Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26124 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Not because it is easy, but because it allows us to push funding to defence companies in a bunch of states in a way that would otherwise require us to have a war to justify
Actually going to the moon is sort of irrelevant, it's all about the velocity of the money supply that matters. You could achieve pretty much the same result if the rocket didn't work, so long as nobody found out.
Robotic service, as in bolt on a new external module with extra gyros = easy
Robotic service, as in pull out failing reaction wheels from deep inside the body = tricky, although they were swapped by one of the last service missions. Unfortunately you really need the reaction wheels to be close the CoG so a bolt-on upgrade isn't as easy
>The upgrades have replaced vast amounts of the telescope over the years, but I'm not sure you could reasonably have built several new versions and launched those for less than the maintenance costs.
Hubble cost many times more than it should because of the service missions - they made it a "manned mission" and imposed much more stringent requirements, and launching from the Shuttle into an orbit that allowed servicing also meant that its operation was severely compromised.
The storage cost for the years after the challenger disaster were estimated to be about what a comparable unmanned recon satellite costs.
Some of this was the politics/environment of the day (which ran on into JWST) - starting now you would probably build a family of identical spacecraft busses with upgraded instruments and launch the with the much cheaper commercial options
Funnily enough banking laws here specifically call out politicians, lawyers, judges and the like - you have to declare it when you open an account
I thought it was to give them extra security, keep their home address anonymous etc but it's because they are much more likely to be receiving large suspicious deposits of cash that the authorities might be interested in
I'd love to know where you get a sample of young people across all social/economic groups that don't use internet to compare them to
It's like a study that showed CRT monitors are bad for you, by comparing blood pressure in Wall St traders who used CRT monitors and Amish farmers who didn't.
Obvious solution is to go back to a time when teenagers could only be referred to the clinic for treatment by their GP and have GPs ignore mental health issues in teenagers, it's only a phase they're going through, et viola a reduction in mental health clinic admissions for teens.
Can AI lead a crusade against the infidels? Can it root out and punish the sinners/unbelievers/people-who-believe-in-a-slightly-different-version-of-the-same-thing ?
Can it persecute people that like to put their ding-dong in a different ooh-ooh (and say so in public instead of just doing it and lying about it)
>...and how we even let people pick up these kind of jobs is really criminal.
Clergy? That was the original grift.
Some very smart dude looks out of the cave, thinks of all the lions out there and says to the rest of the tribe.
"Hey you could all get eaten by lions / have a volcano fall on you - who knows why this happens."
Well I have discovered there is a magic invisible fairy that controls it and only I can talk to it.
So if I stay here safe in the cave and you all bring back an offering of mammoth for their sky fairy I'll ask it not to smite you
>mine has endured significantly more abuse than a modern X series could stand up to.
I think you might be misunderstanding the nature of capitalism. I have a storeroom full of Dell XPS that are out of official support and so corporate abandoned them.
There was also a bunch of Alienware that somebody managed to specify for 'graphics intensive CAD workloads' don't know what happened to them !
Not necessarily, most consumers aren't optimising for reduced install footprint.
We used to install the Windows 'N' builds - the anti-trust version with no bundled codes - to save a few Gb on VMs
But for a customer buying a preinstalled machine with a Tb of disk - it's optimal for them to have drivers for every bit of weird hardware and fonts for every language, without having to go online to download it.
But it is a union effectively making government policy. Suppose the US longshoreman decide they aren't unloading Volvos (officially cos of their Chinese owner and uighurs) or no Porsches (cos he was a Nazi)
No, of course the USA hasn't banned the import of European cars, it's just legitimate worker's rights.
>but there was this one guy who was some kind of kernel developer, and he was an absolute cock. He had to stick his nose into everything.
That's the nice thing about working in commercial corporate software development, everybody pulls together for the good of the shareholders. The efficiency of the market means that anyone not contributing surplus value is weeded out by ruthless capitalism
>We all remember the earlier Ariane "mishaps" so they are not our of the woods yet for sure.
Ariane 5 has a pretty good record. The first one blew, the first one of the improved version 10 years later fell into a swamp - but the others stayed up !
they had a couple of 2nd stage partial failures but on a scale of massive rockets they have an enviable record.
They were also much more precise than alternatives at the time, so the payloads didn't need as much manoeuvring fuel themselves - don't know how SpaceX's craft compare
