It goes with my hunting experience. Mostly blacktail deer, occasionally elk, in SW Oregon. I use a.30-06 slide action, left-hand safety, with handloads of fire-formed brass, 165 grain Spitzer tip boat-tails in front of 59 grain Dupont IMR. There is more muzzle flash than I'd like toward sun down, but the combination lets me shoot 3 inch groups at 100 yards and I've been using it for more than 20 years now.
I can do without the beer buddy hunters who come in from the cities and suburbs in their 4WD rigs with their.300 Magnums and other foolishness. They don't pack out what they bring in, and they tear up the landscape because they don't know how to drive their rigs or know where they shouldn't drive them. Their fun costs everyone else a lot of money in damaged roads, increased erosion, and the problems that garbage in the wild causes. Too many of them also mix beer and bullets and shoot when they don't have a clear target.
I'm pretty sure that Australia has the same breed of "hunter" as that. They seem to be all over.
As I tried to point out, the damage that idjits do when let loose in the woods is often going to be much more expensive than a well run catch-sterilize-release program. It isn't the 22LR casings they leave behind; it's the non-biodegradable garbage, the beer cans, and the ruts of their ATVs and motorcycles that cause long term costs.
Now a method of control through hunting that I think would be far superior to ANY other approach would be to parachute hunters into the forests with however much booze, etc, they could carry on their backs, making sure that each hunting party was deposited a few hundred kilometers from any roads or trails, and that there would be no rescue or assistance if they got into trouble. This would cull both the koalas and the surfeit of idjits that are wanting to overrun the land. Those who survived a couple of such hunting trips would, for the most part, have opinions about wildlife management that would be worth listening to. Would-be "hunters" not willing to get on such intimate terms with the ecosystem they want to exploit should just STFU.
Sounds like possibly the formating you have set up in advance of data entry is being overwritten by the "AutoInput" reformating capability, or something like that.
Play around with your settings under Tools/Cell_Contents and Tools/Auto_Correct. Also, look over the options in Tools/Options.
Also, get familiar with your resources. The OOo Help system is generally more useable than MS Help ever was (it is not yet complete and some of the entries need more clarification... but the volunteers are continously improving it). There are very good support forums at OOo Support. Also, there is Solveig's blog that addresses a problem very similar to yours, as well as a lot of other things pertaining to transitioning.
Main thing: recognize that the OOo defaults are set up to assist total n00bes (like grade school students) in making their first spreadsheets work. You are no longer in that category: you know too much. You can use the extensive OOo online community to figure out how to best control the power of OOo for your own use, but if you continue to ride that motorcycle with the training wheels still attached, yeah, you are not going to be happy.
I don't know koalas. I do know that neutering and releasing is an effective means of population reduction in some species. The neutered animals compete successfully for mating opportunities and the population's birth rate drops. This can be a more effective and lower cost mode of control than other interventions in some situations. Like if the State has determined that allowing a bunch of hard partying, beer drinking, 4WD driving asshole hunters to screw up the forests is the more costly alternative.
Also, from what I've heard koala meat tastes like cough drops and is inedible. Also, fuck you.
I'm not sure what you are doing. But you are doing it wrong.
I've been using OOoCalc for a little over a year. It does have some annoyances, but loss of pre set formats is not one of them. I suspect that there is a default setting or preference that governs this.
Personal annoyances:
Cursor control: If I scroll off the screen while highlighting, sometimes I get into a runaway scrolling situation. This is on Ubuntu, and it might not belong to OOo. Workaround: Don't do that.
OOoCalc likes semi-colons in places where Excel likes commas. Workaround: Let old habits die.
Some of the old keyboard shortcuts are different or don't exist. Workaround: Let old habits die.
There are a few more, but they all come down to less trouble going from Excel to OOoCalc than I had going from Lotus 1.2.3 to Excel.
OOoCalc looks more powerful in terms of graphing, but I haven't done enough with either to say for sure.
I stopped using spreadsheet macros when I went from Excel for DOS to Excel under Windows. With WinXL the security risks were too great. Now I'm thinking spreadsheet macros are probably useable again, but I'm out of the habit.
