Re:Space danger vs launch/atmosphere danger
on
SOHO Is Back
·
· Score: 1
Spacecraft lost on launch are often the result of a launch vehicle failure, rather than a spacecraft failure. Some spacecraft do fail just after launch (during the deployment sequence), but this is a function of the "infant mortality" phenomenon well known to reliability engineers - i.e. it's usually not an environmental factor but a design fault.
Spacecraft do not tend to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. Those that do are typically being disposed of at the end of their life, so failure is really a meaningless term there. Entry into the atmosphere of other planets is another issue, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any spacecraft that has been lost during the actual entry phase. Yes, it's a harsh environment in some ways, but not necessarily as bad as space.
Landing is another one of those things that few spacecraft do. Most failures on landing tend (again) to be design failures rather than environmental issues.
Space is a very hostile environment: various kinds of radiation, high velocity micrometeroids, extremes of temperature, limited ways to reject excess heat, a near-vacuum that encourages outgassing, and so on. Worse yet, you can't really replicate that environment compeltely on the Earth, so testing your spacecraft's ability to deal with that environment before it's actually launched is difficult and requires a lot of inference.
I would be. Yes, more measurements allows you to average out statistical noise. But the position error we are talking about is what is known as Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP). That kind of error is caused by having the satellites in view in a non-ideal (i.e. non-orthogonal) configuration. The errors are not statistical, but inherent in the geometry - averaging or filtering will not help.
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Only if you are assuming the exact same geometric configuration, but with one extra satellite. Otherwise your statement is not true. If you have more sats, but in a worse configuration, your GDOP will be worse, and you'll get lower accuracy. If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy". Which has been my point from the get-go. Please go back and read my earlier posts - I never claimed that more sats will inevitably lead to worse position accuracy, only that the "more sats in view = better position accuracy" statement was not true in all cases.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
If you will examine the previous posts you will find that we were talking specifically about position accuracy, which is where GDOP comes into play. Timing accuracy is a different issue.
That's a good point. However, my argument was with your blanket generalization that "more sats in view = better position accuracy", which, as I said before, is not strictly true. Just adding more orbital planes will not necessarily lead to improved GDOP performance. It may, since, as you stated, it should increase the probability of a favorable configuration (which is the same thing I said in my original post). But in order to see any real improvement the phasing of the satellites within and across the planes is critical as well.
I'd like to think that the Galileo developers have worked with the GPS planners to make sure the two constellations play well together. However, while the initial acrimony over Galileo seems to have abated, I'm not sure how much actual cooperation is going on.
BTW, the GPS constellation consists of 6 planes, not 4.
Using more than 4 satellites does improve your position accuracy, this is generally called an "over determined solution".
Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of an overdetermined solution. But you only get a benefit if those 4+ satellites are in a good geometrical configuration relative to each other. Making the assumption that just adding the Galileo sats will automatically improve position accuracy (as you did in your previous post) is incorrect. If you have, e.g., 5 satellites in view, but all are within 30 deg of each other and directly above you, you will get worse position accuracy than you would if you had just 4 sats that happened to have a near 90 deg separation. As I said before, that's why the current constellation is not optimized for number of sats in view. Initially they were planning on using a symmetric constellation, but found that the were getting bad dilution of precision, even with 6 sats in view, due to the relative position of those sats. That's why the current GPS constellation is a carefully designed asymmetric constellation - the slight offsets in the sat position from a symmetric constellation help to guarantee good geometric configurations. Just adding extra sats into something so carefully designed will not necessarily improve things.
There has always been the PPS ("Precise Positioning Service") P-code signal on the L2 frequency (1.22760 GHz).
Actually, the PPS transmits the P(Y) code on both L1 and L2. That's how the military gets better accuracy: the 2 different frequencies experience slightly different amounts of ionospheric delay, and by measuring this difference it's possible to correct for the delay.
more satellites in view = better positioning accuracy
This is not strictly true, since the position accuracy depends a lot on the relative position of the satellites you are taking a fix from (if they're all bunched up then you will experience significant dilution of precision). More satellites in view may increase the likelihood that you'll get a favorable geometric configuration. But it doesn't always, which is why the current GPS constellation is optimized to provide good geometric configurations, instead of to maximize the number of sats in view.
