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posted by cmn32480 on Monday May 22 2017, @08:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the things-that-can't-be-done-inside dept.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-station-idUSKBN18H0XQ

A pair of astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station as early as Tuesday for an emergency space walk to replace a failed computer, one of two that control major U.S. systems aboard the orbiting outpost, NASA said on Sunday.

The primary device failed on Saturday, leaving the $100 billion orbiting laboratory to depend on a backup system to route commands to its solar power system, radiators, cooling loops and other equipment.

The station's current five-member crew from the United States, Russia and France were never in any danger, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in a statement.

NASA expects to make a decision later on Sunday about which astronauts aboard the station will make the two-hour space walk and when the assignment will take place.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @03:03PM (9 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 22 2017, @03:03PM (#513521)

    Wrong. Amtrak has real stuff too. However, I'm not sure how the OP ever got the idea that Amtrak was part of the tech industry.

    Amazon has real stuff too: you pay them, they ship you real, physical things. You can also buy video-on-demand from them. Of course, with all the counterfeit problems they have, you may want to re-think buying physical stuff from them, but they still do sell a lot of it.

    Lyft is real: you pay money and someone picks you up and drives you someplace. And, unlike their competitor Uber, they do it without having an internal company culture full of misogyny, and reportedly the drivers far prefer working for Lyft too.

    Meetup is a pretty handy way of finding activity groups. I do feel like they charge way too much though, for something that's really just a fancy website.

    Microsoft makes real stuff: software. But it's all shitty software. Some people claim that they like their keyboards, which are real, physical things.

    Netflix is great: it's a convenient way of watching all-you-can-watch video for a low monthly price.

    Skype used to be pretty handy, but then MS bought it and it turned to utter shit.

    Apple makes real stuff too: massively overpriced phones, tablets, and laptops used as fashion accessories by people that exhibit cult-like behavior towards that company, and who even try to peer-pressure other people into buying their crap. (My girlfriend complains about this a lot; some of her friends keep asking her why she doesn't buy an iPhone so she can be just like them. Luckily, she thinks as badly of this behavior and of Apple as I do.)

    I have no comment on AirBnB; I've never used them.

    eBooks are crap. In theory, it's a good idea, but the different, incompatibly file formats and DRM and walled-garden stores to buy them from (meaning you can't buy a Barnes&Noble ebook and read it on your Amazon Kindle) ruined it.

    Eventbrite? Some kind of bullshit.

    Facebook is bullshit which is actively ruining society.

    LinkedIn is a good idea but the company has tried to make it out to be more than it really is (a way for people to post their resume online and maintain professional contacts) and is being ruined by the recruiters.

    Pay toilets should be banned. No, I change my mind: they should be legal, but the government should have a secret department which looks for business owners who try to install them, and then grabs those owners and "disappears" them, so that the pay toilets are never installed and the evil people who attempt this are safely removed from society.

    Spotify is crap.

    Twitter is a horrible idea, much worse even than Facebook, and should never have been done.

    Uber is a great idea, ruined by horrible management, but luckily they have competitors like Lyft doing the same thing, only better and without the horrible corporate culture.

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @03:52PM (5 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 22 2017, @03:52PM (#513551) Journal

    I'll agree on Amtrak. The rest seems more like middle men which of course provide a service. But it ain't rocket science. And some of them are very predatory and needs to be treated that way.

    Why is Twitter btw worse than Facebook?

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @04:42PM (4 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 22 2017, @04:42PM (#513575)

      Of course most of them are "just" services, but without many services, we wouldn't have an economy. Think about what the state of the internet would be if we never had any search engines; good luck finding anything. Lyft is obviously a service, but people do need to get from point A to point B, and Lyft/Uber revolutionized that when the cab companies refused to make use of modern technology.

