So much for anonymous.:-) I know which tent has the fiber hub.
Yeah, he's kidding around obviously. This is a fun accomplishment to put the fiber network up and connect all the station tents. Some of the network installation is done by teens, which provides a great learning opportunity for them.
I'm posting this from the Field Day site of the
West Valley Amateur Radio Association.
We've set up about 12 radio stations on a ridgetop near the peak of Loma Prieta, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Visitors are welcome through the event, which ends
Sunday at 11AM. See WVARA's web site for more
info
and
directions.
Or if you're on the air, we'll be using the club callsign W6PIY.
Emergency coordinators may take an interest in one thing we've done. We use a single generator to power our entire site. Using experience from the construction industry, some of our members knew that most equipment rental shops have large generators and transformers that can be used to step down to 120AC. So we use a transformer near each cluster of station tents to build our own little power grid for the site.
And something just for the Silicon Valley touch, I guess I should mention how I'm on the web from my station tent. We have a data network across the site with a fiber backbone. Yes, we've implemented "fiber to the tent" for a weekend event, for the third year in a row. Though it's easy to just say a member picked up the fiber hubs at a dot-com surplus, there's more to it. When we first started experimenting with networking the site, we discovered that Cat5 ethernet cables longer than 6 feet interferes with and accepts interference from 10m amateur radios. So fiber was the only way to do a site-wide network, Come and take a look!
But if they harass Linus, it's travel time!
I have some vacation time available at work and would show up with other protesters to picket outside
SCO's headquarters if
that helps put some pressure on them.
We can keep piling on the pressure from different directions if they want to play a PR game.
We'd make sure the local media in Salt Lake have enough advance notice to get their cameras warmed up while we're enroute.
Salt Lake City is easily accessible by air (a Delta Airlines hub.) It's a 2-hour non-stop flight from any of the SF Bay Area's three major airports. Or a 1-1/2 day drive if you prefer a road trip.
We in the Bay Area had always assumed that northern Contra Costa County's infamously high cancer rates were entirely because of the oil refineries in that area. But to answer your question, I'll refer you to a Google search and let you sift through all the references...
A friend mentioned this story to me this week. I first reacted as skeptical as others here have. We're both natives of the Bay Area who were superficially aware of the history of the 1944 Port Chicago accident.
But the stuff I read in Vogel's own text, I want independent verification and won't accept anything else in his text for that purpose.
The research by the Napa Sentinel
seems to fit that enough not to drop the story yet.
I don't buy Vogel's theory that such a thing could have been intentional. But it's hard to ignore the optical scans of reports of nuclear tests referring to them as a "mushroom to 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion". Or the fact that the same guy (USN Capt William Parsons) who wrote the initial report on the effects of Port Chicago's blast was a year later aboard the Enola Gay as the Manhattan Project scientist on the crew that attacked Hiroshima. The Napa Sentinel found that the ship's destination was Tinian, which was where the atomic attacks did actually originate a year later.
And the atomic bombs were shipped through the rebuilt Port Chicago.
So what about the radiation?
Well, it immediately struck me in the talk with my friend that we in the Bay Area "always thought the massively high cancer rates in Contra Costa County were due to the oil refineries." Since they have that problem there, once again I see logic pointing at checking it further, not dismissing it.
There seems to be disagreement over the presence of radiation at the scene of the explosion, since no one knew to watch for it. And the site remains under military control today. But this whole thing can be tested one way or the other by checking for elevated background radiation levels in the uninhabited areas of the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta to the northeast of the Concord Naval Weapons Center (formerly known as Port Chicago) which would have been downwind of the explosion in 1944 and where the fallout would have settled.
(In that part of California in July, overnight winds are always inland from San Francisco Bay into the Central Valley. And online info indicates that night in 1944 winds were out of the WSW as would be expected.)
Many people who are working on aspects of reducing costs of space launches would like to dispense with the countdown entirely. It isn't routine enough until we can get it down to "cleared for takeoff" issued by an air traffic controller.
Yes. Some states are trying to open various spaceport concepts to attract what is currently a fledgling niche in the aerospace industry working on commercial launches.
JP Aerospace who did Saturday's launch in Texas also did the inaugural flight at Oklahoma's spaceport (a former Air Force base at the town of Burns Flat) in March with two high-altitude balloons. One carried meteorology instruments for Oklahoma Univ to 100,000 ft. The second released at 95,000 ft about 550 paper airplanes made by Oklahoma school kids.
