While generally aligned with conservative/republican views, I voted for the only senator with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act: Senator Feingold. Granted, I'm not appreciative of all he does, but that sticks out enough to change a republican vote to a democrat one.
And why was the Shuttle not launched the previous day, when it was supposed to?
Forcasters said there would be no chance of acceptable weather. And what was the weather that fine Sunday morning? Beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. Not a cloud in the sky.
Well then... I guess we'll have to look elsewhere for a reason. Here's one: Superbowl was that night. Nobody wanted to be working during the Superbowl and the forcast was delivered accordingly.
I'm telling you people. Beaurocracy sucks. The parent is absolutely correct about the State of the Union. In addition, there was this Superbowl thing. Not to mention the enormous pressure to not delay launches... NASA's Congress-approved budget required 24--yes 24, launches each year by 1987.
What I wanna know is how a college student has a plasma TV. Aren't college kids supposed to be poor? Whatever happened to the trusty 13"er with bad reception?
Well, not entirely *identical*. Your pitch motion is much different in an airplane than in a stable orbit. In the airplane, your pitch acceleration is consistently non-zero, whereas in orbit, your pitch velocity is consistently non-zero. I would know... I've flown in NASA's weightless wonder and had to correct for that very thing with my experiment.
Well, not exactly for free. I put a crapload of effort into it.
I got to fly in the the Weightless Wonder (aka V**** C****) as part of a collegiate student program this past April. All told, we flew 30 micro-g parabolas, 1 lunar parabola, and 1 martian parabola. Let me say this: roller coasters, jumping cars over hills, even piloting gliders do not come close to comparing. Even when piloting an aircraft, you don't have the ability to get up and move around...there's that darn steering part to take care of.
For $3000, if the track record and maintenence records are clean, I would definitely do it again (granted I plan ahead for this as simply an expensive vacation). Especially since I won't have to be preoccupied with any experiments.
Might I suggest: anyone who is in a science-based major in college should try to come up with an experiment that would yield "intriguing" results when flown in microgravity. Remember, each trial must last a maximum of 25 seconds. And the more hands-off (and more automated), the better...that just means more fun for you.
Weather radar loops. Rather than have the client dl multiple jpegs and sequence them with javascript (eww, javascript), the client need only download a single apng.
For an example, check out weather.com's "map in motion" for your locale. Then, check the source of the page. Much cleaner to simply have an <img> tag.
Seriously people. Duke isn't all that special. Over a hundred teams from universities around the US do this every year. Hell, I did it. Guess I know how to make the cover of slashdot come next spring/summer.
Plus, the moon rock between you and space would provide some sort of insulation and therefore warmth as opposed to being simply "out in the open", wouldn't it?
Actually, regolith is such a good insulator, the base would have to vent off heat.
And how hard could moon-mining be anyway?
Not terribly hard. Remember, everything weighs ~6x less on the moon. Picking stuff up and putting it down elsewhere is much easier. But also, regolith is mostly of a very fine composition. Something similar to the sand you find in hourglass timers. Not to mention no water to allow it to clump. I would imagine such a small angle of repose would lead to a more inefficient dig than generally expected.
By making the base mobile, it would obviously need to be above ground (er, regolith, I suppose). One of the major problems with this is shielding from cosmic radiation. By placing a base a few meters under the lunar regolith, expensive (either due to manufacturability or weight) shielding need not be used... the regolith is good enough. However, with a mobile lunar base, that expensive shielding must be employed and transported along with the mobile base.
I'm sorry, but this is just one of the many reasons why a mobile lunar base is infeasible (as of now). The sheer coolness of it is astronomical (haha, get it?), but the costs are simply too high.
Sure, they can keep the beam pointed correctly, but what about the rest of the satellite?