Seems to me that the biggest advantage to standardization was with the gun crew training. Rather than each crew learning how to best manage the peculiarities of the one gun they were assigned to, the Gun Master had interchangeable gunners who could be moved about as changing conditions required.
Also, what was probably more important than the one mile range or the ability to punch holes in both sides of the ship with a single round, was the greater likelihood of smashing into the powder magazine, or disrupting the powder monkeys' work, or knocking a smouldering fuse into something flammable. Breaking winches, blocks, belaying points of ropes, etc, was also good. Anything to disrupt the enemy's ability to use his canon or his ability to maneuver was good.
Was this also the time when the Brits standardized their infantry's muskets? I don't think that the "Brown Bess" had interchangeable parts, but apparently each of them was much like all the others in handling characteristics, and the advent of the paper cartridge with pre-measured powder charge was significant. That had happened before 1750, but I don't know how earlier.
I'd also like to point out that the vast majority of hardware incompatibilities are the result of lazy / exploitative vendors.
Other OSs don't have this problem to the same degree as Microsoft. Microsoft's business model is the foundation of the third party ecology, both software and hardware/hardware drivers. If Microsoft would tend its own garden properly, there would not be these kinds of problems.
But that isn't part of Microsoft's business model. I doubt that it could change without a major top-down restructuring of the corporation.
My take on that is a properly designed and planned out OS shouldn't have to break half the planet on each upgrade cycle to make progress.... Why can't MS work this way?
Short answer: it would break their business model.
An event does not come into existence until its sequalae enter the light cone of the observer. Think about it.
We can indeed infer that in another frame of reference, which is to say another universe than the one we inhabit, the event happened at a different time, but we should always remember that this is a fiction. It is sometimes a convenient shorthand to say that we are seeing back into the past when we look at a distant galaxy, but that phrasing uses older assumptions about the Universe that the theory of relativity has demonstrated to be wrong.
Try not to confuse centrifugal force with reality. The reality is inertia, centrifugal force is a convenient fiction sometimes, but it is a fiction. Same goes with the concept of "fossil light": a convenient fiction, sometimes, but if it is confused with reality, the resultant model is too broad and very bogus.
In fact, try not to confuse physics with reality. With the Copenhagen convention, a large number of physicists came to accept that physics is only good for building models, some of which approximate reality in useful ways. But physics itself is not the reality; it is only one model after another. All the way down; all the way up.
The time of an event is dependent on the moment when the event enters the light cone of the observer. So 1054 AD is the correct time of the supernova wrt Earth. We can infer that the event occurred at some other time in a different frame of reference but that is not directly observable. Just as we cannot know anything about any events that might be occurring on the opposite side of an event horizon.
This means the birth of the Crab Nebula was in the year 5446 BC. Mankind witnessed it 6,500 years later.
Actually what this means is that those who think the logic in parent post is valid need to bone up on relativity and light cones. Relative to the Earth, and therefore the majority of correspondents on Slashdot, the event happened in 1054 AD. Probably by coincidence, it also happened when the Earth-Moon double planet was at its aphelion. (And yes, the sinusoidal path of the Earth about the Sun due to the Moon's influence is significant when looking for accurate aphelion and perihelion points. Learned that while researching my book.)
You drive a Rolls-Royce? Alfa-Romeo? Bentley? Oh, a BMW?? Or a Chrysler? Or a Fiat, or Ford, or Mercedes, or Mitsubishi, or Renault? Or a Sunbeam (those were nice sportscars, are they still made)? And I think I missed a few...
I doubt greatly that English will be a reasonable choice for trade language into the next decade.
No, I think English will be the common language for most of this century at least. Although the English that is commonly used ten years from now may be as foreign to our ears as the English of Shakespeare. English is evolving faster than it ever has before.
For over a decade, there have been more people who have learned English as a second language (ESL) than there are native speakers of English. At this point in time, there may be more ESL speakers than sum of all the native speakers of English who ever lived. If we ar not at that point yet, we soon will be.
