Linux and spaceships can be used for good and evil.
I appreciate the sentiment, but one can cheer the achievement while condemning the sponsors.
The Chinese are well aware that a lot of governments around the world realize that an astronaut could easily be replaced by a nuke. That doesn't make the man in the spacecraft any less brave or the engineers any less triumphant.
Today is the time to celebrate. There are plenty of tomorrows for worry.
I was gonna post this exact same comment, but I'm glad to reply to a like-minded soul. This is a HUGE achievement, and my best wishes go out to the brave souls who rode that modified ICBM into the orbital great beyond, just like Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn did 40+ years ago.
This brings to mind a pilgrimage I made to Cape Canaveral last spring (from San Diego, on a motorcycle... it's a big country, folks). From my trip log:
Well, today was the big day. I got moving kind of late and didn't arrive at Kennedy Space Center until 11:30AM.
I splurged on the maximum access admission package with all the trimmings and walked on in... to Disney Space Center.
Don't get me wrong -- there were a lot of unique and cool things to see -- but everything was waaaay too slick and well merchandised for my taste. The "Space Store" was the worst offender, stuffed with every cheesy space-related gewgaw and gimcrack you can think of, just like Disneyland.
Many of the exhibits were models or poorly-executed mockups, and the video presentations were jingoistic joint productions of Nickolodean and the WWII War Deparment's propaganda writers. Rah, rah, rah -- we beat those dirty Russkies to the Moon.
One mockup *was* cool, though. They had a reconstruction of Robert Goddard's (the father of modern rocketry) first liquid fueled rocket. It was interesting to see how big it really was, or rather wasn't. I did a report about Goddard and that rocket in the fifth or sixth grade, so it's one of my favorites.
I took in an Imax feaure on the International Space Station (the other movie was one we own on DVD... Yeah, I'm a space geek). It was a 3D movie which used polarized glasses (not the red & blue kind) that preserved color fidelity and worked amazingly well on the stuff filmed with a stereoscopic camera.
Afterwards came a 1.5 hour bus tour to the Assembly Building, Launch Complex 39, and some other cool places. Even though it rained like hell, we were forbidden to leave the bus because of intense lightning activity, and the tour narrator's inaccurate or inane comments and responses. Example: a fellow tourist asked who had the most accumulated timein space. She took a tolerably poor guess (Story Musgrave, though he might have gone up more *often* than anyone else). I softly suggested that it was probably one of the Russians who got stuck on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed, to which she responded "Oh, we're talking about Americans".
Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed seeing everything once I tuned her out. For a geek like me, LC39 is like Mecca to Space City, Kazakhstan's Medina. At least one of the exhibits credited Korolev's huge role in space exploration, even though he was a damnable commie.
The sales pitch to taxpayers was laid on pretty thick in the form of signs scattered around the grounds touting spin-off technologies and in a fair amount of tour guide & video presentation verbiage. The rest of the pitch consisted of jingoism hat ignored key contributions played by undesireables like that old Nazi Werner von Braun in Alabama. It's really too bad they took this approach since spaceflight is something that should ignore such divisions and should rise above cheap stars'n'stripes'n'pom-poms.
I'm glad I went, though I must say that I had more "wow" moments at White Sands than at the Disney Space Center.
... and we all know how well that worked out.
Yeah, I know the process is a little different, but the notion that art can come from voting is as silly as thinking democracy pushes the best leaders to the top.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little confused... once "Job 1" is taken care of, what priorities could there possibly be?
From what I've heard, I have just a few years left before the answer to your question is "golf".
HA! And you think you can recover that "stolen" karma just by rephrasing and elaborating on his post?
... I'm over (WELL over) 16 years old, and I get laid on a regular basis. Karma isn't really high on my list of priorities. :-P
No
You must be n... er.. an experienced slashdotter.
Actually, I'm still kind of annoyed that they had to introduce moderation. I liked it better before.
Linux and spaceships can be used for good and evil.
I appreciate the sentiment, but one can cheer the achievement while condemning the sponsors.
The Chinese are well aware that a lot of governments around the world realize that an astronaut could easily be replaced by a nuke. That doesn't make the man in the spacecraft any less brave or the engineers any less triumphant.
Today is the time to celebrate. There are plenty of tomorrows for worry.
It's one thing to design something yourself, and quite another to take a complete design that already works and tweak it.
Like we oh-so-clever Yanks did with the WWII German designs and follow-ons by German engineers?
Thought so.
This brings to mind a pilgrimage I made to Cape Canaveral last spring (from San Diego, on a motorcycle ... it's a big country, folks). From my trip log:
Well, today was the big day. I got moving kind of late and didn't arrive at Kennedy Space Center until 11:30AM.
I splurged on the maximum access admission package with all the trimmings and walked on in ... to Disney Space Center.
Don't get me wrong -- there were a lot of unique and cool things to see -- but everything was waaaay too slick and well merchandised for my taste. The "Space Store" was the worst offender, stuffed with every cheesy space-related gewgaw and gimcrack you can think of, just like Disneyland.
Many of the exhibits were models or poorly-executed mockups, and the video presentations were jingoistic joint productions of Nickolodean and the WWII War Deparment's propaganda writers. Rah, rah, rah -- we beat those dirty Russkies to the Moon.
One mockup *was* cool, though. They had a reconstruction of Robert Goddard's (the father of modern rocketry) first liquid fueled rocket. It was interesting to see how big it really was, or rather wasn't. I did a report about Goddard and that rocket in the fifth or sixth grade, so it's one of my favorites.
I took in an Imax feaure on the International Space Station (the other movie was one we own on DVD ... Yeah, I'm a space geek). It was a 3D movie which used polarized glasses (not the red & blue kind) that preserved color fidelity and worked amazingly well on the stuff filmed with a stereoscopic camera.
Afterwards came a 1.5 hour bus tour to the Assembly Building, Launch Complex 39, and some other cool places. Even though it rained like hell, we were forbidden to leave the bus because of intense lightning activity, and the tour narrator's inaccurate or inane comments and responses. Example: a fellow tourist asked who had the most accumulated timein space. She took a tolerably poor guess (Story Musgrave, though he might have gone up more *often* than anyone else). I softly suggested that it was probably one of the Russians who got stuck on Mir when the Soviet Union collapsed, to which she responded "Oh, we're talking about Americans".
Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed seeing everything once I tuned her out. For a geek like me, LC39 is like Mecca to Space City, Kazakhstan's Medina. At least one of the exhibits credited Korolev's huge role in space exploration, even though he was a damnable commie.
The sales pitch to taxpayers was laid on pretty thick in the form of signs scattered around the grounds touting spin-off technologies and in a fair amount of tour guide & video presentation verbiage. The rest of the pitch consisted of jingoism hat ignored key contributions played by undesireables like that old Nazi Werner von Braun in Alabama. It's really too bad they took this approach since spaceflight is something that should ignore such divisions and should rise above cheap stars'n'stripes'n'pom-poms.
I'm glad I went, though I must say that I had more "wow" moments at White Sands than at the Disney Space Center.
But it does! It elects the lesser of two evils from the two major political parties. I fail to see how that person is not the "best".
:-P
Errr... I hope that you are either being sarcastic or that you don't vote.
... and we all know how well that worked out. Yeah, I know the process is a little different, but the notion that art can come from voting is as silly as thinking democracy pushes the best leaders to the top.