I did a case study on a such a satellite involving a 10km^2 solar array launched into orbit and here's what I learned: -The density of such a satellite has never been tested before. Most satellites are packed to be the smallest in volume possible, whereas this would be the opposite. We don't have any experimental data for non-nominal modes. -The attitude constraint requirement for the solar array is incredibly high. For the given size, it would require approximately 750 500mN ion engines. IIRC, the most powerful ion engine in use is at 100mN. In addition, while ion engines use more electricity than fuel (and they'll have plenty of electricity on a 10km^2 solar array!), the fuel costs are quite high too. The amount of fuel required, per annum, was about 75% of the dry mass of the entire satellite itself. And don't forget we have to get all that fuel up there. -Not only would we need multiple ion engines of a quality not yet designed, but we also haven't studied the effects of the output of these engines in a stable orbit. Ion engines put out a constant stream of really fast plasma. What would happen if one of these streams (recall, we need ~750) glanced a commsat? What if one of these streams consistently pointed at the ISS? I believe the answer is: a Bad Thing (tm).
There was more to this, but I think you get the point. We are a couple of orders of magnitude away in technology from putting this into action, not to mention beyond the break even point. Pointing the beam is easy. Keeping the rest of the satellite aligned with the sun is hard.
Let's pretend. You're the Department of Transportation, and you discover that our company intentionally did nothing about leather seats cured in third world countries with chemicals we know cause birth defects? Brake linings that fail after a thousand miles. Fuel injectors that burn people alive.
What about this? Keep me on payroll as an outside consultant. In exchange for my salary, I'll keep my mouth shut. I won't need to come to the office. I can do this job from home.
I spent a semester and a half of hardly part-time work getting a similar project rolling with 5 other people. Granted, this PSA looks cooler and probably has better control, but we were undergrads and these are NASA post-docs with 8 hours per day to work on this.
And yes, I realize we had a wire sticking out. It was our position/attitude sensor. EM requirements for the plane-borne lab wouldn't allow yet another wireless transceiver.
Actually, the basic installation of Gentoo does this already... albeit with a minimal set of packages. During install, you copy a generic root filesystem to your hard drive, chroot into it, and start replacing the "stock" binaries with your own compiled binaries. That's where much of the waiting is (ie: compiling gcc [twice, I think]).
That's the case for the most basic install (stage 1). If you do a stage 3 install, you're closer to what the parent wants.
Then, if you go to the GRP releases (which I have not touched), you'll have all the major stuff already compiled: xfree, gcc, openoffice, etc.
One place that's dangerous to tread for Gentoo is to have many packages pre-installed. One of the driving philosophies is to know exactly what's installed on the system, and have nothing more.
Believe it or not, you may be on the right track with your semi-offtopic remark. It all depends, of course, on how they mean "the gyroscope failed." If this circuit breaker failure simply means that they can no longer control the gyroscope (which is more likely to have happened), then the problems will be less, and your remark inane.
HOWEVER, if the gyro "failed" in such a way as to stop spinning (less likely), then, because of conservation of angular momentum, the ISS will start rotating in the same way as the gyro used to rotate. Granted, there will be a ratio of moments of inertia to worry about (actually, it is probably a nonlinear combination of respective moments of inertia of the gyro and ISS since the gyro was probably not at 0 degrees when it failed) so the ISS won't start spinning too much. In order to counteract this spinning motion, the other two gyros (actually, they're called control moment gyroscopes...CMGs) can compensate.
Oh, and please, no remarks about how the thrusters are a great redundancy that NASA was ingenious for implementing. Once those CMGs get saturated, they can no longer affect the ISS. The only way to desaturate the CMGs is a momentum dump with thrusters (be they ISS-borne or shuttle-borne while the shuttle is docked).
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While generally aligned with conservative/republican views, I voted for the only senator with the balls to vote against the PATRIOT Act: Senator Feingold. Granted, I'm not appreciative of all he does, but that sticks out enough to change a republican vote to a democrat one.
And why was the Shuttle not launched the previous day, when it was supposed to?
Forcasters said there would be no chance of acceptable weather. And what was the weather that fine Sunday morning? Beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. Not a cloud in the sky.
Well then... I guess we'll have to look elsewhere for a reason. Here's one: Superbowl was that night. Nobody wanted to be working during the Superbowl and the forcast was delivered accordingly.
