The problem they are experiencing is the same one that most small towns (and some big ones) experience when they tie all their hopes and dreams on one industry instead of using tax revenues generated from that industry to help pull additional industries into their city.
I have to love the black-and-white world that Slashdot sees from it's basement - it's such a simple, easy world to live in. Just spend money - industry will come!
It doesn't work like that in the real world. Doubly so when you're a small town in the butt end of nowhere and far from rail or sea transport. (Triply so when that tax revenue you have is badly needed to bring your infrastructure up to date and maintain it to support the industry you already have.)
the rest of the plant is just a massive structure, much of it radioactive enough to reduce the otherwise significant scrap value and require special procedures, built durable enough that it'll be expensive to demolish) which increases the odds that Maine Yankee HQ will do their best to classify the site as some sort of minimally-operational status in perpetuity, because hiring a couple of guards to wander around and punch the clock is cheaper than fully pulling out, leaving the town with a big derelict structure.
Nice rant, but you're way off base. A little research goes a long way... according to the Wikipedia entry on the plant, it was dismantled and cleanup was completed eight years ago. If you visit the site on Google Maps you can see that all that remains are the fuel casks and a transformer station.
They are hardly alone in that, though. All kinds of industrial processes (especially anything inherited from the good old days when Men Were Men, Cigarettes were a health food, and PCBs were a Miracle of Science), even if their buildings are cheaper to tear down, leave the underlying site in lousy enough shape that it's usually cheaper just to say 'eh, fuck 'em' and choose a greenfield location somewhere else.
Again, you're way off base - brownfield sites are routinely remediated and redeveloped.
No, they're mainly slow because they have the power budget of less than a constantly shining 40W light bulb, during dust storms make that a 5W light bulb. There's a huge trade-off between power consumption and execution speed, give a robotic mission the same power budget as a human mission and it will change drastically too
In a universe where execution time is the controlling factor, your comment would make sense. We don't live in that universe. The controlling factor of the current rovers is the time it takes to make the decisions, write the commands, and test them.
And what would a human do at night? Return to his shelter, which would almost certainly have to be fixed. Opportunity is currently 35km from where it started, that's a 70km commute to do the "afternoon's" worth of work and Mars doesn't have paved roads or gas stations. I doubt you can do it in a Martian day and overnight gear again increases complexity and weight. What we have is slow, but extremely efficient.
Let's put it this way - it took Opportunity three years to drive as far as the Apollo astronauts did in just eleven hours. Even taking away the time that she spent taking measurements or holed up waiting for summer, you still end up with humans being faster by a factor of a thousand or so - because robotic rovers have to wait for the humans on the ground to make up their minds. Not to mention you're a bigger fool than I thought if you only consider exploration as being linear... a radius of ten kilometers encompasses an area of three hundred square kilometers. That's a lot of ground to explore, all within a couple of hours of extremely conservative driving.
Because sending the human currently costs hundreds of times as much as sending the robot.
True, but as usual the "count the pennies" argument ignores what you get for those pennies, robots suck donkey balls are pretty much everything except repetitive mindless work and they're slow as frozen molasses. Humans work much faster, and can make decisions like "is that rock over there interesting enough for a closer look?" in seconds, rather than requiring hours or days to get a picture, send it back to Earth, have the ground based scientists make a decisions, have the engineers look at the maps and decide the routing, write the commands, test them, radio them up, wait for the checksum to come back, and then... finally trundle over to take a look at the rock. (Or, as Stephen Squyres (the chief scientist for Spirit and Opportunity) says - "what the two rovers accomplished together in their first year would have been a long afternoons work for a human".) I believe it was Spirit who took over a week photographing a rock from all sides - a job that would take even a spacesuited human just a few minutes.
Yes, costs matter. But it's supremely ignorant only to compare costs and to not compare what you get for the money.
The X-33 fuel tank problems were never resolved, which means a new spaceplane is going to be about as viable as an X-33 demonstrator, for the same reasons, unless they resolve the storage problem.
Well, since the X-33 tank problems were solved in 2005... I fail to see the point. Not to mention the error of believing that lobed conformal tanks are the only solution.
The DC-X demonstrator worked.
Sure - in the same way a family sedan can be considered a working technology demonstrator for a high performance Formula One racer. (And setting aside the fact that the DC-X never demonstrated the critical dive-and-swoop transition from re-entry/ballistic flight to powered landing.)
The only capability that the DC-X lacks relative to their requirements is the ability to fly real real fast on a sub orbital flight to drop bombs or gather intelligence; instead you'd have to deploy other hardware or ceramic coated rebar once you got to orbit.
