I was in the shower. My roommate called out that the Space Shuttle had blown up, and I immediately shouted "Those damned solid rocket boosters!" Anyone who'd considered it knew it would be them on the way up, and a tile failure on the way down. There weren't really any surprises, were there?
I recall reading that they had found that the environmental controls had been altered after the break-up and before colliding with the ocean
It was the Personal Egress Air Packs, which were used for walking around unplugged in that version of the suit. Given the ones activated, the theory is that Onizuka and Reznick didn't perish immediately. Sigh.
I just had the honor of witnessing a conversation between Bruce friggin Perens and a guy with a lower uid than Bruce friggin Perens.
Yes, JD is an old-timer. But the funny thing is that I knew about Slashdot for months, Debian guys were talking about it, etc., and I refrained from showing up there. Finally something made me do it. If I hadn't done that, I'd probably be in the three digit UID club.
Hi JD,
They were past MaxQ at T+73 seconds. The aerodynamic forces, not the explosion, broke up the orbiter. So, maybe not that time. But sure this is nice equipment to have.
Kittinger used a multiple-stage parachute. He did most of the descent in 4 and a half minutes, with a drogue which kept him from tumbling. At 17K he opened his main chute and took 13 more minutes to descend.
Given a large surface area device, you have to carry a lot more oxygen for the passenger, because the re-entry will take much longer. And you might want to get an ill or injured passenger down quickly.
Isn't this potentially a good experiment for a microsat payload? Inflate something and wait for the drag to decay the orbit, then re-enter. It seems to me it might be in the range of a college or amateur team, or AMSAT.
It sounds like the Russians haven't had a fully successful recovery in three tries. But I may be citing a different sort of project.
You can see all of the Excelsior equipment at the Air Force museum in Dayton, in the round room with the missiles, farthest from the front of the museum, on the second floor. I always make a point of stopping there after Dayton Hamvention, and that's one of my favorite exhibits. There's also a nuclear missile command bunker, almost hidden in the museum, directly under the Excelsior capsules on the first floor which is also a great exhibit.
There is the problem of descending from 120,000 feet with a parachute, which is solvable with space suits, multi-stage parachutes, etc.
Then there is the problem that this project would not address at all, which is how to decelerate from orbital speed of Mach 12 or so. The space shuttle that broke up on re-entry did so while it was going fast enough that the atmospheric friction would melt metal.
HP sold defective PCs, IBM sold defective PCs, all have had their class action cases and they're over, and nobody cares.
The fact is, the consumer doesn't buy reliability. The consumer buys emotional factors, and brand perception, and a good marketer can make the consumer buy any garbage whatsoever.
This is not the end of Dell. Nobody will remember this in a few months, any more than they remember HP and "pretexting" when they buy a printer or a PC.
I had a sysadmin who refused to chmod files to 666 because it was the number of the beast. We didn't have the permission-letter version of the command back then.
1) get their main product (the papers, in this case) produced for free by third parties who are not given any cut of the revenues; 2) have much of the intellectual work of reviewing and editing the papers also done for free by third parties; and then 3) lock up the result behind a paywall to maximize revenues, which go to people who had comparatively minor roles in actually producing the product being sold.
Does it strike you that this is a pretty good description of a commercial Linux distribution?
These days you have to go through the "Crawler Access" page, use Google site search plus the spamware keywords to figure out the spamware URLs, and request that google remove them from its cache. Which is not what their own FAQs say, so it just took me a while. I think two directories got spoofed, and my home page had a spoof with queries but I can't remove that one or Google will remove the entire site.
Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.
That's a good question, and the answer would be that the attorney crafting the license would take more time thinking about it than I take to write the typical shashdot comment:-) Making this license work correctly would be within the competence of any lawyer.
Essentially all of my consulting work these days is with attorneys and their customers, and is regarding Open Source in some way, and thus I am getting to see a lot of how things go wrong with Open Source and the law. And the one lesson I've learned is that it is always tremendously less expensive to fix the problem early. That they missed the opportunity to do so is a shame.
