They went on sale this morning, and almost immediately downed the websites of two large electronics suppliers (RS and Farnell). By the time I had got to work, the sites were back up but that is largely because they didn't have anymore Raspberry Pis to sell.
That is the kind of reception that Apple wishes the iPad 3 would get (although it probably won't.)
Others have mentioned that those combinations aren't hypergolic. This is true, but only part of the story.
Engine ignition systems are generally one (or a small number) of shots. They aren't difficult to build, but they are difficult to make have a lot of restarts, which is what you want for on orbit attitude thrusters. That is why hypergolic is good for spacecraft
The other part of the story is that they are storable (i.e. liquid at normal temperatures you will find on Earth and in orbit if you have decent thermal control, rather than being cryogenic.) This is the reason why such fuels are used on non-restartable engines as those that put rockets like the Soviet/Russian Proton and the Chinese Long March series into orbit. These rockets are low-tech, but ultimately expensive due to all the safety you have to implement around large quantities of these propellants - and in both cases are due to be phased out in favour of LOx/RP-1 based rockets.
Another, rare, storable combination is Hydrogen Peroxide/RP-1 (used in the British Black Arrow rocket). This isn't nearly as toxic, but H2O2 in the concentrations used for rocketry (>70%) can be a temperamental beast; used as a mono-propellant in torpedoes it has destroyed more than one submarine, most recently and notably the Kursk.
I think the idea is, that if we can maintain in the youth an interest in science and mathematics beyond that needed to act as passive operators of technological civilization, perhaps their generation will not utterly fail to push space travel forwards, as several recent ones have.
You don't have to embrace the right simply because you've realised that cultural relativism is a crock of shit.
There are good cultures and bad cultures, and there are cultures that are good in some aspects and bad in others. Many of the left have known this for years, they just tend to get shouted down in certain, fairly silly, forums.
Europe is objectively better than the US for healthcare (this can, and is, quite easily measured) due to universal coverage. US is objectively better than Europe for free speech (1st amendment) . Both are objectively better than the Taleban in every possible way you can think of.
Perhaps the notion is only a US perspective, because I don't know anybody with right-wing libertarian beliefs in anything that could be described as an engineering, or science career here in the UK.
Libertarianism here is largely seen as a form of mental illness. In fact we don't tend to use the term (in the way you do) much at all. We do have people like that; Paul Staines, Dan Hannan, etc. but as I said they are considered to be pretty well insane by those who know of them.
To be honest, the notion of engineers being 'libertarian' sounds like a way of trying to promote libertarianism by associating it with a career type that has a lot of geek-cred. Its an attempt to make an irrational ideology seem rational by association.
Let me get this straight. Your (I am assuming that is your site?) criticism of Cybersyn was that it was too ambitious to work, but then the only example of it in action you can come up with is when it *did* work?
Also, the idea that you can't control anything that features a time lag is absolutely laughable. Talk to an engineer for fucks sake. Or better still, take a ride in an aeroplane that has a functioning autopilot and notice how you aren't tossed around like you are in a washing machine...
Someone sensing that there is widespread institutional failure around the world isn't necessarily being dismal. I have hope for us being able to pull out of this nosedive. No fucking idea how, of course...
If anything, going on the comments the Russians are making, they are suffering from a lack of socialism not an excess. R-7 derived rockets became very reliable towards the end of the Soviet era.
Speaking of which, Ayn Rands most infamous brainfart, Atlas Shrugged, which claimed that only capitalists were capable of innovation, was released about a week after Sputnik was put into orbit. That is some pretty epic timing fail LOL
Nothing seems to work quite right these days, does it? The Russians can't launch rockets from a family of launch vehicles that has over half a century of heritage. The currency of continental Europe is on the verge of collapse and the French and Germans are near powerless to stop it. Stimulus packages on top of bailouts have failed to make a dent in a global crisis that has now been going on for three fucking years.
Do we have some kind of species-wide dementia or something? Why can't we do stuff anymore that we used to be able to do?
I disagree. The Chinese want to move into power projection, clearly. Not this carrier, but future ones, might well be used to slap down an African government that decides to say 'no' to China's economic plans in the region. Largely the same thing the US uses its carriers for in the middle east.
More to the point, at least in the case of Sheffield, they were acting as a shield for the vitally important carrier. Getting them hit by Exocet missiles was almost part of the plan.
30 years ago my country sent an aircraft carrier out to fight an enemy with what were state-of-the-art anti ship missiles, and it worked out OK. Was a close call at some points, but our carrier didn't take a hit. Not sure if that would still apply, but it is the most modern deployment of an aircraft carrier against anybody at a higher tech level than Kalashnikovs and IEDs
1. It is very easy to fit rotation curves to data. The errors are quite large. There are many, many theoretical rotation curves (caused by dark matter) that match the data.
