"POS.... I mean Shuttle...now their stuff can't even get through a mission"
You don't think there were missions lost in the "good old days"? Ever wonder why they sent probes out in pairs? Pioneer 10 and a Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and a Voyager 2, Viking 1 and Viking 2? One's the freaking spare in case the other fails! It's only recently that NASA has been confident/foolish/cheap enough to launch probes without a spare. So now when there's a failure the whole mission is forfeit.
I guess in the first generation, they went for ultimate fuel efficiency. There's no reason one couldn't build hybrids with muscles that get better gas mileage than a similar performing regular car.
Train locomotives are diesel/electric hybrids, it doesn't get much more muscley than that.
"Maybe when GM gets their fuel-cell cars in production, America will look a little more updated."
The Scateboard? That little project is just to impress Congress in an effort to hold off proposals to increase the CAFE standard. They have no intention of EVER shipping it. They're lobbying against a measly 1.5 mpg increase by 2007!
"2/19/2003 DETROIT (Reuters) - U.S. automakers, led by General Motors Corp., have fired back at a federal proposal to raise fuel economy standards for trucks by 1.5 miles a gallon, claiming regulators overestimated the companies' ability to meet higher targets and that the costs of tougher rules outweigh the benefits.... Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. told NHTSA they were in favor of the increase...Ford called the levels "technically challenging," and warned NHTSA's cost estimates were low, but said it was committed to meeting the standards."
NASA Hubble FAQ states the Hubble cost $1.5 B to build and launch. $0.5B was for launching it. NASA claims it cost $0.795B for one of the servicing missions (FS-96(11)-023-GSFC) including launch costs. There have been three servicing missions (1993, 1997, and 1999) and was to be one more in 2003 before decomissioning the Hubble and returning it to Earth in a Shuttle in 2010. That's five trips to the Hubble for roughly $4.0B. Grand total of $5.5 B.
Now, say one built several telescopes and launched them without servicing them or bringing them back. Use a Titan-III for launch, big enough for a 11,000 kg Hubble, costing about $245 M each launch (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/ELV_US.html). Even assuming no cost savings from building more than one telescope, each would cost $1.245 B and one could launch four of them for $5.0 B. You could probably build five or six by including the per-unit savings of building more than one.
So even though there would have been problems and failures, there would probably have been more than one operational at any given time so we would have gotten 2-3 times (or more) the science for the same cost without risking any lives.
"And you forgot to mention that the first accident was preventable. An engineering coverup."
They're always preventable in hindsight. The O-ring problem wasn't covered up. The engineers at the time (without the hindsight we now enjoy) thought they understood the problem and had it under control. They knew that when the joint flexed, the O-ring wouldn't seal for a short period and that there might even be a bit of erosion until it did. They had seen erosion on earlier flights and it matched their model, seeming to confirm their understanding. Everything was documented according to the procedures of the time -- hardly a coverup.
There are probably any number of other components on the Shuttle with problems that are (or believed to be) understood and managed. That's engineering.
"The idea is cool but it still runs on petrol or diesel. Back to the stone age..."
Well, one only needs a source of heat with which to generate steam. Hydrocarbons are a handy source of that, but hydrogen could also serve, maybe even solar. Why, even a big hunk of Plutonium 238 would do the trick. 8)
"One thing I'm curious about is why they can only be scaled to 300 horsepower..."
Don't know but one of the variables (tube length, air pressure, steam pressure, etc.) probably gets out of hand as you scale up. Like, a 1000 HP model would require a tube 300 feet long and 1 million PSI steam pressure. I just made up those numbers to illustrate the principle.
The gadget, assuming it works, seems to be small, simple and reliable (no moving parts). So why not just stack a bunch of them together, in parallel, sharing the same steam source to get higher powers?
"It also might be fun to install a 20 cm one into a ketchup dispenser at McDonald's or something."
Sounds like a good homework assignment for Project Mayhem. Oops, I'm not supposed to talk about that.
"If I pick my nose, and patent that, then hey, it's a new patent."
Only if you've come up with a novel method for picking your nose. So "Method for Nasal Debris Removal Using Microscopic Black Holes and Trained Chipmunks" would be patentable but the well known finger-method would not be. Understand?
"They put Khan on Ceti Alpha 5, right? Fifth planet out from Alpha Ceti, which is the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. (Astronomy geek.) Six months later, Ceti Alpha 6 (the next planet out) explodes...."
