Other people are covering this, but it's friday and I'm bored so I'll jump in too.
"I can imagine the use of laser turrets as protection against missiles, but I really can't see the use of a laser mounted in a 747. IMHO, it's way too slow compared to the missiles, and will not be able to scramble fast enough."
The ABL is meant to loiter a few hundred miles off like an AWACS or JSTAR and fire it's laser at battlefield or medium range ballistic missile during thier launch phase when they are moving slow, full of fuel and at max dynamic stress.
It's not a Bamm! Bamm! Kerplow! X-Wing or Star Trek device, but more like the big slow laser of the Death Star, focusing on the missile and knocking it out.
These bad boys won't scramble, a 747, 757, 767, 707 used by the military can remain aloft for 24-36 hours and have an unrefueled loiter of 12 hours. They have all the hardware to refuel from tankers in mid-air.
I'll use North Korea as an example. Things get hot and an ABL is deployed, the US knows where the missiles will be launched from, say No-Dong on the coast. So the US leaves an ABL with a couple US or JSDF F-15s about 120 miles out over the Sea of Japan with a brand new Arleigh Burke - Flight IIA destroyer which has some ABM capability in Navy Area Defense SM-2 Block IVA surface to air missiles. When the DPRK lights off a missile for the US or Japan, the ABL gets a shot and so does the destroyer.
Yea a whole CD of X is less, but in many cases with today's music, there might only be one or two songs I want from CD Y, the single (if there is one) with the song and a B-side and a remix or unreleased track is 4.99 - I get the songs I want for much less than the single or the CD.
China has been working on MRBM, ICBMs and SLBMs for alot longer than the first Bush administration.
ICBMs were first tested there in 1971. The DF-5 has been in service since 1981 http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/chin a/df-5.htm
The first SLBM was in service by 1986
The first MRBM or theatre missil was in service by 1966.
The Chinese can keep buying those new Russian highspeed torpedos, since Chinese subs are loud as hell and US Boomers have the most advanced passive sonars in the world, they will not find the US Ohios.
Triumph Of The Will only needed images and Wagner.
The Birth of a Nation didn't need to be a talkie, Harold Lloyd was very funny and made funny movies without speech. So are silent movies by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Games do not always need "cinema level" graphics. It's game play that is needed.
I started to feel that Id went down the road of eye-candy over game play with Q3A. Game play lacked there, then I tired RTcW and felt that it too ran a little too slow and the game play was a little lacking while it went for eye candy.
I understand the need for development, I don't understand the desire to overwealm the current generation of computers.
Doom 3 and Id's idology, as well as the problems with SimCity 4 are illustrations of what is wrong.
Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.
SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.
Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.
There was the change to "Platinum" at OS 8.0 that added some little nuggets like the pop open windows and drilling down to where you want to move something, then closes all the windows behind you, and it added the drawers at the bottom of the screen.
When I saw the bit about another Windows UI change, I cursed. Thats just what we need at the support level, having to train staff on yet another Windows UI. Because you know at some point MS will ban the sales of XP and all the new computers with come with Longhorn and then places like schools will have Win2K/XP/LH running at the same time.
If you think the American media has been silent, then you need to listen a little closer.
Do a 90 day search for Venezuela crisis in New York Times and you get 1102 hits.
It's mentioned in almost every financial article there is about the price of oil and oil production.
Typing "Venezuela crisis" in Google news brings up recent articles in... Washington Times Boston Globe Austin American Statesman Miami Herald South Bend Tribune Forbes Troy Daily News BusinessWeek Daily Oklahoman Corpus Christi Caller Times
They mention it here in Portland on the local news everytime they do a piece about the rising gas prices.
If you have missed the coverage, it's not because the US media is ignoring it.
In the short term oil companies will make more from high oil prices.
But as soon as the war is over and Iraq starts pumping out the oil and production comes back on line in Venezuela the price stablizes in the mid-20s or lower.
The high oil price right now is because of irrational short term oil markets.
