We just eliminated the only (publicly-acknowledged) viable solution for servicing satellites or for safely returning large loads from ISS. No one else has/had that tech before, and now nobody does. What a waste.
Plus one more thing I'll mention: gutting the shuttles is tremendously stupid. Think of future generations who would love to look at the engine, avionics, and other systems decades or centuries in the future; it would be like purposely burning books, leaving only the covers intact for future generations to see. Why bother putting the fuselage on display at all? It's a damned shame. There are only three shuttles in exsistence - they should keep them intact. Tear them down and decontaminate them to remove all traces of Hydrazine if you must mothball them, but for goodness sake keep them intact for future historians and archeologists!
Gutting museum ships is standard practice for various reasons. 1 of them is safety. Leaving many of them would be a long term fire or chemical hazard. 2. It simplified long-term maintenance which is not a trivial detail for museum exhibits.
Another thing is that most of the parts removed would not be visible to musuem goers anyway unless the entire ship was cut up. Given that there's no way to make these craft flyable anway, making an issue of this is really stirring a tempest in a teapot.
Also many of the shuttle components are being taken out because NASA is going to USE them... which is what they were made for anyway.
With the exception of the Hubble Space telescope and satellites of similar size, using the shuttle to service them would cost more than just replacing the damm satellite in the first place. It never was a practical way of servicing them, more a test bed of techniques.
What I don't get is why can't we turn the grid completely off?
we can see when these storms happen (because they emit light), and the charged particles that cause all the problems take a little while to reach us (hours/days).
If we know it's going to cause a huge problem with the electrical grid, can't we just, uh, turn it off?
No we can't. If you ever read Clarke's Rendevous with Rama series the prologue to the second book reveals what kind of damage we had from just a momentary failure of stock market computers. Our modern high tech society is simply too intertwined and complex. We can't just "stop it" for a few days any more than you can stop a human heart for that long.
A couple of years ago the entire north east region went down because one single tranformer had a blowout which might have been caused by a solar event. Can you imagine the impact of every transformer on the planet blowing simultaneously? The sheer amount of work it would take to replace even a fraction of them? And this would be without any core of civilization actually being functional.
We had a Carrington event today, forget about your precious hard drive or computer. You'd be much more worried about finding out if you were going to eat again after your local supplies run out. Such an event right now would be nothing less than the end of technological civilization on this planet, and given that we've already extracted all the easily available oil on this planet, there would be no future bootstrapping of a new one.
Which makes them no different from any other government agency.
NASA should disestablished, and it's responsibilities farmed out to other agencies. Give space launch to the Air Force and Navy, and science functions to universities and other research agencies.
NASA was created separate from the Air Force to maintain a propagandist fiction that America's activities in the Space Race were non-military in nature as opposed to the Soviets who made no such pretense.
As to the unplugging of Big Iron...All I would say is that it's about time that NASA entered the 21st century of computing and left the 1960's.
He is clearly an Open Source Specialist, whatever that means.
It means almost absolutely nothing. It can range from someone who develops professional applications using open source technology to somene who spends corporate time ranting on Slashdot. Much like all those Hollywood people who buy Prius to say how green they are and drive around in Lamborghinis.
The major reasons most companies shy away from OSS technologies comes down to support and confidence. Most FOSS solutions don't have that unless that expertise is grown in the company culture. And if you don't develop that kind of genius in house, than FOSS isn't a good solution.
The shuttle was simply unsafe for commercial use. We lost two spacecraft with all hands in less than two hundred launches. That may be an acceptable risk for test pilots. But if one out of every hundred commercial airlines exploded on take off or fell to pieces on landing... I imagine that people would have a far dimmer view of flying. Commercial use is for proven technology... and that was something the fairly ramshackle Shuttle never achieved.
Root has never been enabled by default on any OS X that I've known of.
That's a GOOD thing. Enabling root on OS X is a trivial matter. If a user doesn't know how to enable root on a UNIX system, then it's better off left disabled for their own protection. I used to manage about 40 OS X workstations in a corporate environment. You can be dammed sure that root wasn't enabled on a single one of them, not that any of their users would have noticed or CARED. There's ractically no instance where a casual user of OS X would need to have root enabled. And even a savvy user thinks twice before doing so, especially if the system is connected to the Internet.
