Probably, "I can't believe they're making us risk all these lives so that we can haul the shuttle engines back to earth and reuse them" Followed closely by "the damn SSMEs are going to be such maintenance hogs we'd be better off ditching them in the ocean anyway".
The shuttle engines turned out to be brittle things, and the initial overhaul/life design goals were missed by a lot.
Early on they fixed the size / mounting / weight. But the shuttle continually got in danger of cancellation, so they added more and more promises, until it attempted to do everything for everyone. Which made it fat. Only way to get more thrust is crazy chamber pressure, approaching 3000 psi. Which requires crazy injection pressure to keep the injectors stable. Which results in turbopumps that only last "about one mission, plus or minus one".
Just send the whole ISS. Most of their experiments don't care where the station is, so long as it is space, and plenty of instruments are already onboard.
However, the thermal/cooling system is designed around the idea of having half a hemisphere at roughly room/earth temperature... It'll get mighty cold up there rather quickly outside of low earth orbit. I wonder if the refrigerant system can survive a liquid slug, if it gets too cold. Knowing NASA, probably.
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.
Maybe version 2, if there is one.
They're almost certainly going for a free return trajectory
Some of the Russian gear is so freaking tough, that they don't need to eject the service module or point the right way... So with a free return trajectory, after your initial orbit injection burn, you can, if necessary, completely power down the craft and you'll still end up back on earth. So if you're a bit nervous about your thruster rockets or inertial nav or whatever, no big deal. Essentially once the initial burn is complete, the astronauts are spam-in-a-can as far as "piloting" the craft is concerned.
In practice you always need to make a few minor correction burns, but they tend to be ridiculous, like single digit or less m/s delta V.
So whats up with the 'if all us internet time were condensed into one hour' not having any time for pr0n? Or is that assumed diplomatically to be the 20m 36s piece of the pie chart?
What the heck is a portal and what have people been doing there for 2m 36s out of every internet hour? Is that the "make AOL your homepage" that only newbies do?
An understanding of security best practices is a function of a deeper understanding of the hows and whys of networking and encryption than most people (young or old) have.
Biggest problem with computer security isn't forgetting the smallest details of the S-boxes in DES, but failing the social interaction test and getting scammed. Until early onset senility sets in, after which they become totally gullible, old folks are way better at scam detection than young kids, mostly from having fallen for plenty of scams or heard about them from their friends.
Correction, all they need to steal is a picture of your eye to hold up to the camera, or for the most advanced systems, a short video clip of your eye looking around.
Also very non-ADA compliant. Probably not worth the legal risk. I work at a facility with a blind woman, complete with seeing eye dog.
Individual bacteria weigh their decisions carefully
OK dude whatever. Ultimate in anthropomorphism. I'm surprised the author didn't describe it as little bacteria surfing wikipedia and using their smartphones and twitter to coordinate their flash mobs.
4 in 10 respondents shared passwords with at least one person in the past year. > 4 in 10 are married?
Only 4 in 10 have a job?
So you've got a fancy AAA system for logging into your routers (tacacs or whatever) rather than everyone sharing the same enable password... How do you get in an fix it when the fancy AAA system gets isolated / crashes irreparably, etc? Well you get up one top sekret enable password on all devices, and seal it into a paper envelope, and everyone has access to that sealed envelope. The security officers job is to reconfigure all devices with a new manual enable password if that envelope is ever opened or goes missing, and to research and report why the tacacs server blew up. Any engineer whom needs manual non-AAA system access rips open the envelope and reads the password. No big deal.
Similar amusements can be arranged for linux servers, etc.
Problem is most places don't implement OpenID (yet?).
Many want to be an openid provider. Few indeed will allow openid relying party. Net effect ZERO. May as well not bother.
Is there anything out there at all that will operate as a relying party? As of a couple months/years whatever ago, no. Essentially you have to trust someone else to filter out the spammers, scammers, crooks. Making the whole system fairly useless.
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
The problem is most commuters, myself included, are fleeing the local city government due to its failure to police and educate its residents. There's a perfectly good apartment building across the street from my employer with reasonable rents, yet I live 20 miles away because it would border on child abuse to send my kids to one of the worst school districts in the nation, and neither my family nor my stuff would be safe living there. An arcology would be an epic fail in most big cities.
The subject is coal, because coal is the only usable, reasonably constant and reliable expandable baseload source of power other than nuclear. Natgas is too expensive to consider, hydro is unexpandable (tapped out).
