It costs so much because its a government program. The design decisions that made the shuttle, and are now pushing the design of Constellation, were not about technology, they were about which congressional district the components would be manufactured in, how many government employees would be laid off, etc. Under those constraints I'm surprised NASA ever gets anything to fly.
The worst job microsats can perform is communication. To do communication well you need big (read: heavy) antennas. What we *need* around the Moon is a TDRSS. The ones we have in GEO are some of the biggest satellites ever launched. It's said that the entire shuttle program was justified by the launch of just the TDRSS and they've been milking it ever since.
when I worked at VMware we used to just call it "cheating". You'd often hear engineers referring to "the drivers we use to cheat", and communicating through the "backdoor port".
That's true, but there's a consensus that processing ice will be much easier than processing regolith.. the question remains, is it really ice? And how pure is it? Is it mixed with regolith? Even in those worst situations it'll likely still be easier to purify dirty snow than melt regolith in solar furnaces. The important thing is, different materials require different strategies and that means different equipment.. they have to design everything and be 95% sure it'll work before sending it up.
On the other hand, virtually no-one is talking about scouting for high purity metals (say, from asteroid impacts) and the ease at which processing those ores would be compared to processing common regolith. It's not that the payoff is less, it's just that this kind of far off vision is stigmatized and if you want to keep getting funding you have to reign in your enthusiasm.
LCROSS had some issues last weekend which caused it to lose a good portion of its fuel. The mission is down to the wire and may not make it. If it does, it will be because of the skill and dedication of the NASA team.
The data they collect from the impact, from LRO, earth and space telescopes and LCROSS itself, will provide the missing piece of the puzzle for Lunar ISRU. Up until now, the promise of ice on the Moon has been a distant "yeah, we'll do that one day" proposition, but with this data NASA will finally be able to do study on what kinda of equipment will be required to process the ice and produce potable water, oxygen and rocket fuel (most likely methane) and that will drive the design of Lunar exploration systems.
When you hear about someone making $1.2million from a trivial airport game you can't help but cringe. Apparently there's 1.2 million people* out there who don't think anything about blowing $1 on a game.. literally, $1 has no value to them. This shouldn't be very surprising, after all, they bought an iPhone and there's plenty of phones that are at least $1 cheaper than the iPhone and just as good.
This is *exactly* the situation that economists warned about a century ago when selling stock to the public became common place. If you have the means to interact with millions of people to whom $1 has no value you can easily get your company valued way above what it should be. And that's how market fail.
* actually, it's more than that, Apple takes a massive cut of the pie too.
Umm.. it's a banking website.. I dunno about your bank, but my bank takes 30+ seconds to log me in on a good day.
Oh, and blaming the user for a failure of technology is classic geek arrogance. The simple fact is, these token devices a part of the arms race and if you want to keep ahead, you've got to keep innovating. For example, most users don't even *need* wire transfer capabilities so they should be disabled by default, when they ask for it to be enabled the bank gets the opportunity to educate users that the second generator built into the device is for authorizing wire transfers only.
Except that the attacker can just return a "no, that's invalid, try logging in again" and the user will happily give them a second token which they can now use to do the transfer.
I laughed at those words for a different reason: it's the kind of nonsense you get from people who have never dealt with robotics before.
Although accurate, the indicated behaviour of robots is hardly a virtue. If a human kept doing the same task in the same way, regardless of the consequences, we'd call them stupid, and that's exactly what robots are.
I think von Braun said it best: Using robots is a lot like having a wife. She helps you solve the problems you wouldn't have had if you hadn't gotten married.
Uh huh. The news reporting on the HSF review committee has been horrid. The committee has the duty of reporting the options to Congress and the President. Some of those options are affordable, some of them are not, and doing all of some of them isn't affordable either. The mouth breather journalists don't understand the discussion so they latch onto the word "budget" and write a the-sky-is-falling article.
