Some nice ideas, but I've never had any choice in what textbooks to get, so I've got no use for that little widget. And how's it gonna actually give me feedback on essays beyond the spell/grammar check capability already in MS Word/ OO Write? The whole thing strikes me as being a jack of all trades, master of none.
A quick googling verified what you said about the Saturn V, but it was a common bulkhead between LOX and LH2, as is every other reference to a common bulkhead that I found (again, it was a quick googling...if you can disprove me, please do.) And the Saturn folks had had trouble with the bulkhead. Referring from here, "The two tanks shared a common bulkhead consisting of two face sheets separated by an insulating layer. The bulkhead turned out to be especially difficult to manufacture...
A critical problem was insulating the big LH2 tank, especially at the common bulkhead. Initial stages used exterior insulation panels. Later, NAA developed a spray-on foam insulation technique."
The difference between the normal boiling points of hydrogen and oxygen is about 70K. They had trouble guarding against problems caused by heat transfer in that situation. The difference between the NBP of O2 and ambient (where the kerosene will be held) is around 200K. That's a much larger driving temperature difference to work against. To reduce the risk of failure from thermal stresses, or even freezing the kerosene, insulation must be added. This cuts into any weight savings from having a common bulkhead in the first place.
Long story short (and sorry for the verbose response), my fears are probably unfounded. Judging from the story and the website they seem to be stressing weight savings in their design. Heck, maybe they've come up with a brand new ultralightweight insulation to put on the common bulkhead. That'd be a cool thing that would have other applications.
They should send it over to the Junkyard Wars folks once they're done with it....That'd be cool to see.:)
Slightly more ontopic, when I was co-oping at Stennis Space Center they showed me some of the Apollo-era hardware they kept finding discarded in the woods. Some were full-built engines! Apparently the testers would just junk the test articles once they were finished with them. (Obviously not hardware being flight-certified prior to launch, of course.) So it's not unheard of, though Stennis is still a secure facility and a random upstart company wouldn't be able to reverse engineer the parts that were lying around. I'm sure whoever was responsible for discarding that interstage is currently being stood up against a wall facing a Boeing-badged firing squad.
From looking at the article, this looks like one of the most innovative launch systems to come down the pipe in a while. The one thing that strikes me as the Achilles heel though, is that common bulkhead between the oxygen and kerosene tanks. IIRC, common bulkheads have been tried before but have a tendency to rupture due to the thermal stresses induced by having a non-cryogenic fuel and a cryogenic oxidizer sitting on opposite sides of them. Of course I'm not privy to the patent, so maybe they've worked this problem out. If they haven't though, then they're probably going to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.
Haven't you been following the news the last couple of years? Duct tape is supposed to be able to save Joe Blow's ass in case of a biological attack, so why not use it to seal a BSL-4 lab? If Homeland Security says so, then it must be true!:-P
Speaking of seeing the stars, aren't ground based astronomers going to throw a fit when these things start interfering with their ability to conduct science?
Consider the target audience. Variety is essentially the movie industry's journal. Their target audience is Hollywood types, hence the jargon. Pick up a Mechanical Engineering journal at some point. I guarantee you that you'll see terminology specific to engineering. (Of course, on the off chance any mainstream outlets pick up an article appearing in an ME journal, I guarantee you they'd make more of an effort than was made here to dejargonize (is that a word?) it for general consumption.)
There are many TV shows that don't translate well to the big screen because there's nothing left to tell. The core story of B5 ran it's course through the TV series. JMS got to tell the story he wanted to tell and we enjoyed it. Everyone's happy.
As far as Firefly goes, it was killed in it's infancy, making nobody but the Fox suit lobbying for yet another inane reality show happy. Like JMS, there is a story Joss Whedon desperately wants to tell (though I seriously doubt he had 5 seasons more or less planned in advance). This movie is an attempt at breathing life back into the project so that he might get a chance to finish telling his story.
Slidell (now "the Stennis Space Center", a "multi-agency center for 30 resident agencies"), should be sold off to a private developer.
...
NASA's job should be limited to flight hardware and support systems.
