The article's not about how fast Windows runs, it's about how long it's taking MS to develop Vista. Yes, I hate them too, but must everyone be so eager to bash Microsoft products that they can't RTFA?
...the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ordered inspections of all nuclear plants in Illinois (11, the most of any U.S. state) following an "emergency" at an an Exelon-owned plant on Monday along with several tritium leaks at more than one plant in past months. Of course, Exelon's flacks downplay the chances of public danger in all these cases.
When I tried to hit the google.cn link, it apparently checked my IP, determined I wasn't inside China, and redirected me back to google.com so that both links gave me the same result. So not only is Google in bed with the Chinese government regarding censorship, but it's being surreptitious about it for the rest of us. That seems doubly evil to me.
It's not so much the chance of collision, which is (still) low, but more the fact that every potential collision carries with it a very high probability of causing a Very Bad Day.
Also, there are a lot of objects up there (spent rocket stages, dead satellites) that stand a good chance of exploding as they age (from leaking hypergolic propellants, etc.), which tends to generate lots and lots of chunks that are too small to track but big enough to cause said VBD.
My wife and I were discussing "job" vs. "career" the other night. She said (and I agree) that "career" is a mind-control term society uses to make us think that our jobs have some purpose beyond earning money, so that we might feel happy about working at something other than what we really want to do. For us, our "jobs" pay the bills and buy the things we need/want. Our mutual "career" is the pursuit of happiness together, something almost wholly exclusive of our jobs.
Of all our friends (most of whom are quite successful in their jobs), only one has what I'd call a working career (he's an artist) but even he has a day job to help pay the bills.
That said, I work for a pretty terrific, pro-technology company that runs its employees to the brink of job burnout but which also shows its appreciation extremely well, in a myriad of ways -- bonuses are solid and (as one example) last year's company anniversary party had Counting Crows performing. And they're hiring.
I'm thinking of those emergency flashlights that are powered by shaking them up and down for a minute. An internal magnet bounces up and down, passing through a coil to generate current that charges a capacitor. Seems less Rube-Goldbergian than a rack-and-pinion attached to a DC motor, and could probably be adapted to this system.
What they are effectively saying is, the 30 year experiment that was the space shuttle was a failure.
Pretty much, yes.
The Soviets tried a spaceplane (Buran), heavily copied from the U.S. Shuttle, and quickly decided it was too expensive to operate. Didn't even have to risk human lives to figure that out -- the first flight was unmanned and remote-controlled.
Make a simple change of the NYT's graphic, using 1972 technology, and you have a Saturn V for heavy cargo lifting and the quick-and-dirty Saturn IB for crew launches. Both tried-and-true vehicles, somewhat overbuilt but ripe for upgrades and improvements.
IMO if we'd stuck with and upgraded what we had instead of pursuing the Shuttle boondoggle, we'd be walking on Mars by now. (Of course, there would have been zero political clout available to get it done, but that's a different issue.)
At least we got some nice engine technology out of it. The Delta IV's main engine is the direct result of lessons learned from the Shuttle's SSMEs.
Well, ice is heavy, for one thing. So it would definitely adversely affect the rocket's performance. A lesser issue might be the possibility of damage to the rocket when it sloughs off.
I agree that Miles is the very best we've got, but in terms of enthusiasm and sheer geekiness there was no one better than his predecessor, the late great John Holloman. Loved it when John would say "I'm not sure, let me check" and then haul out his 4-inch-thick binder of the Shuttle Operations Manual.
Hey vultures, I've got some MSNBC commentator's bones for you to pick!
(Nearly) complete list of impacts and landings
on
Google Moon Debuts
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My site lists as many of the impacts and landings as I could find, both Russian and U.S. Despite the good info, its interface kind of sucks, particularly in light of Google's nice one -- looks like it's time to get hacking Google Moon.
The blueprints are still around (as others have said, on microfilm), but that doesn't necessarily mean that we still know all the construction techniques that were used to build the Saturn V. Things like brazing hundreds of cooling tubes into the solid mass of an F1 engine nozzle... or using underwater explosions to shape the complex curves of the fuel tank end-caps. Check out Stages to Saturn, you'll be amazed at all the advances these rockets generated.
Did every little engineering tweak that someone thought up on the fly make it into the documentation? I doubt it. Getting to the moon was easy -- the hard part was figuring out how to build a working Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft.
Too bad for you. As great as Curry, Hyde-Pierce, and Azaria were in the Chicago run, it's Sara Ramirez that made the show. Astounding singer in a wide range of musical styles, hot hot hot, and best of all, comedic sensibility and timing that put even Carol Cleveland to shame.
On each corner of Union Station in Chicago are clocks that say "Elgin" and "Central Time" on their faces. Elgin is the name of the clock company based in the western suburb of the same name, and I used to make a (dumb) nerd joke to myself that the clocks told not merely the time, but "Elgin Central Time," as if that was something extra special.
