Depending on where the units were placed, it's quite possible that the operating temperature would exceed 43 degrees even if the ambient temperature was below that.
Yes, official temperature readings measure the air temperature and are always taken in the shade. When the weatherman says the temp is 43deg, it's more like 53deg in direct sunlight.
I agree. Duh, the program is obviously not perfect and screws up sometimes. But I'm amazed by how good it actually is. Even being able to just ballpark it some of the time would be impressive, but the fact that it gets pretty reasonably close most of the time, I find that incredibly impressive.
Someone on my Facebook feed was complaining about how in a washed-out picture of three children the picture guessed only two of them right, but saw one (a young boy) as an adult woman. My response was to crop out just the washed out face, take it out of context, and point out, if you saw this face, not understanding anything about the context, could you guess it? I certainly couldn't have. But that's exactly what the software has to do.
I took a number of pictures of myself in different angles, making different faces, etc, and its range on age guesses was only 3 years. My brother-in-law managed to get a 20-year difference in guesses by making faces, but I couldn't manage it, and neither could most people I know who tried. Again, computationally, it's very impressive.
Yeah, it bites all of us (I can't write a thorn here). They only care about Americans so after countless redesigns there's still no proper unicode support.
Speak for yourself. My lander was near the epicenter and I lost five crew
[Parents] are responsible for their kids' actions, no?
No, but they are usually on the hook for the bill.
And how exactly do you know what her DNA is? There are XX men and XY women.
And seriously, of all of the stupid measures of who someone is, DNA has to take the cake. "Okay, okay, this Stephen Hawking guy seems to be smart, but that doesn't matter, what does his DNA say? Does his DNA say he's smart? If not then I don't care what he has to say."
I personally, look up to both of them.
Space (specifically the Apollo program) was responsible for a purchasing program that drove logic ICs down to consumer level pricing - without which PCs would not have reached the volume that drove the prices far lower.
Analog ICs would not have got far without the logic ones, because production tolerances were so loose that the concept of "it works or it does not" was critical to volume production of ICs in the early days. (Yield was under 3% for the 7400 family (first TTL logic ICs)).
Yes: IBM - the company known for hiring the very best in legal expertise signed away their arms and legs
Why? - I would like to know that!
What I do know is that Bill Gates was a completely unknown school kid until he was brought to IBM's attention by his mother, who was a high-up at IBM. Digital Research was well known. When Garry Kidall did not believe IBM had sent people to see him, somehow Mrs Gates must have been on hand to say to the right person "Check out my son - he is a genius and has written and OS" probably having no idea of the difference between and OS and an interpreter. (Would your mum know the difference? Would she have in 1980?) (mine would, and I have some idea how rare that was). QDOS was known to Bill Gates, who had, indeed, written some software (and a few others) and he spotted an opportunity when it hit him right between the eyes!
Whether Bill Gates or his Dad (who was a very well known lawyer) wrote the contact with IBM, I don't know. Why IBM signed the contract without their lawyers reading it properly, I don't know. In my view the whole thing stinks. (Though I recognise that IBM's decision making was coloured by buffoons who thought they would be lucky to sell 10,000 PCs.
Here in the UK, most people involved in software at the time (like me) did almost nothing for the year that elapsed between rumours that IBM might make a PC, and the first one being delivered, because their employers wanted them to be instantly available to port the company's existing products to the PC - the entire industry knew it would be a game changer. Read the magazines from the time: It was like "Apple is going to make a phone that will run 3rd party apps" x 1,000!
Incidentally, Intel had a perfectly good OS at the time called ISIS but refused to sell it to anyone!
I also don't know why you need a GE225 to write BASIC, surely the most machine independent interpreter ever.
Disclaimer: I wrote an ISIS/CPM clone, but my employers refused to sell it because they said "No one would buy software written in the UK!" - and they were a UK software company"
I don't think NASA needs to make the fictional heroes; I think every piece of sci-fi that comes out helps inspire the next generation. I guarantee you that there's tons kids and young teens who saw, say, Gravity and think that's what it is to work at NASA and have set that as their aspiration. "Astronaut" is usually in the top 10 of what kids want to be when they grow up.
More than anything else, I see the main point of having astronauts is just to inspire kids. Just knowing that there's people going up there is enough - they don't need ot be doing big stunts that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put a footprint on a distant body; they simply need to be twirling around in zero G in LEO.
How many current astronauts can you name?
How many current astronauts can anyone here name off the top of their head?
The time of astronauts as heroes has passed. Far, far more people today do care about MESSENGER and New Horizons than they do about what astronauts are doing in space. They get more coverage in the popular press too. MESSENGER hasn't been a big public eye-catcher (except briefly when it crashed) but there was lots of attention about Rosetta, MERs, MSL, Cassini periodically (for example, the geysers of Enceladus, the Huygens landing, etc), and you better believe New Horizons is going to get a lot of coverage when it does its Pluto flyby (the public has a lot of interest in Pluto, more than in a long time due to the "demotion" controversy)
Yes, the percentage of Americans who read about these sort of things when they come up in the news (let alone follow them in depth) is probably in the 10-20% range. But so? How many specific sub-programs in the Social Security Administration or Internal Revenue Service can you name? NASA still captures the public imagination in a way that no other part of the federal government does. It doesn't take a moon landing to do that.
I'm sitting right next to a dinosaur now and scratching its head.
There wasn't an extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
I think we should secretly replace their employees with Folgers crystals and see if anyone notices.
It's about time someone defunded this utterly ridiculous and transparent scam.
Indeed, it's about time they defund SLS/Orion!
Don't get me wrong, NASA should be in the launch systems business. In the revolutionary launch systems business. Government programs are supposed to exist to do the important thing that private industry is unwilling or unable to do - in the science field this means things like such as science without immediate commercial applications, very expensive basic research, etc. There is no shortage of private companies now competing over the launch market, and indeed even for the heavy launch market. It's no longer some sort of monopolistic scenario.
NASA needs to be working on rocketry techs that are seen as too much cost / too much of a long shot for private industry to try - that is, until someone else (such as NASA) can prove them. Metstable fuels, nuclear-steam rockets, liquid airbreathing rockets, scramjets, solar sails, magnetic sails, fission sails, advanced ion propulsion technologies, fission fragment rockets, ballistic launch, launch loops, antimatter-initiated microfission / microfusion rockets, nuclear saltwater rockets, nuclear pulse propulsion, and on and on, plus advanced non-propulsion techs for landing, transit, sustaining a base/colony, new communications technologies, advanced robotic systems, etc - with all exact schematics, production instructions, consultations with the developers to serious parties, etc made available at no charge. I'm also of the opinion that NASA should produce and make available at low cost to private space companies and researchers the sort of large-scale analysis and test facilities whose capital costs would break a startup.
Basically, they need to be filling in the gaps in advancing space technology, not trying to do everything, even those things that other parties are more than happy to do on their own with their own money.
That might be true if this was some sort of dispassionate commentary on the bill. But it's not, it's a ringing endorsement of a highly partisan bill. Surely you see the difference.
For those who are serious, here's the Planetary Society's commentary, with a link to an indepth but nonpartisan analysis at SpacePolicyOnline. The Planetary Society is very happy with the planetary science numbers, not happy with the earth science numbers, and couldn't seem to care less about the funding for SLS/Orion.
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