Gun launches still need an engine and fuel to run it. The orbit that the gun puts you in will necessarily intersect the atmosphere, so you need a circularization burn at the top to stay in space. It is of course much smaller than what you need to get to space using a rocket all the way, but you definitely need it.
You think that existing rockets don't have vibration problems? Get real!
Funny you should mention Apollo 13. On launch it came within seconds of total destruction due to a pogo oscillation in the second stage center engine that was vibrating at 68 gees, flexing the thrust frame by 3 inches at 16Hz. By complete, pure luck, a fuel sensor tripped and shut the engine down literally seconds before the entire rocket was destroyed.
Apollo 13 was also a huge failure of engineering. Remember all that improvisation they had to do to fit the CO2 scrubbers from the one craft into the other? Why were they not interchangeable? And of course the root cause of the famous accident was due to faulty design and faulty engineering procedures. The wires which triggered the explosion were clad in teflon (not exactly the strongest material), and the whole tank had been dropped during an equipment swap for Apollo 10. Tests indicated that there was no damage from the drop, but in fact there was; it was this drop that directly led to the explosion. And lastly, there was no backup of any kind. The fact that the three Apollo 13 astronauts survived at all was a triumph of quick-footed improvisation but overall the flight exposed a lot of problems with the system.
We love to look at Apollo through rose-colored glasses, but the facts just don't support it. Both the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft had many problems. There were only 11 flights, but one was nearly destroyed (Apollo 13), and three astronauts were killed in a separate incident. In contrast the Shuttle has flown over a hundred times. Yes, the Shuttle has many problems too, but it's not as if the Saturn V/Apollo combination was some magical example of engineering perfection.
3. Basically all space rockets are aerodynamically unstable. This is absolutely nothing new.
4. Before it was eclipsed by an even worse event, Apollo 13 briefly scared the crap out of everyone involved when the center engine of the second stage nearly ripped the entire rocket to little pieces. It was experiencing pogo oscillation, flexing the massive thrust frame by three inches at 16Hz, experiencing 68 gees. Just before this incredible vibration destroyed the entire craft, a fuel sensor was falsely tripped and shut the engine down, saving the ship.
Saturn V and Apollo were full of problems. Rocket science is hard, remember? I suggest that you get a clue before you mindlessly criticize.
You think the Saturn V didn't have many tons of anti-vibration structure, anti-pogo devices, and other such things? Get real!
Clueless computer types such as yourself might think that a rocket should be fuel tanks and an engine and nothing else, but that's not how it actually works in the real world. There's a reason that "rocket science" is used as an idiom to indicate something that's extremely hard, you know.
Yeah, extra weight reduces the performance, you're right.
So let's get rid of the fuel tanks. After all, those things are heavy. And how about the engines? Those things weigh a lot. All that cabling from the flight computer is awfully massive too, and the fuel lines, and the gimbals, and especially all of that terribly heavy safety equipment!
Basically this guy is saying "That laptop over there doesn't have anything illegal on it. Those pigs are just lying ignorant bastards who wouldn't know a playboy bunny shot from japanese tentacle porn.
Not at all. He's saying, "The police don't have enough evidence to prove my guilt. Therefore, since I am to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, you must acquit."
No, it's not just semantics. If you break this law and are successfully prosecuted then you will get sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. If it is subsequently overturned that will not change the fact that you got sent to prison. Frankly I am not going to be very much comforted by people like you telling me that the law is unconstitutional after spending a few years rotting in prison getting my case up to the Supreme Court so they can overturn it.
This sounds like an opinion based more on conviction than on evidence.
In any case, even if you're absolutely correct, it doesn't change things. It is still illegal to break this law until such time as it actually is struck down.
I rather doubt it. The courts are the ones who do the striking down, recall.
Don't let your desire for a perfect world interfere with recognizing reality. There's a big difference between "this should be struck down" and "this will be struck down".
The key difference is that the new version of the law uses the court-endorsed standard for obscenity, whereas the old version did not. Given this, I would not be so optimistic about having it struck down.
I didn't even realize you could be put in jail for failing a sobriety test while walking. I mean, I know that "public drunkenness" is an offense, but I didn't think it was enforced except in dire cases. Or are you implying that you're under 21? If so, that's a bit of a different game, although I agree with you that it's a stupid law either way.
No, not because he agrees with me. Because he knows something all these other people apparently don't; that the laws in the US have changed, and while it was true that it was not previously illegal, it has been since 2003.
I'll be man enough to admit that I thought it had been illegal for much longer, and so the various "you're wrong" responses to my post were also quite enlightening, but they seem to have missed this crucial change in American law.
Either write an actual, understandable question, or don't bother posting. I'm not going to play games with you where I try to decode your point by figuring out exactly what words of mine you've cleverly changed.
