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Which, judging from the comments, many of us are quite familiar with.

The concerns I have are mostly practical. Philosophically there is no problem for me.

Things like security, reliability, speed.

Security, of course, depends on the encryption standards they use, if any. There could be a couple of good spy movies based on this somehow. [Insert plotline here]

Reliability. This is partly a simple hardware issue, the solution to which is 'trivial', because it is "merely" a matter of getting the right equipment. Some of it is not so trivial in terms of enviromental interference. Remember, this is in Sweden. For instance, there are reports in the far north of the Northern Lights being very intense and coming quite low into the atmosphere. As seen here, for example:

An intense auroral display can cause many problems on the ground, such as intense electric currents along electric power lines (causing blackouts) and oil pipelines (enhancing corrosion). The aurora can disturb the ionosphere and disrupt short wave communication. Auroral discharge electrons have even damaged the electronics and solar panels of communications and meteorological satellites, rendering them inoperable.

There is this article about auroral effect at ground level. I even recall reading about aurora being *visible* at ground level, but that was long ago, and I cannot find the link. There is even this article about aurora being *audible*, however. So the effects of such enviromental factors on an aircraft at six miles up can be important.

Speed is not so much an issue internal to the aircraft, but again is a problem of interferance with the ground stations. Enviromental factors are again in play

Needless to say, I am going to be very interested with the results of these trials

Which, judging from the comments, many of us are quite familiar with.

The concerns I have are mostly practical. Philosophically there is no problem for me.

Things like security, reliability, speed.

Security, of course, depends on the encryption standards they use, if any. There could be a couple of good spy movies based on this somehow. [Insert plotline here]

Reliability. This is partly a simple hardware issue, the solution to which is 'trivial', because it is "merely" a matter of getting the right equipment. Some of it is not so trivial in terms of enviromental interference. Remember, this is in Sweden. For instance, there are reports in the far north of the Northern Lights being very intense and coming quite low into the atmosphere. As seen here, for example:

An intense auroral display can cause many problems on the ground, such as intense electric currents along electric power lines (causing blackouts) and oil pipelines (enhancing corrosion). The aurora can disturb the ionosphere and disrupt short wave communication. Auroral discharge electrons have even damaged the electronics and solar panels of communications and meteorological satellites, rendering them inoperable.

There is this article about auroral effect at ground level. I even recall reading about aurora being *visible* at ground level, but that was long ago, and I cannot find the link. There is even this article about aurora being *audible*, however. So the effects of such enviromental factors on an aircraft at six miles up can be important.

Speed is not so much an issue internal to the aircraft, but again is a problem of interferance with the ground stations. Enviromental factors are again in play

Needless to say, I am going to be very interested with the results of these trials

Which, judging from the comments, many of us are quite familiar with.

The concerns I have are mostly practical. Philosophically there is no problem for me.

Things like security, reliability, speed.

Security, of course, depends on the encryption standards they use, if any. There could be a couple of good spy movies based on this somehow. [Insert plotline here]

Reliability. This is partly a simple hardware issue, the solution to which is 'trivial', because it is "merely" a matter of getting the right equipment. Some of it is not so trivial in terms of enviromental interference. Remember, this is in Sweden. For instance, there are reports in the far north of the Northern Lights being very intense and coming quite low into the atmosphere. As seen here, for example:

An intense auroral display can cause many problems on the ground, such as intense electric currents along electric power lines (causing blackouts) and oil pipelines (enhancing corrosion). The aurora can disturb the ionosphere and disrupt short wave communication. Auroral discharge electrons have even damaged the electronics and solar panels of communications and meteorological satellites, rendering them inoperable.

There is this article about auroral effect at ground level. I even recall reading about aurora being *visible* at ground level, but that was long ago, and I cannot find the link. There is even this article about aurora being *audible*, however. So the effects of such enviromental factors on an aircraft at six miles up can be important.