Then one day while I was out in Elgin on a site visit, I ran across the Elgin Watch Company's transit observatory, where daily star sightings were taken to provide accurate time measurements to clocks throughout the Elgin network, which received updates via "ticker" (unintended, unfortunate pun) service. Turns out Union Station really did display Elgin Central Time!
Of course, the observatory was closed in 1958 when it was made obsolete by... atomic clocks.
We didn't deorbit Skylab, it deorbited itself. We had no control over the situation, and it could just have easily hit Perth, Melbourne, or Sydney as that mostly-empty stretch of outback.
Too bad that the people doing the animated restorations aren't the same folks at WB that have done such a good job of restoring old films like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. The Onion AV Club has a very interesting interview with the senior VP in charge of their classic catalog.
Last night TCM ran the WB cartoon "Hollywood Steps Out," one of those pastiches filled with caricatures of what seems like every famous actor and Warner Bros contract player of the era. (Of course, I only recognise a fraction of them.) But the point is that the "That's All Folks" frame had small print at the bottom with a copyright date for the "edited version." So yes, something was taken out, probably some very funny (or not-so-funny) blackface gag. I have no idea what's missing, but even if the gag wasn't all that great I resent having someone else decide that I can't see it just because - god forbid - I might actually laugh at it, even knowing how inappropriate it is.
When I was in college, the local cable company's public access station stayed on the air every weekend by running, in a continuous loop, 6-hour tapes of "Cartoon Control Room with Sloucho Barx," basically an unmoving camera shot of a guy in an ill-fitting Groucho mask sitting at the switcher and cueing up tape after tape from his extensive cartoon collection.
One week, Sloucho ran an entire show with the theme of censored, racist, or otherwise inappropriate cartoons. There were some doozies - all of it WB and MGM stuff - but in its defence everything he aired was first shown on the big screen during Saturday matinees in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Moreover, between every cartoon he offered disclaimers and deprecations, stating the show was meant to illustrate the mindset of the past, neither he nor the cable company supported these views, if you're letting your kids watch this you'd better be talking to them about what they're seeing, I can't believe what an awful joke that was, etc. etc.
Of course the complaints poured in anyway, and needless to say it was Sloucho's last show.
Back to the main topic... aside from Sloucho's fondness for the early-30s WB cartoon "Freddy the Freshman," which he played on every one of his shows, he also clued me in on another obscure one, Chuck Jones' 1940 "The Dover Boys." In it, Jones experimented with a sort of visual shorthand, with fast swooshing movements punctuated by stylised poses. The characters move across the screen as colourful blurs, saving the animators from having to draw a complete figure with every frame. Nowadays it's a common thing - such as the Road Runner's spinning legs - but this was the cartoon where it all began.
"The Dover Boys" is included on WB's Looney Tunes Vol. 2, and I fear what they might have done to action frames that could be construed as being nothing but noise.
From TFA: "The company's MSN Search already has that for a few areas, he said, demonstrating queries on 'Which country has the second-largest GDP?' and 'How many calories are there in spinach?'"
But if you want to know how many calories there are in sperm, you'll have to ask Uncle Cecil.
Slashdot Mirror
The article's not about how fast Windows runs, it's about how long it's taking MS to develop Vista. Yes, I hate them too, but must everyone be so eager to bash Microsoft products that they can't RTFA?
...the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ordered inspections of all nuclear plants in Illinois (11, the most of any U.S. state) following an "emergency" at an an Exelon-owned plant on Monday along with several tritium leaks at more than one plant in past months. Of course, Exelon's flacks downplay the chances of public danger in all these cases.
When I tried to hit the google.cn link, it apparently checked my IP, determined I wasn't inside China, and redirected me back to google.com so that both links gave me the same result. So not only is Google in bed with the Chinese government regarding censorship, but it's being surreptitious about it for the rest of us. That seems doubly evil to me.
Also, there are a lot of objects up there (spent rocket stages, dead satellites) that stand a good chance of exploding as they age (from leaking hypergolic propellants, etc.), which tends to generate lots and lots of chunks that are too small to track but big enough to cause said VBD.
Oh sure -- you eat one conservationist, and they tag you a carnivore.
RTFA: since 1932. Hence, no Verne either.
Of all our friends (most of whom are quite successful in their jobs), only one has what I'd call a working career (he's an artist) but even he has a day job to help pay the bills.
That said, I work for a pretty terrific, pro-technology company that runs its employees to the brink of job burnout but which also shows its appreciation extremely well, in a myriad of ways -- bonuses are solid and (as one example) last year's company anniversary party had Counting Crows performing. And they're hiring.
I'm thinking of those emergency flashlights that are powered by shaking them up and down for a minute. An internal magnet bounces up and down, passing through a coil to generate current that charges a capacitor. Seems less Rube-Goldbergian than a rack-and-pinion attached to a DC motor, and could probably be adapted to this system.
