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