Here's why people apply and who applies: Some do it for the 15 minutes of fame, surely, but many others are serious about it. They know the risk, they know it's a one-way ticket, but their lives are going nowhere on this planet, they've got nothing to lose and this may be just the ticket for them to do something useful for humanity.
That has to be the funniest thing I've read all day.
Airships can no-doubt fundamentally change the arithmetic of delivering supplies to these hazardous and remote locations. If these airships prove to be reliable heavy-lifters
The problem, well known historically but seemingly needing to be rediscovered every twenty years or so, is that airships aren't reliable heavy lifters. They're extraordinarily sensitive to the weather - much more so than any means of transport they replace. Absent heavy and complex propulsion systems (above and beyond that what's needed to travel from point A to point B) or significant ground infrastructure, they can't reliably deliver their cargo to a precise given point. etc... etc... (Worse yet, both of these fundamental problems get worse as the size of the airship approaches any useful cargo capacity.) This scheme doesn't solve the first problem, and probably won't solve the second.
This, seriously. Haselton's entire strawman arguement relies on being completely unaware of the history of and the philosophy behind the processes he questions. It's almost like he didn't even bother to read the answers to his last strawman.
hopefully bringing the era of (more) affordable space tourism even closer.
This is no more 'space tourism' than going to the zoo is 'jungle tourism'. It's a glorified amusement park ride that only goes to 'space' because of an unscientific legal definition of 'space'.
How is bypassing neighborhoods with a high crime rate "racism", unless you yourself are saying high crime areas ALWAYS have people of a certain race...
If the app was about high crime rates, you'd have a point. But it wasn't. It rated neighborhoods based on self reported subjective beliefs from both residents and non residents of the neighborhood.
The bird will need an attitude detection and control system to take advantage of this antenna... decreasing the available weight, volume, and power available for other things. TANSTAAFL.
More than just a few years now... try a few decades. (More like a century in fact.) They're called anti-roll tanks, and were first used around the turn of the 20th century.
As a former service member, the service would be far better off if you just went AWOL rather than staying in and being a weak link. If you weren't ready to obey the orders of those over you (as you swore) and to go in harm's way, you should never have joined in the first place.
Had it been a good point, yours would have been a valid reply. But it wasn't a good point, it was vapid, clueless bullshit that only sounds good to the equally clueless. Like you ad your spew for example.
It must be nice to live in your world where there the option to place such structures in a 'safe' location is always available. (Either that, or you're just an asshat who mistakenly thinks that making such statements as you did makes you like intelligent.*)
Here in the real world - that option is rarely if ever available. We have to make do with the situation that faces us. We have to make trade-offs between building infrastructure where it's at some degree of risk, or not building it at all.
* It doesn't, at least not among those who are actually intelligent.
Create programs which can run when you're not using your computer, which look like multiple browsers and access websites in a random but quasi-human-like fashion. They'll amass tracking cookies, but the cookies will be tracking bots rather than real people. Decrease their signal to noise ratio so much that it's no longer cost-effective to collect people's private data
Are you really so clueless as to think that some very minor pattern analysis won't be able to tell the difference between you and a bot? (And doing that analysis is cheap.) At worst, they'll simply identify that computer/address as having multiple users - which is something they almost certainly already do.
I feared Russian engineering, because they actually could lob a *nuclear* tipped missile over the North Pole or from a submarine (they never solved the "launch from under water" thing, though).
Um... yeah they did. From the Yankee class (1968) onwards they could launch submerged.
I think it IS newsworthy for two reasons : first, it shows yet another example of how utterly fucked the adversarial legal system in the US really is. The goal of this fucked up legal system is to "win", not to find the truth, and the assholes who prosecuted this case ought to be disbarred for their enthusiasm toward suppressing crucial evidence.
What's fucked up is that you can be so clearly and utterly clueless - yet still get modded insightful. The prosecutors didn't suppress evidence - the judge ruled that experts couldn't testify. And that's his bloody job. And reading TFA, I can't say that I think he's entirely in the wrong - because the defense screwed the pooch in the first place. (By not getting a properly qualified expert in the first place, and then by potentially violating the rules of evidence.) Pointing out where the defense screwed up is the prosecutors job, and vice versa.
Second, the news has a technical aspect because the "evidence" of the Google Maps search may have been planted on the machine Cooper supposedly used. If such details as info stored in a browser cache can be the point on which a man's freedom hinges, this is technical news of importance.
Hardly. This isn't the first such case, nor a particularly notable one. "It happened on a computer" isn't enough to make it newsworthy anymore, that ship sailed decades ago.
That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.
I use Yahoo Groups daily, and it really needs to incorporate modern features.
Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.
That doesn't make it true. The design choices and the steps along the way that lead to the Shuttle's final configuration are well documented.
. A join that would not have been there before a design change that allowed different parts to be built in different states had a seal that fell below the glass transition temperature of the polymer in the seal and it fractured. If the join was not there the seal would not have been there.
