Re:I joke a lot on Slashdot, but serious question
on
The Math Behind PageRank
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I notice many sites that do that and don't get slapped down - esp subscription sites.
I wonder, if I changed my useragent to be whatever the googlebot reports itself to be - would I get by the registration screen on websites like the NYTimes??
Here's another great thing about Virgin: I only use the prepaid phone during the summer. I take it with me camping or whatever. So like right now it's winter and I'm not using it and I'm not going to renew it in 90 days. They will shut off the phone of course but get this, when I reactivate it in the summer by putting another $20 on it, all the minutes that were left over from last summer are still there!
You can't beat that! I've had the phone for a couple of years and I actually have a lot of time built up on it.
Really? Because Eratosthenes and Aristarchus lived LONG before 1400AD. I think it's funny that you seem to think that people lived in caves until around 1970, when they suddenly woke up and invented civilization.
Actually, I thought the abstract said that the compound used is oxidized, meaning that the oxygen is captured and only the hydrogen is released. If I read the abstract wrong, please correct me.
My (admittedly layman's) understanding is thus: they have a molecule that sticks to oxygen. Put the molecule into water and it grabs the oxygen away from H2O, releasing H2. That by itself is not very impressive. Sodium does something similar. So here's the cool part, when exposed to sunlight, the molecule releases its oxygen - thus the process will go on so long as you have sunlight and water. This is only interesting because the molecule works like a catalyst.
IF it really works (I am cautiously optimistic) this could be the biggest discovery in the history of the world. It could mean that our civilization is no longer on the road to oblivion. It could mean no more energy wars (but don't worry, we'll still have to fight the United Atheist Alliance).
it's the weaknesses that show up in the practice of shoddy implementation
Right, that's what I was about to say. The only vulnerability I've seen that I would say was AJAX-specific was that someone put security on the main page, but on none of the little ajax widgets. It just didn't occur to this person that securing the widgets was necessary - probably because what we're used to when programming on the web is a main page (that is secure) and libraries that can only be called on the server side.
Someone who has more experience with web services wouldn't have made that mistake.
So anyway, like you said, the problem is shoddy implementation.
Religion has caused more genocide on this planet than any other single force
I hate to bruise your ego, but that simply isn't true. Holocaust: 6,000,000 WWI: 15,000,000 WWII: 62,000,000 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30,000,000 Stalin's Purges: 20,000,000
None of that has anything to do with religion. I challange you to show more than 130 million deaths from religion. Here, I'll even help you get started:
Since when should the "freedom" of misinforming people be tolerable?
Wow! So you're saying that there should be a "ministry of truth" that examines everything that you and I say, and if we say something that the ministry of truth doesn't agree with, then we are misinforming people and don't have the right to say it?
Wow, you are a major, major idiot. You don't deserve to live in a free society because you are too stupid to understand how it works.
Whe else would they ignore the existing Delta 4H and Atlas boosters and decide to design yet another launcher?
That's easy. man rating. It's an expensive process. According to NASA, it is actually cheaper to start over from scratch (or incorporate man-rated components) than to go back and do the man-rating process on the D-IV or Atlas. What happens if you get $500 million into the man-rating process on the D-IV and discover, "oh gosh, there's no way to get the reliability required for man rating out of this pump, and no other pump has the required performance!" Then you're screwed and you're looking at MAJOR redesign work.
Here is the analogy that I gave another poster. When Microsoft built windows their goal was to make it "good enough" and get it out the door. It was economics all the way. And that's fine, because nobody dies when windows crashes. But there are a lot of bugs in windows, and microsoft has to keep patching them. What if you set a goal to have some very very low number of bugs in your OS? I'm sure you can understand how it might actually be cheaper to just start over and build it from the ground up. This time, your goal wouldn't be, "get it out the door" your goal would be fewer bugs.
the Atlas V Heavy is already pretty close to the capabilities of the Ares I.
the official word from NASA on this is that man-rating is a very very expensive process. Neither the Atlas V nor the Delta IV were designed with man-rating in mind (that saved them a lot of development money) and believe it or not, going back and man-rating either would actually be more expensive than designing from the ground up with man-rating in mind - especially when you can use components that are already man-rated.
I might make an analogy to a software development project. Sometimes, it is faster and better to throw out the old and start over. How many times have we said that about Windows? Microsoft keeps patching it. If there was some goal to have some extreemly low number of bugs, I think it would cost more for Microsoft to keep patching windows trying to reach that goal, than it would be to build from scratch and just be careful this time. Their goal with windows was to get it to market. If they started over with the goal of fewer bugs, they might achive that.
