"but imagine what would happen to the middle east, situations would probably end up worse, and it would probably start to resemble its African neighbors."
Most of the Middle East already resembles those "African neighbors" you refer to. Oil income stays in the hands of an elite few (and you think the US oil companies are bad). Take away the oil money and the only people who notice will be the formerly rich and those *ahem* "charities" they like to give their money to.
Depends on how much of the stuff you're talking about. I've seen shuttle launches and the 3 seconds between SSME ignition and SRB ignition can be pretty damned bright. Sure, not as bright as the SRBs, but enough for an artificial twilight miles away.
"I suspect it's a lingering effect from the days when French was the language for the royal and the intellectual elite in Europe."
That's part of it, but another part is French colonialism in populous regions of the world, like southeast Asia and north Africa. There's also Canada, whose federalism has resulted in a mandated bilingualism at the governmental level.
"From my experience travelling through Russia,"
Russia is a little unique because of its historically close ties to France, with relations even being relatively warm during the Soviet era. It's the reason why Germany decided to attack France first when they went to war against Russia in 1914.
It depends who you ask. Things apparently get complicated when you start talking about second languages. For example, English is spoken in many countries where Spanish is the official standard and Spanish itself has a large footprint in the country with the most native Anglophones.
"Umm there is this big thing in space called the International Space Station. All the shuttle has to do is dock with it,"
The ISS is in a God-awful inconvenient orbit so that a certain spacefaring nation which shall remain nameless can reach it from ther BFE lauch facilities in Baikonur. Easy for them means hard for everybody else. The ill-fated Columbia was doing what it was doing at the time because it flat out could not be used to reach the ISS due to its age/weight. We're not talking about a short drive to the local Quick-E-Mart here.
Also, space is really, really, really big. If the surface area of the earth is (pi)*R^2, the potential surface area for the shuttle to have to find the ISS in is (pi) * (R + altitude)^2. More than likely there's going to be a great deal of distance between where the orbiter is and where you'd want it to be. That requires reaction mass, something that, if the orbiter had a lot of, we probably wouldn't need the external tanks TFA is talking about to begin with.
"Ohh and the chances of both shuttles breaking is slim, very very slim."
It goes up quite a bit, however, when you start bumping them together in the hopes of a crew transfer. Especially since it's never been done before. Especially since the last time we tried supporting two simultaneous manned missions was sometime back in the Gemini program.
"Truckers check their brakes before a big hill, why don't astronauts check the heat shield?"
There's rarely any doubt about the trucker's ability to get back into the cab after doing said walkaround. Going EVA is risky enough in the nice enclosed space of the cargo bay, and using an MMU to go much beyond places with easy handholds has been limited mostly to demonstration runs which themselves have been within line-of-sight of the cargo bay. Leaving the cargo bay to inspect other surfaces of the orbiter, especially the undercarriage, not only affords you with no places you can hold on to but instead offers plenty of places you don't want to touch (like the tiles you'd want to inspect). There's a good chance that inspecting for damage itself would cause damage.
Part of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is the idea that neither side can get away with being the attacker, that there is no way to effectively destroy most or all of an enemy's nuclear missiles while they're still on the ground. The only way for that to happen is if the defender is expected to have more than a few seconds' warning, which requires satellites.
Conversely, you can't know where your enemy's missiles are without effective intelligence. To do this you're forced to decide between trying to get away with penetrating your enemy's airspace or taking your photographs from above their airspace.
"but prevents a new Pearl Harbor... Not really"
I was speaking literally, not metaphorically. It's kind of hard to launch a surprise naval attack when you're able to be tracked the moment you steem out of port. There would have been no guesswork as to where the Japanese fleet was going if the US Navy could see the entire Pacific instead of just bits and pieces within a few hundred miles of a friendly airstrip.
Coniser this: just about all the major naval battles in that war are named for the geography they were fought in or near ("Leyte Gulf," "Midway," "Coral Sea," etc.) Even in the age of aircraft most of these battles were fought within sight of land. This is because you can't act to intercept your enemy before they reach their destination if you don't know where they're either coming from or going to. Before satellites, the only way there could be a major naval engagement at, say, 37N 168E is if both sides pre-arranged it beforehand. In modern times, middle-of-nowhere engagements would likely be the rule rather than the exception. It's like the way we no longer name hurricanes for the city they hit but instead assign a random name when we first start tracking them out in the middle of the ocean.
It's called "Kepler's laws of motion." If you're in orbit with little (if any) resources available for course correction, your location is pretty much 100% predictable. If you do a series of small, quick movements timed right to avoid the satellites, you won't be caught. It's the large movements that satellites are essentially meant to watch for (and, because of their presence, essentially eliminate); there are hopes of catching small movements with one, but for that your enemy musn't know what's where when. Once somebody knows where a satellite was at what time, the cat's out of the bag.
