"but why is it that when they build these things they don't just make more than one"
Because there's no point. You can't do twice as much science with two Hubble telescopes. Also, a lot of the money is in the design, but that doesn't mean that construction costs are negligible.
If you need a new engine in your car and you take it to a mechanic MOST of the cost will be the labor, but a new engine sure as hell ain't cheap. Same deal here. Scopes like this are built to extreme tolerances, which is expensive. They're built in clean rooms, which are expensive. They're launched into space, which is EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE.
"Why you'd spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a space station to save a few tens of millions of dollars on telescope repairs is beyond me..."
Because the space station isn't ONLY first servicing the scope. The station will be used for whatever science you do there anyway and every so often it will service the scope. The fact that this is beyond you means that you're a dipshit, it's really quite fucking obvious.
"Yup - would they even need cooling if it weren't for the people?"
Short answer: yes Long answer: Yes, but a different kind. You have the sun radiating heat to the device and the device itself is radiating heat away. Balancing these two is generally performed by orienting the satellite in the proper manner and opening/closing certain panels to allow various things to radiate heat out of the satellite.
"Instead of launching special rescue missions with the shuttle they could have:
1. Made the Hubble serviceable by robots. 2. Just made a new Hubble every few years. Forget upgrades, just replace the whole thing."
You're fucking hilarious. "just making something serviceable by robots" is NOT an easy task. It's not a simple matter of "oh, just use bolt X instead of bolt Y" or something. Of course YOU STILL HAVE TO GET THE FUCKING ROBOTS UP THERE, it's not like we can put robots up there for free.
As for "just making a new Hubble every 5 years", are you mad? These things are expensive as hell. It would cost more to design, build, and launch a new telescope every five years that it would to just launch one telescope and service it. The things that break aren't amazingly complicated devices. The Hubble had several gyros go bad a couple years back. Are you suggesting that we should have junked the Hubble and launched an entirely new scope instead of flying 5 new gyroscopes up?
No, you're not wasting time. Throwing text at a wall is a fucking stupid way of teaching. You're actually wasting time by using powerpoint to display lots of text because you could have just put it IN A FUCKING EMAIL and saved students the time of coming into the classroom.
Any teacher that knows what they're doing writes the stuff on the whiteboard and then explains it. It will take a teacher 10 minutes to write about a paragraph of text because they'll be stopping to explain things. If you think you're getting an education by watching a prof read text off of power point slides then you're a moron.
"If someone steals money from your debit card, it is your money that is gone. If someone steals money from your credit card, it is someone else's money that is gone."
I'm not convinced that you understand how credit cards work, or for that matter, how money works.
Doesn't matter if it's your bank or your credit card company, it's YOUR money that's gone. With a debit card the money comes out of your bank, with a credit card the money initially comes from the credit company, who sends you a bill, and you send them money from your bank. In either case you can file paperwork claiming fraud, and in both cases a valid claim of fraud will result in your money being returned. (specific policies vary by company and bank)
Given the choice, I'd rather deal with a bank than a credit card company. I can walk into my bank and actually talk to someone, can you do that with ANY credit card company? My bank actually wants me to remain a customer, not because I have so much money that it's in their interest to keep me there, but because they actually care about customer service. Any credit card company won't give a flying fuck about you unless you hold one of their super exclusive cards (i.e. Amex Centurion, aka Amex black) that actually cost you roughly two grand per year to have. That's two thousand dollars per year just to hold the card. You're not even eligible for it unless you spend HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars on an Amex gold card. So, yeah, they'll take care of you if you're in the top 0.5% of customers.
"bubble-ish tires (not saying they have to be inflated)"
Then how do you make them "bubble-ish"? This thing has to operate on MARS, not in your back yard. The temperatures are extremely different, the conditions are different, etc. It's not a simple matter of "well, just use technology XYZ that we use here on earth".
