I'm not "thinking about it that way", I'm stating the stone cold truth of the results of the media-hype driven "fears". The reality was that Russian stunts were just that, stunts. Militarily speaking, the US had far more capability - capability we refused to use (at first) in the space race for political reasons.
The Space Race, was a publicity stunt, but a damn good one that really helped America and the world. It helped make people optimistic.
A belief strongly held by the Space Cadets - but one for which there isn't one single shred of evidence to support. In fact, all the evidence runs the other way, the general public didn't particularly support the Space Race and didn't care much one way or another. Most escapist literature in fact got it's start in the 60's and 70's...
If you grew up in the 70's and 80's the Idea that you could be an astronaut, or working in that fancy ground control room with all those monitors, inspired people to try new things study Science and Engineering.
I grew up in the 70's, and was thought odd because I wanted to be an astronaut. Yeah, it inspired a few people, but at great cost to the future of space exploration. (And, interestingly enough, the people most inspired laid the foundations for the "success stories of our age" that you decry.)
"The Soviet Union got us moving then. Perhaps Russia will do the same now."
Back then those in power and the people in general cared that the Russians could do something we could not.
This. The Space Race was a dick size contest of the type that most people deplore today. It also was ultimately a sterile exercise that left a whole bunch of people convinced that space exploration is all about Boldly Going and Big Stunts - rather than the reality of exploration, which is that most of it deadly dull daily stuff. This mistaken belief has done more to hold back space exploration than any apathy of the Administration or budget cut from Congress.
When will we see a scalable local/organic logistics solution for delivering food to a large metro area?
Never. When you're supplying a large metro scale area, you're supplying in industrial quantities. You're simply changing the nature of the industry, not replacing it.
Setting aside of course that proving fresh vegetables in winter to many cities in the US requires energy - whether for transporting it from a distant and more clement clime, or for providing heating and possibly lighting for local growth. So far, transport is far more efficient because the energy requirements are lower.
And if I were buying kitchen knives I would look for a company with a proven track record in general hunting/utility knives more than anything else.
If I were buying kitchen knives, I'd look for a company with a proven track record of producing *gasp* kitchen knives.
A company is just not going to lose their steel forging skills when they produce kitchen knives
Nor will they gain the appropriate design skills when they add kitchen knives to their existing hunting/utility lineup.
Kitchen knives are generally thinner and lighter than hunting or utility knives, and also have specialized shapes that are different from hunting and utility knives. They're generally made of different alloys, as a kitchen knife is much more heavily used and if being properly maintained must withstand regular application of a steel.
That's my point - the "natural life" of a series as "as long as it continues to generate a profit". If Star Wars had tanked, there never would have been an Empire. Had Empire tanked, there never would have been a Return. Etc... etc... When the books/comics/toys/whatever stop making money, they'll stop being manufactured.
Yes, seek assistance from a mental health professional before your obsessive/paranoid behavior tips over into full blown illness.
Seriously, hiding something in a field against a one-in-a-billion combination of events - and then posting an Ask Slashdot to see if there's anything more you can do? There's prudent caution, and then there's.... well, you. You've departed the hump in the bell curve of behavior and you're rapidly blowing past the tail of the curve. This doesn't strike me as healthy.
Jesus H. Christ on a tauntaun - every movie in the series from Empire onwards has been nothing but a money grab. Hell, for that matter Star Warsitself was made for the sole and singular of generating a profit.
Related: anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake how they explained that the reason there was all that old tech (phones with cords, manual doors) aboard a starship made with technology hundreds of years superior to our own was that they designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking?
You find it surprising to find that a fictional world is built to accommodate the plot set in it? Seriously, fiction is a very, very, bad way to evaluate things for the real world.
I see no downside to this. There's no reason for our nuclear silos to be networked or to run modern hardware. If it works, don't fix it.
Disclaimer: While I don't play a nuclear weapons technician on TV, I was one in real life. (Fire Control Technician (Ballistic Missiles) Second Class (Submarines), USN Submarine Service 1981-1991.) I've worked with weapons system components (both installed and spare) that were years and decades old, and have studied the issues as a civilian as well.
Actually, there's a number of downsides, most of which should be obvious with a few minutes serious thought:
Spares - as your systems recede ever further from current technology, the cost of spares goes up and the number of potential suppliers goes down. One of things that drove the (many times delayed) conversion of the SSBN's from Trident-I to Trident-II in the late 90's/early 00's was the drying up of the spares pool. (One of the key reasons they were able to delay so long was they were able to rely on a pool of spare salvaged from the older '41 boats when they were decommissioned in the early 90's.)