Yeah, the only the things DC-X lacks relative to their requirements is pretty much everything specified in the requirements. (Hence my Mercury/Apollo comment.) Did you even read the article, let alone comprehend it?
The X-15 program was *very* successful, with only one serious accident *and* there was a version with drop tanks for greater range/speed.
Yeah... but if you actually read the history of the flights with the drop tanks, going for extreme performance, you'll find there were a lot of problems. The X-15 was an airplane, not a spaceplane, and growing the former into the latter is not as easy as you seem to think. It's like trying to evolve a submarine from a battle tank.
If they had simply continued this line of development instead of stopping everything to put a man in a tin-can on top of a missile, we'd already be going to space casually, for weekend trips and vacations.
Presuming of course that they found cheap and easy solutions to the problems that beset both for the high performance X-15 and the Space Shuttle. That's an awfully big presumption.
Seems a bit redundant compared to simply reviving DC-X.
Of course the DC-X and X-33 were prototype/technology demonstrators - with pretty much none of the capabilities that DARPA wants. They ask for Apollo, and you propose reviving Mercury. What exactly would this accomplish?
In other words they are making this shit up for some unknown reason.
This. Worse yet, when you follow the Wikipedia link you find that "Shadow Banking System" isn't a real term - it's a buzzword that nobody even agrees on the meaning of. There's been a wide variety of tinfoil hat krep posted on Slashdot over the years, but this one takes the cake.
It's possible, but I don't know how much information on the details of submarine design would have been available to the general public. There's also the consideration that many [military] command centers, based largely on WWII CIC experience, were converging on the same general design in the 1950's - a central command station surrounded by action and information stations and facing facing one of more master status and station displays. (Even NASA's MOCR follows the same general pattern.) So there's lots of places for the information to have filtered down to Roddenberry and the set designers.
So the Enterprise bridge design takes its inspiration from US Navy Submarine design?
It's possible, but I don't know how much information on them would have been publicly available back then. But to be honest, based largely on WWII experience with CIC design, a lot of command centers were converging on that same basic design in the 1950's - a central command station surrounded by action or information stations and facing one or more master situation displays. Even NASA's MOCR followed the same general pattern.
As it turns out, the layout of the bridge actually has a functional effect. Submarines as well borrow elements of the Enterprise layout -- our nuclear submarines, for example.
That's a commonly held belief among Trekkies - but it's complete and utter bullshit. The control rooms of (US) nuclear submarines reached essentially their modern form in the Barbel class, the first of which was launched in 1958. There have been some refinements over the years but even the control room of the current Virginia class is a direct descendent of Barbel's. Examining submarine control room layouts pre- and post- Star Trek shows no change that can be attributable to it's influence.
If you can dig up a copy, Friedman's U.S. Submarines Since 1945: An Illustrated Design History dedicates a good chunk of one chapter (and several pages of diagrams) to the evolution of submarine control rooms from WWII through the early Los Angeles class.
(Why yes, yes I am a former submariner and a student of their history.)
Yeah, just pretend I typed in what I meant to type in "The D5, which has had over a hundred operational test launches, has had 100% success". (Operational test launches are production tactical missiles, the one that failed was a PEM bird - a non tactical development missile.)
Let me illustrate. So I have a burger, and I serve it to people. One costs 1 dollar and another costs 10 dollars. Does the 10 dollar burger have better quality?
I don't know - and you don't provide sufficient information for use to decide as you simply present us with two boxes in identical plain wrappers.... but with different price tags. You didn't 'illustrate' anything.
But in the real world, yes, a $10 hamburger can be of much higher quality than a $1 one. (But not always, because there's a lot that goes into costing out that burger.)
Its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world
That's not really an apt comparison, because despite their name... monster trucks bear little resemblance to real trucks. They're prima donna performers, capable of little else other than looking good and making a lot of noise.
Missiles are expendable. A certain percentage (30% or so?) of malfunctions (or simply non-hits) is expected.
Actually, no. At least on the strategic side of the house, 98-99% plus were expected to hit their targets. (Which is about the same percentage of successes as space launches.) The D5, which has had over a hundred launches, had 100% success.
That's why I pointed out today's figures as well - because they have that kind of precision. Not that precision or power are in any way related to the number of launch control crew required in the first place.
The USN boomer force was launching sixteen missiles with just twenty odd people as far back as 1960. (Yes, there were other people on the boat, but they were no more part of the launch crew than the crane operators at Uchinoura.) Today, it's twenty four missiles with the same crew.