The cheapest option, that no-one is considering btw, is to just give SpaceX the $300m for crew transfer to LEO that they were promised and wait 2.5 years, then pay $20m/seat.. if you want to spend a little more, buy seats from the Russians at $53m/seat. If you want to spend a little more, keep flying the shuttle beyond the current manifest (and hope it doesn't explode). If you want to placate your international partners, keep flying the ISS until 2020, by then it'll be completely unusable, but hey. And after doing *all* that you'll have some money left over to launch an unnecessarily large capsule towards the Moon. But just forget about Mars for now because we don't have the skill or the technology (just don't tell Zubrin that).
on windows... if you've got security vulnerabilities, you should be pushing updates.
Oh, and about a month ago MSN connectivity died anyway, so I switched to using the HTTP connecting method. From looking at the code, it seems this isn't affected by this issue.
You do have the option of having no friends on Facebook. Similarly, if you don't go out in public you don't have the problem of your friends taking pictures of you. There's always the unibomber style shack life, consider it.
Wow, must suck to be insightful on Slashdot, I've stopped doing it.
You ask a good question, currently there are no private efforts to go to the Moon, in the US. Energia is offering an Apollo 8-style flyby of the Moon for $100M. Here is the details:
There has been no announcement of interested parties yet.. but that is typical of Orbital space tourism, so I don't see why they would announce that they have received funding just yet, even if they had.
Once a market has been established for this service, they will likely offer a surface mission..
The Russians are ahead of the curve. SpaceX is developing manned launch capability, with or without COTS-D funding, and their Dragon vehicle has been built for a lunar flyby mission (PICA heat shield, wall thickness, 9 day on-orbit, consumables stowage). But none of this will happen within the time frame that NASA is planning to return to the Moon in.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's amazing that after so many years people are *still* confusing commercial with proprietary. 99.9% of the use of Apache is commercial.. and it aint proprietary. However there are proprietary ripoffs of Apache and that is the problem that the GPL tries to defeat.
Slashdot Mirror
Discredited by a bunch of nobodies.
8 years and finally someone outside the company gets that joke.
Thanks Microsoft.. I hope Win7 is as successful as Vista.
It costs so much because its a government program. The design decisions that made the shuttle, and are now pushing the design of Constellation, were not about technology, they were about which congressional district the components would be manufactured in, how many government employees would be laid off, etc. Under those constraints I'm surprised NASA ever gets anything to fly.
The worst job microsats can perform is communication. To do communication well you need big (read: heavy) antennas. What we *need* around the Moon is a TDRSS. The ones we have in GEO are some of the biggest satellites ever launched. It's said that the entire shuttle program was justified by the launch of just the TDRSS and they've been milking it ever since.
when I worked at VMware we used to just call it "cheating". You'd often hear engineers referring to "the drivers we use to cheat", and communicating through the "backdoor port".
That's true, but there's a consensus that processing ice will be much easier than processing regolith.. the question remains, is it really ice? And how pure is it? Is it mixed with regolith? Even in those worst situations it'll likely still be easier to purify dirty snow than melt regolith in solar furnaces. The important thing is, different materials require different strategies and that means different equipment.. they have to design everything and be 95% sure it'll work before sending it up.
On the other hand, virtually no-one is talking about scouting for high purity metals (say, from asteroid impacts) and the ease at which processing those ores would be compared to processing common regolith. It's not that the payoff is less, it's just that this kind of far off vision is stigmatized and if you want to keep getting funding you have to reign in your enthusiasm.
LCROSS had some issues last weekend which caused it to lose a good portion of its fuel. The mission is down to the wire and may not make it. If it does, it will be because of the skill and dedication of the NASA team.
The data they collect from the impact, from LRO, earth and space telescopes and LCROSS itself, will provide the missing piece of the puzzle for Lunar ISRU. Up until now, the promise of ice on the Moon has been a distant "yeah, we'll do that one day" proposition, but with this data NASA will finally be able to do study on what kinda of equipment will be required to process the ice and produce potable water, oxygen and rocket fuel (most likely methane) and that will drive the design of Lunar exploration systems.
Sigh. The question is, how is a trivial airport game worth $1.2 million.
When you hear about someone making $1.2million from a trivial airport game you can't help but cringe. Apparently there's 1.2 million people* out there who don't think anything about blowing $1 on a game.. literally, $1 has no value to them. This shouldn't be very surprising, after all, they bought an iPhone and there's plenty of phones that are at least $1 cheaper than the iPhone and just as good.