Last I heard, the voyagers are about 100-110 AUs from the sun. Is the summary incorrect or do you only need to be 40 AUs from the sun to make these measurments? In which case, why is it news now and not in the 80s/90s when they reached this distance?
Presumably because it's only recently that they discovered techniques to make these observations with the remaining equipment on board. Voyager is now making measurements it was never designed to. Keep in mind that the engineers who built these ships did not expect them to last as long as they did, nor that we would still be able to get useful signal strength from them at this point. Also remember that with the twin factors of half life decay and thermocouple degradation, they're only getting about half the power from the RTG's that they used to, so some equipment has had to have been permanently turned off.
The Woz model was great back in the day, especially when computers cost a fortune and it was really cheaper for a long time to just build your own. The Apple 1 was a true Woz product, something that was sold as a kit rather than a finished machine. The Apple 2 was the beginning of the end of the Woz era even though it had a fair amount of customisability in the form of add on slots.
As they've gotten more powerful and more complicated, the focus is more of a struggle to get them to just work.... without time wasting overhead worrying about it. The Jobs model shows this no more truly than the interface design for iOS, which was the kickstart that tablets needed to become a real product, and that Google thought clever enough to "honor" in Android.
.... Time did, and progress. Hypercard was great when your programming environment was limted to interacting with a 512x342 greyscale screen. Hypercard looked great when it was practically the only alternative to coding line by line in BASIC or C.
But the world did not stay in the mid 80's forever, time went on and other things came to the fore, HTML, Java, The Interface Builder which was part of the Next developer package and now free in Xcode. Yes every now and then there would be those few that would call for a revival of Hypercard, and some folks gave it their shot in Supercard.
But the market had already left it behind for newer, more powerful tools.... that weren't limited to Mac only use.
Perhaps not, but at this point I'd say that climate change is a significantly higher risk factor over the long term than asteroid impact. We really especially need to be keeping our eyes around the Arctic circle reasons. There's a lot of CO2 locked up in permafrost, we could be talking about a hell of a release if that warms up significantly. And the Arctic is going to warm up faster than the bulk of the planet. Key thing to rememember is that the Arctic has milder seasons than the Antarctic which has no permafrost to worry about.
It's a lot more easier scenario to simply buy this stuff off of the Russian black market, than to contemplate trying to recover material that even a black opts with deep pockets couldn't manage. The reason that stuff is still down there is because it's not that easy to get to.
These things are not cheap. We have recovered one from the ocean floor before to fly it on a later mission. (albeit, the relative shallows of the florida coast.) If its possible to build a remote sub that could find it, I would bet the cost of recovery would be less than the cost of manufacture. (radar, sonar? how many right angles are on that thing? HOW would you find it?)
Its not dangerous. PU-238 cannot be used to make weapons.
18-May-68
Status: Mission was aborted because of range safety destruct. RTG heat sources recovered and recycled.
---
As a nuclear engineer, you'd also realise that as an RTG, it's had over 40 years of radioactive decay, so reclaiming it for reuse is not a terribly viable option given how many half lives have passed since then.
Most of the time, people buy mini-itx because they don't want to see the computer. They want to hide them. If
They wanted nice cases, they would have bought ATX cases.
There are other considerations. Sometimes I want my computer to be quiet. Which is why my current box is an XCube. Another consideration is carbon footprint. If my needs don't require a giant case with lots of cooling and a loud fan, I'd rather save space and be more energy efficient with my needs.
If SpaceX gets humans back on the moon, then more power to them. Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.
I'm starting to think we haven't gone to the moon since 1972 because we forgot how.
We haven't gotten back to the moon because of a lack of a compelling reason to do so..Many people forget that the mission of Apollo was not to chart new frontiers and advance science. It was to beat the Russians to the first manned landing on the moon, a mission accomplished in 1969. Once that was done the public perception quickly changed to the idea that Apollo was no longer needed, hence the quick fall off of interest in the moon flights after the brief drama of Apollo 13.
