"With three fuel cells, you can lose one and safely continue the mission."
No you can't. Every mission that's lost one fuel cell has been brought back early, because they can't risk losing another.
Given how heavy the current payload is, you seriouly don't want to have to bring it back to Earth unless you really, really have to (e.g. an early engine failure during the launch where there's no alternative).
"The shuttle has *three* fuel cells, so it's not a major problem if one is acting a teensy bit unusual."
But if one stops working, then mission rules say they have to return to Earth within a couple of days in case another one stops working. It just seems bizarre to me that the new supposedly 'safety-conscious' NASA is going to fly with a possibly duff fuel cell and possibly duff fuel tank sensors, apparently because 'it's never caused a disaster before'.
"Would maybe stopping and clearing the situation up, thus maybe allowing the store to refine its procedures, and not escalating and accident into and incident, be too fucking much to ask of your highness?"
I, for one, don't give a crap about 'their store' and 'their procedures'. I go to a store to buy things and give them money, and their job is to make that as painless for me as possible.
For example, a couple of years ago I was visiting my girlfriend in Canada. She needed to buy something, so we went to one of the local stores, and as we were leaving, the machine beeped as I walked through. I'd been in the country for one day, hadn't bought anything in the store, hadn't shoplifted anything, but their machine was beeping at me anyway. Why should I stay and waste my time because their bloody security system is defective?
This 'security' crap is another reason why I buy almost everything online these days. So much less hassle and usually cheaper too.
"UK is a small crowded place, that's running out of landfill sites rapidly."
Only about 8% of British land is built on, and there are vast areas that could be used for landfills.
Instead, we end up with piles of 'recyclables' that no-one wants, and have to pay to ship them to the Third World so they'll dump them for us. Recycling in the UK is a huge scam, and this is just another way for councils to charge more for doing less.
"The wikipedia page about Luxembourgish language has been containing libelous statements about the former Luxembourgish Minister of Pubs^H^H^H^HEconsomy since January..."
I'm not sure of the situation today, but there used to be about four sites available for non-NASA employees: the Causeway is about 5 miles from the pad, the press site and the VIP site are around 3 miles, and the other one ('static test road', I think) is in between. The VIP site definitely gives a better view of the launch, but because of the location you can't see the shuttle on the launch pad: the tower is between you and the shuttle.
The only one you're likely to get to at short notice is the causeway, and the view from there is still pretty good. In the 90s that involved getting a special pass from NASA and queueing up outside KSC in your car for a couple of hours before they let you in, today I think you can buy bus tickets at KSC.
"It looks like Windows does a better job in this (not so hypothetical) case."
LOL. Windows will swap out my web browser when I'm copying a 2GB file from one drive to another.
The whole idea of kicking out real applications to increase disk cache size is absolutely retarded. Unless the cache is below some absolute minimum size, it should never, ever swap out an application just to try to cache data that I'm probably never going to use again. The operating system has no damn clue about how important a file may be so it should never be trying to make these kind of decisions for me.
Similarly, last night I left my PC running, and Microsoft Antispyware did a disk scan, which meant that Windows swapped out all the applications in order to increase the disk cache size to cache files that the Antispyware program was going to read once. It literally took five minutes of thrashing to get back to a usable system, while providing absolutely no damn benefit whatsoever.
"I think this story is a non-issue, since compliance with local laws is a good thing and it was decent of the New York Times to go to such lengths to respect them."
I take it next time someone is complaining about Google censoring Chinese people's access to foreign web sites, you'll be cheering them on for doing so?
"Because then the guy that has the patent isn't making money, which is why he received the patened in the first place, to amke money."
Companies don't patent things 'to make money', except indirectly: the primary use of patents these days is to keep new competitors out of the market, and free software is the worst kind of competition to have, since it doesn't cost anything. In any developed market, odds are all major companies will have patent cross-licensing deals, so patents don't affect them, they only affect new competitors that want to join the fun.
"As a manager, I get peeved when deliverables are late but I see developers checking out some girl on Myspace."
Have you considered perhaps that a desire to make developers work 9-5 and deprive them of web access in the office might, maybe, lead to you only hiring those who can't get work in companies with less oppressive policies?
