Either way, launching to the Moon (or any Lagrange Points) from the ISS is orbitally dumb.
But if you have a choice between:
1. Spend $50,000,000,000 on building a new NASA heavy lifter and $2,000,000,000 per launch. 2. Spend $100,000,000 per launch sending each of a dozen components to ISS on existing smaller launchers, assemble them and then send the assembled spacecraft to the Moon.
Then ISS makes sense. Obviously launching those components to a new space station in a low inclination orbit would save money in the long term, but would add billions more up front.
I wonder why they went with the plan to have the craft return to earth? It makes more sense to me to have a reusable "shuttlecraft" that ferried astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
You know that big rocket stage that sent Apollo to the Moon from Earth orbit? You'd need something about a quarter as large as that to brake an Apollo CSM-sized vehicle into orbit to dock with ISS, and then you'd need to launch that all the way to the Moon as well, meaning you'd need a much larger rocket stage to get you there. Or you'd need to aerobrake and hope your computer didn't screw up and send you into completely the wrong orbit.
To go from ISS to the Moon and back you'd need a far more efficient engine that current chemical rockets (ion, nuclear, etc).
So yeah, maybe the ISS is a good place to integrate a vehicle like this but the best way seems to fly it around the moon then straight to Earth.
No, the inclination makes it a lousy place to go to the Moon from too. But using it is probably cheaper than building a construction shack in a sensible orbit if you're not planning to be going to the Moon on a regular basis.
I was on a tour of the Nevada test site a few months back and didn't see any robots running around, I guess they weren't operating at that point. It's a pretty interesting place to see if you ever get the chance, and so big that I can understand why they want robots patrolling 24/7.
And the tour guide claimed that years ago a visitor was accidentally left behind in a portapotty near one of the craters, so at least if it happens again they'll be able to flag down a passing robot. Assuming it doesn't go all Terminator on their ass.
Have you seen the opinions expressed by the non-lawyers on sites like Slashdot? EVERYBODY is a constitutional expert (self-proclaimed, of course) around here.
The US Constitution is an extremely simple document: only a lawyer could claim that 'Congress shall make no law' actually means 'Congress can make a law whenever it feels like so long as it's to protect the children/stop terrorism/protect us from evil corporations/lock up evil traitorous antiwar protestors, etc'.
Heck, the average law coming out of Congress these days has a hundred times as many pages as the founding Constitution of the nation.
The would have bankrupted, reformed, settled on debts, and been roughly in the same position they are now except probably much more profitable.
They could also have eliminated the bloated union contracts that make them essentially a pension and benefits company that happens to make cars as a sideline. The real bailout wasn't for the companies, it was for the unions.
The management walked away from a product their customers couldn't wait to get their hands on. Having customers pounding on your door who want to give you mone is an enviable position. This illustrates the incompetence of the management.
The EV-1 reportedly cost over $100,000 to build. How many actual, real customers were queuing up to hand over checks for $100,000 to buy one?
It is a SIGNALLING car. It signals your commitment to the environment, and that you are a caring person.
Considering you can buy a Civic for half the price, that's an awful lot of money to spend on SMUG. Particularly when it has a Chevy badge on the front.
'modern' operating systems do not provide any facilities for running subprocesses that validate system calls via the parent.
Uh, hello? Have you never heard of Apparmor and SELinux?
I have an Apparmor wrapper for Flash which prevents it from doing pretty much anything other than playing videos. It literally cannot write flash cookies to the local disk because the kernel only allows it to write to its own config directory.
And given the insane amount of denials I see for access attempts to random files (it even tries to write to a root-owned font directory), that's a really good idea.
It's called 'tourism' and it's a huge industry. Right now no-one who wants to go to Mars can afford the fare, but the more we develop a private spaceflight infrastructure, the cheaper it will become.... IMHO tourists will walk on Mars before NASA's astronauts do.