To make matters worse, some cheaper GPS receivers just grab data from the first 4 satellites they detect, and satellites that are directly overhead will have (slightly) stronger signals than their counterparts near the horizon as a result of the smaller amount of propagation loss and atmospheric loss their signals will experience. So there's a good chance that a cheap GPS receiver will take a fix from a bunch of satellites directly overhead (particularly with many more satellites in the sky to form that bunch), even if a more favorable configuration is in view, and end up with a much lower accuracy than they should. That said, I believe that most newer receivers look at all of the satellites in view, and pick the best 4.
Also GPS is being heavily upgraded. They are adding a third signal with M-code(L3), and adding C/A code on L2.
This isn't entirely accurate. M-code will in fact be on transmitted on both the L1 and L2 frequencies, not on L3. You're correct about the extra civilian signal on L2 (designated L2C), although I'm not sure if it's identical to the L1 C/A code. There's also another civilian signal that will be broadcast on L5 - this one will be primarily for aviation use and "safety-of-life" applications. I don't remember what L3 is being used for, but I'm fairly sure it's not going to have any kind of navigation code on it. Check out this article in the Aerospace Corporation's online "Crosslink" magazine for a nice overview of GPS modernization.
It's a fairly common misconception - many people hear "solar sail", and logically assume that it must be propelled by the "solar wind". Maybe they should have picked a better name for the solar sails:-)
If it wasn't for the PR factor, the Airforce (or some military force) would to have figured out how to launch spaceships and put satilites in space as it was obvious that being able to put spy satilites in space was a big deal.
The Air Force has always (except for the Shuttle aberration) maintained its own launch capability independent of NASA. They even have their very own launch facility at Vandenberg AFB in California. The USAF was well on its way to putting men in space (look up the X-20 DynaSoar sometime) until it was decided to make manned space a civilian game, and all the funding got moved over to NASA. The 60's space race was made civilian specifically to avoid triggering a war in space.
BTW, there are civilian agencies that require seret clearances of their employees - the Department of Energy guys that do nuclear power research leap to mind.
reflecting the solar wind toward your direction of travel
Actually, a solar sail makes use of solar radiation pressure (i.e. pressure exerted on a surface due to momentum transfer from reflected photons). The "solar wind" is a stream of energetic particles (not light) emitted from the sun. It would produces several orders of magnitude less force on a solar sail than would solar radiation pressure.
That said, you are correct that it is possible to move in a sunward direction by orienting the sail in a way that generates a force opposite to the velocity vector of the sail. Fundamental orbit mechanics tells us that reducing the energy of an orbit will cause the size of the orbit to decrease.
NASA was spawned from the Airforce and still is relient on military money for many projects.
Uh, no. It wasn't. NASA was born of NACA (the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), and has been a civilian agency from the get-go. NASA's funding does not come through the DoD or the USAF, but directly from Congress.
Yes, a number of NASA Astronauts are either ex-military, or active duty military seconded to NASA, but this is a result of the requirements NASA places on shuttle pilots (mission and payload specialists OTOH tend to be civilian). Yes, NASA flew a bunch of DoD payloads on the shuttle, but this was a result of NASA essentially demanding that they be the only launcher for US payloads (this was the only way they could even come close to generating a flight rate that would justify the shuttle).
NASA is a civilian agency. NASA employees are civilian government employees.
As software and hardware have become more complicated, there's a need to increase testing.
You misunderstand the point of "Faster, Better, Cheaper". The idea is to make lots of relatively simple probes, instead of one big, complicated one. That reduces the complexity, and thus the amount of testing, the schedule, and the amount of money required. The idea is that the many simple, low-cost missions will provide data that in the aggregate is equivalent to what you would get from one big mission. Plus if one mission fails you don't lose all of the science.