If NASA got rid of about half its organization, and insisted that the remaining half build stuff that flies, they might get somewhere.
If Stennis were sold off NASA would have serious problems testing it's flight hardware and support systems. The test stands at Stennis are capable of testing heavy flight hardware like the shuttle main engine and the main stage for the Delta IV rocket. (The test stand where the Delta IV engines are certified were once used to flight certify the Saturn V first stage). Developmental engine components are also tested at Stennis. This is important for any new spacecraft that come out of Bush's initiative. If it's built, it has to be tested, before it flies. That's where SSC comes in.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Stennis as a NASA Co-Op in propulsion testing. I'm speaking for myself, and no, I don't know everything about the organization and why most of the decisions debated here on/. are made. I'm just saying what I know. (If anyone's curious and would like to form their own opinion, Stennis's web site is here.)
Doesn't necessarily have to be DoD. I visited the U.S. Customs lab in San Francisco and they are just as paranoid about people bringing cameras in, whether or not they're attached to a phone. I suspect the same policies can be extended to most other government agencies and private companies where protecting information is an issue. The cell Co's are shooting themselves in the foot if they discontinue plain jane phones only to have a big chunk of their market vanish when people figure out the fancy-ass ones can get them fired.
For some stupid reason at my school, it's really hard to find out which books you need until a week or so before classes start, so the free shipping option (which can be quite slow) is tough, especially when you need the book from day one. So, yes shipping was a factor in my decision. I was also saying the price difference (~2 bucks) wasn't enough to justify the wait. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
For the most part I agree with you; it is a racket and the publishers and many profs are complicit. However, I disagree with your solutions. Amazon can be a good idea, but it's not always the magic bullet. Two of my engineering textbooks this semester were actually cheaper at the bookstore after factoring in shipping. Also, particularly in the curriculum I'm in, it's pretty regimented. Everything's required, so boycotting classes is impossible and threatening to switch majors (and thus give up what I want to do with my life just to make a socioeconomic statement) is unfeasible. Lastly, transferring schools is not something to be done lightly. I looked into it briefly after a not-so-spectacular freshman year. It's too much of a pain in the ass to do just because you're mad about book prices.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that this time around it's not quite about power to the people. The power lies in the hands of the profs ordering the books. They need to stop rolling over on every inane change made to textbooks. (Also, IANAL so I don't know anti-trust law, but perhaps some sort of anti-trust investigation against the publishers is in order).
Americans, however, have that tax burden in their face everytime they go to In'N'Out. This might make a difference when it comes to voting on taxes in the future.
Unfortunately, it's already made a difference. It's why most states are slashing their budgets left and right and why Bush is creating record-setting national debt (and indirectly why California now has the Governator). There is a disconnect in the mind of most Americans. On the local level, they want the government to provide them with whatever they want (transportation, schools, you-name-it), but routinely vote down tax measures to fund them. Nationally, our current government realizes that cutting taxes now gets them votes, thus keeping them in power. But how to pay for federal government programs (not to mention escalating costs of blowing up Middle Eastern countries) remains to be seen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of paying taxes, but they are a necessary evil. I rue the day 40 years from now when my undereducated children get to pay extra taxes on the debt from our time while wondering how they'll pay my medical bills because Social Security and Medicare died 20 years before.
Web developers face the possibility of having to significantly rewrite their pages or strip them of commonly used technologies like Macromedia's Flash.
Surely this can only be a good thing?
Fine, as long as Eolas pays to cure me of my addiction to...... (sb voice) EEEEEEEMAIL! (/sb voice)
Just goes to show how much of a cosmic shooting gallery we're in. While I support efforts to catalog NEO's and work up plans to destroy/move/whatever them should they pose a threat to earth, I've a feeling that the one that gets us is gonna be 100x or so bigger and on a similar orbit.
It's kinda like getting in a bar fight where you're doing all you can to beat this guy up in front of you that insulted your girlfriend while his buddy is sneaking up behind you with a chair. You'll never see either coming until it's too late.
Finally, a profession with a worse sense of humor than we engineers are accused of. From a Tulane American Society of Mechanical Engineers t-shirt: "You wish you were as cool...AS-ME."