Just a distractor to the real argument... Nuke waste is "bad for a long time". So freaking what. Every other industrial era waste is also bad, and its bad FOREVER not just a couple half lives. I'd feel much better about dumping nukewaste that we know will be harmless in a couple years, than dumping, say, heavy metals that we know will never, ever be harmless.
Basically nuke is coal except the waste is easily contained, concentrated, and becomes harmless in a long time.
Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.
Nell meets "X" where X is a popular website would be a funny xkcd series...
Lets see... Nell meets/.... Using "irony" and "begging the question" as filler, similar to how modern kids cannot speak without using the work "like" every 10 seconds.
Typical corporate situation where a zillion corps own parts of a zillion other corps. However they seem to have blown about a couple million per year. So I'd guess a high single digit number of lobbyist equivalents, but probably dozens each working part time? Congressmen would see maybe fifty faces, but only get a handful of person-years of work out of the group (insert joke about sounding like where I work...)
Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.
Seriously? An ex-roommate of mine became a geologist and researched the effects of arsenic leaching out of coal mine tailings. So... lets both agree a reactor fuel rod is harmless after X million years. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the arsenic in the mine tailings magically disappears in a similar interval of time?
Oil spills are a VERY special case because what came from living things can easily be eaten and broken down by living things. Arsenic and other heavy metals from coal mining don't disappear the same way.
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over.
Not reactor operators. Their income is controlled 100% by the govt. Not remotely a free market. Probably appropriate for that kind of technology.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Ah but only a nuke has its revenue controlled 100% by the govt, both by regulation, enviroloonie protest suits, and monopoly public utilities commission defining what they charge.
A bit unfair to make the bank liable for the NRC's and PUC's decisions.
How about the arena probably not being designed for its acoustics, or if by some miracle the architect cared (most dont) then I'm sure the acoustics are optimized for the seats not where the mics are installed. I still think it likely you'll end up with the option of tossing out the worst "X" number of mics. You need that functionality, you're not going to tell the NFL commissioner or whatever that theres no play by play because one mic is dead... you're going to need to have the system survive a couple dead mics. Since you need the capability anyway, and I still stand by my theory that in some situations, at least sometimes, pulling the X worst mics might raise the overall system SNR...
The generator powers the wheels which all have electric motors. The reason for this is that the driveshaft needed for the immense torque required if done mechanically would be huge, and would snap instantly.
I'm sure there are naval architects howling at the idea of their hundred thousand HP propeller driveshafts snapping.
From my cousin in the diesel engine repair business, there are two reasons:
1) A thousand HP can flow thru a piece of fire hose sized stranded cable. It is trivial to design, can flex any direction whenever it wants, and when it wears out it costs almost nothing to replace, compared to thousand HP class CV joints and thousand HP class universal joints.
2) No alignment when replacing. You can spend an hour with a dial indicator, some sledge hammers, and shims trying to get the crankshaft to line up with whatever. Or you use an electric power cable thats goes from here to there plus a tiny bit extra. When downtime costs the mine tens of thousands of revenue per hr, saving a couple hours over the life of the machine pays for itself rather quickly in a low profit margin commodity industry.
3) Spare parts in the middle of freaking nowhere. Multi thousand HP CV joints are not a standard stocked item at NAPA store. You break it, the machine is down for weeks, at least. On the other hand any competent electrical supply house, or worst case a buddy at the local electric power company, can chop off a chunk of usable cable, or you can rig something up temporarily with multiple smaller cables. Also a shade-tree mechanic can splice a tension free snapped or worn electrical cable, but you need a very large machine shop to handle a thousand HP CV joint.
The biggest advantage of a purely electric drive is that it is likely to be mechanically more reliable than the hideously complicated transmission used on the like of Prius.
"Hideously" more complicated than a pure electric drive, which may be / often is direct drive (no transmission at all). However, your Daihatsu's transmission is almost certainly hideously more complicated than the prius transmission. The prius transmission has something ridiculous like FIVE moving parts. I've seen mechanical pencils with more moving parts than a prius transmission. Its basically a very simple planetary differential. Should be about as reliable as a conventional cars RWD differential, in other words pretty much maintenance free and last pretty much the life of the car, with exceptions very far and few in between.
Now hideously complicated would apply to the prius electrical system, compared to... almost anything. Maybe a diesel electric locomotive has more electronic "guts" but the locomotive has many more driven wheels than a prius.