But in order to get that philosophy to work you need to demand less from each individual mission. Unfortunately, NASA has a tendency to demand the same capability as missions from the "old paradigm", but for a whole lot less money - which leads them into the situation you mention, where testing gets skimped to meet budgetary constraints.
I agree that standardized platforms would be a great way to do things. However, don't expect it from NASA any time soon. NASA has tried several efforts to build standardized, modular spacecraft buses. Examples include the old Fairchild Multimission Moduler Spacecraft (MMS), the SMEX bus, and the follow-on SMEX-Lite (which was extremely modular). While they've been used for some missions, they've never really caught on for all missions because modularity costs mass. So many missions are on the edge in terms of mass that they need an optimized, custom design just to work. The current Mars mission (Mars Exploration Rover) is a great example of this - it's been riding the ragged edge of slipping off the launch vehicle pretty much from the beginning.
In terms of adaptable, multi-purpose spacecraft, look to the commercial world (e.g. the Boeing 601 and 702 comm-sat lines, or the Lockheed A2100). That's where the production rates are high enough to justify the overhead of developing a common platform, and the missions allow sufficient margin to absorb the mass overhead associated with adaptability.
Actually, the main reason that space computing technology is generally many years behind current commercial offerings is that COTS processors are not particularly radiation tolerant. It takes a lot of time and money to convert a processor design over to a rad-hard version. The latest and greatest in rad-hard space processors are the RHPPC603e (based on old 603 series PowerPC), and the RAD750 (based on a PowerPC 750). Neither of these is exactly cutting edge compared to current PowerPCs, but they've only recently (last 2 years or so) become available, and they're not flying yet AFAIK. The task of rad-hardening a modern processor is made even more difficult since the very thing that provides high performance in new processors (small feature size) contributes to the the susceptibility of the processor to radiation damage.
This is not to say that commercial processors aren't used in space - there have been a number of flights using non-rad-hard x86 processors, and some companies are investigating using automotive processors like the Hitachi SuperH - but they tend to be used in missions where the cost of failure is low and the tolerance for risk is higher than normal, i.e. not NASA interplanetary missions.
I believe that MER does have two lenses for the PANCAM. Worked on MER for about a year and a half, but moved on to other stuff a little over a year ago and so my recollection of the specifics of the PANCAM assembly is a little hazy. Certainly the navigation cameras are stereoscopic, and they're mounted on the same mast as the PANCAM. As I recall, the only difference between the PANCAM and NAVCAM is that the NAVCAM has a much tighter field-of-view, so you could build a panoramic view from NAVCAM images by panning the NAVCAM around (although obviously anything moving would not be captured in the same way as with a real PANCAM image).
I suppose you think it's perfictly alright for a club keep out black people?
Yes.
or for a company not to hire mexicans?
Yes.
Just because you own something dosn't mean you should be able to do whatever the hell you want on it.
Actually, it does. That's what ownership is.
I may think that it's stupid and bigoted for a club to not accept black members, and I think I have a right to tell them so, but I don't think it's my right to force a private club to do something it doesn't choose to do. Similarly, I may think that it's idiotic for a company to refuse to hire Mexicans instead of just hiring the best person for the job, but I also think that the company has a right to make that decision. The whole point of private ownership is that the owner of something has control over that something. If they don't have ultimate control, they are not the owner - by definition.
The advantage of this particular approach is that it not only stops me from forcing other people to things they don't want to do, it also prevents other people from making me do things that I disagree with. I like to have that freedom.
The Vandenberg pad is still there, it's just mothballed
Actually, the Vandenberg pad that was built for the shuttle is in the process of being retooled (if it's not done already) to launch the USAFs new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV), otherwise known as the Delta IV and Atlas V.
Hmmm... I can see now why I haven't experienced most of the problems that you report - I only use Mozilla as a browser (I have other clients for email and the like).
