I know it won't last forever, and certainly at some point it will be uneconomical to repair. But I sure hear a lot of controversy about whether that time has yet come. I think it deserves another look.
Also, I have never heard NASA say that the Hubble is just old and worn out. They say it's too risky to go up for another servicing mission.
I think the "risk" that they're talking about when they say the missions would be too risky is political. NASA doesn't want more egg on its face for another lost crew, and they have no rescue plans that could cover a crew in a damaged ship in the Hubble's orbit.
The only time I've had the reflective stuff come off is when I DIDN'T put labels on. Then it has a chance of getting scratched off. The sticker actually protects the top layer from damage.
I'm not using great (Mitsui, etc) media, I'm using cheap but not crap (Imation, Fuji, etc).
I have literally THOUSANDS of discs with sticky labels on them, and have never had one fail.
True, but the AREN'T PLANNING ANY. The only space telescope on the drawing board is the James Webb scope, and it's an IR scope. There's nothing even in the planning stages for a replacement for Hubble.
The truth is, the Hubble is still very capable, in fact more so than when it was launched. It needs new batteries and gyros, and as long as we're there, some new science instruments, and it'll keep going happily for a long time to come yet.
If new batteries and gyros are put on board, they'll last even longer; the new ones are capable of lasting far longer than the originals.
It's not broken, it's working fine. I don't know what the hell you're talking about, AFAIK ALL systems on the Hubble are working fine. The batteries are getting shot, they're the original ones.
There's equipment already built and in storage, or in process (was until the news came down) that would make the Hubble better than it ever has been, even though as it is now it's the best telescope we have in the optical range.
They want to scrap the Hubble because we need the money to maintain a space station that's nothing but a publicity stunt, and to fund research into a moon/mars mission that, much as I might wish they were real, will get scrapped as soon as the elections are over.
Also, the risk of a servicing mission is too great. Not the human risk, we're apparently perfectly willing to expend dozens of more spacewalk missions on finishing the ISS (which, again, isn't being used for what it was intended to be used for), but we can't risk one mission to work on the device which puts out more real science every week than the ISS ever has.
I've been wanting Discovery Science, but Dish won't let me ala carte anymore, and I don't want the whole next package up. Maybe if I call up hollering about losing the channels I paid for, they'll let me stick Discovery Science in as a substitute or at least an ala carte.
Yes, except according to the Dish Network help people, you can't buy channels a'la carte anymore. So if I want to pick up Nick in addition to basic, I have to buy the whole next package up. This kind of stinks.
According to the person I talked to, the ala carte thing was taken away because they'd get people sitting on the phone with customer service, looking through a listing of 500 channels, hemming and hawing, asking what was on different channels, and taking 30 minutes of phone time to decide to buy 2 channels that cost $1.50 each per month.
Last I checked, you had to buy Outlook as part of Office. Outlook Express, a completely different program, is one of the things I hate about Windows currently; the damn thing just won't go away. It takes some work to make it shut up about setting up an email account under OE, and even then, occasionally I'll see it pop up and try again.
CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Of course, Real is even worse; it just shanghai's your settings without warnings. The other day I pushed in a DVD and it started Real. I'm very careful about not letting Real get control of anything but RM files, but apparently at some point it decided it was ok to shanghai the "DVD insertion" event since I had that set to "do nothing." Uh, no, I have it set that way because when I insert a DVD I want it to DO NOTHING.
Designed by women marketers possibly listening to focus groups. Not real people IMHO, but people trying to figure out what other people want. Possibly a little more real than if it were men trying to figure out what women want. But I know very few marketing people who think like normal people.
FYI, most auto stores now charge and arm and pint of blood to use their scan tool.
They do charge a $150 deposit for the scan tool, and refund it completely when I bring it back. Not a problem for me and perfectly reasonable.
I haven't ever had a car that started throwing wrong codes so I can't say about the other.