I only post this nuanced examination into the phenomenon in hopes that it inspires others to bury these could = will stories before they can escape the firehose.
You forget they know that Slashdot's main audience is a bunch of FOSS nazi's that live for the eventual hope that Apple will either die or be forced to convert iOS to a command line interface.
... that before it came out.. Tablets and most smartphones sucked. They were nothing but computers shrunk down and and most importantly interfaces that were built to be used with mice. It's an interface that failed abysmally when translated to screen and hand use.
iOS works so well, that Android has been spending a good deal of time copying as much of it as Google could get away with.
Of course anyone who just read that and though "wow, that IS great!" should take a step back and realize the general tablet market doesn't do any of that.
Or even more importantly there was no such thing as a general tablet market before the iPad, just a collection of Windows devices that for the most part, gathered dust unsold on the shelves of CompUSA.
chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good.:-)
that he stole most of the ideas for the Mac from Xerox.
Actually he licensed them and ponied up big bucks to get an afternoon for his techs to paw all over the machine. Xerox gets a cut from every GUI OS that's sold commercially these days that includes Windows.
But not only did he licensed them, he made them work. The GUI on Altos was something that Xerox let gather dust, because they believed they couldn't make a computer that could do it for under 16 grand. He turned the GUI from a concept car to production model.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
For one thing, Venus' conditions pretty much guarantee, that the planet is sterile.
Second, Venus is literally Hell on landing craft. An extended mission on the surface is one that lasts more than 60 minutes before the intensely hot and corrosive atmosphere EATS the probe.
The fact that it comes from the CATO organisation. (You know them, the folks that would to find a way to microcharge you for every breath you take) is enough comment in and of itself.
that the only remaining purpose of USENET is accessing binaries of pirate material, than it's day has long past.
The only requirement to apply this decision is to remove the binaries newsgroups. and maybe some post filtering as well. That will cut down 90+ percent of the data traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
We just eliminated the only (publicly-acknowledged) viable solution for servicing satellites or for safely returning large loads from ISS. No one else has/had that tech before, and now nobody does. What a waste.
Plus one more thing I'll mention: gutting the shuttles is tremendously stupid. Think of future generations who would love to look at the engine, avionics, and other systems decades or centuries in the future; it would be like purposely burning books, leaving only the covers intact for future generations to see. Why bother putting the fuselage on display at all? It's a damned shame. There are only three shuttles in exsistence - they should keep them intact. Tear them down and decontaminate them to remove all traces of Hydrazine if you must mothball them, but for goodness sake keep them intact for future historians and archeologists!
Gutting museum ships is standard practice for various reasons. 1 of them is safety. Leaving many of them would be a long term fire or chemical hazard. 2. It simplified long-term maintenance which is not a trivial detail for museum exhibits. Another thing is that most of the parts removed would not be visible to musuem goers anyway unless the entire ship was cut up. Given that there's no way to make these craft flyable anway, making an issue of this is really stirring a tempest in a teapot. Also many of the shuttle components are being taken out because NASA is going to USE them... which is what they were made for anyway. With the exception of the Hubble Space telescope and satellites of similar size, using the shuttle to service them would cost more than just replacing the damm satellite in the first place. It never was a practical way of servicing them, more a test bed of techniques.
because the aliens always attack new york first!
Have you tried getting entertainment in the sticks?
What I don't get is why can't we turn the grid completely off?
we can see when these storms happen (because they emit light), and the charged particles that cause all the problems take a little while to reach us (hours/days).
If we know it's going to cause a huge problem with the electrical grid, can't we just, uh, turn it off?
No we can't. If you ever read Clarke's Rendevous with Rama series the prologue to the second book reveals what kind of damage we had from just a momentary failure of stock market computers. Our modern high tech society is simply too intertwined and complex. We can't just "stop it" for a few days any more than you can stop a human heart for that long. A couple of years ago the entire north east region went down because one single tranformer had a blowout which might have been caused by a solar event. Can you imagine the impact of every transformer on the planet blowing simultaneously? The sheer amount of work it would take to replace even a fraction of them? And this would be without any core of civilization actually being functional. We had a Carrington event today, forget about your precious hard drive or computer. You'd be much more worried about finding out if you were going to eat again after your local supplies run out. Such an event right now would be nothing less than the end of technological civilization on this planet, and given that we've already extracted all the easily available oil on this planet, there would be no future bootstrapping of a new one.
