All the booze and most of cheese, yoghurt and some more are made of bacteria and bacteria shit. To make things more twisted, we shit dead bacteria. (THEY eat food we swallowed, and WE digest THEM to get energy, then excrete "dead shells" - they are the primary compound of the shit...)
...so that several 100's of them have to be replaced after each flight, as they fly loose on each landing? And possibly this glue doesn't have to withstand THAT much of displacement...
Some claim 3D so marvelous, incredible, great. No, it isn't. It's improvement, true, but not all that big. I'd say stereo sound vs mono is better.
In theater (real, with actors playing on the scene) you get full 3D, 100% realistic experience, real multi-sourced sound, you can smell gunpowder from a gunfire. The camera position changes once in 20-40 minutes maybe, and the special effects are somewhat limited and sometimes cheesy, but you can't deny the realism of the scene. But somehow the live theatre seems to be slowly dying, being an "elite" thing...
I've been to a 3D cinema, watching with polaroid glasses. The glasses were light, didn't disturb really, watching experience was generally good. But the movie was rather boring. True, there was that third dimension added. It looked better that way. A corridor really looked like a real room behind the screen. The dinosaur really looked like reaching into the audience. So what? Just one extra sensory experience added. Not really important one. But movies are a kind of storytelling. Like a book, or a still picture. It doesn't have to look realistic to be enjoyable. Special effects? Sometimes - But there's one thing that really "do it": immersion. You just must feel "in it". Involved emotionally. Binding your feelings with the action. Feeling for the characters. There's no single thing that could help it. Good play/storytelling, good plot, no interruptions/distractions - that works. Extra visuals may impress but won't bind you (watch a horror movie, starting 15 minutes from the end and see how scared you are...). I think the old, almost forgotten, entertainment park "180 degrees cinema" (the screen is half of the surface of the dome above the audience, the image covers your whole field of view) would do it better than 3D.
Freefall research. Lots of processes give totally unexpected results without gravity. Some of them can be simulated in ballistic flight, but it lasts at most a few minutes. You can't examine gravity-less growth of plants, formation of crystals, diffusion of liquids and all kinds of processes that simply take time. Things that depend on gravity start often to behave in completely unexpected ways when the gravity is not present. We often have no idea what kind of profit would that give us, but it's like exploring unknown land - you have a good chance of finding something valuable, even if you don't know up front what would that be. Long-term freefall is impossible to simulate on Earth and that's one essential condition of research, but there are others that help a lot. Dirt cheap cryo temperatures. (think superconductors - just put the CPU outdoors and in a shadow:) Dirt cheap vaccuum of good quality (think removing dust/particles/contaminations from ultra-high precision manufacturing, just a great cleanroom "outdoors"). Global travel - several hours to get above any latitude, for free (think orbital observation). Unfiltered cosmic rays. (Bad for humans, but research could greatly benefit, finding particles that simply don't filter through the atmosphere. Also, lots of solar power). No clouds, air, lights, vibrations - all that is needed for good astronomy.
There's a lot of profits from this location. Now, whether they are utilised or not is a different matter...
Just a theoretical idea: Orbital microchip factory. Partially purified resources brought from Earth. Then final purification on the orbit. Waste in large packages mapped as "known space junk" put on a decaying orbit to burn in the atmosphere a few years later. Storage: Open space, possibly shielded from the sun by a big "sail". Purification: No worries about gravity mixing the fluids in transport, possiblity to hang charged pieces of material "levitating" without being touched (=contaminated) by any handling devices, no air/dust contamination (easy to purify the vaccuum by charging and then dragging away all the particles entering the area), then all the processes without any medium to transfer any kinds of vibrations, get optical beams out of focus, no forces on lenses that could change their shape, cheap to achieve dynamic liquid lenses for advanced optics etc. The devices manufactured could be of way higher quality than on Earth. Orders of magnitude in miniaturisation, less manufacturing errors, perfect manufacturing conditions really cheap. Just transport, supply, servicing would cost. And of course intruder risk: Space junk, micrometeorites. But these would be just a calculated risk. Facilities could be located sparsely enough that damage to one would not break any other - the line would just switch to a redundant backup and the broken facility would be replaced with next transport. And a single lander filled with a million of 30 Watt 20GHz 256-core CPUs would quite likely be enough to finance the whole investment.
