Here in Chicago, you can listen to the local news radio station and get a traffic report every 10 minutes. This tells you the travel times for every expressway in town, both ways, in about 30 seconds -- and is rattled off so quickly that it can literally take a person years to learn how to decipher the info pertinent to them.
I think most people would benefit from a system that told them "turn right here" and had the granularity to warn them about breakdowns/emergencies/etc on surface streets as well as the highways. (I definitely would have liked to have known how to avoid the insane traffic jam that resulted last fall when some dipshit threw himself in front of a CTA train and shut down both the subway and the street above at the peak of rush hour.)
The average speed of all vehicles might not improve much, but it might alleviate the times when dozen or hundreds of vehicles are stacked up at a standstill with nowhere to go (admittedly at the cost of slowing down the drivers who routinely use the bypass streets). More information can only help, and this seems a much better solution than most stopgap measures, such as the intermittent stoplights on the on-ramps that 99% of drivers blow through to cram onto an already-congested highway.
without new batteries and gyros on a regular basis, it can't be kept functional
Right, once the gyros fail the Hubble would start to tumble, making the chances of latching on to it (with a robot, a rocket motor, or a shuttle arm) mighty slim.
The optical surface in the hubble is flawed.
Not really. As far as the mirror itself goes, it's still one of the most perfectly shaped mirrors ever made. It's just that its shape isn't quite right for the Hubble. It was ground a little too flat, making its focal point slightly off from where they intended it to be, so everything was a little out of focus. The first servicing mission added a kludgey lens system to adjust things, like wearing a set of bifocals. But later instruments were retooled to compensate internally, and brought the focus up to intended specs.
I'm reminded of an editorial cartoon that appeared after the Challenger accident in 1986. It had a picture of a Conestoga wagon crossing the prairie with no one at the reins, along with a caption saying "Alarmed by the many dangers, the early pioneers abandoned further exploration except for a few unmanned probes."
Maybe they were talking about the fire during the attempted launch of Soyuz T-10 that destroyed the rocket, the cosmonauts only escaping because the Soyuz has a launch escape system, a rocket that pulled the spacecraft clear of the inferno.
Ah, no... American press couldn't care less about Russian space accomplishments.
If you think flying missions out of numerical order is confusing, you'll love the numbering system NASA used for the 10th thru 25th launches. Take Challenger as an example, 51-L. The 5 was the intended year of launch, 1985, even though the flight was moved into January 1986. The 1 stands for the launch site, KSC, even though the SLC-6 pad at Vandenberg AFB in California (site 2) was never completed. The L gives the flight order for that year, so it was intended as the 12th launch of 1985, but even if it had launched that year it would have only been the 10th flight. Fortunately this system is one of the things they reconsidered during the '86-'88 hiatus.
Then as now, they attach a mission number to a particular flight in the early planning stages and never change it. Imagine the gigantic piles of documentation that would need to be rewritten if they did.
The X-15 rocket plane had a similar problem. On one early flight the engine blew up at ignition and not all of the propellants were jettisoned. It came down a little hard and snapped the fuselage in its midsection. Looked like it had broken its back. It was repairable, and flew again.
Spotty reception can result in worse answers than "no data." During a train ride on the south side of Chicago my GPS receiver extrapolated from two intermittent satellite signals and said that we were travelling in a perfectly straight line at an altitude of 3 miles above northern Ontario, at a speed of 1,300 MPH.
That Matted Widescreen page explains what you're seeing with The Fifth Element. To quote: "Only live-action scenes in Super35 movies have the mattes removed. Super35 scenes with special effects are hard-matted at 2.35:1 and must undergo the pan-and-scan process to fit the screen."
Slashdot Mirror
Surveyor III, not II. Surveyor II never reached the moon: a vernier engine failure during a midcourse correction manoeuvre caused it to tumble.
How the hell can you calculate risk if your only input is the chronological age of a software system?
... or a DIV/0 error.
You gave a second input factor yourself... Number of IT staff who know FORTRAN = 0. Seems to me the equation is:
[Age of program] / [# of people to support it] = [infinitely high risk]
I require my kids to use at least 14 character passwords on our home network and I'm considering issuing them smart cards.