2. Even IF this guy can explain rotation curves, he doesn't explain how galaxies form in the quantities we see (which based on current data requires dark matter) and what causes gravitational lensing. He would have to propose an entirely separate mechanism for these things.
What you don't have to pay out for music, movies and games in Switzerland, you have to pay out for food. I was applying for a position at CERN at one point (didn't get very far into the process, gave up as I realised I wasn't interested enough in particle physics to fight for the place) - the advice they give to visitors is "If you want to go shopping, go to France"
The guns aren't because the Swiss don't trust each other. Its because they don't trust the French, the Germans, or the Italians - and not without good reason.
Why does the fall of empires have to be a bad thing? Some people think the fall of the Roman Empire was bad - but the most immediate consequence for people living in Europe in the time was fewer legions pointing swords at them demanding tribute.
Only Germany forbids Nazi symbols by law (gee, I wonder why?) and the Danish government, along with most other EU governments, reacted with indignation when radical islamists when crazy over some cartoons. Yes, super injunctions here in the UK are stupid. So stupid that one of our own MPs scuppered one in Parliament to prove a point. The US does not have a monopoly on freedom.
Stop imposing illiberal legislation on people who never voted for it! That's OUR job!
Don't worry too much about it. The EU in its present form cannot survive at all. I'm all for European integration (which is unusual for a Brit) but the EU is a failed project whose bureaucratic nervous system is too sluggish to have told its brain that it is already dead. Its proclaimations should be taken as seriously as those made by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1990.
It isn't dishonest to take apparent a statement that is generally accepted as wisdom, when it clearly IS rhetorical. It uses the power "democracy" to push through the idea of "property rights" without a clear universal definition of what that means. Fuck, even the USSR under Stalin had property rights (you can have personal stuff in your house).
The idea that democracy needs property rights is therefore unprovable and unfalsifiable; EVERY state has something that can be called 'property rights' under somebodies definition, some states are democratic, and so to say 'democracy needs property rights' is to say 'democracy needs a state' which is a tautology because democracy is, in the context you seem to use it, a way of running a state.
This isn't ridiculous, just because it questions something you clearly hold sacred. It is my prerogative to do that as a free thinker, and I won't apologise if this upsets you.
Slashdot Mirror
They went on sale this morning, and almost immediately downed the websites of two large electronics suppliers (RS and Farnell). By the time I had got to work, the sites were back up but that is largely because they didn't have anymore Raspberry Pis to sell.
That is the kind of reception that Apple wishes the iPad 3 would get (although it probably won't.)
Russian Proton, payload over 20 metric tonnes, uses hydrazine. You are wrong.
Others have mentioned that those combinations aren't hypergolic. This is true, but only part of the story.
Engine ignition systems are generally one (or a small number) of shots. They aren't difficult to build, but they are difficult to make have a lot of restarts, which is what you want for on orbit attitude thrusters. That is why hypergolic is good for spacecraft
The other part of the story is that they are storable (i.e. liquid at normal temperatures you will find on Earth and in orbit if you have decent thermal control, rather than being cryogenic.) This is the reason why such fuels are used on non-restartable engines as those that put rockets like the Soviet/Russian Proton and the Chinese Long March series into orbit. These rockets are low-tech, but ultimately expensive due to all the safety you have to implement around large quantities of these propellants - and in both cases are due to be phased out in favour of LOx/RP-1 based rockets.
Another, rare, storable combination is Hydrogen Peroxide/RP-1 (used in the British Black Arrow rocket). This isn't nearly as toxic, but H2O2 in the concentrations used for rocketry (>70%) can be a temperamental beast; used as a mono-propellant in torpedoes it has destroyed more than one submarine, most recently and notably the Kursk.
I think the idea is, that if we can maintain in the youth an interest in science and mathematics beyond that needed to act as passive operators of technological civilization, perhaps their generation will not utterly fail to push space travel forwards, as several recent ones have.
You don't have to embrace the right simply because you've realised that cultural relativism is a crock of shit.
There are good cultures and bad cultures, and there are cultures that are good in some aspects and bad in others. Many of the left have known this for years, they just tend to get shouted down in certain, fairly silly, forums.
Europe is objectively better than the US for healthcare (this can, and is, quite easily measured) due to universal coverage. US is objectively better than Europe for free speech (1st amendment) . Both are objectively better than the Taleban in every possible way you can think of.
Perhaps the notion is only a US perspective, because I don't know anybody with right-wing libertarian beliefs in anything that could be described as an engineering, or science career here in the UK.
Libertarianism here is largely seen as a form of mental illness. In fact we don't tend to use the term (in the way you do) much at all. We do have people like that; Paul Staines, Dan Hannan, etc. but as I said they are considered to be pretty well insane by those who know of them.
To be honest, the notion of engineers being 'libertarian' sounds like a way of trying to promote libertarianism by associating it with a career type that has a lot of geek-cred. Its an attempt to make an irrational ideology seem rational by association.