Editing is more than just conversion or reformatting - it's also ensuring that the conversion/reformatting operated correctly and did not induce any errors snd that the process produced reasonable and useful output in the target format. (I.E. leave it Slashdot to concentrate on the 1% of the task that can be automated.) Editing is one of those thankless tasks, because done right it's invisible.
I know people in their 40s and 50s that don't even know how to email. Computers and their connections can be a daunting things, especially if you just didn't grow up with it or have a kid around to teach you and fix things.
The mind boggles that you can actually believe that bullcrap. I was in my early twenties when the IBM PC came out (so I didn't grow up with computers) and have no kids (never have). I'm right in the middle of that range (turning 50 in just six weeks), and I have absolutely no problem with technology. (After all, I've had thirty years to learn.)
It's time to kill this idiot myth with fire - if someone in their 40's or 50's doesn't know how to email, it's all on them. Maybe they can't be bothered, maybe they're like the people who can never learn to cook, maybe... well, many reasons. But not growing up with it or having kids around means precisely fuck all.
Somebody has to write the content for the wiki and create all the links - it doesn't happen all on it's own. And few wiki's, even fannish ones, are down to the level of detail described in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to love the black-and-white world that Slashdot sees from it's basement - it's such a simple, easy world to live in. Just spend money - industry will come!
It doesn't work like that in the real world. Doubly so when you're a small town in the butt end of nowhere and far from rail or sea transport. (Triply so when that tax revenue you have is badly needed to bring your infrastructure up to date and maintain it to support the industry you already have.)
Nice rant, but you're way off base. A little research goes a long way... according to the Wikipedia entry on the plant, it was dismantled and cleanup was completed eight years ago. If you visit the site on Google Maps you can see that all that remains are the fuel casks and a transformer station.
Again, you're way off base - brownfield sites are routinely remediated and redeveloped.
In a universe where execution time is the controlling factor, your comment would make sense. We don't live in that universe. The controlling factor of the current rovers is the time it takes to make the decisions, write the commands, and test them.
Let's put it this way - it took Opportunity three years to drive as far as the Apollo astronauts did in just eleven hours. Even taking away the time that she spent taking measurements or holed up waiting for summer, you still end up with humans being faster by a factor of a thousand or so - because robotic rovers have to wait for the humans on the ground to make up their minds. Not to mention you're a bigger fool than I thought if you only consider exploration as being linear... a radius of ten kilometers encompasses an area of three hundred square kilometers. That's a lot of ground to explore, all within a couple of hours of extremely conservative driving.
True, but as usual the "count the pennies" argument ignores what you get for those pennies, robots suck donkey balls are pretty much everything except repetitive mindless work and they're slow as frozen molasses. Humans work much faster, and can make decisions like "is that rock over there interesting enough for a closer look?" in seconds, rather than requiring hours or days to get a picture, send it back to Earth, have the ground based scientists make a decisions, have the engineers look at the maps and decide the routing, write the commands, test them, radio them up, wait for the checksum to come back, and then... finally trundle over to take a look at the rock. (Or, as Stephen Squyres (the chief scientist for Spirit and Opportunity) says - "what the two rovers accomplished together in their first year would have been a long afternoons work for a human".) I believe it was Spirit who took over a week photographing a rock from all sides - a job that would take even a spacesuited human just a few minutes.
Yes, costs matter. But it's supremely ignorant only to compare costs and to not compare what you get for the money.
Didn't read the username of the original poster - but as soon as I saw this, I just *knew* who it was. Scrolled up and I was right.
Well, since the X-33 tank problems were solved in 2005... I fail to see the point. Not to mention the error of believing that lobed conformal tanks are the only solution.
Sure - in the same way a family sedan can be considered a working technology demonstrator for a high performance Formula One racer. (And setting aside the fact that the DC-X never demonstrated the critical dive-and-swoop transition from re-entry/ballistic flight to powered landing.)
Yeah, the only the things DC-X lacks relative to their requirements is pretty much everything specified in the requirements. (Hence my Mercury/Apollo comment.) Did you even read the article, let alone comprehend it?
Yeah... but if you actually read the history of the flights with the drop tanks, going for extreme performance, you'll find there were a lot of problems. The X-15 was an airplane, not a spaceplane, and growing the former into the latter is not as easy as you seem to think. It's like trying to evolve a submarine from a battle tank.