Probably not. It's like exploring the Mariana Trench - We should do that, because it helps us to understand our blue marble, but it's nothing the private sector is that interested in.
Wasn't James Cameron talking recently about his plans to explore the Marianas Trench?
The sad thing is that the fuel tanks could have been easily pushed into orbit. Imagine the cost savings of having 800+ fuel tanks to use for building a space station or orbital construction yards.
First you have to build a tank which can be reused for living space and not blow up on launch because a hatch in the side opened up by accident. Then you have to deal with the high drag and the insulation popping off in vacuum and creating clouds of orbital debris.
And those are just two of the problems that spring to mind; you're not just carrying a metal can up to orbit and then cutting into it with a can-opener in order to live inside.
We had this problem in the mid-90s. We had a Sun server in the building which was regularly used by remote logins (I think it was a build machine so just used to build the Sparc version of the software), but one day we had to find for a hardware upgrade and no-one could remember where the heck it was... we eventually had to get it to play music so we could walk around the building and listen for it.
NO, you bill them for the cost, not the missed payment. The entire cost. which I believe is about 7500 dollars.
While I agree that would have been a better solution, if they won't pay a whole $75 a year to have firefighting service (which is negligible compared to the cost of maintaining the average house), what makes you think they'll pay a bill for $7500 after you put the fire out?
I don't care who you are, that's callous beyond anything I wish to respect.
How long do you think there would be firefighters to call if you could just pay $75 when you have to call them out because your house is on fire? That's like crashing your car into a Ferrari and _then_ offering to pay $100 for insurance because you 'forgot' to pay the premium beforehand.
If that behaviour became the norm then no-one would pay and the next time someone's house caught fire the whole area would burn down.
You cut the rating for a billion dollar profit company to neutral? lol
There are two reasons to buy shares in a company:
1. Growth, which pushes up the value of those shares. 2. Dividends, which give you a better return than a savings account.
Windows may still bring in lots of profits, but the opportunities for growth are far less than a company entering new markets... and most people would rather own shares in growing companies than fat old companies that pay out dividends with a stable or declining share price.
I had to do that on Ubuntu a couple of years back because it kept overwriting resolv.conf and the GUI wouldn't accept the configuration I wanted to use.
What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change.
While it's not quite the same thing, our GUI-based home router has an option to download the config as a text file so you can automatically reconfigure it from that file if it has to be reset to defaults. You could presumably use sed to change IP addresses, etc, and copy it to a different router.
The typical interpretation that I've seen from the more conservative pro-gun groups is that it includes any weapon up to and including what would normally be used by a single infantryman in wartime. So you can have rifles, smaller anti-tank weapons, and MANPADS, but anything crew-served is out.
And where does the 2nd amendment say that?
The Constitution implicitly assumes the private ownership of warships (see 'letters of marque and reprisal'), so the idea that the founders would have been shocked by private ownership of crew-served weapons seems rather silly.
That said, I'm not sure I'd be too happy with rednecks towing 105mm howitzers behind pickups with a rack of Stingers in the back.
Because terrorists would never, ever be able to find out this information by themselves, or crash their plane into an airliner by, uh, looking for it in the sky while they're flying.
Have we now moved on from security theater to security standup comedy? At best this seems to be a DHSvertisment telling terrorists where to get useful apps for their iPhone. which they might otherwise never have heard of.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, launching to the Moon (or any Lagrange Points) from the ISS is orbitally dumb.
But if you have a choice between:
1. Spend $50,000,000,000 on building a new NASA heavy lifter and $2,000,000,000 per launch.
2. Spend $100,000,000 per launch sending each of a dozen components to ISS on existing smaller launchers, assemble them and then send the assembled spacecraft to the Moon.
Then ISS makes sense. Obviously launching those components to a new space station in a low inclination orbit would save money in the long term, but would add billions more up front.
