I'm still trying to figure out what my comment about Joan -- white Joan -- had anything to do with Kelly. Yes, I walked on egg shells around Kelly from then on.
If you're so ill educated as to not know what "integration" means with regards to race, and so blitheringly stupid as to not be able to Google it... you should walk on egg shells around Kathy - so as not to be a future cause of problems.
Fantastic for any online purchases you make. But, in reality - how many times are CC #'s getting stolen online vs in real life?
My debit card was among those believed to be compromised in both of the recent Big News breaches (Target, Home Depot) and all my purchases at both were physical stick-a-card-in-the-reader purchases, not online. So, these things do happen in real life.
Who makes all these cool fannish items? TFS (because there isn't a TFA) would love to have us think it's Michelle and folks like her... But I suspect that the vast majority of the time, it's the guy (or gal) carrying it around or one of their close friends. If not, it's a cheap Chinese knockoff from an online store, or a less cheap (in dollar cost anyhow) Chinese version from Toy 'R Us. Vendors and tailors like Michelle selling detailed props and costumes of any significant quality are actually pretty rare.
Outside of the pop culture hype and exploitation machine that is Comic-Con, there's a strong self-Maker culture among fandom and it's one that's also usually deeply concerned about budget. Not mention that most of fandom doesn't give a hoot about whether or not your costume is perfectly accurate (they leave that for the SCA*), it's the attempt that counts the most.
*I kid, I kid... I'm a long time player in the SCA.
What the OP is doing is what few people really are - placing the risk of the flying on SS2 in context. Given an equal level of risk (say, the Shuttle's demonstrated roughly 2%), I'd fly on the Shuttle to the Station any day - there's real (if unsexy) work being done there. You couldn't pay me enough to fly SS2 on a thrill ride. (OK, you probably could, every person has their price... but it wouldn't be cheap.) It's worth it to others, but not me.
Except that the laws regarding home-built firearms are very well established and have been well fleshed-out. Believe me, a lot of the corner cases have been adjudicated. Wilson is selling a milling machine. People put hunks of metal in it. A CNC program runs on it. A home-built firearm comes out. That makes Wilson's machine no different from any other CNC milling machine.
Certainly his machine is no different than any other machine - but his businessis different from any other business selling those machines. His business isn't selling generic machines to generic people, it's selling them to specific people with a specific intended purpose. You're behaving like the typical geek described by the grandparent - thinking you've found a clever loophole. Stripe is behaving like the judge described by the grandparent - examining the spirit of the law and the Wilson's declared intent.
Shift work wrecks your social life. Your friends never know where you're at, so they don't include you in their plans
I never had a problem with that when I was on shift work... but in the interest of full disclosure this is a Navy town and pretty much everyone has at least a sailor or yardbird or two in their social circle, so dealing with weird schedules is pretty much a part of daily life.
Recruiters come in many different flavors. The younger tech worker will. more likely than not, deal with younger and less experienced recruiters. More experienced prospectives get handed off to the more established recruiters. And, since they get a commission based on things like the salary of the hire, to the victors go the spoils, right? The less experienced have to deal with more perspectives in order to earn enough for a bite to eat. It makes them hungry. And, it can make them rude.
An important point.
My anecdotal bit... A friend of mine has had pretty much no problem with recruiters when he's been job hunting - because he shops for recruiters with the same diligence he shops for jobs. And when he had a job, he quickly learned which headhunters had their emails sent right to the bit bucket, and which were worth at least opening.
Not all recruiters or head hunters are created equal, if you take pot luck, you get pot luck.
As Branson said, this is the cost of space travel, we have known this for a long, long, time.
Sure, a significantly higher chance of an accident and death is a normally expected cost of space travel. But a ride on SpaceShipTwo is no more on par with what we'd normally consider space travel than tourist cruise to Antarctica is on par with the voyage of the the Endurance. It's a Disneyland ride, not exploration.
While I am all for commercial space programs, I am a bit confused why NTSB is involved at this point. This was a test flight for what will never really be commercial travel for the masses.
FWIW, the NTSB is involved in quite a bit more than just "commercial travel for the masses". You're probably just used to only/almost exclusively seeing them associated with commercial airliner crashes because they make the national (and international) news, while probably most of what the NTSB investigates doesn't. Take a look at their list of major open investigations, from a quick scan on my first cup of coffee it looks like probably only 25% or less made the national news. (And the major investigations list are only the tip of the iceberg.)
