Because we can do a hell of a lot better than that now.
And we'd still have to get up there to put it in place. If we're going to do that, might as well just service what's already up there. There's nothing wrong with the Hubble that isn't module-replacable. Replacing the modules and reboosting it would make it every bit as good as a new replacement based on the same blueprints. Actually using the existing one is better because there's a few tons of stuff that don't need to be boosted to orbit.
One thing that could be gained by a new scope is that we might be able to put it in an orbit that was close enough to the ISS that NASA's goal of not putting up shuttle missions unless they could get to ISS could be met. I don't know; it's possible that those orbits are undesirable for telescope work; there are many constraints on where the Hubble can point and how it can be used.
Arguing the other side, as far as building an exact Hubble replacement, it'd actually be relatively cheap; there still exist a lot of backup components, and also there are new instruments and gyros that were intended to be installed in the Hubble. There's even another mirror (that does NOT have the spherical aberration of the current one) - it was made by Kodak by ion etching and I understand it's an excellent mirror.
How can there possibly be this many "memory card failures?" I mean, really, even if you go down to Best Buy and just buy a pile of CF cards, they just don't fail that often. I've only bought a dozen or so cards, but I've used them a bunch in the last 4 years or so, my GB card gets filled nearly full every day and then erased, as I transport data around, and I've never had a failure. How many times have you heard of thumb drives failing? I never have.
I'd think if they bought good cards, pretested them, and used a filesystem that could guard against corruption, there should hardly ever be a problem. I could imagine maybe putting up with ONE failure across all deployed machines per election. More than that, there's something wrong.
I personally feel that the companies building these machines do not take the job seriously enough. I think this is something that ought to be open-sourced. There are a HELL of a lot of people who would GLADLY donate their time to vet this code.
For me anyway, it's not about who won or lost THIS election. It's about making sure the next election, and the ones after that, are fair. The best way to do that is to do a deep analysis of problems with THIS election, find the reasons for the problem, and figure out how to fix them without causing more problems.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
I'm personally also willing to believe that they were fucked up by committee. If one programmer, or perhaps one programmer and one designer, wrote it, in consultation with, but not being controlled by, a group knowledgeable with voting procedure, I think we'd have a nice, workable system.
True fuckups happen when you give design control to a committee.
Our company has RFID security badges for going through doors. I figured I'd use the opportunity to test if aluminum foil will block the signal. With no foil, the card will read from 20 cm. With one piece of foil on the back side, it will read from about 1cm. With the foil on the front, it will read, eventually, if you rub it right on the receiver. With foil wrapped completely around, you can't make it read.
I have no doubt that much more sensitive receivers could be built, but the foil does significantly reduce the read range.
Also, keep in mind that a reader has to transmit an RF pulse strong enough to power the chip for a fraction of a second, and the transmitted power is going to obey the inverse cube law. If the chip is shielded and the RF power pulse has to get through that, if you want to read from 20 feet away, you're going to be carrying around (or mounting if you're part of the establishment) a not-insignificantly-sized battery pack, transmitter, and directional antenna in order to get enough power cranked out to power that chip inside its foil wrap.
In fact, it may be so much power that it would be hazardous if someone stepped in front of it near the antenna.
My mom doesn't understand why I make her click on the red globe icon instead of the blue E.
You can resort to the old standby of car analogies.
The red globe is a nice new car. The blue E looks like a nice new car but there's a bomb under the hood that has a percentage chance of exploding and messing up your computer whenever you use it.
So obviously, use it ONLY if absolutely necessary.
I think some employers hire contractors and then offer full time positions because if a person turns out to be an idiot, it's easy to let contractors go, not so easy (and potential to get sued for wrongful termination) with employees.
Every company has hired people who look great in the interview and wind up being idiots, or jerks, or just unproductive. OTOH there are a lot of very productive, smart people who would be great assets, but don't interview well. Using the contractor option gives companies the option to give you the benefit of the doubt without such a commitment.
So if you're really a competent, hard working individual, going for a contract position is probably a good bet (caveat; I've never done it myself). OTOH if you're the type that got an MSCE through learning-by-rote, and doesn't really know what they're doing, watch out.
The DVDs available on bittorrent, carefully made from the non-special(*)-edition Laserdiscs, look a heck of a lot better than the VHS versions ever did.
(*) I think in the case of Star Wars, "special" in the sense of "short bus."
