I'm a UK citizen, and one of the "John Doe"s on the California deCSS case (#13, lucky for some) (cited for redistributing deCSS.) Congratulations to Jon, let's hope that this is the start of the Law waking up to, and acknowledging, fair use and common sense. My mirror's still up despite various nastygrams from the ISP prompted by bullying tactics by the MPAA (presumably, the complainant was anonymous but who else could it have been?) and the EUCD directive which is currently on hold for a month or two. Is it too much to hope for to wonder whether this case could lead to a rethink of the whole DMCA-like tenor that European law has been heading in of late?
I was intrigued by what I heard about Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive etc and dutifully slogged through them, and someone gave me Virtual Light for Christmas one year - but by then I'd discovered Snowcrash and Virt and realised that Gibson's really just an historical curiosity, on a par with da Vinci's sketches of helicopters... except that Gibson never painted a Mona Lisa.
I see 13 replies beneath my threshold already, so someone's probably already mentioned these... three contemporary UK acts that might do it for you. None of them do concept albums per se, but cerain... themes? do tend to emerge repeatedly from their music. AFAIK none of these have done anything (sales-wise) in the US.
Radiohead
Badly Drawn Boy
Manic Street Preachers
Spiritualised
Saint Etienne
The Pogues (actually an 80s-90s group but WTF;)
The Divine Comedy (these just split up a couple of months ago but have 5 or 6
superb albums in the can.)
Electronic (first and third albums: the second was written under
the influence of Prozac, and it shows;)
Scritti Politti finally released a new album. If you have vague
associations of crappy 80s pop to do from the name, don't worry.
I'd give you a brief idea of what they're about, but that'd spoil the fun;)
Some other stuff I really like, but seems to be a minority taste (around here anyway!): Destiny's Child! (`Independent Woman' is fantastic, classic pop.) And flamenco, whilst it has a seriously intimidating pain barrier (to the uninitiated it often sounds like tuneless wailing): the classic, Elvis-Beatles-Stones-Hendrix type figure, probably the greatest flamenco cantaor of all time, was Camaron de la Isla. Tons of mp3s at http://www.flamenco-world.com. I got into it purely by accident, got stranded at my parent's place for three weeks with nothing else to listen to. Like the candlestick suddenly resolving into two faces, after about a week of putting it on as background, I suddenly grokked it's indescribable beauty.
Of course, even if someone could knock all the root servers over, the net as we know it wouldn't stop working instantly. That's what the time to live value is for:)
> Seriously though how does the state of California > argue that your actions took place in their state?
I have no idea (I'm a British citizen residing in the UK and the mirror's physically located here too.) I won't dignify their pathetic actions by bothering to pay any particular attention to the case. I'm a "John Doe" id'd only by the URL of my mirror. Perhaps the lawyers were too stupid to realise what ".co.uk" signified?
> How's that? It's not a device primarily designed to > circumvent protection, that's just a side effect of > its "edited viewing" capabilities.
Tell that to the judge. deCSS's alleged "infringing" use is just a side-effect of someone trying to watch DVDs using Free software. That hasn't prevented people losing their jobs, getting into very expensive (and risky) legal cases, having their websites silently pulled, and so on.
FWIW my mirror's at http://www.zpok.demon.co.uk/deCSS/ . The last time I posted that URL here I got a nastygram from my ISP (who are now playing nice, to be fair.)
Perhaps (IANAL, naturally) this would enable one to perform edits to a movie legally, as no altered copy of the original work is ever instanciated.
One could distribute the edits alone online, and someone else could play their DVD filtered through that editset.
And how will you do that when the tool itself is illegal, hmmm? It's already in breach of the DMCA, and the MPAA have shown no reluctance to pursue DMCA-infractions outside the US as if they were domestic - as I know to my cost, being prosecuted in California for my deCSS mirror in the UK - and the forthcoming EUCD legislation in the UK mandates DMCA-type provisions, without those pesky exceptions for reverse engineering, interop, et al.