Nobody's gonna remember Congress fixing its mistakes when the elections are over a year away.
True, but that's assuming the general public won't be reminded every time some scum sucker calls them during dinner time. In the same vein, the congresscritters might face some heavy pressure to close that political phone call loophole come election time.
(Slightly OT, but last time Congress passed something this fast, we got that lovely gem known as the Patriot Act...Scary.)
Tulane's been sending techs out to fix desktop machines and making people bring in laptops since the start of school. Still, they had to knock most of the dorms offline as people came back because of the worms. Heavy-handed, yes, (and yet another reason why I'm glad I moved off campus a long time ago...gotta get my/. fix), however, the university also has to operate (it is a business after all, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise). Allowing the worms to persist on the network, especially in such a high concentration of machines, hampers its ability to do it's job of educating students and conducting research effectively. I don't see how they had much choice.
Come on people! Use a bloody Soyuz for that! They're a hell of a lot cheaper than $2.4 Billion Dollars! It's a freakin' lifeboat!
NASA is already relying on Russia for the Soyuz capsules for the lifeboats. Two problems: the Soyuz capsules have a 6 month max lifetime and thus have to be replaced. Also, the Russians are barely able to keep up their commitments to manufacture new Soyuz TMA's and Progress supply capsules. I think NASA's idea is to ensure the continued operation of the station with a reusable vehicle and not having to worry about the Russians going bankrupt.
Don't get me wrong, I think the space-plane is a wise idea. Flying the shuttle is an expensive way to get people up to the space station (unless it's delivering parts, too). I could also see having one docked there if we were going to use Space Station personnel as a "fix-it" crew (if the Hubble has problems, send up the parts and use the "sedan" to drive over and fix it).
You're trying to make the same argument that people were making when they asked why Columbia couldn't have made the station and used it as a sanctuary. The ISS and Hubble (and most everything else in orbit) have very different orbits. It takes fuel to get from one orbit to another and back again. So it is much more cost effective to send the shuttle to fix Hubble than it is to send the parts and the extra fuel needed by way of the space station in order to fix it with an OSP.
I've noticed that most of the laws in this state are generally several years behind the times unless Washington forces a law upon Baton Rouge. Many of the laws themselves make sense. Drunk driving down here is ridiculous and it's plain stupid to not allow night work esp. on major highways like I-10. Of course, some of them are already under review. Privacy advocates down here are already throwing a fit about the DNA collection program, for example. And then there's that little loophole in the DNC list...I've a feeling someone crossed some palms with silver to get that put in. And they wonder why we finish dead last in state rankings of practically everything.
(As far as stuff being forced on LA by the feds, drinking age was 18 until a couple years before I moved down here. Congress threatened to take away Fed highway money unless they changed it to 21. Shoulda come to college a couple of years sooner:-()
Not sure where in the city you are but here in Uptown it's been my experience that the power stays stable (aside from the occasional alarm clock killing blip) unless there's a really major storm.
On another note, CNN is now reporting that a lightning strike hit a power plant in the Niagra Falls area, so this entire story might get a -1, Offtopic.
Slashdot Mirror
Some nice ideas, but I've never had any choice in what textbooks to get, so I've got no use for that little widget. And how's it gonna actually give me feedback on essays beyond the spell/grammar check capability already in MS Word/ OO Write? The whole thing strikes me as being a jack of all trades, master of none.
The difference between the normal boiling points of hydrogen and oxygen is about 70K. They had trouble guarding against problems caused by heat transfer in that situation. The difference between the NBP of O2 and ambient (where the kerosene will be held) is around 200K. That's a much larger driving temperature difference to work against. To reduce the risk of failure from thermal stresses, or even freezing the kerosene, insulation must be added. This cuts into any weight savings from having a common bulkhead in the first place.
Long story short (and sorry for the verbose response), my fears are probably unfounded. Judging from the story and the website they seem to be stressing weight savings in their design. Heck, maybe they've come up with a brand new ultralightweight insulation to put on the common bulkhead. That'd be a cool thing that would have other applications.
