturing and materials going into a single hot cup of cofee.
Worse yet - the coffee is terrible. It doesn't taste quite like coffee, and the added flavoring is off as well. Nasty, nasty stuff.
It's fascinating - on most topics NASA related, the posters whine about how NASA never does anything exciting, or cutting edge, or leading into the future.
Fast forward to an example of NASA doing just that - and they whine about how it's impossible.
My laptop is more powerful than a 1975 supercomputer that filled a room, but a D cell battery hasn't changed its size in 30 years and today's best D cell lasts what 2, 3 times as long as one from 1975?
The problem is this - computing technology and IC chip technology are not representative of the technology curve in general. This can be plainly seen by comparing said technologies to pretty much any other. Because said technologies have been rapidly changing and so pervasive, people believe the opposite - that they are norm, and everything else is laggard.
We're still running coal-based and oil-based power plants that were built in the '70s. Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
It's hardly unusual for facilities costing in the hundreds of millions to be kept around for decades. The commercial world (heavy industry) doesn't toss stuff into the garbage can every other week the way that consumers do. You cannot directly compare the two - the mindsets are utterly different. (For example; just a few blocks from me is a lathe built in the 1930's to turn propeller shafts - it's still in daily use today becase no replacement is cheaper, and the basic tolerances required haven't changed in that period.)
Overall, you contradict yourself so many times in your reply, it's hard to know where to start.
A vehicle that takes factors such as the weather and the environment into accout may be better off and safer than a spacecraft which does not.
And the Shuttle fails to take into account the weather how exactly? That's right, it doesn't so fail. *No* vehicle can fail to be threatened by a hurricane. (Which is why I pointed out the Falcon V and SS2, both in many respects better than the Shuttle.) Your arguement is the same tired old "anything is better than the Shuttle - it simply has to be!", which is faulty.
Even lesser weather, such as a thunderstorm or severe winds, take considerable structure and control authority to batter through - which means greater parasitic weight and less payload, thus less economic viability.
And even when one does, as does the space shuttle, improvements can still always be made.
No, improvement cannot 'always be made'. Despite intensive research, commercial aircraft weather limits have not significantly improved over the last decade and more. The only exception is visibility - which has been overcome by GPS. All other aspects required improved control authority and greater structural weight - anathema to an aircraft intended to operated commercially.
It seems to me that Mother Nature is a little bit reluctant to let her children leave home and grow up...
On the contrary. She's forcing her children (ie. us) to grow up. That's why she's destroying 30-year-old technology like the space shuttle, thus forcing us to look forward towards new space vehicle designs.
Of course [slaps forehead] - no new vehicle could possibly be threatened by weather.
Idiot. Mother Nature doesn't care who designed the vehicle, or how old it is. If it was a Falcon V on the launch pad - it would still be threatened. If it was SS2 sitting in a hangar - it would still be threatened.
Demand a refund of the tuition, striking the failures off the transcript (he didn't fail because of lack of knowledge, but because of being prevented from taking the final)
Um - pherhaps you didn't read my message. The student was kicked off campus for violating school policy - I somehow doubt the school will be sympathetic.
- or at least have the grades coded as W (Withdrew during semester - UNLV does that - many other universities do - the Fs make it look like the person wasn't competant in their work - which is a misrepresentation and can be actionable)
Given that the student didn't withdraw there is no basis for a W. Given that the didn't complete the work (I.E. the finals), there is no misrepresentation.
and demand return of the knives or sue.
Right - tens of thousands of dollars for a suit over a couple of thousand dollars worth of knives.
Pay tuition with a credit card - next time they pull that - do a chargeback.
Those of us who live in the real world know that chargebacks are not automatic. We also equally know that the vendor gets a chance to tell his/her side of the case.
Also, if the guard is unarmed, you can resist. In many cases guards are not allowed to use force, and you can't be convicted of resisting arrest or something similar (check your state laws to be sure). There is a risk of being hurt - but in that case you can often sue.
There have been several proposals in the UK to require registration of all knives, including kitchen knives.
[nods] My sister is attending a culinary school attached to a community college in California, several culinary students have been booted from campus for carrying their knife kits to and from class.
In one incident my sister was part of - one of her class mates had opened her toolboox to loan my sister a melon baller. A campus rentacop was strolling by and saw the knifes in the toolbox - the knives were confiscated and the student suspended for thirty days. He thus lost nearly a thousand dollars worth of knives, and his tuition for the quarter, since he failed from being unable to attend the finals.
