Actually, by the time the LM flew, they'd officially lost the 'E' from the name, but everyone involved still pronounced LM as 'lem' anyway. But in the documentation, it's always written as LM.
That footage--the LM ascent stage blasting off--is from one of the later Apollo missions (possibly the last, but my memory isn't certain), and the camera was mounted on a lunar rover, and controlled from mission control by Ed "Captain Video" Fendell. Because of the lag between Earth and Moon he had to time his control movements a little ahead of time, a tricky job.
Wow, GSCE's must suck. I studied Physics to degree level and the only bit of secondary school/high school science I really had to throw out was the "2 electrons fit into the first shell, then it's eight electrons per shell for all the rest" bit, and even then my Chemistry teacher warned us at the time that it was a horrible, horrible, over simplification, but a useful rule of thumb for getting a handle on the periodic table.
Everything else was an expansion of what we were taught, or new stuff. e.g., you've seen Newtonian mechanics, now here's Relativity, or you've seen this equation of motion using scaler variables, let's do it with vectors...
The article says it was Ed Smylie plus his team, but they'd begun working on it themselves almost immediately after they heard the crew were in the LM. It wasn't an issue of mission control giving them the job after they noticed the CO2 going up, as the movie shows, but mission control finding that, when they needed help, someone had already been working on the problem for hours, saving a lot of time. It's that kind of proactive culture that really made the difference, just as with the the LM lifeboat procedures.
Well, yes, of course, you could reprint the story, but the point is that this is a new story with fresh details, in particular with regard to the work done by the lunar module controller, thanks to interviews with the controllers themselves, who are aging, so it's unlikely you're going to be seeing new stories with new details for all that many more 5 year anniversaries. On the other hand, had we applied your logic at the 30th anniversary, noone would have bothered to ferret out this anniversary's new stuff.
Quite a few: I'm not dissing Howard's movie: you can't tell a four day (actually, eight year) story in two hours without taking some dramatic license. Hence the article.
It's important to realize how much what-if planning work was done up front, before Apollo 13, so that during the accident, the controllers weren't just making it all up as they went along. In particular, the efforts of the lunar module controllers in this regard are absent from the movie, as are a lot of other key contributions.
Other issues: the CSM power-up sequence was not devised primarily under astronaut Ken Mattingly's auspices, but under EECOM John Aaron. Nor did Mattingly come up with the idea of running power back into the CSM from the LM: Bob Legler, a LM controller, came up with that idea months previously. In the movie, the crew were thrown around by the oxygen tank explosion: in fact it took a few minutes for everyone to realise something very serious had happened. And Kranz never said "Failure is not an option!"
As the article points outs, the controllers agree that Howard's movie points out the sense of what went on, even if they also all agree it fictionalized a fair amount of what happened: for example it was John Aaron, not Ken Mattingly, who did the heavy lifting on the CSM power up sequence, and the idea of getting power from the LM to support the CSM, by running power backward through the umblicals, was developed months beforehand by Bob Legler.
To be strictly accurate, the heavy lifting on the trajectory side was done by a bunch of mainframes on the ground, in Houston's Real Time Computer Complex. But as the article says, they didn't have the software to compute how the trajectory of thecojoined CSM and LM would behave using the LM descent engine, so they had to call in a bunch of people to write new software! Then the burn parameters were passed up to be entered into the computer.
Perhaps, but sadly unlikely because the Apollo mission controllers are beginning to pass away at an increasing rate. At lot of them are still in good health, but Sy Liebergot has a list of deceased controllers in his 2003 autobiography, Apollo EECOM that's a page long, and he's said recently that if he released a second edition he'd have to add another bunch of names already: for example, Don Puddy, who played a key role in the post Apollo-10 sim lifeboat procedures team, passed away last November.
Actually, the space treaty doesn't prohibit the weaponization of space, just the deployment of weapons of mass destruction.
For an example of a weapon previously deployed in space by a space treaty signatory, check out Salyut-3's air-to-air (I guess, space-to-space) machine gun cannon.