That's why they could look at it in the first place.
But they failed to gather evidence when they had the chance. And now he's back in the country, subject to all the regular protections. If they had copied the unencrypted contents of his hard drive previously they would be able to use that evidence in court, but they can't force him to decrypt its contents now just because they happened to have access to it when he crossed.
Actually, child pornography is such a witchhunt that even animated child pornography is illegal. That's right, child porn which never involved a child can still get you sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for a long time.
There are convoluted rationalizations for why this is so, but they are so insane that I will not bother to reproduce them here. Suffice it to say that society has collectively lost its mind when it comes to the idea of child pornography.
Guess what? If you give a presentation about how vulnerable standard front door locks are, and exactly how you can defeat them, nobody is going to put a gag order on you.
You are entirely within your rights to deploy an insecure system. But other people are entirely within their rights to talk about just how insecure your system is, and what its vulnerabilities are.
You don't get better locks by burying the information about how bad the existing ones are.
Selling lots of cards below cost is a good way to attract the attention of the police and get put in jail.
This recently happened in Washington, DC. Some clever people figured out how to replicate fare cards. The way they did it, it would have been essentially impossible to catch them. But they didn't want free travel, they wanted cash, so they started selling the replicated cards. At that point the police caught on to what they were doing and now they're in prison.
Maybe it will convince Google to force the use of HTTPS instead of making it optional (and off by default!), which will benefit everyone except those with bad intentions.
Plutonium is not very radioactive. Its activity is fairly low. The half life of Plutonium 239 is approximately 24,100 years, meaning that any given atom probably lasts a very long time before decaying. In turn this means that the number of atoms decaying at any given moment is quite small. Furthermore, Plutonium decays in the form of alpha particles, which don't penetrate at all. Alpha particles are stopped by human skin, still in the dead bits, and thus are completely harmless when external to the human body. You can hold a big lump of Plutonium in your hand all day and not have the slightest ill effect. It only becomes dangerous when ingested, and even then it tends not to be absorbed by the body except in certain forms, for example fine particles breathed into the lungs.
As for toxicity, it's pretty bad, but not nearly as evil as it's made out to be. I'd certainly rather have a little more Plutonium around than live with the many tons of mercury per year emitted straight into the atmosphere by the average coal plant, given the choice between the two.
Lastly, consider that several tons of Plutonium have been released straight into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear bomb testing, and there hasn't been any real environmental harm from this. It's certainly no good thing, but on the other hand this is vastly worse than what happens with nuclear waste, which is safely stored rather than being vaporized and released into the air.
Over the past four years, however, my systems at companies in the ~100 employee range, with redundant servers in quality colo with offsite backups, but no dedicated DR setup, have averaged more than one full 9 better uptime than Google/Amazon, for pretty similar pricing (to $50/user/year, eg with Zimbra $28/user/yr allowing $22/user/year for admin time, hardware, and colocation fees).
How are you running such a system on only $2200/year for admin time, hardware, and colocation fees? This seems to me to be at least an order of magnitude too low.
You might want to talk to your lawyer on that. They count as money when your wife divorces you and you have to split of the estate (in most state, she will gat a portion of your retirement even if it is only through your work). They count as money when someone dies and you have to pay the death taxes. They count as money when you get sued and lose. They count as money when a judge figures out child support payment and whether you need to provide tuition or insurance or something.
No, they count as assets. There's a difference.
Here's my fundamental problem: using your definition of money, everything is "money". Therefore it becomes a pointless word. We already have words to describe this concept, like "value" and "assets". Why should "money" mean the same thing? The word "money" implies an inherent liquidity which houses and other such things do not possess.
No, I'm saying that things which aren't liquid and can't be generally used to purchase stuff aren't money.
That green stuff with "in God we trust" is money, not because the government says so, but because it buys stuff.
The hypothetical house is not money because you cannot use it to buy stuff. You can go through various painful shenanigans to convert it into something that will buy stuff, but you can't buy stuff directly with the house.
You can buy stuff directly with checks, so they are money. Yes, some places don't accept them. Some places don't accept cash either. The important thing is that they are generally accepted. Houses aren't.
And yes, stocks and investments aren't money. They are objects you own which can be converted into money at the market rate. Ever talk to somebody who plays the market a lot, and hear him say "I made $BIGNUM on the market today!"? Invariably this is said when his stock goes up, but when he has not taken any action. Well guess what, he didn't make any money. His stock gained value. But no money gets made until he actually sells and converts that stock back into money.
You're describing ways to get money, you are not describing money.
The fact that one entity is easily convertible into another entity does not make them equivalent. It makes them easily convertible. Your long, rambling post about how easy they are to convert does not, in fact, refute my point in any way.