For the non chefs out there - having the school provide the knives and keep them in the kitchen is a nonstarter. Firstly, you typically you need the knives in several different classes a day. Secondly you really have to know your knives well to get maximum performance out of them - and to a chef, a knife is as basic a tool as a keyboard and monitor is to a programmer. My sister uses the same brand I do - and I could not get the same performance from hers as I do from my own. She sharpens differently than I do, and hence the balance is subtly different and optimized for her hand proportions and mechanics.
While I was being simplistic, you forget that I left off the ~30 Progress flights that support the ISS. That's where the brunt of the human carrying capacity is.
No, you are not being simplistic - you are being ignorant. Witness above where you assign 'human carrying capacity' to an unmanned spacecraft!
Even if we take your figures at face value, 20-21 flights is still significantly more than the four flights required by the Saturn V.
Actually, it's probably considerably *more* than four flights - since your quoted capacity to LEO is based on the 28 degree orbit of Skylab rather than the 56 degree orbit of ISS. It also ignores the deadweight of the shrouds and cargo support/adapter hardware. (For example Skylab's weight included 8 tons of IU - needed by the booster, but not by Skylab.)
And since things would go up in fewer pieces, the number of humans sent up to do construction would be reduced. Which means fewer expensive flights charged toward the construction of the station.
It's less of a savings than you might think. The marginal cost of a single Shuttle mission is around 50-80 million dollars US. OTOH - a single Saturn V costs around 500 million dollars US. (Shuttle flight costs are sensitive to flight rate, whereas Saturn V flights are virtually non sensitive to flight rate.)
Correct. If we were smart, we never would have stuck the ISS there. Its current position is useless as a lunar staging point.
Which is hardly surprising - as it's role isn't as a lunar support base. Even if it were in a more friendly orbit, it's hideously unsuited to being a lunar support base. (More millions to convert it - less saving than you suppose above.)
But the cutbacks during the Clinton administration pushed NASA into being more Internationally Friendly than Exploration Friendly.
Is it painful to be as ignorant as you keep being? NASA's budget wasn't significantly cut during the Clinton years - it was virtually level. The 'Internationally Friendly' NASA was the result of a Presidential mandate. (And for not being 'exploration friendly'... You might look at the history of Cassini and the current Mars rovers, etc... and see on who's watch they were nurtured.)
The ISS will never be useful for anything long term other than just being there.:-/
That's a belief held only by those sad little children who believe that the only thing to do in space is to Boldy Go.
I probably should have been more clear. What I was getting at was because of various other concerns, the engines were poorly engineered and safety issues were deliberately ignored.
Sadly, your 'more clear' version is still not correct. For engines that are (acording to you) 'poorly engineered', they've compiled an incredible record. For engines that had 'safety issues that were ignored', there have been no significant failures. To put it shortly, this version of you dogma is no more supported by facts than the original.
Why would things have changed since then?
The why doesn't matter - the fact is that they have (at least so far as the SSME's are concerned). But knowing that requires leaving off the spouting of dogma and exerting an effort to actually educate yourself.
NASA promised the sky with the shuttle (fast turn around, high reliablity, and high throughput come to mind)
More dogma unsupported by facts - because NASA never promised anything - those were goals of the program, not performance specifications.
when they could not deliver what they had promised, systematically covered it up and ignored good engineering practices.
ROTFLMAO. How can you cover up something that is widely known? Once again, you spout dogma rather than examing facts. (The same for sound engineering practices - because there *are none* in the fields NASA works.)
Has this aspect of NASA changed in 20 years?
Has what changed? Your fantasy NASA? That I can't speak to because it exists in your head.
If you didn't just do a double take, you should have. The booster that lifted SkyLab stuck over 9 times the mass into orbit that current ISS flights do! Just what is going on here?
What's going on? Ignorant comparison of apples and oranges.
Yes, there are 50 flights to ISS during the construction phase - but that includes the manned Soyuz flights, which carry crew, not construction materials. Of the 39 Shuttle flights only about 20-21 of them carry construction materials, the remainder carry crew and/or consumables. 419,000/21= approx 20,000kg/flight. (The missing 8,000 odd kg/flight (on average) from nominal capacity is due to the performance hit caused by placing ISS in the 51 degree orbit that the Russians can reach vice the 28 degree orbit the Shuttles nominal payload is specified for.)