I'm telling you people. Beaurocracy sucks. The parent is absolutely correct about the State of the Union. In addition, there was this Superbowl thing. Not to mention the enormous pressure to not delay launches... NASA's Congress-approved budget required 24--yes 24, launches each year by 1987.
Ridiculous.
What I wanna know is how a college student has a plasma TV. Aren't college kids supposed to be poor? Whatever happened to the trusty 13"er with bad reception?
Yes, but I "estimate" that 0 songs, movies and software programs are illegally distributed over the Internet every month.
MPAA reply: Even if you take the mean of your guess and our estimate, you still get 1.3 billion.
My rebuttal: Not if you take the geometric mean...
Well, at least we know he isn't some PR person faking being a dev.
Well, not entirely *identical*. Your pitch motion is much different in an airplane than in a stable orbit. In the airplane, your pitch acceleration is consistently non-zero, whereas in orbit, your pitch velocity is consistently non-zero. I would know... I've flown in NASA's weightless wonder and had to correct for that very thing with my experiment.
Well, not exactly for free. I put a crapload of effort into it.
I got to fly in the the Weightless Wonder (aka V**** C****) as part of a collegiate student program this past April. All told, we flew 30 micro-g parabolas, 1 lunar parabola, and 1 martian parabola. Let me say this: roller coasters, jumping cars over hills, even piloting gliders do not come close to comparing. Even when piloting an aircraft, you don't have the ability to get up and move around...there's that darn steering part to take care of.
For $3000, if the track record and maintenence records are clean, I would definitely do it again (granted I plan ahead for this as simply an expensive vacation). Especially since I won't have to be preoccupied with any experiments.
Might I suggest: anyone who is in a science-based major in college should try to come up with an experiment that would yield "intriguing" results when flown in microgravity. Remember, each trial must last a maximum of 25 seconds. And the more hands-off (and more automated), the better...that just means more fun for you.
Weather radar loops. Rather than have the client dl multiple jpegs and sequence them with javascript (eww, javascript), the client need only download a single apng.
For an example, check out weather.com's "map in motion" for your locale. Then, check the source of the page. Much cleaner to simply have an <img> tag.
A blog! No way!
Seriously people. Duke isn't all that special. Over a hundred teams from universities around the US do this every year. Hell, I did it. Guess I know how to make the cover of slashdot come next spring/summer.
Tenacity... yes. More than Lance? I really doubt it.
-Brain Surgery
-Testicular Surgery
-Lungs full of tumors
-Grosjean catheter
-One round of BEP chemotherapy
-Three rounds of VIP chemotherapy
And after all that, he wins 5 TDFs in a row. I think that qualifies as tenacity.
Actually, regolith is such a good insulator, the base would have to vent off heat.
Not terribly hard. Remember, everything weighs ~6x less on the moon. Picking stuff up and putting it down elsewhere is much easier. But also, regolith is mostly of a very fine composition. Something similar to the sand you find in hourglass timers. Not to mention no water to allow it to clump. I would imagine such a small angle of repose would lead to a more inefficient dig than generally expected.
By making the base mobile, it would obviously need to be above ground (er, regolith, I suppose). One of the major problems with this is shielding from cosmic radiation. By placing a base a few meters under the lunar regolith, expensive (either due to manufacturability or weight) shielding need not be used... the regolith is good enough. However, with a mobile lunar base, that expensive shielding must be employed and transported along with the mobile base.
I'm sorry, but this is just one of the many reasons why a mobile lunar base is infeasible (as of now). The sheer coolness of it is astronomical (haha, get it?), but the costs are simply too high.
Sure, they can keep the beam pointed correctly, but what about the rest of the satellite?
I did a case study on a such a satellite involving a 10km^2 solar array launched into orbit and here's what I learned:
-The density of such a satellite has never been tested before. Most satellites are packed to be the smallest in volume possible, whereas this would be the opposite. We don't have any experimental data for non-nominal modes.
-The attitude constraint requirement for the solar array is incredibly high. For the given size, it would require approximately 750 500mN ion engines. IIRC, the most powerful ion engine in use is at 100mN. In addition, while ion engines use more electricity than fuel (and they'll have plenty of electricity on a 10km^2 solar array!), the fuel costs are quite high too. The amount of fuel required, per annum, was about 75% of the dry mass of the entire satellite itself. And don't forget we have to get all that fuel up there.