Thats the danger of making judgments on inaccurate facts, you're worried about one of the simplest and most reliable parts of the Prius without even mentioning the complicated parts.
put one pin on a random lane in a bowling alley. Blindfold yourself at the entrance to the alley, then walk to the lane and bowl the pin down. It's kinda like that, only the pin is also moving at 7,000 mph
And the pin is a critical piece of national infrastructure, that costs $10B to replace, with a multi year lead time... and you don't get to toss one ball, but randomly a couple per month, almost all of which we don't know about until after the ball is thrown... I wouldn't expect failure every time, or even a given time, but its gotta happen sooner or later.
Depending on how low level the access to the GPS data is you will be able to get much better differential accuracy (especially with some temporal averaging).
So a wavelength of sound in air around 3 KHz is about five inches (rounded up). To get a couple decimal points of phase accuracy, you're going to need a similar couple decimal points relative to 5 inches. So at each data sample you need the coordinates accurate to a "carpenters level of accuracy". Not as harsh as a machinists level of accuracy but still pretty tough to achieve.
Also you need to sync your times. I'm thinking you'll need much better than 1/3000th of a second accuracy for your sample timestamps to maintain phase and amplitude correlation. Can store the data samples for later analysis, but you're going to need live running NTP or GPS clock to have accurate enough time.
Bingo. This time we found it 2 or so days ahead of closest approach. Usually we don't find out until you look up and see a meteor streaking across the sky, or even worse, discover it a couple days later in historical photos.
I always thought from a ham radio perspective it would be interesting to try "scheduled meteor scatter" not where you schedule an attempt in a general sense and hope a meteor flys by, but where you select your little individual tiny meteor. Would certainly save a lot of overheated amplifiers.
"OK you transmit first on the impact of 2010-TD245 at 1307Z. 73 and good luck"
Slashdot Mirror
2. WTF were you thinking?
Probably, "I can't believe they're making us risk all these lives so that we can haul the shuttle engines back to earth and reuse them" Followed closely by "the damn SSMEs are going to be such maintenance hogs we'd be better off ditching them in the ocean anyway".
The shuttle engines turned out to be brittle things, and the initial overhaul/life design goals were missed by a lot.
Early on they fixed the size / mounting / weight. But the shuttle continually got in danger of cancellation, so they added more and more promises, until it attempted to do everything for everyone. Which made it fat. Only way to get more thrust is crazy chamber pressure, approaching 3000 psi. Which requires crazy injection pressure to keep the injectors stable. Which results in turbopumps that only last "about one mission, plus or minus one".
Just send the whole ISS. Most of their experiments don't care where the station is, so long as it is space, and plenty of instruments are already onboard.
However, the thermal/cooling system is designed around the idea of having half a hemisphere at roughly room/earth temperature... It'll get mighty cold up there rather quickly outside of low earth orbit. I wonder if the refrigerant system can survive a liquid slug, if it gets too cold. Knowing NASA, probably.
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.
Maybe version 2, if there is one.
They're almost certainly going for a free return trajectory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_return_trajectory
Some of the Russian gear is so freaking tough, that they don't need to eject the service module or point the right way... So with a free return trajectory, after your initial orbit injection burn, you can, if necessary, completely power down the craft and you'll still end up back on earth. So if you're a bit nervous about your thruster rockets or inertial nav or whatever, no big deal. Essentially once the initial burn is complete, the astronauts are spam-in-a-can as far as "piloting" the craft is concerned.
In practice you always need to make a few minor correction burns, but they tend to be ridiculous, like single digit or less m/s delta V.
So whats up with the 'if all us internet time were condensed into one hour' not having any time for pr0n? Or is that assumed diplomatically to be the 20m 36s piece of the pie chart?
What the heck is a portal and what have people been doing there for 2m 36s out of every internet hour? Is that the "make AOL your homepage" that only newbies do?
Now, by gambling, do they mean e-trade and td-datek-ameritrade or whatever its called now?
Or checking out zillow zestimates and buying real estate, because real estate only goes up?
I believe second life got rid of all its casinos. Is second life still online?
Then theres the gamble of risking your reputation on online dating sites...
An understanding of security best practices is a function of a deeper understanding of the hows and whys of networking and encryption than most people (young or old) have.
Biggest problem with computer security isn't forgetting the smallest details of the S-boxes in DES, but failing the social interaction test and getting scammed. Until early onset senility sets in, after which they become totally gullible, old folks are way better at scam detection than young kids, mostly from having fallen for plenty of scams or heard about them from their friends.
And what do you do when someone steals your eye?
Correction, all they need to steal is a picture of your eye to hold up to the camera, or for the most advanced systems, a short video clip of your eye looking around.