      Twitter limits you to messages of 160 characters, so obviously that precludes any kind of intelligent discourse, and is merely a way for people to broadcast mindless soundbites. At least on Facebook one can write intelligent thoughts out, even if people rarely do, and you can also include photos, videos, etc.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 22 2017, @05:04PM (1 child)

        by kaszz (4211) on Monday May 22 2017, @05:04PM (#513593) Journal

        Which is why I stated that Google provided a real service. Lyft/Uber is more about providing a website with the right functionality.

        While Facebook permits long messages. The structure makes people focusing on the wrong things and there's not real capabilities to filter out the mental junk.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @08:00PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 22 2017, @08:00PM (#513712)

          Lyft provides a real service too; before them, you couldn't hail a car-for-hire using a simple and convenient smartphone app. Just like Google's search engine and Gmail and Maps, it took real work to create that (plus at least a little ingenuity in coming up with the idea in the first place, and all the details to make it nice (e.g., driver ratings, etc.)). To be fair, no, I don't think Uber/Lyft are as important or as technically impressive as Google's primary products, but they also aren't nearly as large as the company Google is. I also think that Uber/Lyft would not be very hard for someone else to make a clone of (and indeed, many have already, including various taxi companies).

          As for Facebook, it's not just the structure I think, it's the people. Facebook is for the masses, and caters to them. The masses are going to produce "mental junk"; that's just the way it is. You get much higher-quality content on platforms which have far more limited membership. For instance, on a message forum oriented towards owners of a particular automobile, you'll see much more useful information, such as discussion about common problems, how to fix them, which replacement parts are the best or should be avoided, etc. And message boards like this aren't exactly limited to a bunch of highly-educated elitists; car boards are for people who own a particular car (and most such boards are for rather pedestrian cars), and have a high percentage of visitors who are more inclined to DIY, so again not exactly a bunch of pretentious snobs, and quite frequently people of somewhat humble means. But the content quality can be excellent because of the narrow focus of the message board.

          Facebook's vapidity isn't anything new; I saw the same thing on IRC long before Facebook existed or Zuckerberg was in college: any forum that's "general interest" and has no real subject for discussion is usually going to be like this. It's like going to a bar and expecting stimulating intellectual conversation; you're probably not going to find it there. But unlike a bar, these internet forums let everyone see every posting, so there's no filter at all. It'd be a like a bar where you have to all sit in a big circle and and hear everyone's chatter simultaneously, rather than being able to just focus on talking to the one or two people next to you.

          To be fair, FB does try to have more focused "groups", but it really falls flat because it's just not how the site was originally designed and there's already much better places for focused discussion for most things.

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:07AM (1 child)

        by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @05:07AM (#513990) Journal

        > Twitter limits you to messages of 160 characters [...]

        No, you're likely thinking of SMS. Twitter only allows 140 characters.

        https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters [twitter.com]

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:07PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:07PM (#514339)

          Yeah, I knew it was something like that. I don't actually use Twitter, so I didn't remember the exact limitation, just that it was short and stupid.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 22 2017, @04:26PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday May 22 2017, @04:26PM (#513567) Journal

    Twitter is useful even if you don't have an account there. They have no real name policy. Facebook, not so much.

    You can search topics in real time to get a sense of what people are thinking about.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @10:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @10:54PM (#513825)
    Airbnb [stallman.org] |
                    Amazon [stallman.org] |
                    Amtrak [stallman.org] |
                    Apple [stallman.org] |
                    Ebooks [stallman.org] |
                    Eventbrite [stallman.org] |
                    Evernote [stallman.org] |
                    Facebook [stallman.org] |
                    Google [stallman.org] |
                    Intel [stallman.org] |
                    LinkedIn [stallman.org] |
                    Lyft [stallman.org] |
                    Meetup [stallman.org] |
                    Microsoft [stallman.org] |
                    Netflix [stallman.org] |
                    Pay Toilets [stallman.org] |
                    Skype [stallman.org] |
                    Spotify [stallman.org] |
                    Twitter [stallman.org] |
                    Uber [stallman.org] |
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:14AM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:14AM (#513853)

      Is that for real about AirBnB? Holy shit! They won't take you as a customer if you don't have at least 100 Facebook "friends"? WTF?