Comment Re:Holy design, Batman. (Score 1) 168
Go watch 2001 again.
Go watch 2001 again.
Not a problem. Diesels tend to be quite durable, so (with a few notable exceptions) if you can put the mileage into the car, the motor will stand up to it. 1/2 million miles is not uncommon for a VW diesel.
It doesn't make sense to buy an expensive, efficient car if you're going to be putting in low mileage/low hours on your car.
The reasoning that dictator X is worse than dictator Y because X killed more than Y is pure bullshit. Evil doesn't scale with body count, it's a qualitative evaluation.
Hitler's influence certainly lasted more than a decade. Regimes which were influenced by Nazism and it's methods of control include East Germany (the Gestapo were cloned into the Stasi), Peron in Argentina, and the Baath party in Iraq and Syria.
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US (they had after all nearly been destroyed by Germany, a smaller country) and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union. That, and what that notorious left-winger Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex".
Eisenhower wasn't upset about having a strong, high technology military. He was concerned that crackpot projects were excessively milking the country for money and that military spending should be looked upon always with a certain amount of clear eyed judgement to prevent unwarranted waste.
Nuclear powered bombers? Remember that one? Safeguard? Heck, even now NMD is being built for pork purposes under the smokescreen of a fictional "rogue nation" threat.
Even the Sovs had their own version military industrial complex. They called it the "metal eaters alliance".
However, as I suspect that you're writing that from your parents' basement, I doubt that you actually know any history, or were even around for the Cold War."We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays"- if you knew any history, you would know that the Western invasion of Germany was a limited war because high casualties would not be accepted by the American and British public. Read up on Eisenhower. You need to learn about the greatest American general.
I'd say it was pretty much total war. There was a certain amount of trust within the western allied governments that the generals would not be wasteful with soldiers lives and I think Eisenhower and his colleagues were cognisant of that.
I'm guessing this is adaptable to alternative sensor platforms, not just cell towers. If they want that kind of accuracy from the SIGINT/DF hardware, they can probably get it. The problem is that they might not have a handle on the systematic errors being introduced into their targeting.
For example, say they slave the on station Predator optics to data from this software so they can pick up a guy in a town and follow him to wherever he's going. Everything is peachy, because they know there was nobody within 10m (but there were people 12m away) and the system's supposed to be accurate to 5m (or whatever). They have a good fix. CIA decides to make him an ex-person and maybe kills the wrong guy.
I hope this doesn't happen. I hope there are redundant checks within such a program to keep these things from happening. Maybe he has to make two phone calls. Who knows? The original contractor didn't know specifically how their software would be used. They wanted to ensure that the new hardware would match the old based on their regression testing so that as much as humanly possible, there would be no surprises.
Big myth, here.
http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five_000313.html
Rebuilding the assembly lines and rediscovering the small things which aren't down on paper. That's what's hard. The design is still there, right where it should be.
Now people actually know quite a bit about main engines. Nobody makes the really big ones these days because there's not much work and not a large amount of funding for big boosters. If the gloves were pulled off, I'm sure that they'd be able to impress.
I,J,K also work pretty good as array indexes because they are the unit vectors for X,Y,Z. So physicists were mostly ok with leaving them as is.
I'm not sure about their current stuff, but Bruker had (closed) software which they ported from commercial UNIX to Linux (Redhat in this case).
I believe what we're seeing a coalescing of different pressures keeping prices high, including customer wanting Windows, substantial market requirements for CPU power (higher resolution media playback, etc), some key applications not currently available on ARM, marketing channels not setting appropriate expectations vis-a-vis product capabilities. I also believe existing hardware suppliers are somewhat reluctant to race each other to the bottom in pricing and margin.
There was also the article in the New York Times, which you mentioned. Maybe they're also a little left wing, but they're arguably more responsible, and definitely drink less Guinness. Perhaps it's all just a liberal conspiracy, then?
I understand that in order to take office, you had to profess Christianity. You also had to be a property owning white male, and usually protestant. Apparently, these things were all subject to change. Religion was just the first thing on the chopping block. So, it's really not that interesting. Kind of shameful, in a way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States#Removal_of_exclusions
By the way, Sarah Palin is too stupid to be insidious. Pumpkin positive stupid.
They'll just have to learn how to write FORTRAN in any language. Soon enough, they will become a Real Programmer.
A valuable lesson, really.
Everyone knows that the US has orbital photo recon. We don't have a 100% clear picture of what the capabilities are.
The fact that it's an X craft tells us this orbital space plane is a test vehicle. But a test vehicle for what? What are the ultimate objectives of the program? How does it tie in with Prompt Global Strike?
Ares I was a piece of pork which should have long since been canceled. I'm glad it's gone. Everyone knows there are currently two US boosters (three soon enough) in the same weight and performance category and part of Obama's plan is to use those to go into LEO. This makes sense.
What no one has discussed, either in the pro Constellation crowd or those against, is what the propulsion package will be for Flexible Path. I'd like to see some of the ideas behind DIRECT refined so we end up with a moderately economical, scalable launch architecture for really heavy payloads. COTS is not likely to develop this on their own, they're happy at 25 tons to LEO and under. It's where their profit is. Note, I'm choosing to be optimistic on Flexible path being funded and implemented.
It looks like Orion Lite from Bigelow/Boeing/Lockheed is the front runner for crew transport. I'm not sure how much commonality is possible between it and a future Orion Heavy used for lunar or martian missions. Hopefully building one makes it easier to build the other.
And don't depend on your Navy keeping them away forever. Just ask the Minoans. They bottled themselves up on Crete, and when Mt. Thera erupted they were easy pickings for the Mycenaeans.
As to the question of Empire...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
Some will argue that there is a great difference between being a player in power politics and being a colonial power. I do not necessarily agree. Rather, I believe in the duck test.
To release a better, or cheaper product.
I'll settle for either cheaper with the same quality or the same price with better quality.
Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.