Ah, but maybe the weren't numbered in order of distance from the star. They were probably numbered in order of discovery. The moons of planets in our solar system are numbered in order of discovery, at least until a name is assigned.
So now CA-6 is inward from CA-5 and was just discovered afterward. It was on the far side of the star from the survey ship, or something.
There are enough documented cases of [spontaneous] human combustion to at least give some credence to the phenomenon
I don't know of any documented cases. There are cases some have attributed to spontaneous human combustion that can be explained with an external ignition (cigarette, fireplace, etc.) and slow candle-like burning of their body fat. See the entry from The Skeptics Dictionary.
From other posts, it seems reasonable that getting hit by one of these things would do some damage -- equivalent to setting off a few grams of high explosive along the path of the object, but why would it be any more likely to trigger SHC than any number of other violent ends one could meet? Getting hit with large-caliber bullets, or setting off kgs of explosives strapped to one's body don't seem to do the trick so why would quark matter do it?
If SHC were a real phenomenon, militaries would have probably developed weapons to exploit it long ago. SHC-catalyst-tipped bullets? Yikes.
"...optical switches is that the switching time is on the order of tens of *milliseconds*..."
Apparently, this company's optical switch doesn't take tens of milliseconds. They claim it can switch in tens of nanoseconds. They call it an "optical phased array" -- no moving parts. They talk about it a bit on their web site.
All of the devices on a hub share bandwidth to the computer. If one of those devices can saturate the hub, the other devices suffer. The PCI cards have a seperate controller for each plug so you can have multiple active devices without interfering with each other.
An example from my own experience: I bought a tape backup (I know USB tape backup, bleh, it was cheap...). Originally I plopped it onto a hub shared with my modem. When doing a backup, ANY modem activity would starve the tape drive and it would stop, rewind a bit, write a little bit, stop, rewind, etc. Apparently, even when not connected the computer and modem would talk every little while.
After getting the USB card the tape drive and modem each had their very own controller and were happily oblivious of each other.
Writing the servo information is not a "format". It's _never_ been possible to rewrite this in the field. This is only done in the factory by special machines called servo track writers.
A low-level format is different. In the old days, this would go out a rewrite all of the headers for every sector. These days, there aren't any headers so formatting is not much more than just writing every sector. There are some extra steps for defect management, but that's about it.
"just treat the binary stream coming from each head assembly as a separately clocked serial stream, and combine them in the controller."
The problem is that disk drive have only one read channel, the device that turns the analog signal coming out of the preamp, from the head, into the one and zeros. It's an expensive part and you would need one for each active head. Also, the disk controller's going to need additional pipelines and more memory bandwidth.
"It's also straightforward...While the drive is idle, non-destructively reformat the disk continuously, reading an entire cylinder/sector pair head by head and then writing it all at once."
The heads can wander several tracks apart so this approach would require a huge reduction in track density. I'm thinking about 5% useable capacity.
The idea of the drive autonomously rewriting entire cylinders makes my skin crawl. The reliability problems with this are legion. (Like losing power in the middle of one of these updates.)
Better, would be to use microactuators on each head. With these, the main actuator just gets the heads near the target track. Then, each head is positioned independently over its track by the microactuator. This is doable but not cheap. Now, with a much more complicated controls problem, the drive's going to need a heftier DSP.
While it could be done (has been done actually), it isn't cheap, adds complexity, lowers reliability, and doesn't do anything for latency.
Caveman Grog is sitting at the mouth of the cave. Having found some odd rocks, he is banging them together, intrigued by the sparks. The rest of the cave-people are further back in the cave, gnawing raw antelope meat from the bones of a fresh kill.
Head-Caveman Ugg: Grog, idiot rock-banger! What are you doing up there with those stupid rocks?
Caveman Grog: See? I bang the rocks and they make --
Ugg: Shut up, molester of mammoths! Get back here and help us gnaw this tough meat. Caveman Snorg must have killed the toughest Antelope on the plain. You chew it for Old-Toothless-Medicine-Woman tonight!
Grog: But Ugg, see the sparks?
Ugg (standing up, grabbing club): What good are stupid sparks for? We have tough antelope meat to chew now! We have enough problems in this cave without you fooling around. After they are all solved, then you can beat on rocks. So quit messing around or I throw you to the cave bear.