But is he sure they're his kids?
Here in Chicago, you can listen to the local news radio station and get a traffic report every 10 minutes. This tells you the travel times for every expressway in town, both ways, in about 30 seconds -- and is rattled off so quickly that it can literally take a person years to learn how to decipher the info pertinent to them.
I think most people would benefit from a system that told them "turn right here" and had the granularity to warn them about breakdowns/emergencies/etc on surface streets as well as the highways. (I definitely would have liked to have known how to avoid the insane traffic jam that resulted last fall when some dipshit threw himself in front of a CTA train and shut down both the subway and the street above at the peak of rush hour.)
The average speed of all vehicles might not improve much, but it might alleviate the times when dozen or hundreds of vehicles are stacked up at a standstill with nowhere to go (admittedly at the cost of slowing down the drivers who routinely use the bypass streets). More information can only help, and this seems a much better solution than most stopgap measures, such as the intermittent stoplights on the on-ramps that 99% of drivers blow through to cram onto an already-congested highway.
without new batteries and gyros on a regular basis, it can't be kept functional
Right, once the gyros fail the Hubble would start to tumble, making the chances of latching on to it (with a robot, a rocket motor, or a shuttle arm) mighty slim.
The optical surface in the hubble is flawed.
Not really. As far as the mirror itself goes, it's still one of the most perfectly shaped mirrors ever made. It's just that its shape isn't quite right for the Hubble. It was ground a little too flat, making its focal point slightly off from where they intended it to be, so everything was a little out of focus. The first servicing mission added a kludgey lens system to adjust things, like wearing a set of bifocals. But later instruments were retooled to compensate internally, and brought the focus up to intended specs.
I'm reminded of an editorial cartoon that appeared after the Challenger accident in 1986. It had a picture of a Conestoga wagon crossing the prairie with no one at the reins, along with a caption saying "Alarmed by the many dangers, the early pioneers abandoned further exploration except for a few unmanned probes."
Maybe they were talking about the fire during the attempted launch of Soyuz T-10 that destroyed the rocket, the cosmonauts only escaping because the Soyuz has a launch escape system, a rocket that pulled the spacecraft clear of the inferno.
Ah, no... American press couldn't care less about Russian space accomplishments.
If you think flying missions out of numerical order is confusing, you'll love the numbering system NASA used for the 10th thru 25th launches. Take Challenger as an example, 51-L. The 5 was the intended year of launch, 1985, even though the flight was moved into January 1986. The 1 stands for the launch site, KSC, even though the SLC-6 pad at Vandenberg AFB in California (site 2) was never completed. The L gives the flight order for that year, so it was intended as the 12th launch of 1985, but even if it had launched that year it would have only been the 10th flight. Fortunately this system is one of the things they reconsidered during the '86-'88 hiatus. Then as now, they attach a mission number to a particular flight in the early planning stages and never change it. Imagine the gigantic piles of documentation that would need to be rewritten if they did.
no amount of falling foam would have done jack to STS-114, and they'd be fine. Correction: The last flight of Columbia was STS-107.
Offer valid in Chicago only ...and L.A., Detroit, and the student ghettoes of every state university.
...his instrument isn't plugged in!
3 words: Launch Escape System
No wait, that's just the VAGF web site.
The X-15 rocket plane had a similar problem. On one early flight the engine blew up at ignition and not all of the propellants were jettisoned. It came down a little hard and snapped the fuselage in its midsection. Looked like it had broken its back. It was repairable, and flew again.
Spotty reception can result in worse answers than "no data." During a train ride on the south side of Chicago my GPS receiver extrapolated from two intermittent satellite signals and said that we were travelling in a perfectly straight line at an altitude of 3 miles above northern Ontario, at a speed of 1,300 MPH.
...but can it keep the fish from slipping down the drain before you can grab it?
If the first human clone is born less than nine months from now, it'll make this the first "shotgun" cloning license.
That Matted Widescreen page explains what you're seeing with The Fifth Element. To quote: "Only live-action scenes in Super35 movies have the mattes removed. Super35 scenes with special effects are hard-matted at 2.35:1 and must undergo the pan-and-scan process to fit the screen."