Virtual tank simulators can provide much more realism than firing at targets at a tank range. How do you train tank crews in small unit tactics on a tank range? You don't. A simulator lets you do things that would be far too dangerous in a live fire exercise. Plus the crew spends most of their time in training, not in cleaning and repairing the tank.
War is damned expensive, losing a battle because the soldiers are not properly equipped and trained is more expensive. Many modern weapons are too expensive to expend in peacetime training.
Do you have any military experience? Or do you just get your knowledge from TV?
I can assure you that the average soldier understands that war is not a video game, that real people, including soldiers, get killed and wounded. That's more than I can say for some civilians.
Realistic training is vital for combat effectiveness and survival. If you have to think about it, you will be in big trouble when dealing with the high stress of combat. The advantages of virtual reality simulations are cost and safety. Field exercises with live ammunition are very expensive and safety requirements are at odds with realism.
It sounds a lot like CALEA, the federal law designed to ensure that the switched voice network remains wiretap friendly. I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA, the FBI is the agency that has a long history of abusing wiretaps and harassing dissidents.
Did the LSD cause the psychosis or did it expose a preexisting problem? Schizophrenia tends to become visible in young adults and it is a relatively common illness. If someone is a latent schizophrenic, the LSD might trigger a psychotic episode.
US companies did not design new engines since last German engineers, who made Saturn V retired.
What about the RL10 and SSME?
NASA and the USAF have not invested enough money in new ELVs and engines. That said, the Delta and Atlas-Centaur have excellent success rates. The Russian engines are attractive because they invested the time and money in developing improved liquid fuel engines, where the US military has concentrated on solid fuel technology.
IP may be more flexible but I think AppleTalk/EtherTalk still has an advantage in ease of use. You plug the computers into the LAN and the networking software automagically configures itself. That's nice for small networks.
There was a television documentary that showed one way to make something that looked like ball lightning. The experimenter had a warehouse full of surplus submarine storage batteries. These were connected to a metal rod suspended above a metal plate. The plate had a ridge on its surface. When the rod was swung over the ridge, it would strike an arc and small, glowing spheres would go bouncing across the plate. The spheres would vanish after several seconds.
The United States was founded upon disrespect for the laws of England.
The United States had a great deal of respect for the laws of England, it was, and continues to be, the basis for our legal system. Respect for the King and the Parliament is a different matter.
I've seen banks routinely honor checks with no signature and checks with poorly forged signatures. Their policy appears to be that the only time a signature is verified by a human is when a transaction is challenged or when their own money is involved. Digital signatures might be an improvement.
I always write checks with a ball-point pen. This makes it more difficult for someone to alter or forge a check. The ink isn't easily bleached and the paper records the pressure patterns of the writer.
I don't think wireless Internet access will become popular unless the costs to the subscriber can be greatly reduced. I've read a number of reviews of the devices and the associated services. Most of the devices are brain damaged and the service costs are high. There don't seem to be any open standards for the devices and services.
You can run almost any operating system on a VME bus system. It's just a question of what operating systems are supported by the vendor of the CPU board. One of the labs that I work in has several VME bus based Windows NT systems.
You may be thinking of the Forth based Open Firmware that is used on some PCI bus cards.
You might not like it but there is a kernel of truth in his comments. The U.S. has a long history of setting immigration policy based on the needs of large companies. Just look at Pennsylvania where large numbers of immigrants were brought in to work in the mines and steel mills. The steel companies wanted docile workers who would work hard and cheap, and not get any funny ideas about labor unions. Their experience with American workers was that the American worker wanted higher pay and better working conditions, and was willing to go on strike to get them. In recent history, a similar situation developed with registered nurses, who traditionally were underpaid and treated like crap by most hospitals. When a nurse shortage developed, rather than increase pay and improve working conditions for nurses, the health care industry lobbied Congress to grant more visas to foreign nurses.
The money goes into the general fund, not the INS budget. It is up to Congress to allocate more money to the INS so that they can hire and train more employees.