I'm a JPA member. I was there as part of the crew in Oklahoma. I drove both payloads back to the launch site in my truck. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the time off work to do the Texas flight or I'd be there now too.
challenge beyond Moonbounce, research opportunity
on
Amateur Mars Satellite
·
· Score: 1
Who would use it? Amateur Radio operators have been doing satellite and "moonbounce" (using the Moon as a communications satellite by bouncing radio signals off it) communications for decades. It would be a whole new technical challenge to make contact via a satellite in Mars orbit. Not to mention the accomplishment of just getting a non-government spacecraft to Mars. The Physics to do this are well-known.
They'll undoubtedly also get some funding from universities who would like to put research payloads on the spacecraft. For example, AMSAT's P3D/AO-40 satellite carried a research payload from NASA (to map GPS reception from above the GPS satellites.) since it was going into a highly-elliptical "Molniya" orbit that NASA didn't have any birds in.
When Kennedy made the announcement that we intended on going to the Moon by the end of the 60's, at the time the US had about 15 minutes of suborbital manned space flight time. Even that made some people wonder if it could be done. The physicists already knew it was possible for unmanned rockets. But over the course of that decade, Kennedy's goal did set a mark that the rocket scientists were (barely) able to achieve.
China still has zero minutes of manned space flight time. Don't forget they also said they'd have people in orbit before the year 2000 - they still haven't gotten there yet. Let them get some manned space flight time before even considering claims they're going to the Moon. You can't skip any technological hurdles on the way there. Otherwise some is certain to fail and/or you'll lose some people in the process. The Soviets tried to leapfrog some technological steps on the way to the Moon and it cost them when the N1 project failed because of it.
I'm not saying they can't eventually do this. China has a viable satellite launch industry. But their propaganda machine has many times gotten ahead of themselves. I simply cannot believe schedules for putting a person on the Moon from any country or company that has not yet launched a person into orbit or at least on a suborbital space flight. First things first, please...
(Some minor credentials to mention... just a week and a half ago some friends and I got back video of the curvature of the Earth from a balloon we launched to 90,000'. We tracked and recovered the flight package, including 60 experiments from some California grade schools on board, 20 minutes after it landed in the northern Nevada Desert. This was mainly to test electronics for an upcoming rocket launch from one of these balloons to attempt the first amateur rocket launch to space confirmed by electronic telemetry. We're not making any claims for a date to land on the Moon yet!:-)
As Jeff said, many thanks to Alan for his contribution of countless hours of time on kernel maintenance.
One thing we always have to remember in volunteer projects is that people come and go. The only respectful thing that can be done at times like this is to be supportive of our contributors' choices and let them pursue their own courses in life.
The Linux kernel is riding on more than enough popularity that it's not in any danger of failing to find new contributors. But for smaller Open Source projects, this kind of thing is why you'd want to always recruit new volunteers and try to build up a core of leaders in your projects. Then you're able to get through the inevitable times when volunteers need to take a break or go do something else.
Cisco is in the process of Open Sourcing the tools it uses to deploy its officially-supported Linux desktops.
Scott Mewett presented a paper at LinuxWorld Expo in August on Cisco's "Kickstart Tools" which it uses to do network installs of customizable Linux systems in a large enterprise environment.
Why we picked August 25
on
Linux Turns 10
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I was the one who suggested we should hold this on August 25. The choice of the date really was never an issue. In the discussion on the SVLUG list, others who read through the Linux history to verify it, either agreed or didn't object. We had already posted the reason for the choice on the history page at Linux10.org.
We're celebrating the anniversary of the announcement which got the community involved in Linux.
The first beta testers and offers for help came in after this announcement.
August 25, 1991 was when Linux changed from being just Linus' hobby to involving others. Yes, it does pre-date the first kernel posting by a few weeks.
You can choose different criteria and arrive at a different day.
Linux10.org will respect your choice and still link to your local celebration's web site if you pick a different day based on Linux history. The first involvement of the community was what we thought made this date stand out among other candidates.
But as a counterexample, SSLUG in Copenhagen chose Sept 17 based on the actual posting of Linux 0.01. As long as you have a reason grounded in Linux history, it's an equally good choice.
(Though I think Aug 25 and Sept 17 are the only two you're going to find.)
