One thing that has been desirable has been to keep surveillance drones in flight for as long as possible. The longest shuttle mission was 17 days and 15 hours. This drone has been up there for a year before coming down.
Yeah, because it was essentially a satellite in orbit around the earth. We already have spy satellites, and have had them for a lot longer than we have had drones.
The reason why we're using a lot of drones now, despite already having satellites, is because the drones can maintain a lengthy continuous presence over a specific location, rather than passing over that location at regular intervals in an orbit which can be discovered and then worked around. In terms of amount of time continuously observing an area of interest, this space plane has vastly lower numbers than any UAV -- just like all spy satellites.
If you are picturing this being used for surveillance, then what they showed is not a drone with an extremely long loiter time. It's a satellite with an extremely short orbital life span.
I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.
If the military has upgraded equipment they want to put in a spy satellite, they just launch a new one. They have no need to recover old ones (unlike back in the day when spy satellites used film), so they just let the old one deorbit.
To figure out what the X37 is for, we need to figure out why the military would need it back. Spy satellite doesn't fit the bill at all.
You have to look at it in terms of opportunity cost. Compare the amount of effort and cost of going to school for engineering and science Masters or PhD, versus the the job you could get (both pay/benefits and intangibles). Compare that with an MBA or Finance degree and the kind of job you can get with that.
I won't lie -- I'm a fan of Commuevilism, where the means of evil production are owned by the people. From each according to their villainy, to each according to their vulnerability.
Nintendo has created a toy which creates bad haptic habits and you're defending it.
Sorry, I just don't have this problem. I look at the screen and see where the pointer is and move the wiimote accordingly, just like I would a mouse, and it works great. That's not a defense, it's a statement of my personal experience: Used as designed, the wiimote is a fantastic pointer.
The wiimote never taught you to point at what you're trying to hit. There's never anything that says "sight down the wiimote to aim!" and a few seconds or at most minutes of using it on the main Wii screen would demonstrate that it's not line-of-sight to the TV. It's your own reflex that is the problem. If you can't get over that, I'm sorry that the wiimote won't work for you.
Or if you have that stupid gun attachment. Then sure it's creating an expectation of aiming which doesn't exist. Overpriced piece of useless plastic is overpriced and useless.
Have you tried Lost Planet? you can actually get the reticle on the target with only reasonable difficulty.
No, but it doesn't sound much better than any other console shooter. Actually I take that back -- I tried a demo system at Best Buy once. Not a fair shake by any means, but I certainly didn't find anything to be significantly different about the controls than other shooters.
but it's poor at actually determining precisely where I'm pointing and that makes it frustrating.
Never had that problem. Instant and precise targeting with no difficulty whatsoever is exactly why I fell in love with it.. All I can suggest is make sure there are no significant IR sources other than the wiimote sensor bar (i.e. the IR LED bar) in the general direction of the TV. At my last place I had to close the blinds on the windows behind the TV, for example.
Oh and of course it's not line-of-sight to the TV that determines where you're pointing, it's relative like a mouse.
What's amazing is that anyone thinks that this is good, because the play control is abysmal.
Ha! It was after 5 minutes with Metroid Prime: Corruption that I vowed never, ever to play another console FPS with a gamepad again. Before, that was something I just had to put up with because hey, console gaming. It's not as great as mouse/keyboard mostly because turning is still slow but it's a near match for rapidly switching targets on screen, which puts it way beyond any gamepad BS.
Keyboard/mouse is the best. But for console FPS input, the wiimote is awesome.
one problem with this design is that having the engines spread out makes your ship a bigger target, and easier to hit and disable or destroy.
I don't think that necessarily follows. Spreading out the engines into multiple smaller targets seems like it would actually make them harder to hit than making the main body, which would still be the natural target, commensurately larger. Plus it would decrease the chances that multiple engines are damaged at once. Sacrificing maneuverability in a fighter for an unclear advantage in target profile seems like a bad tradeoff.
If there's anything in the story that's beyond current physics, then it's not "hard sci-fi"
What about unconfirmed theoretical predictions of current physics, like wormholes?