Also very non-ADA compliant. Probably not worth the legal risk. I work at a facility with a blind woman, complete with seeing eye dog.
Individual bacteria weigh their decisions carefully
OK dude whatever. Ultimate in anthropomorphism. I'm surprised the author didn't describe it as little bacteria surfing wikipedia and using their smartphones and twitter to coordinate their flash mobs.
4 in 10 respondents shared passwords with at least one person in the past year.
> 4 in 10 are married?
Only 4 in 10 have a job?
So you've got a fancy AAA system for logging into your routers (tacacs or whatever) rather than everyone sharing the same enable password... How do you get in an fix it when the fancy AAA system gets isolated / crashes irreparably, etc? Well you get up one top sekret enable password on all devices, and seal it into a paper envelope, and everyone has access to that sealed envelope. The security officers job is to reconfigure all devices with a new manual enable password if that envelope is ever opened or goes missing, and to research and report why the tacacs server blew up. Any engineer whom needs manual non-AAA system access rips open the envelope and reads the password. No big deal.
Similar amusements can be arranged for linux servers, etc.
Problem is most places don't implement OpenID (yet?).
Many want to be an openid provider. Few indeed will allow openid relying party. Net effect ZERO. May as well not bother.
Is there anything out there at all that will operate as a relying party? As of a couple months/years whatever ago, no. Essentially you have to trust someone else to filter out the spammers, scammers, crooks. Making the whole system fairly useless.
Also, I think that the big cities should encourage 'arcologies', putting both businesses and apartments/condos in the same building.
The problem is most commuters, myself included, are fleeing the local city government due to its failure to police and educate its residents. There's a perfectly good apartment building across the street from my employer with reasonable rents, yet I live 20 miles away because it would border on child abuse to send my kids to one of the worst school districts in the nation, and neither my family nor my stuff would be safe living there. An arcology would be an epic fail in most big cities.
The subject is coal, because coal is the only usable, reasonably constant and reliable expandable baseload source of power other than nuclear. Natgas is too expensive to consider, hydro is unexpandable (tapped out).
Just a distractor to the real argument... Nuke waste is "bad for a long time". So freaking what. Every other industrial era waste is also bad, and its bad FOREVER not just a couple half lives. I'd feel much better about dumping nukewaste that we know will be harmless in a couple years, than dumping, say, heavy metals that we know will never, ever be harmless.
Basically nuke is coal except the waste is easily contained, concentrated, and becomes harmless in a long time.
Or, Coal is nuke except the waste is inherently uncontainable, spread all over the place (you're breathing it now) and its harmful forever.
image board? Odd ideas? The commentary in r9k and others is ... often bizarre. Trust me theres plenty of entertainment there, even for lynx users.
Send her to 4chan
Nell meets "X" where X is a popular website would be a funny xkcd series...
Lets see ... Nell meets /. ... Using "irony" and "begging the question" as filler, similar to how modern kids cannot speak without using the work "like" every 10 seconds.
I don't know how many lobbyists Westinghouse has
Typical corporate situation where a zillion corps own parts of a zillion other corps. However they seem to have blown about a couple million per year. So I'd guess a high single digit number of lobbyist equivalents, but probably dozens each working part time? Congressmen would see maybe fifty faces, but only get a handful of person-years of work out of the group (insert joke about sounding like where I work...)
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/lookup.php?type=c&lname=Westinghouse&goButt2.x=0&goButt2.y=0&goButt2=Submit
Especially if you assume constant or dropping energy prices. Unlikely.
Oil spills are visible to the naked eye and are of course not good either but the time that they are really causing any dangers is short compared to nuclear spills.
Seriously? An ex-roommate of mine became a geologist and researched the effects of arsenic leaching out of coal mine tailings. So... lets both agree a reactor fuel rod is harmless after X million years. Are you seriously trying to tell me that the arsenic in the mine tailings magically disappears in a similar interval of time?
Oil spills are a VERY special case because what came from living things can easily be eaten and broken down by living things. Arsenic and other heavy metals from coal mining don't disappear the same way.
Everyone else manages to take a loan and roll it over.
Not reactor operators. Their income is controlled 100% by the govt. Not remotely a free market. Probably appropriate for that kind of technology.
If you need a government guarantee on your loan in order to afford it then whatever you are doing isn't viable. Whether it's building a nuclear reactor, buying a house, or going to college.
Ah but only a nuke has its revenue controlled 100% by the govt, both by regulation, enviroloonie protest suits, and monopoly public utilities commission defining what they charge.
A bit unfair to make the bank liable for the NRC's and PUC's decisions.