For those who tried to argue one date over the other, don't bother. You will never settle it because there are different criteria by which these dates can be picked. However, I urge you to respect the choices of the volunteers who go to the time and effort to organize a Linux 10th anniversary event in your area.
(BTW, sorry that I didn't post this earlier. I was at the Moffett Air Show all day.)
At the very least, someone may want to set up some housing for him.
I was in the court room today...
Part of the conditions with which Dmitry was allowed out on bail (even though he is a foreign national) was because the defense had arranged for a "custodian", someone at whose home he will stay who accepts some responsibilities under the arrangement. The judge briefly questioned the custodian before accepting him. The deal had already been agreed upon between the prosecutors and the defense so the judge just approved it.
The custodian is a Russian immigrant who has lived in Cupertino (a city adjacent to San Jose on the western side of Silicon Valley, best known as home of Apple Computer) for 8 years.
Not a real-time system?
on
Tux in Space
·
· Score: 3
Hmmm... I'm curious about the choice of BlueCat for a satellite, a system that would require real-time control. A friend and I looked at BlueCat last weekend because it came (unexpected) with a contest package from Embedded Linux Journal which we're working on. We looked through the patches that were applied by BlueCat to the Linux kernel and determined that there are no real-time features added.
BlueCat looks like a nice embedded development system and probably excels in that area. It would undoubtedly be suitable for a PDA or an appliance. But it isn't a real-time system. And you need that for flight control.
For reference of what we were looking for, our application is a flight control computer for a model aircraft. Among our criteria was "hard real-time" (stringent timing tolerances on OS response to interrupts. Milliseconds matter. Consistent response times matter.announcedannouncedannounced) An unmodified Linux kernel has some real-time features, but only "soft real-time" which isn't good enough for flight software. So we looked at a number of systems including RTLinux, TimeSys and MontaVista which do offer hard real-time extensions to Linux.
We selected MontaVista's real-time scheduler and kernel-preemption patches because they offer hard real-time without losing access to the POSIX interfaces of Linux. TimeSys also fit that description but MontaVista was better documented and more recently updated (including one in LWN this week.)
I'm surprised that the FlightLinux project didn't have hard real-time criteria at least somewhat similar to ours.
I wonder if the people who computed the costs consdered the engineering challenges of tunnelling across an active fault line. It can be done. For example, the BART subway in San Francisco skirts the San Andreas Fault, which is a similar plate boundary. But it sends the engineering and construction costs way up.
From what I've been reading in the comments here, some fears are warranted and some aren't. The danger of a 9+ quake only occurs at a plate boundary where subduction is occurring
(one plate being forced under another and melting in the Earth's mantle.) That's going on along the southern coast of Alaska. But don't forget that Alaska is a huge state, several times the size of Texas. Alaska is usually drawn to a smaller scale on diagrams/maps of the continential US since it's too big to fit.
At the Bering Strait, you'd have to ask a Geologist what's happenning at the plate boundary. Subduction usually results in mountain formation but there's sea at this one so I think it isn't subducting there. So your biggest quakes would be about an 8. (Not small itself, but 10 times smaller than a 9.)
I think a bigger problem from what I've been reading is this permafrost. If you have to drive piles to bedrock (as others said was done on the oil pipeline) for a surface railway, it'll cost about as much per mile as an elevated railway. And that's a lot of miles to multiply that over.
Again, you'd need to consult a Geologist to determine if there's a route that circumvents these hazards. If they're serious about this, they'll do that.
What? Electric trolleys are dead?! I wish people would tell me these things sooner... So then what
are
those things that go by my office
in the median of Tasman Drive (in Silicon Valley) every 5 minutes? I thought they were trolleys! The flashing signs at intersections even say "Trolley Coming". But I guess they're not trolleys because this article says they're dead.:-)
Seriously though... The author made some obvious research errors on this. Though many trolley systems were dismantled decades ago, in more recent decades, they've been slowly building them back in places. But the marketing guys now call it... "light rail". They're still trolleys.
Actually, on several of these things, the technology continues to exist. It just moved on from the original implementation as technology tends to do. Amiga inspired many current desktop video production systems. WordStar is the ancestor of features found in most word processors today.
Then again, he's also getting nostalgic about some technologies that had good reason to fade away.