We are also very close to the point where more communication in English is being done between ESL speakers than is being done between a native speaker of English and an ESL speaker. It is common in FOSS projects to find a Finn, a Brazilian, and a Japanese person using English in their correspondence while they fix a bug or develop a feature.
Would someone who knows how to do it propose a Slashdot poll for me? Something like this:
My native and only human language is English (don't count programming languages)
My native language is English and I am fluent in one or more other languages
My native language is not English, but outside of my family and friends, I use English for most of my communications
My native language is not English, but I use English for most of my internet communications
I read Slashdot in some other language than English (Babblefish is my friend)
I only talk to Cowboy Neal because, well, he's The Cowboy Neal
It would be neat to see this done every couple of years, see what the trend is.
Flash is pretty much controllable with Firefox, NoScript, and a couple of other extensions.
I'm probably counted as one of the 99% that Adobe has "penetrated" (I dislike that, neither they nor anyone else is raping me or my Ubuntu). But I'm not sure that I should be since on this machine Flash remains under user client control, and not under any pusher's control. (Use of drug dealer's slang intentional.)
I'm thinking that the Prosecution and Plaintiffs had prepared to fight a very different case, and were expecting a defense that was some variant of "sharing copyrighted material that has been legally purchased is not copyright infringement".
Instead TPB has raised the defense that whether or not any copyright infringement may have occurred, we are not culpable for it; you've got the wrong guys.
That defense actually looks pretty strong. And the Prosecution and Plaintiffs look at this point like they not only didn't do their homework, they didn't even have a clue as to what subjects they should have been studying.
A valid defense is showing that whether or not a crime had been committed, the defendant would not be culpable.
If this defense of PTB is broken, I think the prosecution would still have to demonstrate that copyright violations had occurred (which may or may not be an easy thing to do). But because the defense has been raised, they now must demonstrate that they are accusing the right people to begin with.
The prosecution will simply have to prove that it was impossible for them NOT to know.
Above quote fails it. At least I think so.
On the basis of what I have learned in following this story, the defense is that Swedish law requires the prosecution to demonstrate intentional assistance was provided to someone who was infringing on a copyright, and tje defens is that such a demonstration cannot be done. It cannot be done because any copyright infringement that may have occurred was an unintentional side effect of TPB's activities. It doesn't matter whether TPB management was aware in general that some people were doing this, just like the Swiss banks know that often its anonymous accounts are being used in criminal activities.
I have gotten the impression that under Swedish law the prosecution and plaintiff need to demonstrate that TPB had some kind of direct involvement with at least one instance of copyright infringement. That showing generalized unintended side effects is not enough, just like Henry Ford could not be held responsible for the loss of farriers' income when horseshoes were no longer a budget item for taxi and delivery services due to his invention.
I think it is clear that simply choosing a parody for a name is not sufficient to demonstrate intentional assistance. The Pirate Bay is clearly a parody, even a farce, of the way that the minor civil tort of copyright infringement is being equated by some parties with one of the worst kinds of felonies, that of armed robbery and hostage-taking on the high seas. It might be considered to be in poor taste, like calling a girlie magazine Hustler, but no one is passing laws against bad taste. Yet.
Henry Ford's work benefited everyone by helping remove a lot horses' asses from the city streets. Perhaps TPB will have a similar effect on the entertainment industry, strictly unintended, of course. Of course.
My earlier response was flippant, and it turns out, inappropriate. I can only say that I sent it before I had read, and assessed, all the messages on this thread. If I had read those first, I would not have responded at all. In the full context of the other messages, the problems evident here are far beyond anything that can be handled in a public, on-line communications medium like slashdot.
I think these messages should be discussed with someone trustworthy, ideally someone with professional training in managing a clinician's persona, in a face to face setting. There is serious shit here that needs to be looked at, but in the proper setting. Which is NOT slashdot.
This is the kind of interaction that I know has a negative impact on my karma. I don't mean slashdot's scoring system, either.
Again, my apologies. That I see no way in which I can avoid making this kind of mistake again, in interactions like those on slashdot, does not excuse the damage i have contributed to.