What they are effectively saying is, the 30 year experiment that was the space shuttle was a failure.
Pretty much, yes.
The Soviets tried a spaceplane (Buran), heavily copied from the U.S. Shuttle, and quickly decided it was too expensive to operate. Didn't even have to risk human lives to figure that out -- the first flight was unmanned and remote-controlled.
Make a simple change of the NYT's graphic, using 1972 technology, and you have a Saturn V for heavy cargo lifting and the quick-and-dirty Saturn IB for crew launches. Both tried-and-true vehicles, somewhat overbuilt but ripe for upgrades and improvements.
IMO if we'd stuck with and upgraded what we had instead of pursuing the Shuttle boondoggle, we'd be walking on Mars by now. (Of course, there would have been zero political clout available to get it done, but that's a different issue.)
At least we got some nice engine technology out of it. The Delta IV's main engine is the direct result of lessons learned from the Shuttle's SSMEs.
Well, ice is heavy, for one thing. So it would definitely adversely affect the rocket's performance. A lesser issue might be the possibility of damage to the rocket when it sloughs off.
I'm impressed that they appear to have done this shot directly across Las Vegas. Surely the air/light/MW pollution must have been detrimental?
I agree that Miles is the very best we've got, but in terms of enthusiasm and sheer geekiness there was no one better than his predecessor, the late great John Holloman. Loved it when John would say "I'm not sure, let me check" and then haul out his 4-inch-thick binder of the Shuttle Operations Manual. Hey vultures, I've got some MSNBC commentator's bones for you to pick!
My site lists as many of the impacts and landings as I could find, both Russian and U.S. Despite the good info, its interface kind of sucks, particularly in light of Google's nice one -- looks like it's time to get hacking Google Moon.
... and then crashed into his own trail.
You're thinking of David Ogden Stiers.
Did every little engineering tweak that someone thought up on the fly make it into the documentation? I doubt it. Getting to the moon was easy -- the hard part was figuring out how to build a working Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft.
Too bad for you. As great as Curry, Hyde-Pierce, and Azaria were in the Chicago run, it's Sara Ramirez that made the show. Astounding singer in a wide range of musical styles, hot hot hot, and best of all, comedic sensibility and timing that put even Carol Cleveland to shame.
Then one day while I was out in Elgin on a site visit, I ran across the Elgin Watch Company's transit observatory, where daily star sightings were taken to provide accurate time measurements to clocks throughout the Elgin network, which received updates via "ticker" (unintended, unfortunate pun) service. Turns out Union Station really did display Elgin Central Time!
Of course, the observatory was closed in 1958 when it was made obsolete by... atomic clocks.
And a decade after that, we'd forgotten how we did it.
We didn't deorbit Skylab, it deorbited itself. We had no control over the situation, and it could just have easily hit Perth, Melbourne, or Sydney as that mostly-empty stretch of outback.
Mmmmm... yellowcake.
Too bad that the people doing the animated restorations aren't the same folks at WB that have done such a good job of restoring old films like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. The Onion AV Club has a very interesting interview with the senior VP in charge of their classic catalog.
When I was in college, the local cable company's public access station stayed on the air every weekend by running, in a continuous loop, 6-hour tapes of "Cartoon Control Room with Sloucho Barx," basically an unmoving camera shot of a guy in an ill-fitting Groucho mask sitting at the switcher and cueing up tape after tape from his extensive cartoon collection.
One week, Sloucho ran an entire show with the theme of censored, racist, or otherwise inappropriate cartoons. There were some doozies - all of it WB and MGM stuff - but in its defence everything he aired was first shown on the big screen during Saturday matinees in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Moreover, between every cartoon he offered disclaimers and deprecations, stating the show was meant to illustrate the mindset of the past, neither he nor the cable company supported these views, if you're letting your kids watch this you'd better be talking to them about what they're seeing, I can't believe what an awful joke that was, etc. etc.
Of course the complaints poured in anyway, and needless to say it was Sloucho's last show.
Back to the main topic... aside from Sloucho's fondness for the early-30s WB cartoon "Freddy the Freshman," which he played on every one of his shows, he also clued me in on another obscure one, Chuck Jones' 1940 "The Dover Boys." In it, Jones experimented with a sort of visual shorthand, with fast swooshing movements punctuated by stylised poses. The characters move across the screen as colourful blurs, saving the animators from having to draw a complete figure with every frame. Nowadays it's a common thing - such as the Road Runner's spinning legs - but this was the cartoon where it all began.
"The Dover Boys" is included on WB's Looney Tunes Vol. 2, and I fear what they might have done to action frames that could be construed as being nothing but noise.
But if you want to know how many calories there are in sperm, you'll have to ask Uncle Cecil.
Oops, correction: it smacked hard southeast of Copernicus crater.