Those of us who have actually studied the space program know that the reason the joint is there is because the segmented solids were chosen over monolithic solids. Even if monolithics had been chosen, the parts would have been built in different states. Hell, even if monolithics had been chosen, there's a good chance there would *still* be joints in the case in order to avoid handling one whole. So, yeah, you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
So what have you said that is relevant materially to what I said?
What part of "your claim that they should have started with small vehicles is invalid because they did start with small vehicles" are you finding so difficult to grasp? (And no, they didn't "still have the Saturn Ib, it was cancelled years before - the vehicles used for Skylab had been in mothballs for years, they were not new construction. Again, completely clueless.)
The dual-use thing came only because the plans were for more Shuttle than NASA could afford by itself. If they had started with a smaller, less ambitious, and of course, less costly Space Shuttle, then they wouldn't have needed DoD money or gotten those DoD strings attached.
*Sigh*. And again,/. demonstrates it's ignorance of the history of the Shuttle program. Seriously, utter and complete cluelessness.
If you actually study the history of the Shuttle program, you'll find that's exactly what they did. The first Shuttles were small vehicles intended to shuttle crew and very light cargo back and forth between Earth and a space station launched by a Saturn V. Then the Saturn V was essentially cancelled when it was defunded in 1967, leaving the Shuttle without a destination or a purpose.... and the Shuttle began to grow in size and complexity to serve as a flying pickup rather than a flying commuter car. (All the DoD really did was finalize the size of the pickup truck.)
Also the sort of games you describe were the direct cause of the Challenger disaster - a part introduced due to a design change to spread around the pork failed and killed seven.
*Sigh* Seriously, this bit of urban legend bullshit either needs to die in a fire, or people who believe it need to have "too stupid to live" tatooed on their forehead.
Boosters (and drop tanks) were added to save money, correct performance shortfalls, and simplify the design. Solid boosters were chosen over liquid because they were cheaper, simpler, and easier to design and validate. Segmented solids were chosen over monolithic solids for a whole laundry list of technical reasons. It's really as simple as that. Yes, a powerful senator happened to come from that state, but correlation isn't causation. Equally, the company that got the contracts for the solids was a strong contender regardless of the type of solids chosen - no tinfoil required.
The thing that *actually* lead directly to the Challenger disaster (poorly designed joint seals)*... nobody seems to know how those were chosen. In the blizzard of paper that went back and forth between Morton-Thiokol and NASA, the joint design seems to have 'just appeared' and nobody questioned it. When the same failure that destroyed Challenger (joint rotation** leading to blow-by) appeared in testing, the 'back-up' o-ring was added as a quick, cheap, fix rather than questioning the design. Fixing it right could have been expensive and potentially time consuming - and NASA had neither budget nor time.
During development, everyone assumed the backup would never fail - yet it almost failed on the first flight. It continued to fail to some degree regularly thereafter. These failures were so common and raising such a level of concern that a new joint design was created that addressed the root cause... (This is why NASA had a fix proposed so soon after the accident - it was already in the pipeline.) But they continued to fly anyhow, until the joint failed entirely.
* Yes, I know the soundbite version is "they got too cold". Like all soundbites it contains an element of truth, but there's a whole hell of a lot more to the story.
** And if you look at the fix - it contains not only heaters to protect against the cold, but additional pins to hold the joint from rotating and opening up and additional o-rings in vulnerable positions. There's a reason for that.
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Because that requires windows... which are heavy, and vulnerable to damage, etc... etc...
If I'm doing something that needs screen size, I have a desktop or a borrow the wife's Nook. A phone is a phone, not a tablet.
That has to be the funniest thing I've read all day.
The problem, well known historically but seemingly needing to be rediscovered every twenty years or so, is that airships aren't reliable heavy lifters. They're extraordinarily sensitive to the weather - much more so than any means of transport they replace. Absent heavy and complex propulsion systems (above and beyond that what's needed to travel from point A to point B) or significant ground infrastructure, they can't reliably deliver their cargo to a precise given point. etc... etc... (Worse yet, both of these fundamental problems get worse as the size of the airship approaches any useful cargo capacity.) This scheme doesn't solve the first problem, and probably won't solve the second.
This, seriously. Haselton's entire strawman arguement relies on being completely unaware of the history of and the philosophy behind the processes he questions. It's almost like he didn't even bother to read the answers to his last strawman.
As always, there's a difference between something being theoretically possible - and proving that it is in fact possible.
This is no more 'space tourism' than going to the zoo is 'jungle tourism'. It's a glorified amusement park ride that only goes to 'space' because of an unscientific legal definition of 'space'.
Hah! Another kerbalnaut - we're everywhere!
If the app was about high crime rates, you'd have a point. But it wasn't. It rated neighborhoods based on self reported subjective beliefs from both residents and non residents of the neighborhood.
Space exploration is nothing if not accounting for one aggravating detail after another...
The bird will need an attitude detection and control system to take advantage of this antenna... decreasing the available weight, volume, and power available for other things. TANSTAAFL.
OTOH, SWATH hulls are more expensive than conventional hulls and offer less volume per displacement ton.
Your own words marked you as a weak link.
More than just a few years now... try a few decades. (More like a century in fact.) They're called anti-roll tanks, and were first used around the turn of the 20th century.
