"people say you know fuck nothing, but you know fuck all"

just ask all the "freetards" managing the world's biggest datacenters which OS they think "just works"

i think he's actually pursuing the ecosystem ideology... trying to trap developers and users in a similar fashion to microsoft and apple. not surprising really. canonical must turn a profit to survive. they don't have clout in the datacenter like redhat and their user base is full of ex-windows freeloaders.

if shuttleworth was really an ideological inventor before businessman, it wouldn't really make much sense to piggyback off another operating system. he might be gradually trying to develop a new OS, but he'll probably do it as a businessman, implementing small pieces and building his ecosystem by stealth. eventually ubuntu users will be as trapped with ubuntu as isheep are enslaved by their ithings.

inventions that came out of the space race weren't due to the "space race"... they were because of huge R&D investments made by government during a cold war with Russia, and American taxpayers probably still haven't broken even from R&D investment in the mid 1900's.

The space race was merely a front for ridiculous unwarranted missile and spy satellite R&D.

The United States doesn't even have it's own regular access to Low Earth Orbit... humanity is decades away from making space stations beyond the size of supporting specialists.

The problem isn't that the economy isn't growing... growth cannot be sustained (on earth alone anyway) but the problem is that many Americans don't realize just how fucked the economy really is.

It's pretty hard to be upbeat when you can see a country collapsing through cracks between fake backgrounds propped up by a government out of control that show off how great things are meant to be. There's nothing to be optimistic about in America today. The best you can do is look after yourself and your family and forget your country, because your country doesn't give a fuck about you or your family.

You are an idiot if you really believe what you read by Reuters.

Even the CPI numbers are cooked. Maybe instead of reading Reuters (where do you think Fox gets its stories?) you should listen to Peter Schiff and Ron Paul, who have predicted recent events. A lot of people seem to think that Peter is wrong on the dollar collapse simply because he refuses to nail it down to a specific time, but it will happen soon enough. Keynesians are fools... always have been.

Keep chugging your mainstream media kool aid.

$17 trillion in debt - that means every American taxpayer is $150k in debt merely from government spending (not including their own debt), and that doesn't even include unfunded liabilities that aren't included in the national debt. Taxpayers are forking out $220 billion on interest alone, at a 0.25% interest rate... if that interest raises (due to Fed pressure to raise it if demand for bonds falls) Americans will be fucked. The Fed will print to oblivion and the world will stop trading in US dollars. If the US defaults on it's debt, it will lose all international credibility and the world will stop trading in US dollars.

The writing is on the wall. It's just unfortunate (for you) that you (like many others) seem to be unable to read.

Not really. I'm just highlighting that America's budget is so far down the toilet that fixing it should take priority over making it worse.

America should cut military spending... by 80%, and all subsidies should be stopped.

If the Slashdot article was about a defense issue, I would have raised the issue of defense spending. The story in this case was about space, so I highlighted how much of a waste of taxpayer money NASA is at the moment. If NASA was doing anything that benefited average Americans I would be all for it, but NASA is full of bureaucrats and academics peddling their own bandwagons.

By the way; I'm a Ron Paul supporter.

From the Slashdot summary:

No mention of two anything.

Your quote is from the TFA (which I usually don't bother reading).

Still seems as though if they can lose two wheels out of four in a single mission, with three wheels required, any reliability engineer would tell you that the level of redundancy is insufficient.

i blame whatever website i plagiarized from... it's not like i commit that kind of shit to memory

one reaction wheel failed and they lost a primary mission objective... where's the redundancy in that?

so what if there were four wheels... if it only takes one to fail and kill the mission, then that one is a single point of failure and the other three aren't redundancies for that critical one.

no, the United States as a nation (just as all other nations) should address its terrestrial problems before looking to extraterrestrial ones... if it can never address its terrestrial ones then it kinda doesn't give it much credibility in solving extraterrestrial ones.

Anyone who thinks the survival or our species really depends on NASA is even more deluded than the ignorant Keynesian economists.

The other problem with trying to look to the stars whilst problems on earth get worse is that the problems on earth can affect the stellar mission... and I suspect that's what may have happened in this case... trying to achieve difficult objectives on a relatively shoestring budget is always going to result in shortcuts being taken and quality processes being compromised.

When America can afford to look to the stars, they should. Until then, they are wasting their time (and precious taxpayer money).

"In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity's so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise."

"But for a time it was good."

"The machines worked tirelessly to do man's bidding."

"It was not long before seeds of descent took root. Though loyal and pure, the machines earned no respect from their masters, these strange, endlessly multiplying mammals."

...redundancy in aerospace.

It's not like anyone is physically hurt from such spacecraft failure, and space programs are great, but not at the expense of burying future generations in debt... Keynesian economics is a failed experiment; government spending is horribly out of control, and yet there are still deluded revisionists who claim that Roosevelt's New Deal brought the USA out of the Great Depression.

sieg heil

"come get some"

resistance is futile

it's like economists having conferences about the prospects for a vibrant economy

everyone likes to talk about what they are paid to work towards but will never achieve