On Earth, as it is in Heaven .... two bits of good news

[unixronin]

On Earth .... the Christian Science Monitor reports that a group of five Islamic judges in Yemen are successfully "reforming" militant Islamic terrorists by showing them that terrorism is not justified by the Quran and, in fact, violates many of its dictates.

For example, he quotes: "Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul, or for corruption done in the land - it is as if he had slain all mankind entirely.  And, whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely."  He uses the passage to bolster his argument against bombing Western targets in Yemen - attacks he says defy the Koran.  And, he says, the Koran says under no circumstances should women and children be killed.

Meanwhile, that heavenly part:  ESA successfully launched the Ariane ECA heavy-lift booster just after 2100GMT on Saturday.  With a payload of ten tons, the ECA can put multiple satellites into orbit in a single launch.  Saturday's launch carried three satellites totalling over seven tons weight, though only two were placed into orbit (the third was ballast and booster telemetry, and was not intended to be orbited).

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Alright. Now to built my beltminer, and work up launch costs...

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Dude. Make that puppy at least a two seater, huh?

/me ponders power and fuel sources to keep a VASIMR (http://www.nasatech.com/Briefs/Sep01/MSC23041.html) happy

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

I figured I'd build it habitat for 4...

After we get rich (even at $50 a ton, 7 megatons of iron fetches quite a penny) y'all have to build your own rides, though...

-Ogre

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

while it can put multiple sats up in a single pass, that's all the more sats you stand to loose when it fails.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True, but that's true of anything. You stand to lose more if a supertanker breaks up on a reef than if a tramp steamer does, and more if a bus goes off an overpass than if a single car does. This doesn't make supertankers or buses bad things.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

I'm not disputing that fact, just noting that I would prefer lots of smaller, cheaper rockets than one giant one.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Then again, you can't launch giant payloads on small boosters, and the more separate launches you have to make, the higher the risk of a failed launch.

Ultimately, I suspect the overall loss rate is about the same with a few large launches or a lot of small ones. However, I'd suspect the cost of getting ten tons into orbit is less if you do it in a single ten-ton load than if you do it as five separate two-ton payloads.

There's also the issue that you only have to wait for one good launch window.

[tquid.livejournal.com]

I was really happy to read of this success, until I got to the later paragraphs, which show the typical view of nonviolence: "Gosh golly gee, it's wacky, but it seems to work! Must be some kind of fluke, with no implications whatsoever for how our civilized countries deal with violence in their own midst."

Sigh. Rather than bitching about how the cleric's method lets "bad guys" "off the hook", maybe we could be led to examine how punitive measures obviously tend to harden tendencies towards violence? Hm?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The problem is, that would invalidate their model of how the world works and their role in it. Most people are enormously resistant to acknowledging anything that would suggest that they could have made a mistake, or worse, that their entire approach to a problem has been completely wrong from the beginning.

(Try as I might to avoid this particular mental pitfall, I don't doubt I'm gulty of it at times myself.)

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. We keep beating our heads over how to deal with Goose. But we do change tactics every time we see what we're doing isn't working. But still I can't help but feel we're missing something vital here.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

These deudes are dead. I don't think the powers that be will allow this.