Maintenance - as components age (and they do age, whether installed or sitting in a warehouse), you start climbing up the right hand side of the bathtub curve. This means that your maintenance costs and downtime start rising sharply and also exacerbate the spares issues. I've personally had to replace cables where the insulation was damaged by aging - and had to go through three sets of spare cables to make up one good one. (And the trainers really kill you here, as they're used and abused much harder than the operational hardware.)
Support - as with spares, the farther you recede from current technology and practices, the harder it becomes to find people and companies with the experience to support and maintain the systems. Eventually you reach a closed ecosystem where the military relies on local tribal knowledge and contractors rely on a pool of specialists that dwindles as the old guys retire. (You can overcome this, but it costs significant money.)
Compatibility - when you (as the USAF has done) upgrade parts of the system but not the rest, you end up with all manner of compatibility issues. You either have to limit the performance of the new hardware, or build specialized interfaces, or build in emulators, etc... (The latter two drive up costs and increase the potential sources for faults and bugs.)
Etc..., etc...
The USAF claiming that older tech makes them more 'safe' is just making lemons into lemonade. (And the situation is mostly a product of how far the missiles are from being a priority.) Mostly, I evaluate the claims as a way to deflect attention from the number of serious incidents they've had recently and from their significant personnel problems.
About 10%. The real driver is the almost zero cost of pSi, who's market price is completely determined by supply/demand.
pSi isn't an element, or a chemical... so, it sounds like you're spouting crap you don't even understand.
In contrast, PV systems in Germany take 2 weeks, end to end, on average. The output may be lower, but the ROI kicks ass.
And this is proof positive of your lack of a clue. The situation in Germany exists because of a seriously distorted market due to subsidies and dumped Chinese panels.
For a mechanical construct, this is still well done.
No, it's not. It's a piece of shit that barely meets the standards of a century ago.
And what is wrong with liking the beauty of mechanics?
Nothing is wrong with admiring the beauty of mechanics. Where you err is in treating it not as something beautiful but as something worthy of admiration. It's as if you were drooling over a $2300 eight digit four function calculator (state of the art circa 1973) for sale today and going "wow, man, they do all that with a single microprocessor!".
Think about it, one minute accuracy over a month realised with only vibrating springs etc. That is technically impressive.
Only to those easily impressed or completely ignorant of the history of timekeeping. A minute a month was bog standard in high end watches (like those that train conductors used) by the start of the 20th century. For a $2300 dollar watch bought around the turn of the 21st, it's a complete piece of overpriced shit.
Close enough. I was fascinated by the thing, and was able to solve it before the books came out--with a little help from Scientific American. They published an article which included a way to annotate moves on the Cube.
That's probably Douglas Hofstadter's article. His non-fiction should be required reading for any geek/nerd. (He was influential enough in the 80's to be immortalized in the novel 2010 where HAL was described as being "trapped in a Hofstadterâ"Mobius loop".)
For some reason people are obsessed with finding a single reason for the disintegration of the Roman empire
Part of it is our increasing addiction to soundbites. Part of it is finding a soundbite cause that (just by chance mind you) matches current political/philosophical bugaboos.
While there were a few brands, corded phones were mostly the domain of smaller manufacturers and were pretty much a bland commodity product. This gathering is of high end brands and manufacturers. Apples and the thing most unlike apples that you can think of.
Asking how it worked out for corded phone manufacturers is like asking high end steakhouse owners if they are "threatened" by a fast food hamburger chain that serves an entirely different demographic.
Yes, that's all very well and good, but have you asked the rich person what s/he will do about this? Actually, you don't need to. They're already doing it. They're trying to completely pwn our political system in order to avoid having to lose that money.
Rich or poor, everyone is trying to game the system for their own personal end.
I've been lurking here forever, and it really wasn't this science-ignorant before
No, contrary to your memory, it's pretty much always been this way. Outside of computer related topics and specific geek topics (Monty Python, or game trivia for example), Slashdot in general isn't very much smarter or more knowledgeable than any other random Joe. Moat days, we're lucky and the moderation system produces a thin facade of not being so, but not always.
i think both of Google's founders were smart enough to understand they were GEEKS and not try to run the business themselves. So they went out and got Eric Schmidt, an experienced industry professional to run things for them.
