Catch up? I would say that Shenzhou is at least comparable with other manned space flight systems. The shuttle is on its last legs and crippled with problems. Soyuz is also due to be retired.
As essentially a larger version of Soyuz, with an orbital module that can operate indepedently. The program might not be moving fast (although now the Chinese have finished with the olympics they might redirect more resources) they do have the most technically impressive craft currently flying.
Why not? Most live events have a delay, because sometimes bad shit happens. I don't think the Chinese state not making its own impromptu snuff film has anything to do with their censorship practices.
People with non-standard body language will suffer constant harassment from the police, and as such people often have psychological/neurological issues they will find it harder to defend themselves from aggressive questioning techniques.
The idea behind this is to filter people by 'normality' and assume that abnormality is evidence of criminality. Its a disgusting notion to me.
...create barriers to entry for free speech that make sure only those who are wealthy (i.e. beneficiaries of the status quo) have any chance of speaking.
Don't try and pin this exclusively on the political left. The current UK government is at best centre-right (if not far right in terms of economic policy at least, privatising everything in sight and punishing the poor to relieve the rich). As has been mentioned elsewhere, Nazi Germany had just such a scheme in place. Don't try the Nazi=socialist bullshit either, because that ignores the historical facts that Hitler purged any vaguely left wing elements early on and that the Nazi party colluded extensively with both foreign and domestic corporations.
They might visit you for that. The police are good at fishing out easy convictions; they often go after 'chavs' and intimidate them until they either strike the officer or try to resist arrest - because both of those things will get put through a magistrates court in about 30 seconds - whereas many more serious crimes like domestic assaults are very difficult to get a conviction out of because the victim usually retracts the accusation. Having worked for the police doing paperwork, I got really fucked off with the phrase 'hes OK when he isnt drinking/smoking crack'...
Its about control. The psychos in charge of the country believe the way to make things better is to measure them, and then work to create quantitative improvements in the chosen metric. This is how we ended up with shit like the 'Rural vibrancy index' which incorporates the 'birdsong index'.
When these hair-brained classification and target schemes inevitably die on their arse (as any such attempt to reduce the complexity of human society to a number of arbitrary measurements will) the government decides that it obviously didn't collect enough random bullshit information to optimise, and throws away liberty for the sake of computing their fucking targets.
Its a sort of extremist rationality gone made. They want to reduce us to a set of numbers calculated by intruding our privacy at every turn, and then manipulate those numbers to achieve a banal society based around middle-class dinner parties.
You buy the gadgets, then sew the leads into a nest in which you can raise geeklets.
To be honest, I think having too many chargers to handle is a sign of having too many gadgets. Either find ones with combined functionality, or do without some of your toys you freakish cyborg person.
Our government hates freedom. Its desire to turn society into a perfect little machine to optimise a bunch of meaningless metrics leaves no room for free will, or dissent from the middle-class, middle-of-the-road lifestyle that we are supposed to lead.
There is no priority for this government than maintaining the status quo, at any cost. Our internet connections must be monitored, our lives recorded in minute detail, our rights before the law curtailed, just so the City can continue to gamble peoples pensions and walk home rich whatever happens.
That is what is so dumb about our approach to a nuclear Iran. We are forcibly denying them the expertise they need to have a safe, independent nuclear industry. So they are buying that expertise from Russia. There could be another Chernobyl in Iran simply because the same people responsible for that have found new jobs there.
They are converting their Scud fleet to solid propellant, but Scuds are already a weapon so this doesn't really tell you much about their military intentions other than that they wish to modernise (a fairly common theme in Iranian politics. They see themselves as a major civilisation and thus think they deserve a seat at the table with the big boys).
Whilst its doubtful a LOX/Kerosene rocket could be turned into a more useful UDMH/N2O4 missile, what they learn from building and firing the former will give them a great deal of expertise at building and firing the latter. Turbopumps, thrust vectoring, programming sufficiently robust software are all transferable skills.
Comparing this launcher with North Koreas pimp-my-scud attempt, its clear Iran's aerospace industry is quite impressive for a developing country. I think their intentions are more about modernising than becoming a military power, but we misread their intentions because of the dual use of much modern technology and the fiery rhetoric of their leaders, which is largely intendd to gain domestic support.
Manned space program is an elegant way of proving your ICBM technology to the rest of the world: if you can put a fragile human being into space and bring him down at a specific location, you can do the same with a fragile nuclear warhead.