This is typical of federal agencies, they do not get to keep the money they collect in fees.
The tapes in question are 3600 foot, 7-track analog tapes recorded at 15 inches per second. During recovery, the analog experiment data is digitized at 40,000 (16-bit) samples per second. That comes out to about 230 megabytes per track. Not all of the tracks are used for experiment data, some are used for frequency reference, time code and low rate spacecraft PCM data, others are unused. Assuming one track with experiment data, the result is about 250 megabytes per tape.
I worked on a data recovery project for NASA/GSFC. The spacecraft data was originally recorded on analog 7-track 1/2" instrumentation recorders at ground stations all over the world. There were 100,000 tapes stored in the Public Archives of Canada. The tapes were deteriorating and destined for a landfill. It costs a substantial amount of money, every year, to store that many tapes in a climate controlled facility. That was just the data from one family of spacecraft (Alouette and ISIS).
Recovering the data from just a portion of the tapes requires substantial amounts of time and money due to the labor intensive nature of the task. Think of copying 20,000 LP records to CD-R disks.
With limited budgets, NASA and other scientific research agencies are often in the unhappy position of having huge amounts of potentially valuable data on rapidly deteriorating media, of which only a fraction can be saved. Unless someone invents a time machine, the data is irreplaceable.
For many years, magnetic tape has been the medium of choice for storing spacecraft data. Storing it on an on-line system, on disk, just wasn't practical or affordable. Huge amounts of data were archived on 7-track 1/2" digital computer tapes, the same kind of tapes that you see in cheesy science fiction movies from the 1960s. Try to find one of those tape drives today, or a computer that can talk to it.
I keep wondering what these media moguls are going to do when all the latest audio and video recordings can be freely downloaded from a server that they can't even locate. Think of an IP network composed of encrypted wormholes and anonymous packet routers.
Re:The solution to World Hunger
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
It wasn't intentional, but the Black Death improved the economic condition of the survivors in Western Europe.
I recently read a novel (Beyond Recall, Stephen Kyle) in which a genetically engineered virus was designed to kill women. The virus designer's (a woman, by the way) goal was to save the human race and the Earth from the threat of an ecological and social collapse caused by overpopulation. Killing females is the most effective way to reduce the size of a population. Males are expendable and easily replaced.
Re:It's logical to go to space
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 2
You ask me if I'm willing to pay to increase funding to help out NASA?? I ask you this. Who decides NASA's budget? Congress! How many people "my" age do you know of in congress? NONE! I think perhaps the baby-boomers of this world had better shut the hell up and stop blaming s#it on their kids!
Congress listens to people who vote.
Take a look at the Census Bureau report on voting in the 1996 election. Less than one-third (32.4%) of 18-24 year olds voted. The majority of the baby boomers voted. Two-thirds (67.0%) of the 65 year old and over group voted.
You can whine about the demographics of the Congress, but if you don't get up off your ass, register and vote, you will never have any political power.
If someone wishes to remain ignorant of English, fine, that is their choice and handicap.
A knowledge of Latin used to be mandatory for educated Europeans and Americans. It was the lingua franca of its day. It is still useful for some professions. German had a similar standing in chemistry.
The reality is that you need to be able to communicate with people in other countries. Today, the most useful language is English. Tomorrow, who knows. Don't confuse practicality with colonialism.
Many of my coworkers are Chinese, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese. Their only common language is English.
Re:We need to Privatize NASA
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 2
NASA *does* take in money, you know... from launching all those communications satellites and other services.
No, that isn't the way it works.
Let's say you want to launch a satellite on a Delta II ELV (expendable launch vehicle). You negotiate a contract with Boeing and pay them 60 million dollars. Boeing gives some of that money to the USAF and NASA to pay for their use of government facilities. NASA does not make a profit from the launch.
Re:It's logical to go to space
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 2
Yet it takes us another 30 to break a lander on the surface of mars?? This isn't a matter of "children" wanting something too quickly. This is a matter of "children" wondering exactly how long something like this is supposed to take!