You must have lived in a bubble back then, failed to read TFA, be a serious fanboy, or some other form of being terminally clueless. It's well known both that Schmidt was hired at the behest of investors, and that Page and Brin weren't particularly happy about it. Slashdot wasn't either back in the day, if you listen carefully you can probably still hear the echoes of the howls.
Probably not. Even as expensive as launches are, they're still only a fraction of the total cost of developing and delivering an operational payload on orbit, and a *very* small portion of the total budget including operations costs.
Do the math on this.
What makes you think I didn't? You don't seem to grasp my point, so I'll repeat it more plainly: Saving money on launches does not mean more money is available for procurement and operations. Goverment budgeting doesn't work that way.
Not really, not if you have a clue or at least don't belong to the Cult Of Elon and wear the sacred blinders. You don't set procurement schedules based on waiting for someone who may or may not ever be capable of bidding on the contract.
As a taxpayer, I wouldn't usually care about these corporate tiffs, but SpaceX can probably save the government hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars which could be used towards additional capabilities in space...
Probably not. Even as expensive as launches are, they're still only a fraction of the total cost of developing and delivering an operational payload on orbit, and a *very* small portion of the total budget including operations costs.
It is boggles the mind that the procurement folks at the air force would sign long term contracts with ULA just a few months before SpaceX has finished jumping through all the Air Force hoops for certification.
Not really, not if you have a clue or at least don't belong to the Cult Of Elon and wear the sacred blinders. You don't set procurement schedules based on waiting for someone who may or may not ever be capable of bidding on the contract.
And yet the Shuttle program was shutdown with a 98+% reliability rating - two failures in 135 launches.
Which is why we've been hitching a ride with the Russians on the much more reliable Soyuz, which has had only two failures in 120 launches....
Only two failures if you only count the Soyuz booster failures. When you add in the multiple failures of the Soyuz spacecraft.... the picture isn't quite so rosy.
But yeah, the Soyuz isn't all that different in reliability from Shuttle. That's the great paradox that the capsule cabal and "cheap+simple=safe" cadets won't recognize.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not "thinking about it that way", I'm stating the stone cold truth of the results of the media-hype driven "fears". The reality was that Russian stunts were just that, stunts. Militarily speaking, the US had far more capability - capability we refused to use (at first) in the space race for political reasons.
A belief strongly held by the Space Cadets - but one for which there isn't one single shred of evidence to support. In fact, all the evidence runs the other way, the general public didn't particularly support the Space Race and didn't care much one way or another. Most escapist literature in fact got it's start in the 60's and 70's...
I grew up in the 70's, and was thought odd because I wanted to be an astronaut. Yeah, it inspired a few people, but at great cost to the future of space exploration. (And, interestingly enough, the people most inspired laid the foundations for the "success stories of our age" that you decry.)
This. The Space Race was a dick size contest of the type that most people deplore today. It also was ultimately a sterile exercise that left a whole bunch of people convinced that space exploration is all about Boldly Going and Big Stunts - rather than the reality of exploration, which is that most of it deadly dull daily stuff. This mistaken belief has done more to hold back space exploration than any apathy of the Administration or budget cut from Congress.
Never. When you're supplying a large metro scale area, you're supplying in industrial quantities. You're simply changing the nature of the industry, not replacing it.
Setting aside of course that proving fresh vegetables in winter to many cities in the US requires energy - whether for transporting it from a distant and more clement clime, or for providing heating and possibly lighting for local growth. So far, transport is far more efficient because the energy requirements are lower.
Why should I care about what some random guy/pseudo celebrity has to say about the future of food?
If I were buying kitchen knives, I'd look for a company with a proven track record of producing *gasp* kitchen knives.
Nor will they gain the appropriate design skills when they add kitchen knives to their existing hunting/utility lineup.
Kitchen knives are generally thinner and lighter than hunting or utility knives, and also have specialized shapes that are different from hunting and utility knives. They're generally made of different alloys, as a kitchen knife is much more heavily used and if being properly maintained must withstand regular application of a steel.
That's my point - the "natural life" of a series as "as long as it continues to generate a profit". If Star Wars had tanked, there never would have been an Empire. Had Empire tanked, there never would have been a Return. Etc... etc... When the books/comics/toys/whatever stop making money, they'll stop being manufactured.
It's all about the money, always has been.
"But there must be more to do!"
Yes, seek assistance from a mental health professional before your obsessive/paranoid behavior tips over into full blown illness.
Seriously, hiding something in a field against a one-in-a-billion combination of events - and then posting an Ask Slashdot to see if there's anything more you can do? There's prudent caution, and then there's.... well, you. You've departed the hump in the bell curve of behavior and you're rapidly blowing past the tail of the curve. This doesn't strike me as healthy.