Let me get this straight. Your (I am assuming that is your site?) criticism of Cybersyn was that it was too ambitious to work, but then the only example of it in action you can come up with is when it *did* work?
Also, the idea that you can't control anything that features a time lag is absolutely laughable. Talk to an engineer for fucks sake. Or better still, take a ride in an aeroplane that has a functioning autopilot and notice how you aren't tossed around like you are in a washing machine...
Someone sensing that there is widespread institutional failure around the world isn't necessarily being dismal. I have hope for us being able to pull out of this nosedive. No fucking idea how, of course...
Ayn Rand? Seriously?
If anything, going on the comments the Russians are making, they are suffering from a lack of socialism not an excess. R-7 derived rockets became very reliable towards the end of the Soviet era.
Speaking of which, Ayn Rands most infamous brainfart, Atlas Shrugged, which claimed that only capitalists were capable of innovation, was released about a week after Sputnik was put into orbit. That is some pretty epic timing fail LOL
Nothing seems to work quite right these days, does it? The Russians can't launch rockets from a family of launch vehicles that has over half a century of heritage. The currency of continental Europe is on the verge of collapse and the French and Germans are near powerless to stop it. Stimulus packages on top of bailouts have failed to make a dent in a global crisis that has now been going on for three fucking years.
Do we have some kind of species-wide dementia or something? Why can't we do stuff anymore that we used to be able to do?
I disagree. The Chinese want to move into power projection, clearly. Not this carrier, but future ones, might well be used to slap down an African government that decides to say 'no' to China's economic plans in the region. Largely the same thing the US uses its carriers for in the middle east.
More to the point, at least in the case of Sheffield, they were acting as a shield for the vitally important carrier. Getting them hit by Exocet missiles was almost part of the plan.
30 years ago my country sent an aircraft carrier out to fight an enemy with what were state-of-the-art anti ship missiles, and it worked out OK. Was a close call at some points, but our carrier didn't take a hit. Not sure if that would still apply, but it is the most modern deployment of an aircraft carrier against anybody at a higher tech level than Kalashnikovs and IEDs
Two things lead me to dismiss this immediately:
1. It is very easy to fit rotation curves to data. The errors are quite large. There are many, many theoretical rotation curves (caused by dark matter) that match the data.
2. Even IF this guy can explain rotation curves, he doesn't explain how galaxies form in the quantities we see (which based on current data requires dark matter) and what causes gravitational lensing. He would have to propose an entirely separate mechanism for these things.
Or, as this blogger puts it "Give me inconvenience of give me death!"
http://rob.rho.org.uk/2011/06/give-me-inconvenience.html
Earlier this year, episode 88:
http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2011/06/10/episode-88-10th-june-2011/
What you don't have to pay out for music, movies and games in Switzerland, you have to pay out for food. I was applying for a position at CERN at one point (didn't get very far into the process, gave up as I realised I wasn't interested enough in particle physics to fight for the place) - the advice they give to visitors is "If you want to go shopping, go to France"
The guns aren't because the Swiss don't trust each other. Its because they don't trust the French, the Germans, or the Italians - and not without good reason.
Why does the fall of empires have to be a bad thing? Some people think the fall of the Roman Empire was bad - but the most immediate consequence for people living in Europe in the time was fewer legions pointing swords at them demanding tribute.
Only Germany forbids Nazi symbols by law (gee, I wonder why?) and the Danish government, along with most other EU governments, reacted with indignation when radical islamists when crazy over some cartoons. Yes, super injunctions here in the UK are stupid. So stupid that one of our own MPs scuppered one in Parliament to prove a point. The US does not have a monopoly on freedom.
Don't worry too much about it. The EU in its present form cannot survive at all. I'm all for European integration (which is unusual for a Brit) but the EU is a failed project whose bureaucratic nervous system is too sluggish to have told its brain that it is already dead. Its proclaimations should be taken as seriously as those made by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1990.
From the site:
and
FFS, Wallace and Gromitt have a more credible interplanetary space program.
Maybe they are developing some kind of orbital kinetic bombardment weapon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Thor#Project_Thor
Somebody teach this man to read the entire post, not just react to keywords.
Dishonest? WTF?
It isn't dishonest to take apparent a statement that is generally accepted as wisdom, when it clearly IS rhetorical. It uses the power "democracy" to push through the idea of "property rights" without a clear universal definition of what that means. Fuck, even the USSR under Stalin had property rights (you can have personal stuff in your house).
The idea that democracy needs property rights is therefore unprovable and unfalsifiable; EVERY state has something that can be called 'property rights' under somebodies definition, some states are democratic, and so to say 'democracy needs property rights' is to say 'democracy needs a state' which is a tautology because democracy is, in the context you seem to use it, a way of running a state.
This isn't ridiculous, just because it questions something you clearly hold sacred. It is my prerogative to do that as a free thinker, and I won't apologise if this upsets you.