Perhaps I would have the same issues that you report if I was exercising the email and nntp functionality. I certainly haven't experienced the volume of crashes that you report. The rare crashes I do get tend to be instigated by the acrobat reader plugin, and they don't blitz all of my preferences.
I've also had very few problems with webpages not rendering correctly on Mozilla. Even the MSDN website seems to render ok now (used to have problems with it). Perhaps we surf very different parts of the web.
I guess with Mozilla, as with so many other things in life, "your mileage may vary"...
I must admit that I'm a little intrigued about what your issues are with Mozilla. I haven't use OO, so I can't comment on it, but I've been using Mozilla as my primary browser for a while now, and haven't had a problem with it. In fact, I consider it a superior browser to IE in many ways. What are your peeves with it?
The earth is a finite resource which means we should treat it carefully and ration it and not overuse it... NOT that we should look elsewhere so we can continue to be wasteful
Given that the Earth is finite (I'm going to ignore the fact that it's actually an open system), don't you think that means we should be doing everything we can to find additional resources before the Earth is completely used up? I'm not saying that we should be wantonly wasteful. But if we are eventually going to run out of resources, surely it behooves us to find and prepare another source of raw materials before we do run out. At least, that would be the "longsighted" thing to do...
On the other hand, I guess if you think that humanity is a "disease", it's better that it does die out. Do you think that it should be allowed to die naturally? Or is it better to just exterminate the "disease" of humanity now before it does even more damage? Care to do your part for saving the planet, and volunteer for termination?
An organization is a complex human system. Executive management are charged with viewing the big picture and designing a large complex system -- but they can't use an engineering approach, because they're dealing with people, not objects.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with that. Systems engineering is an approach to engineering any complex system, including businesses, enterprises, and entire social systems (the systems engineering approach is being used at the enterprise level in some places already). Just because human systems are "fuzzy" doesn't mean that a they can't be engineered.
The problem is that managers (as opposed to engineers) are not generaly trained to develop a new system (or if they are it is without any semblance of engineering), but instead are taught how to operate within in an already existing system - they are end-users, not designers. This has started to change with the introduction of things like systems thinking for management (e.g. Peter Senge's "Learning Organizations"), and the movement towards "intelligent enterprises", but the shift is gradual, and not yet widespread. It will be interesting to see if business can successfully make the transtion from ad hoc systems to designed systems.
The original poster was correct, this is the manager's responsibility (among others): to facilitate the necessary interactions of systems engineers between portions of the project.
Perhaps you don't understand what a systems engineer actually is. I'm not talking about an MCSE, or some other silly certification. A systems engineer is, fundamentally, the technical person who takes responsibility for delivering a particular product (the system) with a specified performance.
As another poster correctly pointed out, that task is often conflated with management on smaller projects. But on a truly large, complex system (e.g. the space shuttle) the systems engineer has ultimate responsibility for the technical performance of the product, leads the design team, and facilitates the necessary interactions between everyone else (including between other systems engineers who are operating at lower levels of abstraction). The manager is there to manage, i.e. to perform all the administrative BS, handle the budget, track the schedule, etc. etc. In a good design team there will be close interaction between the systems engineer and the manager - their jobs are not independent - but those tasks require different skillsets. Many of the problems with recent large systems have been a result of managers thinking that, either:
A) It's ok to overrule the systems engineer, rather than achieving consensus on a compromise between technical and budget/schedule performance
B) There's no need for a "systems engineer" at all - either the manager thinks they can do it themselves, or doesn't even realize that it should be done
Slashdot Mirror
Spacecraft do not tend to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. Those that do are typically being disposed of at the end of their life, so failure is really a meaningless term there. Entry into the atmosphere of other planets is another issue, but I'm hard-pressed to think of any spacecraft that has been lost during the actual entry phase. Yes, it's a harsh environment in some ways, but not necessarily as bad as space.
Landing is another one of those things that few spacecraft do. Most failures on landing tend (again) to be design failures rather than environmental issues.