They've a young population and a reasonable education system. The kids spawned when Khomeini said he wanted the population to boom are now science and engineering graduates.
Again, I must reiterate that private enterprise is yet to produce anything of such size. Reality doesn't quite match up to your ideology; I wonder which you will disregard?
The US government oversaw Apollo. US enterprise is currently overseeing a crappy suborbital space plane and an even crappier low payload rocket.
If the current incarnation of NASA has a problem, it is that like many modern government agencies it is trying to emulated private enterprise too much.
Ares being cheap is a false economy. By trying to essentially throw together a rocket from spare parts, they are now costing more money making it work than if they had just built a launcher with a free hand.
1. First attempt at building a man rated launcher with an entirely solid fueled stage
2. Largest solid rocket booster ever flown
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
4. And now, first use of shock absorbers to dampen an otherwise lethal vibration in a launcher
Considering how reverting to capsules was seen as a safe bet, and as taking advantage of existing technology and production lines, there is an increasing amount of experimental new technology involved.
With the Shuttles headed towards retirement and the only remaining source of access to the ISS in jeopardy due to chilly relations with Russia, now doesn't seem like the best time to be getting experimental. Functional will do just nicely.
I honestly think that a manned ATV might fly before Orion at this rate.
Could it be that, as well as being from an era of more ad-hoc approaches, the code is simply showing its age? System tend to get modified over time, and such modification is often done by multiple people under multiple managers.
I would also dispute the idea that the simplicity of newer code is necessarily a good thing. Maybe they are yet to find all the bugs that require inelegant solutions...
A lot of people feel the same. I however have difficulty in most human contact situations, even more so with strangers, so I will often go for the self service. I know I am an outlier in terms of sociability, but think of me as the canary in the mine. Technology that I currently use to alienate myself from society will eventually temp you into doing the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Catch up? I would say that Shenzhou is at least comparable with other manned space flight systems. The shuttle is on its last legs and crippled with problems. Soyuz is also due to be retired.
As essentially a larger version of Soyuz, with an orbital module that can operate indepedently. The program might not be moving fast (although now the Chinese have finished with the olympics they might redirect more resources) they do have the most technically impressive craft currently flying.
Why not? Most live events have a delay, because sometimes bad shit happens. I don't think the Chinese state not making its own impromptu snuff film has anything to do with their censorship practices.
People with non-standard body language will suffer constant harassment from the police, and as such people often have psychological/neurological issues they will find it harder to defend themselves from aggressive questioning techniques.
The idea behind this is to filter people by 'normality' and assume that abnormality is evidence of criminality. Its a disgusting notion to me.
...create barriers to entry for free speech that make sure only those who are wealthy (i.e. beneficiaries of the status quo) have any chance of speaking.
Don't try and pin this exclusively on the political left. The current UK government is at best centre-right (if not far right in terms of economic policy at least, privatising everything in sight and punishing the poor to relieve the rich). As has been mentioned elsewhere, Nazi Germany had just such a scheme in place. Don't try the Nazi=socialist bullshit either, because that ignores the historical facts that Hitler purged any vaguely left wing elements early on and that the Nazi party colluded extensively with both foreign and domestic corporations.
They might visit you for that. The police are good at fishing out easy convictions; they often go after 'chavs' and intimidate them until they either strike the officer or try to resist arrest - because both of those things will get put through a magistrates court in about 30 seconds - whereas many more serious crimes like domestic assaults are very difficult to get a conviction out of because the victim usually retracts the accusation. Having worked for the police doing paperwork, I got really fucked off with the phrase 'hes OK when he isnt drinking/smoking crack'...
In the UK, bongs are sold openly, on big shelves saying 'BONGS FOR SALE' with pictures of marijuana leaves next to them, in high street shops.
Its about control. The psychos in charge of the country believe the way to make things better is to measure them, and then work to create quantitative improvements in the chosen metric. This is how we ended up with shit like the 'Rural vibrancy index' which incorporates the 'birdsong index'.
When these hair-brained classification and target schemes inevitably die on their arse (as any such attempt to reduce the complexity of human society to a number of arbitrary measurements will) the government decides that it obviously didn't collect enough random bullshit information to optimise, and throws away liberty for the sake of computing their fucking targets.
Its a sort of extremist rationality gone made. They want to reduce us to a set of numbers calculated by intruding our privacy at every turn, and then manipulate those numbers to achieve a banal society based around middle-class dinner parties.