"An e-mail containing the rumor that the payload was a metric ton too heavy"
So, people honestly think that actual engineers, with actual engineering degrees, and actual engineering experience - people who can calculate exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under, and exactly how much tension the cables on a bridge need to be able to withstand, and exactly where to point and how much thrust is needed to send Cassini inward to Mercury, then back out past Venus, then inward again, then past Earth, then past Jupiter, and go into orbit at SAturn - going right past Titan so that it can release a probe...
*takes a breath*... and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
And then some random guy on the Internets looks over their work and says, "whoa guys, I may not have any education or experience and not even be able to balance my checkbook, but it looks to me that you're 1 metric ton too heavy."
WORKAROUND: In Robo-sentry administration plugin, 1. click on Automated Missions 2. select Time Travel 3. uncheck the box labeled "Kill Sarah Conor" 4. reboot Robo-sentry
maybe, but you need to do it anyway. You menton bind variables, and that's definitely something that people should do, but bind variables wont stop out-of-bounds inputs. For example, if you are expecting an integer between 1 and 3, you still need to do input checking.
Seems a lot easier than dual-booting (for those of us with SO's who aren't comfortable with Linux)
and it's a lot more powerful than that too. The real power of a VM imho is that you set up a machine seperately from the hardware. I like to have a little web server on my home network. I bet most slashdotters have a web server at home. I can't even remember how many times I've installed debian and configured apache. The thing is, I'm all the time taking my little server apart, taking parts out of it for my main computer or whatever. Each time I have to reinstall the OS.
No more. Now I have a VM with a web server set up just the way I like it. I have an image of that VM burned off on DVD. I can set up a brand new machine, install a bare bones OS in an hour or so, then I install VMWare and copy the image of my server, boot it up the image and I'm in business. The old config still works.
So basically I now have an abstraction layer between the server and the hardware. My example was simplified but the principle is sound.
sure sure, change the subject so that it's all about me - even though you don't know anything about me.
For your information, I was paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, who happens to be an eminent scientist -perhaps THE world authority on evolution. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about. I actually got his example slightly incorrect though. The example he used was not peacocks, it was widow birds. They have, he says, such long tails for one reason and one reason only, because females like it. Here is the book I got this from:
now I'm not going to get any even when my wife does want another bambino.
um, if your partner enjoys sex, then she'll be willing to have sex. If she doesn't enjoy sex, then guess what, that is *your* fault. If you take some time to remove some stress from her life (often as simple as cleaning the house) then run a bubble bath for her, light a few candles, burn some incense, but on some soft music, and then afterwards do oral sex on her - I promise you, she'll be more receptive.
But you except to just jump on top of her, then of course she's gong to get "headaches"
they're working diligantly on not needing us anymore.
They don't need us and the human species will be better off without us. We (males) are just too aggressive and violent.
Of course, the reason males are aggressive is the same as the reason that male peacocks have such enormous plumes. You don't think that male peacocks actually *want* to have those ridiculous tales do you? Oh no. The reason they have those tales is that female peacocks like it that way. The same sort of thing happens with humans. Men who are violent and aggressive are rewarded by being able to pass on their genes. The trait of aggression is selected for (by women) and so it becomes more common. The trait that is selected against becomes less common. If women didn't like males that way, they could breed it out of the gene pool in just one or two generations.
At about 8 min, it got interesting again, with the very quick transition from "over the clouds" to "underwater".
That was pretty cool, wasn't it. I also thought it was pretty cool how the booster stood up after it hit the water. I wasn't aware that they were designed to do that. I guess that makes them easier to spot from the recovery ships.
Man, those engineeers thought of everything didn't they - here's another example that I heard recently: the metal that the external tank is made of isn't strong enough to withstand the stresses of launch with that big heavy shuttle hanging from the side - at least, it isn't strong enough at room temperature or above. But when they fill the tank, they let some of the fuel boil off and that freezes the metal and makes it stronger, allowing it to survive launch.
I mean seriously, how cool is that?
Re:"The mst complex machine ever built, blaah, bla
on
Shuttle Launch Success
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· Score: 1
The progress modules have been boostng ISS without any problem.
