Perhaps you can explain why the static testing Space-X has performed isn't applicable?
Had I said it wasn't applicable, you'd have a point. But the applicability of the static testing is sharply limited because the test stand isn't flight - the environments are radically different.
So why are you so pessimistic?
Because I've studied and am actually familiar with the engineering, issues, and challenges.
Are you seriously so completely ignorant as to think that represents a reasoned argument? (Actually, don't answer that, because I know the answer - despite the complete ignorance displayed, it's one of the most intelligent things I've ever seen you write.)
Only if you're stupid enough to believe that stretching an analogy until it breaks is somehow reasonable and intelligent. When in fact, it's neither - quite the opposite in fact.
Who is this guy and how did he get to be so clueless? He knows some of what he's talking about, but in large chunks he's nearly completely clueless.
the home kitchen and the restaurant industry will always be dominated by authentic foods with a long heritage and a story behind them
The restaurant industry hasn't been dominated by these foods for years now. Well, not outside of the burger chain and delivery pizza, and even they can't resist tinkering. The last refuge of "heritage" food in the US is largely the small mom-'n-pop ethnic or regional restaurant or maybe a small local chain.
It been all about the fusion, fads, and trends ever since a bastardized version of nouvelle cuisine leapt into the mainstream back in the 1980's. This is especially true at the upper end of the market. Even when you can find mass market food that looks like it has "a long heritage and a story", it's more often than Disneyfied and Wal-martized to make it more appealing to the mass market, cheaper, and assembled from standardized industrial components which may or may not bear any resemblance to the actual ingredients of the dish.
Butchering has most certainly changed with the advent of industrialized animal husbandry. Most butchering happens at centralized locations now, with steaks, chicken breasts, and the like being cut, packaged and delivered to the grocery store, rather than an in-store butcher doing the breaking down and packaging. Butchers are a rapidly vanishing phenomenon...you have to really search to find one in most places. The other day, I was at an upscale gourmet market and asked the person behind the meat counter if they could cut some flat iron steaks for me out of the chuck, and they looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and said, "Everything comes already cut and packaged to us. We can't really cut anything for you."
Then frankly, you need to stop shopping at Wal-mart. While it's true they cut down from cryovaced primals rather than sides... the butcher isn't entirely dead (yet). I live in a small town that verges on being on the butt-end of nowhere, and I can get custom and semi custom cuts - at large national chains.
we're planting the seeds of change for that moment when it becomes NECESSARY for us to produce food for our cities inside our cities
For all practical purposes, you can't produce the food needed by a city inside the city - it simply takes too much room (for conventional farming) or too much energy (for non conventional farming).
The only time we'll see sustainable, organic ingredients as the norm is when a fourth of our population is back in small-scale, diverse family farming. And our country's size, comparatively light population density, government, and economy do not encourage that.
The problem with that thesis is that it's utter bullshit. It's not those things that drove people away from farming like that - it's that farming like that makes very little money for the farmer and results in extraordinarily expensive food for the consumer due to inefficiencies and losses inherent in the complicated logistical chain it took to gather all that food from multiple tiny sources and channel it towards it's ultimate destination. Back around the turn of the 20th century, in what became the last days of that kind of farming, the average household spent as much as 30%-40% of it's budget of it's budget on food. That's why the chain grocers exploded so fast in the teens and twenties - they began to industrialize the process, streamlining it, cutting out the middleman, and reducing prices to the consumer drastically. (Seriously, study history rather than repeating the dogma and fantasies of organic wingnuts.)
The organic food industry exists in the shape it does today because we have a minority of people willing to pay
No doubt that SpaceX has put a whole lot of effort into making this work, but it amazes me that people who are otherwise knowledgeable about this kind of stuff can't stand looking at actual results rather than assuming this is just random musings.
So, where are the actual results they can't stand looking at? How many engines has SpaceX reflown even once let alone forty plus times?
What the people actually knowledgeable know that you don't is that NASA was building engines that could be fired multiple times on the test stand as far back as the late 1950's.... and that the test stand isn't flight. They also know that you can't start with no operational experience and leap straight to such a high operational goal as SpaceX is proposing. They also know that they more times you muck with something (I.E. refurbishment), the more chances you have to eff it up. Etc... etc...