Why on earth you provided a link that ends with "How many other names should also have been on there remains to be determined" (in reference to a plaque placed on the moon listing dead astronauts) is way beyond me. Your link argues strongly against you
Becuase the only secret deaths Oberg finds are from various training and other accidents, not space accidents, and therefore there have been no Soyuz launch/orbital/landing deaths since 1971, and therefore that's a trustworthy statistic for comparing spacecraft reliability. Oberg explicitly rejects a long lists of cosmonauts rumored to have died in space. The plaque on the moon, deposited during Apollo 15, lists the names of astronauts and cosmonauts who died while on the books, even if they died nowhere near a spacecraft, e.g. Edward Givens, who died in an automobile accident. Oberg is not wondering "who else died in space," when he asks "How many other names should also have been on there?" He's lamenting the secrecy that covered up ground deaths in the Soviet Union.
As for the failures, as you are wont to point out, nothing is without risk. Soyuz's still blow up. I didn't state their reliability statistics as 100%. But they a) never blew up very often and b) blow up less often now, epescially when they're being used for manned missions: the last manned Soyuz booster explosion was a pad explosion in 1983. Fortunately, unlike the shuttle, in that case the cosmanauts had a emergceny evacauation system that worked within fractions of a second (a Faget-style escape rocket) and sent them to safety.
That the aging shuttles statistics don't follow the same trend as the Soyuz is evidenced by the recertification requirement (one no-one expects NASA to bother even trying to meet) in 2010 to allow the shuttle to continue flying. If everyone thought shuttle was getting better with age, the orginal certification program would still be valid.
Let me be clear: I do not believe the Shuttle is a deathtrap. Nor is the Soyuz a wundervehicle: it has it's own slate of problems. But I do believe the philosophy of seperating cargo and people onto seperate vehicles is a good one (which I why I was heartened to see that approach adopted for NASA's new CEV). I also believe that the economics of the shuttle prevents NASA from fully taking advantage of what it learns during missions and incorporating that into better engineering, unlike the Soyuz spacecraft and booster, if only because the Russians get to build a new one every mission.
There hasn't been a *public* Soyuz crew death since 1971
There haven't been any, and so the statistic stands. There are no gaps in the Soyuz launch records, no missing crews. Jim Oberg has pretty much debunked claims of covered up deaths in space. The deaths you explicitly refer to were indeed training accidents, and just as I don't count the crew of Apollo 1 (or people like Eliott See for that matter) in launch reliability statistics, you're correct not to count them either.
The Proton is a rocket family, but it doesn't contain the Soyuz, so I don't know where that non-sequiter comes from, especially given the proton is not human-rated. The Soyuz is also a family, but the differences between the family members comes from what upper stage you stick on top (Fregat, etc). The lower stage plus boosters is the same, right back to the original R-7 ICBM adapted to launch Sputnik. You can find more recent launch data from Starsem, the Soyuz launch company, and historical data can be also be found pretty easily, assuming you're searching for the right rocket family! If you're vague on Russian rocket families, this diagram will help. The Proton statistics -- a completely different, cargo rated booster-- have no bearing on the Soyuz statistics, the actual launch vehicle that is in the same arena as the shuttle (and these days the Long March 2F) in putting humans in orbit.
What statistics are you using? If you are talking about what vehicle has the best safety record that you can fly in today, as opposed to, perhaps, a Vostok vs. a Mercury Capsule, then it's Soyuz vs. Shuttle. And there the difference in mission counts is 86 to 113: within the bounds of "nearly as many," at least enough to allow meaningful comparision.
Although there's been some hairraising moments, that there hasn't been a Soyuz crew death since 1971, indicates a mature spacecraft design whose reliability has increased over time, something that can't be said about the shuttle. In other words, the practice of launching Soyuz's has demonstrably shown improvements in the chances of crew survival, while launching shuttles has not. Indeed, the physical aging involved with these resuable vehicles has given rise to significant concerns in itself. If everyone thought the shuttle was getting better with age, it would not need to be recertified in 2010, something no-one believes is going to happen.
It's also worth noting that the Soyuz booster itself has had nearly 1,700 launches under its belt, far outstripping any US launcher, with a reliability rate of around 96-98% since its introduction back in the 1950s. Of the 98 launches since 1996, the Soyuz booster has one failure: a 99% success rate, indicating that it too has become more reliable over time.
Do you think you are a fucking rocket scientist!?! Most of them are... you are not smarter than the lowest 5% of people at NASA... why don't you people quit thinking you know everything and leave the worrying up to the people who REALLY know what they are talking about.