Having grown up well after the first space launches, it can be easy to take for granted just how much these satellites do for us. Radar only goes out to the horizon, and planes can only do so much before they need to be refuelled in friendly airspace. Satellites are about the only thing preventing large-scale sneak attacks like Pearl Harbor from happening again.
Here, let me try to make this statement "more correct:"
"Louisiana is trying to lure industry"
There's oil, there's fishing, in New Orleans there's some tourism, and there's not much else. And of what there is, most of the work available is manual and the educational system makes sure it stays that way. On top of that, Baton Rouge has notoriously dropped the ball in recent years: the governor didn't see any point in going to "Japan" to talk to Hyundai (see previous note on educational system) to convince them to build their new plant in Louisiana (while Mississippi scored a Mercedes-Benz plant), but when the local NFL team started to talk about moving away...
"the majority of app and game files circulating on the 'net are either done by 1 person who figured out the crack from standard deprotection tools, or from the established cracking houses like paradox, class, etc."
Yes, but the "lone gunman" theory doesn't allow publishers to take overbroad measures that invade personal privacy on a large scale in the name of "fighting piracy."
" A DVD is a Digital Versatile Disc, but an ordinary DVD player only plays DVD-Video from them(...) The PSP is a game console first and all that other shit second."
Your analogy is flawed: DVDs were not developed by Sony solely for the PS2. Considering that the UMD was developed expressly for the PSP, then why didn't they call them "PSP game discs?"
Um, somebody might want to tell Sony that at some point, since they're marketing folks have been pushing it as an all-in-one media handheld, hence the name "universial media disc."
"I just hope they release some of the out of print Battletech sourcebooks also."
For the most part, they've been "working on it" for a quite a while, but they do have the House Davion sourcebook as a PDF as well as some other House sourcebooks in text format here
Slashdot Mirror
Simple: he was sober.
"but imagine what would happen to the middle east, situations would probably end up worse, and it would probably start to resemble its African neighbors."
Most of the Middle East already resembles those "African neighbors" you refer to. Oil income stays in the hands of an elite few (and you think the US oil companies are bad). Take away the oil money and the only people who notice will be the formerly rich and those *ahem* "charities" they like to give their money to.
"and, since H2 burns colorless no one saw it."
Depends on how much of the stuff you're talking about. I've seen shuttle launches and the 3 seconds between SSME ignition and SRB ignition can be pretty damned bright. Sure, not as bright as the SRBs, but enough for an artificial twilight miles away.
I can't figure out whether I should make a joke about EA or about Acclaim here...
"I suspect it's a lingering effect from the days when French was the language for the royal and the intellectual elite in Europe."
That's part of it, but another part is French colonialism in populous regions of the world, like southeast Asia and north Africa. There's also Canada, whose federalism has resulted in a mandated bilingualism at the governmental level.
"From my experience travelling through Russia,"
Russia is a little unique because of its historically close ties to France, with relations even being relatively warm during the Soviet era. It's the reason why Germany decided to attack France first when they went to war against Russia in 1914.
It depends who you ask. Things apparently get complicated when you start talking about second languages. For example, English is spoken in many countries where Spanish is the official standard and Spanish itself has a large footprint in the country with the most native Anglophones.
"Umm there is this big thing in space called the International Space Station. All the shuttle has to do is dock with it,"
The ISS is in a God-awful inconvenient orbit so that a certain spacefaring nation which shall remain nameless can reach it from ther BFE lauch facilities in Baikonur. Easy for them means hard for everybody else. The ill-fated Columbia was doing what it was doing at the time because it flat out could not be used to reach the ISS due to its age/weight. We're not talking about a short drive to the local Quick-E-Mart here.
Also, space is really, really, really big. If the surface area of the earth is (pi)*R^2, the potential surface area for the shuttle to have to find the ISS in is (pi) * (R + altitude)^2. More than likely there's going to be a great deal of distance between where the orbiter is and where you'd want it to be. That requires reaction mass, something that, if the orbiter had a lot of, we probably wouldn't need the external tanks TFA is talking about to begin with.
"Ohh and the chances of both shuttles breaking is slim, very very slim."
It goes up quite a bit, however, when you start bumping them together in the hopes of a crew transfer. Especially since it's never been done before. Especially since the last time we tried supporting two simultaneous manned missions was sometime back in the Gemini program.
"Truckers check their brakes before a big hill, why don't astronauts check the heat shield?"
There's rarely any doubt about the trucker's ability to get back into the cab after doing said walkaround. Going EVA is risky enough in the nice enclosed space of the cargo bay, and using an MMU to go much beyond places with easy handholds has been limited mostly to demonstration runs which themselves have been within line-of-sight of the cargo bay. Leaving the cargo bay to inspect other surfaces of the orbiter, especially the undercarriage, not only affords you with no places you can hold on to but instead offers plenty of places you don't want to touch (like the tiles you'd want to inspect). There's a good chance that inspecting for damage itself would cause damage.