Still, I wouldn't categorically write off SpaceX either and it is just stupid to dismiss something like this as impossible without even making an attempt to see if it could be done.
*sigh* Nobody has dismissed anything as impossible. They've only explained (and not without what reads as reasonable justification if you're actually knowledgeable as opposed to arguing from bias and hyperbole) that it's likely to be far more difficult than SpaceX's pronouncements would lead you to believe.
Exactly, SpaceX thinks *outside the box*. This innovative thinking allows them to toss aside all learned wisdom and knowledge from those old dinosaurs at NASA.
Sometimes that leads to innovative solutions. Sometimes that leads to falling flat on your face and learning that the dinosaurs aren't as stupid as you thought. Witness the loss of the first Falcon I.... to galvanic corrosion. The "outside the box" thinkers are SpaceX ignored engineering 101 and the lessons of the dinosaurs.
Innovative thinking, used to build synergy and form a new paradigm, THAT'S what it's all about. The physical reality will follow from that.
Yeah, that's worked for flying cars. And jet packs. The barriers of the laws of physics and economic factors will simply melt away if you're positive enough and use the latest management buzzwords.
However people really get into the narrative of hip young capitalists taking on the stogy old government and shoe horn an adversarial narrative in.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Even if they weren't arguing from bias - the "facts" they bring to the table in support of their biased arguments are actually urban legends and sheer nonsense that have achieved the status of "fact" mostly because they've been repeated again and again for years. Even here on Slashdot (which prides itself on it's knowledge level) most posters are... not actually as knowledgeable as they think they are.
The biggest thing is Space-X is applying modern technology, not 50 year old technology, to their solutions.
That's the thing - there is no modern technology to apply here. There's only ever been one re-useable engine built, and though it was upgraded in the 90's it's basic design dates back to the 1960's.
If you think back to the shuttle design... Most of the work was done on paper, with perhaps a few months on computer simulation.
Space-X with its new design and all computer driven, means they can test fix test and retest in the computer before they build a working system. This allows them engineer to reliability, without a bunch of testing.
Computer models aren't magic wands, they're only as good as the input data to the model. And when it comes to flying engines 40 times... there simply isn't a great of data to base the models on.
NASA spent billions (with a B) of dollars, and for a decade we had not one bolt flying in orbit.
They spent billions because Congress kept delaying and rescoping the project. Then they had to start over again practically from scratch when the President and Congress insisted they had to include the Russians.
I used to call the project the Origami space station, made out of paper.
Announcing "I'm ignorant of reality" is hardly a convincing argument.
It wasn't until the Russians went ahead and launched the first module that NASA got around to giving up on Powerpoint and Viewgraphs and meetings, and actually -did- something.
That's like saying "my neighbor is stupid because he waited until his window was broken to replace it". By the time Zarya launched, NASA had already been "doing something" (I.E. bending metal and building hardware) for years.
I just love it when people proudly proclaim that something isn't possible.
I just love it when people misrepresent what was said. Nobody said making an engine re-useable on the scale SpaceX is planning is impossible, they said it would be challenging and there was reasonable doubt as to if it would be possible based on existing engineering knowledge. And quite frankly, if you're actually conversant with the engineering involved (or at least not extremely biased and and proudly ignorant), the argument isn't completely without merit. SpaceX is headed off into virtually completely unknown territory here.
NASA found that it was not worth trying to reuse the space shuttle main engines after every flight without extensive refurbishment.
*sigh* This myth again. Folks, this claim is a complete and utter fabrication. (And if you read TFA, it's not actually attributed to NASA.) By the mid-90's, while NASA was still removing the engines after each flight, this was solely for inspection - they no longer disassembled or refurbished them between every flight. By the late 90's/early 00's, they'd stopped routinely removing them after every flight, instead inspecting them with fiber optics and only removing them after every three-to-five flights or if inspection showed them to require removal. As is the case with so much science and technology journalism, the author is... not entirely aware of the facts or in possession of a clue. (Sadly, 90%+ of the Slashdot readers replying to this doesn't know these facts, and will attack the article anyhow because it disagrees with their biases.)