NASA engineers are smart, but that doesn't mean they, or NASA as a whole, aren't capable of huge errors.
Go read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, especially the bit where it discusses how exactly the institutional arrogance you seem to be endorsing insulated NASA from listening to critics and contributed to the collapse of the safety culture within the manned space program. You'll find it on pages 102-106 of the free pdf of volume 1. Here's one quote, emphasis mine:
In the aftermath of the Challenger accident, these contradictory forces prompted a resistance to externally imposed changes and an attempt to maintain the internal belief that NASA was still a "perfect place," alone in its ability to execute a program of human space flight. Within NASA centers, as Human Space Flight Program managers strove to maintain their view of the organization, they lost their ability to accept criticism, leading them to reject the recommendations of many boards and blue-ribbon panels, the Rogers Commission among them.
External criticism and doubt, rather than spurring NASA to change for the better, instead reinforced the will to "impose the party line vision on the environment, not to reconsider it," according to one authority on organizational behavior. This in turn led to "flawed decision making, self deception, introversion and a diminished curiosity about the world outside the perfect place." The NASA human space flight culture the Board found during its investigation manifested many of these characteristics, in particular a self-confidence about NASA possessing unique knowledge about how to safely launch people into space. As will be discussed later in this chapter, as well as in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, the Board views this cultural resistance as a fundamental impediment to NASA's effective organizational performance.
Man, I used to love Tony Hart's show: a rare gem in that it managed to avoid patronising children, and was a hell of a lot more creative than Blue Peter.
It is of course totally possible to create a wifi-based mesh network, but the Mesh network in Vegas inverts that idea: mesh is used for the backbone (which city workers and high end subscribers can access directly), with bridges to local WiFi hot spots for normal consumers. The radio technology underlying the Vegas mesh is very different from WiFi. The company which brought the technology over from its military roots (MeshNetworks) was bought by Motorala a few months ago, so expect to see more of it, including the possibility of a Mesh-based cell phone network.
The advantage of the Vegas Mesh technology is that it can handle, e.g. people driving around at 40 miles per hour and still maintain a seamless high speed VPN connection, even when moving from access point to access point, something 802.11 can't do. Nor do 802.11 based systems easily allow clients to become peers in the network, thereby automatically scaling coverage -- it's basically a backbone-and-star configuration, while MeshNetwork's tech is a true peer-to-peer mesh configuration (excluding anything on the other side of a WiFi bridge of course). However, MeshNetwork's cards for direct access are a lot pricier than WiFi cards, and the bells and whistles may not be needed for some municipalities anyway, especially if all you are interested in is providing WiFi service in the first place: Mesh really shines when you're also considering it as part of a package that includes first responder communications.
Disclaimer -- I'm the author of the original IEEE Spectrum article!
Your prize for asking that rare gem, a perceptive question on/., deserves to be rewarded by a (hopefully) informative answer:
Jim Oberg has a good analysis of the problem in an article on an earlier thruster incideny. In summary, a "mystery force" is being applied to the station during spacewalks which torques it and overloads the gyroscopes normally used to maintain attitude control. The Russians think it may be a small leak from the airlock, NASA is leaning more towards venting from the spacesuits.
A monopoly is "the power to fix prices or exclude competition, coupled with policies designed to use or preserve that power."
Google demonstrably does not have this power. Just because it is popular -- even to the point where you imagine it's used exclusively by everyone -- doesn't make it a monopoly, because competitors have no artificial barriers to market entry raised to them and consumers have low, or zero, switching costs.
If even if, somehow, Google did become a monoply, there are legal and illegal monopolies. Microsoft was shown to be an illegal monoply, while no credible evidence has been offered to show Google would fulfil the criteria established under the Sherman act, even if their monoply status was granted as a given.
It's not the same: Microsoft was illegally leveraging a monoply via forced bundling that had locked in consumers.
Google may be succesful, and even the gold standard for Internet searches, but it does not have a monoply on search (MSN, Yahoo, Teoma, etc), nor does it lock in consumers -- you can go to a different search engine by simply typing in a different URL into your browser bar. Not so easy to swap operating systems. And where exactly is the forced bundling?