This is *exactly* the situation that economists warned about a century ago when selling stock to the public became common place. If you have the means to interact with millions of people to whom $1 has no value you can easily get your company valued way above what it should be. And that's how market fail.
* actually, it's more than that, Apple takes a massive cut of the pie too.
Alternatively, only idiots believe cameras are effective tools for catching criminals and therefore change their behaviour when in front of one.
Umm.. it's a banking website.. I dunno about your bank, but my bank takes 30+ seconds to log me in on a good day.
Oh, and blaming the user for a failure of technology is classic geek arrogance. The simple fact is, these token devices a part of the arms race and if you want to keep ahead, you've got to keep innovating. For example, most users don't even *need* wire transfer capabilities so they should be disabled by default, when they ask for it to be enabled the bank gets the opportunity to educate users that the second generator built into the device is for authorizing wire transfers only.
Except that the attacker can just return a "no, that's invalid, try logging in again" and the user will happily give them a second token which they can now use to do the transfer.
to fit in with the others
nerd fail.
Predominately the reason why I try not to hang around with other nerds, I feel so damn accepted.
If Google decides that they don't want you reading some book for whatever reason, then you're shit out of luck unless you've got a hard copy of it.
So.. kinda like if Google did nothing?
If they kept flipping the burger even though the meat had gone rotten, you'd fire them.
I laughed at those words for a different reason: it's the kind of nonsense you get from people who have never dealt with robotics before.
Although accurate, the indicated behaviour of robots is hardly a virtue. If a human kept doing the same task in the same way, regardless of the consequences, we'd call them stupid, and that's exactly what robots are.
I think von Braun said it best: Using robots is a lot like having a wife. She helps you solve the problems you wouldn't have had if you hadn't gotten married.
Uh huh. The news reporting on the HSF review committee has been horrid. The committee has the duty of reporting the options to Congress and the President. Some of those options are affordable, some of them are not, and doing all of some of them isn't affordable either. The mouth breather journalists don't understand the discussion so they latch onto the word "budget" and write a the-sky-is-falling article.
The cheapest option, that no-one is considering btw, is to just give SpaceX the $300m for crew transfer to LEO that they were promised and wait 2.5 years, then pay $20m/seat.. if you want to spend a little more, buy seats from the Russians at $53m/seat. If you want to spend a little more, keep flying the shuttle beyond the current manifest (and hope it doesn't explode). If you want to placate your international partners, keep flying the ISS until 2020, by then it'll be completely unusable, but hey. And after doing *all* that you'll have some money left over to launch an unnecessarily large capsule towards the Moon. But just forget about Mars for now because we don't have the skill or the technology (just don't tell Zubrin that).
Unnecessarily Large Capsule.
Yeah, cause the US gives a shit about international treaties.
You *are* aware that most naval vessels are nuclear powered right?
on windows... if you've got security vulnerabilities, you should be pushing updates.
Oh, and about a month ago MSN connectivity died anyway, so I switched to using the HTTP connecting method. From looking at the code, it seems this isn't affected by this issue.
You do have the option of having no friends on Facebook. Similarly, if you don't go out in public you don't have the problem of your friends taking pictures of you. There's always the unibomber style shack life, consider it.
Wow, must suck to be insightful on Slashdot, I've stopped doing it.
You ask a good question, currently there are no private efforts to go to the Moon, in the US. Energia is offering an Apollo 8-style flyby of the Moon for $100M. Here is the details:
http://www.spaceadventures.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Lunar.welcome
There has been no announcement of interested parties yet.. but that is typical of Orbital space tourism, so I don't see why they would announce that they have received funding just yet, even if they had.
Once a market has been established for this service, they will likely offer a surface mission..
The Russians are ahead of the curve. SpaceX is developing manned launch capability, with or without COTS-D funding, and their Dragon vehicle has been built for a lunar flyby mission (PICA heat shield, wall thickness, 9 day on-orbit, consumables stowage). But none of this will happen within the time frame that NASA is planning to return to the Moon in.
It's amazing that after so many years people are *still* confusing commercial with proprietary. 99.9% of the use of Apache is commercial.. and it aint proprietary. However there are proprietary ripoffs of Apache and that is the problem that the GPL tries to defeat.