Yes, some of these do make sense to allow corporations or individuals to operate
This is a great example. In the California electricity deregulation mess, cities with their own power companies were given the option of keeping their own generation systems for some time (a couple years?) longer than the private companies.
Pasadena (where I was at the time) and Los Angeles are among those that wisely chose to wait. The rates remained reasonable that summer in Pasadena, and we suffered very few outages. LA apparently made a profit (though don't seem to have gouged and gamed like certain private companies) on their excess generation.
In those cases gov't did indeed provide a better service at a lower price (because they weren't running a scam) than private industry, and covered all the costs with user fees.
Sort of. A star has a zone where liquid water could be available in large enough quantities to make a large fraction of the planet habitable for long periods, which is what's necessary for a remote detection (at least with forseeable technology).
Mercury is unlikely to have enough water for long enough to support life, and doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of, so it wouldn't be possible to detect life around an exo-mercury, even if you could observe that close to a star.
Moons of gas giants are trickier business-- the gas giants have their own habitable zones that are more or less separate from those of the parent star. Because they can actually hold an atmosphere it's conceivable to detect those, but it's hard enough just to detect the ones around the stars where they orbit farther from the parent and reflect or emit enough photons to gather in a reasonable time.
It's still useful to talk about the habitable zone of a star when looking for extra-solar planets. But other things in the stellar system (tidal locking around a gas giant, or a hot radioactive core) could create additional habitable areas.
VLSI is vastly more important than MEMS, and it didn't even make the list. Besides, MEMS is little more than a pit stop on the road to nanotech.
If you go down the list, more than half of the innovations listed wouldn't be possible without the unbelievable progress in microfab due to improvements in materials and processes for VLSI and its spinoffs.
1) That interweb thingy that they'll list as #1 2) cell phone 3) personal computer 4) commercial gps 5) portable computer 6) consumer digital cam 7) rfid 8) mems 9) atm 10) oleds (might have come about with VLSI infrastructure, but probably much later) 11) display panels 12) nanotech (most nanotech is actually microtech, but if you put in "nano" you get more money 13) flash memory 14) modern hearing aids
There are even a few more that are arguable-- storage disks, email, and voicemail.
Yeah, I got my first microcomputer in 1981 I think-- an apple II with 48K of RAM, and a cassette drive for storage. I had actually tried to win one in a Games Magazine contest about a year before that and gotten a bit obsessed.
And I wouldn't put the shuttle on the top innovations of the last 25 years-- It looks more like a dead end, and will probably be replaced by expendables for the forseeable future.
I don't know of any reason why the robot itself couldn't take over the functions of the Hubble's aiming systems
For the very finest guiding and control HST uses a signal off the telescope rather than just star trackers and gyros/IRUs. There may not be a reasonable way to bolt a robot on the outside and couple it to that system.
And possibly only enough parts for two. In one of the post Columbia reports I recall reading that they rotate some of the parts through because they don't have enough-- i.e. when one shuttle lands, they pull some parts and move them up to the next one that will launch.
You're correct that they always keep an escape capsule at the station. It doesn't have the capacity for a shuttle full of people-- Soyuz only holds 3 people-- but being on board a station in one piece, with air and food and stuff is much better than being scattered across Texas. Russia seems to have quite a bit of capacity for Soyuz launches and could probably send more escape capsules on relatively short notice.
LA Weekly had a couple articles about this a few months ago-- Myths Debunked and New Small Future that pointed out that overall CD sales were going up, but the sales of the biggest sellers (i.e. the stuff produced by RIAA members) were going down drastically.
There is a lot more depth to list of CDs that people buy than the major labels would like (the majors want to stamp out enormous numbers of a few titles and not have to deal with the breadth of catalog that listeners seem to want), and a lot of it is due to the increased access to samples of alternatives that people get through filesharing. Filesharing has probably replaced radion for many people as their source of introductions to music, and it allows them to find things that they otherwise would never be exposed to via the conventional RIAA/Clear Channel sources. Niche labels are doing well as a result, because they get the free marketing and people go on to buy the CD, either to support the band or for the higher quality, or maybe for some other reason.