It may have been there intention to make the SSMEs reusable but from what I read in the original Feynman report
[frustrated sigh] You do realize that the Feynman report was written nearly twenty years ago?
The frustrated sigh is because of people who keep quoting that damm report and act as if the Shuttle is stuck in some kind of time warp. The amount of utter ignorance on Slashdot about the Shuttle amazes and frightens me... Here's an incredible ongoing engineering feat with tons of information available on it - and everyone quotes from a twenty year old document as if it were written yesterday.
they were designed so close or past the engineering of the time that they had to be completely rebuilt after every flight anyway.
That was true then, but this is now. They stopped rebuilding them after every flight about 1989 or so, and stopped pulling them for inspection after every flight about 1995 or so. The current Block II SSME's are a considerable improvement in performance and reliabilty over the Challenger era ones.
The problem is that spelling is completely arbitrary.
*Was* completely arbitrary - but that stopped being true among educated speakers of English over a century and half ago.
America obsessed about spelling in post-colonial times and came up with standard dictionaries. Britain didn't care.
They may have started out not caring - but that rapidly changed across the 19th century. By the turn of the 20th, Britain was equally 'obsessed' about the value of education and clarity of communications.
With its odd mix of Latin and Anglo-Saxon words and grammar rules it's complicated enough as it is without weirdo spellings that are unrelated to pronunciation.
In other words - something a child could master a century ago is 'too complicated' for a child to master today?
Knight is spelled the way it is because it used to be pronounced kuh-nig-it (yes, just like monty python).
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Since clearly those 5 justices cannot read,
Nor clearly can you read, or understand what you read. The Kelso decision did not say that property can be taken without compensation. What it did do was add to the definition of of public use, ( which was essentially "roads, bridges, schools and other civic uses"), "and other projects believed to provide benefits to the goverment and by derivation the public, in the form of tax revenues, increase in the availability of jobs or other forms of civic improvement". Which is a very different kettle o' fish.
Look, this memo was written by hispanic Albert Gonzales! The choice bits: "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" and "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Yet, the fact remains, both statement are completely true. Never before has a worldwide war been fought against such a decentralized enemy. Furthermore, the detainees at Guantanamo *do* fall outside the Geneva Conventions. They aren't combatants under arms in the sense of the Conventions, and they aren't ['irregulars'|saboteurs|spies] in service of a nation state either.
That is emphatically NOT to say that the Administration's treatment of them is correct, as it patently is not. They are people, and do have basic rights to legal counsel, fair treatment, etc... etc... But it's ludicrous to claim that they are covered by either the Conventions or by tradition.
Things like Free Speech, etc, are fairly clearly laid out in the Bill of Rights, no amount of RIAA politicing will CHANGE the bill of rights. Its just a matter of getting the right cases to the Supreme Court so that they can smack down laws that are in violation of those rights. The reason many things like the DMCA survive is because nobody will challenge them to the degree neccessary to get them to the Supreme Court.
The reason such things survive is that the opposition's position can fairly be described as "fuck the big corpseorations, i can fucken download whatever i want, i have all the right and they have fuekn none". Until a philosophical basis can be formed that is somewhat more mature than that - matters won't improve no matter who sits on the Supreme Court bench. The massive improvements of the early 20th Century didn't come about because the public sat on it's collective fundaments, nor did it come about because they whined and moaned on the equivalent of Slashdot (old fasioned op-ed pages and letters to the editior). It came about because people were able to erect a rational philosophical basis, and use that to convince people to get to the polls.
The Senate has never in its history been so owned by corporations.
Such a statement suggests you haven't actually studied any history. The remainder of your comment simply confirms it.
If the Senate has ever been well and truly owned by Big Business, it was in the latter half of the 1800's up until the early years of the 1900's. (Today's big business has got nothing on the Robber Barons of yore.) Public sentiment (and voting) broke that logjam - trustbusters, support for unions, more liberal work and health policies, etc... etc...
I can just imagine what the future holds- the 6 day work week, 9 hours a day.
That future will come true because of individuals like yourself, who believe illiterate rants on the internet and a 'gimme gime gimmee, I g0t rights und nobdi3 else does' attitude are a reasonable substitute for philosophy and discourse.