I don't think that the current Shuttle says anything about the problems in designing reusable spacecraft in this day and age.
The current shuttle was built by engineers who used sliderules at their desks, because this was done years before the first desktop computers, and pocket calculators were slower than what someone with undergraduate skills in any of the hard sciences could do with a slipstick. Those engineers kept their development notes by hand in three ring binders since none of them had routine access to a word processor. This was back in the day before there was even the concept of an electronic spreadsheet, and well before that first Apple computer made Bricklin's concept possible.
Yeah, between CAD, computer modeling of hypersonic shock waves, and spreadsheets to handle acceleration vs fuel consumption projections... well, what we have today just isn't your father's rocket science any more.
Please also note that the original Space Shuttle concept involved the use of a piloted suborbital rocket plane for the first stage, instead of bolting on the two sticks of dynamite. Under the original concept, the Space Shuttle would have had enough fuel to reach stable LEO, rather than barely skimming the top of the atmosphere in low LEO like the ISS does. The aerodynamic lift of the rocket plane would have conserved fuel during that most expensive first 60,000 vertical feet of the ride.
If the program had been managed better (and if what had been learned in building the Blackbird had been made available to Shuttle developers), the Shuttle would have been an effective launch vehicle for many commercial satellites. That was a big part of the initial vision. NASA was expected to partially fund itself while also giving the US aerospace industry a significant lead over all potential competitors.
The technology was within reach back then, and the modular approach would have supported improvements through stepwise refinements. But the original vision did not survive the politics of bureaucratic committee meetings, and the stupidly short-sighted secrecy surrounding the Blackbird program did not help either.
So basically you could say that Space Shuttle program failed to reach its objectives not because of hardware limitations, nor because of software limitations, but because of limited, malfunctioning wetware in NASA and NASA related committees, and in the committees that so badly mismanaged military intellectual property.
Slashdot Mirror
from sig:
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
That may be, but even a simple picture generally costs several dozen more k than a plaintext description.
Content is related to topic. Sort of.
(This seems like a good place to ask a question)
To what extent can Blender or other FOSS projects fill the emptiness?
Stereotype much, do we?
It goes with my hunting experience. Mostly blacktail deer, occasionally elk, in SW Oregon. I use a .30-06 slide action, left-hand safety, with handloads of fire-formed brass, 165 grain Spitzer tip boat-tails in front of 59 grain Dupont IMR. There is more muzzle flash than I'd like toward sun down, but the combination lets me shoot 3 inch groups at 100 yards and I've been using it for more than 20 years now.
I can do without the beer buddy hunters who come in from the cities and suburbs in their 4WD rigs with their .300 Magnums and other foolishness. They don't pack out what they bring in, and they tear up the landscape because they don't know how to drive their rigs or know where they shouldn't drive them. Their fun costs everyone else a lot of money in damaged roads, increased erosion, and the problems that garbage in the wild causes. Too many of them also mix beer and bullets and shoot when they don't have a clear target.
I'm pretty sure that Australia has the same breed of "hunter" as that. They seem to be all over.
As I tried to point out, the damage that idjits do when let loose in the woods is often going to be much more expensive than a well run catch-sterilize-release program. It isn't the 22LR casings they leave behind; it's the non-biodegradable garbage, the beer cans, and the ruts of their ATVs and motorcycles that cause long term costs.
Now a method of control through hunting that I think would be far superior to ANY other approach would be to parachute hunters into the forests with however much booze, etc, they could carry on their backs, making sure that each hunting party was deposited a few hundred kilometers from any roads or trails, and that there would be no rescue or assistance if they got into trouble. This would cull both the koalas and the surfeit of idjits that are wanting to overrun the land. Those who survived a couple of such hunting trips would, for the most part, have opinions about wildlife management that would be worth listening to. Would-be "hunters" not willing to get on such intimate terms with the ecosystem they want to exploit should just STFU.
Sounds like possibly the formating you have set up in advance of data entry is being overwritten by the "AutoInput" reformating capability, or something like that.
