Posts by imanidiot

Re: "it was required to keep a second shuttle on standby just so they could use it as a lifeboat"

LDS said:

"And I find very funny that in the late 1970s they could handle Shuttle complexity, but in the 2000s they could no longer - nor devise ways to reduce it with new technology."

That's not really true. They couldn't properly handle the shuttles complexity in the 70s either. Just look at how the Challenger disaster happened. And they COULD handle it in the 2000s. The problem with the shuttles wasn't that they're too complex. It's that they are too complex for what they do. NASA could handle it, but after the ISS was completed that level of complexity just wasn't worth it.

The fact that there was no way to recover from SRB failure was a massive issue. The fact that there was no proper way to inspect or repair the heat shield on orbit (until they cludged something together after Columbia came down in flames) was a massive issue. The fact that it AT BEST had a 30 day on orbit lifetime was a massive issue. The fact that the heat shield was easily damaged on launch was a massive issue. Etc. STS has MANY shortcomings

The fact that there was no replacement after the shuttles were retired is down to politics and mismanagement, which is the real issue here. the US should never have put all its faith in JUST the space shuttle. If it had kept a separate man rated heavy lift capability the shuttle would probably have been retired sooner and probably not nearly missed as much.

Don't get me wrong, I LIKE the shuttles. They're really cool technology. They just didn't live up to their potential and had many many shortcomings that were never addressed for one reason or another.

Re: Surely everyone knows...

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

Re: Reading the learning sytem's mind...

Not really, due to the way most machine learning (what this most likely is) works what is in between the input and the output is just a bunch of weighted tensors. You can get the weights and the methods used to combine the inputs to get the outputs, but those don't really give you any more info than the outputs themselves.

Re: Smart speakers remind me of Sirius Cybernetics

There's a reason cheap BT speakers are Cheap. They're all rubbish. I'd avoid anything under €30 to begin with if you want a good listening experience.

Re: Huh?

It is indeed the sort of stuff I don't appreciate at all. Not if it's stored by passport number. I keep that in a privacy sleeve for a reason. And barely if it's stored any other way.

Re: So others may Live

She hasn't permanently removed herself from the gene pool, so no Darwin award for this lady.

Re: "as much value as a truckload of dead rats in a tampon factory"

The rockets won't fire, dear Lisa, dear Lisa.

The rockets won't fire, dear Lisa, won't burn

Win10Privacy (Not affiliated) seems to work for me just fine. Haven't encountered any sort of ads on my system whatsoever.

Re: American companies...

I strongly advice AGAINST wanting to know. Just... Don't. You're better off not knowing.

Re: Err

Minor nit-pick: Super Micro is an american company that does most of it's manufacturing in China.

Re: Improbability drive

It was very probably they were going to exit the heliosphere. It was slightly less probable we'd have the instrumentation data communicated back to us by the still working probes

Re: Legislate, regulate

Sure, give a government organisation full control over what can and cannot be done on the internet. Really great idea! What could Possibly go wrong?!

Re: First stage landing was... damp

maybe they ran into the same problem they had with one of the earlier soft landed boosters where they can't depressurise the tanks properly, preventing them from getting too close.

Re: FAA grounding imminent?

" (They've had to do this because it's impossible to give the 737 design longer landing gear)"

Not impossible, just undesirable for the market the 737 operates in and for certification purposes. The advantage of the 737 design (and why it had originally been designed that way) is that the low ground clearance allows easy ground service to almost all relevant parts of the aircraft with easy methods (stepladders and low moveable scaffolds) where competitors require more safety equipment because the worker needs to be higher up. Redesigning the landing gear to put the plane higher off the ground would be easy but would necessitate a huge amount of new equipment be bought by customers all over the world. Customers that might be more likely to go to the competitor in that case.

On top of that the landing gear is a very important bit of the aircraft and so structurally intertwined with the entire design of the main fuselage and inner wing spar section that a change in main gear leg length would necessitate a substantial redesign of the main wing spar, which would then require certification as an entirely new aircraft design instead of being allowed to be certified as a modification of the original 737 type air worthiness certification.

Re: Sensitivity, Specificity and False Positives

This sort of false positive because of blue coloring could easily be avoided with a control test. A second bag of liquid that should NOT color in the presence of methamphetamine, MDMA or Ritalin (plain distilled water?) compare the 2. If both are equal shades of blue it's a negative result (ofcourse the comparison would have to be made side-by-side over the same lightsource, but a somewhat even tempered lightsource should be used to judge these tests to begin with).

Re: re: why should we give a toss?

The reason for it being girls is simple economics. The viewers are by far predominantly straight males most attracted to pretty women. So putting attractive women around the car is more likely to keep get/keep them watching. Sexist, yeah probably a little bit, but that's the way it's been for all of humanity. I don't get the push to suddenly pretend we males aren't simple creatures when it comes to what we like seeing. Just having some women stand around looking attractive isn't exactly going to do much to harm egality of women.

Re: Er,

Yes, but not by enough to matter THAT much when passing something like a Lego figure head. (And generally, if they can swallow it whole, it'll pass through)

Re: And my friends and family are wondering...

But still, no need to provide the computers with conveniently tagged training data.

Re: "On the ground"??

What AbelSoul says.

It's the mass after the heat shield, parachutes, landing rocket propellant and all other gubbins have been discarded. And it reaches that mass pretty much exactly by the time it touches down.

Re: Engineering?

Again, that's technicians you're talking about. Real engineers don't do spare parts fitting. (Unless possibly it involves complicated one offs that require in field tweaking and redesign)