How much is the dealership paying you to advertise on your license plate frame?
I don't allow the dealerships to put advertising on my car. When I pay them for the car, I tell them "When I pick the car up, I won't accept delivery if there are any stickers or plate frames on it."
I have to disagree. The advantages of modern engine control are huge. Computer control has given us tons in terms of increased efficiency and horsepower, decreased emissions, and increased integration between components; IE when you stomp on the gas, the computer turns off the A/C for a few seconds to divert power to the drivetrain.
Computer engine control was kind of rough when it first started being used; the computers died a lot, they were susceptible to sensor failure, etc. Now they're way better, and engines are FAR more reliable than they were before computers.
I for one don't want to go back to the days of carburetors and distributors. Fuel injection and coil packs or coil-on-plug, along with the computer(s) to control them, have made cars LOADS more reliable. Sure, it may be harder to work on them, but you don't NEED to work on them nearly as much.
Try taking a 1969 car and driving it 120,000 miles without doing anything more than changing the oil.
Also, I find that in most cases it's EASIER to work on my car with a computer. Without a computer you only know if there's something wrong if it's bad enough to cause serious performance degradation. With a computer, you can catch problems way before they become serious. I had a light a few months ago, went to the auto parts store, borrowed their scanner, saw that I had a stuck EGR valve, wrenched it off, cleaned it, and replaced it. Without the computer I'd never have had a clue, just kept polluting more than necessary, and possibly fouling my catalytic converter as well.
I do have to agree about the shut hood though. I'd never even consider buying a car like this, or letting anyone in my family buy one.
I think they're missing a bit by saying this is "for women" - most men never do anything under the hood, either; I know men that are more hopeless mechanically than many women I know. One of the best mechanics I've ever had was female. I think the whole thing is kind of insulting.
It says one of the fluids is aqueous. I wonder if these lenses will be safe to use in low temps. I've had trouble with film cameras in -20*F temps, the film froze and broke.
Also I wonder how gravity affects these in reasonable sizes; seems it would tend to pull the lens downward unless the two solutions had exactly the same specific gravity.
Nit: Singular of "lenses" is "lens". I don't know what a "lense" is but I'd pronounce it "lens-ee" if I had to guess.
with the promise of a $40 rebate that you'll never actually recieve.
I buy a TON of stuff with rebate deals. I have NEVER been denied the rebate. I probably cash > $1000 a year in rebate checks. It's just a game they play. You want stuff cheap, you play the game. Last week I got a $90 rebate on a 250GB hard drive, this week $40 on a 512M DDR RAM, in a couple of weeks $200 on a projector that I bought a few weeks ago (I'm tracking it online, that's when it should be here).
Basically you're shifting some cost over to people too lazy or unorganized to send in the stuff correctly or on time (or at all). I have no problem with that. Rebates take very little time to do if you just deal with them as soon as you get home. Probably 5 to 10 minutes.
In fact, when I was shopping for a laptop a couple of years ago, I seriously considered building a machine in a briefcase around a flat panel screen and standard components.
My reason was a combination of price and expandability. I want a couple hundred GB, and I want to be able to plug in standard PCI cards. I don't give a damn about running on battery.
I didn't because of laziness, so now I have a laptop that I never run off batteries. I just have it because I want a machine that I can carry to a few places.
For the money I probably would be better off building three separate machines and carrying the personality around on a hard drive.
What are you talking about? 512M DDR RAM is on sale for $50 every week somewhere. How damn cheap do you want it to get?
I find it very hard to complain about this, when I remember both paying $100 for a 1MB SIMM, and back in the day (1983), $150 for a 16KB (that's KILObyte) set of chips, and that was a discounted price.
Is that why to refill the cart Canon charges $10 for, I can buy ink from a 3rd party for about a buck a refill, and that's in small quantities? If I buy by the gallon it's even better; $85 per gallon, 15ml per cart, that's 252 refills, or 33 cents per refill. If I wanted to buy by the drum it'd probably get a little better.