Like airships... Set aside the Hindenburg for a moment and realize that the US Navy had already given up on them before that accident because, even when filled with Helium, they're very sensitive to bad weather. Nearly all the Navy's airships (which were flying aircraft carriers) went down in storms.
I could go on. But it's pretty obvious that the author is calling things dead just because he hasn't followed where the technology went. Or he gets nostalgic about things that he didn't bother to look up the reasons why other technologies left them behind.
It's just another case of a so-called journalist failing to do his homework before writing about technology. Happens all the time.
Well, it looks like AboveNet caught some flack for BGP-blocking RBL-listed sites. But that doesn't make MAPS RBL any less essential for blocking e-mail spams.
From what I read in this article, MAPS RBL was correct to pursue a spammer-software site whose web site is what they advertise but is not where they send their spams from. The Slashdot author who posted this story is being naive about the war on spam and trying to make an academic argument out of it.
Even for residential sites, RBL is one of a number of tools which block significant amounts of spam
when used in combination.
(If you're looking for censorship, you should pick on ORBS, not MAPS.)
It's very difficult to keep ahead in this battle. I condemn Slashdot for posting such a poorly-researched article to make life difficult on volunteers who are trying to help us all in the war on spam!
Be more careful with our volunteers.
Shame on you!
That link for Roton is very out of date. Gary Hudson, who wrote the white paper referenced on that page, went on to found Rotary Rocket Company, which built the Roton/ATV (atmospheric test vehicle) which successfully demonstrated the hover and landing stability of the design. The picture on their home page is a real photo of the 60-foot tall Roton ATV in Rotary Rocket's "High Bay" hangar at the Mojave Airport in Southern California.
People who knew anything about the company had high hopes to be watching manned commercial space launches and landings at the Mojave Airport.
The company is currently looking for enough investment money to build and fly the space flight version of Roton, which was esitmated to run $1000/lb on a 7000lb payload capacity to low-Earth orbit. The Space Access Newsletter that this Slashdot article refers to mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
Careful, the guy whom you were trying to correct is an FCC-licensed Amateur Radio operator. (He listed his callsign in the message.)
When trying to determine if a license is necessary for transmitting on any given frequency, you have to look at the FCC regulations for that part of the radio spectrum. In general, there is nowhere that you have free reign to transmit anything you want. This is a very old problem whose solution is well known. They tried the free-for-all thing 100 years ago when radio was new and found that everyone just interferes with each other and can't do anything, unless they group similar users in certain bands (frequency ranges) of the radio spectrum. So there's a reason why they do that.
On Amateur Radio frequencies, you need an Amateur Radio license. They're not hard to get. Dave lists a good start on his web page on how to study to get one.
On 802.11 Wireless Ethernet, you have to stay on low power to avoid interfering with the licensed users of those frequencies. So even though you don't have a license, that's the condition under which you may transmit. Other commercial uses require commercial licenses that you probably can't afford for a hobby project.
Don't just flaunt the rules. You'll undoubtedly end up interfering with someone who belongs there, which just isn't nice. It may take them a lot of work to find you and they won't be happy when they do because of all the work you caused them. And the FCC started doing enforcement again last year after neglecting it since 1993. Some people are still of the attitude that there's no enforcement. They won't accept ignorance as a defense.
...for the billboard on I-4 just outside the entrance to Disney World that advertises the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Until now that was the only tourist attraction in Central Florida that Disney couldn't match.:-)
I can just picture mouse ears on the sperical liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks by Pads 39A and 39B.
Besides the Mach 1 speed limitation, conventional GPS receivers will also stop reporting results when over 50,000 feet in altitude. Again, it's to prevent common GPS receivers from being used as a ballistic missile guidance system.
If you have a legitimate use for it, you can get a waiver for one (and only one) of the limits. Amateur rocket experimenters have used this to waive the altitude restriction so the receiver starts reporting data again when it goes subsonic while the rocket is coasting near its apogee (highest altitude.) Then they can prove how high it went.
The current amateur rocketry altitude record is 72,000 feet, set in May 1999 by JP Aerospace, a non-profit amateur rocket group from Sacramento, CA. It was measured by GPS. The launch was also taped and aired by CNN.
I haven't seen the terraserver pictures (except what CNN aired this morning) since the site is still getting hit by the CNN/Yahoo/CBS/Slashdot effect. But I have online pictures that I took in November which show that you can see this base from airliners without much difficulty if you have some idea where to look.