There are even bands that have given up with labels and are dealing the CDs themselves-- They Might Be Giants is one, and Einstürzende Neubauten is another. They seem to prefer both the greater control over their work and not having to get paid through a label.
This means the Big Bang was "tuned" to produce exactly this density
Actually, if you go and look at the published, refereed technical paper (the first one at WMAP papers you'll see that the most probable value for Omega_total is 1.02+-.02. This is consistent with a flat universe (1.0), but is also consistent with a closed, large radius of curvature universe. Other experiments produce similar values (some referenced in the paper), also slightly greater than one but with error bars that include 1.0.
It always makes me cringe a little when people stand up and show data plots of the various cosmological parameters that are consistent with flat, but also consistently tend towards very large radius closed, and then declare the universe to be flat. And I've been at a lot of those talks. I'm fine with them saying "It's nearly flat" or "it's got such a large radius that we can treat it as flat for most purposes" or "it's flat enough to be consistent with inflation", but it's not convincingly dead-ass flat. The data always seem to be centered around "very-nearly-flat-but-closed"
I was talking to a cosmologist friend about this, and his comment was "Yeah, but it would be perverse if the universe were that close to flat, but not really flat". To which my reply is "The universe is a perverse place-- it doesn't have to be flat just to make the mathematical description pretty". Life as an experimenter is way more fun when the data give you those tiny deviations from the theory-- they're often real, and they're hinting at something missing from the theory.
Renting a car from a traditional rental agency involves going to the agency during their working hours, standing in line (frequently 1/2 hour), filling out paperwork, and returning the car during working hours. It makes no sense to rent the car for less than a day.
It's probably been a while since you rented a car or you've had bad luck-- I generally book online (even when renting on short notice) and can't remember the last time I had to fill out anything beyond signing my name and checking a box. I also can't remember the last time I had to wait in line more than a few minutes. If you really don't want to wait, and you rent often enough, you join one of the premium programs.
You do have to get there during working working hours, but many of them will drop off the car at your door within a certain distance of your location. You can also generally drop off the cars after hours and drop the key in a slot.
I agree that it doesn't make sense usually to rent for less than a day, but it's not hard to come up with enough errands to fill the day and make it worthwhile.
Bikes are nice, but they're not an ultimate solution in most of the country. Think Minneapolis.
I biked year round in Mpls for the 6 years I lived there, and knew a lot of others who did the same. Even when I had a car for the last year I kept an extra bike at work in case the car wouldn't start in the cold.
The bike always starts, never gets stuck (it's easy to lift out of deep snow) and warms up as soon as you start pedaling. I stopped and pushed a lot of stuck cars in the winter.
I'm visiting Montreal in the winter as I write this, and have done some biking here as well. There are locals who also bike year round, the the public transport is pretty good, and many of the streets are a bit narrow for biking in traffic when they're full of snow.
Some genius kid in my school tried to steal one of the microgram-accuracy digital scales from the chem lab
This reminds me of about a dozen years ago when I was trying to order various biological stains for my (geeky) girlfriend for xmas. It turned out you couldn't buy any chemicals (including stains) or scales by credit card unless they were shipped to an educational address. I was lucky in being a grad student, and had it shipped to my dept address, but those rules seemed misguided because anyone who wanted a balance would just steal from a school (that could scarcely afford to replace it) rather than just getting it through the mail.
switching them on your iPod - like old 8-track cartridges?
It would be way cooler to have a car stereo that takes hot swappable hard drives that are packaged to look like 8 track tapes. It could even insert "clunk" sounds every 10 minutes if you really wanted to feel like you were back in the 70s.
Which reminds me that it also has to account for things growing in the yard...
I'd be happy to have all the data without the integration-- most of the time I don't bother with recipes, or I use them for inspiration but modify them a lot. The integration is just an added bonus, but as I write this it seems like it might include thresholds for missing items and recommended substitutions-- if you have nearly the right stuff for a recipe, you can usually do a pretty decent job of it. That would be useful.