Grog: But the sparks might be useful. Maybe they could be used to make fi--
Ugg swings the clug, mashing Grog's skull to a pulp before he can finish the sentence. The invention of fire is delayed another 10,000 years.
"getting men and material to and from the Lagrangian points would be vastly cheaper than getting them to and from the moon"
delta-V from Earth's surface to LEO is 12 km/sec. From LEO to Lunar Surface is 6.2 km/sec. From Lunar Surface to LEO is 3.2 km/sec.
Getting from LEO to L1 requires 3.77 km/s and only 0.77 km/s to get back.
So Earth to Moon and back to LEO is 21.4 km/s delta-v and Earth to L1 and back to LEO is 16.54 km/sec.
So it is cheaper to get to L1 but not "vastly" so. Most of the work is getting into LEO in both cases. The article talks about the dangers of radiation. The Moon at least offers some potential shielding (pile dirt onto shelter) and a bit of gravity.
[disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist. I swiped those delta-v numbers from an online source and, while they seem reasonable, they could be wrong.]
I had the procedure done on my left eye a few years ago. All I can say is thank God I didn't do both eyes.
Before surgery, both eyes were correctable to 20/20 with contacts. Annoying but bearable.
Now, my left eye is slightly overcorrected (far sighted) and has irregular astigmatism. Basically, I can see double out of my left eye, with my right eye closed.
It is difficult to read small text on a computer monitor with that eye only. Luckily, my right eye is dominant. If I had done both eyes and they both messed up, I would be in trouble.
So, yes, 95%+ people have a great experience, are doing cartwheels of joy down the aisles. Good for them. 1 out of 20 of us do not have a good experience. Think about that before you let them perform an irreversible procedure to your eye.
Yes, I went to an experienced surgeon, name brand laser, etc., etc.
I think your definition of unemployment doesn't match the one used for the well-known government statistic.
Unemployment is a measure of the people who are are out of work and actively looking for a job.
It doesn't matter whether or not one has been fired or laid off or if one is receiving benefits or not. People do not fall out of the statistic after their benefits, if any, run out, provided they are still looking. If one stops looking, to retire or to stay home with the kids or to go back to school, then one does stop being "unemployed". People who have not worked or looked for work for decades can suddenly become unemployed if they decide to start looking for a job.
The number of people receiving jobless benefits, the number of unemployed, and the number of people who do not work at a paying job, are all different numbers.
"But what's the point of burning a 1 mm hole in a tank or plane? How much damage does that do?"
Well, it may depend on how accurate the laser is. Where the damage is might make all the difference. How about a 1mm hole through the skull of the pilot?
Venus is basically the same size as Earth so a sample-return would be more difficult than on Mars. Think how big a rocket we need to get into orbit from Earth's surface. Speed is what is required to make orbit, not just altitude, so even starting at 50 km, one would need an enormous amount of fuel.
For an atmospheric sample, it might make sense for the probe to not enter orbit or slow down enough for a parachute. Perhaps it could approach Venus at high speed, penetrating the atmosphere only enough to get a sample and then skimming off of it, back into space.
It's either a troll or ignorant. The "analogy" doesn't hold up for a nanosecond.
For the zillionth time: the software is not bundled. There's a coupon for a free copy. The software is not installed on the computer when shipped.
In Design is not an Apple product. It's in Apple's interest to have lots of software products available for the OSX. They don't really have an interest in crushing Quark. They do have an interest in promoting OSX software. If that's at the expense of programs that don't run on OSX, then that's how it is.
It's just a marketing tie in. If Quark had an OSX version of their product, and wanted a similar deal, I'm sure Apple would be more than happy to put a coupon in the crate.
Slashdot Mirror
"POS.... I mean Shuttle...now their stuff can't even get through a mission"
You don't think there were missions lost in the "good old days"? Ever wonder why they sent probes out in pairs? Pioneer 10 and a Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and a Voyager 2, Viking 1 and Viking 2? One's the freaking spare in case the other fails! It's only recently that NASA has been confident/foolish/cheap enough to launch probes without a spare. So now when there's a failure the whole mission is forfeit.
"How many know that the Boeing 747 development was entirely funded by the DOD for building the AWACS."
Apparently only you. The E-3 (AWACS) is based on a Boeing 707/320.
Iz
I guess in the first generation, they went for ultimate fuel efficiency. There's no reason one couldn't build hybrids with muscles that get better gas mileage than a similar performing regular car.