Yes, that's why copying your DVDs to DVD-R with "Remove PUO's" checked is a must with Disney DVDs. Put the originals in a binder in the basement. Keeps the kids from scratching the originals all up too.
If they're in low orbit, they'll be visible to the naked eye under the right conditions. "Right conditions" = they're in sunlight, you're not, like in the first or last couple of hours of night.
If they're in geosync orbit then you'll need a decent (8" or larger) telescope.
If you're at a dark site, you can lay on your back and watch satellites trucking by constantly all night, usually multiples at once. They're so thick that they *commonly* are visible going through a 1 degree telescope field (typically this happens to me several times in a night's 2-hour observing session) - a 1 degree field is a very small percentage of the sky, so there are a hell of a lot of satellites buzzing around if you can see them that often looking at that small an area.
Not to mention the fact that someone could track anyone in the school after they figure out which RFID is theirs
Our company uses the same system they do, at least the reader in the photo looks the same as ours.
The cards only work from a max of 20cm away. If you put a square of aluminum foil behind the card in the holder, you have to actually rub the card on the reader to get it to work. If you put aluminum foil on both sides (even if it's not totally sealed) it won't read at all even if you rub it around on the reader.
I did these tests on the big square grey reader they show. It's the most sensitive. We also have some doorjamb readers that are 5 x 10 cm, and even normally you have to get within about 4 cm to get them to read.
I had the same concerns when our system went in at work, but I don't now think that these cards will be read unless you know it. Or, at least, it's simple to take countermeasures.
True for me as well. I used to get my prescription changed yearly, and it wasn't uncommon for it to shift many degrees in axis and/or a diopter in strength. I'm 40 now, still using CRTs, and for the last 10 years or so, my prescription changes only slightly, tweaking it just a bit, maybe 1/4 diopter, maybe a few degrees of axis, every 2 or 3 years is fine. I could probably get around fine in my old glasses from 15 years ago.
This is common apparently; when my eyes were changing a lot, my optician said that eventually my eyes would settle down, everyones do.
I'm running CRTs because I like 1600x1200 or higher, and I can't afford a 19"+ LCD that does that res. OK, I could afford it, but I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.
Come on, LED brightness control should be via PWM. Get going on the microcontroller code, dude! Then you can do color cycling, timed dimming/brightning, etc.
Laying an LCD panel on an overhead projector used to be the only way to do projection. Our company threw away a dozen or so 640x480 panels intended for use with an overhead, about 8 years ago.
I also recommend Canon printers. I have an i970. While not designed intentionally for refilling, it's about as good as it gets these days. As you say, the tanks are just clear plastic boxes with ink in them, refilling is a snap. I've previously refilled Epson and HP, and the Canon is by far the easiest. After refilling Epson/HP, you have to let the ink settle overnight to eliminate bubbles, and do a lot of fiddling to get it printing right. I've refilled my Canon tanks about 15 times so far and haven't had to even do a nozzle cleaning pass once. The printer does automatically do a nozzle clean if it hasn't for a while during idle time after a print job.
The i970 is a 6 color printer, FWIW. Photo printing is quite nice.
I don't either. Every single person I've gotten to try Firefox has switched permanently. About 12 so far, including grandmothers and non-technical people.
Yes, you can create a static spark and ignite the gasoline vapors coming from the filling port.
This is usually not a huge deal. Hitting the emergency cutoff will usually stop the fire (you do find the emergency cutoff while fueling, right?), because it's only the vapor burning, and it needs a good mix of vapor and air (O2) to burn well. The vapor in the tank will not burn because there's just not enough O2 in there. So the flame will stop at the filler.
The problem is, most people freak out and grab the nozzle and yank it out of their tank. At that point they're holding a flamethrower, pumping burning gasoline all over the ground, their car, the pump, themselves, etc. This is where the big hurt comes from.
Hydrogen pumps are not going to leak fumes like gas pumps do, since they'll by necessity be sealed; what your pumping is a gas, so you'll have lock down pressure fittings at the pumps, just like the compressed natural gas fittings that are already at some filling stations.
So I think they will be much less likely to ignite, and if it does and some idiot takes the nozzle off (which is harder to do, you have to unscrew it instead of just pulling), as soon as you unscrew the fitting, both the tank and the fill nozzle have valves that will close.
Even if it did ignite and it did have a leak, you've got a flame that goes out and up. Drop on the ground and you're pretty much out of the way of the flame and can crawl/roll away from it. In contrast, get a gasoline fire, you're fscked. There's burning gasoline on the ground, and you're standing in it. Say hello to months of pain in the hospital, if you don't go straight to the morgue.