"I want my teams focused on the job at hand during the day when the entire staff is around to help each other out."
And what do your teams want? The most productive developer I've ever worked with didn't even bother getting to work until the early evening, unless he'd been there all night: their boss was eventually sacked after trying to impose a 'core hours' policy that would require people to be at work by 5pm.
What matters at the end of the day is getting the job done on time and on budget. Silly rules just discourage the more productive and creative people from working for you, or working as hard as they could: why stay late and get a bit more work done if you can't faff around on the web and read your personal email while your test program is running?
Have you ever travelled through an Israeli airport? The mere idea that we could adopt similar policies in an airport as busy as, say, Heathrow is mind-bogglingly stupid.
They're also useless: every time I've been to Israel I've had to suffer third-degree searching on the way in and out. Oddly enough, I'm not a terrorist, and I also have no desire to fly to or from Israel again: they don't care, because they put security above happy travellers, but the rest of the world has different priorities.
"The neighbor would have come over and yelled at us to get out of the @#!@!! tree. Then we would have egged his house that night...."
And today the kids would pull knives on you, tell you to fsck off, and then report you to the cops as a pedophile.
The reason people won't interfere with this kind of behaviour is because the potential liabilities are huge and the potential benefits are tiny. If kids were vandalising a tree in the 50s an adult would have given them a slap around the ear and sent them home to their parents, who would have taught them not to do it again. Today that's 'child abuse', so there is literally no way to stop bad behaviour on the part of kids without throwing them into the legal system.
This isn't the fault of the adults who choose not to get involved, it's the fault of a government that for decades has increasingly criminalised responsible behaviour while failing to punish irresponsible behaviour.
"Why is it that most people automatically assume technological solutions to problems are infallible, and don't create any further problems?"
You know how little the average person understands about technology? Well, 49% of people understand even less than that...
Plus the manufacturers regularly seem to claim that every new technology is precisely such an infallible solution, even though it always turns out not to be.
"Hello? AMD chips have an integrated memory controller, with the AM2s having support for DDR2 memory, running at 667 MHz. So unbuffered memory, running in dual channel mode runs at a speed of approximately 10.7GB/sec. In comparison current graphics technology runs at about 6.4GB/sec."
Hello? My 7800GS card has a memory bandwidth of 40GB/second from on-board RAM. It would be utterly crippled by a measly 10GB/second shared with the CPU.
Seems highly unlikely to me that they'd stick a GPU into the CPU. Modern GPUs are a similar size to CPUs (if not larger) and need much higher memory bandwidth... so you'd be doubling the size of your CPU and you'd need a 256-bit 1GHz+ memory interface. And then the 'high end' users would just go and buy a PCI-Express card when the next generation came out, making the whole thing a total waste.
I could see perhaps that they'd stick a cheap and crappy GPU into a cheap and crappy CPU for the low end of the market, but with Vista coming out with all its eye-candy that may not even be viable for rendering the Vista desktop, let alone games.
"Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?"
I believe you'll find that murder rates are down in every US state that passed a concealed carry program. Heck, last time I looked there were a couple of US states with murder rates similar to the UK... and they're not the ones that have banned guns.
Why is being murdered with a gun somehow worse than being murdered by having your brains smashed out of your skull with a blunt object? There are far more crimes committed with guns in the UK today than there were a century ago when anyone could buy a gun over the counter and anyone with ten shillings to spare could get a permit to carry one, no questions asked.
The simple fact is that British people murder each other less than most other countries, regardless of what weapons are used. Guns are irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
TV actors generally don't expect to make $50,000,000 for appearing in one two-hour show...
I've been waiting decades for Lucas to make Part 2 of the 'Star Wars Holiday Special'...
"It is really hard to resolve controversies over rights not enumerated by the Constitution because"
The Constitution explicitly states what the government is allowed to do... anything outside those narrow limits is unconstitutional.
What's so hard about that? The hard part is _stopping_ them from doing things that are blatantly unconstitutional, not figuring out whether they are.
"Switzerland isn't in Western Europe"
LOL. Where do you think it is? Asia?
Hint for the geographically-special: Switzerland is further West than Germany or most of Italy.
"With three fuel cells, you can lose one and safely continue the mission."