Realtime movies of last 48 hours
on
Today's Solar Flare
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The best pics for my money are at: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mpe g/
In particular this: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/curre nt _c2.mpg
is a reasonably small (3Mb) mpeg of the last 48 hours... the flare is right at the end of the sequence. Notice that although it appears on the right limb of the sun first, it's also pretty symetrical - indictating that the thing's coming straight for us.
Incidentally, if you've ever fancies getting your name on a comet, there are people who sit in front of those pages pressing ^r constantly in order to be the first to identify a new sungrazer. No, there's no software sitting processing the images in realtime for comet-like objects, and they (or rather, their ion tails) show up nicely. Enjoy!
Ponytails are for yuppies, and people who work in advertising. Be like me - let your freak flag fly - just say NO! to hairbands, and let your shaggy mane fly as free - free as the wind - as the software we use!
NB: joke... I keep it in a ponytail, outside the comfort & security of my own home...
It's good to see vendor J getting more exposure (go go BSD!) but I don't see anything in the docs about the choice of routing platform. Does J support something vital that vendor C does not yet provide? Or is it just a preference for clean code over crufty ol' IOS?
It's funny, there's a guy with a foldout table outside my local tube station (Brixton, London, UK) selling DVDs - often of films which are still on theatrical release, or indeed have only just opened - and I'll eat my hat if deCSS was used for *any* of them. Why should a copyright infringer go to all the trouble of decrypting an MPG video file when the encrypted version will play just fine on Fred Bloggs' standard home DVD player? So someone can tie up their broadband connection for a couple of hours, uploading a ripped film to total strangers - for *free*?? Get real, these blokes want to make MONEY! They can do that selling encrypted DVDs to people owning normal players much, much more easily than trying to sell them on the net.
The original Slashdot story about Jon prompted me throw up a mirror on my own site, and link to it from a comment. (I'm a UK citizen resident in the UK, as is the server holding my little site.) A couple of months later I was clearing the christmas mail list backlog when I came across a legalistic document concerning deCSS. To my amazement it seemed I was a defendant ("John Doe #13") in the California case. (The 2600 case is in NYC.)
In the ensuing two and a half years I've become increasingly radicalised (in the geek sense: I had a flirtation with "IRL" politics for a few years in my late teens/early 20s and lost interest pretty thoroughly after that.) In retrospect, this event was the first time I made a small gesture of public support for the freedoms we all consider so important. The reaction to it, whilst amusing, has given me a different perspective on matters which previously seemed unconnected: the importance of the GPL, for instance, the reasons *why* the DMCA is just the tip of an iceberg...
The only moral to my anecdote is this: where's *your* mirror of deCSS? Mine's still there =)
ISTR an earlier incarnation of this idea which was designed to vapourise the pilot of the other aircraft being engaged. (I think this was in New Scientist's Incarus column of fond memory...) The way it would work was that a computer would identify where the pilot was sitting in the other plane, fire the laser, then run the returned light (or flash from the impact) through a spectrometer. When you see carbon emission lines, you know you've hit the pilot...
One day,.. when I've repaid the ten thousand pounds of debt I owe the bank, my landlord, my brother and various other people that I;ve run up over the last year of (mostly) unemployment;... once I've upgraded this PoS to a reasonable spec machine, and moved up to proper broadband... once I've digitised all my media onto a nice fat RAID file server... in other words, once I find someone prepared to pay me for my ten years' commerical IT experience, five years of Perl and Linux, BSD, security, networking, and system admin skills... even though I've only ever/officially/ worked as a Perl programmer... in other words, when hell freezes over... I'm gonna get me a nice Meade LX200, interface it with my Linux box, get the Astronomical Software distribution, and do some quiet little research into something unsexy like variable stars, something where professional astronomers haven't yet made all progress impossible to the amateur. I've heard it said that astronomy is one of the only remaining areas of science where a dedicated amateur can still produce useful original research. In a parallel universe, where I don't get sacked for advocating Free software (and pointing out that the employer is stealing GPL'd code and selling it without including the source, license, or acknowledgment.)