Which makes them no different from any other government agency.
NASA should disestablished, and it's responsibilities farmed out to other agencies. Give space launch to the Air Force and Navy, and science functions to universities and other research agencies.
NASA was created separate from the Air Force to maintain a propagandist fiction that America's activities in the Space Race were non-military in nature as opposed to the Soviets who made no such pretense. As to the unplugging of Big Iron...All I would say is that it's about time that NASA entered the 21st century of computing and left the 1960's.
He is clearly an Open Source Specialist, whatever that means.
It means almost absolutely nothing. It can range from someone who develops professional applications using open source technology to somene who spends corporate time ranting on Slashdot. Much like all those Hollywood people who buy Prius to say how green they are and drive around in Lamborghinis. The major reasons most companies shy away from OSS technologies comes down to support and confidence. Most FOSS solutions don't have that unless that expertise is grown in the company culture. And if you don't develop that kind of genius in house, than FOSS isn't a good solution.
The shuttle was simply unsafe for commercial use. We lost two spacecraft with all hands in less than two hundred launches. That may be an acceptable risk for test pilots. But if one out of every hundred commercial airlines exploded on take off or fell to pieces on landing... I imagine that people would have a far dimmer view of flying. Commercial use is for proven technology... and that was something the fairly ramshackle Shuttle never achieved.
Root has never been enabled by default on any OS X that I've known of.
That's a GOOD thing. Enabling root on OS X is a trivial matter. If a user doesn't know how to enable root on a UNIX system, then it's better off left disabled for their own protection. I used to manage about 40 OS X workstations in a corporate environment. You can be dammed sure that root wasn't enabled on a single one of them, not that any of their users would have noticed or CARED. There's ractically no instance where a casual user of OS X would need to have root enabled. And even a savvy user thinks twice before doing so, especially if the system is connected to the Internet.
Last I heard, the voyagers are about 100-110 AUs from the sun. Is the summary incorrect or do you only need to be 40 AUs from the sun to make these measurments? In which case, why is it news now and not in the 80s/90s when they reached this distance?
Presumably because it's only recently that they discovered techniques to make these observations with the remaining equipment on board. Voyager is now making measurements it was never designed to. Keep in mind that the engineers who built these ships did not expect them to last as long as they did, nor that we would still be able to get useful signal strength from them at this point. Also remember that with the twin factors of half life decay and thermocouple degradation, they're only getting about half the power from the RTG's that they used to, so some equipment has had to have been permanently turned off.
The Woz model was great back in the day, especially when computers cost a fortune and it was really cheaper for a long time to just build your own. The Apple 1 was a true Woz product, something that was sold as a kit rather than a finished machine. The Apple 2 was the beginning of the end of the Woz era even though it had a fair amount of customisability in the form of add on slots. As they've gotten more powerful and more complicated, the focus is more of a struggle to get them to just work.... without time wasting overhead worrying about it. The Jobs model shows this no more truly than the interface design for iOS, which was the kickstart that tablets needed to become a real product, and that Google thought clever enough to "honor" in Android.
.... Time did, and progress. Hypercard was great when your programming environment was limted to interacting with a 512x342 greyscale screen. Hypercard looked great when it was practically the only alternative to coding line by line in BASIC or C. But the world did not stay in the mid 80's forever, time went on and other things came to the fore, HTML, Java, The Interface Builder which was part of the Next developer package and now free in Xcode. Yes every now and then there would be those few that would call for a revival of Hypercard, and some folks gave it their shot in Supercard. But the market had already left it behind for newer, more powerful tools.... that weren't limited to Mac only use.
Perhaps not, but at this point I'd say that climate change is a significantly higher risk factor over the long term than asteroid impact. We really especially need to be keeping our eyes around the Arctic circle reasons. There's a lot of CO2 locked up in permafrost, we could be talking about a hell of a release if that warms up significantly. And the Arctic is going to warm up faster than the bulk of the planet. Key thing to rememember is that the Arctic has milder seasons than the Antarctic which has no permafrost to worry about.