From TFA: It's very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals with an effectiveness that compares favourably to harsher chemicals such as DEET
I seriously doubt that this will work as well as a repellant. All he did was figure out what flavor of human mosquitos like. Sure, if there are lots of humans around, they will go after the one they like, but in a pinch, they are still comming after you. It's like saying, we did research and found that oni prefers chocolate ice cream, so we are only selling vanilla - that wll keep him away.
No, actually it wont. If you're the only ice cream shop in town, I'll make do with vanilla. Similarly, if you're out walking alone in the woods, the mosquitoes are going to bite you even if you don't taste just the way they like.
This discovery is still good for when you are in a group of people - unless everyone in the group makes use of it, then you're back where you started.
He did the work to figure it out, he deserves the exclusive right FOR A LIMITED TIME to manufacture it. After that, it goes into the public domain.
Without that protection, his recipe would be a closely guarded secret and there is the possibility that his death, or a fire in the factory, or a hard drive crash, would result in the formula being lost. Then we all lose. That's the way things used to work, and that's why we can't make violins as good as Stradivarius, or swords out of damascus steel (or buildings out of it for that matter).
Patents do benefit mankind. It's not this guy's fault that politicians have perverted the system.
Re:"The mst complex machine ever built, blaah, bla
on
Shuttle Launch Success
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· Score: 1
Unnecessary complexity is your enemy in any mission critical system. I don't know if it's necessary, but the Shuttle is capable of doing a lot more than the Russian launch vehicles. Hubble and the International Space Station were possible only because of the Shuttle's capability to allow extended spacewalks, as well as the use of the Canadarm.
That's true. The shuttle is often criticized, but it's important to remember that it really has a lot more capability than any other spaceship that's ever been designed.
If the criticism is, "omg it's so expensive to put seven people in orbit" well yeah, that's valid, just like it's valid to say, "omg it's so expensive to drive my two kids to school in a $50,000 hummer that gets 8MPG" That's true, and the *reason* it's true is that you have too much vehicle there to use it as a taxi.
If you just want to put people into orbit, experience seems to show that a capsule is best. That's the bottom line, and every time the shuttle flies with no payload other than passengers, it is a waste. We really need a space taxi for that. It'd be safer and cheaper.
On the other hand, if you want to carry a satellite or space-station module into orbit AND you want to have the option of bringing it back to Earth (as opposed to throwing it away) if it turns out to be broken somehow, then guess what, the shuttle is perfect, and I challenge anyone to even come up with a better concept than the shuttle.
The real waste is that we don't use it for that. We bought the $50,000 hummer, but we so rarely go off-road. It's politics. The people in NASA know that the problem is as I've described it, but they also know that congress wont give them money for both a shuttle and a taxi, any more than your wife will let you buy a hummer to use just for those weekend trips and a honda to take the kids to school.
Just think about what is possible. Think how efficient we'd be if, back in the '70s we had built both the shuttle and another capsule-based launcher. Then today we'd have frequent, maybe once a month taxi missions to the ISS. Scientists from all over the world could make trips up there. And once a year or so we'd launch a fully loaded shuttle with a new space station module (or better yet, a component for a large interplanetary ship that we'd assemble at the ISS).
The Energiya booster is configurable to 400,000 lbs, and that exceeds the 285,000 lbs orbital lift capacity of Saturn V.
Sure sure. It was designed that way in large part because it had to be, because of the extreme northern latitude of the soviet launch site, they don't get as much of a kick from the Earth's rotation as the US or ESA. So they *have* to build larger rockets to put the same payload into orbit.
Sadly, Energia was never actually tested with anything anywhere near the capability of the Saturn V. So saying, "it's configurable to 400k" is kind of like saying, "oh the Airbus A380 isn't that big of a deal because the 747 can be configured to be larger." In other words, it's something of a laughable statement. The Soviet N1 would also have been more powerful than the Saturn V, but that too never materialized.
A rocket motor is just a pump you know. That's all it is, a high-speed pump. It's easy to *design* a big rocket. It's something else altogether to actually make one work - because the devil is in the details. For the time being, the Saturn V is still the most powerful working rocket ever built by man.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice many sites that do that and don't get slapped down - esp subscription sites.
I wonder, if I changed my useragent to be whatever the googlebot reports itself to be - would I get by the registration screen on websites like the NYTimes??
Here's another great thing about Virgin: I only use the prepaid phone during the summer. I take it with me camping or whatever. So like right now it's winter and I'm not using it and I'm not going to renew it in 90 days. They will shut off the phone of course but get this, when I reactivate it in the summer by putting another $20 on it, all the minutes that were left over from last summer are still there!