But I digress.
In the back of Astronomy magazine you can see many ads for home domes like these. That, I think, would give you absolute maximum geek points...
Graham Chapman was - IS - a complete hero of mine. Not only did he write much of the Python material (in collaboration with Eric Idle and John Cleese), he starred in The Life of Brian and the Holy Grail films whilst suffereing from a chronic alcohol problem (multiple bottles of gin a day.) He was also one of the first celebrities to come out as gay, and helped found Gay News when sexual relationships between two consenting adults was still illegal in this country.
I strongly recommend his wonderful "A Liar's Autobiography" for a painfully candid (and very funny) story of his life.
"Really, the problem is that Ken Livingstone hates cars, always has. A classical socialist, he thinks all transport should be public, and that taxation is the solution to every problem."
I'm sorry... the *problem* is that Livingstone hates cars? Bruv, that's the main reason I voted for him...
And I fear you've been listening to Ian Duncan Coughdrop a bit too much if you think he's a "classical socialist". For a "socialist", he's awfully close friends with the big City financial institutions. Hence what seems to have become a rubber-stamping process, rather than a planning review, when proposals for new glass towers in centrol London come up. Already the glass gherkin is joining the Nat West Tower and that abominable Adrian Viedt-style Canary Wharf tower in the docklands; there are three or four more, even less interesting, highrise office blocks on the proverbial drawing board (CAD display), which personally I think are a very bad idea - even *before* 9/11. God knows why people want to build more of those death-traps. But that's another issue.
Anyway, Livingstone and Labour (new OR old) haven't been the face of "radical politics" in this country since the 1970s; that honour goes to the Liberals, the SDP, and now the Liberal Democrats (result of merger of first two parties.) Remember who was the first to seriously propose decriminalisation of marijuana? Yeah, that was us. Now, if only we could get Blunkett to believe a real democratic voting system (some form of PR, rather than the present anti-democratic, wildly unrepresentative "system" that has changed little since the days of Rotten Boroughs) was a way to keep "Tone" Bleurgh in power for ever...
" it seems like a logical step to me, if they can track all the license plates going into and coming out of london; and they have databases of facial prints and whatnot that it would be trivial to see where everyone is on a particular day at a particular time [...]"
No-one is suggesting that; there's no NEED to know where/when people are all the time. Only where a certain car is; toll or non-toll. I voted for Ken Livingstone (the mayor who's bringing this scheme in) so I'm in favour, anyway.
Exactly. Your right to personal freedom (eg to swing your fist) ends at my nose. Cars cost me (a non-driver) money -- subsidies to the roads, to the NHS for healthcare in looking after the broken bodies of victims of cars, in asthma, PM10 particulates causing lung cancer, pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the air... And I have to stop and give way to the buggers on the way to the shops. Make cars give way to pedestrians, I say!
....but that (LCD gizmo to make the plate invisble to cameras) would be tax evasion, which is criminal, and rightly so. Why is this suggestion moderated up? Hey, Microsoft charge $250 for XP - if only I had some heavy mates, then we could smash our way into the warehouse and steal as many copies as we want, 'eh?
Gosh, I wish private firearms were legal over here. Then we could resist the state's endless desire to control our lives, like you lucky people in the USA.
On a more serious note... *shrug* who cares? Cars are a menace, anything that discourages their use is a good thing in my book. (Hope that doesn't sound like a troll; it really is what I think.) Civil liberties angle? Pffft, this is the country where you can be jailed for five years for losing your PGP provate key, and the same again for telling third parties that the Govt. has seized your keys (and thus encrypted communication is compromised.) There are five CCTV cameras between me and my local pub. But I haven't been mugged (or in deed a victim of any crime) in 7 years in Brixton, supposedly the crime centre of the London inner city according to the Daily Fascis^h^h Mail.
