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Comment I knew it! (Score 5, Funny) 347

At last, we finally have undeniable proof that Donald J. Trump is a deep cover Russian agent sent here decades ago to hand the U.S. over to Russia! And to think, they called us all delusional, hysterical crackpots, with zero critical thinking skills, all throwing childish temper tantrums because our candidate lost a close election. The fools! Vindication is now ours!

Comment Re:Revolutionary Rocket aka aerospike engine (Score 1) 44

by ShipIt (#54198873) Attached to: ARCA Plans 2018 Launch For Revolutionary Single-Stage Rocket
After watching a video of this engine fire, I kept looking for some kind of variable geometry component and didn't see it. It turns out there isn't one. The thrust pattern itself changes shape as a function of altitude to achieve the extra efficiency. This promotional video from Rocketdyne shows how it works.

Comment Biblical Theory (Score 1) 279

Just posting this as a curiosity, but one of our Sunday School teachers at Church came along something interesting while preparing for a lesson. He somehow got sidetracked into some of the lesser known Jewish teachings (can't remember the Hebrew name for these,) and found this theory about Adam and Eve. The theory said that God took not a rib from Adam to create Eve, but rather Adam's penis bone. This explains not only the lack of a baculum in humans but also the reason the scrotum has a ridge of tissue in the middle to symbolize the scar Adam incurred from its removal. It at least made for a light-hearted start to Sunday School that morning.
Government

Senator Makes NASA Complete $350 Million Testing Tower That It Will Never Use 342

Posted by Soulskill from the pork:-the-final-frontier dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Phillip Swarts reports in the Washington Times that NASA is completing a $350 million rocket-engine testing tower at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that it doesn't want and will never use. 'Because the Constellation Program was canceled in 2010, the A-3's unique testing capabilities will not be needed and the stand will be mothballed upon completion (PDF),, said NASA's inspector general. The A-3 testing tower will stand 300 feet and be able to withstand 1 million pounds of thrust (PDF). The massive steel structure is designed to test how rocket engines operate at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet by creating a vacuum within the testing chamber to simulate the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Although NASA does not expect to use the tower after construction, it's compelled by legislation from Sen. Roger F. Wicker (R-MS), who says the testing tower will help maintain the research center's place at the forefront of U.S. space exploration. 'Stennis Space Center is the nation's premier rocket engine testing facility,' says Wicker. 'It is a magnet for public and private research investment because of infrastructure projects like the A-3 test stand. In 2010, I authored an amendment to require the completion of that particular project, ensuring the Stennis facility is prepared for ever-changing technologies and demands.' Others disagree, calling the project the 'Tower of Pork' and noting that the unused structure will cost taxpayers $840,000 a year to maintain. 'Current federal spending trends are not sustainable, and if NASA can make a relatively painless contribution to deficit reduction by shutting down an unwanted program, why not let it happen?' says Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union. 'It's not rocket science, at least fiscally.'"
Earth

What Killed the Great Beasts of North America? 214

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the mostly-spears dept.
sciencehabit writes "Until about 11,000 years ago, mammoths, giant beavers, and other massive mammals roamed North America. Many researchers have blamed their demise on incoming Paleoindians, the first Americans, who allegedly hunted them to extinction. But a new study points to climate and environmental changes instead. The findings could have implications for conservation strategies, including controversial proposals for 'rewilding' lions and elephants into North America."
Privacy

Senator Dianne Feinstein: NSA Metadata Program Here To Stay 510

Posted by samzenpus from the settle-in dept.
cold fjord writes "The Hill reports, 'Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) predicted Sunday that lawmakers who favored shutting down the bulk collection of telephone metadata would not be successful in their efforts as Congress weighs potential reforms to the nation's controversial intelligence programs. "I don't believe so," Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press (video). "The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that." ... "A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."'"
Crime

Washington Post: Assange 'Unlikely To Be Prosecuted In US' 236

Posted by timothy from the he-never-calls-he-never-writes-oy dept.
vikingpower writes "The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials." That "all but" probably wouldn't feel all that comforting if this announcement applied to me.
Medicine

US Doctors Back Circumcision 1264

Posted by Soulskill from the yep-we're-going-there dept.
ananyo writes "On 27 August, a report by the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes for the first time that, overall, boys will be healthier if circumcised. The report says that although the choice is ultimately up to parents, medical insurance should pay for the procedure. The recommendation, coming from such an influential body, could boost U.S. circumcision rates, which, at 55%, are already higher than much of the developed world. The researchers estimate that each circumcision that is not performed costs the U.S. health-care system $313."
Space

Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise In 20 Years 589

Posted by Soulskill from the to-boldly-go dept.
Nancy_A writes "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise. The ship would be based on current technology, and would take about 20 years to construct, at a cost of roughly $1 trillion. 'We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let's do it,' writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE-Dan."

Comment Made it Through Pretty Much Unscathed (Score 5, Informative) 147

by ShipIt (#35916532) Attached to: EC2 Outage Shows How Much the Net Relies On Amazon
Totally concur with others pointing out Amazon offers redundancy if you choose to use it.

We had webservers, database (master/slave,) and other services split across usa-east and usa-west.

When usa-east started showing problems, we:
*) Took the usa-east webservers out of round robin DNS (ttl 1hr)
*) Verified the slave (in usa-west) was up to date, shut down the master (usa-east,) and converted the slave to master.
*) Updated all webservers to point to the new master.
*) Cranked up new usa-west webservers / updated round robin DNS

I believe Amazon offers mechanisms to do this automatically or we could just always write our own failover scripts, but this is the tradeoff me made. We were willing to trade some service degradation by switching over manually in exchange for avoiding the pitfalls of false-positive detection. Very much an application specific tradeoff, not for everyone, but it worked for what we are doing.

The key was to avoid putting all eggs in the usa-east basket and splitting up across usa-west, even though we incur additional bandwidth fees, ie master/slave replication transfer is full fee between regions.

We were never concerned about cascading failures effecting multiple availability zones in a give region nor did it matter for us - our redundancy requirement was geographical diversity, not partitions within a datacenter. We were thinking natural disaster, but the architecture covered us in this case as well.

The coolest thing to me is just how quickly we were able to shuffle around these resources to avoid a problem area - a couple of hours. There's no way we could have done it so quickly with what we had before - a combination of our own colocated servers and VPS.

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