Pitch Black appears to involve interplanetary travel, which again can't be hard sci-fi unless it's a generation ship that rotates to generate gravity, and while I haven't seen the movie, I doubt that's the ship they depicted.
Pitch Black has aliens in it, so I'd assume that disqualifies it harder than the magical gravity -- especially since you could easily re-write the movie with the magical gravity removed, but without the aliens there's no plot.
Unless going beyond current biology doesn't count?
There's very, very few "hard sci-fi" movies in existence that I can even think of. Even 2001 didn't really count; it had the magical monoliths.
Huh. And all this time I thought the term "hard sci-fi" was relevant to my interests. But if 2001 and Contact don't count then, well, it turns out whether something is "hard sci-fi" is meaningless to me.:/
What's the term for Sci-Fi that treats all elements that are related to known physics and technology in an accurate and rigorous way, but is also allowed to speculate on the unknown or incorporate other unexplained elements?
The X-Wing's engines are pretty close to the main body, and it's just the weapons that are on the end of the wings IIRC. Which is okay since Star Wars operates under the principle that Space Flight Is Just Like Atmospheric Flight... But in Spaaaaace!
The Star Fury though perfectly demonstrates the principle, as do the battle scenes it's involved in. Its weapons are close to the body and the engines spread out. It's not designed for atmospheric flight, though, so the only reason to have "wings" is for maneuvering in space.
The Vipers are designed to fly in an atmosphere, so there it makes sense that they look more like a jet fighter with maneuvering thrusters.
"In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form," notes Alsup (emphasis in original).
Indeed, this is just so. And you can't copyright "functionality"; that's akin to copyrighting a concept, which is not what copyright is about. Copyright is about protecting implementations of concepts, and those are still protected. But a programming language requires a rigid codification of the concept itself.
Oracle's response made me chuckle a little...
"The court's reliance on "interoperability" ignores the undisputed fact that Google deliberately eliminated interoperability between Android and all other Java platforms," the company said in a statement issued this afternoon. "Google's implementation intentionally fragmented Java and broke the "write once, run anywhere" promise."
That's really immaterial to the reasoning for why an APIs aren't protected under the Copyright Act in the first place. It would be relevant if "interoperability" were a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not, since the item in question wasn't protected in the first place.
Just because my implementation of fopen() breaks programs that depended on your implementation of fopen() that doesn't suddenly mean that your declaration of a function called fopen() is protected and my identical declaration is infringing. This would imply that copyright infringement claims based on APIs would suddenly be dependent on some kind of compatibility test.
And on that note, it was that last line that made me chuckle. Brings to mind something about ships and sailing, or barn doors and horses.
The mean human IQ at a particular time and place (IQs for given test results have been adjusted downward several times because people are in general becoming more educated [which some people assume means smarter for some reason but hey]).
Point being -- relative to a universal scale incorporating all possible intelligence values (not just those attainable by living humans) 100 IQ is probably pretty stupid... but so is 180 IQ.:)
You force socialized medicine down our throats and then when the costs get out of hand, you want to regulate what people do with their own bodies?
Sorry most of us are not on board with just letting people fucking die on the steps of a hospital because they failed an insurance/credit check, and never will be.
That's what you meant, right? Obamacare is a long sight from actual socialized medicine, but our system of treating people in emergency rooms results in de facto socialized medicine, just excessively expensive.
Normally this is where I say "may you be subject to the world you wish for", and wonder aloud if your last words before dying of a heart attack after being laid off and not being able to afford COBRA would be "at least I got to drink soda in large containers". But you know what? Even despite this sociopathic bent contrary to the nature of human beings as social animals, I would still want the ambulance to come for you, and would gladly pay my portion of the bill.
I hope the hell they don't - there's plenty of useful work to be done in LEO yet. (Even though it doesn't give space fanbois any wood.)
I hope to hell they do -- by doing all the useful work in LEO that will enable it, like orbital refueling depots or even shipyards. Getting to LEO is what needs to be handed off.
If we can make access to LEO routine and cheap (relatively speaking), and allow NASA to develop LEO capabilities instead of wasting all their money on pork launchers so they can start their missions from components launched to LEO on commodity rockets, then we can make getting to the Moon trivial, and Mars easy enough that it's conceivable to do without stopping all other NASA work.
