The investment necessary isn't nearly what it was a few years ago. Today it takes just a couple of people to design a rover rather than a team of hundreds, a handful to assemble it from COTS hardware that didn't exist a decade ago, and they can choose from half a dozen different landing technologies that have been tested. The financing aspect has changed in the last decade as well, as there are now quite a few billionaires that are just looking for a vanity project that strikes their fancy.
I'm kind of surprised (and disappointed) that LEGO isn't in the competition, I would think that the publicity alone would have been worth the investment.
SpaceX is just a launch provider, they wouldn't be competing.
The rate of technological progress has changed a bit in the last half century, just the advances in CAD/CAM means that a process that would have taken 1000 engineers with slide rules a year can be done by a handful of engineers in a week. Much of the time spent between Sputnik and Mercury was simply figuring out how to build powerful rockets without them blowing up, we've got most of the bugs in that process worked out now and hypergolic fuels no longer eat through their containers either. A musical birthday card has more memory than the Apollo on-board computer, and we now have twenty years of experience running rovers around on Mars (Opportunity will start the 13th year of its 90-day mission tomorrow). It really is a different ballpark than it was in 1959.
They stopped counting the long-term unemployed under St. Ronnie, under Shrub they redefined 'long-term'. I believe it was under Bush the Elected (but maybe under Clinton) that they stopped counting people who didn't have phones.
Removing food, fuel, housing and healthcare from the official yardstick for inflation happened during the '80s, that was how Reagan "beat inflation". In the '90s they added electronics and communications to make the numbers look better (not sure if they're still in there).
Benghazi? Seriously? I thought even InfoWars had given up beating that poor dead horse.
The IRS didn't target conservative groups, they were instructed by Congress to enforce the laws on the books about registering non-profit organizations (IIRC environmental groups were the actual target of Congress). That conservative groups were found to be breaking the law wasn't a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. They chose a category which disallowed political action so that they could hide their donor lists, and started politicking before they even finished the paperwork. The non-Libertardian groups caught said, "Oops, we chose the wrong category and will fix it."
Before you go off on your tangent of calling me an Obama-loving Democratic shill I should probably make clear that I loathe what the Democratic Party has become and seriously dislike Barry "Bush-lite" Obama. Just your post was so full of bullshit that it irritated me.
I'm pretty sure the National Day of Patriotic Devotion is a Pence thing. There's no way the orangutan could have written that, much less **would** have written it, and it's couched in the whole redneck Baptist vernacular. I suspect we're seeing a new Dick Cheney with a healthier heart emerge.
"it'll get out" to who? The press corpse? The current little tiff between White House and the media is just for show, it won't last for more than a few weeks. As soon as they find their access to officials and political celebrities is turned off the media will return to its duties as court stenographers. Reagan's bAdministration taught the Republican leadership well.
How much have you heard about the voting irregularities and voter purges from the mainstream press? Have you heard **anyone** mention that tRump hid international weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi out at Mar Lago while he was being sought for what was the largest fraud in history at the time? Have they brought up his or his father's lifelong relationship with organized crime? His rather blatant bribing of officials overseas? How long did his bribe to the Florida attorney general stay in the newspapers?
No, I don't have any confidence that news of censorship will get out to the general public. Before long if we want to review NOAA climate data we'll have to go to WikiLeaks.
Sorry, but actual progressives, as opposed to Democratic party faithful, knew Obama was not to be trusted from the first. One does not have a meteoric rise through Chicago politics if they're not dirty, after all. We weren't voting **for** him as much as voting **against** the other moron. I'm not sure why Libertardians can't figure out that actual liberals and progressives aren't tied to the thoroughly-corrupted Democratic party, we just don't have any viable alternatives in most elections.
On the other hand, while I certainly didn't expect a new FDR I don't think any of us were prepared to discover that he was Bush-lite.
If you are the only person who can access an account then you've already demonstrated incompetence. If rather than being fired tomorrow you get run over by a bus your employer is equally screwed. Ensuring that the data can't be retrieved from your employer-supplied computer is even more asinine.
It's only been a couple of decades that we've recognized that we're unable to even detect 85% (or maybe more) of the mass in the universe at less than the galactic scale. I think that there might be one or two things out there that we don't understand yet.
I think it was historian Barbara Tuchman who said (paraphrased), "The principle thing we learn from history is that leaders rarely learn anything from history." She even named a book 'The March Of Folly'.