That being said, this was a test flight of a vehicle in the process of being certified by the FAA to carry paying passengers - and that places it in the NTSB's purview, same as the 787.
How many "rich boys" died testing initial aircrafts? or when very early cars were being bought and tested?
The difference is - those things opened up economic opportunity (as you correctly point out). Absent technological breakthroughs that are almost tantamount to magic, or some alteration in economics that amount the same... SS2 is pretty much an evolutionary dead end. Air launch schemes don't scale, largely because the carrier aircraft grows larger and more expensive far faster than the passenger capacity and range of the carried aircraft does. (Mathematically, it's the same problem orbital boosters face - doubling the size of the payload delivered requires a fourfold increase in the size of the booster.)
Supersonic aircraft face the same problem, and after fifty years we're still in the same place - they drink too much fuel and require expensive and exotic materials to build. We still (despite five decades of work) don't know how to build one that will economically cross the Atlantic*, yet alone one that will cross the Pacific at all.
All technologies were initially affordable usually only by the rich however.
And many remained and remain that way to this day. Private aviation certainly isn't within the reach of the average Joe. Nor are cars of significant performance. (The performance of cars that the average Joe could afford topped out in the late 60's/early 70's.)
Or to put it another way, your argument is just a variant of the "they laughed at Columbus" fallacy - forgetting that they laughed at Bozo The Clown too. It's nice to look at the technologies that did pan out, but as Paul Harvey so often pointed out - there's more to the story than that. A lot more.
*The only reason Concorde was even remotely economical (and even then it remained a rich man's toy) was because the operators didn't pay the full fare - they were basically gifts from the Government and the development costs were written off.
I think you ought to learn more about what the market is for suborbital before telling us about all the magic that needs to be done.
I know what the market for suborbital is - and the difference between suborbital and the usual meaning of "cheap access to space". Unlike the fanboi's, I debase the meaning so I can sneak SpaceShip Two in.
As I've noted before, Scaled Composites has demonstrated that they can design and build such things
Since they haven't designed and built an aircraft with anything even remotely resembling those performance characteristics... no, they haven't demonstrated the ability to such things.
An iPhone is not the same as an Android, but it is still a type of smartphone.
Which is a meaningless comparison because they are the same thing. Calling these pilots "explorers" is placing them on the same plane as Amundsen, or Aldrin, or Magellan - which they patently were not. (Which is why we have different terms for smart phones and not smart phones - they aren't the same thing.)
Like somebody else mentioned earlier, you used to have to be pretty wealthy to be able to afford privately owned automobiles and airplanes. At that time, everything you just said applied to those as well.
You *still* have to be pretty well off to own an operate a private aircraft. (And what cost reductions there have been are more due to wide adoption and mass production.) And what brought down the cost of automobiles wasn't technological breakthroughs in the vehicle, but a sea change in how the vehicle was manufactured.
So no, neither situation is even remotely applicable. And seriously, this being Slashdot, I shouldn't think that I need to explain this... (On the other hand, it is a thread about space, and pretty much all space fanbois are clueless and self delusional.)
Yes, I know how progress works. You just repeat tripe in a cargo cult like fashion and with no more comprehension of the meaning than that possessed by the coffee cup at my elbow.
The difference between the current state of the technology, and that required to scale into cheap useful access to space requires what amounts to magic - and it doesn't matter whether it's in a bunch of small advances or One Great Leap. It's the difference between the Wright Flyer and Concorde either way, and not very likely due to the cumulative size of the change.
The meth head is glad that not everyone shares the viewpoint that drugs are bad. That doesn't make taking meth a good idea.
Using a strategy like selling rich people seats so they can be the first ones up there is perfectly satisfactory to get the technology developed and bring costs down an open it up to a wider audience. It's not a zero sum game.
No, it's not a zero sum game. But that doesn't mean the game is what many people think it is - because this game, this technology, isn't Tesla. There isn't a straight line funded by wealthy adopters from a rich man's toy to a game and world changer for the commoners. Absent several technological breakthroughs that are each tantamount to magic - this technology doesn't scale to cheap, useful, access to space. It's pretty much limited to being a thrill ride.