I see a reasonable solution to both. Official console unlocking service. For a fee. Say, they are currently underselling the consoles, in hope to get it back in profits from games sales. Okay, great. But say, you'd like more than they will ever provide. You'd like to hack the console to your heart's content. Port stuff to it. Maybe you'd like to play pirated games. Well, the last one would cost them. A serious loss of revenue. So just pay them the kind of money they would be expecting from you. Get the original firmware replaced with "open" one for measy $500, at official service point. Then develop, hack, pirate, mod, copy - to your heart's content. They already got all the money they wanted from you, if you buy an original game - cool, thanks, you really didn't have to. If you spread your pirated game, everyone who can play it already has paid for the right to play it. If you want EVERYONE to play it - then pay the license, get it checked, signed and released as "generic" version. Just along with your "open" one. Same with modchips etc. Allow them - for a fee. Somebody wants to sell modchips? Cool, sell them for $450, from which $50 is what you can keep and $400 goes to the console manufacturer. Treat this as a single, legal, fixed price lifetime subscription to all of the services. I'm pretty sure many would be satisfied with this solution.
Think globally. NASA is not alone in the world. Currently the US doesn't have any good, robust fleet of personal space transport vehicles. But the World (through Russia) has. With the demise of Mir, the World was left without a space station. Now the US funded and provided most of it. As effect, the World has a good space station and a good fleet of space transport. The probes to the planets are often launched by common effort of many countries. Man To Mars is another goal which should be achieved by the world. Be it NASA, ESA, or even the Chineese if it has to be so. Lunar base is to be yet another. We don't need two lunar bases, or two mars missions in paralell, but one of each would be great - and certainly launching both is beyond reach of any space organisation. So let's just share achievments and responsiblities instead of competing. This way we all profit. The US doesn't really need a new fleet. They are doing enough good in other fields, and launching stuff into orbit could be safely left to Russians, who seem to be really good at that.
All true except the shuttle is quite old, and on the upper edge of allowed weight. A solid brick of iron (even similar to Sayuz) would be feasible and would work much better both in air and in space but it would have to be much smaller. Means: No precious cargo, just astronauts. Which is what the designers of the Cold War era wanted to avoid at all cost, and which their successors defend dearly, despite the idea being obsolete, unnecessary, dangerous and generally wrong. True it has to fly, but it has to fly down. A pretty solid, rugged design of a "plane-like" lander, similar to current one, but WAY smaller would be great. And just let the cargo go by a different train...
First, you can't see the ratings in the search window. You must start downloading and only after connecting to some peers and starting the download, ratings start to appear. Second, if you want to leave a rating of "Fake/Bad" you still need to host the file. Thank you very much, 2.5GB of gay porn just to tell people it is not really SWIII-ROTS-DVD_QUALITY.AVI - only malicious seeders of these files will retain the description ("Great quality! Not Fake!") and everyone else will delete the file after downloading - and stop spreading the rating.
What I like though is that you can give a description explaining WHAT is wrong with the file. Say, I started downloading LOTR-ROTK. After a while I see red icon: "bad/fake". So I read - Oh, yes, some idiot is spreadtng FOTR DVD edition, misnamed as ROTK. But I have the Fellowship only in the cinema screener with spoilers. So I just continue and end up with something different I had intended, but in the end something I like. It also allows for describing the file accurately - "VHS quality", "Heavy rip, all sound missing" or such.
Of course it didn't! Lighter = cheaper = less subcontractors = less work = less money = less political support! This idea just COULDN'T pass through The Machine.
Yes... Kinda like a socket that is almost like RS232, but not quite, so you have to buy a proprietary cable for $100 instead of using a generic one for $0.30 - Yes, it's not a bug, it's a feature!
lighter, smaller, stronger, more durable. Not heavier. Quite possible. What is more durable: A mile radius sphere made of 1 inch thick metal? Or 5 inch radius sphere made of the same 1-inch metal? Which one is heavier? Decrease overall size - significantly, like 5-10% of the present. The crew still will fit. As well as life support. As well as maneuvre engines and some other necessities. You have enormous savings in weight by now - possibly down to 2 tons from 100. Now start adding weight in protection of the surface. By the time you reach 5 tons total, you have a nearly indestructible "brick" with surface layer thick and durable enough to survive a meteorite impact, not just foam.
The problem the armies of people who made decisions about the shape and size of the shuttles didn't look to make it cost less and be safer, but to cost more (for contractors), and look impressive (to show they are better than Soviets).
IANA Physicist, but "less thrust" and "less force" to me means you aren't taking much up into space with you. If you can't take material with you, why would you want to go to space?
To bring humans into space? If the separate vessel with cargo gets blown to pieces, no biggie, several $mln bite the dust, but nobody gets hurt. If there are humans on board, dump all the stuff that could kill them and that you can dump. Flying heavy cargo and crew in the same vessel was one of the biggest mistakes of the whole design.