Why wouldn't I? Just to pile on the "My anger about manned exploration causes me to not understand what's going on today" theme? If nonsense and angry tangents is a "good moment', then what's "bad"?
Oh? I'll slow down for you. It would be amazing that the sensors on both spacecraft were not functioning when entering Lunar Orbit.
That's what you were trying to say? You don't need to slow down you just need to say things in a way that makes sense. Yes, the sensors were functioning when it entered orbit and nearly continuously since.
The usage of "have provided" states that the operators know what's there, and have already evaluated the data.
No, it only means that the craft has provided data of unprecedented detail, and that it's about the lunar structure. These aren't Star Trek sensors that just "scan" the moon and somehow directly spit out all the salient details about its composition. Actually going from the raw gravity sensor data to the 3D density map you desire takes a lot of work.
Both craft have passed over the same surface multiple times; at this point, if anything had changed, that would be intriguing.
The implication being that they're recording the same data over and over and should have been done after the first 'pass'. Which is hilarious; thank you for clearly explaining. These are gravity probes, not cameras looking at large regions of the surface. Every unique position over the moon is a unique data point.
Or another analogy I'm fond of is, "A first year Geology Major could learn more about the Moon in one day using a Bucket and a Shovel then all of humanity currently knows."
I think it's perfect that you'd trot out this analogy in an instance where an army of geology majors spending their whole lives with buckets and shovels couldn't get us the data this probe has. It really does put everything you said in perspective.
So you're upset at the lack of progress in manned exploration. Understandable. What's less understandable is how this has turned your thinking on anything related to the subject of space exploration to mush.
Article certainly sounded like they were already done with your two tasks that will "take a long time".
No, the article only makes it sound like the data collection is done. And it is. Data of unprecedented detail, and about the structure of the moon. That doesn't mean you just run the data through a plotter and get a picture of what the data means about the structure of the moon. That will take time.
Sorry you're disappointed that this article is only about the successful end of the main mission, and not about the conclusions from that mission's data, but that's what it is.
Knowing what we know today about the shape of the world - which peoples of his time most certainly did not - can you really sit there and say he failed?
Ah, sorry, but this "People thought the world was flat, and Columbus proved that it was round" thing is a myth.
Peoples of the time knew very well the "shape of the world" as roughly spherical. They also knew roughly how large it was -- this had in fact been figured out around 200 BC by Eratosthenes. It was because of this, not a belief in a flat earth, that they thought Columbus was a fool. They knew that the distance to Asia was far too great for it to make sense to take the 'back route' to India. Columbus thought the earth was much smaller than it actually is. He was wrong, they were right.
The thing that was learned was that there was an entire continent there (which had been discovered before but wasn't known to Europeans). But because Columbus was using a grossly wrong value for the earth's size, he didn't even realize what he had discovered and thought he had completed his journey to India on schedule. And so, centuries later, we're still stuck with our "dot or feather" Indians confusion.:P
Anyway, he didn't discover anything about the shape of the earth. And on his mission to find a faster trade route to Asia, he did in fact fail. Of course since the reason for that mission was to make money, you can't really say it was a complete failure from Spain's point of view.
Of course! The people that put the insturments in the craft didn't bother to create a manual so that the staff monitoring the craft would know what it's doing, or how to control it. Now the craft controllers have to figure it out on their own, makes sense to me.
Um... the staff monitoring the craft do know what it's doing, and how to control it. That doesn't mean they can magically turn the data acquired by the probe into meaningful conclusions without any effort.
I'm sure your post made sense to you, but it has nothing to do with anything in reality.
They don't know yet. What they have now is a crapload of data. It's going to take a long time to analyze it and figure out what it means, and what it implies about the development of other bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that has been desirable has been to keep surveillance drones in flight for as long as possible. The longest shuttle mission was 17 days and 15 hours. This drone has been up there for a year before coming down.
Yeah, because it was essentially a satellite in orbit around the earth. We already have spy satellites, and have had them for a lot longer than we have had drones.