Train locomotives are diesel/electric hybrids, it doesn't get much more muscley than that.
"Maybe when GM gets their fuel-cell cars in production, America will look a little more updated."
... Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. told NHTSA they were in favor of the increase...Ford called the levels "technically challenging," and warned NHTSA's cost estimates were low, but said it was committed to meeting the standards."
The Scateboard? That little project is just to impress Congress in an effort to hold off proposals to increase the CAFE standard. They have no intention of EVER shipping it. They're lobbying against a measly 1.5 mpg increase by 2007!
"2/19/2003 DETROIT (Reuters) - U.S. automakers, led by General Motors Corp., have fired back at a federal proposal to raise fuel economy standards for trucks by 1.5 miles a gallon, claiming regulators overestimated the companies' ability to meet higher targets and that the costs of tougher rules outweigh the benefits.
OK.
NASA Hubble FAQ states the Hubble cost $1.5 B to build and launch. $0.5B was for launching it. NASA claims it cost $0.795B for one of the servicing missions (FS-96(11)-023-GSFC) including launch costs. There have been three servicing missions (1993, 1997, and 1999) and was to be one more in 2003 before decomissioning the Hubble and returning it to Earth in a Shuttle in 2010. That's five trips to the Hubble for roughly $4.0B. Grand total of $5.5 B.
Now, say one built several telescopes and launched them without servicing them or bringing them back. Use a Titan-III for launch, big enough for a 11,000 kg Hubble, costing about $245 M each launch (http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/ELV_US.html). Even assuming no cost savings from building more than one telescope, each would cost $1.245 B and one could launch four of them for $5.0 B. You could probably build five or six by including the per-unit savings of building more than one.
So even though there would have been problems and failures, there would probably have been more than one operational at any given time so we would have gotten 2-3 times (or more) the science for the same cost without risking any lives.
Iz
"Actually, I believe that the Hubble Space Telescope is an excellent argument for manned space travel/exploration."
Actually, for the cost of the various shuttle missions to repair and maintain the Hubble we could have launched a whole series of similar telescopes.
"And you forgot to mention that the first accident was preventable. An engineering coverup."
They're always preventable in hindsight. The O-ring problem wasn't covered up. The engineers at the time (without the hindsight we now enjoy) thought they understood the problem and had it under control. They knew that when the joint flexed, the O-ring wouldn't seal for a short period and that there might even be a bit of erosion until it did. They had seen erosion on earlier flights and it matched their model, seeming to confirm their understanding. Everything was documented according to the procedures of the time -- hardly a coverup.
There are probably any number of other components on the Shuttle with problems that are (or believed to be) understood and managed. That's engineering.
"The idea is cool but it still runs on petrol or diesel. Back to the stone age..."
Well, one only needs a source of heat with which to generate steam. Hydrocarbons are a handy source of that, but hydrogen could also serve, maybe even solar. Why, even a big hunk of Plutonium 238 would do the trick. 8)
Iz
"One thing I'm curious about is why they can only be scaled to 300 horsepower..."
Don't know but one of the variables (tube length, air pressure, steam pressure, etc.) probably gets out of hand as you scale up. Like, a 1000 HP model would require a tube 300 feet long and 1 million PSI steam pressure. I just made up those numbers to illustrate the principle.
The gadget, assuming it works, seems to be small, simple and reliable (no moving parts). So why not just stack a bunch of them together, in parallel, sharing the same steam source to get higher powers?
"It also might be fun to install a 20 cm one into a ketchup dispenser at McDonald's or something."
Sounds like a good homework assignment for Project Mayhem. Oops, I'm not supposed to talk about that.
Iz
"If I pick my nose, and patent that, then hey, it's a new patent."
Only if you've come up with a novel method for picking your nose. So "Method for Nasal Debris Removal Using Microscopic Black Holes and Trained Chipmunks" would be patentable but the well known finger-method would not be. Understand?
"They put Khan on Ceti Alpha 5, right? Fifth planet out from Alpha Ceti, which is the brightest star in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. (Astronomy geek.) Six months later, Ceti Alpha 6 (the next planet out) explodes. ..."
Ah, but maybe the weren't numbered in order of distance from the star. They were probably numbered in order of discovery. The moons of planets in our solar system are numbered in order of discovery, at least until a name is assigned.