Especially since (as the FA points out) it is much cheaper to use "older" technology to carry over 100 tons up each time (compared with the 20 tons the shuttle presently carries).
100 tons of DEAD cargo. Huge thrust, acceleration sufficient to kill anyone, vibrations that make lots of stuff to fall off, but no risk of failure at reentry (no reentry). And if it blows up, well, so it does. One story in the news at 11. The problem with transporting humans is that you must provide a way to bring them back. So things must withstand the start (or the crew dies), retain the vessel relatively intact (so the crew survives reentry), but it doesn't have to carry 20 or 100 tons of stuff, just a few humans plus basic necessities.
Is the whole design of the shuttle overly fragile? Extremely. At least on launch. The liquid propellant container is made of layer of metal thin like tinfoil. Internal pressure keeps it from bending and breaking, but a small point pressure (bird's beak? Air gun dart?) is enough to pierce it - and make it explode. The shuttle itself is much more durable, but the foam remember that E=mv^2 so even small m at speeds the shuttle is going creates huge E, capable of seriously damaging it. Micrometeors and tiniest debris will just pierce tiny holes. Possible to repair (or not, depends where they happen), but unless a human or essential piece of electronics happens on the way, mostly harmless. Bigger meteors or pieces - hard luck, you're screwed.
Actually, they can do this easily. Just make the whole friggin' thing lighter. Less weight, less fuel, less thrust, less force, vibrations weaker and easier to dampen. And less stuff to fall off, so it can be attached better too. One of reasons shuttle vibrates so much is that it's so damn big. Make it a good solid brick, surviving in all conditions, instead of a sleek glider that can get blown to pieces by stronger wind. True shuttles are prettier that Sayuz capsules, but they suck at durability.
Slashdot Mirror
All the booze and most of cheese, yoghurt and some more are made of bacteria and bacteria shit.
To make things more twisted, we shit dead bacteria. (THEY eat food we swallowed, and WE digest THEM to get energy, then excrete "dead shells" - they are the primary compound of the shit...)
Using up about half of Earth's coal resources to build.
And the nanotubes should be kilometers long, not nanometers...
Opened 8 tabs with obscure searches. So far (some 10 mins later) 1 loaded.
Gentlemen! We have managed to slashdot Yahoo!
...plus it hasn't been ultimately proven that ANY of the planets was created from the Sun matter.
One of few things in their censorship thing they got right.
I really don't understand why boobs are so no-no and killing is okay.
...so that several 100's of them have to be replaced after each flight, as they fly loose on each landing? And possibly this glue doesn't have to withstand THAT much of displacement...
Yes, the best blogs spreat, the worse ones get forgotten. But the worst ones can cost you a breakfast.
Some claim 3D so marvelous, incredible, great. No, it isn't. It's improvement, true, but not all that big. I'd say stereo sound vs mono is better.
In theater (real, with actors playing on the scene) you get full 3D, 100% realistic experience, real multi-sourced sound, you can smell gunpowder from a gunfire. The camera position changes once in 20-40 minutes maybe, and the special effects are somewhat limited and sometimes cheesy, but you can't deny the realism of the scene. But somehow the live theatre seems to be slowly dying, being an "elite" thing...
I've been to a 3D cinema, watching with polaroid glasses. The glasses were light, didn't disturb really, watching experience was generally good. But the movie was rather boring. True, there was that third dimension added. It looked better that way. A corridor really looked like a real room behind the screen. The dinosaur really looked like reaching into the audience. So what? Just one extra sensory experience added. Not really important one.
But movies are a kind of storytelling. Like a book, or a still picture. It doesn't have to look realistic to be enjoyable. Special effects? Sometimes - But there's one thing that really "do it": immersion. You just must feel "in it". Involved emotionally. Binding your feelings with the action. Feeling for the characters. There's no single thing that could help it. Good play/storytelling, good plot, no interruptions/distractions - that works. Extra visuals may impress but won't bind you (watch a horror movie, starting 15 minutes from the end and see how scared you are...). I think the old, almost forgotten, entertainment park "180 degrees cinema" (the screen is half of the surface of the dome above the audience, the image covers your whole field of view) would do it better than 3D.
Last but not least option, for single person viewing: Camera tracking the head movement and adjusting the images accordingly.