Play around with your settings under Tools/Cell_Contents and Tools/Auto_Correct. Also, look over the options in Tools/Options.
Also, get familiar with your resources. The OOo Help system is generally more useable than MS Help ever was (it is not yet complete and some of the entries need more clarification... but the volunteers are continously improving it). There are very good support forums at OOo Support. Also, there is Solveig's blog that addresses a problem very similar to yours, as well as a lot of other things pertaining to transitioning.
Main thing: recognize that the OOo defaults are set up to assist total n00bes (like grade school students) in making their first spreadsheets work. You are no longer in that category: you know too much. You can use the extensive OOo online community to figure out how to best control the power of OOo for your own use, but if you continue to ride that motorcycle with the training wheels still attached, yeah, you are not going to be happy.
I don't know koalas. I do know that neutering and releasing is an effective means of population reduction in some species. The neutered animals compete successfully for mating opportunities and the population's birth rate drops. This can be a more effective and lower cost mode of control than other interventions in some situations. Like if the State has determined that allowing a bunch of hard partying, beer drinking, 4WD driving asshole hunters to screw up the forests is the more costly alternative.
Also, from what I've heard koala meat tastes like cough drops and is inedible. Also, fuck you.
There. I said it.
I'm not sure what you are doing. But you are doing it wrong.
I've been using OOoCalc for a little over a year. It does have some annoyances, but loss of pre set formats is not one of them. I suspect that there is a default setting or preference that governs this.
Personal annoyances:
OOoCalc looks more powerful in terms of graphing, but I haven't done enough with either to say for sure.
I stopped using spreadsheet macros when I went from Excel for DOS to Excel under Windows. With WinXL the security risks were too great. Now I'm thinking spreadsheet macros are probably useable again, but I'm out of the habit.
Seems to me that the biggest advantage to standardization was with the gun crew training. Rather than each crew learning how to best manage the peculiarities of the one gun they were assigned to, the Gun Master had interchangeable gunners who could be moved about as changing conditions required.
Also, what was probably more important than the one mile range or the ability to punch holes in both sides of the ship with a single round, was the greater likelihood of smashing into the powder magazine, or disrupting the powder monkeys' work, or knocking a smouldering fuse into something flammable. Breaking winches, blocks, belaying points of ropes, etc, was also good. Anything to disrupt the enemy's ability to use his canon or his ability to maneuver was good.
Was this also the time when the Brits standardized their infantry's muskets? I don't think that the "Brown Bess" had interchangeable parts, but apparently each of them was much like all the others in handling characteristics, and the advent of the paper cartridge with pre-measured powder charge was significant. That had happened before 1750, but I don't know how earlier.
I'd also like to point out that the vast majority of hardware incompatibilities are the result of lazy / exploitative vendors.
Other OSs don't have this problem to the same degree as Microsoft. Microsoft's business model is the foundation of the third party ecology, both software and hardware/hardware drivers. If Microsoft would tend its own garden properly, there would not be these kinds of problems.
But that isn't part of Microsoft's business model. I doubt that it could change without a major top-down restructuring of the corporation.
My take on that is a properly designed and planned out OS shouldn't have to break half the planet on each upgrade cycle to make progress.... Why can't MS work this way?
Short answer: it would break their business model.
An event does not come into existence until its sequalae enter the light cone of the observer. Think about it.
We can indeed infer that in another frame of reference, which is to say another universe than the one we inhabit, the event happened at a different time, but we should always remember that this is a fiction. It is sometimes a convenient shorthand to say that we are seeing back into the past when we look at a distant galaxy, but that phrasing uses older assumptions about the Universe that the theory of relativity has demonstrated to be wrong.
Try not to confuse centrifugal force with reality. The reality is inertia, centrifugal force is a convenient fiction sometimes, but it is a fiction. Same goes with the concept of "fossil light": a convenient fiction, sometimes, but if it is confused with reality, the resultant model is too broad and very bogus.