Similar economics exist for the HP and Epson printers I've owned.
And, the ink is just as good, if not better. I've done both color comparisons and long-term (2 years in sunlight) fade comparisons. In fact the 3rd party stuff is better in many respects.
All bills contain metallic and magnetic inks. You can SEE it. What happens to metal in the microwave? It gets hot.
If there were RFID chips in the bills, you'd be able to see them as I don't think they're transparent. Hold the bill up to a strong light. Nothing there.
Yeah, this guy's about as much a genius as most conspiracy theorists.
These are already on the store shelves
on
Stolen Laptop Alarms
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I saw one at Best Buy 3 days ago. Two parts, one on the unit, one in your pocket, alarms if they're more than 15 feet apart. google for proximity alarm site:bestbuy.com - it's sold by Fellowes and costs $30.
The last statement in the article: "If you want more secure software, upgrade." pretty much sums up Microsoft's position.
Does anyone remember Bill G's statement a few years ago... "Nobody upgrades their software to fix bugs, that's the stupidest thing I've heard of. People buy new software to get new features."
I guess not getting 0wnd must be considered a "feature".
And yet, all those systems were the state of the art "secure" systems in MS's latest BS at one time.
In 5 years, they'll be saying "Well, everyone knows that Windows XP is insecure. Why are you still running that old thing? Of course you need to upgrade to be secure."
Port 80 inbound is definitely blocked here in Michigan. I'm running on a different port for that reason. Kind of a pain; it makes me do website redirection for my domain, which means bookmarks don't have my domain but rather my dyndns address, etc. So their block stops zero traffic, just makes things worse for me, and makes nothing better for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it won't last forever, and certainly at some point it will be uneconomical to repair. But I sure hear a lot of controversy about whether that time has yet come. I think it deserves another look.
Also, I have never heard NASA say that the Hubble is just old and worn out. They say it's too risky to go up for another servicing mission.
I think the "risk" that they're talking about when they say the missions would be too risky is political. NASA doesn't want more egg on its face for another lost crew, and they have no rescue plans that could cover a crew in a damaged ship in the Hubble's orbit.
The only time I've had the reflective stuff come off is when I DIDN'T put labels on. Then it has a chance of getting scratched off. The sticker actually protects the top layer from damage.
I'm not using great (Mitsui, etc) media, I'm using cheap but not crap (Imation, Fuji, etc).
I have literally THOUSANDS of discs with sticky labels on them, and have never had one fail.
You can click on the link embedded right in the page you gave a link to, from Sept 1, 2002. APOD never removes something from archive.
True, but the AREN'T PLANNING ANY. The only space telescope on the drawing board is the James Webb scope, and it's an IR scope. There's nothing even in the planning stages for a replacement for Hubble.
The truth is, the Hubble is still very capable, in fact more so than when it was launched. It needs new batteries and gyros, and as long as we're there, some new science instruments, and it'll keep going happily for a long time to come yet.
If new batteries and gyros are put on board, they'll last even longer; the new ones are capable of lasting far longer than the originals.
It's not broken, it's working fine. I don't know what the hell you're talking about, AFAIK ALL systems on the Hubble are working fine. The batteries are getting shot, they're the original ones.
There's equipment already built and in storage, or in process (was until the news came down) that would make the Hubble better than it ever has been, even though as it is now it's the best telescope we have in the optical range.
They want to scrap the Hubble because we need the money to maintain a space station that's nothing but a publicity stunt, and to fund research into a moon/mars mission that, much as I might wish they were real, will get scrapped as soon as the elections are over.
Also, the risk of a servicing mission is too great. Not the human risk, we're apparently perfectly willing to expend dozens of more spacewalk missions on finishing the ISS (which, again, isn't being used for what it was intended to be used for), but we can't risk one mission to work on the device which puts out more real science every week than the ISS ever has.
