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User: jcnnghm

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  1. Re:NASA Has 2 Hubbles on NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes For Astronomy · · Score: 4, Funny

    Interesting you should say that, because it's basically her background. She was involved in the design and production of women's clothing before she worked at NASA. Basically, she'd design patterns then make dresses. She claims it is much easier to design patterns for spacecraft than women, they don't move as much and they aren't as picky.

  2. NASA Has 2 Hubbles on NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes For Astronomy · · Score: 5, Informative

    NASA has a fully functional copy of Hubble "sitting around" at Goddard Space Flight Center as well. If something goes wrong in space, fabrication of replacement components and the training of the astronauts that will fix it does not occur in space. It is invaluable to have an exact duplicate on the ground for this reason.

    Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects. For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.

    Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have higher powered telescopes in space.

    My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html.

    Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps 15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4. Disclaimer: This is a cross-post of something I wrote at Hacker News earlier today.

  3. Re:Good lord. on NASA To Drastically Cut Mars Mission Funding · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B, including military space spending. NASA, the US civilian space programs 2010 budget was $18.7B, 83% of the spending for the entire rest of the world. All of Europe spent a paltry $4.6B on the ESA. Where is the spending from these enlightened, long-sighted countries?

    Consider this as well, many space projects aren't actually funded by NASA. For example, GPS is funded and operated by the Air Force Space Command. The United States is, by a massive margin, the country most invested in space exploration.

  4. Re:Any High Tech artifacts that last even 100 year on New Heat Pump Will Last 10,000 Years · · Score: 1

    Which ancient road have you driven on recently? If you can't actually use them today, do you think they may have grossly overspent on them then?

  5. Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything on Pirates as a Marketplace · · Score: 1

    But if the produced material sucks, you're stuck wasting your money on something that isn't any good.

    Or in the alternative, you could allow investors to shoulder that risk, and in exchange be allowed the exclusive right to distribute and charge for the produced material. This way, if the game sucks, you don't have to spend any money on it. But if the game is good, you've got to give the investor some money to cover his cost, plus some to cover his risk, plus some to provide a return on his investment to encourage him to take the risk to begin with. Of course, if people could just copy it, the investor wouldn't be able to recoup the investment, so he wouldn't be able to do it. So maybe there could be some kind of law for that. But that kind of brings us full circle doesn't it.

    So it looks like you fall into the category of naive. A little more.

  6. Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything on Pirates as a Marketplace · · Score: 1

    How much did it cost to record an album in 1982 using equipment more powerful than a Fostex prosumer deck?

    A hell of a lot more than it does today with a cheap Mac? Quality hasn't exactly gone up with falling costs and more amateurs.

    Then explain shareware, and explain the whole free software movement.

    How well do shareware games cope with piracy again? What was the last shareware game purchased by over five million people?

    The free software movement works well for one and only one type of software, software used by programmers, in particular, library code. This includes things like operating systems, web browsers, programming languages, web servers, and other related code. My company has launched several open source projects, and we contribute code to open source projects that we use. The reason that we do this isn't some greater good bullshit, it's to externalize the continued development and maintenance cost of software that isn't core to our business. In other words, we'll only open source in house projects in the hopes that we'll generate some feature additions and bug fixes from the community. Along those same lines, we don't contribute bugfixes and feature additions back to help out a project. We do it because we want to get our changes merged into the head so we don't have to pay to maintain our own branch. You'll notice that it doesn't translate to entertainment.

    You still haven't answered the question. What are you going to replace copyright with so that large projects are still undertaken? You're either stupid, ignorant, or naive if you think the answer is amateurs working for free.

  7. Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything on Pirates as a Marketplace · · Score: 1

    The same reason there are so few open-source games of a reasonable quality. Time and complexity. Unlike a book, it can take a large team of people years to produce a modern game. The average cost to produce a modern videogame is over $15m. And before you say it wasn't always that way, keep in mind it cost $100,000 to produce Pacman way back in 1982.

    And to cut you off again, not many people are going to work on something for your enjoyment full time for years on end. It's a fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.

  8. Re:I don't think anybody should pirate anything on Pirates as a Marketplace · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So what is your solution to this problem? You still want these same "oligarch's" to fund the creation of the content you want, right? Why would they do so if there was no possibility of a return on their investment? You are aware that a large percentage of projects fail, right? What would inspire people to take the risk if there was no reward? More government? Magic fairy dust? Bullshit fantasy land?

  9. Re:In other news... on Comcast to Buy 51% of NBC, GE Goes After 49% · · Score: 1

    So fight to change it at the local level. We don't have tough franchise agreements, so we have three companies competing to provide cable television and internet access. The result is faster speeds and lower prices. It was kind of a hassle having the lawn dug up three times to install lines, but we probably save $500 a year because of the competition.

  10. Re:Politics on Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout · · Score: 1

    If cooling or changing weather patterns in certain areas doesn't disprove global warming, the opposite doesn't prove it either.

  11. Re:Politics on Scientists Step Down After CRU Hack Fallout · · Score: 1

    denialism and spin

    Hypocritical much?

  12. Re:Code Name is Offensive on Intel Shows 48-Core x86 Processor · · Score: 1

    How awful of them to use the name of San Fransisco's sister city, the "Silicon Valley" of India, as a product codename. Were you equally offended when Ibex Peak, Tylersburg, Alviso, Calistoga, Lakeport, Broadwater, Eaglelake, Crestline and Cantiga were used as codenames?