Space is a very hostile environment: various kinds of radiation, high velocity micrometeroids, extremes of temperature, limited ways to reject excess heat, a near-vacuum that encourages outgassing, and so on. Worse yet, you can't really replicate that environment compeltely on the Earth, so testing your spacecraft's ability to deal with that environment before it's actually launched is difficult and requires a lot of inference.
I would be. Yes, more measurements allows you to average out statistical noise. But the position error we are talking about is what is known as Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP). That kind of error is caused by having the satellites in view in a non-ideal (i.e. non-orthogonal) configuration. The errors are not statistical, but inherent in the geometry - averaging or filtering will not help.
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Only if you are assuming the exact same geometric configuration, but with one extra satellite. Otherwise your statement is not true. If you have more sats, but in a worse configuration, your GDOP will be worse, and you'll get lower accuracy. If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy". Which has been my point from the get-go. Please go back and read my earlier posts - I never claimed that more sats will inevitably lead to worse position accuracy, only that the "more sats in view = better position accuracy" statement was not true in all cases.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
If you will examine the previous posts you will find that we were talking specifically about position accuracy, which is where GDOP comes into play. Timing accuracy is a different issue.
I'd like to think that the Galileo developers have worked with the GPS planners to make sure the two constellations play well together. However, while the initial acrimony over Galileo seems to have abated, I'm not sure how much actual cooperation is going on.
BTW, the GPS constellation consists of 6 planes, not 4.
Go Boilers! :-)
Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of an overdetermined solution. But you only get a benefit if those 4+ satellites are in a good geometrical configuration relative to each other. Making the assumption that just adding the Galileo sats will automatically improve position accuracy (as you did in your previous post) is incorrect. If you have, e.g., 5 satellites in view, but all are within 30 deg of each other and directly above you, you will get worse position accuracy than you would if you had just 4 sats that happened to have a near 90 deg separation. As I said before, that's why the current constellation is not optimized for number of sats in view. Initially they were planning on using a symmetric constellation, but found that the were getting bad dilution of precision, even with 6 sats in view, due to the relative position of those sats. That's why the current GPS constellation is a carefully designed asymmetric constellation - the slight offsets in the sat position from a symmetric constellation help to guarantee good geometric configurations. Just adding extra sats into something so carefully designed will not necessarily improve things.
Actually, the PPS transmits the P(Y) code on both L1 and L2. That's how the military gets better accuracy: the 2 different frequencies experience slightly different amounts of ionospheric delay, and by measuring this difference it's possible to correct for the delay.
more satellites in view = better positioning accuracy
This is not strictly true, since the position accuracy depends a lot on the relative position of the satellites you are taking a fix from (if they're all bunched up then you will experience significant dilution of precision). More satellites in view may increase the likelihood that you'll get a favorable geometric configuration. But it doesn't always, which is why the current GPS constellation is optimized to provide good geometric configurations, instead of to maximize the number of sats in view.
To make matters worse, some cheaper GPS receivers just grab data from the first 4 satellites they detect, and satellites that are directly overhead will have (slightly) stronger signals than their counterparts near the horizon as a result of the smaller amount of propagation loss and atmospheric loss their signals will experience. So there's a good chance that a cheap GPS receiver will take a fix from a bunch of satellites directly overhead (particularly with many more satellites in the sky to form that bunch), even if a more favorable configuration is in view, and end up with a much lower accuracy than they should. That said, I believe that most newer receivers look at all of the satellites in view, and pick the best 4.
Also GPS is being heavily upgraded. They are adding a third signal with M-code(L3), and adding C/A code on L2.
This isn't entirely accurate. M-code will in fact be on transmitted on both the L1 and L2 frequencies, not on L3. You're correct about the extra civilian signal on L2 (designated L2C), although I'm not sure if it's identical to the L1 C/A code. There's also another civilian signal that will be broadcast on L5 - this one will be primarily for aviation use and "safety-of-life" applications. I don't remember what L3 is being used for, but I'm fairly sure it's not going to have any kind of navigation code on it. Check out this article in the Aerospace Corporation's online "Crosslink" magazine for a nice overview of GPS modernization.