That being said, I tend to agree somewhat with NASA on this one. SpaceX has reduced launch costs mostly by applying known engineering and production techniques that had not previously been applied to launch vehicles. (And with the limited number of launches to date, it's far too early to be reasonably analyze if they've truly been successful.) But when you're talking about flying an engine 40+ times... there aren't really any such previously known but unused techniques. They're headed off into largely unexplored regions of engineering and technology.
Slashdot really needs to stop taking Musk's pronouncements as gospel at face value and look at the engineering and the facts.
Don't sneer at the easy/simple/etc... Just because they seem so at first blush doesn't always mean they are so once you get into them. Not to mention, working on the basics never hurts no matter what you're trying to learn.
If you can't grasp what I implied about your statements, it becomes even easier to grasp why you posted such nonsense.
Tragedy has that affect on people when they are left with little to no information about what's happening to them. Which was the point of my post.
If that was your point - why did you say nothing whatsoever to indicate that was your point? Instead you relied on made up bullshit to throw baseless mud at the agencies.
Oh, right, the tinfoil demographic that characterizes Slashdot won't laugh because it plays right to their biases. When that happens, Slashdot's usual capacity for at least a little more critical thinking than the average Joe goes right out the window and the Two Minute Hate commences.
Seriously, the 'study' verges on being joke. The words used were determined to be "sensitive" based on whether or not a bunch of random people would be "embarrassed" or thought "it would get them in trouble" - about as unscientific as you can get. Further, the drop is miniscule, 2.2% below what would be "expected" (and thus presuming their expectations were correct rather than pulled from their ass). Lastly, since we have no idea who was performing the searches in the first place, there's no way to determine if the minor effect has been "chilling" - or "deterrent".
also, could it not be done in a way where we use the salt water in a new type of energy generating plant, that collects the steam and makes it usable?
Not economically, no. Steam plants typically cool the steam just enough to make it condense before sending it back to the boiler to become steam again. This conserves heat and thus the amount of fuel consumed per pound of steam delivered.
As the Network Administrator for the largest independent Primary Care facility in Montana I'm getting a kick out of these replies.
Indeed... every time one of these stories gets posted, we get a flood of the same kind of replies "it's not McHipsterville, so nobody will want to live there". Get the hell over yourselves Slashdot. Not everyone is a McHipster.
It's funny because it was an incredibly accurate description of the beginning of time from a document thats nearly 4000 years old, before they even know what stars, time or space were. The concept of "Formless and Void" are incredibly advanced topics for the time period it was written in. We had no concept of "Void" at the time.
Well, 4000 years ago they didn't say "formless and void" they said "(something in a language that wasn't English)". They only said "formless and void" when the Bible was translated into English. On top of that, if they had no "concept of void"... how do you think they had a word for it in the first place?
Or, I could have followed the directions in TFA and still have Google Earth spending the next hour killing my bandwidth downloading map tiles.
If it would take you an hour to download map tiles, you need to get off your ass and upgrade your 300 baud modem.
"Or, for the incredibly lazy, click here for a click-and-drag map" - Which conspicuously didn't actually include any sort of link?
If you didn't see a link, try upgrading your 1990's era browser.
Seriously, the OP is a jackass for lying and stating the article didn't contain any useful information or links - and you're one for being completely ignorant.
No, that's a site with a map - had you actually read the article, you'd have found it included a way to incorporate the information in Google Earth (a map program, you may have heard of it) as well.
I love how the most modern looking sites with all the share, like, and tracking code embedded into them have the least amount of information...
The article referenced in the summary had plenty of information - including two different ways to get the dark sky maps.
A couple of hundred bucks and who knows how many hours of work and fiddling for movies you haven't watched since your last player died? That seems a bit steep to me.