I wonder if the DNC will get the message that voters want to make a choice, not be told who the candidate will be after their discussions in the legendary "smoke filled room". It's not likely, considering the inside-the-beltway articles that I'm already seeing that tRump won because of this or that. He won because the DNC insisted on running a candidate that was universally loathed by the opposition and whose only real asset was "I'm not Donald Trump."
Economic boom??? I take it you were in diapers or not born yet. I remember searching three months for a job, any job, and taking flipping burgers at Wendys because that's all there was. I remember entire families with little children sleeping in the streets because they had lost everything, something that hadn't happened since the Great Depression. I remember soaring deficits and massive layoffs and the highest unemployment in half a century. The only reason that inflation went down was because they stopped including food, housing, transportation, petroleum products and medical care in the statistics.
Economic boom my ass. The only segment that saw a boom was military hardware vendors.
Experience. Phone lines, especially major feeders and trunk lines, are buried as often as possible. That's not possible for high tension and major electrical supply lines except in downtown areas where that type of very expensive infrastructure makes financial sense. The 'last mile' electrical cable between the substation and your home may be buried, but the lines to the substation are almost certainly not. Phone lines are easier to fix, don't require major equipment, and don't need to be brought up in a specific order, either.
I live near I-90 and I-405 interchange. Major traffic issues at rush hour will overload the T-Mobile and Sprint connections in our area (ATT seems to have more capacity), the end of the fireworks display or the SeaFair air show will bring them to their virtual knees. When we had the big windstorm a few years ago (2008?) we were without power for 5 days, but never lost land line. Duval didn't have power for two weeks, but had telephone service within a couple of days.
I would keep the land line. People don't think about it, but in an emergency the cellphone network is almost immediately overwhelmed (even bad rush hour traffic in our area). For that matter many (most?) of the towers don't have backup generators so will shutdown as soon as their batteries run out in a power emergency. I live in the Pacific Northwest, we have earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and a 70 mph windstorm will bring down so many Douglas Fir trees that it can take two weeks to restore power to some areas. During any of these our land line will continue to work as long as the phone line itself isn't broken, while the cellphone network implodes and melts down. Cheap insurance.
I think that will depend on the VR industry. Currently most of the VR headsets work off a smartphone, generally a Samsung one. VR porn is supposedly absolutely amazing and studios are starting to put out titles that really take advantage of its abilities. If the VR industry starts putting out decent cheap headsets that don't require a phone (and there's no reason for them not to, the electronics are cheap now) we may see smartphones become commodity devices, the way they should be. If they keep relying on smartphones for their guts we'll probably see at least one or two more generations of "I need this new phone because of X" (X being some nominal unimportant feature but the real reason will be porn, of course).
Indeed. My wife occasionally tells me that I "need" a new truck. I tell her that the wheels haven't fallen off yet, so it doesn't need replacing.
I'm much the same way with my phone. If I hadn't finally broken it this spring I'd still have the four year-old $60 phone that did absolutely everything that I needed. I do have to admit that the low-light performance on the camera is better on the new one, but that's just a nice-to-have, not a need.
Falling from an airliner's cruising altitude to about 15,000 feet, where air is breathable and parachutes can be deployed, would only take a couple of minutes. For most people I think that unconsciousness would be preferable to being awake for that whole time, but if the pod maintains structural integrity there's no reason why it would necessarily decompress anyway (unless that's part of the design for some reason).
Just thinking about the whole thing, while I doubt the pods would ever be deployed on a commercial airliner I can see a market for thrill-seekers who might want to get dropped from 35,000 feet.
Not sure anyone needs to worry about hypoxia for the couple of minutes a pod would be falling to an altitude where the parachute would be opening. It's not like they're piloting the thing on its way down, they're just along for the ride.
In flight the capsule would be pressurized, even if it depressurized immediately upon disconnect in free fall it would only be above 18,000 feet for two or three minutes. Below that you can breathe without much trouble, and the parachute probably wouldn't be opened above 15,000 feet or so. But yeah, they'd be too heavy.
Slashdot Mirror
'Talking points facts. Sometimes they're congruent, frequently not. The truth does have a liberal bias, though.
The investment necessary isn't nearly what it was a few years ago. Today it takes just a couple of people to design a rover rather than a team of hundreds, a handful to assemble it from COTS hardware that didn't exist a decade ago, and they can choose from half a dozen different landing technologies that have been tested. The financing aspect has changed in the last decade as well, as there are now quite a few billionaires that are just looking for a vanity project that strikes their fancy.