I've been wanting Discovery Science, but Dish won't let me ala carte anymore, and I don't want the whole next package up.
Maybe if I call up hollering about losing the channels I paid for, they'll let me stick Discovery Science in as a substitute or at least an ala carte.
Yes, except according to the Dish Network help people, you can't buy channels a'la carte anymore. So if I want to pick up Nick in addition to basic, I have to buy the whole next package up. This kind of stinks.
According to the person I talked to, the ala carte thing was taken away because they'd get people sitting on the phone with customer service, looking through a listing of 500 channels, hemming and hawing, asking what was on different channels, and taking 30 minutes of phone time to decide to buy 2 channels that cost $1.50 each per month.
Last I checked, you had to buy Outlook as part of Office.
Outlook Express, a completely different program, is one of the things I hate about Windows currently; the damn thing just won't go away. It takes some work to make it shut up about setting up an email account under OE, and even then, occasionally I'll see it pop up and try again.
CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Of course, Real is even worse; it just shanghai's your settings without warnings. The other day I pushed in a DVD and it started Real. I'm very careful about not letting Real get control of anything but RM files, but apparently at some point it decided it was ok to shanghai the "DVD insertion" event since I had that set to "do nothing." Uh, no, I have it set that way because when I insert a DVD I want it to DO NOTHING.
Ford Taurus.
BTW, according to some web sites, the code I read out "EGR flow insufficient" is THE most commonly read out code.
I don't think they're talking about pron movies. I mean, re-enacting scenes from those is fun and all, but probably not a good idea in bars. :)
Designed by women marketers possibly listening to focus groups. Not real people IMHO, but people trying to figure out what other people want. Possibly a little more real than if it were men trying to figure out what women want. But I know very few marketing people who think like normal people.
FYI, most auto stores now charge and arm and pint of blood to use their scan tool.
They do charge a $150 deposit for the scan tool, and refund it completely when I bring it back. Not a problem for me and perfectly reasonable.
I haven't ever had a car that started throwing wrong codes so I can't say about the other.
How much is the dealership paying you to advertise on your license plate frame?
I don't allow the dealerships to put advertising on my car. When I pay them for the car, I tell them "When I pick the car up, I won't accept delivery if there are any stickers or plate frames on it."
I have to disagree. The advantages of modern engine control are huge. Computer control has given us tons in terms of increased efficiency and horsepower, decreased emissions, and increased integration between components; IE when you stomp on the gas, the computer turns off the A/C for a few seconds to divert power to the drivetrain.
Computer engine control was kind of rough when it first started being used; the computers died a lot, they were susceptible to sensor failure, etc. Now they're way better, and engines are FAR more reliable than they were before computers.
I for one don't want to go back to the days of carburetors and distributors. Fuel injection and coil packs or coil-on-plug, along with the computer(s) to control them, have made cars LOADS more reliable. Sure, it may be harder to work on them, but you don't NEED to work on them nearly as much.
Try taking a 1969 car and driving it 120,000 miles without doing anything more than changing the oil.
Also, I find that in most cases it's EASIER to work on my car with a computer. Without a computer you only know if there's something wrong if it's bad enough to cause serious performance degradation. With a computer, you can catch problems way before they become serious. I had a light a few months ago, went to the auto parts store, borrowed their scanner, saw that I had a stuck EGR valve, wrenched it off, cleaned it, and replaced it. Without the computer I'd never have had a clue, just kept polluting more than necessary, and possibly fouling my catalytic converter as well.
I do have to agree about the shut hood though. I'd never even consider buying a car like this, or letting anyone in my family buy one.
I think they're missing a bit by saying this is "for women" - most men never do anything under the hood, either; I know men that are more hopeless mechanically than many women I know. One of the best mechanics I've ever had was female. I think the whole thing is kind of insulting.
It says one of the fluids is aqueous. I wonder if these lenses will be safe to use in low temps. I've had trouble with film cameras in -20*F temps, the film froze and broke.