The BBC article mentions that
"Developers, who include Mitsubishi and Nissan, hope that the new supersonic plane will have noise levels similar to the Boeing 747. That would mean that it would be able to operate far more widely than Concorde, which is notoriously noisy." This was also mentioned in previous news stories about the planned aircraft.
Nothing I've seen, however, explains how they were planning to deal with the sonic boom.
Or are they just referring to the noise level when in subsonic operation? In which case, like the Concorde, it could only go supersonic over water... but then how could it "operate far more widely" than the Concorde?
As a kid I often stayed at my Grandfather's place on the north coast of Cornwall (non-UK readers: the 'foot' that sticks out of the UK to the south-west.) You'd often hear the sonic boom from Concorde accelerating through (or decelerating back through) the sound barrier above the Bristol Channel. It sounded like a distant roll of thunder on a hot summer's day. (Of course it was always hot and sunny back then... </nostalgia >&.) This location was at least fifteen miles *horizontally* from the point the boom originated; I don't know the height they'd do this, but the point is sonic booms from something big enough to carry passengers carry a *long* way.
Nowadays, I live in South London, which happens to be on the flight path for Heathrow (along with most of the rest of south/west London...). The windows are double-glazed, which makes a nice Concorde test: when you can hear aircraft noise indoors, it's *always* either Concorde, or a low-flying police surveillance camera. (We live in a police state over hear, because guns are illegal. Gosh, how I wish I lived in the USA, so I could defend myself against the crushing power of the State! </troll > ) I usually pop outside to watch it pass overhead if I have the time, 'cos I grew up somewhere where aircraft were either contrails, or Tornados, Jaguars and A10s practicing low-level flying: these split the sky open and were gone usually within 10 seconds, rarely long enough to get much of a look. The difference in noise level is very noticeable compared to the usual commerical widebody heavies flying at the same altitude (?5000 feet?). It's also noticeable how long and slim Concorde appears compared to a 747 at the same altitude; it appears to be perhaps 60% of the size, and the fuselage is barely discernable; on a modern stretched 747, you can easily distinguish upper and mid and lower-deck rows of windows.)
The reason the Concorde is so damn loud are the Rolls Royce Olympus engines. They're optimised for supersonic flight, which makes them horribly inefficient -- they have to burn a *lot* of fuel to provide reasonable thrust at low air speeds (and given the airframe's delta-wing profile, "low speed" is relative: I haven't the numbers, but she takes off and lands *very* fast. Most supersonic military aircraft for the last 20 years or so have had variable geometry flight surfaces (BAE Tornado, f'rinstance, or the US Tomcat. Or that fskcing GORGEOUS Russian aircraft with the twin air intakes below the fuselage... but I digress) - the wings are swept forward for low-speed operation, then back into a delta configuration for high speeds.
This is another reason the Concorde's so expensive to run, which was another factor in it's commerical (lack of) success. Now, what I'm wondering - and I'm slightly puzzled why there hasn't been a/. story on this - what will happen to the competing next-generation passenger aircraft planned by Airbus and Boeing, pre-9/11? IIRC Airbus had settled on a 'superjumbo' carrying 700+ passengers, and Boeing had taken the brave - nay, reckless! - decision to go for a "super Concorde", a high-volume production, wide-body, supersonic passenger aircraft, carrying 250-400 passengers (compared to the original 60's version, with a maximum of ~110 passengers and crew.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a UK citizen, and one of the "John Doe"s on the California deCSS case (#13, lucky for some) (cited for redistributing deCSS.) Congratulations to Jon, let's hope that this is the start of the Law waking up to, and acknowledging, fair use and common sense. My mirror's still up despite various nastygrams from the ISP prompted by bullying tactics by the MPAA (presumably, the complainant was anonymous but who else could it have been?) and the EUCD directive which is currently on hold for a month or two. Is it too much to hope for to wonder whether this case could lead to a rethink of the whole DMCA-like tenor that European law has been heading in of late?