Are the "children" willing to pay for it? Or are they too busy watching TV?
People have forgotten the enormous resources that were put into the space program in the 1960s, both in money and engineering talent. Richard Nixon, the Congress, and the public killed NASA's funding in the 1970s. The result was that many thousands of aerospace engineers (and others) ended up driving cabs or collecting unemployment compensation. Congress took that money, the money from cutting the Defense Department budget, and money they didn't have and spent it on increasing Social Security benefits to levels that made the voters happy and guaranteed the future insolvency of Social Security. Everyone cheered.
I used to be in a programming group that did this all the time, pick a cool name for the program and then justify it by claiming that it was an acronym. That was part of the fun of being a programmer.
You should also read the 14th Amendment and the appropriate Supreme Court decisions (for the First Amendment see Gitlow versus New York, 1925) that prohibit the states from violating individual rights listed in the Bill of Rights. Clemson is a state institution and must abide by these decisions.
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War is damned expensive, losing a battle because the soldiers are not properly equipped and trained is more expensive. Many modern weapons are too expensive to expend in peacetime training.
I can assure you that the average soldier understands that war is not a video game, that real people, including soldiers, get killed and wounded. That's more than I can say for some civilians.
Realistic training is vital for combat effectiveness and survival. If you have to think about it, you will be in big trouble when dealing with the high stress of combat. The advantages of virtual reality simulations are cost and safety. Field exercises with live ammunition are very expensive and safety requirements are at odds with realism.
California is supposed to be a liberal state. Why does anyone vote for that bitch? She is doing her best to nuke the first and second amendments.
It sounds a lot like CALEA, the federal law designed to ensure that the switched voice network remains wiretap friendly. I'm not terribly concerned about the NSA, the FBI is the agency that has a long history of abusing wiretaps and harassing dissidents.
Did the LSD cause the psychosis or did it expose a preexisting problem? Schizophrenia tends to become visible in young adults and it is a relatively common illness. If someone is a latent schizophrenic, the LSD might trigger a psychotic episode.
What about the RL10 and SSME?
NASA and the USAF have not invested enough money in new ELVs and engines. That said, the Delta and Atlas-Centaur have excellent success rates. The Russian engines are attractive because they invested the time and money in developing improved liquid fuel engines, where the US military has concentrated on solid fuel technology.
IP may be more flexible but I think AppleTalk/EtherTalk still has an advantage in ease of use. You plug the computers into the LAN and the networking software automagically configures itself. That's nice for small networks.
There was a television documentary that showed one way to make something that looked like ball lightning. The experimenter had a warehouse full of surplus submarine storage batteries. These were connected to a metal rod suspended above a metal plate. The plate had a ridge on its surface. When the rod was swung over the ridge, it would strike an arc and small, glowing spheres would go bouncing across the plate. The spheres would vanish after several seconds.
The United States had a great deal of respect for the laws of England, it was, and continues to be, the basis for our legal system. Respect for the King and the Parliament is a different matter.
I always write checks with a ball-point pen. This makes it more difficult for someone to alter or forge a check. The ink isn't easily bleached and the paper records the pressure patterns of the writer.
I don't think wireless Internet access will become popular unless the costs to the subscriber can be greatly reduced. I've read a number of reviews of the devices and the associated services. Most of the devices are brain damaged and the service costs are high. There don't seem to be any open standards for the devices and services.
You may be thinking of the Forth based Open Firmware that is used on some PCI bus cards.
You might not like it but there is a kernel of truth in his comments. The U.S. has a long history of setting immigration policy based on the needs of large companies. Just look at Pennsylvania where large numbers of immigrants were brought in to work in the mines and steel mills. The steel companies wanted docile workers who would work hard and cheap, and not get any funny ideas about labor unions. Their experience with American workers was that the American worker wanted higher pay and better working conditions, and was willing to go on strike to get them. In recent history, a similar situation developed with registered nurses, who traditionally were underpaid and treated like crap by most hospitals. When a nurse shortage developed, rather than increase pay and improve working conditions for nurses, the health care industry lobbied Congress to grant more visas to foreign nurses.