You can't beat that! I've had the phone for a couple of years and I actually have a lot of time built up on it.
There were no science in the 1400's.
Really? Because Eratosthenes and Aristarchus lived LONG before 1400AD. I think it's funny that you seem to think that people lived in caves until around 1970, when they suddenly woke up and invented civilization.
Actually, I thought the abstract said that the compound used is oxidized, meaning that the oxygen is captured and only the hydrogen is released. If I read the abstract wrong, please correct me.
My (admittedly layman's) understanding is thus: they have a molecule that sticks to oxygen. Put the molecule into water and it grabs the oxygen away from H2O, releasing H2. That by itself is not very impressive. Sodium does something similar. So here's the cool part, when exposed to sunlight, the molecule releases its oxygen - thus the process will go on so long as you have sunlight and water. This is only interesting because the molecule works like a catalyst.
IF it really works (I am cautiously optimistic) this could be the biggest discovery in the history of the world. It could mean that our civilization is no longer on the road to oblivion. It could mean no more energy wars (but don't worry, we'll still have to fight the United Atheist Alliance).
it's the weaknesses that show up in the practice of shoddy implementation
Right, that's what I was about to say. The only vulnerability I've seen that I would say was AJAX-specific was that someone put security on the main page, but on none of the little ajax widgets. It just didn't occur to this person that securing the widgets was necessary - probably because what we're used to when programming on the web is a main page (that is secure) and libraries that can only be called on the server side.
Someone who has more experience with web services wouldn't have made that mistake.
So anyway, like you said, the problem is shoddy implementation.
Religion has caused more genocide on this planet than any other single force
I hate to bruise your ego, but that simply isn't true.
Holocaust: 6,000,000
WWI: 15,000,000
WWII: 62,000,000
Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30,000,000
Stalin's Purges: 20,000,000
None of that has anything to do with religion. I challange you to show more than 130 million deaths from religion. Here, I'll even help you get started:
Spanish Inquisition: 5,000
Only 132,995,000 more to go! Good luck with that!
Since when should the "freedom" of misinforming people be tolerable?
Wow! So you're saying that there should be a "ministry of truth" that examines everything that you and I say, and if we say something that the ministry of truth doesn't agree with, then we are misinforming people and don't have the right to say it?
Wow, you are a major, major idiot. You don't deserve to live in a free society because you are too stupid to understand how it works.
Whe else would they ignore the existing Delta 4H and Atlas boosters and decide to design yet another launcher?
That's easy. man rating. It's an expensive process. According to NASA, it is actually cheaper to start over from scratch (or incorporate man-rated components) than to go back and do the man-rating process on the D-IV or Atlas. What happens if you get $500 million into the man-rating process on the D-IV and discover, "oh gosh, there's no way to get the reliability required for man rating out of this pump, and no other pump has the required performance!" Then you're screwed and you're looking at MAJOR redesign work.
Here is the analogy that I gave another poster. When Microsoft built windows their goal was to make it "good enough" and get it out the door. It was economics all the way. And that's fine, because nobody dies when windows crashes. But there are a lot of bugs in windows, and microsoft has to keep patching them. What if you set a goal to have some very very low number of bugs in your OS? I'm sure you can understand how it might actually be cheaper to just start over and build it from the ground up. This time, your goal wouldn't be, "get it out the door" your goal would be fewer bugs.
the Atlas V Heavy is already pretty close to the capabilities of the Ares I.
the official word from NASA on this is that man-rating is a very very expensive process. Neither the Atlas V nor the Delta IV were designed with man-rating in mind (that saved them a lot of development money) and believe it or not, going back and man-rating either would actually be more expensive than designing from the ground up with man-rating in mind - especially when you can use components that are already man-rated.
I might make an analogy to a software development project. Sometimes, it is faster and better to throw out the old and start over. How many times have we said that about Windows? Microsoft keeps patching it. If there was some goal to have some extreemly low number of bugs, I think it would cost more for Microsoft to keep patching windows trying to reach that goal, than it would be to build from scratch and just be careful this time. Their goal with windows was to get it to market. If they started over with the goal of fewer bugs, they might achive that.