If you're counting on people using their signals then you're an idiot. Sure, someone might signal an exist, but it doesn't mean they're actually going to take it. Most of the time the signals are not used or they're used incorrectly.
Technical problems: They're usually too small to safely take at speed so they slow everything down even with perfect drivers.
People problems: There's a lot of dipshit drivers that don't obey the line dividing the lanes within them so you end up having to brake/swerve to avoid some moron that's cutting into your lane. Also, some morons think that there's an implied stop sign before a roundabout and will stop even if there's no traffic present. This strikes me as odd considering the number of people that roll through real stop signs.
It's not. But this guy can get a lot of attention by claiming that he "exposed some new privacy threat". Privacy settings are all the rage right now and you can get a lot of attention with almost no work if you play your cards right.
Making a script to go search google and pull public profiles then calling it "OMG PRIVACY ISSUES!!" is one such example.
There's a similar trick for wrenches in a machine shop. There's a couple sizes of wrench that are extremely common for changing tools on a mill/lathe. What you do is buy a combo wrench (one with a wrench on both ends) and use a chop saw or plasma cutter to cut off the worthless end of the wrench. The wrench still works great for changing tools, but no one steals it because no one wants a "broken" wrench in their toolbox.
Servers are generally operated by people that know what they're doing. Yeah, a windows server might be more vulnerable than Linux, but a competent sysadmin can secure either system and fix any problems that arise in a timely manner.
Basically, regardless of the system running on a server,a virus-infected server will be removed from the network within minutes and the virus removed within hours.
Yes, there are significant differences between MAC and windows systems. However, this does NOT mean that it is impossible to create a virus for a MAC computer. It's just as easy to write a virus for mac as it is for windows. Of course, given the choice between the two any sensible person will write it for windows because they'll infect more targets with the same amount of effort.
Yes, and that's all that is necessary to reverse a charge. By law, they must remove the charge unless the company offers some proof that the customer authorized the charge. I can't imagine that a scam would be too willing to provide a lot of proof that someone authorized the purchase of a fake product and that they then delivered that fake product.
Call back and ask for a supervisor, or their supervisor, or however many people you have to talk to to get to someone who can reverse the charge without changing your number.
Of course, I'd want to change my number. Someone unauthorized clearly has your CC information and can successfully charge money to it. Keeping the same number makes NO FUCKING SENSE. It's like refusing to change your locks after you know that a thief has a copy of your key because last time he broke in he only took $10. HE'LL BE BACK LATER WITH A VAN AND TAKE EVERYTHING IN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE. You're going to end up with some $5000 charge to your card and that's going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to deal with then ten fucking dollars.
Dispute the charge, change your number, and SPEND TEN FUCKING MINUTES UPDATING YOUR AUTO-BILL INFORMATION.
"What I would like to see is the CC companies pro actively shut down these people."
Yeah, but that's a lot of work. These charges mean greater credit card bills which means more money (in the form of interest paid) for the CC company. If they deal with this in an efficient and ethical manner then they make less money. If it were up to the credit card companies, they wouldn't even have to tell you their credit rating EVER. As it is they only have to inform you ONCE PER YEAR.
Without regulation, this won't get fixed. Thus, the only way to get this fixed is to make sure that the identity of senators gets stolen so that they're encouraged to start passing laws with stricter regulations on data security.
"Public servant does not mean working for the public, it means working for the government."
The government is supposed to SERVE THE PUBLIC, moron. Whether or not the government actually does serve the public is another matter, but saying that the police officers aren't there to serve you is just completely asinine. It's printed on half of their cars "to protect and SERVE".
There's no way in hell you covered fourier transforms in high school.
Even if you did, you're not taking into account the difference between high school and college level classes. Just because you took calculus 3 in high school doesn't mean that you know anything that's going to be taught in a college calc 3 class. The difference in level of material between the two is insane.