No, no. That's Australia. Easy mistake to make though.
I guess you've never visited New Zealand... ;-)
It's a fairly common misconception - many people hear "solar sail", and logically assume that it must be propelled by the "solar wind". Maybe they should have picked a better name for the solar sails :-)
The Air Force has always (except for the Shuttle aberration) maintained its own launch capability independent of NASA. They even have their very own launch facility at Vandenberg AFB in California. The USAF was well on its way to putting men in space (look up the X-20 DynaSoar sometime) until it was decided to make manned space a civilian game, and all the funding got moved over to NASA. The 60's space race was made civilian specifically to avoid triggering a war in space.
BTW, there are civilian agencies that require seret clearances of their employees - the Department of Energy guys that do nuclear power research leap to mind.
Actually, a solar sail makes use of solar radiation pressure (i.e. pressure exerted on a surface due to momentum transfer from reflected photons). The "solar wind" is a stream of energetic particles (not light) emitted from the sun. It would produces several orders of magnitude less force on a solar sail than would solar radiation pressure.
That said, you are correct that it is possible to move in a sunward direction by orienting the sail in a way that generates a force opposite to the velocity vector of the sail. Fundamental orbit mechanics tells us that reducing the energy of an orbit will cause the size of the orbit to decrease.
Uh, no. It wasn't. NASA was born of NACA (the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics), and has been a civilian agency from the get-go. NASA's funding does not come through the DoD or the USAF, but directly from Congress.
Yes, a number of NASA Astronauts are either ex-military, or active duty military seconded to NASA, but this is a result of the requirements NASA places on shuttle pilots (mission and payload specialists OTOH tend to be civilian). Yes, NASA flew a bunch of DoD payloads on the shuttle, but this was a result of NASA essentially demanding that they be the only launcher for US payloads (this was the only way they could even come close to generating a flight rate that would justify the shuttle).
NASA is a civilian agency. NASA employees are civilian government employees.
You misunderstand the point of "Faster, Better, Cheaper". The idea is to make lots of relatively simple probes, instead of one big, complicated one. That reduces the complexity, and thus the amount of testing, the schedule, and the amount of money required. The idea is that the many simple, low-cost missions will provide data that in the aggregate is equivalent to what you would get from one big mission. Plus if one mission fails you don't lose all of the science.
But in order to get that philosophy to work you need to demand less from each individual mission. Unfortunately, NASA has a tendency to demand the same capability as missions from the "old paradigm", but for a whole lot less money - which leads them into the situation you mention, where testing gets skimped to meet budgetary constraints.
In terms of adaptable, multi-purpose spacecraft, look to the commercial world (e.g. the Boeing 601 and 702 comm-sat lines, or the Lockheed A2100). That's where the production rates are high enough to justify the overhead of developing a common platform, and the missions allow sufficient margin to absorb the mass overhead associated with adaptability.
This is not to say that commercial processors aren't used in space - there have been a number of flights using non-rad-hard x86 processors, and some companies are investigating using automotive processors like the Hitachi SuperH - but they tend to be used in missions where the cost of failure is low and the tolerance for risk is higher than normal, i.e. not NASA interplanetary missions.
I believe that MER does have two lenses for the PANCAM. Worked on MER for about a year and a half, but moved on to other stuff a little over a year ago and so my recollection of the specifics of the PANCAM assembly is a little hazy. Certainly the navigation cameras are stereoscopic, and they're mounted on the same mast as the PANCAM. As I recall, the only difference between the PANCAM and NAVCAM is that the NAVCAM has a much tighter field-of-view, so you could build a panoramic view from NAVCAM images by panning the NAVCAM around (although obviously anything moving would not be captured in the same way as with a real PANCAM image).
Yes.
or for a company not to hire mexicans?
Yes.
Just because you own something dosn't mean you should be able to do whatever the hell you want on it.
Actually, it does. That's what ownership is.