We just came across a bunch of boxes of old VHS movies, and after some conversation... we're just tossing them in the Goodwill donation box. If we haven't watched 'em in five years, there's no point in going to all the trouble of copying them to a new format. The handful we might have converted, we've long since bought on DVD or Blu-Ray, not knowing this box was buried underneath a bunch of other crap. If our DVD player wasn't a combo DVD/VCR unit, we wouldn't even have hooked the VCR player back up when we re-arranged the living room a month or so ago.
Seriously, unless you have a ton of old (commercial) tapes that simply cannot be replaced, just convert the home movies (and possibly outsource that) and toss/donate the rest. If it's a movie that's in demand and it's one you actually want, odds are it's been remastered if it's available on DVD or Blu-Ray and you can get a copy pretty cheap at your local used disc place.
Its like the story of the 2 bakers that had stores next door to each other, so were both not making much money. One put his prices up, the other put his prices down. Guess which one survived?
That depends on what kind of bakeries they are - if they're high end artisanal bakeries, odds are it's the baker who puts his prices up who will be the survivor. Because he can be seen as offering a better perceived value, while the guy who cuts his prices can be seen as offering 'cut-rate' goods or catering to a lower class of customer. While it's true that in general the American consumer shops on price to the near exclusion of other factors (no matter how much the talk about quality, etc...), there are important exceptions.
T-Mobile has broken ranks with the price-fixing collusion of the big carriers, and are now trying to charge a fairer price and not lock people in, on the basis that Americans aren't actually stupid so will switch to a better deal.
Except... T-Mobile's deal isn't significantly better. They make the bill look smaller by splitting it into two smaller chunks (phone and service), but the total isn't all that different unless you're only buying a POS low end droid. Listening to their commercials on the radio is an interesting excersise in the loud slow voice giving, while the quiet fast voice taketh away.
Slashdot Mirror
Had I said it wasn't applicable, you'd have a point. But the applicability of the static testing is sharply limited because the test stand isn't flight - the environments are radically different.
Because I've studied and am actually familiar with the engineering, issues, and challenges.
Are you seriously so completely ignorant as to think that represents a reasoned argument? (Actually, don't answer that, because I know the answer - despite the complete ignorance displayed, it's one of the most intelligent things I've ever seen you write.)
Only if you're stupid enough to believe that stretching an analogy until it breaks is somehow reasonable and intelligent. When in fact, it's neither - quite the opposite in fact.
Who is this guy and how did he get to be so clueless? He knows some of what he's talking about, but in large chunks he's nearly completely clueless.
The restaurant industry hasn't been dominated by these foods for years now. Well, not outside of the burger chain and delivery pizza, and even they can't resist tinkering. The last refuge of "heritage" food in the US is largely the small mom-'n-pop ethnic or regional restaurant or maybe a small local chain.
It been all about the fusion, fads, and trends ever since a bastardized version of nouvelle cuisine leapt into the mainstream back in the 1980's. This is especially true at the upper end of the market. Even when you can find mass market food that looks like it has "a long heritage and a story", it's more often than Disneyfied and Wal-martized to make it more appealing to the mass market, cheaper, and assembled from standardized industrial components which may or may not bear any resemblance to the actual ingredients of the dish.
Then frankly, you need to stop shopping at Wal-mart. While it's true they cut down from cryovaced primals rather than sides... the butcher isn't entirely dead (yet). I live in a small town that verges on being on the butt-end of nowhere, and I can get custom and semi custom cuts - at large national chains.
For all practical purposes, you can't produce the food needed by a city inside the city - it simply takes too much room (for conventional farming) or too much energy (for non conventional farming).
The problem with that thesis is that it's utter bullshit. It's not those things that drove people away from farming like that - it's that farming like that makes very little money for the farmer and results in extraordinarily expensive food for the consumer due to inefficiencies and losses inherent in the complicated logistical chain it took to gather all that food from multiple tiny sources and channel it towards it's ultimate destination. Back around the turn of the 20th century, in what became the last days of that kind of farming, the average household spent as much as 30%-40% of it's budget of it's budget on food. That's why the chain grocers exploded so fast in the teens and twenties - they began to industrialize the process, streamlining it, cutting out the middleman, and reducing prices to the consumer drastically. (Seriously, study history rather than repeating the dogma and fantasies of organic wingnuts.)
