And when we got there, we found lots of jagged dust.
We had supersonic transport.
Which we already knew was horribly expensive due to (a) the effort required to slice through the air that vast, and (b) the heat generated at such speeds.
We built the fastest airplane ever,
And retired it because flying that fast is so fscking expensive!
we built several different airplane models that are still in production and have yet to be surpassed.
Because in the real world, there are always engineering trade-offs between physics and economics, and it turns out that the sound "barrier" is in actuality an economics barrier.
Yes, it saddens me, but I've moved on from youthful sci-fi dreams.
the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station.
10 years ago, the first comment to an article such as this would have been about robots with Messiah complexes, and the second would have welcome our new Robot Prophet Overlords, IN SPACE!!
The science fiction nerd quotient of/. has tumbled.
If wildfires are increasing, my first suspect is the decades of fuel we stored when the states had enough money to put out every spark. Now we don't have the money, but we have all that fuel stored.
That argument is 90 years old. The National Park Service has been doing controlled burns for 45 years.
Slashdot Mirror
given the NHS's catastrophic record for IT projects
Confusing NIH and NHS, which, besides being in different countries, have totally different missions?
How can a study of ethical issues cost that much?
Yeoman (Janice) Rand wasn't a man.
Don't be an idiot.
Come again?
Pointing out that Yeoman Rand is not actually a man is an idiotic thing to say, since Yeoman is a naval rating, not an indication of gender.
(The beehive hairdo, well-rounded figure, really short minidress and go-go boots are also giveaways that Yeoman Rand isn't a guy.)
Don't be an idiot.
Chief O'Brien and Yeoman Rand are the only two I can think of.
Is this IT as in "desktop support", or "IT" as in managing PB-scale Oracle RAC data warehouses?
Besides the link I've provided is more than enough to make the point
No, you didn't.
why are you still bothering me?
Jesus F'ing Christ. Where's the gun pointed at your head threatening to evacuate your skull if you don't respond to me?
Oh, wait. There isn't one. You're replying because you want to!
Thus, not only are your "facts" uncorroborated, but your rationale is questionable.
casual anecdotes by strangers
/. isn't a cocktail party.
It was a news item at the time and mentioned in documentaries
So what you have is hazy memory.
When I went looking for it the best I could find in two minutes was the above link.
Which you can't corroborate.
Maybe if you spend five minutes :)
I spent 20 minutes reading through 8 links.
just playing some sort of high school mass debating game
No, I'm not. But which is worse? H.S. debate or hazily-remembered undocumented claims.
Nowhere have I seen evidence that Apollo 18 was in the VAB when it was canceled.
Look beyond the obvious. It's hard, I know, but you'll learn how the world really works.
The design reminds me of too-hip gamer sites.
The political point that NASA's budgets were already shrinking even before Apollo 11?
I think you're missing the fact that missions cost is more than just building a rocket.
only one military superpower
Military superpowers need strong economies to fund those military machines.
Which mission?
rocket built and the fuel delivered.
That strongly implies the rocket was assembled and sitting on the launch pad when canceled.
That's a political stunt.
Political stunts require political justifications. In this case, it was that enough people wanted the money spent on something else.
And that's economics.
We had rockets that went to the moon.
And when we got there, we found lots of jagged dust.
We had supersonic transport.
Which we already knew was horribly expensive due to (a) the effort required to slice through the air that vast, and (b) the heat generated at such speeds.
We built the fastest airplane ever,
And retired it because flying that fast is so fscking expensive!
we built several different airplane models that are still in production and have yet to be surpassed.
Because in the real world, there are always engineering trade-offs between physics and economics, and it turns out that the sound "barrier" is in actuality an economics barrier.
Yes, it saddens me, but I've moved on from youthful sci-fi dreams.
the microwave downlink gets misaligned and burns down the city block next to the ground station.
10 years ago, the first comment to an article such as this would have been about robots with Messiah complexes, and the second would have welcome our new Robot Prophet Overlords, IN SPACE!!
The science fiction nerd quotient of /. has tumbled.
If wildfires are increasing, my first suspect is the decades of fuel we stored when the states had enough money to put out every spark. Now we don't have the money, but we have all that fuel stored.
That argument is 90 years old. The National Park Service has been doing controlled burns for 45 years.
Ultraviolet Magic Pixie Rays.
You're a bit thick, eh? We're talking laser comms here, which are nearly monochromatic -- you don't need a "big" window.
Unless you want to simultaneously use multiple frequencies so as to increase throughput even more.
we used to "turbo boost" our connections by using large packets (1024 bytes).
Takes me back to the days of ZMODEM, which was significantly faster than TCP/IP and FTP
My comments were directed towards people who think this could be used for something else.
Where are those people's comments/delusions?
Must. Not. Snark. About. Girls. Bungling. Technology....
I do think OP is jumping the gun just a bit.
+1, Understatement.