TIC: A couple years ago the Verizon CEO said they don't care about land lines anymore. Perhaps it could be that they are essentially an unregulated monopoly when it comes to cell service where we live. Profit... and how might they make more money, perhaps do away with the POTS lines. TAC or FCC TECHNOLOGICAL ADVISORY COUNCIL: and get a bunch of other business people with conflicts of interest http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1025/DOC-302376A1.txt who will profit from increased business to tell the govt what is best for them. TOE: We will hear about this one later. Does anyone remember how Verizon promised to put fiber every where in exchange for being able to get back into the long distance business? And how the delivery of that so called promise doesn't exist, at least not in our county, or any of the surrounding counties. A phase out will be announced with some promises about how great cell and broadband will be, and we will probably just see higher monthly bills...
We lost power for almost two weeks after Hurricane Isabel and cell service was mostly down, cable TV was down and the POTS line worked intermittently. My brother bought a cheap generator and we could use our dialup service while the landline worked. Although only one very old computer and the laptop could take the non standard voltages of our cheap generator... It was about 3 weeks without cabletv, which also is our current ISP. A couple of months ago I tried to call 911 with our cell phone when I saw (likely a drunk driver) a truck driving slowly down a dark road with no lights, and guess what 911 didn't work! My parents are elderly and I have argued with my father for a couple of years now not to get rid of the land line because it is more reliable in an emergency. This is all I need, now he will get rid of the land line and need it for an emergency call...
How about some of you slashdot readers help us get the servicig mission restored?
The following is an editorial I wrote which was published in our local paper.
President Bush's plan for manned space missions to the Moon and Mars at the expense of such a successful project as the Hubble Space Telescope is unwise. The proposed funding for that initiative is nothing near the actual funds required for sending people to Mars, much less the Moon.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has announced that as part of the NASA reorganization the planned servicing mission for the Hubble has been canceled. This will cause this valuable mission to end prematurely and prompted us to action with http://savehubble.org.
Mr. O'Keefe has stated that the major reason this mission was canceled was safety. However, we have an overwhelming amount of data to the contrary. The other reason for the cancellation was time constraints due to the new space initiative. The public is not likely to support a President, or a new space initiative if it does not include one of the most popular missions of all time.
Other claims say that Hubble is past its prime and that ground telescopes can do most of the same work. Neither is true.
Hubble is anything but past its prime. NASA's own website states that very day the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world!
Hubble has been NASA's most productive mission, accounting for 35 percent of all discoveries in the past twenty years. As for the relevance of such data - Hubble's data accounts for twice as many referred papers in astronomical journals as the next biggest contributing facility.
Just a few of Hubble's most recent accomplishments in 2004 have been: Returned new data about "dark energy" that is causing the universe to accelerate. Found galaxies in formation less than one billion years after the big bang. Detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of planet outside of our solar system.
Ground-based telescopes simply cannot do what Hubble does. Hubble is sensitive to all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Many of these wavelengths are blocked by the atmosphere and cannot be seen by earthbound telescopes.
It is also untrue that the future Webb Telescope will be a replacement for Hubble. While this telescope will be very sophisticated, it will be observing mainly in the infrared only, not the range that Hubble observes in.
As part of our efforts to save Hubble, we have setup a form where visitors can send an email to President Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. The web form is filled out with a letter that asks them to reverse their decision to doom Hubble and let this national treasure continue to do valuable work.
We are also asking congress what what they think about the servicing mission and future of the Hubble Space Telescope. We will be publishing responses, or lack thereof, from all House Representatives and Senators at http://savehubble.org.
We started our efforts at http://SaveHubble.org because that petition was unlikely to accomplish much. O'Keefe doesn't care about a petition, he will care if Bush and a lot of congress calls or writes him!
Actually, a congressman from Colorado is trying to get a commitee together to determine the fate of the Hubble, so the decision is not solely on the director of NASA. This could mean life for the Hubble.
It was politics, ie Bush's men on mars initiative, that led to O'Keefe's decision to cancel Hubble's servicing mission. Let's not give up now that O'Keefe is starting to feel some political pressure. At http://SaveHubble.org we are working on polling all of congress. How about some of you slashdot readers give us a hand contacting them?
Here is more evidence MSN sucks! First and foremost it returned results which were entirely irrelevant and showed up prior to our "Leonid Meteor Shower" page, which is fairly popular and slashdotted last year (perhaps another slashdotting soon too).