Also, there's no O2 in the tank or in the fill system. So those can't explode. Worst case is that you have a leak that ignites, giving you a jet of flame where the leak is. The flame can't propagate into the tank (no O2). I have seen people put propane camping tanks next to flares and shoot them from a distance. They don't explode, you just get a big gout of flame coming out of the side of the tank, and if the tank isn't strapped to something, it flies around for a second.
In short, I'd MUCH rather be trapped in a car with a hydrogen leak than one with a gasoline leak.
What, a 1" square Suicide Girls ad? I hardly consider that porn, but I suppose some places probably consider any image that hints at naughty bits to be actionable.
Look into refilling your cartridges. A pain for Epson, not terribly viable for HP since the carts wear out, but I've refilled my Canon i970 carts about 15 times so far. There's no hokey chip to reset, the tanks are just plastic boxes full of ink, one per color. It takes seconds to refill them, and so far no problems with air bubbles, haven't had a single clogged nozzle (actually it's working better than either my Epson or HP when I was using OEM ink!), color accuracy seems totally fine to my eyes, and permanence is acceptable (better than factory ink, but still not great).
Of course, you have to get ink from a place that does proper formulation per printer, not some generic "one-size-fits-all" thing.
It costs me about $2 to refill all the tanks on my printer. I bought a $35 kit, and after 15 refills it's just about gone. The same thing from Canon would have cost me about $540 (six $6 tanks, 15 times) - from Epson, even more ($16 black, $20 color, and the tanks were smaller).
Different world from me then. When I was in college, I was lucky to be able to scrape together enough money to buy a pizza maybe once every 4 or 6 weeks. I lived on campus, ate in the dorm, could use dad's credit card to buy enough gas to come home on break. My family took a hit by sending me to college, I was the only one in my family who went, and spending money was last priority.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we can do a hell of a lot better than that now.
And we'd still have to get up there to put it in place. If we're going to do that, might as well just service what's already up there. There's nothing wrong with the Hubble that isn't module-replacable. Replacing the modules and reboosting it would make it every bit as good as a new replacement based on the same blueprints. Actually using the existing one is better because there's a few tons of stuff that don't need to be boosted to orbit.
One thing that could be gained by a new scope is that we might be able to put it in an orbit that was close enough to the ISS that NASA's goal of not putting up shuttle missions unless they could get to ISS could be met. I don't know; it's possible that those orbits are undesirable for telescope work; there are many constraints on where the Hubble can point and how it can be used.
Arguing the other side, as far as building an exact Hubble replacement, it'd actually be relatively cheap; there still exist a lot of backup components, and also there are new instruments and gyros that were intended to be installed in the Hubble. There's even another mirror (that does NOT have the spherical aberration of the current one) - it was made by Kodak by ion etching and I understand it's an excellent mirror.
How can there possibly be this many "memory card failures?" I mean, really, even if you go down to Best Buy and just buy a pile of CF cards, they just don't fail that often. I've only bought a dozen or so cards, but I've used them a bunch in the last 4 years or so, my GB card gets filled nearly full every day and then erased, as I transport data around, and I've never had a failure. How many times have you heard of thumb drives failing? I never have.
I'd think if they bought good cards, pretested them, and used a filesystem that could guard against corruption, there should hardly ever be a problem. I could imagine maybe putting up with ONE failure across all deployed machines per election. More than that, there's something wrong.
I personally feel that the companies building these machines do not take the job seriously enough. I think this is something that ought to be open-sourced. There are a HELL of a lot of people who would GLADLY donate their time to vet this code.
For me anyway, it's not about who won or lost THIS election. It's about making sure the next election, and the ones after that, are fair. The best way to do that is to do a deep analysis of problems with THIS election, find the reasons for the problem, and figure out how to fix them without causing more problems.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
I'm personally also willing to believe that they were fucked up by committee. If one programmer, or perhaps one programmer and one designer, wrote it, in consultation with, but not being controlled by, a group knowledgeable with voting procedure, I think we'd have a nice, workable system.
True fuckups happen when you give design control to a committee.
Admit it, you posted this just for the sake of linking to your goofy homemade MAME cabinet.
Not only that, he appears to have slashdotted himself.
Our company has RFID security badges for going through doors. I figured I'd use the opportunity to test if aluminum foil will block the signal.