"An e-mail containing the rumor that the payload was a metric ton too heavy"
... and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
So, people honestly think that actual engineers, with actual engineering degrees, and actual engineering experience - people who can calculate exactly how much compression force a load-bearnig wall is under, and exactly how much tension the cables on a bridge need to be able to withstand, and exactly where to point and how much thrust is needed to send Cassini inward to Mercury, then back out past Venus, then inward again, then past Earth, then past Jupiter, and go into orbit at SAturn - going right past Titan so that it can release a probe...
*takes a breath*
And then some random guy on the Internets looks over their work and says, "whoa guys, I may not have any education or experience and not even be able to balance my checkbook, but it looks to me that you're 1 metric ton too heavy."
Is that how the world works?
I note that you made no attempt to refute anything he said. I take that to mean that he is right and it makes you uncomfortable.
Could you imagine if Microsoft made this robot?
Robo-sentry.NET Vista Live: Hotfix 918899
SYMPTOMS:
Robo-sentry travels back in time and attempts to kill Sarah Conor.
You may also recieve the following error message: "I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle."
RESOLUTION:
Install Robo-sentry cumulative security patch 918899
WORKAROUND:
In Robo-sentry administration plugin,
1. click on Automated Missions
2. select Time Travel
3. uncheck the box labeled "Kill Sarah Conor"
4. reboot Robo-sentry
oh good point! I wish I could still play descent II, but it requires the CD and my CD was scratched. That was a seriously ground-breaking game!
Input checking is a half-assed solution.
maybe, but you need to do it anyway. You menton bind variables, and that's definitely something that people should do, but bind variables wont stop out-of-bounds inputs. For example, if you are expecting an integer between 1 and 3, you still need to do input checking.
Seems a lot easier than dual-booting (for those of us with SO's who aren't comfortable with Linux)
and it's a lot more powerful than that too. The real power of a VM imho is that you set up a machine seperately from the hardware. I like to have a little web server on my home network. I bet most slashdotters have a web server at home. I can't even remember how many times I've installed debian and configured apache. The thing is, I'm all the time taking my little server apart, taking parts out of it for my main computer or whatever. Each time I have to reinstall the OS.
No more. Now I have a VM with a web server set up just the way I like it. I have an image of that VM burned off on DVD. I can set up a brand new machine, install a bare bones OS in an hour or so, then I install VMWare and copy the image of my server, boot it up the image and I'm in business. The old config still works.
So basically I now have an abstraction layer between the server and the hardware. My example was simplified but the principle is sound.
;) It was a joke...
that's cool.
girls aren't passing you up
9 24972-0945613?v=glance&n=283155
sure sure, change the subject so that it's all about me - even though you don't know anything about me.
For your information, I was paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, who happens to be an eminent scientist -perhaps THE world authority on evolution. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about. I actually got his example slightly incorrect though. The example he used was not peacocks, it was widow birds. They have, he says, such long tails for one reason and one reason only, because females like it. Here is the book I got this from:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393315703/002-6
Read it yourself. Educate yourself on the topic before you try to debate it. His other book, The Selfish Gene is excellent too.
now I'm not going to get any even when my wife does want another bambino.
um, if your partner enjoys sex, then she'll be willing to have sex. If she doesn't enjoy sex, then guess what, that is *your* fault. If you take some time to remove some stress from her life (often as simple as cleaning the house) then run a bubble bath for her, light a few candles, burn some incense, but on some soft music, and then afterwards do oral sex on her - I promise you, she'll be more receptive.
But you except to just jump on top of her, then of course she's gong to get "headaches"
they're working diligantly on not needing us anymore.
They don't need us and the human species will be better off without us. We (males) are just too aggressive and violent.
Of course, the reason males are aggressive is the same as the reason that male peacocks have such enormous plumes. You don't think that male peacocks actually *want* to have those ridiculous tales do you? Oh no. The reason they have those tales is that female peacocks like it that way. The same sort of thing happens with humans. Men who are violent and aggressive are rewarded by being able to pass on their genes. The trait of aggression is selected for (by women) and so it becomes more common. The trait that is selected against becomes less common. If women didn't like males that way, they could breed it out of the gene pool in just one or two generations.
At about 8 min, it got interesting again, with the very quick transition from "over the clouds" to "underwater".
That was pretty cool, wasn't it. I also thought it was pretty cool how the booster stood up after it hit the water. I wasn't aware that they were designed to do that. I guess that makes them easier to spot from the recovery ships.