No you can't. Every mission that's lost one fuel cell has been brought back early, because they can't risk losing another.
Given how heavy the current payload is, you seriouly don't want to have to bring it back to Earth unless you really, really have to (e.g. an early engine failure during the launch where there's no alternative).
"The shuttle has *three* fuel cells, so it's not a major problem if one is acting a teensy bit unusual."
But if one stops working, then mission rules say they have to return to Earth within a couple of days in case another one stops working. It just seems bizarre to me that the new supposedly 'safety-conscious' NASA is going to fly with a possibly duff fuel cell and possibly duff fuel tank sensors, apparently because 'it's never caused a disaster before'.
"Would maybe stopping and clearing the situation up, thus maybe allowing the store to refine its procedures, and not escalating and accident into and incident, be too fucking much to ask of your highness?"
I, for one, don't give a crap about 'their store' and 'their procedures'. I go to a store to buy things and give them money, and their job is to make that as painless for me as possible.
For example, a couple of years ago I was visiting my girlfriend in Canada. She needed to buy something, so we went to one of the local stores, and as we were leaving, the machine beeped as I walked through. I'd been in the country for one day, hadn't bought anything in the store, hadn't shoplifted anything, but their machine was beeping at me anyway. Why should I stay and waste my time because their bloody security system is defective?
This 'security' crap is another reason why I buy almost everything online these days. So much less hassle and usually cheaper too.
"UK is a small crowded place, that's running out of landfill sites rapidly."
Only about 8% of British land is built on, and there are vast areas that could be used for landfills.
Instead, we end up with piles of 'recyclables' that no-one wants, and have to pay to ship them to the Third World so they'll dump them for us. Recycling in the UK is a huge scam, and this is just another way for councils to charge more for doing less.
"The wikipedia page about Luxembourgish language has been containing libelous statements about the former Luxembourgish Minister of Pubs^H^H^H^HEconsomy since January..."
Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?
I'm not sure of the situation today, but there used to be about four sites available for non-NASA employees: the Causeway is about 5 miles from the pad, the press site and the VIP site are around 3 miles, and the other one ('static test road', I think) is in between. The VIP site definitely gives a better view of the launch, but because of the location you can't see the shuttle on the launch pad: the tower is between you and the shuttle.
The only one you're likely to get to at short notice is the causeway, and the view from there is still pretty good. In the 90s that involved getting a special pass from NASA and queueing up outside KSC in your car for a couple of hours before they let you in, today I think you can buy bus tickets at KSC.
"It looks like Windows does a better job in this (not so hypothetical) case."
LOL. Windows will swap out my web browser when I'm copying a 2GB file from one drive to another.
The whole idea of kicking out real applications to increase disk cache size is absolutely retarded. Unless the cache is below some absolute minimum size, it should never, ever swap out an application just to try to cache data that I'm probably never going to use again. The operating system has no damn clue about how important a file may be so it should never be trying to make these kind of decisions for me.
Similarly, last night I left my PC running, and Microsoft Antispyware did a disk scan, which meant that Windows swapped out all the applications in order to increase the disk cache size to cache files that the Antispyware program was going to read once. It literally took five minutes of thrashing to get back to a usable system, while providing absolutely no damn benefit whatsoever.
"I think this story is a non-issue, since compliance with local laws is a good thing and it was decent of the New York Times to go to such lengths to respect them."
I take it next time someone is complaining about Google censoring Chinese people's access to foreign web sites, you'll be cheering them on for doing so?
"I fail to see how so many slashdotters can be so oblivious to this concept."
So presumably they'll also be blocking things the Saudis dislike, the Iranians dislike, the North Koreans dislike, the Chinese dislike, etc, etc, etc?
Don't worry, by the time Vista ships it'll be CAD$1 = US$1.
"Because then the guy that has the patent isn't making money, which is why he received the patened in the first place, to amke money."
Companies don't patent things 'to make money', except indirectly: the primary use of patents these days is to keep new competitors out of the market, and free software is the worst kind of competition to have, since it doesn't cost anything. In any developed market, odds are all major companies will have patent cross-licensing deals, so patents don't affect them, they only affect new competitors that want to join the fun.