I also just noticed that the number MSN gives is misleading. I searched for Leonid Meteor Shower on MSN and it said 35 results, but when I got past 35 it says 10566 results. A Flyer made last year made result number 159 - Leonid Meteor Shower: MeteorStorm! http://www.starryskies.com/leonids is listed as result 229.;(
Yahoo found 22,300 and our page is number 9 there.
Given our problems trying to get some of our better pages listed on Yahoo's directory, they want $300 per submission now, I was a bit surprised to see we are listed there and did well in this search ranking.
Anyone have any tips on a better way to determine search engine ranking?
We never have bothered with these search engine submission services, they just seemed like a rip off.
We are running some good educational/science websites - StarrySkies Network (1, 2 and 3. Google ads aren't perfect, we keep finding those star naming and lunar real estate scams on our site, but it sure beats the junk we had with burstmedia and fastclick - the Google text advertising isn't ruining our visitors experience.
I tried to find a place to write to Norton/Symantec, but they aren't making it easy to find. I would like to tell Norton/Symantec that blocking ads will be very damaging to our efforts to offset costs and improve our sites. We will be recommending to our users that they use other anti-virus products like AVG.
One slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to not allow surfers not viewing ads, so I sent the following note to Google.
Hi,
You may have heard that many computers will be running ad blocking software in the near future because Norton anti-virus. I believe google ads should not be subject to this blocking partly because they aren't completely annoying like the pop up/under and so called rich format ads. A slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to determine if the ads are being viewed. Can you impliment something which allows us to redirect a user to a google page saying "This website has chosen to not allow browsers with ad blocking software, please disable it on your computer and then return to (referrer variable).
What would the odds of success been - 1 in 10,000 perhaps. Retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board is a navy man who might know something about the navy and its military aircraft, but spaceflight is a very different expertise. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has no business being leader of such an organization, he is a Bush crony with a background in Public Administration - he is a career politician.
The TV reporting on this has been very inaccurate and really didn't say it had a very low probability of success. The only thing I saw that sounded close to reasonable is when one of the shows was doing a talking heads interview with an astronaut. This skewed reporting is exactly the kind of propaganda the Bush administration is good at, they have deflected the real cause. Ron Dittemore had been promised relieve of pushing his people too hard and taking shortcuts because the political correct word of the day was "Keep things on time for the space station and keep them under budget" - but it was all just a put off. Ron blames himself for what happened wondering what more he could have done and how he could have gotten O'Keefe to live up to his promises. What is very ironic about this is after the Challenger accident one of the key findings was to put technical people in managerial positions - Ron Dittemore was one of the engineers who was brought into management. If Bush ever heard such a recommendation, it must have been akin to that fuzzy math he talked about in the campaign. I studied Math and Science, and my father was on the navigation team of many of JPL's space mission, innumeracy really peeves me and Bush has done a lot to promote innumeracy.
If a rescue had been attempted, most likely we would have lost two shuttles and more astronauts.
I submitted the story this morning and was rejected. I think Starry Skies did just as good a job if not better of covering the eclipse than space.com. I did the html for Kathy, and find it interesting that while Kathy is disabled and we did the pages with a budget of zero - I think she did a mighty fine job. I would have liked to see what we could have done if we had the resources of space.com, who have paid writers and staff. Furthermore the guy running the NASA eclipse site and Mr Eclipse has asked Kathy for permission to use her Columbus article on those sites.
Here is what I submitted early this morning, I certainly thought it was worthy of the top page of slashdot... Take a look and let us know what you thing.
Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight
The May 15/16 lunar eclipse starts at 9:05 p.m. EDT and will be visible
over North and South America as well as western Europe and Africa.
Eastern US and Canada will be able to see the entire eclipse. In the
western US and Canada, the partial phase of the eclipse begins before
the Moon rises and for the Pacific northwest, the Moon will rise while
in totality. For times in your area, folklore, an interesting story on
the Lunar Eclipse that Saved Christopher Columbus, and more see The StarrySkies Lunar Eclipse Pages.
The article used the term unaided eye. It does suck that language is so politically correct these days. A little while ago someone showed me a couple of pages of terms that aren't supposed to be used. For example founding fathers is considered sexist.
Below are parts of a USA Today Article which I think show that Ron Dittamore has done all he could in insuring the safety of NASA's people. Lets's not forget one of the astronauts that died in the accident was a personal friend of Ron Dittamore. I have heard a bit about what others at NASA think about Ron and Safety, one particular astronaut thinks he is too cautious. Most agree with what
Joe Rothenberg, the former head of human space flight for NASA, said. "Ron did not let time pressures, peer pressure, political pressure, or any other pressure keep him from putting safety first... He's very competent technically, managerially. Great leadership. Very thorough."