This is typical of federal agencies, they do not get to keep the money they collect in fees.
The tapes in question are 3600 foot, 7-track analog tapes recorded at 15 inches per second. During recovery, the analog experiment data is digitized at 40,000 (16-bit) samples per second. That comes out to about 230 megabytes per track. Not all of the tracks are used for experiment data, some are used for frequency reference, time code and low rate spacecraft PCM data, others are unused. Assuming one track with experiment data, the result is about 250 megabytes per tape.
Recovering the data from just a portion of the tapes requires substantial amounts of time and money due to the labor intensive nature of the task. Think of copying 20,000 LP records to CD-R disks.
With limited budgets, NASA and other scientific research agencies are often in the unhappy position of having huge amounts of potentially valuable data on rapidly deteriorating media, of which only a fraction can be saved. Unless someone invents a time machine, the data is irreplaceable.
For many years, magnetic tape has been the medium of choice for storing spacecraft data. Storing it on an on-line system, on disk, just wasn't practical or affordable. Huge amounts of data were archived on 7-track 1/2" digital computer tapes, the same kind of tapes that you see in cheesy science fiction movies from the 1960s. Try to find one of those tape drives today, or a computer that can talk to it.
I keep wondering what these media moguls are going to do when all the latest audio and video recordings can be freely downloaded from a server that they can't even locate. Think of an IP network composed of encrypted wormholes and anonymous packet routers.
I recently read a novel (Beyond Recall, Stephen Kyle) in which a genetically engineered virus was designed to kill women. The virus designer's (a woman, by the way) goal was to save the human race and the Earth from the threat of an ecological and social collapse caused by overpopulation. Killing females is the most effective way to reduce the size of a population. Males are expendable and easily replaced.
Congress listens to people who vote.
Take a look at the Census Bureau report on voting in the 1996 election. Less than one-third (32.4%) of 18-24 year olds voted. The majority of the baby boomers voted. Two-thirds (67.0%) of the 65 year old and over group voted.
You can whine about the demographics of the Congress, but if you don't get up off your ass, register and vote, you will never have any political power.
A knowledge of Latin used to be mandatory for educated Europeans and Americans. It was the lingua franca of its day. It is still useful for some professions. German had a similar standing in chemistry.
The reality is that you need to be able to communicate with people in other countries. Today, the most useful language is English. Tomorrow, who knows. Don't confuse practicality with colonialism.
Many of my coworkers are Chinese, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese. Their only common language is English.
No, that isn't the way it works.
Let's say you want to launch a satellite on a Delta II ELV (expendable launch vehicle). You negotiate a contract with Boeing and pay them 60 million dollars. Boeing gives some of that money to the USAF and NASA to pay for their use of government facilities. NASA does not make a profit from the launch.
Are the "children" willing to pay for it? Or are they too busy watching TV?
People have forgotten the enormous resources that were put into the space program in the 1960s, both in money and engineering talent. Richard Nixon, the Congress, and the public killed NASA's funding in the 1970s. The result was that many thousands of aerospace engineers (and others) ended up driving cabs or collecting unemployment compensation. Congress took that money, the money from cutting the Defense Department budget, and money they didn't have and spent it on increasing Social Security benefits to levels that made the voters happy and guaranteed the future insolvency of Social Security. Everyone cheered.
I used to be in a programming group that did this all the time, pick a cool name for the program and then justify it by claiming that it was an acronym. That was part of the fun of being a programmer.
You should also read the 14th Amendment and the appropriate Supreme Court decisions (for the First Amendment see Gitlow versus New York, 1925) that prohibit the states from violating individual rights listed in the Bill of Rights. Clemson is a state institution and must abide by these decisions.
Highly unlikely.
From unclassified information in the press, the NSA has large numbers of Sun workstations (Solaris) and Cray/SGI supercomputers (Unicos).