I'm kind of surprised (and disappointed) that LEGO isn't in the competition, I would think that the publicity alone would have been worth the investment.
SpaceX is just a launch provider, they wouldn't be competing.
The rate of technological progress has changed a bit in the last half century, just the advances in CAD/CAM means that a process that would have taken 1000 engineers with slide rules a year can be done by a handful of engineers in a week. Much of the time spent between Sputnik and Mercury was simply figuring out how to build powerful rockets without them blowing up, we've got most of the bugs in that process worked out now and hypergolic fuels no longer eat through their containers either. A musical birthday card has more memory than the Apollo on-board computer, and we now have twenty years of experience running rovers around on Mars (Opportunity will start the 13th year of its 90-day mission tomorrow). It really is a different ballpark than it was in 1959.
Then the "men never landed on the moon" lunatics will have a real field day (pun intended). "See, we told you it was all done in a studio!"
They stopped counting the long-term unemployed under St. Ronnie, under Shrub they redefined 'long-term'. I believe it was under Bush the Elected (but maybe under Clinton) that they stopped counting people who didn't have phones.
Removing food, fuel, housing and healthcare from the official yardstick for inflation happened during the '80s, that was how Reagan "beat inflation". In the '90s they added electronics and communications to make the numbers look better (not sure if they're still in there).
Benghazi? Seriously? I thought even InfoWars had given up beating that poor dead horse.
The IRS didn't target conservative groups, they were instructed by Congress to enforce the laws on the books about registering non-profit organizations (IIRC environmental groups were the actual target of Congress). That conservative groups were found to be breaking the law wasn't a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. They chose a category which disallowed political action so that they could hide their donor lists, and started politicking before they even finished the paperwork. The non-Libertardian groups caught said, "Oops, we chose the wrong category and will fix it."
Before you go off on your tangent of calling me an Obama-loving Democratic shill I should probably make clear that I loathe what the Democratic Party has become and seriously dislike Barry "Bush-lite" Obama. Just your post was so full of bullshit that it irritated me.
I'm pretty sure the National Day of Patriotic Devotion is a Pence thing. There's no way the orangutan could have written that, much less **would** have written it, and it's couched in the whole redneck Baptist vernacular. I suspect we're seeing a new Dick Cheney with a healthier heart emerge.
I take it you haven't read the Bible. God isn't trustable either.
"it'll get out" to who? The press corpse? The current little tiff between White House and the media is just for show, it won't last for more than a few weeks. As soon as they find their access to officials and political celebrities is turned off the media will return to its duties as court stenographers. Reagan's bAdministration taught the Republican leadership well.
How much have you heard about the voting irregularities and voter purges from the mainstream press? Have you heard **anyone** mention that tRump hid international weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi out at Mar Lago while he was being sought for what was the largest fraud in history at the time? Have they brought up his or his father's lifelong relationship with organized crime? His rather blatant bribing of officials overseas? How long did his bribe to the Florida attorney general stay in the newspapers?
No, I don't have any confidence that news of censorship will get out to the general public. Before long if we want to review NOAA climate data we'll have to go to WikiLeaks.
Sorry, but actual progressives, as opposed to Democratic party faithful, knew Obama was not to be trusted from the first. One does not have a meteoric rise through Chicago politics if they're not dirty, after all. We weren't voting **for** him as much as voting **against** the other moron. I'm not sure why Libertardians can't figure out that actual liberals and progressives aren't tied to the thoroughly-corrupted Democratic party, we just don't have any viable alternatives in most elections.
On the other hand, while I certainly didn't expect a new FDR I don't think any of us were prepared to discover that he was Bush-lite.
If you are the only person who can access an account then you've already demonstrated incompetence. If rather than being fired tomorrow you get run over by a bus your employer is equally screwed. Ensuring that the data can't be retrieved from your employer-supplied computer is even more asinine.
It's only been a couple of decades that we've recognized that we're unable to even detect 85% (or maybe more) of the mass in the universe at less than the galactic scale. I think that there might be one or two things out there that we don't understand yet.
This, a thousand times.
I think it was historian Barbara Tuchman who said (paraphrased), "The principle thing we learn from history is that leaders rarely learn anything from history." She even named a book 'The March Of Folly'.
I wonder if the DNC will get the message that voters want to make a choice, not be told who the candidate will be after their discussions in the legendary "smoke filled room". It's not likely, considering the inside-the-beltway articles that I'm already seeing that tRump won because of this or that. He won because the DNC insisted on running a candidate that was universally loathed by the opposition and whose only real asset was "I'm not Donald Trump."