I may think that it's stupid and bigoted for a club to not accept black members, and I think I have a right to tell them so, but I don't think it's my right to force a private club to do something it doesn't choose to do. Similarly, I may think that it's idiotic for a company to refuse to hire Mexicans instead of just hiring the best person for the job, but I also think that the company has a right to make that decision. The whole point of private ownership is that the owner of something has control over that something. If they don't have ultimate control, they are not the owner - by definition.
The advantage of this particular approach is that it not only stops me from forcing other people to things they don't want to do, it also prevents other people from making me do things that I disagree with. I like to have that freedom.
I believe you mean compliment ;-)
Actually, the Vandenberg pad that was built for the shuttle is in the process of being retooled (if it's not done already) to launch the USAFs new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV), otherwise known as the Delta IV and Atlas V.
Perhaps I would have the same issues that you report if I was exercising the email and nntp functionality. I certainly haven't experienced the volume of crashes that you report. The rare crashes I do get tend to be instigated by the acrobat reader plugin, and they don't blitz all of my preferences.
I've also had very few problems with webpages not rendering correctly on Mozilla. Even the MSDN website seems to render ok now (used to have problems with it). Perhaps we surf very different parts of the web.
I guess with Mozilla, as with so many other things in life, "your mileage may vary"...
I must admit that I'm a little intrigued about what your issues are with Mozilla. I haven't use OO, so I can't comment on it, but I've been using Mozilla as my primary browser for a while now, and haven't had a problem with it. In fact, I consider it a superior browser to IE in many ways. What are your peeves with it?
Interestingly, large portions of LTool are written in Python. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that JPL will ever actually release LTool to the world.
Given that the Earth is finite (I'm going to ignore the fact that it's actually an open system), don't you think that means we should be doing everything we can to find additional resources before the Earth is completely used up? I'm not saying that we should be wantonly wasteful. But if we are eventually going to run out of resources, surely it behooves us to find and prepare another source of raw materials before we do run out. At least, that would be the "longsighted" thing to do...
On the other hand, I guess if you think that humanity is a "disease", it's better that it does die out. Do you think that it should be allowed to die naturally? Or is it better to just exterminate the "disease" of humanity now before it does even more damage? Care to do your part for saving the planet, and volunteer for termination?
I'm afraid I have to disagree with that. Systems engineering is an approach to engineering any complex system, including businesses, enterprises, and entire social systems (the systems engineering approach is being used at the enterprise level in some places already). Just because human systems are "fuzzy" doesn't mean that a they can't be engineered.
The problem is that managers (as opposed to engineers) are not generaly trained to develop a new system (or if they are it is without any semblance of engineering), but instead are taught how to operate within in an already existing system - they are end-users, not designers. This has started to change with the introduction of things like systems thinking for management (e.g. Peter Senge's "Learning Organizations"), and the movement towards "intelligent enterprises", but the shift is gradual, and not yet widespread. It will be interesting to see if business can successfully make the transtion from ad hoc systems to designed systems.
Perhaps you don't understand what a systems engineer actually is. I'm not talking about an MCSE, or some other silly certification. A systems engineer is, fundamentally, the technical person who takes responsibility for delivering a particular product (the system) with a specified performance.
As another poster correctly pointed out, that task is often conflated with management on smaller projects. But on a truly large, complex system (e.g. the space shuttle) the systems engineer has ultimate responsibility for the technical performance of the product, leads the design team, and facilitates the necessary interactions between everyone else (including between other systems engineers who are operating at lower levels of abstraction). The manager is there to manage, i.e. to perform all the administrative BS, handle the budget, track the schedule, etc. etc. In a good design team there will be close interaction between the systems engineer and the manager - their jobs are not independent - but those tasks require different skillsets. Many of the problems with recent large systems have been a result of managers thinking that, either:
A) It's ok to overrule the systems engineer, rather than achieving consensus on a compromise between technical and budget/schedule performance
B) There's no need for a "systems engineer" at all - either the manager thinks they can do it themselves, or doesn't even realize that it should be done