In other words, Google has not artificially raised barriers to market entry as Microsoft did, and therefore substituting "Microsoft" for "Google" creates a spurious comparison.
As for the underlying ethics, having one rule for outsiders and one rule for insiders is extremely common: look at every closed source EULA: it says you can't decompile the code, for example. But do you think anyone squawks if the original developer's own engineers don't abide by the same restriction?
If you want a Google lisiting, you have to dance to Google's tune. Don't like? Don't play. If it realy upsets enough people, Google will see it's search relevancies fade and they will adjust accordingly. This is the kind of market force adjustment that Google is subject to, precisely because its situation's is not the same as Microsoft's antitrust situation.
Unfortunately, and as the article points out, NTP synchronises only the System clock. Most of the article concerns itself with the TCP stack clock, an independant and different clock which doesn't get synched with NTP (it's also typically just set to zero at boot time as another example of its difference to system time)
Alan Turing was very unlikely to be known by a couple of Atari employees in California.
While the Bletchly Park work was kept secret for many years, by the 1970's Turing was already a demigod in computer science circles for his invention of that little mathematical creation, the Universal Turing Machine, published in the open scientific literature in 1936. After the war, Turing was publicly associated with computing and made many open contributions, especially regarding artificial intelligence: in a very well known paper he published the concept of the Turing Test in 1950.
People who live in glass amateur historian houses shouldn't throw stones:)
Unfortunatley, this is a classic ad hominem attack.
You have done nothing to advance your point because you have offered nothing to counter the substance of "The Ford guy"'s allegations. Now, if you'd demonstrated, say, a conflict of interest, that would have been compelling, but just flailing away at someone does not a useful advocate make.
Books are not free to produce or distribute, either. Laptops have the advantage that once distributed, they could greatly ease later distribution logistics: want kids to have 10 text books each for their class curriculum? Ship the school one CD.
It's been so long since I've seen a slashdot thread end with "You're right..."
There must be something in the water -- that happended to me too, a couple of days ago. It was so unsettling that (after marking the respondant a friend), I had to go lie down for half an hour.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, by the time the LM flew, they'd officially lost the 'E' from the name, but everyone involved still pronounced LM as 'lem' anyway. But in the documentation, it's always written as LM.
That footage--the LM ascent stage blasting off--is from one of the later Apollo missions (possibly the last, but my memory isn't certain), and the camera was mounted on a lunar rover, and controlled from mission control by Ed "Captain Video" Fendell. Because of the lag between Earth and Moon he had to time his control movements a little ahead of time, a tricky job.
Wow, GSCE's must suck. I studied Physics to degree level and the only bit of secondary school/high school science I really had to throw out was the "2 electrons fit into the first shell, then it's eight electrons per shell for all the rest" bit, and even then my Chemistry teacher warned us at the time that it was a horrible, horrible, over simplification, but a useful rule of thumb for getting a handle on the periodic table.
Everything else was an expansion of what we were taught, or new stuff. e.g., you've seen Newtonian mechanics, now here's Relativity, or you've seen this equation of motion using scaler variables, let's do it with vectors...
The article says it was Ed Smylie plus his team, but they'd begun working on it themselves almost immediately after they heard the crew were in the LM. It wasn't an issue of mission control giving them the job after they noticed the CO2 going up, as the movie shows, but mission control finding that, when they needed help, someone had already been working on the problem for hours, saving a lot of time. It's that kind of proactive culture that really made the difference, just as with the the LM lifeboat procedures.
Well, yes, of course, you could reprint the story, but the point is that this is a new story with fresh details, in particular with regard to the work done by the lunar module controller, thanks to interviews with the controllers themselves, who are aging, so it's unlikely you're going to be seeing new stories with new details for all that many more 5 year anniversaries. On the other hand, had we applied your logic at the 30th anniversary, noone would have bothered to ferret out this anniversary's new stuff.
Quite a few: I'm not dissing Howard's movie: you can't tell a four day (actually, eight year) story in two hours without taking some dramatic license. Hence the article.
It's important to realize how much what-if planning work was done up front, before Apollo 13, so that during the accident, the controllers weren't just making it all up as they went along. In particular, the efforts of the lunar module controllers in this regard are absent from the movie, as are a lot of other key contributions.