I wonder why they went with the plan to have the craft return to earth? It makes more sense to me to have a reusable "shuttlecraft" that ferried astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
You know that big rocket stage that sent Apollo to the Moon from Earth orbit? You'd need something about a quarter as large as that to brake an Apollo CSM-sized vehicle into orbit to dock with ISS, and then you'd need to launch that all the way to the Moon as well, meaning you'd need a much larger rocket stage to get you there. Or you'd need to aerobrake and hope your computer didn't screw up and send you into completely the wrong orbit.
To go from ISS to the Moon and back you'd need a far more efficient engine that current chemical rockets (ion, nuclear, etc).
So yeah, maybe the ISS is a good place to integrate a vehicle like this but the best way seems to fly it around the moon then straight to Earth.
No, the inclination makes it a lousy place to go to the Moon from too. But using it is probably cheaper than building a construction shack in a sensible orbit if you're not planning to be going to the Moon on a regular basis.
The article states they have only recently deployed one with two more to be deployed in the coming months. This is probably why you didn't see it.
I still think I prefer the ninja robot option :).
One bank account = one set of sign in credentials. So how do we work this situation without sharing passwords?
We have a joint account and two different logins.
I was on a tour of the Nevada test site a few months back and didn't see any robots running around, I guess they weren't operating at that point. It's a pretty interesting place to see if you ever get the chance, and so big that I can understand why they want robots patrolling 24/7.
And the tour guide claimed that years ago a visitor was accidentally left behind in a portapotty near one of the craters, so at least if it happens again they'll be able to flag down a passing robot. Assuming it doesn't go all Terminator on their ass.
Have you seen the opinions expressed by the non-lawyers on sites like Slashdot? EVERYBODY is a constitutional expert (self-proclaimed, of course) around here.
The US Constitution is an extremely simple document: only a lawyer could claim that 'Congress shall make no law' actually means 'Congress can make a law whenever it feels like so long as it's to protect the children/stop terrorism/protect us from evil corporations/lock up evil traitorous antiwar protestors, etc'.
Heck, the average law coming out of Congress these days has a hundred times as many pages as the founding Constitution of the nation.
Actual lease costs were 33k, in the range of a much larger clientel.
And bear no relation to the actual, real cost of building the cars.
The would have bankrupted, reformed, settled on debts, and been roughly in the same position they are now except probably much more profitable.
They could also have eliminated the bloated union contracts that make them essentially a pension and benefits company that happens to make cars as a sideline. The real bailout wasn't for the companies, it was for the unions.
The management walked away from a product their customers couldn't wait to get their hands on. Having customers pounding on your door who want to give you mone is an enviable position. This illustrates the incompetence of the management.
The EV-1 reportedly cost over $100,000 to build. How many actual, real customers were queuing up to hand over checks for $100,000 to buy one?
It is a SIGNALLING car. It signals your commitment to the environment, and that you are a caring person.
Considering you can buy a Civic for half the price, that's an awful lot of money to spend on SMUG. Particularly when it has a Chevy badge on the front.
'modern' operating systems do not provide any facilities for running subprocesses that validate system calls via the parent.
Uh, hello? Have you never heard of Apparmor and SELinux?
I have an Apparmor wrapper for Flash which prevents it from doing pretty much anything other than playing videos. It literally cannot write flash cookies to the local disk because the kernel only allows it to write to its own config directory.
And given the insane amount of denials I see for access attempts to random files (it even tries to write to a root-owned font directory), that's a really good idea.
Flying people to Mars for the first time?
It's called 'tourism' and it's a huge industry. Right now no-one who wants to go to Mars can afford the fare, but the more we develop a private spaceflight infrastructure, the cheaper it will become.... IMHO tourists will walk on Mars before NASA's astronauts do.
Probably not. It's like exploring the Mariana Trench - We should do that, because it helps us to understand our blue marble, but it's nothing the private sector is that interested in.
Wasn't James Cameron talking recently about his plans to explore the Marianas Trench?