The organic food industry exists in the shape it does today because we have a minority of people willing to pay
Demonstrating that you can produce apples is not reason to assume you can produce oranges.
So, where are the actual results they can't stand looking at? How many engines has SpaceX reflown even once let alone forty plus times?
What the people actually knowledgeable know that you don't is that NASA was building engines that could be fired multiple times on the test stand as far back as the late 1950's.... and that the test stand isn't flight. They also know that you can't start with no operational experience and leap straight to such a high operational goal as SpaceX is proposing. They also know that they more times you muck with something (I.E. refurbishment), the more chances you have to eff it up. Etc... etc...
*sigh* Nobody has dismissed anything as impossible. They've only explained (and not without what reads as reasonable justification if you're actually knowledgeable as opposed to arguing from bias and hyperbole) that it's likely to be far more difficult than SpaceX's pronouncements would lead you to believe.
Sometimes that leads to innovative solutions. Sometimes that leads to falling flat on your face and learning that the dinosaurs aren't as stupid as you thought. Witness the loss of the first Falcon I.... to galvanic corrosion. The "outside the box" thinkers are SpaceX ignored engineering 101 and the lessons of the dinosaurs.
Yeah, that's worked for flying cars. And jet packs. The barriers of the laws of physics and economic factors will simply melt away if you're positive enough and use the latest management buzzwords.
Actually, it's even worse than that. Even if they weren't arguing from bias - the "facts" they bring to the table in support of their biased arguments are actually urban legends and sheer nonsense that have achieved the status of "fact" mostly because they've been repeated again and again for years. Even here on Slashdot (which prides itself on it's knowledge level) most posters are... not actually as knowledgeable as they think they are.
That's the thing - there is no modern technology to apply here. There's only ever been one re-useable engine built, and though it was upgraded in the 90's it's basic design dates back to the 1960's.
Computer models aren't magic wands, they're only as good as the input data to the model. And when it comes to flying engines 40 times... there simply isn't a great of data to base the models on.
They spent billions because Congress kept delaying and rescoping the project. Then they had to start over again practically from scratch when the President and Congress insisted they had to include the Russians.
Announcing "I'm ignorant of reality" is hardly a convincing argument.
That's like saying "my neighbor is stupid because he waited until his window was broken to replace it". By the time Zarya launched, NASA had already been "doing something" (I.E. bending metal and building hardware) for years.
I just love it when people misrepresent what was said. Nobody said making an engine re-useable on the scale SpaceX is planning is impossible, they said it would be challenging and there was reasonable doubt as to if it would be possible based on existing engineering knowledge. And quite frankly, if you're actually conversant with the engineering involved (or at least not extremely biased and and proudly ignorant), the argument isn't completely without merit. SpaceX is headed off into virtually completely unknown territory here.
*sigh* This myth again. Folks, this claim is a complete and utter fabrication. (And if you read TFA, it's not actually attributed to NASA.) By the mid-90's, while NASA was still removing the engines after each flight, this was solely for inspection - they no longer disassembled or refurbished them between every flight. By the late 90's/early 00's, they'd stopped routinely removing them after every flight, instead inspecting them with fiber optics and only removing them after every three-to-five flights or if inspection showed them to require removal. As is the case with so much science and technology journalism, the author is... not entirely aware of the facts or in possession of a clue. (Sadly, 90%+ of the Slashdot readers replying to this doesn't know these facts, and will attack the article anyhow because it disagrees with their biases.)
That being said, I tend to agree somewhat with NASA on this one. SpaceX has reduced launch costs mostly by applying known engineering and production techniques that had not previously been applied to launch vehicles. (And with the limited number of launches to date, it's far too early to be reasonably analyze if they've truly been successful.) But when you're talking about flying an engine 40+ times... there aren't really any such previously known but unused techniques. They're headed off into largely unexplored regions of engineering and technology.
Slashdot really needs to stop taking Musk's pronouncements as gospel at face value and look at the engineering and the facts.