-Not only would we need multiple ion engines of a quality not yet designed, but we also haven't studied the effects of the output of these engines in a stable orbit. Ion engines put out a constant stream of really fast plasma. What would happen if one of these streams (recall, we need ~750) glanced a commsat? What if one of these streams consistently pointed at the ISS? I believe the answer is: a Bad Thing (tm).
There was more to this, but I think you get the point. We are a couple of orders of magnitude away in technology from putting this into action, not to mention beyond the break even point. Pointing the beam is easy. Keeping the rest of the satellite aligned with the sun is hard.
to this:
Let's pretend. You're the Department of Transportation, and you discover that our company intentionally did nothing about leather seats cured in third world countries with chemicals we know cause birth defects? Brake linings that fail after a thousand miles. Fuel injectors that burn people alive.
What about this? Keep me on payroll as an outside consultant. In exchange for my salary, I'll keep my mouth shut. I won't need to come to the office. I can do this job from home.
They've done that already. I believe the reply to DeCSS was "Oh c'mon! That took us forever to come up with!"
Let's face it, people, copy protection is really really easy to do. It's really really hard to do it well.
It took them this long to get it working?
I spent a semester and a half of hardly part-time work getting a similar project rolling with 5 other people. Granted, this PSA looks cooler and probably has better control, but we were undergrads and these are NASA post-docs with 8 hours per day to work on this.
Check, check, check, check it out.
And yes, I realize we had a wire sticking out. It was our position/attitude sensor. EM requirements for the plane-borne lab wouldn't allow yet another wireless transceiver.
replied: "Simple... Volume."
Unstoppable object, meet impenetrable wall.
Impenetrable wall, unstoppable object.
To answer your questions:
No.
Yes.
Please, just because it's on eBay doesn't mean it's worth buying. Some people out there really need to realize this fact.
Actually, the basic installation of Gentoo does this already... albeit with a minimal set of packages. During install, you copy a generic root filesystem to your hard drive, chroot into it, and start replacing the "stock" binaries with your own compiled binaries. That's where much of the waiting is (ie: compiling gcc [twice, I think]).
That's the case for the most basic install (stage 1). If you do a stage 3 install, you're closer to what the parent wants.
Then, if you go to the GRP releases (which I have not touched), you'll have all the major stuff already compiled: xfree, gcc, openoffice, etc.
One place that's dangerous to tread for Gentoo is to have many packages pre-installed. One of the driving philosophies is to know exactly what's installed on the system, and have nothing more.
Yeah, pretty boring. But with my setup, distcc approximately triples compilation speed. And yes, the wait is definitely worth it.
So I got that going for me, which is nice.
Believe it or not, you may be on the right track with your semi-offtopic remark. It all depends, of course, on how they mean "the gyroscope failed." If this circuit breaker failure simply means that they can no longer control the gyroscope (which is more likely to have happened), then the problems will be less, and your remark inane.
HOWEVER, if the gyro "failed" in such a way as to stop spinning (less likely), then, because of conservation of angular momentum, the ISS will start rotating in the same way as the gyro used to rotate. Granted, there will be a ratio of moments of inertia to worry about (actually, it is probably a nonlinear combination of respective moments of inertia of the gyro and ISS since the gyro was probably not at 0 degrees when it failed) so the ISS won't start spinning too much. In order to counteract this spinning motion, the other two gyros (actually, they're called control moment gyroscopes...CMGs) can compensate.
Oh, and please, no remarks about how the thrusters are a great redundancy that NASA was ingenious for implementing. Once those CMGs get saturated, they can no longer affect the ISS. The only way to desaturate the CMGs is a momentum dump with thrusters (be they ISS-borne or shuttle-borne while the shuttle is docked).
he was heard saying:
*mumble* I'll burn this place down *mumble*
Fat chance of finding any intelligence there, much less of the extraterrestrial type.
I think my sig has something to say about that.