People have been talking about this since the Apple II.
And computers have almost gotten to where they can realize their full potential in the kitchen-keeping track of recipes, which was a justification for many computers to sneak into homes in those days.
This thanksgiving is the first time I used the computer to help in the kitchen-- not because I'm very anal (I'm very bad at being anal) but because it was easier than any other way. I had emailed out the menu to my mom who came to visit from out of state, and when we were cooking, I had the laptop there on the counter (I have a lot of counter space, so it was convenient and not in the way) and would mark things off and make notes as we made them, and check on line for preparation tips when questions came up.
I'd kind of like RFID tags in the fridge-- there are things you need when cooking at the holidays that you don't realize aren't there, or they've been in the fridge so long you might be afraid to use them. And it would be nice to be able to slap an rfid on leftovers (or have it built into the container) and have the fridge keep track of how old they are. I don't even want it to track what they are- that would require effort. I've tried marking them with a marker, but I'm not anal enough and it stops after a day or two.
The spice cabinet is another place for RFID tags-- I have a lot of spices, including many obscure ones, and I'm too lazy to organize them in the very large spice cabinet. I'd like to be able to pull up a list of what's in there to compare to recipes.
... the NYTimes also had the Jayson Blair problem, as well as one other less-publicized example...
Yeah, I almost started to put down the litany of things that have caused me to look more skeptically at the times, but the Wen Ho Lee thing was the turning point.
There are times when I don't care about searching online or skipping ads. Times when you just want something to look at. A prop. Something to pass the time.
Yeah, that's about the only thing I use them for anymore, but it's usually one of the free alt-weeklies, rather than an LA times or something that would require me to find some quarters in my pocket. If I know that I'm going to have to kill some time (or have a high probability) I'd usually rather carry a book in my pocket. When I used to ride the subway a lot (in a city that actually had public transport) I usually had a couple of books in my pockets at all times.
I totally understand your point, I just am less and less likely to use a daily for that.
But did it seem to anyone else that the L.A. Times in the past year or two had gotten WAY too opinionated in their HARD NEWS stories?
Actually, it seemed to me the opposite had happened, and over a longer period of time. I mentioned in another post that I think the NYTimes put too much spin on news sometimes (though I still like to read their op eds, but I know they're opinion pieces). The opinion page in NY seems to me to be more partisan than the one in LA, and I read both almost every day.
If the LA paper seems to be more anti-bush, maybe it's jsut because they're more willing to print news that makes teh administration look bad. Then again, maybe they're both doing it and the two of us prefer the opinions of one over the other...
I think weekly/weekend papers will stay for the same reason the books will stay.
Nah. I can even get the Fry's ads with the online version, and I don't have to sift through all the other ads that are stuffed into the paper version.
Newspapers are mostly ephemeral- you want the current information and as current as possible. It's easier to keep up to the minute online, and if you're interested in the archival value of newpapers, online is easier to search.
5 or 6 years ago I would have agreed that the NYTimes is substantially better than the LATimes. Lately I'm not so sure. I think the turning point for the NYTimes was the Wen Ho Lee thing at Los Alamos, where the NY paper practically convicted him on the front page. The LA paper was better about just reporting the news, and being more skeptical about unproven claims.
Then again, maybe I've just been in LA to long...
As far as closing down the national edition-- it makes sense to me. I'm local and I read it online. If I lived somewhere else I wouldn't buy a paper copy.
HP has somehow managed to go from one of the leading producers of quality printers, for example, to one of the many cheapo vendors.
I've used a lot of HP test and analysis equipment over the years, and most of it has both performed well and been durable. I always thought of HP as an instrument manufacturer, even at their peak of printer quality. I was kind of suprised that the consumer products company got to keep the HP name, and they renamed the instrument company. I still use a lot of Agilent stuff, and still often call it HP out of habit. Their printers seem to be a mixed bag, and don't really stand out the way they used to.
But what will they do when its gyros need to be replaced?