Man, those engineeers thought of everything didn't they - here's another example that I heard recently: the metal that the external tank is made of isn't strong enough to withstand the stresses of launch with that big heavy shuttle hanging from the side - at least, it isn't strong enough at room temperature or above. But when they fill the tank, they let some of the fuel boil off and that freezes the metal and makes it stronger, allowing it to survive launch.
I mean seriously, how cool is that?
The progress modules have been boostng ISS without any problem.
From TFA: It's very exciting," Logan told New Scientist, "because these are totally natural chemicals with an effectiveness that compares favourably to harsher chemicals such as DEET
I seriously doubt that this will work as well as a repellant. All he did was figure out what flavor of human mosquitos like. Sure, if there are lots of humans around, they will go after the one they like, but in a pinch, they are still comming after you. It's like saying, we did research and found that oni prefers chocolate ice cream, so we are only selling vanilla - that wll keep him away.
No, actually it wont. If you're the only ice cream shop in town, I'll make do with vanilla. Similarly, if you're out walking alone in the woods, the mosquitoes are going to bite you even if you don't taste just the way they like.
This discovery is still good for when you are in a group of people - unless everyone in the group makes use of it, then you're back where you started.
He did the work to figure it out, he deserves the exclusive right FOR A LIMITED TIME to manufacture it. After that, it goes into the public domain.
Without that protection, his recipe would be a closely guarded secret and there is the possibility that his death, or a fire in the factory, or a hard drive crash, would result in the formula being lost. Then we all lose. That's the way things used to work, and that's why we can't make violins as good as Stradivarius, or swords out of damascus steel (or buildings out of it for that matter).
Patents do benefit mankind. It's not this guy's fault that politicians have perverted the system.
Unnecessary complexity is your enemy in any mission critical system. I don't know if it's necessary, but the Shuttle is capable of doing a lot more than the Russian launch vehicles. Hubble and the International Space Station were possible only because of the Shuttle's capability to allow extended spacewalks, as well as the use of the Canadarm.
That's true. The shuttle is often criticized, but it's important to remember that it really has a lot more capability than any other spaceship that's ever been designed.
If the criticism is, "omg it's so expensive to put seven people in orbit" well yeah, that's valid, just like it's valid to say, "omg it's so expensive to drive my two kids to school in a $50,000 hummer that gets 8MPG" That's true, and the *reason* it's true is that you have too much vehicle there to use it as a taxi.
If you just want to put people into orbit, experience seems to show that a capsule is best. That's the bottom line, and every time the shuttle flies with no payload other than passengers, it is a waste. We really need a space taxi for that. It'd be safer and cheaper.
On the other hand, if you want to carry a satellite or space-station module into orbit AND you want to have the option of bringing it back to Earth (as opposed to throwing it away) if it turns out to be broken somehow, then guess what, the shuttle is perfect, and I challenge anyone to even come up with a better concept than the shuttle.
The real waste is that we don't use it for that. We bought the $50,000 hummer, but we so rarely go off-road. It's politics. The people in NASA know that the problem is as I've described it, but they also know that congress wont give them money for both a shuttle and a taxi, any more than your wife will let you buy a hummer to use just for those weekend trips and a honda to take the kids to school.
Just think about what is possible. Think how efficient we'd be if, back in the '70s we had built both the shuttle and another capsule-based launcher. Then today we'd have frequent, maybe once a month taxi missions to the ISS. Scientists from all over the world could make trips up there. And once a year or so we'd launch a fully loaded shuttle with a new space station module (or better yet, a component for a large interplanetary ship that we'd assemble at the ISS).
Then we'd be a space faring race.
The Energiya booster is configurable to 400,000 lbs, and that exceeds the 285,000 lbs orbital lift capacity of Saturn V.
Sure sure. It was designed that way in large part because it had to be, because of the extreme northern latitude of the soviet launch site, they don't get as much of a kick from the Earth's rotation as the US or ESA. So they *have* to build larger rockets to put the same payload into orbit.
Sadly, Energia was never actually tested with anything anywhere near the capability of the Saturn V. So saying, "it's configurable to 400k" is kind of like saying, "oh the Airbus A380 isn't that big of a deal because the 747 can be configured to be larger." In other words, it's something of a laughable statement. The Soviet N1 would also have been more powerful than the Saturn V, but that too never materialized.
A rocket motor is just a pump you know. That's all it is, a high-speed pump. It's easy to *design* a big rocket. It's something else altogether to actually make one work - because the devil is in the details. For the time being, the Saturn V is still the most powerful working rocket ever built by man.