Don't sneer at the easy/simple/etc... Just because they seem so at first blush doesn't always mean they are so once you get into them. Not to mention, working on the basics never hurts no matter what you're trying to learn.
If you can't grasp what I implied about your statements, it becomes even easier to grasp why you posted such nonsense.
If that was your point - why did you say nothing whatsoever to indicate that was your point? Instead you relied on made up bullshit to throw baseless mud at the agencies.
Yes. But then, unlike you, I'm dealing in facts rather than pulling nonsense out my my nether regions.
Whatever you're smoking - you should consider laying off it before commenting. Or at least label your comments with "hallucinogen induced fiction".
Oh, right, the tinfoil demographic that characterizes Slashdot won't laugh because it plays right to their biases. When that happens, Slashdot's usual capacity for at least a little more critical thinking than the average Joe goes right out the window and the Two Minute Hate commences.
Seriously, the 'study' verges on being joke. The words used were determined to be "sensitive" based on whether or not a bunch of random people would be "embarrassed" or thought "it would get them in trouble" - about as unscientific as you can get. Further, the drop is miniscule, 2.2% below what would be "expected" (and thus presuming their expectations were correct rather than pulled from their ass). Lastly, since we have no idea who was performing the searches in the first place, there's no way to determine if the minor effect has been "chilling" - or "deterrent".
Not economically, no. Steam plants typically cool the steam just enough to make it condense before sending it back to the boiler to become steam again. This conserves heat and thus the amount of fuel consumed per pound of steam delivered.
Indeed... every time one of these stories gets posted, we get a flood of the same kind of replies "it's not McHipsterville, so nobody will want to live there". Get the hell over yourselves Slashdot. Not everyone is a McHipster.
Oh my soul for mod points!
Well, 4000 years ago they didn't say "formless and void" they said "(something in a language that wasn't English)". They only said "formless and void" when the Bible was translated into English. On top of that, if they had no "concept of void"... how do you think they had a word for it in the first place?
If it would take you an hour to download map tiles, you need to get off your ass and upgrade your 300 baud modem.
If you didn't see a link, try upgrading your 1990's era browser.
Seriously, the OP is a jackass for lying and stating the article didn't contain any useful information or links - and you're one for being completely ignorant.
No, that's a site with a map - had you actually read the article, you'd have found it included a way to incorporate the information in Google Earth (a map program, you may have heard of it) as well.
The article referenced in the summary had plenty of information - including two different ways to get the dark sky maps.
A couple of hundred bucks and who knows how many hours of work and fiddling for movies you haven't watched since your last player died? That seems a bit steep to me.
We just came across a bunch of boxes of old VHS movies, and after some conversation... we're just tossing them in the Goodwill donation box. If we haven't watched 'em in five years, there's no point in going to all the trouble of copying them to a new format. The handful we might have converted, we've long since bought on DVD or Blu-Ray, not knowing this box was buried underneath a bunch of other crap. If our DVD player wasn't a combo DVD/VCR unit, we wouldn't even have hooked the VCR player back up when we re-arranged the living room a month or so ago.
Seriously, unless you have a ton of old (commercial) tapes that simply cannot be replaced, just convert the home movies (and possibly outsource that) and toss/donate the rest. If it's a movie that's in demand and it's one you actually want, odds are it's been remastered if it's available on DVD or Blu-Ray and you can get a copy pretty cheap at your local used disc place.
Like hell it should. SpaceX was late to the party, and like everyone else should wait for the next round.
That depends on what kind of bakeries they are - if they're high end artisanal bakeries, odds are it's the baker who puts his prices up who will be the survivor. Because he can be seen as offering a better perceived value, while the guy who cuts his prices can be seen as offering 'cut-rate' goods or catering to a lower class of customer. While it's true that in general the American consumer shops on price to the near exclusion of other factors (no matter how much the talk about quality, etc...), there are important exceptions.
Except... T-Mobile's deal isn't significantly better. They make the bill look smaller by splitting it into two smaller chunks (phone and service), but the total isn't all that different unless you're only buying a POS low end droid. Listening to their commercials on the radio is an interesting excersise in the loud slow voice giving, while the quiet fast voice taketh away.