The reason why we're using a lot of drones now, despite already having satellites, is because the drones can maintain a lengthy continuous presence over a specific location, rather than passing over that location at regular intervals in an orbit which can be discovered and then worked around. In terms of amount of time continuously observing an area of interest, this space plane has vastly lower numbers than any UAV -- just like all spy satellites.
If you are picturing this being used for surveillance, then what they showed is not a drone with an extremely long loiter time. It's a satellite with an extremely short orbital life span.
I think they're aiming to replace spy satellites with these drones and this was a test to see if a drone can stay up in space for a long duration and still arrive back on ground intact for repairs or to upgrade its system.
If the military has upgraded equipment they want to put in a spy satellite, they just launch a new one. They have no need to recover old ones (unlike back in the day when spy satellites used film), so they just let the old one deorbit.
To figure out what the X37 is for, we need to figure out why the military would need it back. Spy satellite doesn't fit the bill at all.
I don't see how USD50 000 is a third word wage.
You have to look at it in terms of opportunity cost. Compare the amount of effort and cost of going to school for engineering and science Masters or PhD, versus the the job you could get (both pay/benefits and intangibles). Compare that with an MBA or Finance degree and the kind of job you can get with that.
Everyone who makes sweeping generalizations is a complete moron.
Gee, perhaps the "here's why" could be referring to the article linked immediately prior?
I won't lie -- I'm a fan of Commuevilism, where the means of evil production are owned by the people. From each according to their villainy, to each according to their vulnerability.
Nintendo has created a toy which creates bad haptic habits and you're defending it.
Sorry, I just don't have this problem. I look at the screen and see where the pointer is and move the wiimote accordingly, just like I would a mouse, and it works great. That's not a defense, it's a statement of my personal experience: Used as designed, the wiimote is a fantastic pointer.
The wiimote never taught you to point at what you're trying to hit. There's never anything that says "sight down the wiimote to aim!" and a few seconds or at most minutes of using it on the main Wii screen would demonstrate that it's not line-of-sight to the TV. It's your own reflex that is the problem. If you can't get over that, I'm sorry that the wiimote won't work for you.
Or if you have that stupid gun attachment. Then sure it's creating an expectation of aiming which doesn't exist. Overpriced piece of useless plastic is overpriced and useless.
Funny how you never hear the Moon Landing Hoaxers talk about that niggling little detail.
Have you tried Lost Planet? you can actually get the reticle on the target with only reasonable difficulty.
No, but it doesn't sound much better than any other console shooter. Actually I take that back -- I tried a demo system at Best Buy once. Not a fair shake by any means, but I certainly didn't find anything to be significantly different about the controls than other shooters.
but it's poor at actually determining precisely where I'm pointing and that makes it frustrating.
Never had that problem. Instant and precise targeting with no difficulty whatsoever is exactly why I fell in love with it.. All I can suggest is make sure there are no significant IR sources other than the wiimote sensor bar (i.e. the IR LED bar) in the general direction of the TV. At my last place I had to close the blinds on the windows behind the TV, for example.
Oh and of course it's not line-of-sight to the TV that determines where you're pointing, it's relative like a mouse.
What's amazing is that anyone thinks that this is good, because the play control is abysmal.
Ha! It was after 5 minutes with Metroid Prime: Corruption that I vowed never, ever to play another console FPS with a gamepad again. Before, that was something I just had to put up with because hey, console gaming. It's not as great as mouse/keyboard mostly because turning is still slow but it's a near match for rapidly switching targets on screen, which puts it way beyond any gamepad BS.
Keyboard/mouse is the best. But for console FPS input, the wiimote is awesome.
Like Ozymandias, whose only mistake was his choice of Meaningful Name.
But if they're like Ozy, then that means the villain might have to win.
one problem with this design is that having the engines spread out makes your ship a bigger target, and easier to hit and disable or destroy.
I don't think that necessarily follows. Spreading out the engines into multiple smaller targets seems like it would actually make them harder to hit than making the main body, which would still be the natural target, commensurately larger. Plus it would decrease the chances that multiple engines are damaged at once. Sacrificing maneuverability in a fighter for an unclear advantage in target profile seems like a bad tradeoff.
If there's anything in the story that's beyond current physics, then it's not "hard sci-fi"
What about unconfirmed theoretical predictions of current physics, like wormholes?