USA Today
In October 2000, shuttle program director Ron Dittemore minced no words when the liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery was delayed after workers found a loose metal pin near the external fuel tank.
"I don't want to sugarcoat it," he said, noting the dangers the pin could have posed during the launch. "There was a mistake here... Our inspection teams should have spotted it earlier than they did today."
That kind of candid, straightforward approach -- and meticulous attention to safety -- are hallmarks of Dittemore's 25-year NASA career. Now, since Saturday, he has become the public face of the Columbia disaster while he leads the public briefings.
Dittemore also warned the media and public that "it's certainly possible that we'll contradict ourselves from day to day" as more data is examined.
Perfectly in character, say those who have worked with Dittemore.
Joe Rothenberg, the former head of human space flight for NASA, describes his former colleague as impervious to pressure. At least twice before, said Rothenberg, Dittemore took the lead in insisting on delaying flights for safety reasons.
"Ron was at the forefront of taking charge, or making decisions, to take those timeouts," said Rothenberg. "Ron did not let time pressures, peer pressure, political pressure, or any other pressure keep him from putting safety first... He's very competent technically, managerially. Great leadership. Very thorough."
And very human.
Tommy Holloway, who preceded Dittemore as head of the shuttle program, phoned him Monday. He found Dittemore wondering what more he and others could have been done to prevent the tragedy.
"He holds himself personally accountable," said Holloway, now retired. "He has a great deal of compassion and caring, and it's clear he has a great deal of anguish and compassion for the families."
If in the very unlikely event military satelites had seen a serious gash, they couldn't have done anything about it when it was in space.
That is not true from what I read. Some things that could have been done:
* Reduce the weight of the shuttle by tossing non-critical systems. This would decrease friction.
* Rotate shuttle to put damanged portion in shadow just before re-entry. This would reduce tempurature a bit.
* I have read that there were ways to reduce the peak reentry friction by spreading it out over time
1. Tossing stuff sounds like you have been watching too many old movies. Maybe they could have ditched hundreds of pounds, but it isn't likely they could reduced the mass more than a percentage or two. It would not have been a significant enough reduction in friction or heat to make any difference. Worse is all that debris doesn't just fall to earth over night, it creates hazards of future space flights.
2. Rotation is more likely to have helped than ditching mass, but if the suspected cause is correct (and I think it is), it would not have made enough of a difference either.
3. Re-entry is already optimized to minimize heat and structural stresses.
I am fairly familiar with the space
program as my Dad worked for JPL, he was on the navigation team for Pioneer, Voyager, Marineer and others.
I submitted this story, but someone didn't think it was worth slashdot, it just happens to be the biggest story StarrySkies has had an early sccop on... It should have been posted!
Information retreived from Columbia's Flight Data Recorder coupled with
CAT scan images of shuttle Atlantis' leading wing's RCC panels may
provide the answers to what happened to Columbia. Early results from the
flight data recorder indicate structural damage to Columbia much earlier
than perviously thought, even before re-entry. Also, CAT scans of the
reinforced carbon carbon panels from the wing's leading edges off
Atlantis, show minute gaps in the layers. These gaps could allow
superheated gases to enter into Columbia's wing. If all the data proves
correct, Columbia was likely doomed before ever reaching the launch pad.
The Leonid Meteor Shower are remnants of the comet Tempel-Tuttle. A perturbation by the planet Jupiter in 2029, will change the orbit of Tempel-Tuttle away from the Earth. You may have to wait until 2098, 2099 or 2131 to see the next Leonid storm.
RMS is a radical, and Open Source would not be where it is without out him. RMS is the revolutionary and Linus and ESR are making what was once revolutionary mainstream. Their is room for both.
The points RMS made are valid.
I for one support what Tim@ORA is doing and RMS in saying "Amazon and other software patent holders should abjure the use of patents for aggression, and adopt a no-first-use policy."
Slashdot Mirror
TIC: A couple years ago the Verizon CEO said they don't care about land lines anymore. Perhaps it could be that they are essentially an unregulated monopoly when it comes to cell service where we live. Profit... and how might they make more money, perhaps do away with the POTS lines.