Also I wonder how gravity affects these in reasonable sizes; seems it would tend to pull the lens downward unless the two solutions had exactly the same specific gravity.
Nit: Singular of "lenses" is "lens". I don't know what a "lense" is but I'd pronounce it "lens-ee" if I had to guess.
(forgot this part before pressing submit) ... but even so, even $90 for a 512M stick is cheap IMHO.
with the promise of a $40 rebate that you'll never actually recieve.
I buy a TON of stuff with rebate deals. I have NEVER been denied the rebate. I probably cash > $1000 a year in rebate checks. It's just a game they play. You want stuff cheap, you play the game. Last week I got a $90 rebate on a 250GB hard drive, this week $40 on a 512M DDR RAM, in a couple of weeks $200 on a projector that I bought a few weeks ago (I'm tracking it online, that's when it should be here).
Basically you're shifting some cost over to people too lazy or unorganized to send in the stuff correctly or on time (or at all). I have no problem with that. Rebates take very little time to do if you just deal with them as soon as you get home. Probably 5 to 10 minutes.
In fact, when I was shopping for a laptop a couple of years ago, I seriously considered building a machine in a briefcase around a flat panel screen and standard components.
My reason was a combination of price and expandability. I want a couple hundred GB, and I want to be able to plug in standard PCI cards. I don't give a damn about running on battery.
I didn't because of laziness, so now I have a laptop that I never run off batteries. I just have it because I want a machine that I can carry to a few places.
For the money I probably would be better off building three separate machines and carrying the personality around on a hard drive.
What are you talking about? 512M DDR RAM is on sale for $50 every week somewhere. How damn cheap do you want it to get?
I find it very hard to complain about this, when I remember both paying $100 for a 1MB SIMM, and back in the day (1983), $150 for a 16KB (that's KILObyte) set of chips, and that was a discounted price.
Is that why to refill the cart Canon charges $10 for, I can buy ink from a 3rd party for about a buck a refill, and that's in small quantities? If I buy by the gallon it's even better; $85 per gallon, 15ml per cart, that's 252 refills, or 33 cents per refill. If I wanted to buy by the drum it'd probably get a little better.
Similar economics exist for the HP and Epson printers I've owned.
And, the ink is just as good, if not better. I've done both color comparisons and long-term (2 years in sunlight) fade comparisons. In fact the 3rd party stuff is better in many respects.
This person isn't very smart.
You could have stopped there.
This bright boy overlooked a few things:
All bills contain metallic and magnetic inks. You can SEE it. What happens to metal in the microwave? It gets hot.
If there were RFID chips in the bills, you'd be able to see them as I don't think they're transparent. Hold the bill up to a strong light. Nothing there.
Yeah, this guy's about as much a genius as most conspiracy theorists.
I saw one at Best Buy 3 days ago. Two parts, one on the unit, one in your pocket, alarms if they're more than 15 feet apart. google for proximity alarm site:bestbuy.com - it's sold by Fellowes and costs $30.
The last statement in the article: "If you want more secure software, upgrade." pretty much sums up Microsoft's position.
Does anyone remember Bill G's statement a few years ago... "Nobody upgrades their software to fix bugs, that's the stupidest thing I've heard of. People buy new software to get new features."
I guess not getting 0wnd must be considered a "feature".
And yet, all those systems were the state of the art "secure" systems in MS's latest BS at one time.
In 5 years, they'll be saying "Well, everyone knows that Windows XP is insecure. Why are you still running that old thing? Of course you need to upgrade to be secure."
Free, or already paid for in your license fee?
Port 80 inbound is definitely blocked here in Michigan. I'm running on a different port for that reason. Kind of a pain; it makes me do website redirection for my domain, which means bookmarks don't have my domain but rather my dyndns address, etc.
So their block stops zero traffic, just makes things worse for me, and makes nothing better for anyone.