So now CA-6 is inward from CA-5 and was just discovered afterward. It was on the far side of the star from the survey ship, or something.
Feel better?
There are enough documented cases of [spontaneous] human combustion to at least give some credence to the phenomenon
I don't know of any documented cases. There are cases some have attributed to spontaneous human combustion that can be explained with an external ignition (cigarette, fireplace, etc.) and slow candle-like burning of their body fat. See the entry from The Skeptics Dictionary.
From other posts, it seems reasonable that getting hit by one of these things would do some damage -- equivalent to setting off a few grams of high explosive along the path of the object, but why would it be any more likely to trigger SHC than any number of other violent ends one could meet? Getting hit with large-caliber bullets, or setting off kgs of explosives strapped to one's body don't seem to do the trick so why would quark matter do it?
If SHC were a real phenomenon, militaries would have probably developed weapons to exploit it long ago. SHC-catalyst-tipped bullets? Yikes.
"...optical switches is that the switching time is on the order of tens of *milliseconds*..."
Apparently, this company's optical switch doesn't take tens of milliseconds. They claim it can switch in tens of nanoseconds. They call it an "optical phased array" -- no moving parts. They talk about it a bit on their web site.
All of the devices on a hub share bandwidth to the computer. If one of those devices can saturate the hub, the other devices suffer. The PCI cards have a seperate controller for each plug so you can have multiple active devices without interfering with each other.
An example from my own experience: I bought a tape backup (I know USB tape backup, bleh, it was cheap...). Originally I plopped it onto a hub shared with my modem. When doing a backup, ANY modem activity would starve the tape drive and it would stop, rewind a bit, write a little bit, stop, rewind, etc. Apparently, even when not connected the computer and modem would talk every little while.
After getting the USB card the tape drive and modem each had their very own controller and were happily oblivious of each other.
Writing the servo information is not a "format". It's _never_ been possible to rewrite this in the field. This is only done in the factory by special machines called servo track writers.
A low-level format is different. In the old days, this would go out a rewrite all of the headers for every sector. These days, there aren't any headers so formatting is not much more than just writing every sector. There are some extra steps for defect management, but that's about it.
"just treat the binary stream coming from each head assembly as a separately clocked serial stream, and combine them in the controller."
The problem is that disk drive have only one read channel, the device that turns the analog signal coming out of the preamp, from the head, into the one and zeros. It's an expensive part and you would need one for each active head. Also, the disk controller's going to need additional pipelines and more memory bandwidth.
"It's also straightforward...While the drive is idle, non-destructively reformat the disk continuously, reading an entire cylinder/sector pair head by head and then writing it all at once."
The heads can wander several tracks apart so this approach would require a huge reduction in track density. I'm thinking about 5% useable capacity.
The idea of the drive autonomously rewriting entire cylinders makes my skin crawl. The reliability problems with this are legion. (Like losing power in the middle of one of these updates.)
Better, would be to use microactuators on each head. With these, the main actuator just gets the heads near the target track. Then, each head is positioned independently over its track by the microactuator. This is doable but not cheap. Now, with a much more complicated controls problem, the drive's going to need a heftier DSP.
While it could be done (has been done actually), it isn't cheap, adds complexity, lowers reliability, and doesn't do anything for latency.
1 million years ago....
Caveman Grog is sitting at the mouth of the cave. Having found some odd rocks, he is banging them together, intrigued by the sparks. The rest of the cave-people are further back in the cave, gnawing raw antelope meat from the bones of a fresh kill.
Head-Caveman Ugg: Grog, idiot rock-banger! What are you doing up there with those stupid rocks?
Caveman Grog: See? I bang the rocks and they make --
Ugg: Shut up, molester of mammoths! Get back here and help us gnaw this tough meat. Caveman Snorg must have killed the toughest Antelope on the plain. You chew it for Old-Toothless-Medicine-Woman tonight!
Grog: But Ugg, see the sparks?
Ugg (standing up, grabbing club): What good are stupid sparks for? We have tough antelope meat to chew now! We have enough problems in this cave without you fooling around. After they are all solved, then you can beat on rocks. So quit messing around or I throw you to the cave bear.
Grog: But the sparks might be useful. Maybe they could be used to make fi--
Ugg swings the clug, mashing Grog's skull to a pulp before he can finish the sentence. The invention of fire is delayed another 10,000 years.