In the event of a total catastrophic war, the world markets will lose just 1.7 million barrels at a time when Venezuela oil is coming back online and many producers, like Saudi Arabia, want to fill that capacity.
The United States is getting less and less of it's oil from the Persian Gulf, but Europe, Korea and Japan still get much of thier oil from the Gulf.
Iraq in 1980 attempted to take control of Iran's oil which spiked oil prices around the world and messed with the Asian and American economies. In the mid 1980s Iran and Iraq started targeting oil tankers (Iran went after Kuwait and Iraqs, Iraq after Irans) which also spiked oil prices for a time. In 1990 Iraq took Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia with invasion, which spiked oil prices. In 1991 Iraq set fire to nearly 1000 oil wells and spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf in an attempt to destroy the desal plants in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
So it can easily be argued that in this case regional stability and oil are about the National Security of the United States.
Even if the United States was getting a tiny amount of oil from the Gulf, Japan and Koreas dependance on this oil and the damage to thier economy from Iraqi attacks in the Gulf would make it in the United States national interest to remove an unstable leadership from Iraq.
Japan's movement towards Australia in the Second World War didn't threaten the United States directly but it was in our national interest to support them.
I meant, here on/. everytime NASA somwhat somehow screws up people clamer for Private Space Everything. The poster I replied to said Pioneer was great and private space like the EchoStar showed that was a waste.
I'm asking whos side/. is on this week.
Now I'll say this and I'm not trolling or looking for flames.
The UN couldn't run a space program.
Why not? Because the UN hasn't accomplished anything of any technical merit since the Smallpox innoculation program ended, and in some ways the US/UN/Russians and others dropped the ball at the end of Smallpox.
The problems with the UN isn't the Security Council or vetos, it's the fact that a a vast organization populated by autocrats doesn't solve a problem. What would the UN do, what could the UN do, that NASA or ESA can't do?
Throw extravagant parties like OHCHR in Durban? Oh wait, here is why NASA can't run a space program, because they do totally stupid things like making newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission Libya, or passing, the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament to Iraq.
NASA/ESA/JSA do a god enough job with funding, but as funding decreases or remains constant programs shrink.
Fuel cells will require fuel and electricity and will not be as hardy as an RTG. And RTG doesn't need maintance nor does it need an environment similar to that of a human.
I was down at Eglin AFB in '96 and one day around 11am I was driving along the road that is at the end of one of the runways, traffic came to a hault and there was the 747 and Shuttle taking off after a refuel for Florida.
It was amazing.
People don't stop there for F-15s, AC-130s, F-16s or even the F-22s that are there for weapons and climate testing, but they stop for the Shuttle.
Space is always dangerous, anytime you go 100 miles up into a vacuum with hard radiation and spin around at 17,000 miles an hour with 30,000 screws, bolts, pain chips and rocket boosters shit is hairy.
If you think LEO is too dangerous, then you should be dead set against sending humans or hamsters to Mars.
On a side note, NBC reported that 16 minutes of video tape from right before and during the Columbia re-entry survived the fall and then was found and is being shown to the crew's family. That's Super VHS.
Slashdot Mirror
Other people are covering this, but it's friday and I'm bored so I'll jump in too.
"I can imagine the use of laser turrets as protection against missiles, but I really can't see the use of a laser mounted in a 747. IMHO, it's way too slow compared to the missiles, and will not be able to scramble fast enough."
The ABL is meant to loiter a few hundred miles off like an AWACS or JSTAR and fire it's laser at battlefield or medium range ballistic missile during thier launch phase when they are moving slow, full of fuel and at max dynamic stress.
It's not a Bamm! Bamm! Kerplow! X-Wing or Star Trek device, but more like the big slow laser of the Death Star, focusing on the missile and knocking it out.
These bad boys won't scramble, a 747, 757, 767, 707 used by the military can remain aloft for 24-36 hours and have an unrefueled loiter of 12 hours. They have all the hardware to refuel from tankers in mid-air.