Economic boom??? I take it you were in diapers or not born yet. I remember searching three months for a job, any job, and taking flipping burgers at Wendys because that's all there was. I remember entire families with little children sleeping in the streets because they had lost everything, something that hadn't happened since the Great Depression. I remember soaring deficits and massive layoffs and the highest unemployment in half a century. The only reason that inflation went down was because they stopped including food, housing, transportation, petroleum products and medical care in the statistics.
Economic boom my ass. The only segment that saw a boom was military hardware vendors.
1997
Me: What's it say on the screen?
Margaret: I don't know. It doesn't work.
Me: You don't know what it says on the screen?
Margaret: No. It just doesn't work. Come fix it.
Computer screen: Operating system not found.
After popping the floppy disk out and rebooting the machine Windows NT launches.
Margaret: Well, I could have done that, why didn't you tell me that was the problem?
What makes you think the lines are separate?
Experience. Phone lines, especially major feeders and trunk lines, are buried as often as possible. That's not possible for high tension and major electrical supply lines except in downtown areas where that type of very expensive infrastructure makes financial sense. The 'last mile' electrical cable between the substation and your home may be buried, but the lines to the substation are almost certainly not. Phone lines are easier to fix, don't require major equipment, and don't need to be brought up in a specific order, either.
I live near I-90 and I-405 interchange. Major traffic issues at rush hour will overload the T-Mobile and Sprint connections in our area (ATT seems to have more capacity), the end of the fireworks display or the SeaFair air show will bring them to their virtual knees. When we had the big windstorm a few years ago (2008?) we were without power for 5 days, but never lost land line. Duval didn't have power for two weeks, but had telephone service within a couple of days.
I would keep the land line. People don't think about it, but in an emergency the cellphone network is almost immediately overwhelmed (even bad rush hour traffic in our area). For that matter many (most?) of the towers don't have backup generators so will shutdown as soon as their batteries run out in a power emergency. I live in the Pacific Northwest, we have earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and a 70 mph windstorm will bring down so many Douglas Fir trees that it can take two weeks to restore power to some areas. During any of these our land line will continue to work as long as the phone line itself isn't broken, while the cellphone network implodes and melts down. Cheap insurance.
Ah. That makes sense, thanks.
I think that will depend on the VR industry. Currently most of the VR headsets work off a smartphone, generally a Samsung one. VR porn is supposedly absolutely amazing and studios are starting to put out titles that really take advantage of its abilities. If the VR industry starts putting out decent cheap headsets that don't require a phone (and there's no reason for them not to, the electronics are cheap now) we may see smartphones become commodity devices, the way they should be. If they keep relying on smartphones for their guts we'll probably see at least one or two more generations of "I need this new phone because of X" (X being some nominal unimportant feature but the real reason will be porn, of course).
Indeed. My wife occasionally tells me that I "need" a new truck. I tell her that the wheels haven't fallen off yet, so it doesn't need replacing.
I'm much the same way with my phone. If I hadn't finally broken it this spring I'd still have the four year-old $60 phone that did absolutely everything that I needed. I do have to admit that the low-light performance on the camera is better on the new one, but that's just a nice-to-have, not a need.
SFL is implemented as kernel-level syscalls from processes/threads that are not Windows processes/threads
That sounds dangerous as all hell, an escalation just waiting to happen. Or am I misunderstanding?
My kingdom for mod points . . .
Falling from an airliner's cruising altitude to about 15,000 feet, where air is breathable and parachutes can be deployed, would only take a couple of minutes. For most people I think that unconsciousness would be preferable to being awake for that whole time, but if the pod maintains structural integrity there's no reason why it would necessarily decompress anyway (unless that's part of the design for some reason).
Just thinking about the whole thing, while I doubt the pods would ever be deployed on a commercial airliner I can see a market for thrill-seekers who might want to get dropped from 35,000 feet.
Not sure anyone needs to worry about hypoxia for the couple of minutes a pod would be falling to an altitude where the parachute would be opening. It's not like they're piloting the thing on its way down, they're just along for the ride.
In flight the capsule would be pressurized, even if it depressurized immediately upon disconnect in free fall it would only be above 18,000 feet for two or three minutes. Below that you can breathe without much trouble, and the parachute probably wouldn't be opened above 15,000 feet or so. But yeah, they'd be too heavy.