Anyway, who needs fiction when there's Jean Baudrillard? I defy anyone here to read America and tell me it doesn't change their life, or rather their perception of their cultural environment forever.
Pardon our dust?
already mentioned these... three contemporary UK acts that might do it
for you. None of them do concept albums per se, but cerain... themes?
do tend to emerge repeatedly from their music. AFAIK none of these have
done anything (sales-wise) in the US.
superb albums in the can.)
the influence of Prozac, and it shows
associations of crappy 80s pop to do from the name, don't worry.
I'd give you a brief idea of what they're about, but that'd spoil the
fun
Some other stuff I really like, but seems to be a minority taste
(around here anyway!): Destiny's Child! (`Independent Woman' is
fantastic, classic pop.) And flamenco, whilst it has a seriously
intimidating pain barrier (to the uninitiated it often sounds like
tuneless wailing): the classic, Elvis-Beatles-Stones-Hendrix type
figure, probably the greatest flamenco cantaor of all time, was
Camaron de la Isla. Tons of mp3s at
http://www.flamenco-world.com. I got into it purely by accident,
got stranded at my parent's place for three weeks with nothing else to
listen to. Like the candlestick suddenly resolving into two faces,
after about a week of putting it on as background, I suddenly grokked
it's indescribable beauty.
Root-servers.net
The legendary cymru.com data.
I haven't looked yet but LINX mrtg charts might show something interesting.
Of course, even if someone could knock all the root servers over, the net as we know it wouldn't stop working instantly. That's what the time to live value is for :)
http://www.discover.com/sept_02/featice.html
> Seriously though how does the state of California
> argue that your actions took place in their state?
I have no idea (I'm a British citizen residing in the UK and the mirror's physically located here too.) I won't dignify their pathetic actions by bothering to pay any particular attention to the case. I'm a "John Doe" id'd only by the URL of my mirror. Perhaps the lawyers were too stupid to realise what ".co.uk" signified?
> How's that? It's not a device primarily designed to
> circumvent protection, that's just a side effect of
> its "edited viewing" capabilities.
Tell that to the judge. deCSS's alleged "infringing" use is just a side-effect of someone trying to watch DVDs using Free software. That hasn't prevented people losing their jobs, getting into very expensive (and risky) legal cases, having their websites silently pulled, and so on.
FWIW my mirror's at http://www.zpok.demon.co.uk/deCSS/ . The last time I posted that URL here I got a nastygram from
my ISP (who are now playing nice, to be fair.)
And how will you do that when the tool itself is illegal, hmmm? It's already in breach of the DMCA, and the MPAA have shown no reluctance to pursue DMCA-infractions outside the US as if they were domestic - as I know to my cost, being prosecuted in California for my deCSS mirror in the UK - and the forthcoming EUCD legislation in the UK mandates DMCA-type provisions, without those pesky exceptions for reverse engineering, interop, et al.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mp
In particular this:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/LATEST/curr
is a reasonably small (3Mb) mpeg of the last 48 hours... the flare is right at the end of the sequence. Notice that although it appears on the right limb of the sun first, it's also pretty symetrical - indictating that the thing's coming straight for us.
Incidentally, if you've ever fancies getting your name on a comet, there are people who sit in front of those pages pressing ^r constantly in order to be the first to identify a new sungrazer. No, there's no software sitting processing the images in realtime for comet-like objects, and they (or rather, their ion tails) show up nicely.
Enjoy!
NB: joke... I keep it in a ponytail, outside the comfort & security of my own home...
It's good to see vendor J getting more exposure (go go BSD!) but I don't see anything in the docs about the choice of routing platform. Does J support something vital that vendor C does not yet provide? Or is it just a preference for clean code over crufty ol' IOS?