The problem is simply that they didn't know the right words. They could have given permission to distribute a document without restriction when the fonts are embedded in it, and everything would have been OK. But they didn't give that permission, they said, and I quote: The requirement for fonts to
remain under this license does not apply to any document created
using the Font Software. They didn't consider that if the font is no longer under the license, none of the license terms apply any longer. They don't suddenly come back if you extract the font from the document. They also said that if you violate the license, it's null and void. What they meant to say was that the license terminates, but again they didn't know the right words. If a license is "null and void", does that mean "all rights reserved" or does it mean "no rules, do what you want"? You might have to go to court to determine what it means, and bankrupt some poor Open Source developer in the process, just because you picked the wrong words.
We have a case of one developer, Bob Jacobsen, and his project JMRI, who were pretty seriously screwed by the fact that he chose Artistic License 1.0 and a lower-court judge was convinced that it meant "public domain". A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort taking that to appeal. Fortunately we won, but it took years, and Bob lost about a year's income in the process and was not fully compensated in the settlement. Larry Wall wrote that license before there were any lawyers who would help Open Source developers, but now we have ones who work for free and there is no excuse to craft a license without one.
I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable (although font programs are) and that fonts can be traced without infringement. It is easy for the font to leave the control of the copyright holder, although perhaps without any hinting that is embedded in the font.
But in this case, the entire intent of the SIL license is that the fonts do not appear in one of those "10,000 Fonts!" packages sold by folks who only aggregate them and do none of the work. And that intent will be thwarted.
Uh-oh. Nobody told those publishers that the SIL license was not written by a lawyer and never had any legal review. OSI, unfortunately, will approve a license that hasn't been crafted by a lawyer, and this can be a big problem for the users of that license, when the license acts radically differently in court than they expect it to.
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I just refill my HP 88s with ink. Not enough work to merit the external reservoir. The third-party ink works great, but it's time to alcohol-wipe the rubber parts - the paper handling isn't what it used to be.
Look here for the best (IMO) approach to making printed circuit boards with inkjets.
While I was a senior manager at HP, I got a pretty good idea of the size of printer R&D. It wasn't so big that it cost 1/100 of what they make from ink. But I did get figures on HP margins, which were essentially whatever they could get, not really held to any multiple of internal costs.
The printer market won't change as long as any company that makes printers has to license patents from the others. Eventually that day will end and you might get fair ink prices.
It's in part a combinatorial problem. Put a few clauses like that in active licenses, and you would have to analyze the licenses in active projects and chart out what you could, and could not do, and if there is a twilight as you propose - for how long and with whose potential permission.
While it might be acceptable to you for your particular cause, here and there, when you put all of the causes together the negative effect on the community in general is significant.
Open Source licenses are not allowed to discriminate against fields of endeavor. When I was writing the Open Source Definition, there were Berkeley SPICE license that prohibited use by the Police of South Africa. Apartheid had ended, those Police were Black, and they were still prohibited.
I didn't want to see anti-abortion licenses and pro-choice licenses, etc. Just licenses for software that people could use without having to read the license or ask a lawyer.
Too bad that software patents broke the "not having to see a lawyer" thing for some companies in some places. But in general, if you just want to use software under a real Open Source license, go ahead.
Does it really exchange precision for reliability? I thought it worked by determining the path delay to a number of fixed points, where the path delay is a function of the position of the satellite and the presence of different areas of atmospheric refractivity (referred to as "billows"). I don't see how this decreases precision in the name of reliability. The main goal is to increase the full-time vertical precision to a value usable for instrument landing.
What fascinates me about using light pressure is that you could potentially do it from the ground. Lots of energy available. Big thick atmosphere to traverse. Stuff that doesn't like getting shot with a laser flying by. Sure, it's got problems. But I'd love to see someone explore the potential and I'm not the right person to do it.
Well, we don't really care about its other functions since they were moved to other C-band satellites without making the news. You can't move WAAS to a C-band-only satellite, you need the special L-band payload.