Presuming of course that they found cheap and easy solutions to the problems that beset both for the high performance X-15 and the Space Shuttle. That's an awfully big presumption.
Of course the DC-X and X-33 were prototype/technology demonstrators - with pretty much none of the capabilities that DARPA wants. They ask for Apollo, and you propose reviving Mercury. What exactly would this accomplish?
This. Worse yet, when you follow the Wikipedia link you find that "Shadow Banking System" isn't a real term - it's a buzzword that nobody even agrees on the meaning of. There's been a wide variety of tinfoil hat krep posted on Slashdot over the years, but this one takes the cake.
It's possible, but I don't know how much information on the details of submarine design would have been available to the general public. There's also the consideration that many [military] command centers, based largely on WWII CIC experience, were converging on the same general design in the 1950's - a central command station surrounded by action and information stations and facing facing one of more master status and station displays. (Even NASA's MOCR follows the same general pattern.) So there's lots of places for the information to have filtered down to Roddenberry and the set designers.
It's possible, but I don't know how much information on them would have been publicly available back then. But to be honest, based largely on WWII experience with CIC design, a lot of command centers were converging on that same basic design in the 1950's - a central command station surrounded by action or information stations and facing one or more master situation displays. Even NASA's MOCR followed the same general pattern.
Which is why we rely on parents to teach them - which this couple is failing mightily at. They've gone from one extreme to the other.
That's a commonly held belief among Trekkies - but it's complete and utter bullshit. The control rooms of (US) nuclear submarines reached essentially their modern form in the Barbel class, the first of which was launched in 1958. There have been some refinements over the years but even the control room of the current Virginia class is a direct descendent of Barbel's. Examining submarine control room layouts pre- and post- Star Trek shows no change that can be attributable to it's influence.
If you can dig up a copy, Friedman's U.S. Submarines Since 1945: An Illustrated Design History dedicates a good chunk of one chapter (and several pages of diagrams) to the evolution of submarine control rooms from WWII through the early Los Angeles class.
(Why yes, yes I am a former submariner and a student of their history.)
Submariners don't have that kind of sensibility problems.
Yeah, just pretend I typed in what I meant to type in "The D5, which has had over a hundred operational test launches, has had 100% success". (Operational test launches are production tactical missiles, the one that failed was a PEM bird - a non tactical development missile.)
I don't know - and you don't provide sufficient information for use to decide as you simply present us with two boxes in identical plain wrappers.... but with different price tags. You didn't 'illustrate' anything.
But in the real world, yes, a $10 hamburger can be of much higher quality than a $1 one. (But not always, because there's a lot that goes into costing out that burger.)
That's not really an apt comparison, because despite their name... monster trucks bear little resemblance to real trucks. They're prima donna performers, capable of little else other than looking good and making a lot of noise.
Actually, no. At least on the strategic side of the house, 98-99% plus were expected to hit their targets. (Which is about the same percentage of successes as space launches.) The D5, which has had over a hundred launches, had 100% success.
That's why I pointed out today's figures as well - because they have that kind of precision. Not that precision or power are in any way related to the number of launch control crew required in the first place.
The USN boomer force was launching sixteen missiles with just twenty odd people as far back as 1960. (Yes, there were other people on the boat, but they were no more part of the launch crew than the crane operators at Uchinoura.) Today, it's twenty four missiles with the same crew.
Editing is more than just conversion or reformatting - it's also ensuring that the conversion/reformatting operated correctly and did not induce any errors snd that the process produced reasonable and useful output in the target format. (I.E. leave it Slashdot to concentrate on the 1% of the task that can be automated.) Editing is one of those thankless tasks, because done right it's invisible.
The mind boggles that you can actually believe that bullcrap. I was in my early twenties when the IBM PC came out (so I didn't grow up with computers) and have no kids (never have). I'm right in the middle of that range (turning 50 in just six weeks), and I have absolutely no problem with technology. (After all, I've had thirty years to learn.)
It's time to kill this idiot myth with fire - if someone in their 40's or 50's doesn't know how to email, it's all on them. Maybe they can't be bothered, maybe they're like the people who can never learn to cook, maybe... well, many reasons. But not growing up with it or having kids around means precisely fuck all.
Somebody has to write the content for the wiki and create all the links - it doesn't happen all on it's own. And few wiki's, even fannish ones, are down to the level of detail described in the article.
I take it you'd never been to an airport before 9/11?
Because it's either that, or you're a complete fool, or so hopelessly clueless one wonders how you can function in daily life.
Precisely - it's called deterrence, and it's very hard to determine it's effectiveness.