I thank the explorers who take these risks, sometimes at the cost of their lives.
Are you out of your friggin mind? No disrespect to them, but these guys weren't explorers. They were testing a commercial craft, no different conceptually from the guys Boeing hires to give an aircraft fresh off the assembly line a quick spin around the sky. They should be mourned, but for what they were - brave individuals doing a difficult job, not for something they weren't.
Engineering and operating equipment at this level requires a certain level of being fairly clinical and detached about it, and not devolving into a screeching monkey while it's happening.
I wish I could dredge up some examples, but I seem to remember seeing some things which some of the astronauts said in the middle of a crisis which made them sound like it was just a little thing, when the rest of us would all be screaming "we're all gonna die we're all gonna die".
Yep. On (USN) submarines, we called everything from a few pints of spilled diesel fuel to significant flooding a "casualty" - for precisely the reasons you said. We're concentrating on fixing the problem, not on what's happening or what's going to happen if we don't. The term is specifically used and meant to alert the listener to Pay The Fuck Attention.
When the problem happens, and while it's going on, it's all calm, cool, and collected - freaking out is for over beers when you get home.
Historically, there was a fairly sharp delineation between universities and vocational schools
Actually, there wasn't. Universities *started* back in the Middle Ages as vocational schools, and the modern liberal arts degree is based (very roughly) on their curriculum and philosophy. The idea that universities were purely institutes of higher learning is actually (historically speaking) a rather recent development aimed mostly at separating those institutions who wished to place themselves a "cut above" (I.E. universities that mostly accepted students from the upper class who on graduation were expected to be "gentlemen" and enter a "respected" white collar vocations like Government, the military, or the Church if they entered a formal profession at all) from more "mundane" institutions. At the grass roots level, the general populace never stopped looking at them as vocational school and a stepping stone to employment.
The result was a massive spike in the number of people going to 4-year colleges--that number has sextupled or so over the past 60ish years
You've got your timeline and causes and effects all kinds of screwed up. The "higher learning" idea arose in the early/mid 19th century. Professional law and medical universities in the mid/late 19th century. The massive spike occurred after WWII between veterans and their GI benefits and the sudden spike of "prosperity" and the enlarging middle class which had the discretionary income to send their kids to college.
Your definition of "painstaking" may be different than mine.
Yeah, mine matches the real world - yours and the one you falsely attribute to me... not so much.
"And here we are, with a sum total effort of taking some photos and looking at them, while making up new shit about stuff that we have no evidence ever existed."
Please demonstrate where they "made something up" and where their process went wrong. And take into account they have actual photographic evidence the patch existed. And actual comparison to actual aircraft structure. And actual comparison to aircraft repair practices of the day. And... the list goes on.
The vague mudslinging you're indulging in speaks more to your bias and ignorance than to any error on their part. If you can't demonstrate error, you're just full of shit.
The reason you cannot shoot firearms inside the city limits is because people make mistakes and miss their targets sending stray bullets that could harm or kill someone else.
Correct - stray bullets pose an immediate danger to everyone around them.
This is no different because she could be mistaken and infect others or worse yet, infect the wildlife which will infect others.
False - because she does not represent even the faintest most remote infection risk until symptoms arise that are completely unmistakable.
The two cases are not the same, not even remotely.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're so ill educated as to not know what "integration" means with regards to race, and so blitheringly stupid as to not be able to Google it... you should walk on egg shells around Kathy - so as not to be a future cause of problems.
My debit card was among those believed to be compromised in both of the recent Big News breaches (Target, Home Depot) and all my purchases at both were physical stick-a-card-in-the-reader purchases, not online. So, these things do happen in real life.
Who makes all these cool fannish items? TFS (because there isn't a TFA) would love to have us think it's Michelle and folks like her... But I suspect that the vast majority of the time, it's the guy (or gal) carrying it around or one of their close friends. If not, it's a cheap Chinese knockoff from an online store, or a less cheap (in dollar cost anyhow) Chinese version from Toy 'R Us. Vendors and tailors like Michelle selling detailed props and costumes of any significant quality are actually pretty rare.