The sad thing is that the fuel tanks could have been easily pushed into orbit. Imagine the cost savings of having 800+ fuel tanks to use for building a space station or orbital construction yards.
First you have to build a tank which can be reused for living space and not blow up on launch because a hatch in the side opened up by accident. Then you have to deal with the high drag and the insulation popping off in vacuum and creating clouds of orbital debris.
And those are just two of the problems that spring to mind; you're not just carrying a metal can up to orbit and then cutting into it with a can-opener in order to live inside.
We had this problem in the mid-90s. We had a Sun server in the building which was regularly used by remote logins (I think it was a build machine so just used to build the Sparc version of the software), but one day we had to find for a hardware upgrade and no-one could remember where the heck it was... we eventually had to get it to play music so we could walk around the building and listen for it.
I have two 1080p monitors hooked up to my computer but I could just as easily hook them up to an HDMI device instead.
Maybe... I tried connecting my Blu-Ray player to my monitor with HDMI and all I got was garbage. It works fine with the TV.
While that claim is still pretty broad it isn't nearly as broad as the thing posted in the summary.
It's still blatantly obvious to anyone with an IQ higher than a watermelon.
NO, you bill them for the cost, not the missed payment. The entire cost. which I believe is about 7500 dollars.
While I agree that would have been a better solution, if they won't pay a whole $75 a year to have firefighting service (which is negligible compared to the cost of maintaining the average house), what makes you think they'll pay a bill for $7500 after you put the fire out?
I don't care who you are, that's callous beyond anything I wish to respect.
How long do you think there would be firefighters to call if you could just pay $75 when you have to call them out because your house is on fire? That's like crashing your car into a Ferrari and _then_ offering to pay $100 for insurance because you 'forgot' to pay the premium beforehand.
If that behaviour became the norm then no-one would pay and the next time someone's house caught fire the whole area would burn down.
Win/XP has fine IPv6 support except that it can only query DNS over IPv4 transport. That is, you can't run a pure IPv6 + Windows XP environment.
XP doesn't support IPSEC on IPV6 either, which I believe is mandatory for a 'real' IPV6 implementation?
Then again, its IPSEC support on IPV4 is pretty awful anyway.
You cut the rating for a billion dollar profit company to neutral? lol
There are two reasons to buy shares in a company:
1. Growth, which pushes up the value of those shares.
2. Dividends, which give you a better return than a savings account.
Windows may still bring in lots of profits, but the opportunities for growth are far less than a company entering new markets... and most people would rather own shares in growing companies than fat old companies that pay out dividends with a stable or declining share price.
vi /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf
chattr +i
I had to do that on Ubuntu a couple of years back because it kept overwriting resolv.conf and the GUI wouldn't accept the configuration I wanted to use.
What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change.
While it's not quite the same thing, our GUI-based home router has an option to download the config as a text file so you can automatically reconfigure it from that file if it has to be reset to defaults. You could presumably use sed to change IP addresses, etc, and copy it to a different router.
Of course it runs Linux.
The typical interpretation that I've seen from the more conservative pro-gun groups is that it includes any weapon up to and including what would normally be used by a single infantryman in wartime. So you can have rifles, smaller anti-tank weapons, and MANPADS, but anything crew-served is out.
And where does the 2nd amendment say that?
The Constitution implicitly assumes the private ownership of warships (see 'letters of marque and reprisal'), so the idea that the founders would have been shocked by private ownership of crew-served weapons seems rather silly.
That said, I'm not sure I'd be too happy with rednecks towing 105mm howitzers behind pickups with a rack of Stingers in the back.
Because terrorists would never, ever be able to find out this information by themselves, or crash their plane into an airliner by, uh, looking for it in the sky while they're flying.
Have we now moved on from security theater to security standup comedy? At best this seems to be a DHSvertisment telling terrorists where to get useful apps for their iPhone. which they might otherwise never have heard of.