Well, we've already got a PM with about as much electoral legitimacy as Hitler did. Adopting Nazis snooping tactics is just the next logical step.
Have you read any of our newspapers recently?
You buy the gadgets, then sew the leads into a nest in which you can raise geeklets.
To be honest, I think having too many chargers to handle is a sign of having too many gadgets. Either find ones with combined functionality, or do without some of your toys you freakish cyborg person.
Our government hates freedom. Its desire to turn society into a perfect little machine to optimise a bunch of meaningless metrics leaves no room for free will, or dissent from the middle-class, middle-of-the-road lifestyle that we are supposed to lead.
There is no priority for this government than maintaining the status quo, at any cost. Our internet connections must be monitored, our lives recorded in minute detail, our rights before the law curtailed, just so the City can continue to gamble peoples pensions and walk home rich whatever happens.
I hate my own country.
China, Iran and Russia together in some kind of anti-US club? Already happened. Its called the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
And Irans leaders aren't crazy and aren't suicide bombers. Its dangerous to think so.
That is what is so dumb about our approach to a nuclear Iran. We are forcibly denying them the expertise they need to have a safe, independent nuclear industry. So they are buying that expertise from Russia. There could be another Chernobyl in Iran simply because the same people responsible for that have found new jobs there.
They are converting their Scud fleet to solid propellant, but Scuds are already a weapon so this doesn't really tell you much about their military intentions other than that they wish to modernise (a fairly common theme in Iranian politics. They see themselves as a major civilisation and thus think they deserve a seat at the table with the big boys).
Whilst its doubtful a LOX/Kerosene rocket could be turned into a more useful UDMH/N2O4 missile, what they learn from building and firing the former will give them a great deal of expertise at building and firing the latter. Turbopumps, thrust vectoring, programming sufficiently robust software are all transferable skills.
Comparing this launcher with North Koreas pimp-my-scud attempt, its clear Iran's aerospace industry is quite impressive for a developing country. I think their intentions are more about modernising than becoming a military power, but we misread their intentions because of the dual use of much modern technology and the fiery rhetoric of their leaders, which is largely intendd to gain domestic support.
Manned space program is an elegant way of proving your ICBM technology to the rest of the world: if you can put a fragile human being into space and bring him down at a specific location, you can do the same with a fragile nuclear warhead.
They've a young population and a reasonable education system. The kids spawned when Khomeini said he wanted the population to boom are now science and engineering graduates.
Again, I must reiterate that private enterprise is yet to produce anything of such size. Reality doesn't quite match up to your ideology; I wonder which you will disregard?
No, they are dampening the vibrations because vibrations from SRBs are too unpredictable to be canceled out in the way you describe.
The US government oversaw Apollo. US enterprise is currently overseeing a crappy suborbital space plane and an even crappier low payload rocket.
If the current incarnation of NASA has a problem, it is that like many modern government agencies it is trying to emulated private enterprise too much.
Ares being cheap is a false economy. By trying to essentially throw together a rocket from spare parts, they are now costing more money making it work than if they had just built a launcher with a free hand.
Lets review what we have so far:
1. First attempt at building a man rated launcher with an entirely solid fueled stage
2. Largest solid rocket booster ever flown
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
4. And now, first use of shock absorbers to dampen an otherwise lethal vibration in a launcher
Considering how reverting to capsules was seen as a safe bet, and as taking advantage of existing technology and production lines, there is an increasing amount of experimental new technology involved.
With the Shuttles headed towards retirement and the only remaining source of access to the ISS in jeopardy due to chilly relations with Russia, now doesn't seem like the best time to be getting experimental. Functional will do just nicely.
I honestly think that a manned ATV might fly before Orion at this rate.
Could it be that, as well as being from an era of more ad-hoc approaches, the code is simply showing its age? System tend to get modified over time, and such modification is often done by multiple people under multiple managers.
I would also dispute the idea that the simplicity of newer code is necessarily a good thing. Maybe they are yet to find all the bugs that require inelegant solutions...
I don't mean getting Mr. Fusor to give Mrs. Fusor a special cuddle, I mean using the thing as a neutron source to produce fission fuel.
I'm guessing not, as the thing would be more tightly controlled.
A lot of people feel the same. I however have difficulty in most human contact situations, even more so with strangers, so I will often go for the self service. I know I am an outlier in terms of sociability, but think of me as the canary in the mine. Technology that I currently use to alienate myself from society will eventually temp you into doing the same.