"getting men and material to and from the Lagrangian points would be vastly cheaper than getting them to and from the moon"
delta-V from Earth's surface to LEO is 12 km/sec. From LEO to Lunar Surface is 6.2 km/sec. From Lunar Surface to LEO is 3.2 km/sec.
Getting from LEO to L1 requires 3.77 km/s and only 0.77 km/s to get back.
So Earth to Moon and back to LEO is 21.4 km/s delta-v and Earth to L1 and back to LEO is 16.54 km/sec.
So it is cheaper to get to L1 but not "vastly" so. Most of the work is getting into LEO in both cases. The article talks about the dangers of radiation. The Moon at least offers some potential shielding (pile dirt onto shelter) and a bit of gravity.
[disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist. I swiped those delta-v numbers from an online source and, while they seem reasonable, they could be wrong.]
"Hmm... What about "Bob"? "
There's a few Bobs:
(5871) Bobbell
(6708) Bobbievaile
(5642) Bobbywilliams
(10498) Bobgent
(12014) Bobhawkes
(2829) Bobhope
(37859) Bobkoff
(2507) Bobone
(6641) Bobross
(2637) Bobrovnikoff
(5549) Bobstefanik
(39890) Bobstephens
(13423) Bobwoolley
and some Georges:
(3854) George
(6400) Georgealexander
(16225) Georgebaldo
(9704) Georgebeekman
(6202) Georgemiley
(10733) Georgesand
(11740) Georgesmith
(359) Georgia
(9119) Georgpeuerbach
See http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/MPNames.html for the whole list.
Oops, those are already taken by asteroids:
(93) Minerva
(5254) Ulysses
(3361) Orpheus
With all the known asteroids and moons, it's probably getting pretty tough to come up with new names.
Iz
I had the procedure done on my left eye a few years ago. All I can say is thank God I didn't do both eyes.
Before surgery, both eyes were correctable to 20/20 with contacts. Annoying but bearable.
Now, my left eye is slightly overcorrected (far sighted) and has irregular astigmatism. Basically, I can see double out of my left eye, with my right eye closed.
It is difficult to read small text on a computer monitor with that eye only. Luckily, my right eye is dominant. If I had done both eyes and they both messed up, I would be in trouble.
So, yes, 95%+ people have a great experience, are doing cartwheels of joy down the aisles. Good for them. 1 out of 20 of us do not have a good experience. Think about that before you let them perform an irreversible procedure to your eye.
Yes, I went to an experienced surgeon, name brand laser, etc., etc.
I think your definition of unemployment doesn't match the one used for the well-known government statistic.
Unemployment is a measure of the people who are are out of work and actively looking for a job.
It doesn't matter whether or not one has been fired or laid off or if one is receiving benefits or not. People do not fall out of the statistic after their benefits, if any, run out, provided they are still looking. If one stops looking, to retire or to stay home with the kids or to go back to school, then one does stop being "unemployed". People who have not worked or looked for work for decades can suddenly become unemployed if they decide to start looking for a job.
The number of people receiving jobless benefits, the number of unemployed, and the number of people who do not work at a paying job, are all different numbers.
"But what's the point of burning a 1 mm hole in a tank or plane? How much damage does that do?"
Well, it may depend on how accurate the laser is. Where the damage is might make all the difference. How about a 1mm hole through the skull of the pilot?
Venus is basically the same size as Earth so a sample-return would be more difficult than on Mars. Think how big a rocket we need to get into orbit from Earth's surface. Speed is what is required to make orbit, not just altitude, so even starting at 50 km, one would need an enormous amount of fuel.
For an atmospheric sample, it might make sense for the probe to not enter orbit or slow down enough for a parachute. Perhaps it could approach Venus at high speed, penetrating the atmosphere only enough to get a sample and then skimming off of it, back into space.
It's either a troll or ignorant. The "analogy" doesn't hold up for a nanosecond.
For the zillionth time: the software is not bundled. There's a coupon for a free copy. The software is not installed on the computer when shipped.
In Design is not an Apple product. It's in Apple's interest to have lots of software products available for the OSX. They don't really have an interest in crushing Quark. They do have an interest in promoting OSX software. If that's at the expense of programs that don't run on OSX, then that's how it is.
It's just a marketing tie in. If Quark had an OSX version of their product, and wanted a similar deal, I'm sure Apple would be more than happy to put a coupon in the crate.