TAC or FCC TECHNOLOGICAL ADVISORY COUNCIL: and get a bunch of other business people with conflicts of interest http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1025/DOC-302376A1.txt who will profit from increased business to tell the govt what is best for them.
TOE: We will hear about this one later. Does anyone remember how Verizon promised to put fiber every where in exchange for being able to get back into the long distance business? And how the delivery of that so called promise doesn't exist, at least not in our county, or any of the surrounding counties. A phase out will be announced with some promises about how great cell and broadband will be, and we will probably just see higher monthly bills...
We lost power for almost two weeks after Hurricane Isabel and cell service was mostly down, cable TV was down and the POTS line worked intermittently. My brother bought a cheap generator and we could use our dialup service while the landline worked. Although only one very old computer and the laptop could take the non standard voltages of our cheap generator... It was about 3 weeks without cabletv, which also is our current ISP. A couple of months ago I tried to call 911 with our cell phone when I saw (likely a drunk driver) a truck driving slowly down a dark road with no lights, and guess what 911 didn't work! My parents are elderly and I have argued with my father for a couple of years now not to get rid of the land line because it is more reliable in an emergency. This is all I need, now he will get rid of the land line and need it for an emergency call...
Anyone else hear about this corrosion issue?
Kathy posted something about it at "NASA managers mull shuttle engine issue and that links to a Florida Today article.
Kathy usually includes this sort of news and more in our newsletter the Starry Messenger. Here is a mailto link to subscribe to the Starry Messenger.
The following is an editorial I wrote which was published in our local paper.
President Bush's plan for manned space missions to the Moon and Mars at the expense of such a successful project as the Hubble Space Telescope is unwise. The proposed funding for that initiative is nothing near the actual funds required for sending people to Mars, much less the Moon.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has announced that as part of the NASA reorganization the planned servicing mission for the Hubble has been canceled. This will cause this valuable mission to end prematurely and prompted us to action with http://savehubble.org.
Mr. O'Keefe has stated that the major reason this mission was canceled was safety. However, we have an overwhelming amount of data to the contrary. The other reason for the cancellation was time constraints due to the new space initiative. The public is not likely to support a President, or a new space initiative if it does not include one of the most popular missions of all time.
Other claims say that Hubble is past its prime and that ground telescopes can do most of the same work. Neither is true.
Hubble is anything but past its prime. NASA's own website states that very day the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world!
Hubble has been NASA's most productive mission, accounting for 35 percent of all discoveries in the past twenty years. As for the relevance of such data - Hubble's data accounts for twice as many referred papers in astronomical journals as the next biggest contributing facility.
Just a few of Hubble's most recent accomplishments in 2004 have been: Returned new data about "dark energy" that is causing the universe to accelerate. Found galaxies in formation less than one billion years after the big bang. Detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of planet outside of our solar system.
Ground-based telescopes simply cannot do what Hubble does. Hubble is sensitive to all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Many of these wavelengths are blocked by the atmosphere and cannot be seen by earthbound telescopes.
It is also untrue that the future Webb Telescope will be a replacement for Hubble. While this telescope will be very sophisticated, it will be observing mainly in the infrared only, not the range that Hubble observes in.
As part of our efforts to save Hubble, we have setup a form where visitors can send an email to President Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. The web form is filled out with a letter that asks them to reverse their decision to doom Hubble and let this national treasure continue to do valuable work.
We are also asking congress what what they think about the servicing mission and future of the Hubble Space Telescope. We will be publishing responses, or lack thereof, from all House Representatives and Senators at http://savehubble.org.
Chuck Peters
http://starryskies.com
You can write President Bush and Sean O'Keefe from our website.
Contact you Congress person and your Senator.
Help SaveHubble.org poll congress!
Senator Barbara Mikulski is also leading some efforts in the Senate as well as a Maryland Delegation, and has a response from O'Keefe.
On the house side we have picked up 5 more co-sponsors.
Ehlers
Markey
Inslee
Cummings Jim Moran
http://SaveHubble.org could use some help with our efforts to poll all of congress on the Hubble issue!
It was politics, ie Bush's men on mars initiative, that led to O'Keefe's decision to cancel Hubble's servicing mission. Let's not give up now that O'Keefe is starting to feel some political pressure. At http://SaveHubble.org we are working on polling all of congress. How about some of you slashdot readers give us a hand contacting them?
I also just noticed that the number MSN gives is misleading. I searched for Leonid Meteor Shower on MSN and it said 35 results, but when I got past 35 it says 10566 results. A Flyer made last year made result number 159 - Leonid Meteor Shower: MeteorStorm! ;(
http://www.starryskies.com/leonids is listed as result 229.