I'll use North Korea as an example. Things get hot and an ABL is deployed, the US knows where the missiles will be launched from, say No-Dong on the coast. So the US leaves an ABL with a couple US or JSDF F-15s about 120 miles out over the Sea of Japan with a brand new Arleigh Burke - Flight IIA destroyer which has some ABM capability in Navy Area Defense SM-2 Block IVA surface to air missiles. When the DPRK lights off a missile for the US or Japan, the ABL gets a shot and so does the destroyer.
Yes it should.
Then the farmers in the midwest can grow more corn and get that powering the laptops.
Apple would be paying for the bandwidth on thier end, the licence fees, the manhours to maintain the equipment and the hardware also.
I wonder how many Xserves this will take.
Pricing is just right.
Yea a whole CD of X is less, but in many cases with today's music, there might only be one or two songs I want from CD Y, the single (if there is one) with the song and a B-side and a remix or unreleased track is 4.99 - I get the songs I want for much less than the single or the CD.
China has been working on MRBM, ICBMs and SLBMs for alot longer than the first Bush administration.
n a/df-5 .htm
ICBMs were first tested there in 1971.
The DF-5 has been in service since 1981
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/chi
The first SLBM was in service by 1986
The first MRBM or theatre missil was in service by 1966.
The Chinese can keep buying those new Russian highspeed torpedos, since Chinese subs are loud as hell and US Boomers have the most advanced passive sonars in the world, they will not find the US Ohios.
The Moon isn't US property, but the equipment left there by respective governments is the property of those governments.
Same as materials that sink are the property of the governement and the owners of the vessel that sank.
Yea.
Triumph Of The Will only needed images and Wagner.
The Birth of a Nation didn't need to be a talkie, Harold Lloyd was very funny and made funny movies without speech. So are silent movies by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
"Mood" does not require crippling slow graphics.
Hitchcock didn't need CGI to create "mood", if Id wanted to they could create all the "mood" they need without screwing people with current hardware.
Games do not always need "cinema level" graphics. It's game play that is needed.
I started to feel that Id went down the road of eye-candy over game play with Q3A. Game play lacked there, then I tired RTcW and felt that it too ran a little too slow and the game play was a little lacking while it went for eye candy.
I understand the need for development, I don't understand the desire to overwealm the current generation of computers.
The admin tools are the same.
However when you are dealing with elected and education persons, in my experiance, one is often not allowed to say no or to attempt to "control" them.
Doom 3 and Id's idology, as well as the problems with SimCity 4 are illustrations of what is wrong.
Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.
SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.
Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.
In an enterprise one can do that.
In education or Government or dealing with people that sign checks and make decisions, you can't do that.
When I typed this.
2.25 times.
There was the change to "Platinum" at OS 8.0 that added some little nuggets like the pop open windows and drilling down to where you want to move something, then closes all the windows behind you, and it added the drawers at the bottom of the screen.
When I saw the bit about another Windows UI change, I cursed. Thats just what we need at the support level, having to train staff on yet another Windows UI. Because you know at some point MS will ban the sales of XP and all the new computers with come with Longhorn and then places like schools will have Win2K/XP/LH running at the same time.
They aren't made that solidly anymore because people won't pay $4000 for a computer.
Remeber steel keyboards?
In many states the Judges are not elected but appointed.
At the Federal level Judges are appointed for life and are only removed by US Senate Impeachment.
State judges may be impeached by State Senates.
If you think the American media has been silent, then you need to listen a little closer.
Do a 90 day search for Venezuela crisis in New York Times and you get 1102 hits.
It's mentioned in almost every financial article there is about the price of oil and oil production.
Typing "Venezuela crisis" in Google news brings up recent articles in...
Washington Times
Boston Globe
Austin American Statesman
Miami Herald
South Bend Tribune
Forbes
Troy Daily News
BusinessWeek
Daily Oklahoman
Corpus Christi Caller Times
They mention it here in Portland on the local news everytime they do a piece about the rising gas prices.