GPS doesn't work as well without it, but the real reason I used "Geostationary GPS" in the title was that Slashdot would not let me have enough characters in the title to say something more accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in the shower. My roommate called out that the Space Shuttle had blown up, and I immediately shouted "Those damned solid rocket boosters!" Anyone who'd considered it knew it would be them on the way up, and a tile failure on the way down. There weren't really any surprises, were there?
It was the Personal Egress Air Packs, which were used for walking around unplugged in that version of the suit. Given the ones activated, the theory is that Onizuka and Reznick didn't perish immediately. Sigh.
Bruce
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Yes, JD is an old-timer. But the funny thing is that I knew about Slashdot for months, Debian guys were talking about it, etc., and I refrained from showing up there. Finally something made me do it. If I hadn't done that, I'd probably be in the three digit UID club.
Well, I did get credit for some other stuff :-)
Hi JD, They were past MaxQ at T+73 seconds. The aerodynamic forces, not the explosion, broke up the orbiter. So, maybe not that time. But sure this is nice equipment to have.
Kittinger used a multiple-stage parachute. He did most of the descent in 4 and a half minutes, with a drogue which kept him from tumbling. At 17K he opened his main chute and took 13 more minutes to descend.
Isn't this potentially a good experiment for a microsat payload? Inflate something and wait for the drag to decay the orbit, then re-enter. It seems to me it might be in the range of a college or amateur team, or AMSAT.
It sounds like the Russians haven't had a fully successful recovery in three tries. But I may be citing a different sort of project.
Yes, almost all of the one-person re-entry device proposals from the 1960's to present look a great deal like a Mercury capsule.
You can see all of the Excelsior equipment at the Air Force museum in Dayton, in the round room with the missiles, farthest from the front of the museum, on the second floor. I always make a point of stopping there after Dayton Hamvention, and that's one of my favorite exhibits. There's also a nuclear missile command bunker, almost hidden in the museum, directly under the Excelsior capsules on the first floor which is also a great exhibit.
There is the problem of descending from 120,000 feet with a parachute, which is solvable with space suits, multi-stage parachutes, etc.
Then there is the problem that this project would not address at all, which is how to decelerate from orbital speed of Mach 12 or so. The space shuttle that broke up on re-entry did so while it was going fast enough that the atmospheric friction would melt metal.
The fact is, the consumer doesn't buy reliability. The consumer buys emotional factors, and brand perception, and a good marketer can make the consumer buy any garbage whatsoever.
This is not the end of Dell. Nobody will remember this in a few months, any more than they remember HP and "pretexting" when they buy a printer or a PC.
I had a sysadmin who refused to chmod files to 666 because it was the number of the beast. We didn't have the permission-letter version of the command back then.
Does it strike you that this is a pretty good description of a commercial Linux distribution?
Bruce
These days you have to go through the "Crawler Access" page, use Google site search plus the spamware keywords to figure out the spamware URLs, and request that google remove them from its cache. Which is not what their own FAQs say, so it just took me a while. I think two directories got spoofed, and my home page had a spoof with queries but I can't remove that one or Google will remove the entire site.
I saw it a few days ago. It must have been a DNS spoof or a redirect spoof. I can't think of anything else. I'm just waiting for Google to re-scan me.
Very impressive, but these are just jump-jets for now - sort of rocket helicopters. Going from what we saw to something that can get to orbit, deposit a payload, and return to earth undamaged is going to take a lot more work. Good luck to both teams.
That's a good question, and the answer would be that the attorney crafting the license would take more time thinking about it than I take to write the typical shashdot comment :-) Making this license work correctly would be within the competence of any lawyer.
Essentially all of my consulting work these days is with attorneys and their customers, and is regarding Open Source in some way, and thus I am getting to see a lot of how things go wrong with Open Source and the law. And the one lesson I've learned is that it is always tremendously less expensive to fix the problem early. That they missed the opportunity to do so is a shame.