Jesus H. Christ on a tauntaun - every movie in the series from Empire onwards has been nothing but a money grab. Hell, for that matter Star Wars itself was made for the sole and singular of generating a profit.
You find it surprising to find that a fictional world is built to accommodate the plot set in it? Seriously, fiction is a very, very, bad way to evaluate things for the real world.
Disclaimer: While I don't play a nuclear weapons technician on TV, I was one in real life. (Fire Control Technician (Ballistic Missiles) Second Class (Submarines), USN Submarine Service 1981-1991.) I've worked with weapons system components (both installed and spare) that were years and decades old, and have studied the issues as a civilian as well.
Actually, there's a number of downsides, most of which should be obvious with a few minutes serious thought:
Etc..., etc...
The USAF claiming that older tech makes them more 'safe' is just making lemons into lemonade. (And the situation is mostly a product of how far the missiles are from being a priority.) Mostly, I evaluate the claims as a way to deflect attention from the number of serious incidents they've had recently and from their significant personnel problems.
pSi isn't an element, or a chemical... so, it sounds like you're spouting crap you don't even understand.
And this is proof positive of your lack of a clue. The situation in Germany exists because of a seriously distorted market due to subsidies and dumped Chinese panels.
How much of that is due to Chinese dumping?
No, it's not. It's a piece of shit that barely meets the standards of a century ago.
Nothing is wrong with admiring the beauty of mechanics. Where you err is in treating it not as something beautiful but as something worthy of admiration. It's as if you were drooling over a $2300 eight digit four function calculator (state of the art circa 1973) for sale today and going "wow, man, they do all that with a single microprocessor!".
Only to those easily impressed or completely ignorant of the history of timekeeping. A minute a month was bog standard in high end watches (like those that train conductors used) by the start of the 20th century. For a $2300 dollar watch bought around the turn of the 21st, it's a complete piece of overpriced shit.
That's probably Douglas Hofstadter's article. His non-fiction should be required reading for any geek/nerd. (He was influential enough in the 80's to be immortalized in the novel 2010 where HAL was described as being "trapped in a Hofstadterâ"Mobius loop".)
Considering how good humans actually are (per vehicle mile traveled), that's actually a pretty tall order.
Part of it is our increasing addiction to soundbites. Part of it is finding a soundbite cause that (just by chance mind you) matches current political/philosophical bugaboos.
While there were a few brands, corded phones were mostly the domain of smaller manufacturers and were pretty much a bland commodity product. This gathering is of high end brands and manufacturers. Apples and the thing most unlike apples that you can think of.
Asking how it worked out for corded phone manufacturers is like asking high end steakhouse owners if they are "threatened" by a fast food hamburger chain that serves an entirely different demographic.
Rich or poor, everyone is trying to game the system for their own personal end.
No, contrary to your memory, it's pretty much always been this way. Outside of computer related topics and specific geek topics (Monty Python, or game trivia for example), Slashdot in general isn't very much smarter or more knowledgeable than any other random Joe. Moat days, we're lucky and the moderation system produces a thin facade of not being so, but not always.
You must have lived in a bubble back then, failed to read TFA, be a serious fanboy, or some other form of being terminally clueless. It's well known both that Schmidt was hired at the behest of investors, and that Page and Brin weren't particularly happy about it. Slashdot wasn't either back in the day, if you listen carefully you can probably still hear the echoes of the howls.
What makes you think I didn't? You don't seem to grasp my point, so I'll repeat it more plainly: Saving money on launches does not mean more money is available for procurement and operations. Goverment budgeting doesn't work that way.
No, it's not silly. It's a stone cold fact.
Probably not. Even as expensive as launches are, they're still only a fraction of the total cost of developing and delivering an operational payload on orbit, and a *very* small portion of the total budget including operations costs.
Not really, not if you have a clue or at least don't belong to the Cult Of Elon and wear the sacred blinders. You don't set procurement schedules based on waiting for someone who may or may not ever be capable of bidding on the contract.
I had odd parents - my dad actually got pissed if I used a nickle word when there was a more correct or descriptive dollar word available.
Only two failures if you only count the Soyuz booster failures. When you add in the multiple failures of the Soyuz spacecraft.... the picture isn't quite so rosy.
But yeah, the Soyuz isn't all that different in reliability from Shuttle. That's the great paradox that the capsule cabal and "cheap+simple=safe" cadets won't recognize.