Pitch Black appears to involve interplanetary travel, which again can't be hard sci-fi unless it's a generation ship that rotates to generate gravity, and while I haven't seen the movie, I doubt that's the ship they depicted.
Pitch Black has aliens in it, so I'd assume that disqualifies it harder than the magical gravity -- especially since you could easily re-write the movie with the magical gravity removed, but without the aliens there's no plot.
Unless going beyond current biology doesn't count?
There's very, very few "hard sci-fi" movies in existence that I can even think of. Even 2001 didn't really count; it had the magical monoliths.
Huh. And all this time I thought the term "hard sci-fi" was relevant to my interests. But if 2001 and Contact don't count then, well, it turns out whether something is "hard sci-fi" is meaningless to me. :/
What's the term for Sci-Fi that treats all elements that are related to known physics and technology in an accurate and rigorous way, but is also allowed to speculate on the unknown or incorporate other unexplained elements?
The X-Wing's engines are pretty close to the main body, and it's just the weapons that are on the end of the wings IIRC. Which is okay since Star Wars operates under the principle that Space Flight Is Just Like Atmospheric Flight... But in Spaaaaace!
The Star Fury though perfectly demonstrates the principle, as do the battle scenes it's involved in. Its weapons are close to the body and the engines spread out. It's not designed for atmospheric flight, though, so the only reason to have "wings" is for maneuvering in space.
The Vipers are designed to fly in an atmosphere, so there it makes sense that they look more like a jet fighter with maneuvering thrusters.
"In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form," notes Alsup (emphasis in original).
Indeed, this is just so. And you can't copyright "functionality"; that's akin to copyrighting a concept, which is not what copyright is about. Copyright is about protecting implementations of concepts, and those are still protected. But a programming language requires a rigid codification of the concept itself.
Oracle's response made me chuckle a little...
"The court's reliance on "interoperability" ignores the undisputed fact that Google deliberately eliminated interoperability between Android and all other Java platforms," the company said in a statement issued this afternoon. "Google's implementation intentionally fragmented Java and broke the "write once, run anywhere" promise."
That's really immaterial to the reasoning for why an APIs aren't protected under the Copyright Act in the first place. It would be relevant if "interoperability" were a defense against copyright infringement, but it's not, since the item in question wasn't protected in the first place.
Just because my implementation of fopen() breaks programs that depended on your implementation of fopen() that doesn't suddenly mean that your declaration of a function called fopen() is protected and my identical declaration is infringing. This would imply that copyright infringement claims based on APIs would suddenly be dependent on some kind of compatibility test.
And on that note, it was that last line that made me chuckle. Brings to mind something about ships and sailing, or barn doors and horses.
The mean human IQ at a particular time and place (IQs for given test results have been adjusted downward several times because people are in general becoming more educated [which some people assume means smarter for some reason but hey]).
Point being -- relative to a universal scale incorporating all possible intelligence values (not just those attainable by living humans) 100 IQ is probably pretty stupid... but so is 180 IQ. :)
You force socialized medicine down our throats and then when the costs get out of hand, you want to regulate what people do with their own bodies?
Sorry most of us are not on board with just letting people fucking die on the steps of a hospital because they failed an insurance/credit check, and never will be.
That's what you meant, right? Obamacare is a long sight from actual socialized medicine, but our system of treating people in emergency rooms results in de facto socialized medicine, just excessively expensive.
Normally this is where I say "may you be subject to the world you wish for", and wonder aloud if your last words before dying of a heart attack after being laid off and not being able to afford COBRA would be "at least I got to drink soda in large containers". But you know what? Even despite this sociopathic bent contrary to the nature of human beings as social animals, I would still want the ambulance to come for you, and would gladly pay my portion of the bill.
Yeah, he was only buzzed.
I hope the hell they don't - there's plenty of useful work to be done in LEO yet. (Even though it doesn't give space fanbois any wood.)
I hope to hell they do -- by doing all the useful work in LEO that will enable it, like orbital refueling depots or even shipyards. Getting to LEO is what needs to be handed off.
