None of it is a threat.

That's some good thinking! Shows you have your priorities straight.

Google could just purchase Italy outright. I hear it will be rather a bargain. Problem solved!

I don't features should be removed, unless removing them makes the programmers *make the features that are there work properly*. Maybe I am also a relic (ok, not maybe, definitely), but I get rather irritated when Word (or any other similar crap application) adds some more features or changes the UI just for the sake of doing it, and the same f*cking bug that sometimes for some unknown reason corrupts the document and won't let me save it still existing pretty much exactly like it worked in 1997.

Wasting time adding features while serious bugs are left untouched is what p*sses people off. Of course it's a lot easier to ad copy saying "n Exciting New Features" than it is "Word 2007, 45% fewer fatal bugs"

      Brett

Well, one of them burns some sort of fuel to drive an impeller wheel connected to another impeller wheel to compress a working fluid, and the other, er, never mind...

Call it an airplane, get an aircraft RT license and license the pilots. It *is* an airplane, it's not really a spacecraft since it's at most, a hop.

        In any case, no one is coming close to doing multiple flights A MONTH, much less multiple flights a day.

Thread over, you win!

We have VAXes that have been up for at least that long and the only downtimes I can recall since the late 80s were from power failures of those machines not attached to UPSs. And before anybody drones on about "patches", its not connected to the external world.

How is it not a solution, oh indignant one? It's the one and only solution that has any chance of working. A bunch of self-professed "gamers" still buy the thing, you are going to keep getting it.

Given that this is equally fallacious, almost the same relevance.

Star Trek, Episode 7 - Depends of the Sith

I wonder why this is not something that is kept up to date anyway. I can see keeping B an update or two behind A to prevent a single programming error taking both of them down. But after you are satisfied with A's software load, why keep B so far back-level that transition takes so much time. And since the computers are said to be identical, why the desire to move back to A?

I can easily imagine this happening, I work on a very similar, perhaps nearly identical spacecraft (that's just a tad mode critical AND expensive than this thing...) and we haven't necessarily maintained this. You underestimate the overhead associated with generating the necessary uploads.

        The reason they probably want to go back to the Prime is that their failure isolation system database is keyed to using the prime units only, and to alter it to start on the "B" side and have it switch back to "A" is prohibitive, or at least easier to get around by switching back to A. This last is also something we do in the rare case of a temporary failure. There's less good justification to doing it than leaving the backup program image alone but having to completely retest the entire redundancy management system for a new configuration is generally avoided. If it fails hard, it doesn't really matter, since there's no Prime to switch back to.

      Brett

Frequently, but not always. It's not unheard of to open and close the source pressure valves, because you don't want to count on the regulators not leaking for any significant length of time. If you leave the source pressure connecting, any regulator leak will likely overpressure the tank. We don't usually do that but it's not uncommon. I would much rather take my chances on valves sticking closed than on regulator leaks.

Sorry, that's original research. Reverted.