Outside of the pop culture hype and exploitation machine that is Comic-Con, there's a strong self-Maker culture among fandom and it's one that's also usually deeply concerned about budget. Not mention that most of fandom doesn't give a hoot about whether or not your costume is perfectly accurate (they leave that for the SCA*), it's the attempt that counts the most.
*I kid, I kid... I'm a long time player in the SCA.
True, and that's something nobody has debated.
What the OP is doing is what few people really are - placing the risk of the flying on SS2 in context. Given an equal level of risk (say, the Shuttle's demonstrated roughly 2%), I'd fly on the Shuttle to the Station any day - there's real (if unsexy) work being done there. You couldn't pay me enough to fly SS2 on a thrill ride. (OK, you probably could, every person has their price... but it wouldn't be cheap.) It's worth it to others, but not me.
Certainly his machine is no different than any other machine - but his business is different from any other business selling those machines. His business isn't selling generic machines to generic people, it's selling them to specific people with a specific intended purpose. You're behaving like the typical geek described by the grandparent - thinking you've found a clever loophole. Stripe is behaving like the judge described by the grandparent - examining the spirit of the law and the Wilson's declared intent.
I never had a problem with that when I was on shift work... but in the interest of full disclosure this is a Navy town and pretty much everyone has at least a sailor or yardbird or two in their social circle, so dealing with weird schedules is pretty much a part of daily life.
An important point.
My anecdotal bit... A friend of mine has had pretty much no problem with recruiters when he's been job hunting - because he shops for recruiters with the same diligence he shops for jobs. And when he had a job, he quickly learned which headhunters had their emails sent right to the bit bucket, and which were worth at least opening.
Not all recruiters or head hunters are created equal, if you take pot luck, you get pot luck.
Sure, a significantly higher chance of an accident and death is a normally expected cost of space travel. But a ride on SpaceShipTwo is no more on par with what we'd normally consider space travel than tourist cruise to Antarctica is on par with the voyage of the the Endurance. It's a Disneyland ride, not exploration.
FWIW, the NTSB is involved in quite a bit more than just "commercial travel for the masses". You're probably just used to only/almost exclusively seeing them associated with commercial airliner crashes because they make the national (and international) news, while probably most of what the NTSB investigates doesn't. Take a look at their list of major open investigations, from a quick scan on my first cup of coffee it looks like probably only 25% or less made the national news. (And the major investigations list are only the tip of the iceberg.)
That being said, this was a test flight of a vehicle in the process of being certified by the FAA to carry paying passengers - and that places it in the NTSB's purview, same as the 787.
The difference is - those things opened up economic opportunity (as you correctly point out). Absent technological breakthroughs that are almost tantamount to magic, or some alteration in economics that amount the same... SS2 is pretty much an evolutionary dead end. Air launch schemes don't scale, largely because the carrier aircraft grows larger and more expensive far faster than the passenger capacity and range of the carried aircraft does. (Mathematically, it's the same problem orbital boosters face - doubling the size of the payload delivered requires a fourfold increase in the size of the booster.)
Supersonic aircraft face the same problem, and after fifty years we're still in the same place - they drink too much fuel and require expensive and exotic materials to build. We still (despite five decades of work) don't know how to build one that will economically cross the Atlantic*, yet alone one that will cross the Pacific at all.
And many remained and remain that way to this day. Private aviation certainly isn't within the reach of the average Joe. Nor are cars of significant performance. (The performance of cars that the average Joe could afford topped out in the late 60's/early 70's.)
Or to put it another way, your argument is just a variant of the "they laughed at Columbus" fallacy - forgetting that they laughed at Bozo The Clown too. It's nice to look at the technologies that did pan out, but as Paul Harvey so often pointed out - there's more to the story than that. A lot more.
*The only reason Concorde was even remotely economical (and even then it remained a rich man's toy) was because the operators didn't pay the full fare - they were basically gifts from the Government and the development costs were written off.
Once again the brutal truth is modded down because the easily bruised egos of the space fanbois can't deal with reality.
I know what the market for suborbital is - and the difference between suborbital and the usual meaning of "cheap access to space". Unlike the fanboi's, I debase the meaning so I can sneak SpaceShip Two in.
Since they haven't designed and built an aircraft with anything even remotely resembling those performance characteristics... no, they haven't demonstrated the ability to such things.