No fucking shit a centerfuge can separate it, moron. The problem is that the dispersants have made the oil and water mix and thus disperse the oil to VERY DEEP PARTS OF THE OCEAN that are almost impossible to actually pump water out of. Before you'd have to collect it mostly on the surface, now you have to somehow pump out large sections of deeper parts of the ocean.
Of course, he's hanging back about 6 car lengths on a left turn lane that's about 8 car lengths long. Two more cars want to turn left and all of a sudden you're backing up left turn traffic into the regular lane which causes a huge jam. Your dad is jamming up traffic.
Other problems: People think that because he's so far back that he has a disabled vehicle and thus move in front of him, causing a dangerous situation. People realize that he's a fucking moron and cut in front of him, causing problems. People think that he's drunk and call the police, taking up their time.
An entire town got together to cause bad traffic for over a year when they somehow knew that traffic data companies were in the area? Unless you can cite some evidence here I'm going to call bullshit and chalk this one up to general inaccuracies in GPS traffic data.
"In my limited workplace experience, if you answer "Fix my software" with "Use this other software instead," you will either be ignored or fired."
As you should be. The solution to "I need to open this document so I can display it at a meeting in 10 minutes. I tested it yesterday but it's not working now." is not "go install other software and get that working, then try to unbreak all of the ms-specific formatting that OO.org can't handle".
Sure, as the IT guy it's your job to suggest that the company make a switch to whatever you believe will work better than the current situation, but it's not a place for you to push your ideals and certainly not during a time-critical situation.
Making the suggestion to switch to linux when your company depends on MS-only applications that have no open source equivalent is just fucking stupid. Making the suggestion to switch from MS office to OO might be a good idea, but not when you need twenty.doc files opened up for a meeting in ten fucking minutes.
There's a time and a place for everything, your office generally isn't it.
Slashdot Mirror
"but why is it that when they build these things they don't just make more than one"
Because there's no point. You can't do twice as much science with two Hubble telescopes. Also, a lot of the money is in the design, but that doesn't mean that construction costs are negligible.
If you need a new engine in your car and you take it to a mechanic MOST of the cost will be the labor, but a new engine sure as hell ain't cheap. Same deal here. Scopes like this are built to extreme tolerances, which is expensive. They're built in clean rooms, which are expensive. They're launched into space, which is EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE.
"Why you'd spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a space station to save a few tens of millions of dollars on telescope repairs is beyond me..."
Because the space station isn't ONLY first servicing the scope. The station will be used for whatever science you do there anyway and every so often it will service the scope. The fact that this is beyond you means that you're a dipshit, it's really quite fucking obvious.
"Yup - would they even need cooling if it weren't for the people?"
Short answer: yes
Long answer: Yes, but a different kind. You have the sun radiating heat to the device and the device itself is radiating heat away. Balancing these two is generally performed by orienting the satellite in the proper manner and opening/closing certain panels to allow various things to radiate heat out of the satellite.
"Instead of launching special rescue missions with the shuttle they could have:
1. Made the Hubble serviceable by robots.
2. Just made a new Hubble every few years. Forget upgrades, just replace the whole thing."
You're fucking hilarious. "just making something serviceable by robots" is NOT an easy task. It's not a simple matter of "oh, just use bolt X instead of bolt Y" or something. Of course YOU STILL HAVE TO GET THE FUCKING ROBOTS UP THERE, it's not like we can put robots up there for free.
As for "just making a new Hubble every 5 years", are you mad? These things are expensive as hell. It would cost more to design, build, and launch a new telescope every five years that it would to just launch one telescope and service it. The things that break aren't amazingly complicated devices. The Hubble had several gyros go bad a couple years back. Are you suggesting that we should have junked the Hubble and launched an entirely new scope instead of flying 5 new gyroscopes up?
No, you're not wasting time. Throwing text at a wall is a fucking stupid way of teaching. You're actually wasting time by using powerpoint to display lots of text because you could have just put it IN A FUCKING EMAIL and saved students the time of coming into the classroom.