Google yields 33,900 results, and our page is number 25.
http://starryskies.com/The_sky/events/meteors/
Yahoo found 22,300 and our page is number 9 there.
Given our problems trying to get some of our better pages listed on Yahoo's directory, they want $300 per submission now, I was a bit surprised to see we are listed there and did well in this search ranking.
Anyone have any tips on a better way to determine search engine ranking?
We never have bothered with these search engine submission services, they just seemed like a rip off.
Chuck
Mod the "Harmonic Concordance" post down for linking to pseudo science BS, IMHO he is helping promote a fraud!
I tried to find a place to write to Norton/Symantec, but they aren't making it easy to find. I would like to tell Norton/Symantec that blocking ads will be very damaging to our efforts to offset costs and improve our sites. We will be recommending to our users that they use other anti-virus products like AVG.
One slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to not allow surfers not viewing ads, so I sent the following note to Google.
Hi,
You may have heard that many computers will be running ad blocking software in the near future because Norton anti-virus. I believe google ads should not be subject to this blocking partly because they aren't completely annoying like the pop up/under and so called rich format ads. A slashdot reader suggested using a cookie to determine if the ads are being viewed. Can you impliment something which allows us to redirect a user to a google page saying "This website has chosen to not allow browsers with ad blocking software, please disable it on your computer and then return to (referrer variable).
Thanks,
Chuck
My question is why would vendors want such an organization when they can easily host their own apt archives?
What would the odds of success been - 1 in 10,000 perhaps. Retired Navy Adm. Harold Gehman Jr., chairman of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board is a navy man who might know something about the navy and its military aircraft, but spaceflight is a very different expertise. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has no business being leader of such an organization, he is a Bush crony with a background in Public Administration - he is a career politician.
The TV reporting on this has been very inaccurate and really didn't say it had a very low probability of success. The only thing I saw that sounded close to reasonable is when one of the shows was doing a talking heads interview with an astronaut. This skewed reporting is exactly the kind of propaganda the Bush administration is good at, they have deflected the real cause. Ron Dittemore had been promised relieve of pushing his people too hard and taking shortcuts because the political correct word of the day was "Keep things on time for the space station and keep them under budget" - but it was all just a put off. Ron blames himself for what happened wondering what more he could have done and how he could have gotten O'Keefe to live up to his promises. What is very ironic about this is after the Challenger accident one of the key findings was to put technical people in managerial positions - Ron Dittemore was one of the engineers who was brought into management. If Bush ever heard such a recommendation, it must have been akin to that fuzzy math he talked about in the campaign. I studied Math and Science, and my father was on the navigation team of many of JPL's space mission, innumeracy really peeves me and Bush has done a lot to promote innumeracy.
If a rescue had been attempted, most likely we would have lost two shuttles and more astronauts.
I submitted the story this morning and was rejected. I think Starry Skies did just as good a job if not better of covering the eclipse than space.com. I did the html for Kathy, and find it interesting that while Kathy is disabled and we did the pages with a budget of zero - I think she did a mighty fine job. I would have liked to see what we could have done if we had the resources of space.com, who have paid writers and staff. Furthermore the guy running the NASA eclipse site and Mr Eclipse has asked Kathy for permission to use her Columbus article on those sites.
Here is what I submitted early this morning, I certainly thought it was worthy of the top page of slashdot... Take a look and let us know what you thing.
Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight
The May 15/16 lunar eclipse starts at 9:05 p.m. EDT and will be visible over North and South America as well as western Europe and Africa. Eastern US and Canada will be able to see the entire eclipse. In the western US and Canada, the partial phase of the eclipse begins before the Moon rises and for the Pacific northwest, the Moon will rise while in totality. For times in your area, folklore, an interesting story on the Lunar Eclipse that Saved Christopher Columbus, and more see The StarrySkies Lunar Eclipse Pages.
Lots of good stuff at http://StarrySkies.com, not just astronomy.
Also http://StarrySkies.net, http://StarryMessenger.net and coming soon http://88Constellations.com
The article used the term unaided eye. It does suck that language is so politically correct these days. A little while ago someone showed me a couple of pages of terms that aren't supposed to be used. For example founding fathers is considered sexist.