Slightly more ontopic, when I was co-oping at Stennis Space Center they showed me some of the Apollo-era hardware they kept finding discarded in the woods. Some were full-built engines! Apparently the testers would just junk the test articles once they were finished with them. (Obviously not hardware being flight-certified prior to launch, of course.) So it's not unheard of, though Stennis is still a secure facility and a random upstart company wouldn't be able to reverse engineer the parts that were lying around. I'm sure whoever was responsible for discarding that interstage is currently being stood up against a wall facing a Boeing-badged firing squad.
From looking at the article, this looks like one of the most innovative launch systems to come down the pipe in a while. The one thing that strikes me as the Achilles heel though, is that common bulkhead between the oxygen and kerosene tanks. IIRC, common bulkheads have been tried before but have a tendency to rupture due to the thermal stresses induced by having a non-cryogenic fuel and a cryogenic oxidizer sitting on opposite sides of them. Of course I'm not privy to the patent, so maybe they've worked this problem out. If they haven't though, then they're probably going to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.
Haven't you been following the news the last couple of years? Duct tape is supposed to be able to save Joe Blow's ass in case of a biological attack, so why not use it to seal a BSL-4 lab? If Homeland Security says so, then it must be true! :-P
Speaking of seeing the stars, aren't ground based astronomers going to throw a fit when these things start interfering with their ability to conduct science?
Consider the target audience. Variety is essentially the movie industry's journal. Their target audience is Hollywood types, hence the jargon. Pick up a Mechanical Engineering journal at some point. I guarantee you that you'll see terminology specific to engineering. (Of course, on the off chance any mainstream outlets pick up an article appearing in an ME journal, I guarantee you they'd make more of an effort than was made here to dejargonize (is that a word?) it for general consumption.)
As far as Firefly goes, it was killed in it's infancy, making nobody but the Fox suit lobbying for yet another inane reality show happy. Like JMS, there is a story Joss Whedon desperately wants to tell (though I seriously doubt he had 5 seasons more or less planned in advance). This movie is an attempt at breathing life back into the project so that he might get a chance to finish telling his story.
...
NASA's job should be limited to flight hardware and support systems.
If NASA got rid of about half its organization, and insisted that the remaining half build stuff that flies, they might get somewhere.
If Stennis were sold off NASA would have serious problems testing it's flight hardware and support systems. The test stands at Stennis are capable of testing heavy flight hardware like the shuttle main engine and the main stage for the Delta IV rocket. (The test stand where the Delta IV engines are certified were once used to flight certify the Saturn V first stage). Developmental engine components are also tested at Stennis. This is important for any new spacecraft that come out of Bush's initiative. If it's built, it has to be tested, before it flies. That's where SSC comes in.
Disclaimer: I've worked at Stennis as a NASA Co-Op in propulsion testing. I'm speaking for myself, and no, I don't know everything about the organization and why most of the decisions debated here on /. are made. I'm just saying what I know. (If anyone's curious and would like to form their own opinion, Stennis's web site is here.)
Doesn't necessarily have to be DoD. I visited the U.S. Customs lab in San Francisco and they are just as paranoid about people bringing cameras in, whether or not they're attached to a phone. I suspect the same policies can be extended to most other government agencies and private companies where protecting information is an issue. The cell Co's are shooting themselves in the foot if they discontinue plain jane phones only to have a big chunk of their market vanish when people figure out the fancy-ass ones can get them fired.
For some stupid reason at my school, it's really hard to find out which books you need until a week or so before classes start, so the free shipping option (which can be quite slow) is tough, especially when you need the book from day one. So, yes shipping was a factor in my decision. I was also saying the price difference (~2 bucks) wasn't enough to justify the wait. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that this time around it's not quite about power to the people. The power lies in the hands of the profs ordering the books. They need to stop rolling over on every inane change made to textbooks. (Also, IANAL so I don't know anti-trust law, but perhaps some sort of anti-trust investigation against the publishers is in order).