(Naval architecture geek FTW!)
As a former service member, the service would be far better off if you just went AWOL rather than staying in and being a weak link. If you weren't ready to obey the orders of those over you (as you swore) and to go in harm's way, you should never have joined in the first place.
Had it been a good point, yours would have been a valid reply. But it wasn't a good point, it was vapid, clueless bullshit that only sounds good to the equally clueless. Like you ad your spew for example.
It must be nice to live in your world where there the option to place such structures in a 'safe' location is always available. (Either that, or you're just an asshat who mistakenly thinks that making such statements as you did makes you like intelligent.*)
Here in the real world - that option is rarely if ever available. We have to make do with the situation that faces us. We have to make trade-offs between building infrastructure where it's at some degree of risk, or not building it at all.
* It doesn't, at least not among those who are actually intelligent.
Are you really so clueless as to think that some very minor pattern analysis won't be able to tell the difference between you and a bot? (And doing that analysis is cheap.) At worst, they'll simply identify that computer/address as having multiple users - which is something they almost certainly already do.
Um... yeah they did. From the Yankee class (1968) onwards they could launch submerged.
What's fucked up is that you can be so clearly and utterly clueless - yet still get modded insightful. The prosecutors didn't suppress evidence - the judge ruled that experts couldn't testify. And that's his bloody job. And reading TFA, I can't say that I think he's entirely in the wrong - because the defense screwed the pooch in the first place. (By not getting a properly qualified expert in the first place, and then by potentially violating the rules of evidence.) Pointing out where the defense screwed up is the prosecutors job, and vice versa.
Hardly. This isn't the first such case, nor a particularly notable one. "It happened on a computer" isn't enough to make it newsworthy anymore, that ship sailed decades ago.
That's a nice bromide... and it's easy to blame unspecified 'people' but it's bullshit in this case. Over the last few months, Yahoo! has been rolling out change after ill thought out change in page layout, UI, and functionality. They're trying to be 'hip' and 'modern' and failing miserably while alienating their existing userbase.
Like what? And more importantly why? The system worked, and worked well.
That doesn't make it true. The design choices and the steps along the way that lead to the Shuttle's final configuration are well documented.
Those of us who have actually studied the space program know that the reason the joint is there is because the segmented solids were chosen over monolithic solids. Even if monolithics had been chosen, the parts would have been built in different states. Hell, even if monolithics had been chosen, there's a good chance there would *still* be joints in the case in order to avoid handling one whole. So, yeah, you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
What part of "your claim that they should have started with small vehicles is invalid because they did start with small vehicles" are you finding so difficult to grasp? (And no, they didn't "still have the Saturn Ib, it was cancelled years before - the vehicles used for Skylab had been in mothballs for years, they were not new construction. Again, completely clueless.)
*Sigh*. And again, /. demonstrates it's ignorance of the history of the Shuttle program. Seriously, utter and complete cluelessness.
If you actually study the history of the Shuttle program, you'll find that's exactly what they did. The first Shuttles were small vehicles intended to shuttle crew and very light cargo back and forth between Earth and a space station launched by a Saturn V. Then the Saturn V was essentially cancelled when it was defunded in 1967, leaving the Shuttle without a destination or a purpose.... and the Shuttle began to grow in size and complexity to serve as a flying pickup rather than a flying commuter car. (All the DoD really did was finalize the size of the pickup truck.)
*Sigh* Seriously, this bit of urban legend bullshit either needs to die in a fire, or people who believe it need to have "too stupid to live" tatooed on their forehead.
Boosters (and drop tanks) were added to save money, correct performance shortfalls, and simplify the design. Solid boosters were chosen over liquid because they were cheaper, simpler, and easier to design and validate. Segmented solids were chosen over monolithic solids for a whole laundry list of technical reasons. It's really as simple as that. Yes, a powerful senator happened to come from that state, but correlation isn't causation. Equally, the company that got the contracts for the solids was a strong contender regardless of the type of solids chosen - no tinfoil required.
The thing that *actually* lead directly to the Challenger disaster (poorly designed joint seals)*... nobody seems to know how those were chosen. In the blizzard of paper that went back and forth between Morton-Thiokol and NASA, the joint design seems to have 'just appeared' and nobody questioned it. When the same failure that destroyed Challenger (joint rotation** leading to blow-by) appeared in testing, the 'back-up' o-ring was added as a quick, cheap, fix rather than questioning the design. Fixing it right could have been expensive and potentially time consuming - and NASA had neither budget nor time.
During development, everyone assumed the backup would never fail - yet it almost failed on the first flight. It continued to fail to some degree regularly thereafter. These failures were so common and raising such a level of concern that a new joint design was created that addressed the root cause... (This is why NASA had a fix proposed so soon after the accident - it was already in the pipeline.) But they continued to fly anyhow, until the joint failed entirely.
* Yes, I know the soundbite version is "they got too cold". Like all soundbites it contains an element of truth, but there's a whole hell of a lot more to the story.
** And if you look at the fix - it contains not only heaters to protect against the cold, but additional pins to hold the joint from rotating and opening up and additional o-rings in vulnerable positions. There's a reason for that.