The original Slashdot story about Jon prompted me throw up a mirror on my own site, and link to it from a comment. (I'm a UK citizen resident in the UK, as is the server holding my little site.) A couple of months later I was clearing the christmas mail list backlog when I came across a legalistic document concerning deCSS. To my amazement it seemed I was a defendant ("John Doe #13") in the California case. (The 2600 case is in NYC.)
In the ensuing two and a half years I've become increasingly radicalised (in the geek sense: I had a flirtation with "IRL" politics for a few years in my late teens/early 20s and lost interest pretty thoroughly after that.) In retrospect, this event was the first time I made a small gesture of public support for the freedoms we all consider so important. The reaction to it, whilst amusing, has given me a different perspective on matters which previously seemed unconnected: the importance of the GPL, for instance, the reasons *why* the DMCA is just the tip of an iceberg...
The only moral to my anecdote is this: where's *your* mirror of deCSS? Mine's still there =)
Ah yes, that's the one, Daedalus... tch my memory's getting terribly shakey on important trivia these days :)
ISTR an earlier incarnation of this idea which was designed to vapourise the pilot of the other aircraft being engaged. (I think this was in New Scientist's Incarus column of fond memory...) The way it would work was that a computer would identify where the pilot was sitting in the other plane, fire the laser, then run the returned light (or flash from the impact) through a spectrometer. When you see carbon emission lines, you know you've hit the pilot...
One day,.. when I've repaid the ten thousand pounds of debt I owe the bank, my landlord, my brother and various other people that I;ve run up over the last year of (mostly) unemployment;... once I've upgraded this PoS to a reasonable spec machine, and moved up to proper broadband... once I've digitised all my media onto a nice fat RAID file server... in other words, once I find someone prepared to pay me for my ten years' commerical IT experience, five years of Perl and Linux, BSD, security, networking, and system admin skills... even though I've only ever /officially/ worked as a Perl programmer... in other words, when hell freezes over... I'm gonna get me a nice Meade LX200, interface it with my Linux box, get the Astronomical Software distribution, and do some quiet little research into something unsexy like variable stars, something where professional astronomers haven't yet made all progress impossible to the amateur. I've heard it said that astronomy is one of the only remaining areas of science where a dedicated amateur can still produce useful original research. In a parallel universe, where I don't get sacked for advocating Free software (and pointing out that the employer is stealing GPL'd code and selling it without including the source, license, or acknowledgment.)
But I digress.
In the back of Astronomy magazine you can see many ads for home domes like these. That, I think, would give you absolute maximum geek points...
Sigh. Life is hard.
Graham Chapman was - IS - a complete hero of mine. Not only did he write much of the Python material (in collaboration with Eric Idle and John Cleese), he starred in The Life of Brian and the Holy Grail films whilst suffereing from a chronic alcohol problem (multiple bottles of gin a day.) He was also one of the first celebrities to come out as gay, and helped found Gay News when sexual relationships between two consenting adults was still illegal in this country.
I strongly recommend his wonderful "A Liar's Autobiography" for a painfully candid (and very funny) story of his life.
And I fear you've been listening to Ian Duncan Coughdrop a bit too much if you think he's a "classical socialist". For a "socialist", he's awfully close friends with the big City financial institutions. Hence what seems to have become a rubber-stamping process, rather than a planning review, when proposals for new glass towers in centrol London come up. Already the glass gherkin is joining the Nat West Tower and that abominable Adrian Viedt-style Canary Wharf tower in the docklands; there are three or four more, even less interesting, highrise office blocks on the proverbial drawing board (CAD display), which personally I think are a very bad idea - even *before* 9/11. God knows why people want to build more of those death-traps. But that's another issue.