Unfortunately, it's already made a difference. It's why most states are slashing their budgets left and right and why Bush is creating record-setting national debt (and indirectly why California now has the Governator). There is a disconnect in the mind of most Americans. On the local level, they want the government to provide them with whatever they want (transportation, schools, you-name-it), but routinely vote down tax measures to fund them. Nationally, our current government realizes that cutting taxes now gets them votes, thus keeping them in power. But how to pay for federal government programs (not to mention escalating costs of blowing up Middle Eastern countries) remains to be seen.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of paying taxes, but they are a necessary evil. I rue the day 40 years from now when my undereducated children get to pay extra taxes on the debt from our time while wondering how they'll pay my medical bills because Social Security and Medicare died 20 years before.
Web developers face the possibility of having to significantly rewrite their pages or strip them of commonly used technologies like Macromedia's Flash.
Surely this can only be a good thing?
Fine, as long as Eolas pays to cure me of my addiction to...... (sb voice) EEEEEEEMAIL! (/sb voice)
It's kinda like getting in a bar fight where you're doing all you can to beat this guy up in front of you that insulted your girlfriend while his buddy is sneaking up behind you with a chair. You'll never see either coming until it's too late.
The easy way to destroy a computer:
1. Set up computer as a server.
2. Create a web page with a certain "geek appeal."
3. Get posted to Slashdot.
4. Clean up smoking rubble.
Groan...I'm switching majors. Or shooting myself.
True, but that's assuming the general public won't be reminded every time some scum sucker calls them during dinner time. In the same vein, the congresscritters might face some heavy pressure to close that political phone call loophole come election time.
(Slightly OT, but last time Congress passed something this fast, we got that lovely gem known as the Patriot Act...Scary.)
I'm reminded of the civil engineering definition of SCO: sewer cleanout. Maybe Darl's expanding into sewage treatment plants!
Tulane's been sending techs out to fix desktop machines and making people bring in laptops since the start of school. Still, they had to knock most of the dorms offline as people came back because of the worms. Heavy-handed, yes, (and yet another reason why I'm glad I moved off campus a long time ago...gotta get my /. fix), however, the university also has to operate (it is a business after all, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise). Allowing the worms to persist on the network, especially in such a high concentration of machines, hampers its ability to do it's job of educating students and conducting research effectively. I don't see how they had much choice.
NASA is already relying on Russia for the Soyuz capsules for the lifeboats. Two problems: the Soyuz capsules have a 6 month max lifetime and thus have to be replaced. Also, the Russians are barely able to keep up their commitments to manufacture new Soyuz TMA's and Progress supply capsules. I think NASA's idea is to ensure the continued operation of the station with a reusable vehicle and not having to worry about the Russians going bankrupt.
Don't get me wrong, I think the space-plane is a wise idea. Flying the shuttle is an expensive way to get people up to the space station (unless it's delivering parts, too). I could also see having one docked there if we were going to use Space Station personnel as a "fix-it" crew (if the Hubble has problems, send up the parts and use the "sedan" to drive over and fix it).
You're trying to make the same argument that people were making when they asked why Columbia couldn't have made the station and used it as a sanctuary. The ISS and Hubble (and most everything else in orbit) have very different orbits. It takes fuel to get from one orbit to another and back again. So it is much more cost effective to send the shuttle to fix Hubble than it is to send the parts and the extra fuel needed by way of the space station in order to fix it with an OSP.
Too late.
I've noticed that most of the laws in this state are generally several years behind the times unless Washington forces a law upon Baton Rouge. Many of the laws themselves make sense. Drunk driving down here is ridiculous and it's plain stupid to not allow night work esp. on major highways like I-10. Of course, some of them are already under review. Privacy advocates down here are already throwing a fit about the DNA collection program, for example. And then there's that little loophole in the DNC list...I've a feeling someone crossed some palms with silver to get that put in. And they wonder why we finish dead last in state rankings of practically everything.
(As far as stuff being forced on LA by the feds, drinking age was 18 until a couple years before I moved down here. Congress threatened to take away Fed highway money unless they changed it to 21. Shoulda come to college a couple of years sooner :-()
On another note, CNN is now reporting that a lightning strike hit a power plant in the Niagra Falls area, so this entire story might get a -1, Offtopic.
He's replacing a thousand dead voters with one live one. Here's to efficiency! :-P