Other issues: the CSM power-up sequence was not devised primarily under astronaut Ken Mattingly's auspices, but under EECOM John Aaron. Nor did Mattingly come up with the idea of running power back into the CSM from the LM: Bob Legler, a LM controller, came up with that idea months previously. In the movie, the crew were thrown around by the oxygen tank explosion: in fact it took a few minutes for everyone to realise something very serious had happened. And Kranz never said "Failure is not an option!"
As the article points outs, the controllers agree that Howard's movie points out the sense of what went on, even if they also all agree it fictionalized a fair amount of what happened: for example it was John Aaron, not Ken Mattingly, who did the heavy lifting on the CSM power up sequence, and the idea of getting power from the LM to support the CSM, by running power backward through the umblicals, was developed months beforehand by Bob Legler.
To be strictly accurate, the heavy lifting on the trajectory side was done by a bunch of mainframes on the ground, in Houston's Real Time Computer Complex. But as the article says, they didn't have the software to compute how the trajectory of thecojoined CSM and LM would behave using the LM descent engine, so they had to call in a bunch of people to write new software! Then the burn parameters were passed up to be entered into the computer.
will we have to see this article every 5 years
Perhaps, but sadly unlikely because the Apollo mission controllers are beginning to pass away at an increasing rate. At lot of them are still in good health, but Sy Liebergot has a list of deceased controllers in his 2003 autobiography, Apollo EECOM that's a page long, and he's said recently that if he released a second edition he'd have to add another bunch of names already: for example, Don Puddy, who played a key role in the post Apollo-10 sim lifeboat procedures team, passed away last November.
Actually, the space treaty doesn't prohibit the weaponization of space, just the deployment of weapons of mass destruction.
For an example of a weapon previously deployed in space by a space treaty signatory, check out Salyut-3's air-to-air (I guess, space-to-space) machine gun cannon.
Why on earth you provided a link that ends with "How many other names should also have been on there remains to be determined" (in reference to a plaque placed on the moon listing dead astronauts) is way beyond me. Your link argues strongly against you
Becuase the only secret deaths Oberg finds are from various training and other accidents, not space accidents, and therefore there have been no Soyuz launch/orbital/landing deaths since 1971, and therefore that's a trustworthy statistic for comparing spacecraft reliability. Oberg explicitly rejects a long lists of cosmonauts rumored to have died in space. The plaque on the moon, deposited during Apollo 15, lists the names of astronauts and cosmonauts who died while on the books, even if they died nowhere near a spacecraft, e.g. Edward Givens, who died in an automobile accident. Oberg is not wondering "who else died in space," when he asks "How many other names should also have been on there?" He's lamenting the secrecy that covered up ground deaths in the Soviet Union.
As for the failures, as you are wont to point out, nothing is without risk. Soyuz's still blow up. I didn't state their reliability statistics as 100%. But they a) never blew up very often and b) blow up less often now, epescially when they're being used for manned missions: the last manned Soyuz booster explosion was a pad explosion in 1983. Fortunately, unlike the shuttle, in that case the cosmanauts had a emergceny evacauation system that worked within fractions of a second (a Faget-style escape rocket) and sent them to safety.
That the aging shuttles statistics don't follow the same trend as the Soyuz is evidenced by the recertification requirement (one no-one expects NASA to bother even trying to meet) in 2010 to allow the shuttle to continue flying. If everyone thought shuttle was getting better with age, the orginal certification program would still be valid.
Let me be clear: I do not believe the Shuttle is a deathtrap. Nor is the Soyuz a wundervehicle: it has it's own slate of problems. But I do believe the philosophy of seperating cargo and people onto seperate vehicles is a good one (which I why I was heartened to see that approach adopted for NASA's new CEV). I also believe that the economics of the shuttle prevents NASA from fully taking advantage of what it learns during missions and incorporating that into better engineering, unlike the Soyuz spacecraft and booster, if only because the Russians get to build a new one every mission.
There hasn't been a *public* Soyuz crew death since 1971
There haven't been any, and so the statistic stands. There are no gaps in the Soyuz launch records, no missing crews. Jim Oberg has pretty much debunked claims of covered up deaths in space. The deaths you explicitly refer to were indeed training accidents, and just as I don't count the crew of Apollo 1 (or people like Eliott See for that matter) in launch reliability statistics, you're correct not to count them either.