Anyway, Livingstone and Labour (new OR old) haven't been the face of "radical politics" in this country since the 1970s; that honour goes to the Liberals, the SDP, and now the Liberal Democrats (result of merger of first two parties.) Remember who was the first to seriously propose decriminalisation of marijuana? Yeah, that was us. Now, if only we could get Blunkett to believe a real democratic voting system (some form of PR, rather than the present anti-democratic, wildly unrepresentative "system" that has changed little since the days of Rotten Boroughs) was a way to keep "Tone" Bleurgh in power for ever...
" it seems like a logical step to me, if they can track all the license plates going into and coming out of london; and they have databases of facial prints and whatnot that it would be trivial to see where everyone is on a particular day at a particular time [...]"
No-one is suggesting that; there's no NEED to know where/when people are all the time. Only where a certain car is; toll or non-toll. I voted for Ken Livingstone (the mayor who's bringing this scheme in) so I'm in favour, anyway.
Exactly. Your right to personal freedom (eg to swing your fist) ends at my nose. Cars cost me (a non-driver) money -- subsidies to the roads, to the NHS for healthcare in looking after the broken bodies of victims of cars, in asthma, PM10 particulates causing lung cancer, pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gasses into the air... And I have to stop and give way to the buggers on the way to the shops. Make cars give way to pedestrians, I say!
....but that (LCD gizmo to make the plate invisble to cameras) would be tax evasion, which is criminal, and rightly so. Why is this suggestion moderated up? Hey, Microsoft charge $250 for XP - if only I had some heavy mates, then we could smash our way into the warehouse and steal as many copies as we want, 'eh?
Sometimes I despair of Slashdotters.
Gosh, I wish private firearms were legal over here. Then we could resist the state's endless desire to control our lives, like you lucky people in the USA.
On a more serious note... *shrug* who cares? Cars are a menace, anything that discourages their use is a good thing in my book. (Hope that doesn't sound like a troll; it really is what I think.) Civil liberties angle? Pffft, this is the country where you can be jailed for five years for losing your PGP provate key, and the same again for telling third parties that the Govt. has seized your keys (and thus encrypted communication is compromised.) There are five CCTV cameras between me and my local pub. But I haven't been mugged (or in deed a victim of any crime) in 7 years in Brixton, supposedly the crime centre of the London inner city according to the Daily Fascis^h^h Mail.
the north coast of Cornwall (non-UK readers: the 'foot' that sticks out of the UK to the south-west.) You'd often hear the sonic boom from Concorde accelerating through (or decelerating back through) the sound barrier above the Bristol Channel. It sounded like a distant roll of thunder on a hot summer's day. (Of course it was always hot and sunny back then... </nostalgia >&
Nowadays, I live in South London, which happens to be on the flight path for Heathrow (along with most of the rest of south/west London...). The windows are double-glazed, which makes a nice Concorde test: when you can hear aircraft noise indoors, it's *always* either Concorde, or a low-flying police surveillance camera. (We live in a police state over hear, because guns are illegal. Gosh, how I wish I lived in the USA, so I could defend myself against the crushing power of the State! <
The reason the Concorde is so damn loud are the Rolls Royce Olympus engines. They're optimised for supersonic flight, which makes them horribly inefficient -- they have to burn a *lot* of fuel to provide reasonable thrust at low air speeds (and given the airframe's delta-wing profile, "low speed" is relative: I haven't the numbers, but she takes off and lands *very* fast. Most supersonic military aircraft for the last 20 years or so have had variable geometry flight surfaces (BAE Tornado, f'rinstance, or the US Tomcat. Or that fskcing GORGEOUS Russian aircraft with the twin air intakes below the fuselage... but I digress) - the wings are swept forward for low-speed operation, then back into a delta configuration for high speeds.
This is another reason the Concorde's so expensive to run, which was another factor in it's commerical (lack of) success. Now, what I'm wondering - and I'm slightly puzzled why there hasn't been a
Anyone able to enlighten me on this?
If you can't find the NANOG signup info, you don't need to read it.