Let it fall out of orbit. It has a design lifetime, and it will probably last longer than that. It's only cost effective to service things when the cost of servicing is largely borne by someone elses budget line (e.g. the manned program subsidizing HST).
Even though the technology has improved, most of the costs of designing, building, and launching have gone UP, not down.
Sort of. If you want the replacement to push the state of the art today (e.g. JWST) you pay a premium. If you get largely "off the shelf" parts, and don't design anything that will require new capital facilities for testing then it can be much cheaper than $2B. The spacecraft bus market is quite competitive, as is launch (though launch is still cheaper with foreign LVs). A telescope like HST has doesn't push the state of the art today-- you can probably get lower mass for less money. The instruments are also already built and waiting for someone to install them on something.
If you're referring to JWST as the new telescope, it isn't really a Hubble replacement-- it won't have good enough optics to do any of the UV stuff that HST does. It will still bring back great pictures and spectra.
They can certainly find astronauts willing to take the risk to fix Hubble, and I agree that it's a better idea than the robotic mission. The worst case is that you sink a billion dollars or so into the robotic mission and then HST dies before you can get there.
I doubt that they even have all of the correct engineering drawings for the Hubble
The technology for space telescopes has changed quite a bit since HST was built-- you wouldn't want to build an exact copy.
It's not like other agencies hadn't built similar things before Hubble, and those agencies haven't been sitting on their butts for 20 years. Even NASA has flown and is developing new telescopes based on much newer technology. The basic geometry would probably be the same, but the primary mirror (and whole telescope) would be lower mass, the avionics would probably be a lot newer, you might launch to an L2 orbit instead.
A shuttle mission would ensure the least downtime for visible astronomy (assuming they can get back flying in a couple years), but it's probably cheaper to build a new one from scratch, even with all the new design that would have to be done.
Slashdot Mirror
It was 'Space with Sam Neil', a BBC documentary in 6 episodes.. quite nice, actually.
If that's the same guy who was in Event Horizon there's no way I'm going into space with him.
Or even watching it on TV
"Where we're going, we won't need eyes..."
electrical grids
electrical power generation
Yes, some of these do make sense to allow corporations or individuals to operate
This is a great example. In the California electricity deregulation mess, cities with their own power companies were given the option of keeping their own generation systems for some time (a couple years?) longer than the private companies.
Pasadena (where I was at the time) and Los Angeles are among those that wisely chose to wait. The rates remained reasonable that summer in Pasadena, and we suffered very few outages. LA apparently made a profit (though don't seem to have gouged and gamed like certain private companies) on their excess generation.
In those cases gov't did indeed provide a better service at a lower price (because they weren't running a scam) than private industry, and covered all the costs with user fees.
The habitable zone is a rather out-of-date idea.
Sort of. A star has a zone where liquid water could be available in large enough quantities to make a large fraction of the planet habitable for long periods, which is what's necessary for a remote detection (at least with forseeable technology).
Mercury is unlikely to have enough water for long enough to support life, and doesn't have any atmosphere to speak of, so it wouldn't be possible to detect life around an exo-mercury, even if you could observe that close to a star.
Moons of gas giants are trickier business-- the gas giants have their own habitable zones that are more or less separate from those of the parent star. Because they can actually hold an atmosphere it's conceivable to detect those, but it's hard enough just to detect the ones around the stars where they orbit farther from the parent and reflect or emit enough photons to gather in a reasonable time.
It's still useful to talk about the habitable zone of a star when looking for extra-solar planets. But other things in the stellar system (tidal locking around a gas giant, or a hot radioactive core) could create additional habitable areas.
And without HDTV, nobody would have been able to tell what was underneath that wardrobe malfunction.
VLSI is vastly more important than MEMS, and it didn't even make the list. Besides, MEMS is little more than a pit stop on the road to nanotech.
If you go down the list, more than half of the innovations listed wouldn't be possible without the unbelievable progress in microfab due to improvements in materials and processes for VLSI and its spinoffs.