It's a lot more easier scenario to simply buy this stuff off of the Russian black market, than to contemplate trying to recover material that even a black opts with deep pockets couldn't manage. The reason that stuff is still down there is because it's not that easy to get to.
I'm a nuclear engineer.
These things are not cheap. We have recovered one from the ocean floor before to fly it on a later mission. (albeit, the relative shallows of the florida coast.) If its possible to build a remote sub that could find it, I would bet the cost of recovery would be less than the cost of manufacture. (radar, sonar? how many right angles are on that thing? HOW would you find it?)
Its not dangerous. PU-238 cannot be used to make weapons.
Ref: http://www.ne.doe.gov/space/neSpace2c.html --- SNAP-19B2
Nimbus-B-1
Meteorological
18-May-68 Status: Mission was aborted because of range safety destruct. RTG heat sources recovered and recycled. ---
As a nuclear engineer, you'd also realise that as an RTG, it's had over 40 years of radioactive decay, so reclaiming it for reuse is not a terribly viable option given how many half lives have passed since then.
Most of the time, people buy mini-itx because they don't want to see the computer. They want to hide them. If They wanted nice cases, they would have bought ATX cases.
There are other considerations. Sometimes I want my computer to be quiet. Which is why my current box is an XCube. Another consideration is carbon footprint. If my needs don't require a giant case with lots of cooling and a loud fan, I'd rather save space and be more energy efficient with my needs.
If SpaceX gets humans back on the moon, then more power to them. Currently, though, the notion that "private sector will solve all!" seems like more of an ideological excuse than an honest assessment of what the U.S. is capable of in space.
I'm starting to think we haven't gone to the moon since 1972 because we forgot how.
We haven't gotten back to the moon because of a lack of a compelling reason to do so. .Many people forget that the mission of Apollo was not to chart new frontiers and advance science. It was to beat the Russians to the first manned landing on the moon, a mission accomplished in 1969. Once that was done the public perception quickly changed to the idea that Apollo was no longer needed, hence the quick fall off of interest in the moon flights after the brief drama of Apollo 13.
"ABI Research Survey: 58% of iPod Owners Planning Another MP3 Player Purchase Will Consider Microsoft's Zune"
http://www.zunegy.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=ABISURV110106&Store_Code=Z
How did that turn out?
Well they may have CONSIDERED it. :)
I only post this nuanced examination into the phenomenon in hopes that it inspires others to bury these could = will stories before they can escape the firehose.
You forget they know that Slashdot's main audience is a bunch of FOSS nazi's that live for the eventual hope that Apple will either die or be forced to convert iOS to a command line interface.
Apple's iOS has had two or three major upgrades since the release of the original iPad.
Of course anyone who just read that and though "wow, that IS great!" should take a step back and realize the general tablet market doesn't do any of that.
Or even more importantly there was no such thing as a general tablet market before the iPad, just a collection of Windows devices that for the most part, gathered dust unsold on the shelves of CompUSA.
chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)
So you're looking to dial by command line then?
that he stole most of the ideas for the Mac from Xerox.
Actually he licensed them and ponied up big bucks to get an afternoon for his techs to paw all over the machine. Xerox gets a cut from every GUI OS that's sold commercially these days that includes Windows. But not only did he licensed them, he made them work. The GUI on Altos was something that Xerox let gather dust, because they believed they couldn't make a computer that could do it for under 16 grand. He turned the GUI from a concept car to production model.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
For one thing, Venus' conditions pretty much guarantee, that the planet is sterile. Second, Venus is literally Hell on landing craft. An extended mission on the surface is one that lasts more than 60 minutes before the intensely hot and corrosive atmosphere EATS the probe.
The fact that it comes from the CATO organisation. (You know them, the folks that would to find a way to microcharge you for every breath you take) is enough comment in and of itself.
that the only remaining purpose of USENET is accessing binaries of pirate material, than it's day has long past. The only requirement to apply this decision is to remove the binaries newsgroups. and maybe some post filtering as well. That will cut down 90+ percent of the data traffic.