Posts by Mongo27 posts • joined Sunday 26th April 2009 07:47 GMT
I watched the video. I saw a NAZI airship destroyed by God's Own Hand in the Land of the Free. I think we should be told just what the LOHAN team thinks is the problem here - are they perhaps BLASPHEMERS who crookedly insinuate that the Lord will smite them by mistake? Or do they in fact rightly fear the firey doom that awaits all SECRET NAZI CONSPIRATORS?
That's tempting fate! Once the docking is complete I'll think of it as a successfully sent mission; once it deposits the (stinky) payload it will have successfully returned.
Genuinely curious, as it also often gets cited as a key justification for the expense of ISS, but is there really a queue of companies performing zero-G research, and of a sufficiently compelling nature that they will pay market rates for it (ie that the Bigelow habitat will be self-funding through this)? I quite understand that there are processes that can't be performed under normal gravitational conditions and that these are interesting to study but are many real companies digging into their own pockets for this?
Aggregating items of a certain type has a very real value to the reader. Just consider that you read this story on El Reg presumably without first thinking "I'll go looking for more Elsevoir revolt stories" but clicked an interesting headline on the contents page.
Instead of this Register journal/website existing the dozen or two contributors could blog and you could follow those but (a) the research journal equivalent would be hundreds of blogs with only one or two posts per year (b) the continued success of such sites suggests the edited aggregation model has value for readers (c) much of that value is filtering out the kooks...
But the point is that the shuttle wasn't meant to be equivalent to a test programme - after the first series of flights it was meant to be a cheap, frequent, and safe means of going into space with the risks and real exploration downrange from it, eg on the ISS (at least that features some ongoing technology development, be it urine recycling or automated supply vessels). Beyond relatively small system upgrades the shuttle wasn't being further developed, and bitterly some of the most striking research it produced was on how management failures can promote a culture of risk.
So what the Columbia Board was reporting was the clear failure of this goal, which left the shuttle as a too-expensive, too-unsafe way to get to low orbit. They didn't recommend "no more space it's too scary", they explicitly recommended the prompt development of a better-suited replacement.
But their fleet was acquired on notably favourable terms: "In 1983, BA's managing director, Sir John King, convinced the government to sell the aircraft outright to British Airways for £16.5 million plus the first year’s profits." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#British_Airways_buys_its_Concordes_outright)
Quite reasonable for a fleet of 7 aircraft whose 1977 price was "around £23 million each" (http://www.concordesst.com/faq.html), and that higher price of course in no way covered the development cost of well over a billion pounds. Indeed the per-aircraft production costs were apparently about £40m, being a very small production run.
28 years old with just over 1 year of time in space: about the only other kind of "plane" that spends 96% of its time in the hangar is a working museum piece. Rather like Concorde: gloriously high tech, inspiring widespread awe and even devotion, but never supportable on simple economic grounds.
As for the "Obamacare hates American space triumphs" school of thought, of course the shuttle was actually cancelled back in 2004 after the loss of Columbia, with the investigating board reporting that it was too dangerous to remain in use beyond completing the construction flights for the ISS, concluding:
"The Shuttle has few of the mission capabilities that NASA originally promised. It cannot be launched on demand, does not recoup its costs, no longer carries national security payloads, and is not cost-effective enough, nor allowed by law, to carry commercial satellites. Despite efforts to improve its safety, the Shuttle remains a complex and risky system that remains central to U.S. ambitions in space. Columbia's failure to return home is a harsh reminder that the Space Shuttle is a developmental vehicle that operates not in routine flight but in the realm of dangerous exploration."
You cannot and should not expect a judge to explore legal avenues for expressing dislike or moral sanctions. That sort of exploration is what you & your lawyer do in deciding precisely what suit to file, and here the judge is dismissing it as being legally incorrect - the evidence presented of deliberate breach of privacy simply cannot sustain a charge which requires proof of substantial monetary loss. Perhaps they should have brought a different claim: that's a problem for the plaintiff. Perhaps US law needs strengthening to defend individuals' expectations of privacy. That's a problem for Congress. But don't attack the judge, unless you can say in what way her action is legally incorrect.
Or put more simply: they won't bill you for Sony network access on days when their network is inaccessible. Truly a paradigm shift, refraining from dunning customers for work not actually delivered...
I do hope it's the authorisation that's coming from the BoD & not all those shares, but given the "because (I say) I'm worth it" school of director remuneration it's not utterly unbelievable
If the amount to be refunded is ~£900k to 30,000 people (holding a detailed set of records of their identity, that being rather the point) then surely a couple of clerks with the list of names, a pen for crossing them out, and cheque book & a PO Box number for people to send some suitable ID [perhaps their defunct card] is pretty much all that's required?