The Proton is a rocket family, but it doesn't contain the Soyuz, so I don't know where that non-sequiter comes from, especially given the proton is not human-rated. The Soyuz is also a family, but the differences between the family members comes from what upper stage you stick on top (Fregat, etc). The lower stage plus boosters is the same, right back to the original R-7 ICBM adapted to launch Sputnik. You can find more recent launch data from Starsem, the Soyuz launch company, and historical data can be also be found pretty easily, assuming you're searching for the right rocket family! If you're vague on Russian rocket families, this diagram will help. The Proton statistics -- a completely different, cargo rated booster-- have no bearing on the Soyuz statistics, the actual launch vehicle that is in the same arena as the shuttle (and these days the Long March 2F) in putting humans in orbit.
What statistics are you using? If you are talking about what vehicle has the best safety record that you can fly in today, as opposed to, perhaps, a Vostok vs. a Mercury Capsule, then it's Soyuz vs. Shuttle. And there the difference in mission counts is 86 to 113: within the bounds of "nearly as many," at least enough to allow meaningful comparision.
Although there's been some hairraising moments, that there hasn't been a Soyuz crew death since 1971, indicates a mature spacecraft design whose reliability has increased over time, something that can't be said about the shuttle. In other words, the practice of launching Soyuz's has demonstrably shown improvements in the chances of crew survival, while launching shuttles has not. Indeed, the physical aging involved with these resuable vehicles has given rise to significant concerns in itself. If everyone thought the shuttle was getting better with age, it would not need to be recertified in 2010, something no-one believes is going to happen.
It's also worth noting that the Soyuz booster itself has had nearly 1,700 launches under its belt, far outstripping any US launcher, with a reliability rate of around 96-98% since its introduction back in the 1950s. Of the 98 launches since 1996, the Soyuz booster has one failure: a 99% success rate, indicating that it too has become more reliable over time.
Do you think you are a fucking rocket scientist!?! Most of them are... you are not smarter than the lowest 5% of people at NASA... why don't you people quit thinking you know everything and leave the worrying up to the people who REALLY know what they are talking about.
NASA engineers are smart, but that doesn't mean they, or NASA as a whole, aren't capable of huge errors.
Go read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, especially the bit where it discusses how exactly the institutional arrogance you seem to be endorsing insulated NASA from listening to critics and contributed to the collapse of the safety culture within the manned space program. You'll find it on pages 102-106 of the free pdf of volume 1. Here's one quote, emphasis mine:
In the aftermath of the Challenger accident, these contradictory forces prompted a resistance to externally imposed changes and an attempt to maintain the internal belief that NASA was still a "perfect place," alone in its ability to execute a program of human space flight. Within NASA centers, as Human Space Flight Program managers strove to maintain their view of the organization, they lost their ability to accept criticism, leading them to reject the recommendations of many boards and blue-ribbon panels, the Rogers Commission among them.
External criticism and doubt, rather than spurring NASA to change for the better, instead reinforced the will to "impose the party line vision on the environment, not to reconsider it," according to one authority on organizational behavior. This in turn led to "flawed decision making, self deception, introversion and a diminished curiosity about the world outside the perfect place." The NASA human space flight culture the Board found during its investigation manifested many of these characteristics, in particular a self-confidence about NASA possessing unique knowledge about how to safely launch people into space. As will be discussed later in this chapter, as well as in Chapters 6, 7, and 8, the Board views this cultural resistance as a fundamental impediment to NASA's effective organizational performance.
Man, I used to love Tony Hart's show: a rare gem in that it managed to avoid patronising children, and was a hell of a lot more creative than Blue Peter.
It is of course totally possible to create a wifi-based mesh network, but the Mesh network in Vegas inverts that idea: mesh is used for the backbone (which city workers and high end subscribers can access directly), with bridges to local WiFi hot spots for normal consumers. The radio technology underlying the Vegas mesh is very different from WiFi. The company which brought the technology over from its military roots (MeshNetworks) was bought by Motorala a few months ago, so expect to see more of it, including the possibility of a Mesh-based cell phone network.