With no foil, the card will read from 20 cm. With one piece of foil on the back side, it will read from about 1cm. With the foil on the front, it will read, eventually, if you rub it right on the receiver. With foil wrapped completely around, you can't make it read.
I have no doubt that much more sensitive receivers could be built, but the foil does significantly reduce the read range.
Also, keep in mind that a reader has to transmit an RF pulse strong enough to power the chip for a fraction of a second, and the transmitted power is going to obey the inverse cube law. If the chip is shielded and the RF power pulse has to get through that, if you want to read from 20 feet away, you're going to be carrying around (or mounting if you're part of the establishment) a not-insignificantly-sized battery pack, transmitter, and directional antenna in order to get enough power cranked out to power that chip inside its foil wrap.
In fact, it may be so much power that it would be hazardous if someone stepped in front of it near the antenna.
My mom doesn't understand why I make her click on the red globe icon instead of the blue E.
You can resort to the old standby of car analogies.
The red globe is a nice new car. The blue E looks like a nice new car but there's a bomb under the hood that has a percentage chance of exploding and messing up your computer whenever you use it.
So obviously, use it ONLY if absolutely necessary.
Do you understand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation? Apparently not.
I think some employers hire contractors and then offer full time positions because if a person turns out to be an idiot, it's easy to let contractors go, not so easy (and potential to get sued for wrongful termination) with employees.
Every company has hired people who look great in the interview and wind up being idiots, or jerks, or just unproductive. OTOH there are a lot of very productive, smart people who would be great assets, but don't interview well. Using the contractor option gives companies the option to give you the benefit of the doubt without such a commitment.
So if you're really a competent, hard working individual, going for a contract position is probably a good bet (caveat; I've never done it myself). OTOH if you're the type that got an MSCE through learning-by-rote, and doesn't really know what they're doing, watch out.
The DVDs available on bittorrent, carefully made from the non-special(*)-edition Laserdiscs, look a heck of a lot better than the VHS versions ever did.
(*) I think in the case of Star Wars, "special" in the sense of "short bus."
Yes, that's why copying your DVDs to DVD-R with "Remove PUO's" checked is a must with Disney DVDs. Put the originals in a binder in the basement. Keeps the kids from scratching the originals all up too.
uh oh...
I guess I can take comfort in the fact that at least I'm not Cmdr Taco.
Assuming they're the same as any other satellite:
If they're in low orbit, they'll be visible to the naked eye under the right conditions. "Right conditions" = they're in sunlight, you're not, like in the first or last couple of hours of night.
If they're in geosync orbit then you'll need a decent (8" or larger) telescope.
If you're at a dark site, you can lay on your back and watch satellites trucking by constantly all night, usually multiples at once. They're so thick that they *commonly* are visible going through a 1 degree telescope field (typically this happens to me several times in a night's 2-hour observing session) - a 1 degree field is a very small percentage of the sky, so there are a hell of a lot of satellites buzzing around if you can see them that often looking at that small an area.
Not to mention the fact that someone could track anyone in the school after they figure out which RFID is theirs
Our company uses the same system they do, at least the reader in the photo looks the same as ours.
The cards only work from a max of 20cm away. If you put a square of aluminum foil behind the card in the holder, you have to actually rub the card on the reader to get it to work. If you put aluminum foil on both sides (even if it's not totally sealed) it won't read at all even if you rub it around on the reader.
I did these tests on the big square grey reader they show. It's the most sensitive. We also have some doorjamb readers that are 5 x 10 cm, and even normally you have to get within about 4 cm to get them to read.
I had the same concerns when our system went in at work, but I don't now think that these cards will be read unless you know it. Or, at least, it's simple to take countermeasures.
Yes, L&S the movie was pretty fun. L&S the TV series is sappy garbage.
"Ohana means family" - *RETCH* - OK, that was in the movie as well, but they didn't drown it in honey and keep going on about it for hours.
True for me as well. I used to get my prescription changed yearly, and it wasn't uncommon for it to shift many degrees in axis and/or a diopter in strength.
I'm 40 now, still using CRTs, and for the last 10 years or so, my prescription changes only slightly, tweaking it just a bit, maybe 1/4 diopter, maybe a few degrees of axis, every 2 or 3 years is fine. I could probably get around fine in my old glasses from 15 years ago.
This is common apparently; when my eyes were changing a lot, my optician said that eventually my eyes would settle down, everyones do.
I'm running CRTs because I like 1600x1200 or higher, and I can't afford a 19"+ LCD that does that res. OK, I could afford it, but I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.