How about the arena probably not being designed for its acoustics, or if by some miracle the architect cared (most dont) then I'm sure the acoustics are optimized for the seats not where the mics are installed. I still think it likely you'll end up with the option of tossing out the worst "X" number of mics. You need that functionality, you're not going to tell the NFL commissioner or whatever that theres no play by play because one mic is dead... you're going to need to have the system survive a couple dead mics. Since you need the capability anyway, and I still stand by my theory that in some situations, at least sometimes, pulling the X worst mics might raise the overall system SNR...
The generator powers the wheels which all have electric motors. The reason for this is that the driveshaft needed for the immense torque required if done mechanically would be huge, and would snap instantly.
I'm sure there are naval architects howling at the idea of their hundred thousand HP propeller driveshafts snapping.
From my cousin in the diesel engine repair business, there are two reasons:
1) A thousand HP can flow thru a piece of fire hose sized stranded cable. It is trivial to design, can flex any direction whenever it wants, and when it wears out it costs almost nothing to replace, compared to thousand HP class CV joints and thousand HP class universal joints.
2) No alignment when replacing. You can spend an hour with a dial indicator, some sledge hammers, and shims trying to get the crankshaft to line up with whatever. Or you use an electric power cable thats goes from here to there plus a tiny bit extra. When downtime costs the mine tens of thousands of revenue per hr, saving a couple hours over the life of the machine pays for itself rather quickly in a low profit margin commodity industry.
3) Spare parts in the middle of freaking nowhere. Multi thousand HP CV joints are not a standard stocked item at NAPA store. You break it, the machine is down for weeks, at least. On the other hand any competent electrical supply house, or worst case a buddy at the local electric power company, can chop off a chunk of usable cable, or you can rig something up temporarily with multiple smaller cables. Also a shade-tree mechanic can splice a tension free snapped or worn electrical cable, but you need a very large machine shop to handle a thousand HP CV joint.
The biggest advantage of a purely electric drive is that it is likely to be mechanically more reliable than the hideously complicated transmission used on the like of Prius.
"Hideously" more complicated than a pure electric drive, which may be / often is direct drive (no transmission at all). However, your Daihatsu's transmission is almost certainly hideously more complicated than the prius transmission. The prius transmission has something ridiculous like FIVE moving parts. I've seen mechanical pencils with more moving parts than a prius transmission. Its basically a very simple planetary differential. Should be about as reliable as a conventional cars RWD differential, in other words pretty much maintenance free and last pretty much the life of the car, with exceptions very far and few in between.
Now hideously complicated would apply to the prius electrical system, compared to... almost anything. Maybe a diesel electric locomotive has more electronic "guts" but the locomotive has many more driven wheels than a prius.
Thats the danger of making judgments on inaccurate facts, you're worried about one of the simplest and most reliable parts of the Prius without even mentioning the complicated parts.
put one pin on a random lane in a bowling alley. Blindfold yourself at the entrance to the alley, then walk to the lane and bowl the pin down.
It's kinda like that, only the pin is also moving at 7,000 mph
And the pin is a critical piece of national infrastructure, that costs $10B to replace, with a multi year lead time... and you don't get to toss one ball, but randomly a couple per month, almost all of which we don't know about until after the ball is thrown... I wouldn't expect failure every time, or even a given time, but its gotta happen sooner or later.
Depending on how low level the access to the GPS data is you will be able to get much better differential accuracy (especially with some temporal averaging).
So a wavelength of sound in air around 3 KHz is about five inches (rounded up). To get a couple decimal points of phase accuracy, you're going to need a similar couple decimal points relative to 5 inches. So at each data sample you need the coordinates accurate to a "carpenters level of accuracy". Not as harsh as a machinists level of accuracy but still pretty tough to achieve.
Also you need to sync your times. I'm thinking you'll need much better than 1/3000th of a second accuracy for your sample timestamps to maintain phase and amplitude correlation. Can store the data samples for later analysis, but you're going to need live running NTP or GPS clock to have accurate enough time.
Is it because we know about it?
Bingo. This time we found it 2 or so days ahead of closest approach. Usually we don't find out until you look up and see a meteor streaking across the sky, or even worse, discover it a couple days later in historical photos.
I always thought from a ham radio perspective it would be interesting to try "scheduled meteor scatter" not where you schedule an attempt in a general sense and hope a meteor flys by, but where you select your little individual tiny meteor. Would certainly save a lot of overheated amplifiers.
"OK you transmit first on the impact of 2010-TD245 at 1307Z. 73 and good luck"