The advantage of the Vegas Mesh technology is that it can handle, e.g. people driving around at 40 miles per hour and still maintain a seamless high speed VPN connection, even when moving from access point to access point, something 802.11 can't do. Nor do 802.11 based systems easily allow clients to become peers in the network, thereby automatically scaling coverage -- it's basically a backbone-and-star configuration, while MeshNetwork's tech is a true peer-to-peer mesh configuration (excluding anything on the other side of a WiFi bridge of course). However, MeshNetwork's cards for direct access are a lot pricier than WiFi cards, and the bells and whistles may not be needed for some municipalities anyway, especially if all you are interested in is providing WiFi service in the first place: Mesh really shines when you're also considering it as part of a package that includes first responder communications.
Disclaimer -- I'm the author of the original IEEE Spectrum article!
Your prize for asking that rare gem, a perceptive question on /., deserves to be rewarded by a (hopefully) informative answer:
Jim Oberg has a good analysis of the problem in an article on an earlier thruster incideny. In summary, a "mystery force" is being applied to the station during spacewalks which torques it and overloads the gyroscopes normally used to maintain attitude control. The Russians think it may be a small leak from the airlock, NASA is leaning more towards venting from the spacesuits.
Bzzt. Wrong.
A monopoly is "the power to fix prices or exclude competition, coupled with policies designed to use or preserve that power."
Google demonstrably does not have this power. Just because it is popular -- even to the point where you imagine it's used exclusively by everyone -- doesn't make it a monopoly, because competitors have no artificial barriers to market entry raised to them and consumers have low, or zero, switching costs.
If even if, somehow, Google did become a monoply, there are legal and illegal monopolies. Microsoft was shown to be an illegal monoply, while no credible evidence has been offered to show Google would fulfil the criteria established under the Sherman act, even if their monoply status was granted as a given.
It's not the same: Microsoft was illegally leveraging a monoply via forced bundling that had locked in consumers.
Google may be succesful, and even the gold standard for Internet searches, but it does not have a monoply on search (MSN, Yahoo, Teoma, etc), nor does it lock in consumers -- you can go to a different search engine by simply typing in a different URL into your browser bar. Not so easy to swap operating systems. And where exactly is the forced bundling?
In other words, Google has not artificially raised barriers to market entry as Microsoft did, and therefore substituting "Microsoft" for "Google" creates a spurious comparison.
As for the underlying ethics, having one rule for outsiders and one rule for insiders is extremely common: look at every closed source EULA: it says you can't decompile the code, for example. But do you think anyone squawks if the original developer's own engineers don't abide by the same restriction?
If you want a Google lisiting, you have to dance to Google's tune. Don't like? Don't play. If it realy upsets enough people, Google will see it's search relevancies fade and they will adjust accordingly. This is the kind of market force adjustment that Google is subject to, precisely because its situation's is not the same as Microsoft's antitrust situation.
Unfortunately, and as the article points out, NTP synchronises only the System clock. Most of the article concerns itself with the TCP stack clock, an independant and different clock which doesn't get synched with NTP (it's also typically just set to zero at boot time as another example of its difference to system time)
"...a little anarchy, but not the hurting kind!"
Hmm, fellow Great Big Sea fan then?
Alan Turing was very unlikely to be known by a couple of Atari employees in California.
:)
While the Bletchly Park work was kept secret for many years, by the 1970's Turing was already a demigod in computer science circles for his invention of that little mathematical creation, the Universal Turing Machine, published in the open scientific literature in 1936. After the war, Turing was publicly associated with computing and made many open contributions, especially regarding artificial intelligence: in a very well known paper he published the concept of the Turing Test in 1950.
People who live in glass amateur historian houses shouldn't throw stones
Unfortunatley, this is a classic ad hominem attack.
You have done nothing to advance your point because you have offered nothing to counter the substance of "The Ford guy"'s allegations. Now, if you'd demonstrated, say, a conflict of interest, that would have been compelling, but just flailing away at someone does not a useful advocate make.
Books are not free to produce or distribute, either. Laptops have the advantage that once distributed, they could greatly ease later distribution logistics: want kids to have 10 text books each for their class curriculum? Ship the school one CD.
It's been so long since I've seen a slashdot thread end with "You're right ..."
There must be something in the water -- that happended to me too, a couple of days ago. It was so unsettling that (after marking the respondant a friend), I had to go lie down for half an hour.