... or "Bill Gates Declares"
translation:
Bill Gates has some new thing he wants to sell, which might be able to replace some tried-and-true technology.
Come on, LED brightness control should be via PWM. Get going on the microcontroller code, dude! Then you can do color cycling, timed dimming/brightning, etc.
Laying an LCD panel on an overhead projector used to be the only way to do projection. Our company threw away a dozen or so 640x480 panels intended for use with an overhead, about 8 years ago.
I also recommend Canon printers. I have an i970. While not designed intentionally for refilling, it's about as good as it gets these days. As you say, the tanks are just clear plastic boxes with ink in them, refilling is a snap. I've previously refilled Epson and HP, and the Canon is by far the easiest. After refilling Epson/HP, you have to let the ink settle overnight to eliminate bubbles, and do a lot of fiddling to get it printing right. I've refilled my Canon tanks about 15 times so far and haven't had to even do a nozzle cleaning pass once. The printer does automatically do a nozzle clean if it hasn't for a while during idle time after a print job.
The i970 is a 6 color printer, FWIW. Photo printing is quite nice.
I don't either. Every single person I've gotten to try Firefox has switched permanently. About 12 so far, including grandmothers and non-technical people.
Yes, you can create a static spark and ignite the gasoline vapors coming from the filling port.
This is usually not a huge deal. Hitting the emergency cutoff will usually stop the fire (you do find the emergency cutoff while fueling, right?), because it's only the vapor burning, and it needs a good mix of vapor and air (O2) to burn well. The vapor in the tank will not burn because there's just not enough O2 in there. So the flame will stop at the filler.
The problem is, most people freak out and grab the nozzle and yank it out of their tank. At that point they're holding a flamethrower, pumping burning gasoline all over the ground, their car, the pump, themselves, etc. This is where the big hurt comes from.
Hydrogen pumps are not going to leak fumes like gas pumps do, since they'll by necessity be sealed; what your pumping is a gas, so you'll have lock down pressure fittings at the pumps, just like the compressed natural gas fittings that are already at some filling stations.
So I think they will be much less likely to ignite, and if it does and some idiot takes the nozzle off (which is harder to do, you have to unscrew it instead of just pulling), as soon as you unscrew the fitting, both the tank and the fill nozzle have valves that will close.
Even if it did ignite and it did have a leak, you've got a flame that goes out and up. Drop on the ground and you're pretty much out of the way of the flame and can crawl/roll away from it. In contrast, get a gasoline fire, you're fscked. There's burning gasoline on the ground, and you're standing in it. Say hello to months of pain in the hospital, if you don't go straight to the morgue.
Also, there's no O2 in the tank or in the fill system. So those can't explode. Worst case is that you have a leak that ignites, giving you a jet of flame where the leak is. The flame can't propagate into the tank (no O2). I have seen people put propane camping tanks next to flares and shoot them from a distance. They don't explode, you just get a big gout of flame coming out of the side of the tank, and if the tank isn't strapped to something, it flies around for a second.
In short, I'd MUCH rather be trapped in a car with a hydrogen leak than one with a gasoline leak.
What, a 1" square Suicide Girls ad? I hardly consider that porn, but I suppose some places probably consider any image that hints at naughty bits to be actionable.
Look into refilling your cartridges. A pain for Epson, not terribly viable for HP since the carts wear out, but I've refilled my Canon i970 carts about 15 times so far. There's no hokey chip to reset, the tanks are just plastic boxes full of ink, one per color. It takes seconds to refill them, and so far no problems with air bubbles, haven't had a single clogged nozzle (actually it's working better than either my Epson or HP when I was using OEM ink!), color accuracy seems totally fine to my eyes, and permanence is acceptable (better than factory ink, but still not great).
Of course, you have to get ink from a place that does proper formulation per printer, not some generic "one-size-fits-all" thing.
It costs me about $2 to refill all the tanks on my printer. I bought a $35 kit, and after 15 refills it's just about gone. The same thing from Canon would have cost me about $540 (six $6 tanks, 15 times) - from Epson, even more ($16 black, $20 color, and the tanks were smaller).
Different world from me then. When I was in college, I was lucky to be able to scrape together enough money to buy a pizza maybe once every 4 or 6 weeks. I lived on campus, ate in the dorm, could use dad's credit card to buy enough gas to come home on break. My family took a hit by sending me to college, I was the only one in my family who went, and spending money was last priority.