I wonder if Boeing can elaborate on what these resources are & how manned spaceflight will be enriching the commercial sector beyond Boeing & chums? Beyond space tourism where's the money? a little materials research gets done on the ISS but are firms actually queuing up to pay for it?
Of course for Boeing the resource is plain: the gravy train of govt contracts begins a new lap
Dodgy kerning & missing possessive apostrophe - bet none of the Pythons had a hand in this one
Shakespeare did indeed have point - let's look at that commonly used quote in context:
>> CADE
>>
>> I thank you, good people: there shall be no money;
>> all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will
>> apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree
>> like brothers and worship me their lord.
>>
>> DICK
>>
>> The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
>>
>> CADE
>>
>> Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
>> thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
>> be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
>> o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
>> but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
>> once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
>> since.
So these are desperate revolutionaries intent upon establishing themselves as the new power in land, and for this they need (among other things) the suspension of the practice of law (and existing order)
Still feel like subscribing to their newsletter?
And a whole lot more like Jabba the Hutt.
Though clumsily expressed here by those self-interested Pentagon folk, through millennia of worrying the human race has yet to dispense with "If you wish for peace, prepare for war"
[while not of course disregarding the myriad of other useful diplomatic and social things that may help you rub along with other nations, but keeping some kind of stick in the cupboard will serve you well a while yet]
Well it's almost 8.5 years since they stopped Gary Mackinnon's quest for UFOs - a little longer than the interval between Kennedy's "We choose the Moon" speech and "one giant leap for mankind". So it's not unreasonable to hope that they've somewhat got A into G in the meantime
The voyage that "discovered" America (first European public disclosure anyway; probably the Norse & Basque knew of it) was a commercially backed venture to find a quicker/cheaper route to the trading riches of the "Indies". Everyone knew perfectly well that the world was round by then, but Columbus thought it was rather smaller than it is and hence going the opposite way would be a splendid shortcut. Happily enough for him he bumped into something just as valuable when only 1/3 of the way...
So note the dissimilarity: Columbus was trying to find a cheaper way to provide control and exploitation of something well known to have huge immediate value, with Queen Isabella backing him for solid economic reasons and imagination & curiosity hardly in sight. Manned exploration of space? Nobody has any idea how to make a return on that - orbital space tourism merely weakens a catastrophic loss to an appalling one (when considering the total space investment: as with Concorde if you eliminate all preceding costs then it almost makes sense)
Which I think is a real shame - I'd *love* to go into space. But robot probes make sense until something transformative (eg limitless energy supply and/or warp drive) arrives - just look at what Spirit & Cassini have achieved...
What a great way to sell the idea of being buried alive!
It's really amazing how many people forget this simple precaution and so needlessly fall victim to malicious links!
Behind the scenes where we can't see it they toil ceaselessly to protect us from the scourge of living-room elephants, their only reward the knowledge that, despite their shallow jeering, the Which? researchers too are safe from having currant buns & peanuts picked from their pockets.
Simply a gift to the opponents' speechwriters come next election
They get the increasingly thankless task of navigating the morass of ill-conceived legislation crammed through by twitchy govts (seemingly with half a sleepy eye on tomorrow's red-top SCANDAL!! headline). A saddening report on the Lord Chief Justice's recent speech on this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5834409/Sir-Igor-Judge-tells-Jack-Straw-the-UK-has-too-many-crime-laws.html
And of course in this case the UK govt feels itself hostage to the "special relationship" with all the rich and varied dividends that brings to the UK
(sfx: wind howling, loose door banging, tumbleweed bouncing down street)
A small dish is surprising - all the (few) photos of tracking stations I've seen had large dishes. And these reminisces of a HSK denizen show some big kit:
http://users.bigpond.net.au/eagle33/places/hsk.htm
But this could have been post-Apollo ie for deep-space tracking I guess? Can you flesh out your notes, go get that photo, etc? :-)
So how about you tell us what makes you disbelieve that the manned moon landings happened? eg what are the five best counter arguments, how do you explain the various pieces of evidence supporting that they did (eg the large weight of moonrocks sourced from multiple locations, the laser ranging targets, the apparent acquiescence of the Soviets in the cover-up at the very height of the space race), and please also say what would convince you that the landings did occur - ie your chance to demonstrate that you're driven by reason and not zealotry? (eg for my part, what would convince me they were faked is: detailed coverage of the landing sites showing nothing Apollo-esque & no reasonable alternative explanation such as a fresh meteor strike there. Or how about actual footage of the faking, details of the studios involved, the super-Surveyor probe series that must have been involved, etc)
No it doesn't - you meant to say it raises the question; begging it would . See http://begthequestion.info/
I remember back in the day when there was much debate over whether one could simply (re)boot consciousness from a captured algorithmic state. I must have missed the announcement that it was trivially solved - or just possibly the crazy-techers don't feel that their budgeting & goals should be at all constrained by petty considerations of "known to be in accordance with established research?