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Gun launches still need an engine and fuel to run it. The orbit that the gun puts you in will necessarily intersect the atmosphere, so you need a circularization burn at the top to stay in space. It is of course much smaller than what you need to get to space using a rocket all the way, but you definitely need it.
You think that existing rockets don't have vibration problems? Get real!
Funny you should mention Apollo 13. On launch it came within seconds of total destruction due to a pogo oscillation in the second stage center engine that was vibrating at 68 gees, flexing the thrust frame by 3 inches at 16Hz. By complete, pure luck, a fuel sensor tripped and shut the engine down literally seconds before the entire rocket was destroyed.
Apollo 13 was also a huge failure of engineering. Remember all that improvisation they had to do to fit the CO2 scrubbers from the one craft into the other? Why were they not interchangeable? And of course the root cause of the famous accident was due to faulty design and faulty engineering procedures. The wires which triggered the explosion were clad in teflon (not exactly the strongest material), and the whole tank had been dropped during an equipment swap for Apollo 10. Tests indicated that there was no damage from the drop, but in fact there was; it was this drop that directly led to the explosion. And lastly, there was no backup of any kind. The fact that the three Apollo 13 astronauts survived at all was a triumph of quick-footed improvisation but overall the flight exposed a lot of problems with the system.
We love to look at Apollo through rose-colored glasses, but the facts just don't support it. Both the Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft had many problems. There were only 11 flights, but one was nearly destroyed (Apollo 13), and three astronauts were killed in a separate incident. In contrast the Shuttle has flown over a hundred times. Yes, the Shuttle has many problems too, but it's not as if the Saturn V/Apollo combination was some magical example of engineering perfection.
3. Basically all space rockets are aerodynamically unstable. This is absolutely nothing new.
4. Before it was eclipsed by an even worse event, Apollo 13 briefly scared the crap out of everyone involved when the center engine of the second stage nearly ripped the entire rocket to little pieces. It was experiencing pogo oscillation, flexing the massive thrust frame by three inches at 16Hz, experiencing 68 gees. Just before this incredible vibration destroyed the entire craft, a fuel sensor was falsely tripped and shut the engine down, saving the ship.
Saturn V and Apollo were full of problems. Rocket science is hard, remember? I suggest that you get a clue before you mindlessly criticize.
You think the Saturn V didn't have many tons of anti-vibration structure, anti-pogo devices, and other such things? Get real!
Clueless computer types such as yourself might think that a rocket should be fuel tanks and an engine and nothing else, but that's not how it actually works in the real world. There's a reason that "rocket science" is used as an idiom to indicate something that's extremely hard, you know.
Yeah, extra weight reduces the performance, you're right.
So let's get rid of the fuel tanks. After all, those things are heavy. And how about the engines? Those things weigh a lot. All that cabling from the flight computer is awfully massive too, and the fuel lines, and the gimbals, and especially all of that terribly heavy safety equipment!
Basically this guy is saying "That laptop over there doesn't have anything illegal on it. Those pigs are just lying ignorant bastards who wouldn't know a playboy bunny shot from japanese tentacle porn.
Not at all. He's saying, "The police don't have enough evidence to prove my guilt. Therefore, since I am to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, you must acquit."
No, it's not just semantics. If you break this law and are successfully prosecuted then you will get sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. If it is subsequently overturned that will not change the fact that you got sent to prison. Frankly I am not going to be very much comforted by people like you telling me that the law is unconstitutional after spending a few years rotting in prison getting my case up to the Supreme Court so they can overturn it.
This sounds like an opinion based more on conviction than on evidence.
In any case, even if you're absolutely correct, it doesn't change things. It is still illegal to break this law until such time as it actually is struck down.
I rather doubt it. The courts are the ones who do the striking down, recall.
Don't let your desire for a perfect world interfere with recognizing reality. There's a big difference between "this should be struck down" and "this will be struck down".
The key difference is that the new version of the law uses the court-endorsed standard for obscenity, whereas the old version did not. Given this, I would not be so optimistic about having it struck down.
And this, in a nutshell, is why it is judges who set the punishment for offenders and not victims or relatives of victims.
I didn't even realize you could be put in jail for failing a sobriety test while walking. I mean, I know that "public drunkenness" is an offense, but I didn't think it was enforced except in dire cases. Or are you implying that you're under 21? If so, that's a bit of a different game, although I agree with you that it's a stupid law either way.
No, not because he agrees with me. Because he knows something all these other people apparently don't; that the laws in the US have changed, and while it was true that it was not previously illegal, it has been since 2003.
I'll be man enough to admit that I thought it had been illegal for much longer, and so the various "you're wrong" responses to my post were also quite enlightening, but they seem to have missed this crucial change in American law.
Either write an actual, understandable question, or don't bother posting. I'm not going to play games with you where I try to decode your point by figuring out exactly what words of mine you've cleverly changed.