Anyway, to my non-lawyer mind it's easy to see the letter as an attempt to protect himself from a shitload of legal trouble if/when the company's bad acts came to light,
And that's just the thing - this letter provides no such protection - in fact it provides evidence that he continued to work at the company after becoming aware of the illegal/unethical acts. He names himself as an accomplice and conspirator. He admits to writing the a portion of the code while in the companies employ. He admits to continuing his employment and participation after becoming aware of the illegal/unethical acts. A DA would call this letter a confession.
BTW, by the same analysis they may have just bought themselves a world of pain. An aggressive DA might make a case for witness intimidation, something that might stick even if they're cleared of any other illegal activity.
He's an employee who made threats against the company and refused to perform his assigned work. It's not witness itimidation, it's protecting the company from from potential harm by a hostile 'insider'. It's hard for some people to believe, but geeks can be wrong.
(P.S., I wouldn't have called the activity "illegal" in the letter. You can raise concerns without making judgments.)
He could hardly have made the letter less professional and more immflamatory - not a good sign if/when this goes to court.
Slashdot Mirror
For example - there were hundreds of news stories across thousands of news source about the London bomb attacks a few days ago, but there was only one series of attacks. The same is true in the evidence you provide - despite it's volume, they all describe one incident.
Fast forward to an example of NASA doing just that - and they whine about how it's impossible.
Even lesser weather, such as a thunderstorm or severe winds, take considerable structure and control authority to batter through - which means greater parasitic weight and less payload, thus less economic viability.
No, improvement cannot 'always be made'. Despite intensive research, commercial aircraft weather limits have not significantly improved over the last decade and more. The only exception is visibility - which has been overcome by GPS. All other aspects required improved control authority and greater structural weight - anathema to an aircraft intended to operated commercially.Idiot. Mother Nature doesn't care who designed the vehicle, or how old it is. If it was a Falcon V on the launch pad - it would still be threatened. If it was SS2 sitting in a hangar - it would still be threatened.
In one incident my sister was part of - one of her class mates had opened her toolboox to loan my sister a melon baller. A campus rentacop was strolling by and saw the knifes in the toolbox - the knives were confiscated and the student suspended for thirty days. He thus lost nearly a thousand dollars worth of knives, and his tuition for the quarter, since he failed from being unable to attend the finals.
For the non chefs out there - having the school provide the knives and keep them in the kitchen is a nonstarter. Firstly, you typically you need the knives in several different classes a day. Secondly you really have to know your knives well to get maximum performance out of them - and to a chef, a knife is as basic a tool as a keyboard and monitor is to a programmer. My sister uses the same brand I do - and I could not get the same performance from hers as I do from my own. She sharpens differently than I do, and hence the balance is subtly different and optimized for her hand proportions and mechanics.
Yes, there are 50 flights to ISS during the construction phase - but that includes the manned Soyuz flights, which carry crew, not construction materials. Of the 39 Shuttle flights only about 20-21 of them carry construction materials, the remainder carry crew and/or consumables. 419,000/21= approx 20,000kg/flight. (The missing 8,000 odd kg/flight (on average) from nominal capacity is due to the performance hit caused by placing ISS in the 51 degree orbit that the Russians can reach vice the 28 degree orbit the Shuttles nominal payload is specified for.)
The frustrated sigh is because of people who keep quoting that damm report and act as if the Shuttle is stuck in some kind of time warp. The amount of utter ignorance on Slashdot about the Shuttle amazes and frightens me... Here's an incredible ongoing engineering feat with tons of information available on it - and everyone quotes from a twenty year old document as if it were written yesterday.
That was true then, but this is now. They stopped rebuilding them after every flight about 1989 or so, and stopped pulling them for inspection after every flight about 1995 or so. The current Block II SSME's are a considerable improvement in performance and reliabilty over the Challenger era ones.That is emphatically NOT to say that the Administration's treatment of them is correct, as it patently is not. They are people, and do have basic rights to legal counsel, fair treatment, etc... etc... But it's ludicrous to claim that they are covered by either the Conventions or by tradition.
If the Senate has ever been well and truly owned by Big Business, it was in the latter half of the 1800's up until the early years of the 1900's. (Today's big business has got nothing on the Robber Barons of yore.) Public sentiment (and voting) broke that logjam - trustbusters, support for unions, more liberal work and health policies, etc... etc...
That future will come true because of individuals like yourself, who believe illiterate rants on the internet and a 'gimme gime gimmee, I g0t rights und nobdi3 else does' attitude are a reasonable substitute for philosophy and discourse.