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Comment Re:Wait a minute (Score 2) 248

I see later down in this discussion that the engine steering is done with pressurized fuel, which is presumably then dumped into the exhaust stream to burn. And the other actuators are too far from there to make it practical to extend the fuel-based hydraulic system to them.

Weird set of engineering compromises, but they make sense. Too bad about underestimating the capacity needed for the upper hydraulic reserve.

Comment Re:Wait a minute (Score 1) 248

Maybe the main-engine vectoring used hydraulic actuators? Internal verniers, nozzle steering, engine steering... something has to push it around, and why would you have two actuation systems? If you're too mass-cheap for a closed-loop hydraulics, a complete independent actuator system for thrust steering seems like a bad bargain.

Comment Re:The Dangers of the World (Score 5, Insightful) 784

If the local police feel that the world is such a dangerous place, perhaps they would be better employed fixing that, rather than interfering with young kids going out to play.

It's easier to corral the sheep than face the wolves. Even if some of the sheep don't want to cooperate. That's why you castrate them.

Maybe it's not so baaaad.

Comment Re:When I was a young squirt (Score 4, Interesting) 314

I don't mean to one-up (ok, actually, I am), but my first computer was from Radio Shack as well. A TRS-80 (later, it would be called a Model I, but at the time it was the only model so didn't need a steenkin' model badge). 4 whole kilobytes of RAM. A tiny BASIC interpreter in-ROM which probably started life as someone's punched-tape baby. 300 baud I/O for highly unreliable audio cassette storage. A video monitor that started out life as a gutted-down RCA black-and-white TV. It's the reason I'm a SW/Systems Engineer instead of an Electrical Engineer.

I was in a local Radio Shack late last year. There was virtually nothing there for me. I guess some of the Arduino toys were cool, but for my degree of urgency I'd be far better off shopping online. And their consumer electronics stopped being interesting sometime shortly after the 1980s.

A little sad, a little nostalgic, but the same way as discovering the ol' neighborhood has changed so much and all the landmarks you remember are gone. If they bulldozed the whole thing, it wouldn't be much different.

Comment Re:Oh it gets better (Score 3, Insightful) 490

Yeah, because everyone with a fucking grievance grabs an AK-47 and shoots up a magazine don't they love?

Just what the hell does it take to knock some common sense into these bloody liberals??

Irony: right-wingers complaining about left-wingers painting them as violent lunatics and then threatening them with violence.

Of course, in the interest of literal correctness, you didn't threaten to shoot them up with an AK-47. So it's grazing irony, not center-of-mass double-tap irony.

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