That's why they could look at it in the first place.
But they failed to gather evidence when they had the chance. And now he's back in the country, subject to all the regular protections. If they had copied the unencrypted contents of his hard drive previously they would be able to use that evidence in court, but they can't force him to decrypt its contents now just because they happened to have access to it when he crossed.
Actually, child pornography is such a witchhunt that even animated child pornography is illegal. That's right, child porn which never involved a child can still get you sent to Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for a long time.
There are convoluted rationalizations for why this is so, but they are so insane that I will not bother to reproduce them here. Suffice it to say that society has collectively lost its mind when it comes to the idea of child pornography.
Guess what? If you give a presentation about how vulnerable standard front door locks are, and exactly how you can defeat them, nobody is going to put a gag order on you.
You are entirely within your rights to deploy an insecure system. But other people are entirely within their rights to talk about just how insecure your system is, and what its vulnerabilities are.
You don't get better locks by burying the information about how bad the existing ones are.
Selling lots of cards below cost is a good way to attract the attention of the police and get put in jail.
This recently happened in Washington, DC. Some clever people figured out how to replicate fare cards. The way they did it, it would have been essentially impossible to catch them. But they didn't want free travel, they wanted cash, so they started selling the replicated cards. At that point the police caught on to what they were doing and now they're in prison.
Maybe it will convince Google to force the use of HTTPS instead of making it optional (and off by default!), which will benefit everyone except those with bad intentions.
So, I'm having trouble figuring this out, and would appreciate some help. Are you an asshole, or just a moron?
Plutonium is not very radioactive. Its activity is fairly low. The half life of Plutonium 239 is approximately 24,100 years, meaning that any given atom probably lasts a very long time before decaying. In turn this means that the number of atoms decaying at any given moment is quite small. Furthermore, Plutonium decays in the form of alpha particles, which don't penetrate at all. Alpha particles are stopped by human skin, still in the dead bits, and thus are completely harmless when external to the human body. You can hold a big lump of Plutonium in your hand all day and not have the slightest ill effect. It only becomes dangerous when ingested, and even then it tends not to be absorbed by the body except in certain forms, for example fine particles breathed into the lungs.
As for toxicity, it's pretty bad, but not nearly as evil as it's made out to be. I'd certainly rather have a little more Plutonium around than live with the many tons of mercury per year emitted straight into the atmosphere by the average coal plant, given the choice between the two.
Lastly, consider that several tons of Plutonium have been released straight into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear bomb testing, and there hasn't been any real environmental harm from this. It's certainly no good thing, but on the other hand this is vastly worse than what happens with nuclear waste, which is safely stored rather than being vaporized and released into the air.
Over the past four years, however, my systems at companies in the ~100 employee range, with redundant servers in quality colo with offsite backups, but no dedicated DR setup, have averaged more than one full 9 better uptime than Google/Amazon, for pretty similar pricing (to $50/user/year, eg with Zimbra $28/user/yr allowing $22/user/year for admin time, hardware, and colocation fees).
How are you running such a system on only $2200/year for admin time, hardware, and colocation fees? This seems to me to be at least an order of magnitude too low.
You might want to talk to your lawyer on that. They count as money when your wife divorces you and you have to split of the estate (in most state, she will gat a portion of your retirement even if it is only through your work). They count as money when someone dies and you have to pay the death taxes. They count as money when you get sued and lose. They count as money when a judge figures out child support payment and whether you need to provide tuition or insurance or something.
No, they count as assets. There's a difference.
Here's my fundamental problem: using your definition of money, everything is "money". Therefore it becomes a pointless word. We already have words to describe this concept, like "value" and "assets". Why should "money" mean the same thing? The word "money" implies an inherent liquidity which houses and other such things do not possess.
No, I'm saying that things which aren't liquid and can't be generally used to purchase stuff aren't money.
That green stuff with "in God we trust" is money, not because the government says so, but because it buys stuff.
The hypothetical house is not money because you cannot use it to buy stuff. You can go through various painful shenanigans to convert it into something that will buy stuff, but you can't buy stuff directly with the house.
You can buy stuff directly with checks, so they are money. Yes, some places don't accept them. Some places don't accept cash either. The important thing is that they are generally accepted. Houses aren't.
And yes, stocks and investments aren't money. They are objects you own which can be converted into money at the market rate. Ever talk to somebody who plays the market a lot, and hear him say "I made $BIGNUM on the market today!"? Invariably this is said when his stock goes up, but when he has not taken any action. Well guess what, he didn't make any money. His stock gained value. But no money gets made until he actually sells and converts that stock back into money.
You're describing ways to get money, you are not describing money.
The fact that one entity is easily convertible into another entity does not make them equivalent. It makes them easily convertible. Your long, rambling post about how easy they are to convert does not, in fact, refute my point in any way.