"Troy Hurtubise, the Canadian"
And that right there is why NASA will never use his idea. We're still miffed about having a Canadian flag in all those pics of the shuttle cargo bay.
Kruschev breaks out the nuclear missiles, and Kennedy unleashes black iPods. No wonder the USSR collapsed...
"I guess all those nukes are usless."
Part of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is the idea that neither side can get away with being the attacker, that there is no way to effectively destroy most or all of an enemy's nuclear missiles while they're still on the ground. The only way for that to happen is if the defender is expected to have more than a few seconds' warning, which requires satellites.
Conversely, you can't know where your enemy's missiles are without effective intelligence. To do this you're forced to decide between trying to get away with penetrating your enemy's airspace or taking your photographs from above their airspace.
"but prevents a new Pearl Harbor... Not really"
I was speaking literally, not metaphorically. It's kind of hard to launch a surprise naval attack when you're able to be tracked the moment you steem out of port. There would have been no guesswork as to where the Japanese fleet was going if the US Navy could see the entire Pacific instead of just bits and pieces within a few hundred miles of a friendly airstrip.
Coniser this: just about all the major naval battles in that war are named for the geography they were fought in or near ("Leyte Gulf," "Midway," "Coral Sea," etc.) Even in the age of aircraft most of these battles were fought within sight of land. This is because you can't act to intercept your enemy before they reach their destination if you don't know where they're either coming from or going to. Before satellites, the only way there could be a major naval engagement at, say, 37N 168E is if both sides pre-arranged it beforehand. In modern times, middle-of-nowhere engagements would likely be the rule rather than the exception. It's like the way we no longer name hurricanes for the city they hit but instead assign a random name when we first start tracking them out in the middle of the ocean.
It's called "Kepler's laws of motion." If you're in orbit with little (if any) resources available for course correction, your location is pretty much 100% predictable. If you do a series of small, quick movements timed right to avoid the satellites, you won't be caught. It's the large movements that satellites are essentially meant to watch for (and, because of their presence, essentially eliminate); there are hopes of catching small movements with one, but for that your enemy musn't know what's where when. Once somebody knows where a satellite was at what time, the cat's out of the bag.
Having grown up well after the first space launches, it can be easy to take for granted just how much these satellites do for us. Radar only goes out to the horizon, and planes can only do so much before they need to be refuelled in friendly airspace. Satellites are about the only thing preventing large-scale sneak attacks like Pearl Harbor from happening again.
So NSA stands for "No Such Article?"
The poster used American English in describing the quote while the actual quote was in British English. Two different people.
"Amateur paranoiacs cannot hope to compete with professional ones."
In Stalin's *ahem* Soviet Russia, there were two kinds of people: the paranoid and the dead.
"implement a Slashdot-like karma and moderation (and metamoderation, if necessary) system."
That, too, has its own problems.
When was the last time you saw a post appear more than once at the same time in metamoderation, let alone in consecutive days?
"Louisiana is trying to lure the game industry"
Here, let me try to make this statement "more correct:"
"Louisiana is trying to lure industry"
There's oil, there's fishing, in New Orleans there's some tourism, and there's not much else. And of what there is, most of the work available is manual and the educational system makes sure it stays that way. On top of that, Baton Rouge has notoriously dropped the ball in recent years: the governor didn't see any point in going to "Japan" to talk to Hyundai (see previous note on educational system) to convince them to build their new plant in Louisiana (while Mississippi scored a Mercedes-Benz plant), but when the local NFL team started to talk about moving away...
"Louisiana: Third world and proud of it."
"the majority of app and game files circulating on the 'net are either done by 1 person who figured out the crack from standard deprotection tools, or from the established cracking houses like paradox, class, etc."
Yes, but the "lone gunman" theory doesn't allow publishers to take overbroad measures that invade personal privacy on a large scale in the name of "fighting piracy."
"Why do we name everything using greek mythology?"
Because Galileo got frist p0st.
"Alas, you also have to be running Redmond's finest."
So I need to run it on my Nintendo DS?
"This laser DOES NOT pose a threat to airplanes or pilots"
Remember: lasers don't kill people, guided weapons that follow laser beams kill people.
Alright, so how many Libraries of Congress would it move?
" A DVD is a Digital Versatile Disc, but an ordinary DVD player only plays DVD-Video from them(...) The PSP is a game console first and all that other shit second."
Your analogy is flawed: DVDs were not developed by Sony solely for the PS2. Considering that the UMD was developed expressly for the PSP, then why didn't they call them "PSP game discs?"
"It's not a movie viewer, it's a game console."
Um, somebody might want to tell Sony that at some point, since they're marketing folks have been pushing it as an all-in-one media handheld, hence the name "universial media disc."
That's a Nintendo argument, not a Sony one.
"I just hope they release some of the out of print Battletech sourcebooks also."
For the most part, they've been "working on it" for a quite a while, but they do have the House Davion sourcebook as a PDF as well as some other House sourcebooks in text format here