Freefall research. Lots of processes give totally unexpected results without gravity. Some of them can be simulated in ballistic flight, but it lasts at most a few minutes. You can't examine gravity-less growth of plants, formation of crystals, diffusion of liquids and all kinds of processes that simply take time. Things that depend on gravity start often to behave in completely unexpected ways when the gravity is not present. We often have no idea what kind of profit would that give us, but it's like exploring unknown land - you have a good chance of finding something valuable, even if you don't know up front what would that be. :) Dirt cheap vaccuum of good quality (think removing dust/particles/contaminations from ultra-high precision manufacturing, just a great cleanroom "outdoors"). Global travel - several hours to get above any latitude, for free (think orbital observation). Unfiltered cosmic rays. (Bad for humans, but research could greatly benefit, finding particles that simply don't filter through the atmosphere. Also, lots of solar power). No clouds, air, lights, vibrations - all that is needed for good astronomy.
Long-term freefall is impossible to simulate on Earth and that's one essential condition of research, but there are others that help a lot. Dirt cheap cryo temperatures. (think superconductors - just put the CPU outdoors and in a shadow
There's a lot of profits from this location. Now, whether they are utilised or not is a different matter...
Just a theoretical idea: Orbital microchip factory. Partially purified resources brought from Earth. Then final purification on the orbit. Waste in large packages mapped as "known space junk" put on a decaying orbit to burn in the atmosphere a few years later. Storage: Open space, possibly shielded from the sun by a big "sail". Purification: No worries about gravity mixing the fluids in transport, possiblity to hang charged pieces of material "levitating" without being touched (=contaminated) by any handling devices, no air/dust contamination (easy to purify the vaccuum by charging and then dragging away all the particles entering the area), then all the processes without any medium to transfer any kinds of vibrations, get optical beams out of focus, no forces on lenses that could change their shape, cheap to achieve dynamic liquid lenses for advanced optics etc. The devices manufactured could be of way higher quality than on Earth. Orders of magnitude in miniaturisation, less manufacturing errors, perfect manufacturing conditions really cheap. Just transport, supply, servicing would cost. And of course intruder risk: Space junk, micrometeorites. But these would be just a calculated risk. Facilities could be located sparsely enough that damage to one would not break any other - the line would just switch to a redundant backup and the broken facility would be replaced with next transport. And a single lander filled with a million of 30 Watt 20GHz 256-core CPUs would quite likely be enough to finance the whole investment.
Only except it can't roll itself back... You'd expect that from a car antenna.
Just try frequency 2.54 times higher or lower and it should work fine.
I see a reasonable solution to both. Official console unlocking service. For a fee.
Say, they are currently underselling the consoles, in hope to get it back in profits from games sales. Okay, great. But say, you'd like more than they will ever provide. You'd like to hack the console to your heart's content. Port stuff to it. Maybe you'd like to play pirated games. Well, the last one would cost them. A serious loss of revenue. So just pay them the kind of money they would be expecting from you. Get the original firmware replaced with "open" one for measy $500, at official service point. Then develop, hack, pirate, mod, copy - to your heart's content. They already got all the money they wanted from you, if you buy an original game - cool, thanks, you really didn't have to. If you spread your pirated game, everyone who can play it already has paid for the right to play it. If you want EVERYONE to play it - then pay the license, get it checked, signed and released as "generic" version. Just along with your "open" one.
Same with modchips etc. Allow them - for a fee. Somebody wants to sell modchips? Cool, sell them for $450, from which $50 is what you can keep and $400 goes to the console manufacturer. Treat this as a single, legal, fixed price lifetime subscription to all of the services. I'm pretty sure many would be satisfied with this solution.
Think globally. NASA is not alone in the world.
Currently the US doesn't have any good, robust fleet of personal space transport vehicles. But the World (through Russia) has.
With the demise of Mir, the World was left without a space station. Now the US funded and provided most of it. As effect, the World has a good space station and a good fleet of space transport. The probes to the planets are often launched by common effort of many countries. Man To Mars is another goal which should be achieved by the world. Be it NASA, ESA, or even the Chineese if it has to be so. Lunar base is to be yet another. We don't need two lunar bases, or two mars missions in paralell, but one of each would be great - and certainly launching both is beyond reach of any space organisation. So let's just share achievments and responsiblities instead of competing. This way we all profit. The US doesn't really need a new fleet. They are doing enough good in other fields, and launching stuff into orbit could be safely left to Russians, who seem to be really good at that.
All true except the shuttle is quite old, and on the upper edge of allowed weight. A solid brick of iron (even similar to Sayuz) would be feasible and would work much better both in air and in space but it would have to be much smaller. Means: No precious cargo, just astronauts. Which is what the designers of the Cold War era wanted to avoid at all cost, and which their successors defend dearly, despite the idea being obsolete, unnecessary, dangerous and generally wrong.
True it has to fly, but it has to fly down. A pretty solid, rugged design of a "plane-like" lander, similar to current one, but WAY smaller would be great. And just let the cargo go by a different train...