1) That interweb thingy that they'll list as #1
2) cell phone
3) personal computer
4) commercial gps
5) portable computer
6) consumer digital cam
7) rfid
8) mems
9) atm
10) oleds (might have come about with VLSI infrastructure, but probably much later)
11) display panels
12) nanotech (most nanotech is actually microtech, but if you put in "nano" you get more money
13) flash memory
14) modern hearing aids
There are even a few more that are arguable-- storage disks, email, and voicemail.
Yeah, I got my first microcomputer in 1981 I think-- an apple II with 48K of RAM, and a cassette drive for storage. I had actually tried to win one in a Games Magazine contest about a year before that and gotten a bit obsessed.
And I wouldn't put the shuttle on the top innovations of the last 25 years-- It looks more like a dead end, and will probably be replaced by expendables for the forseeable future.
I don't know of any reason why the robot itself couldn't take over the functions of the Hubble's aiming systems
For the very finest guiding and control HST uses a signal off the telescope rather than just star trackers and gyros/IRUs. There may not be a reasonable way to bolt a robot on the outside and couple it to that system.
We only have three shuttles left.
And possibly only enough parts for two. In one of the post Columbia reports I recall reading that they rotate some of the parts through because they don't have enough-- i.e. when one shuttle lands, they pull some parts and move them up to the next one that will launch.
You're correct that they always keep an escape capsule at the station. It doesn't have the capacity for a shuttle full of people-- Soyuz only holds 3 people-- but being on board a station in one piece, with air and food and stuff is much better than being scattered across Texas. Russia seems to have quite a bit of capacity for Soyuz launches and could probably send more escape capsules on relatively short notice.
LA Weekly had a couple articles about this a few months ago-- Myths Debunked and New Small Future
that pointed out that overall CD sales were going up, but the sales of the biggest sellers (i.e. the stuff produced by RIAA members) were going down drastically.
There is a lot more depth to list of CDs that people buy than the major labels would like (the majors want to stamp out enormous numbers of a few titles and not have to deal with the breadth of catalog that listeners seem to want), and a lot of it is due to the increased access to samples of alternatives that people get through filesharing. Filesharing has probably replaced radion for many people as their source of introductions to music, and it allows them to find things that they otherwise would never be exposed to via the conventional RIAA/Clear Channel sources. Niche labels are doing well as a result, because they get the free marketing and people go on to buy the CD, either to support the band or for the higher quality, or maybe for some other reason.
There are even bands that have given up with labels and are dealing the CDs themselves-- They Might Be Giants is one, and Einstürzende Neubauten is another. They seem to prefer both the greater control over their work and not having to get paid through a label.
This means the Big Bang was "tuned" to produce exactly this density
Actually, if you go and look at the published, refereed technical paper (the first one at WMAP papers you'll see that the most probable value for Omega_total is 1.02+-.02. This is consistent with a flat universe (1.0), but is also consistent with a closed, large radius of curvature universe. Other experiments produce similar values (some referenced in the paper), also slightly greater than one but with error bars that include 1.0.
It always makes me cringe a little when people stand up and show data plots of the various cosmological parameters that are consistent with flat, but also consistently tend towards very large radius closed, and then declare the universe to be flat. And I've been at a lot of those talks. I'm fine with them saying "It's nearly flat" or "it's got such a large radius that we can treat it as flat for most purposes" or "it's flat enough to be consistent with inflation", but it's not convincingly dead-ass flat. The data always seem to be centered around "very-nearly-flat-but-closed"
I was talking to a cosmologist friend about this, and his comment was "Yeah, but it would be perverse if the universe were that close to flat, but not really flat". To which my reply is "The universe is a perverse place-- it doesn't have to be flat just to make the mathematical description pretty". Life as an experimenter is way more fun when the data give you those tiny deviations from the theory-- they're often real, and they're hinting at something missing from the theory.
Renting a car from a traditional rental agency involves going to the agency during their working hours, standing in line (frequently 1/2 hour), filling out paperwork, and returning the car during working hours. It makes no sense to rent the car for less than a day.