Which is a meaningless comparison because they are the same thing. Calling these pilots "explorers" is placing them on the same plane as Amundsen, or Aldrin, or Magellan - which they patently were not. (Which is why we have different terms for smart phones and not smart phones - they aren't the same thing.)
No, you have that backwards - if that's exploration, then the term is so broad as to be meaningless.
If it's not the same, then why use the same term and implicitly put them on the same plane? That's just debasing the term into meaninglessness.
You *still* have to be pretty well off to own an operate a private aircraft. (And what cost reductions there have been are more due to wide adoption and mass production.) And what brought down the cost of automobiles wasn't technological breakthroughs in the vehicle, but a sea change in how the vehicle was manufactured.
So no, neither situation is even remotely applicable. And seriously, this being Slashdot, I shouldn't think that I need to explain this... (On the other hand, it is a thread about space, and pretty much all space fanbois are clueless and self delusional.)
Yes, I know how progress works. You just repeat tripe in a cargo cult like fashion and with no more comprehension of the meaning than that possessed by the coffee cup at my elbow.
The difference between the current state of the technology, and that required to scale into cheap useful access to space requires what amounts to magic - and it doesn't matter whether it's in a bunch of small advances or One Great Leap. It's the difference between the Wright Flyer and Concorde either way, and not very likely due to the cumulative size of the change.
The meth head is glad that not everyone shares the viewpoint that drugs are bad. That doesn't make taking meth a good idea.
No, it's not a zero sum game. But that doesn't mean the game is what many people think it is - because this game, this technology, isn't Tesla. There isn't a straight line funded by wealthy adopters from a rich man's toy to a game and world changer for the commoners. Absent several technological breakthroughs that are each tantamount to magic - this technology doesn't scale to cheap, useful, access to space. It's pretty much limited to being a thrill ride.
Are you out of your friggin mind? No disrespect to them, but these guys weren't explorers. They were testing a commercial craft, no different conceptually from the guys Boeing hires to give an aircraft fresh off the assembly line a quick spin around the sky. They should be mourned, but for what they were - brave individuals doing a difficult job, not for something they weren't.
Yep. On (USN) submarines, we called everything from a few pints of spilled diesel fuel to significant flooding a "casualty" - for precisely the reasons you said. We're concentrating on fixing the problem, not on what's happening or what's going to happen if we don't. The term is specifically used and meant to alert the listener to Pay The Fuck Attention.
When the problem happens, and while it's going on, it's all calm, cool, and collected - freaking out is for over beers when you get home.
Orbital Sciences launch was being paid for by NASA - how is that privately funded? Otherwise, ULA is a privately funded spaceflight company too.
Actually, there wasn't. Universities *started* back in the Middle Ages as vocational schools, and the modern liberal arts degree is based (very roughly) on their curriculum and philosophy. The idea that universities were purely institutes of higher learning is actually (historically speaking) a rather recent development aimed mostly at separating those institutions who wished to place themselves a "cut above" (I.E. universities that mostly accepted students from the upper class who on graduation were expected to be "gentlemen" and enter a "respected" white collar vocations like Government, the military, or the Church if they entered a formal profession at all) from more "mundane" institutions. At the grass roots level, the general populace never stopped looking at them as vocational school and a stepping stone to employment.
You've got your timeline and causes and effects all kinds of screwed up. The "higher learning" idea arose in the early/mid 19th century. Professional law and medical universities in the mid/late 19th century. The massive spike occurred after WWII between veterans and their GI benefits and the sudden spike of "prosperity" and the enlarging middle class which had the discretionary income to send their kids to college.
Yeah, mine matches the real world - yours and the one you falsely attribute to me... not so much.
Please demonstrate where they "made something up" and where their process went wrong. And take into account they have actual photographic evidence the patch existed. And actual comparison to actual aircraft structure. And actual comparison to aircraft repair practices of the day. And... the list goes on.
The vague mudslinging you're indulging in speaks more to your bias and ignorance than to any error on their part. If you can't demonstrate error, you're just full of shit.
How did they ID the part? Through painstaking detective work, as documented in this report.
Correct - stray bullets pose an immediate danger to everyone around them.
False - because she does not represent even the faintest most remote infection risk until symptoms arise that are completely unmistakable.
The two cases are not the same, not even remotely.