The problem is simply that they didn't know the right words. They could have given permission to distribute a document without restriction when the fonts are embedded in it, and everything would have been OK. But they didn't give that permission, they said, and I quote: The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software. They didn't consider that if the font is no longer under the license, none of the license terms apply any longer. They don't suddenly come back if you extract the font from the document. They also said that if you violate the license, it's null and void . What they meant to say was that the license terminates, but again they didn't know the right words. If a license is "null and void", does that mean "all rights reserved" or does it mean "no rules, do what you want"? You might have to go to court to determine what it means, and bankrupt some poor Open Source developer in the process, just because you picked the wrong words.
We have a case of one developer, Bob Jacobsen, and his project JMRI, who were pretty seriously screwed by the fact that he chose Artistic License 1.0 and a lower-court judge was convinced that it meant "public domain". A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort taking that to appeal. Fortunately we won, but it took years, and Bob lost about a year's income in the process and was not fully compensated in the settlement. Larry Wall wrote that license before there were any lawyers who would help Open Source developers, but now we have ones who work for free and there is no excuse to craft a license without one.
I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable (although font programs are) and that fonts can be traced without infringement. It is easy for the font to leave the control of the copyright holder, although perhaps without any hinting that is embedded in the font.
But in this case, the entire intent of the SIL license is that the fonts do not appear in one of those "10,000 Fonts!" packages sold by folks who only aggregate them and do none of the work. And that intent will be thwarted.
Uh-oh. Nobody told those publishers that the SIL license was not written by a lawyer and never had any legal review. OSI, unfortunately, will approve a license that hasn't been crafted by a lawyer, and this can be a big problem for the users of that license, when the license acts radically differently in court than they expect it to.
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I left a note on their web submission form.
Bruce
I just refill my HP 88s with ink. Not enough work to merit the external reservoir. The third-party ink works great, but it's time to alcohol-wipe the rubber parts - the paper handling isn't what it used to be.
Look here for the best (IMO) approach to making printed circuit boards with inkjets.
While I was a senior manager at HP, I got a pretty good idea of the size of printer R&D. It wasn't so big that it cost 1/100 of what they make from ink. But I did get figures on HP margins, which were essentially whatever they could get, not really held to any multiple of internal costs.
The printer market won't change as long as any company that makes printers has to license patents from the others. Eventually that day will end and you might get fair ink prices.
It's in part a combinatorial problem. Put a few clauses like that in active licenses, and you would have to analyze the licenses in active projects and chart out what you could, and could not do, and if there is a twilight as you propose - for how long and with whose potential permission.
While it might be acceptable to you for your particular cause, here and there, when you put all of the causes together the negative effect on the community in general is significant.
Open Source licenses are not allowed to discriminate against fields of endeavor. When I was writing the Open Source Definition, there were Berkeley SPICE license that prohibited use by the Police of South Africa. Apartheid had ended, those Police were Black, and they were still prohibited.
I didn't want to see anti-abortion licenses and pro-choice licenses, etc. Just licenses for software that people could use without having to read the license or ask a lawyer.
Too bad that software patents broke the "not having to see a lawyer" thing for some companies in some places. But in general, if you just want to use software under a real Open Source license, go ahead.
Does it really exchange precision for reliability? I thought it worked by determining the path delay to a number of fixed points, where the path delay is a function of the position of the satellite and the presence of different areas of atmospheric refractivity (referred to as "billows"). I don't see how this decreases precision in the name of reliability. The main goal is to increase the full-time vertical precision to a value usable for instrument landing.
What fascinates me about using light pressure is that you could potentially do it from the ground. Lots of energy available. Big thick atmosphere to traverse. Stuff that doesn't like getting shot with a laser flying by. Sure, it's got problems. But I'd love to see someone explore the potential and I'm not the right person to do it.
Well, we don't really care about its other functions since they were moved to other C-band satellites without making the news. You can't move WAAS to a C-band-only satellite, you need the special L-band payload.
GPS doesn't work as well without it, but the real reason I used "Geostationary GPS" in the title was that Slashdot would not let me have enough characters in the title to say something more accurate.