Find me a (rubber-like) glue that can sustain dynamic 90% volume change in any temperature between 4K and 4000K.
Well, beware of Mouse Gestures then. You'll fall in the same trap. (WHY THE HELL DO I HAVE TO PRESS THE BACK BUTTON?)
First, you can't see the ratings in the search window. You must start downloading and only after connecting to some peers and starting the download, ratings start to appear.
Second, if you want to leave a rating of "Fake/Bad" you still need to host the file. Thank you very much, 2.5GB of gay porn just to tell people it is not really SWIII-ROTS-DVD_QUALITY.AVI - only malicious seeders of these files will retain the description ("Great quality! Not Fake!") and everyone else will delete the file after downloading - and stop spreading the rating.
What I like though is that you can give a description explaining WHAT is wrong with the file. Say, I started downloading LOTR-ROTK. After a while I see red icon: "bad/fake". So I read - Oh, yes, some idiot is spreadtng FOTR DVD edition, misnamed as ROTK. But I have the Fellowship only in the cinema screener with spoilers. So I just continue and end up with something different I had intended, but in the end something I like. It also allows for describing the file accurately - "VHS quality", "Heavy rip, all sound missing" or such.
http://www.hellkom.co.za/ :)
We All Love hellkom
Of course it didn't! Lighter = cheaper = less subcontractors = less work = less money = less political support! This idea just COULDN'T pass through The Machine.
Yes... Kinda like a socket that is almost like RS232, but not quite, so you have to buy a proprietary cable for $100 instead of using a generic one for $0.30 - Yes, it's not a bug, it's a feature!
lighter, smaller, stronger, more durable. Not heavier.
Quite possible. What is more durable: A mile radius sphere made of 1 inch thick metal? Or 5 inch radius sphere made of the same 1-inch metal? Which one is heavier?
Decrease overall size - significantly, like 5-10% of the present. The crew still will fit. As well as life support. As well as maneuvre engines and some other necessities. You have enormous savings in weight by now - possibly down to 2 tons from 100. Now start adding weight in protection of the surface. By the time you reach 5 tons total, you have a nearly indestructible "brick" with surface layer thick and durable enough to survive a meteorite impact, not just foam.
The problem the armies of people who made decisions about the shape and size of the shuttles didn't look to make it cost less and be safer, but to cost more (for contractors), and look impressive (to show they are better than Soviets).
IANA Physicist, but "less thrust" and "less force" to me means you aren't taking much up into space with you. If you can't take material with you, why would you want to go to space?
To bring humans into space? If the separate vessel with cargo gets blown to pieces, no biggie, several $mln bite the dust, but nobody gets hurt. If there are humans on board, dump all the stuff that could kill them and that you can dump. Flying heavy cargo and crew in the same vessel was one of the biggest mistakes of the whole design.
Especially since (as the FA points out) it is much cheaper to use "older" technology to carry over 100 tons up each time (compared with the 20 tons the shuttle presently carries).
100 tons of DEAD cargo. Huge thrust, acceleration sufficient to kill anyone, vibrations that make lots of stuff to fall off, but no risk of failure at reentry (no reentry). And if it blows up, well, so it does. One story in the news at 11.
The problem with transporting humans is that you must provide a way to bring them back. So things must withstand the start (or the crew dies), retain the vessel relatively intact (so the crew survives reentry), but it doesn't have to carry 20 or 100 tons of stuff, just a few humans plus basic necessities.
Is the whole design of the shuttle overly fragile?
Extremely.
At least on launch.
The liquid propellant container is made of layer of metal thin like tinfoil. Internal pressure keeps it from bending and breaking, but a small point pressure (bird's beak? Air gun dart?) is enough to pierce it - and make it explode.
The shuttle itself is much more durable, but the foam remember that E=mv^2 so even small m at speeds the shuttle is going creates huge E, capable of seriously damaging it.
Micrometeors and tiniest debris will just pierce tiny holes. Possible to repair (or not, depends where they happen), but unless a human or essential piece of electronics happens on the way, mostly harmless. Bigger meteors or pieces - hard luck, you're screwed.
Actually, they can do this easily.
Just make the whole friggin' thing lighter. Less weight, less fuel, less thrust, less force, vibrations weaker and easier to dampen. And less stuff to fall off, so it can be attached better too. One of reasons shuttle vibrates so much is that it's so damn big. Make it a good solid brick, surviving in all conditions, instead of a sleek glider that can get blown to pieces by stronger wind. True shuttles are prettier that Sayuz capsules, but they suck at durability.