jccooper

83 ms·

871.
by jccooper 12y ago
Indeed. I remembered incorrectly. But the only reason you need a federal permit for making the fuel is so you don't go making any demon rum on the sly and avoiding the tax.
872.
by jccooper 12y ago
I think the paranoia is mostly due to the practice being so illegal for so long that nobody has any idea how it works or contact with it, and now assumes that there must be some good reason other than "we forgot to fix that after Prohi
873.
by jccooper 12y ago
Sure. But it's not illegal to distill alcohol for fuel--or any of the other various laboratory operations that are similarly dangerous. If that reason had anything to do with the law, it would be a fire code thing. No, the real reason
874.
by jccooper 12y ago
The only way to get people to encrypt their email will be to make them want to encrypt their email enough to overcome whatever hassle it takes to do so. Most people seem focused on making the second part of that equation (the hassle) small.
875.
by jccooper 12y ago
It's not reversible in the car, but it is reversible in an aluminum smelter. The power cell is turning the metal into aluminum oxide, which is (mostly) how we find Al in its ore form. So once you burn it out, it gets shipped back to Al
876.
by jccooper 12y ago
I was hoping they'd get into the later patent struggle and competitive technology. (But I guess it's really a piece about a single interview someone manager to score.) Another company in the field (PVI) at about the same time used
877.
by jccooper 12y ago
Transport to a space station may need a few days in transit. It also makes it useful for non-station missions, such as research (DragonLab), in-orbit assembly, or satellite repair. For long-duration missions, the PICA-X heat shield has plen
878.
by jccooper 12y ago
If you parachute onto land, you're probably going to have a bad time. But better than no rockets and no parachutes. However, I expect they will usually pick a coastal landing site where the "no power" trajectory puts you in t
879.
by jccooper 12y ago
Yeah, that's where the "compromised" is from. STS was killed in the cradle by politics, and operated its whole life as a zombie. A nearly impossible and quite capable zombie, but still a zombie. An amazing feat to be sure, bu
880.
by jccooper 12y ago
You aren't hitting anything other than "abort" during launch. And for a modern system, the space of problems where the computer hasn't already done it and you're not already dead must be pretty small. It doesn'
881.
by jccooper 12y ago
Astronaut pilots should be on their way out. The STS required them because it was a semi-airplane. All modern and future craft will be mostly- or fully-autonomous. Soyuz still requires some technical skill, though not actual flying, but unl
882.
by jccooper 12y ago
They say it's "actual flight design hardware". Probably not quite ready to chuck at the ISS, but all the pieces are there. The main differences from the already-operational Dragon seem to be: - improved heat shield (presumabl
883.
by jccooper 12y ago
When rocket scientists say "any two" they usually mean it. It can probably tolerate more, if they fail just right, but you can't assume that. And it seems plausible. The layout of the SuperDraco clusters is not equidistant; i
884.
by jccooper 12y ago
Doubtless they will take their time in the beginning, and learn exactly what it does take to relaunch. (They'll have plenty of time, as their current sole customer probably won't want more than four a year for at least a few years
885.
by jccooper 12y ago
After more than 30 years I'd have to consider any batteries suspect... Much less ones that spent their time in space. Considering it was meant to spend its life at L1 it may not have any batteries. Then again it also doesn't have
886.
by jccooper 12y ago
Possibly. Probably not. That'll only help if the tax debt is > 2 years old. Some of it might be. However, not filing on time will probably make the tax debt non-dischargable. Since it seems the poster has income still, the bankruptc
887.
by jccooper 12y ago
Since Pluto is a Kuiper Belt Object (rather than a "planet" or the even sillier appellation "dwarf planet"), I take issue with the wording. However, it is an unusually large one, and it would be a shame not to be able
888.
by jccooper 12y ago
I'm just glad it exists at all. Saved my bacon wrt backend toolchain when I set up SSL through App Engine. I think my problems were with getting pyOpenSSL compiled for Windows and/or my way-too-old Ubuntu. Or maybe it was pycrypto
889.
by jccooper 12y ago
I say hurrah! There is an awful little dance you can do to make SNI work in 2.7 with requests but it is way too complicated for most deployments: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/blob/master/reque
890.
Crowdfunding push to bring 36-year old spacecraft out of retirement(gizmag.com)
1 points by jccooper 13y ago|0 comments
891.
by jccooper 13y ago
There's one in Canberra, as well as Guam, Hawaii, and Bangalore. I don't know if they're Japanese per se; "joint" is probably better. The US territory ones are NOAA or NASA in collaboration with JAXA. http:/&#
892.
by jccooper 13y ago
It is a Tundra orbit. Both are pretty clever, but the Molniya is more famous--being older and more used. Molniya is cheaper, certainly, and has the interesting property of dwelling over both the United States and Russia. Tundra orbit is a
893.
by jccooper 13y ago
If anyone's wondering about the orbit, it's a geosynchronous but not geostationary orbit. The geosynchronous part is so that they only need a few sats to cover their region, unlike GPS which is global and requires some 32 sats. It
894.
by jccooper 13y ago
Probably not. The tower is used for horizontal transport and erection to vertical, for loading power and propellant to all stages of the rocket up until a few minutes before ignition, and for protection against strong winds. And, perhaps, l
895.
Elon Musk announces spaceport in Texas(blog.chron.com)
3 points by jccooper 13y ago|1 comments
896.
by jccooper 13y ago
It's almost certainly "accidental" and a relic of some indexing or something that Sharepoint is doing to the documents. I'll bet it recognizes XML-ish content (as the article notes, images and plain text are ignored), to
897.
by jccooper 13y ago
Nothing detailed about the first stage yet. They certainly have telemetry showing it hovered for a while but that is all the public has seen. During the launch they mentioned having video of the first stage retrofire but we haven't see
898.
by jccooper 13y ago
STS-128 launched 4 days after a scrub. STS-134 had 3 days between attempts. STS-74 was scrubbed due to weather at landing sites, and launched the next day (about 30 hours later). The older shuttle launches generally had less penalty for mis
899.
by jccooper 13y ago
It's to encourage Tesla to settle so that he stops producing negative publicity. The presence of the videos perhaps gives you a hint about what the case is really about. And it's probably not about the car.
900.
by jccooper 13y ago
Terminal velocity for a small flat rock is not all that fast. 200-400mph: http://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/#8 Considering the skydiver also has a significant speed, that corresponds reasonably well with yo

More ›