If we can make access to LEO routine and cheap (relatively speaking), and allow NASA to develop LEO capabilities instead of wasting all their money on pork launchers so they can start their missions from components launched to LEO on commodity rockets, then we can make getting to the Moon trivial, and Mars easy enough that it's conceivable to do without stopping all other NASA work.
This is my dream, and it could happen. Crazy.
Why wouldn't I? Just to pile on the "My anger about manned exploration causes me to not understand what's going on today" theme? If nonsense and angry tangents is a "good moment', then what's "bad"?
Oh? I'll slow down for you. It would be amazing that the sensors on both spacecraft were not functioning when entering Lunar Orbit.
That's what you were trying to say? You don't need to slow down you just need to say things in a way that makes sense. Yes, the sensors were functioning when it entered orbit and nearly continuously since.
The usage of "have provided" states that the operators know what's there, and have already evaluated the data.
No, it only means that the craft has provided data of unprecedented detail, and that it's about the lunar structure. These aren't Star Trek sensors that just "scan" the moon and somehow directly spit out all the salient details about its composition. Actually going from the raw gravity sensor data to the 3D density map you desire takes a lot of work.
Both craft have passed over the same surface multiple times; at this point, if anything had changed, that would be intriguing.
The implication being that they're recording the same data over and over and should have been done after the first 'pass'. Which is hilarious; thank you for clearly explaining. These are gravity probes, not cameras looking at large regions of the surface. Every unique position over the moon is a unique data point.
Or another analogy I'm fond of is, "A first year Geology Major could learn more about the Moon in one day using a Bucket and a Shovel then all of humanity currently knows."
I think it's perfect that you'd trot out this analogy in an instance where an army of geology majors spending their whole lives with buckets and shovels couldn't get us the data this probe has. It really does put everything you said in perspective.
So you're upset at the lack of progress in manned exploration. Understandable. What's less understandable is how this has turned your thinking on anything related to the subject of space exploration to mush.
Article certainly sounded like they were already done with your two tasks that will "take a long time".
No, the article only makes it sound like the data collection is done. And it is. Data of unprecedented detail, and about the structure of the moon. That doesn't mean you just run the data through a plotter and get a picture of what the data means about the structure of the moon. That will take time.
Sorry you're disappointed that this article is only about the successful end of the main mission, and not about the conclusions from that mission's data, but that's what it is.
Well the good news is there's already an Astrotrain that fits the bill!
The bad news is he's a Decepticon. Let's just say insuring your satellite that's being launched by malevolent robot is cost prohibitive.
Knowing what we know today about the shape of the world - which peoples of his time most certainly did not - can you really sit there and say he failed?
Ah, sorry, but this "People thought the world was flat, and Columbus proved that it was round" thing is a myth.
Peoples of the time knew very well the "shape of the world" as roughly spherical. They also knew roughly how large it was -- this had in fact been figured out around 200 BC by Eratosthenes. It was because of this, not a belief in a flat earth, that they thought Columbus was a fool. They knew that the distance to Asia was far too great for it to make sense to take the 'back route' to India. Columbus thought the earth was much smaller than it actually is. He was wrong, they were right.
The thing that was learned was that there was an entire continent there (which had been discovered before but wasn't known to Europeans). But because Columbus was using a grossly wrong value for the earth's size, he didn't even realize what he had discovered and thought he had completed his journey to India on schedule. And so, centuries later, we're still stuck with our "dot or feather" Indians confusion. :P
Anyway, he didn't discover anything about the shape of the earth. And on his mission to find a faster trade route to Asia, he did in fact fail. Of course since the reason for that mission was to make money, you can't really say it was a complete failure from Spain's point of view.
Of course! The people that put the insturments in the craft didn't bother to create a manual so that the staff monitoring the craft would know what it's doing, or how to control it. Now the craft controllers have to figure it out on their own, makes sense to me.
Um... the staff monitoring the craft do know what it's doing, and how to control it. That doesn't mean they can magically turn the data acquired by the probe into meaningful conclusions without any effort.
I'm sure your post made sense to you, but it has nothing to do with anything in reality.
They don't know yet. What they have now is a crapload of data. It's going to take a long time to analyze it and figure out what it means, and what it implies about the development of other bodies.