Any teacher that knows what they're doing writes the stuff on the whiteboard and then explains it. It will take a teacher 10 minutes to write about a paragraph of text because they'll be stopping to explain things. If you think you're getting an education by watching a prof read text off of power point slides then you're a moron.
"If someone steals money from your debit card, it is your money that is gone. If someone steals money from your credit card, it is someone else's money that is gone."
I'm not convinced that you understand how credit cards work, or for that matter, how money works.
Doesn't matter if it's your bank or your credit card company, it's YOUR money that's gone. With a debit card the money comes out of your bank, with a credit card the money initially comes from the credit company, who sends you a bill, and you send them money from your bank. In either case you can file paperwork claiming fraud, and in both cases a valid claim of fraud will result in your money being returned. (specific policies vary by company and bank)
Given the choice, I'd rather deal with a bank than a credit card company. I can walk into my bank and actually talk to someone, can you do that with ANY credit card company? My bank actually wants me to remain a customer, not because I have so much money that it's in their interest to keep me there, but because they actually care about customer service. Any credit card company won't give a flying fuck about you unless you hold one of their super exclusive cards (i.e. Amex Centurion, aka Amex black) that actually cost you roughly two grand per year to have. That's two thousand dollars per year just to hold the card. You're not even eligible for it unless you spend HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars on an Amex gold card. So, yeah, they'll take care of you if you're in the top 0.5% of customers.
Also operated only within the gravity of the MOON. Mars has a lot more gravity.
"bubble-ish tires (not saying they have to be inflated)"
Then how do you make them "bubble-ish"? This thing has to operate on MARS, not in your back yard. The temperatures are extremely different, the conditions are different, etc. It's not a simple matter of "well, just use technology XYZ that we use here on earth".
From the video: "I trusted him because he was a Dell technician"
Using my amazing powers of deduction, I have found this to be the root cause of the trouble.
If you're counting on people using their signals then you're an idiot. Sure, someone might signal an exist, but it doesn't mean they're actually going to take it. Most of the time the signals are not used or they're used incorrectly.
Technical problems: They're usually too small to safely take at speed so they slow everything down even with perfect drivers.
People problems: There's a lot of dipshit drivers that don't obey the line dividing the lanes within them so you end up having to brake/swerve to avoid some moron that's cutting into your lane. Also, some morons think that there's an implied stop sign before a roundabout and will stop even if there's no traffic present. This strikes me as odd considering the number of people that roll through real stop signs.
It's not. But this guy can get a lot of attention by claiming that he "exposed some new privacy threat". Privacy settings are all the rage right now and you can get a lot of attention with almost no work if you play your cards right.
Making a script to go search google and pull public profiles then calling it "OMG PRIVACY ISSUES!!" is one such example.
There's a similar trick for wrenches in a machine shop. There's a couple sizes of wrench that are extremely common for changing tools on a mill/lathe. What you do is buy a combo wrench (one with a wrench on both ends) and use a chop saw or plasma cutter to cut off the worthless end of the wrench. The wrench still works great for changing tools, but no one steals it because no one wants a "broken" wrench in their toolbox.
Servers are generally operated by people that know what they're doing. Yeah, a windows server might be more vulnerable than Linux, but a competent sysadmin can secure either system and fix any problems that arise in a timely manner.
Basically, regardless of the system running on a server,a virus-infected server will be removed from the network within minutes and the virus removed within hours.
Yes, there are significant differences between MAC and windows systems. However, this does NOT mean that it is impossible to create a virus for a MAC computer. It's just as easy to write a virus for mac as it is for windows. Of course, given the choice between the two any sensible person will write it for windows because they'll infect more targets with the same amount of effort.
Yes, and that's all that is necessary to reverse a charge. By law, they must remove the charge unless the company offers some proof that the customer authorized the charge. I can't imagine that a scam would be too willing to provide a lot of proof that someone authorized the purchase of a fake product and that they then delivered that fake product.