It's probably been a while since you rented a car or you've had bad luck-- I generally book online (even when renting on short notice) and can't remember the last time I had to fill out anything beyond signing my name and checking a box. I also can't remember the last time I had to wait in line more than a few minutes. If you really don't want to wait, and you rent often enough, you join one of the premium programs.
You do have to get there during working working hours, but many of them will drop off the car at your door within a certain distance of your location. You can also generally drop off the cars after hours and drop the key in a slot.
I agree that it doesn't make sense usually to rent for less than a day, but it's not hard to come up with enough errands to fill the day and make it worthwhile.
Bikes are nice, but they're not an ultimate solution in most of the country. Think Minneapolis.
I biked year round in Mpls for the 6 years I lived there, and knew a lot of others who did the same. Even when I had a car for the last year I kept an extra bike at work in case the car wouldn't start in the cold.
The bike always starts, never gets stuck (it's easy to lift out of deep snow) and warms up as soon as you start pedaling. I stopped and pushed a lot of stuck cars in the winter.
I'm visiting Montreal in the winter as I write this, and have done some biking here as well. There are locals who also bike year round, the the public transport is pretty good, and many of the streets are a bit narrow for biking in traffic when they're full of snow.
Some genius kid in my school tried to steal one of the microgram-accuracy digital scales from the chem lab
This reminds me of about a dozen years ago when I was trying to order various biological stains for my (geeky) girlfriend for xmas. It turned out you couldn't buy any chemicals (including stains) or scales by credit card unless they were shipped to an educational address. I was lucky in being a grad student, and had it shipped to my dept address, but those rules seemed misguided because anyone who wanted a balance would just steal from a school (that could scarcely afford to replace it) rather than just getting it through the mail.
switching them on your iPod - like old 8-track cartridges?
It would be way cooler to have a car stereo that takes hot swappable hard drives that are packaged to look like 8 track tapes. It could even insert "clunk" sounds every 10 minutes if you really wanted to feel like you were back in the 70s.
Or perhaps, leave me only buying fresh rosemary
Which reminds me that it also has to account for things growing in the yard...
I'd be happy to have all the data without the integration-- most of the time I don't bother with recipes, or I use them for inspiration but modify them a lot. The integration is just an added bonus, but as I write this it seems like it might include thresholds for missing items and recommended substitutions-- if you have nearly the right stuff for a recipe, you can usually do a pretty decent job of it. That would be useful.
People have been talking about this since the Apple II.
And computers have almost gotten to where they can realize their full potential in the kitchen-keeping track of recipes, which was a justification for many computers to sneak into homes in those days.
This thanksgiving is the first time I used the computer to help in the kitchen-- not because I'm very anal (I'm very bad at being anal) but because it was easier than any other way. I had emailed out the menu to my mom who came to visit from out of state, and when we were cooking, I had the laptop there on the counter (I have a lot of counter space, so it was convenient and not in the way) and would mark things off and make notes as we made them, and check on line for preparation tips when questions came up.
I'd kind of like RFID tags in the fridge-- there are things you need when cooking at the holidays that you don't realize aren't there, or they've been in the fridge so long you might be afraid to use them. And it would be nice to be able to slap an rfid on leftovers (or have it built into the container) and have the fridge keep track of how old they are. I don't even want it to track what they are- that would require effort. I've tried marking them with a marker, but I'm not anal enough and it stops after a day or two.
The spice cabinet is another place for RFID tags-- I have a lot of spices, including many obscure ones, and I'm too lazy to organize them in the very large spice cabinet. I'd like to be able to pull up a list of what's in there to compare to recipes.
... the NYTimes also had the Jayson Blair problem, as well as one other less-publicized example...
Yeah, I almost started to put down the litany of things that have caused me to look more skeptically at the times, but the Wen Ho Lee thing was the turning point.
There are times when I don't care about searching online or skipping ads. Times when you just want something to look at. A prop. Something to pass the time.
Yeah, that's about the only thing I use them for anymore, but it's usually one of the free alt-weeklies, rather than an LA times or something that would require me to find some quarters in my pocket. If I know that I'm going to have to kill some time (or have a high probability) I'd usually rather carry a book in my pocket. When I used to ride the subway a lot (in a city that actually had public transport) I usually had a couple of books in my pockets at all times.