In fact, try not to confuse physics with reality. With the Copenhagen convention, a large number of physicists came to accept that physics is only good for building models, some of which approximate reality in useful ways. But physics itself is not the reality; it is only one model after another. All the way down; all the way up.
The time of an event is dependent on the moment when the event enters the light cone of the observer. So 1054 AD is the correct time of the supernova wrt Earth. We can infer that the event occurred at some other time in a different frame of reference but that is not directly observable. Just as we cannot know anything about any events that might be occurring on the opposite side of an event horizon.
This means the birth of the Crab Nebula was in the year 5446 BC. Mankind witnessed it 6,500 years later.
Actually what this means is that those who think the logic in parent post is valid need to bone up on relativity and light cones. Relative to the Earth, and therefore the majority of correspondents on Slashdot, the event happened in 1054 AD. Probably by coincidence, it also happened when the Earth-Moon double planet was at its aphelion. (And yes, the sinusoidal path of the Earth about the Sun due to the Moon's influence is significant when looking for accurate aphelion and perihelion points. Learned that while researching my book.)
You drive a Rolls-Royce? Alfa-Romeo? Bentley? Oh, a BMW?? Or a Chrysler? Or a Fiat, or Ford, or Mercedes, or Mitsubishi, or Renault? Or a Sunbeam (those were nice sportscars, are they still made)? And I think I missed a few...
Meh. Where I am, BMW usually stands for the kind of bitching, moaning, and whining we here from fashionable people who drive cars from Bavaria.
The main point of a car should be transportation. Not a fashion statement. But that was really just my BMW, I'll stop ranting now.
I doubt greatly that English will be a reasonable choice for trade language into the next decade.
No, I think English will be the common language for most of this century at least. Although the English that is commonly used ten years from now may be as foreign to our ears as the English of Shakespeare. English is evolving faster than it ever has before.
For over a decade, there have been more people who have learned English as a second language (ESL) than there are native speakers of English. At this point in time, there may be more ESL speakers than sum of all the native speakers of English who ever lived. If we ar not at that point yet, we soon will be.
We are also very close to the point where more communication in English is being done between ESL speakers than is being done between a native speaker of English and an ESL speaker. It is common in FOSS projects to find a Finn, a Brazilian, and a Japanese person using English in their correspondence while they fix a bug or develop a feature.
Would someone who knows how to do it propose a Slashdot poll for me? Something like this:
It would be neat to see this done every couple of years, see what the trend is.
Flash is pretty much controllable with Firefox, NoScript, and a couple of other extensions.
I'm probably counted as one of the 99% that Adobe has "penetrated" (I dislike that, neither they nor anyone else is raping me or my Ubuntu). But I'm not sure that I should be since on this machine Flash remains under user client control, and not under any pusher's control. (Use of drug dealer's slang intentional.)
So I'm a bit out of the loop on this jargon.
Is "IRL" appropriate in a role playing context to distinguish when players are meeting over pizza and beer (as opposed to being in their roles)?
Is "AFK" still used in a "hold my place, I'll get back to this in an hour or so" sense, a sort of extended BRB?
Any thoughts on where I, as a fiction writer interested in doing good dialog, could stay current with the jargon of these intertubes?
I'm thinking that the Prosecution and Plaintiffs had prepared to fight a very different case, and were expecting a defense that was some variant of "sharing copyrighted material that has been legally purchased is not copyright infringement".
Instead TPB has raised the defense that whether or not any copyright infringement may have occurred, we are not culpable for it; you've got the wrong guys.
That defense actually looks pretty strong. And the Prosecution and Plaintiffs look at this point like they not only didn't do their homework, they didn't even have a clue as to what subjects they should have been studying.
A valid defense is showing that whether or not a crime had been committed, the defendant would not be culpable.
If this defense of PTB is broken, I think the prosecution would still have to demonstrate that copyright violations had occurred (which may or may not be an easy thing to do). But because the defense has been raised, they now must demonstrate that they are accusing the right people to begin with.
The prosecution will simply have to prove that it was impossible for them NOT to know.
Above quote fails it. At least I think so.