Below are parts of a USA Today Article which I think show that Ron Dittamore has done all he could in insuring the safety of NASA's people. Lets's not forget one of the astronauts that died in the accident was a personal friend of Ron Dittamore. I have heard a bit about what others at NASA think about Ron and Safety, one particular astronaut thinks he is too cautious. Most agree with what Joe Rothenberg, the former head of human space flight for NASA, said. "Ron did not let time pressures, peer pressure, political pressure, or any other pressure keep him from putting safety first ... He's very competent technically, managerially. Great leadership. Very thorough."
USA Today
In October 2000, shuttle program director Ron Dittemore minced no words when the liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery was delayed after workers found a loose metal pin near the external fuel tank.
"I don't want to sugarcoat it," he said, noting the dangers the pin could have posed during the launch. "There was a mistake here ... Our inspection teams should have spotted it earlier than they did today."
That kind of candid, straightforward approach -- and meticulous attention to safety -- are hallmarks of Dittemore's 25-year NASA career. Now, since Saturday, he has become the public face of the Columbia disaster while he leads the public briefings.
Dittemore also warned the media and public that "it's certainly possible that we'll contradict ourselves from day to day" as more data is examined.
Perfectly in character, say those who have worked with Dittemore.
Joe Rothenberg, the former head of human space flight for NASA, describes his former colleague as impervious to pressure. At least twice before, said Rothenberg, Dittemore took the lead in insisting on delaying flights for safety reasons. "Ron was at the forefront of taking charge, or making decisions, to take those timeouts," said Rothenberg. "Ron did not let time pressures, peer pressure, political pressure, or any other pressure keep him from putting safety first ... He's very competent technically, managerially. Great leadership. Very thorough."
And very human.
Tommy Holloway, who preceded Dittemore as head of the shuttle program, phoned him Monday. He found Dittemore wondering what more he and others could have been done to prevent the tragedy.
"He holds himself personally accountable," said Holloway, now retired. "He has a great deal of compassion and caring, and it's clear he has a great deal of anguish and compassion for the families."
1. Tossing stuff sounds like you have been watching too many old movies. Maybe they could have ditched hundreds of pounds, but it isn't likely they could reduced the mass more than a percentage or two. It would not have been a significant enough reduction in friction or heat to make any difference. Worse is all that debris doesn't just fall to earth over night, it creates hazards of future space flights.
2. Rotation is more likely to have helped than ditching mass, but if the suspected cause is correct (and I think it is), it would not have made enough of a difference either.
3. Re-entry is already optimized to minimize heat and structural stresses.
I am fairly familiar with the space program as my Dad worked for JPL, he was on the navigation team for Pioneer, Voyager, Marineer and others.
ChuckI submitted this story, but someone didn't think it was worth slashdot, it just happens to be the biggest story StarrySkies has had an early sccop on... It should have been posted!
Information retreived from Columbia's Flight Data Recorder coupled with CAT scan images of shuttle Atlantis' leading wing's RCC panels may provide the answers to what happened to Columbia. Early results from the flight data recorder indicate structural damage to Columbia much earlier than perviously thought, even before re-entry. Also, CAT scans of the reinforced carbon carbon panels from the wing's leading edges off Atlantis, show minute gaps in the layers. These gaps could allow superheated gases to enter into Columbia's wing. If all the data proves correct, Columbia was likely doomed before ever reaching the launch pad.
http://starryskies.com/articles/2003/03/columbia.The Leonid Meteor Shower are remnants of the comet Tempel-Tuttle. A perturbation by the planet Jupiter in 2029, will change the orbit of Tempel-Tuttle away from the Earth. You may have to wait until 2098, 2099 or 2131 to see the next Leonid storm.
StarrySkies, has some very cool images from last year's Leonid, star charts, folklore and more. Also see Near-Live Leonid Watching System, NASA Leonid Multi Instrument Aircraft Campaign and
Gart W. Kronk's Comets & Meteor Showers.
RMS is a radical, and Open Source would not be where it is without out him. RMS is the revolutionary and Linus and ESR are making what was once revolutionary mainstream. Their is room for both.
The points RMS made are valid.
I for one support what Tim@ORA is doing and RMS in saying "Amazon
and other software patent holders should abjure the use of patents for
aggression, and adopt a no-first-use policy."
It's been a while since I read DNS and Bind, but isn't there some way to query all the domains in there DNS servers?
If others are interested in forming a club to participate in the IPO, please send email to invest@investmentclub.org.
Initial Public Offer
The first time a company sells stock, it's called an IPO.
Chuck
If you are interested send email to