I totally understand your point, I just am less and less likely to use a daily for that.
But did it seem to anyone else that the L.A. Times in the past year or two had gotten WAY too opinionated in their HARD NEWS stories?
Actually, it seemed to me the opposite had happened, and over a longer period of time. I mentioned in another post that I think the NYTimes put too much spin on news sometimes (though I still like to read their op eds, but I know they're opinion pieces). The opinion page in NY seems to me to be more partisan than the one in LA, and I read both almost every day.
If the LA paper seems to be more anti-bush, maybe it's jsut because they're more willing to print news that makes teh administration look bad. Then again, maybe they're both doing it and the two of us prefer the opinions of one over the other...
I think weekly/weekend papers will stay for the same reason the books will stay.
Nah. I can even get the Fry's ads with the online version, and I don't have to sift through all the other ads that are stuffed into the paper version.
Newspapers are mostly ephemeral- you want the current information and as current as possible. It's easier to keep up to the minute online, and if you're interested in the archival value of newpapers, online is easier to search.
5 or 6 years ago I would have agreed that the NYTimes is substantially better than the LATimes. Lately I'm not so sure. I think the turning point for the NYTimes was the Wen Ho Lee thing at Los Alamos, where the NY paper practically convicted him on the front page. The LA paper was better about just reporting the news, and being more skeptical about unproven claims.
Then again, maybe I've just been in LA to long...
As far as closing down the national edition-- it makes sense to me. I'm local and I read it online. If I lived somewhere else I wouldn't buy a paper copy.
HP has somehow managed to go from one of the leading producers of quality printers, for example, to one of the many cheapo vendors.
I've used a lot of HP test and analysis equipment over the years, and most of it has both performed well and been durable. I always thought of HP as an instrument manufacturer, even at their peak of printer quality. I was kind of suprised that the consumer products company got to keep the HP name, and they renamed the instrument company. I still use a lot of Agilent stuff, and still often call it HP out of habit. Their printers seem to be a mixed bag, and don't really stand out the way they used to.
But what will they do when its gyros need to be replaced?
Let it fall out of orbit. It has a design lifetime, and it will probably last longer than that. It's only cost effective to service things when the cost of servicing is largely borne by someone elses budget line (e.g. the manned program subsidizing HST).
Even though the technology has improved, most of the costs of designing, building, and launching have gone UP, not down.
Sort of. If you want the replacement to push the state of the art today (e.g. JWST) you pay a premium. If you get largely "off the shelf" parts, and don't design anything that will require new capital facilities for testing then it can be much cheaper than $2B. The spacecraft bus market is quite competitive, as is launch (though launch is still cheaper with foreign LVs). A telescope like HST has doesn't push the state of the art today-- you can probably get lower mass for less money. The instruments are also already built and waiting for someone to install them on something.
If you're referring to JWST as the new telescope, it isn't really a Hubble replacement-- it won't have good enough optics to do any of the UV stuff that HST does. It will still bring back great pictures and spectra.
They can certainly find astronauts willing to take the risk to fix Hubble, and I agree that it's a better idea than the robotic mission. The worst case is that you sink a billion dollars or so into the robotic mission and then HST dies before you can get there.
I doubt that they even have all of the correct engineering drawings for the Hubble
The technology for space telescopes has changed quite a bit since HST was built-- you wouldn't want to build an exact copy.
It's not like other agencies hadn't built similar things before Hubble, and those agencies haven't been sitting on their butts for 20 years. Even NASA has flown and is developing new telescopes based on much newer technology. The basic geometry would probably be the same, but the primary mirror (and whole telescope) would be lower mass, the avionics would probably be a lot newer, you might launch to an L2 orbit instead.
A shuttle mission would ensure the least downtime for visible astronomy (assuming they can get back flying in a couple years), but it's probably cheaper to build a new one from scratch, even with all the new design that would have to be done.