On the basis of what I have learned in following this story, the defense is that Swedish law requires the prosecution to demonstrate intentional assistance was provided to someone who was infringing on a copyright, and tje defens is that such a demonstration cannot be done. It cannot be done because any copyright infringement that may have occurred was an unintentional side effect of TPB's activities. It doesn't matter whether TPB management was aware in general that some people were doing this, just like the Swiss banks know that often its anonymous accounts are being used in criminal activities.
I have gotten the impression that under Swedish law the prosecution and plaintiff need to demonstrate that TPB had some kind of direct involvement with at least one instance of copyright infringement. That showing generalized unintended side effects is not enough, just like Henry Ford could not be held responsible for the loss of farriers' income when horseshoes were no longer a budget item for taxi and delivery services due to his invention.
I think it is clear that simply choosing a parody for a name is not sufficient to demonstrate intentional assistance. The Pirate Bay is clearly a parody, even a farce, of the way that the minor civil tort of copyright infringement is being equated by some parties with one of the worst kinds of felonies, that of armed robbery and hostage-taking on the high seas. It might be considered to be in poor taste, like calling a girlie magazine Hustler, but no one is passing laws against bad taste. Yet.
Henry Ford's work benefited everyone by helping remove a lot horses' asses from the city streets. Perhaps TPB will have a similar effect on the entertainment industry, strictly unintended, of course. Of course.
My apologies to author of parent post.
My earlier response was flippant, and it turns out, inappropriate. I can only say that I sent it before I had read, and assessed, all the messages on this thread. If I had read those first, I would not have responded at all. In the full context of the other messages, the problems evident here are far beyond anything that can be handled in a public, on-line communications medium like slashdot.
I think these messages should be discussed with someone trustworthy, ideally someone with professional training in managing a clinician's persona, in a face to face setting. There is serious shit here that needs to be looked at, but in the proper setting. Which is NOT slashdot.
This is the kind of interaction that I know has a negative impact on my karma. I don't mean slashdot's scoring system, either.
Again, my apologies. That I see no way in which I can avoid making this kind of mistake again, in interactions like those on slashdot, does not excuse the damage i have contributed to.
I think I see your problem.
You are mistaking an authority on the English language as an authority on Engineering.
Don't do that.
I don't think that the current Shuttle says anything about the problems in designing reusable spacecraft in this day and age.
The current shuttle was built by engineers who used sliderules at their desks, because this was done years before the first desktop computers, and pocket calculators were slower than what someone with undergraduate skills in any of the hard sciences could do with a slipstick. Those engineers kept their development notes by hand in three ring binders since none of them had routine access to a word processor. This was back in the day before there was even the concept of an electronic spreadsheet, and well before that first Apple computer made Bricklin's concept possible.
Yeah, between CAD, computer modeling of hypersonic shock waves, and spreadsheets to handle acceleration vs fuel consumption projections... well, what we have today just isn't your father's rocket science any more.
A couple of concrete examples:
Please also note that the original Space Shuttle concept involved the use of a piloted suborbital rocket plane for the first stage, instead of bolting on the two sticks of dynamite. Under the original concept, the Space Shuttle would have had enough fuel to reach stable LEO, rather than barely skimming the top of the atmosphere in low LEO like the ISS does. The aerodynamic lift of the rocket plane would have conserved fuel during that most expensive first 60,000 vertical feet of the ride.
If the program had been managed better (and if what had been learned in building the Blackbird had been made available to Shuttle developers), the Shuttle would have been an effective launch vehicle for many commercial satellites. That was a big part of the initial vision. NASA was expected to partially fund itself while also giving the US aerospace industry a significant lead over all potential competitors.
The technology was within reach back then, and the modular approach would have supported improvements through stepwise refinements. But the original vision did not survive the politics of bureaucratic committee meetings, and the stupidly short-sighted secrecy surrounding the Blackbird program did not help either.
So basically you could say that Space Shuttle program failed to reach its objectives not because of hardware limitations, nor because of software limitations, but because of limited, malfunctioning wetware in NASA and NASA related committees, and in the committees that so badly mismanaged military intellectual property.