"As a manager, I get peeved when deliverables are late but I see developers checking out some girl on Myspace."
Have you considered perhaps that a desire to make developers work 9-5 and deprive them of web access in the office might, maybe, lead to you only hiring those who can't get work in companies with less oppressive policies?
"I want my teams focused on the job at hand during the day when the entire staff is around to help each other out."
And what do your teams want? The most productive developer I've ever worked with didn't even bother getting to work until the early evening, unless he'd been there all night: their boss was eventually sacked after trying to impose a 'core hours' policy that would require people to be at work by 5pm.
What matters at the end of the day is getting the job done on time and on budget. Silly rules just discourage the more productive and creative people from working for you, or working as hard as they could: why stay late and get a bit more work done if you can't faff around on the web and read your personal email while your test program is running?
Have you ever travelled through an Israeli airport? The mere idea that we could adopt similar policies in an airport as busy as, say, Heathrow is mind-bogglingly stupid.
They're also useless: every time I've been to Israel I've had to suffer third-degree searching on the way in and out. Oddly enough, I'm not a terrorist, and I also have no desire to fly to or from Israel again: they don't care, because they put security above happy travellers, but the rest of the world has different priorities.
"The neighbor would have come over and yelled at us to get out of the @#!@!! tree.
Then we would have egged his house that night...."
And today the kids would pull knives on you, tell you to fsck off, and then report you to the cops as a pedophile.
The reason people won't interfere with this kind of behaviour is because the potential liabilities are huge and the potential benefits are tiny. If kids were vandalising a tree in the 50s an adult would have given them a slap around the ear and sent them home to their parents, who would have taught them not to do it again. Today that's 'child abuse', so there is literally no way to stop bad behaviour on the part of kids without throwing them into the legal system.
This isn't the fault of the adults who choose not to get involved, it's the fault of a government that for decades has increasingly criminalised responsible behaviour while failing to punish irresponsible behaviour.
"Why is it that most people automatically assume technological solutions to problems are infallible, and don't create any further problems?"
You know how little the average person understands about technology? Well, 49% of people understand even less than that...
Plus the manufacturers regularly seem to claim that every new technology is precisely such an infallible solution, even though it always turns out not to be.
"And I'm supposed to believe he can find better actors, can direct better and will write a better story than we already have."
Would be difficult to do worse than 'Phantom Menace'. Though, to be fair, it's not the actor's fault that they suck ass in the movie.
"I expect terrible actors, terrible direction and even worse dialogue."
If they can write worse dialog than George Lucas, they deserve an award.
"Hello? AMD chips have an integrated memory controller, with the AM2s having support for DDR2 memory, running at 667 MHz. So unbuffered memory, running in dual channel mode runs at a speed of approximately 10.7GB/sec. In comparison current graphics technology runs at about 6.4GB/sec."
Hello? My 7800GS card has a memory bandwidth of 40GB/second from on-board RAM. It would be utterly crippled by a measly 10GB/second shared with the CPU.
Seems highly unlikely to me that they'd stick a GPU into the CPU. Modern GPUs are a similar size to CPUs (if not larger) and need much higher memory bandwidth... so you'd be doubling the size of your CPU and you'd need a 256-bit 1GHz+ memory interface. And then the 'high end' users would just go and buy a PCI-Express card when the next generation came out, making the whole thing a total waste.
I could see perhaps that they'd stick a cheap and crappy GPU into a cheap and crappy CPU for the low end of the market, but with Vista coming out with all its eye-candy that may not even be viable for rendering the Vista desktop, let alone games.
"Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?"
I believe you'll find that murder rates are down in every US state that passed a concealed carry program. Heck, last time I looked there were a couple of US states with murder rates similar to the UK... and they're not the ones that have banned guns.
Why is being murdered with a gun somehow worse than being murdered by having your brains smashed out of your skull with a blunt object? There are far more crimes committed with guns in the UK today than there were a century ago when anyone could buy a gun over the counter and anyone with ten shillings to spare could get a permit to carry one, no questions asked.
The simple fact is that British people murder each other less than most other countries, regardless of what weapons are used. Guns are irrelevant.
True, but ice falls off, so you don't have to take it into space with you :).