Speed is not so much an issue internal to the aircraft, but again is a problem of interferance with the ground stations. Enviromental factors are again in play

Needless to say, I am going to be very interested with the results of these trials

Tesla invented radio. Marconi made his fortune on Tesla's patents.

PBS recently aired a documentary on Tesla -- you can view the Web site here: http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ .

Everyone said Tesla was crazy when he said you could generate AC power from Niagara Falls. They are the first installation of hydroelectric power anywhere in the world.

Tesla is the king (and the USA stole his "deathray" plans). They're also working on another weapon he designed.

• US NAVY site (you will be monitored)
• Project home page (another military site -- you will be monitored)
• Conspiracy site -- lots of projects links (not military, but you may be monitored anyway, you conpiracy theory spouting nut!!! : ) ).

In short, Tesla was robbed.

Remember the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth? They're composed of energetic charged particles (protons and electrons), excited to high energies by the magnetosphere, and are held in their spiraling paths by the terrestrial magnetic field. Before they were discovered (in the late 50's, by James Van Allen), people like Werner Von Braun had planned to put manned satellites in a two-hour orbit -- about 1075 miles up. This turned out to be in the lower Van Allen belt, and the radiation hazard was far too great for safety, so manned spaceflight now is generally in orbits below 250 or 300 miles.

But it's Jupiter we're talking about, and the jovian magnetic field is much stronger than Earth's; the jovian equivalent of the Van Allen belts are millions of times more energetic than the terrestrial belts. Just to give you an idea of what this means to people, compare the exposure at Jupiter (say, in the neighborhood of Io) to that around Earth.

When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they had to penetrate the Van Allen belts twice, going out and coming back; in doing so, they received about 2 rem radiation dose. This isn't too much: the U.S. limits radiation workers to about 25 times this, each year, based on the cancer risk. When you talk acute doses -- say, you do a pass by Io, which is in the middle of the jovian belts -- the whole-body exposure which is 50% fatal within 30 days (when untreated) is around 250-300 rad (under these circumstances, 1 rad ~ 1 rem).

Jupiter's radiation belts are millions of times stronger than Earth's, so if an astronaut spent the same time in them (about 3 hours total on a lunar mission -- but Jupiter's much larger, and so your speed would have to be hugely greater to make the transit in that time) they'd get an exposure of millions of rem. In other words, they'd be dead almost immediately -- an exposure of mere seconds would probably be lethal.

Galileo is radiation-hardened, since it was intended to survive in this environment; however, it's been there for almost three times its design limit, and it must be getting pretty fried by now. As a matter of fact, last year when it made its first really close flyby of Io, there was concern that the radiation would corrupt the computer memory and cause it to go into safe mode, or blind the camera's CCD. When that didn't happen, everyone was relieved -- and they promptly did it again!

The radiation environment is severe enough that they actually expect the spacecraft to be physically destroyed in a few hundred million years, if they left it in Jupiter orbit.

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If you aren't far enough north to see them then I'd recommend a few weeks off sick and a holiday in Alaska, they don't get this good that often, and well, once you've watched one you are never going to forget it. Don't mean to be blasphemous, but well, it's almost better than beer...

(ok for one moment I will try not to be flippant) It will touch your soul, you will always remember it.

How many 11 years do you live anyway?

Thanks, here is a clickable version of that link. Its good to see there are a few /. readers who care about something more than their karma.

Bah! Living in Fairbanks, Alaska we get to see the aurora quite often (right now we have less then 11 hours of daylight and are losing about 7 minutes per day). There's been times I've seen it driving home from work. Of course, they look the best when it is about -40 or so and the light drowns out the stars... way cool ;-) For a forcast, see the UAF Geophysical Institute's Aurora Forcast page.

The HIPAS observatory operated near Fairbanks AK by UCLA has had a 2.7 m mercury telescope operating as part of their LIDAR system for well over a year (I couldn't find a first light date easily, so that's a very conservative number--I think it's been two or three years at least). Sure a 6m 'scope will be sweet. But if /. is going to start updating me with every new larger telescope that comes out...