"the court said that they couldn't use that tactic to prevent cashing of checks."
What? They said that bank customers can't make the decision to NOT cash a check?
Call back and ask for a supervisor, or their supervisor, or however many people you have to talk to to get to someone who can reverse the charge without changing your number.
Of course, I'd want to change my number. Someone unauthorized clearly has your CC information and can successfully charge money to it. Keeping the same number makes NO FUCKING SENSE. It's like refusing to change your locks after you know that a thief has a copy of your key because last time he broke in he only took $10. HE'LL BE BACK LATER WITH A VAN AND TAKE EVERYTHING IN YOUR FUCKING HOUSE. You're going to end up with some $5000 charge to your card and that's going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to deal with then ten fucking dollars.
Dispute the charge, change your number, and SPEND TEN FUCKING MINUTES UPDATING YOUR AUTO-BILL INFORMATION.
"What I would like to see is the CC companies pro actively shut down these people."
Yeah, but that's a lot of work. These charges mean greater credit card bills which means more money (in the form of interest paid) for the CC company. If they deal with this in an efficient and ethical manner then they make less money. If it were up to the credit card companies, they wouldn't even have to tell you their credit rating EVER. As it is they only have to inform you ONCE PER YEAR.
Without regulation, this won't get fixed. Thus, the only way to get this fixed is to make sure that the identity of senators gets stolen so that they're encouraged to start passing laws with stricter regulations on data security.
"Public servant does not mean working for the public, it means working for the government."
The government is supposed to SERVE THE PUBLIC, moron. Whether or not the government actually does serve the public is another matter, but saying that the police officers aren't there to serve you is just completely asinine. It's printed on half of their cars "to protect and SERVE".
There's no way in hell you covered fourier transforms in high school.
Even if you did, you're not taking into account the difference between high school and college level classes. Just because you took calculus 3 in high school doesn't mean that you know anything that's going to be taught in a college calc 3 class. The difference in level of material between the two is insane.
Aren't those completely open APs anyway?
No fucking shit a centerfuge can separate it, moron. The problem is that the dispersants have made the oil and water mix and thus disperse the oil to VERY DEEP PARTS OF THE OCEAN that are almost impossible to actually pump water out of. Before you'd have to collect it mostly on the surface, now you have to somehow pump out large sections of deeper parts of the ocean.
Of course, he's hanging back about 6 car lengths on a left turn lane that's about 8 car lengths long. Two more cars want to turn left and all of a sudden you're backing up left turn traffic into the regular lane which causes a huge jam. Your dad is jamming up traffic.
Other problems:
People think that because he's so far back that he has a disabled vehicle and thus move in front of him, causing a dangerous situation.
People realize that he's a fucking moron and cut in front of him, causing problems.
People think that he's drunk and call the police, taking up their time.
An entire town got together to cause bad traffic for over a year when they somehow knew that traffic data companies were in the area? Unless you can cite some evidence here I'm going to call bullshit and chalk this one up to general inaccuracies in GPS traffic data.
"In my limited workplace experience, if you answer "Fix my software" with "Use this other software instead," you will either be ignored or fired."
.doc files opened up for a meeting in ten fucking minutes.
As you should be. The solution to "I need to open this document so I can display it at a meeting in 10 minutes. I tested it yesterday but it's not working now." is not "go install other software and get that working, then try to unbreak all of the ms-specific formatting that OO.org can't handle".
Sure, as the IT guy it's your job to suggest that the company make a switch to whatever you believe will work better than the current situation, but it's not a place for you to push your ideals and certainly not during a time-critical situation.
Making the suggestion to switch to linux when your company depends on MS-only applications that have no open source equivalent is just fucking stupid. Making the suggestion to switch from MS office to OO might be a good idea, but not when you need twenty
There's a time and a place for everything, your office generally isn't it.