      You don't need to get your panties in a twist over this. Although it is worth mentioning that it makes you look like a racist when you assume that an innocuous naming decision is some form of racial bigotry or social commentary.

  13. Re:Network redundancy not backups on New Virginia IT Systems Lack Network Backup · · Score: 1

    From the article:

    "The first thing I noticed was that the network that Northrop Grumman rolled out didn't have redundancy, backup," Coulter said yesterday. "The contract does not call for redundancy in carriers . . . in the network.

    The government didn't include network redundancy in the RFP. Poor planning on the part of the government.

  14. Re:outsourcing on New Virginia IT Systems Lack Network Backup · · Score: 1

    Government can't properly spec a problem causing outages, and it's the fault of "free enterprise". You people sure have a vivid imagination. From the article:

    "The problem of no-redundancy . . . accounts for 90 percent of our outages," said David W. Burhop, the DMV's chief information officer.

    "The first thing I noticed was that the network that Northrop Grumman rolled out didn't have redundancy, backup," Coulter said yesterday. "The contract does not call for redundancy in carriers . . . in the network.

    Smells like government incompetence.

  15. Re:Blame Northrop? on New Virginia IT Systems Lack Network Backup · · Score: 1

    Incompetent government employees? Impossible.

  16. Re:Blame Northrop? on New Virginia IT Systems Lack Network Backup · · Score: 1

    Welcome to the world of uninformed slashdotters. This contract was likely best value, not low-bid. Low-bid procurements are pretty rare, especially for something like this. It's not the contractors job to overbid the contract to provide services the government decided it didn't need.

  17. Re:And In Unrelated News... on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 2, Informative

    Then maybe the real issue is people using the school system to indoctrinate people. It's no secret that educators across America push liberal ideals. Just take a look at the list of Obama's top donors, http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638. It should be stopped all around.

  18. Re:In Russia, commie govt gives health care to YOU on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1

    As I said this is mostly NOT govt money. If US Private companies have more money to spend that is their right, and they do so to make a profit so in fact there is a profit, not a cost.

    You can try and deflect the facts but they are simple. We were talking about Govt provided health care and I am willing to bet most of the US research is privatley funded. How on earth can you see that as relevant to the discussion.

    How can you see it as not relevant, in a discussion of government taking over for the private sector.

    As to costs, I provided a table, how about reading it insted of trying to manufature evidence to support your case.

    First you made up stastistics, then when called tried to defend the indefensible.

    Australia is a leader in quite a few areas of biomedical research, a LOT of it payed for by our government, via the CSIRO. You may have heard of them, particularly the recent invention of the anti chlamidiya vaccine, which ahs been a major benefit in the fight against cervical cancer.

    If you stop pulling "facts" out of your ass and
    you might end up with some relevant input, but going by your posts so far I doubt it.

    I guess you missed the citation in my post. Again, number of papers does not equal dollars spent. The US supports 82% of biomedical R&D.

    Heatlh care research and Health care are 2 different areas.

      It is typical of the "fuck you I am alright conservatives" that you bring irrelevancies into this discussion, in much the same manner that creationists and climate change deniers use cherry picked out of context snippets to support their amusingly ludicrous argumnents.

    Talk about irrelevancies. Way to bring global warming into this. And that further discredits you, there is clear evidence they bs'd their evidence to support their agenda. That's why they "lost" their data.

  19. Re:In Russia, commie govt gives health care to YOU on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 0, Troll

    Does every paper cost the same to produce? Here is a source on the data I provided, http://www.efpia.org/content/Default.asp?PageID=388.

    Between 1990 and 2008, R&D investment in United States grew 5.6 times whilst in Europe it only grew 3.5 times. The latest study released in 2007 estimated the average cost of researching and developing a new chemical or biological entity at € 1,059 million.

    The United States still dominates the biopharmaceutical field, accounting for the three quarters of the world’s biotechnology revenues and R&D spending.

    When do you all plan to start supporting yourselves? Until then take your righteous indignation and shove it.

  20. Re:And In Unrelated News... on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm actually aware of that, having gone to a Catholic school. Just to expand on this a bit, in Catholic school they teach religion and science in two separate classes. They teach the creation story as a parable, and evolution and the big bang as facts. They also teach the history and beliefs of every major religion, not just Christianity, so you get a balanced view. Personally, I always liked Buddhism and Hinduism.

  21. Re:John Q on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1

    Insurance is the appropriate model. What is inappropriate is people refusing to pay for it, developing conditions, then insisting someone else pay for their poor planning.

  22. Re:Insurance after someone else wrecks my car on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1

    The definition of insurance isn't "pay for everything bad that happens to me, past present, or future."

  23. Re:In Russia, commie govt gives health care to YOU on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    That's only because your country doesn't adequately contribute to biomedical research and development. The US pays for 82% of global biomedical R&D.

  24. Re:You forgot on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1

    You left out lawful tax-paying immigrants not yet naturalized, and you also left out people whom all the available insurance companies have declined to cover due to a preexisting condition.

    Do you believe that you can't buy insurance after you wreck your car? Those greedy bastards.

  25. Re:And In Unrelated News... on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why do catholic schools consistently outperform public schools on standardized science tests?