It has been about five years since I did the vinyl to CD thing (I've since converted the resulting CDs to MP3 and OGG), so I don't recall exactly what program I used at the time. It may have been a command line utility.

I did not dd from /dev/dsp -- I don't know if that would work or not.

However, there are any number of small X utilities that will allow one to capture audio from the microphone or line-in and save in some format (which, if not .wav already, can be converted). A number of audio editing tools allow recording (select the record input device using your mixer program). SLAB is one possibility, others include a command line utility which someone else wrote to do exactly what I did (convert vinyl to digital), a simple command line recorder (this might be what I used), another recorder SCAR, another tape/LP converter kit, Vsound (allows you to capture audio from apps like realplayer). Finally there's "yarec" and "xwav" (which I also used as I recall), but I cannot find URLs for either right now.

(Sorry to reply to my own post).

I just looked up the HIPAS LIDAR specs here. They have a 2.7m liquid mercury telescope as part of their LIDAR diagnostics.

Quite sizable telescopes of this type have already been constructed. For example, at the HIPAS facility in Fairbanks, AL, a liquid-mercury telescope is used for collecting LIDAR data (optical backscatter from the upper atmosphere/ionosphere). IIRC their telescope was quite large, one of the largest-diameter optical telescopes in the world, however they couldn't orient it by more than a few degrees one way or another (this done by adjusting the optics near the focal point, not by positioning the mirror). Even still, it was very cheap (only a few thousand dollar or so to construct), so one might imagine using 1000 or so for meteor and space-junk surveys.

Get forecasts at UofAlaska, Fairbanks
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It's really good to see that this sort of issue is being considered so well in advance of full transferral to digital scientific communique. Unfortunately it has to be in advance, because the transition from paper publications to electronic form is moving along at the pace of a cold sloth. It hurts me every time i watch the multiple paper copies of manuscripts go in, watch the bills from the publishing company come back and several months later the paper is published in unmodifiable format. Open research is the future, and it needs to happen now. (further rants here. )

They don't say much about any net shattering event though.

Academia is mired in fear. The nail that stands up gets hammered. The researcher who discovered that ulcers could be cured is ridiculed. I have had researchers at Fermi and two universities candidly talk about areas they cannot explore; e.g., checking if Saint Einstein's theories would be sufficient with time dialation limited to gravity effects. One had a clear warning that this would put them on "the radical fringe, clearly not tenure material".

So how do we get back to courage?

The obvious part of K-12 science education to cut is the teaching of evolution. Fundamentally, we need more roboticists, computer scientists, physchologists, and geneticists than folks who study evolution, so it is better to cut this class than any math, chemistry, or physics. Let's gut this class in one fell swoop and blow the minds of a couple students. Here's what I propose...

A class that starts with Creationism, Theory of Evolution, and the Prachet giant turtle theory. Compare and contrast the beliefs, examine the evidence and consistency, look at the scientific method and places it falls down, study some famous mistakes and some radical breakthroughs. Explore the accidental discoveries and the effect on society. Get students to think about where they get their information.

Maybe we could get our courage back.

Two links to get you started:

Using multi-headed framebuffers

Multi-Hea d Mini HOWTO

Killing mentally ill people is a classic in the USA. But there are even more compelling cases, see for instance the careful www.essential.org/dpic/index.html ("Other Cases of Possible Innocence"), or http://members.tripod.com/~Boycott/Execution.html, or follow links starting from http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/just/deat h/index.html.

Two possible cases of innocents in the death row, from these sites, are Jimmy Dennis and Charles Raby. There are others (an average of 4 people are freed from death row every year, for they are innoncent).

Just a couple of places you can get info, in case you are interested in getting one of these Multias and putting Linux on it.

http://www.alphalinux.org has lots of great Alpha and Linux/Alpha docs, news, and links.

The Linux/Alpha mailing list hosted by Redhat is an excellent source of information, too - go to http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/axp-list/ for a searchable index.

AlphaPowered,
Craig