If you have missed the coverage, it's not because the US media is ignoring it.
Rocket Launcher, sitting in the pool of the hotel by the airport.
In the short term oil companies will make more from high oil prices.
But as soon as the war is over and Iraq starts pumping out the oil and production comes back on line in Venezuela the price stablizes in the mid-20s or lower.
The high oil price right now is because of irrational short term oil markets.
In the event of a total catastrophic war, the world markets will lose just 1.7 million barrels at a time when Venezuela oil is coming back online and many producers, like Saudi Arabia, want to fill that capacity.
The United States is getting less and less of it's oil from the Persian Gulf, but Europe, Korea and Japan still get much of thier oil from the Gulf.
Iraq in 1980 attempted to take control of Iran's oil which spiked oil prices around the world and messed with the Asian and American economies. In the mid 1980s Iran and Iraq started targeting oil tankers (Iran went after Kuwait and Iraqs, Iraq after Irans) which also spiked oil prices for a time. In 1990 Iraq took Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia with invasion, which spiked oil prices. In 1991 Iraq set fire to nearly 1000 oil wells and spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf in an attempt to destroy the desal plants in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
So it can easily be argued that in this case regional stability and oil are about the National Security of the United States.
Even if the United States was getting a tiny amount of oil from the Gulf, Japan and Koreas dependance on this oil and the damage to thier economy from Iraqi attacks in the Gulf would make it in the United States national interest to remove an unstable leadership from Iraq.
Japan's movement towards Australia in the Second World War didn't threaten the United States directly but it was in our national interest to support them.
I meant, here on /. everytime NASA somwhat somehow screws up people clamer for Private Space Everything. The poster I replied to said Pioneer was great and private space like the EchoStar showed that was a waste.
/. is on this week.
I'm asking whos side
Now I'll say this and I'm not trolling or looking for flames.
The UN couldn't run a space program.
Why not? Because the UN hasn't accomplished anything of any technical merit since the Smallpox innoculation program ended, and in some ways the US/UN/Russians and others dropped the ball at the end of Smallpox.
The problems with the UN isn't the Security Council or vetos, it's the fact that a a vast organization populated by autocrats doesn't solve a problem. What would the UN do, what could the UN do, that NASA or ESA can't do?
Throw extravagant parties like OHCHR in Durban? Oh wait, here is why NASA can't run a space program, because they do totally stupid things like making newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission Libya, or passing, the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament to Iraq.
NASA/ESA/JSA do a god enough job with funding, but as funding decreases or remains constant programs shrink.
When Columbia failed it was bad for the government to run space programs.
When Pioneer works its is a testiment to NASA and shows how crappy the private sector can be.
So which is it? NASA bad or Private Sector bad?
Al Qadea could bang on an RTG all day and all night without getting one into shape to make into a dirty bomb.
s s/ RTGs1.html
s s/ RTGs.html
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/messenger/oldme
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/messenger/oldme
http://nuclear.gov/space/space-desc.html
Fuel cells will require fuel and electricity and will not be as hardy as an RTG. And RTG doesn't need maintance nor does it need an environment similar to that of a human.
Nuclear is what we need for space.
I was down at Eglin AFB in '96 and one day around 11am I was driving along the road that is at the end of one of the runways, traffic came to a hault and there was the 747 and Shuttle taking off after a refuel for Florida.
It was amazing.
People don't stop there for F-15s, AC-130s, F-16s or even the F-22s that are there for weapons and climate testing, but they stop for the Shuttle.
Wow, Jon Katz is here posting under another name.
Space is always dangerous, anytime you go 100 miles up into a vacuum with hard radiation and spin around at 17,000 miles an hour with 30,000 screws, bolts, pain chips and rocket boosters shit is hairy.
If you think LEO is too dangerous, then you should be dead set against sending humans or hamsters to Mars.
On a side note, NBC reported that 16 minutes of video tape from right before and during the Columbia re-entry survived the fall and then was found and is being shown to the crew's family. That's Super VHS.