I photographed it out the window of a Delta Airlines Boeing 757 at 38,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to San Jose. The flight went to the north of the base.
At 7.5 miles in altitude, you can see the base from unrestricted airspace. Look for a round dry lakebed with a straight line (runway) across the southern third of it. There is also a shorter parallel runway that doesn't go onto the lakebed. It's north of Las Vegas and east of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. It helps to have some practice spotting runways from the air - ask any private pilot for help with that.
Back in 1997, I was able to see the base (but didn't have film in my camera) from the south on an American Airlines 757 from San Jose to Dallas around 39,000 feet. I saw sunlight glint/sparkle off the windows of buildings south of the lakebed indicating a small city's worth of a base there. (Couldn't see the buildings themselves but reflected sunlight can give away stuff like that.) So I know it can be seen from both the north and the south from unrestricted airspace.
Personally, I'm not interested in the conspiracy theory stuff. But as an aviation enthusiast, I'd be curious to find out some day what airplane needs/needed a 4-mile-long runway. Was it just the SR-71 or were there more?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
The Bay Area's NBC11 (KNTV) News is here planning to do a live shot from our Field Day site during the 5PM newscast.
Yeah, he's kidding around obviously. This is a fun accomplishment to put the fiber network up and connect all the station tents. Some of the network installation is done by teens, which provides a great learning opportunity for them.
Emergency coordinators may take an interest in one thing we've done. We use a single generator to power our entire site. Using experience from the construction industry, some of our members knew that most equipment rental shops have large generators and transformers that can be used to step down to 120AC. So we use a transformer near each cluster of station tents to build our own little power grid for the site.
And something just for the Silicon Valley touch, I guess I should mention how I'm on the web from my station tent. We have a data network across the site with a fiber backbone. Yes, we've implemented "fiber to the tent" for a weekend event, for the third year in a row. Though it's easy to just say a member picked up the fiber hubs at a dot-com surplus, there's more to it. When we first started experimenting with networking the site, we discovered that Cat5 ethernet cables longer than 6 feet interferes with and accepts interference from 10m amateur radios. So fiber was the only way to do a site-wide network, Come and take a look!
Salt Lake City is easily accessible by air (a Delta Airlines hub.) It's a 2-hour non-stop flight from any of the SF Bay Area's three major airports. Or a 1-1/2 day drive if you prefer a road trip.
We in the Bay Area had always assumed that northern Contra Costa County's infamously high cancer rates were entirely because of the oil refineries in that area. But to answer your question, I'll refer you to a Google search and let you sift through all the references...
I don't buy Vogel's theory that such a thing could have been intentional. But it's hard to ignore the optical scans of reports of nuclear tests referring to them as a "mushroom to 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion". Or the fact that the same guy (USN Capt William Parsons) who wrote the initial report on the effects of Port Chicago's blast was a year later aboard the Enola Gay as the Manhattan Project scientist on the crew that attacked Hiroshima. The Napa Sentinel found that the ship's destination was Tinian, which was where the atomic attacks did actually originate a year later. And the atomic bombs were shipped through the rebuilt Port Chicago.
So what about the radiation? Well, it immediately struck me in the talk with my friend that we in the Bay Area "always thought the massively high cancer rates in Contra Costa County were due to the oil refineries." Since they have that problem there, once again I see logic pointing at checking it further, not dismissing it.
There seems to be disagreement over the presence of radiation at the scene of the explosion, since no one knew to watch for it. And the site remains under military control today. But this whole thing can be tested one way or the other by checking for elevated background radiation levels in the uninhabited areas of the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta to the northeast of the Concord Naval Weapons Center (formerly known as Port Chicago) which would have been downwind of the explosion in 1944 and where the fallout would have settled.
(In that part of California in July, overnight winds are always inland from San Francisco Bay into the Central Valley. And online info indicates that night in 1944 winds were out of the WSW as would be expected.)
Many people who are working on aspects of reducing costs of space launches would like to dispense with the countdown entirely. It isn't routine enough until we can get it down to "cleared for takeoff" issued by an air traffic controller.
JP Aerospace who did Saturday's launch in Texas also did the inaugural flight at Oklahoma's spaceport (a former Air Force base at the town of Burns Flat) in March with two high-altitude balloons. One carried meteorology instruments for Oklahoma Univ to 100,000 ft. The second released at 95,000 ft about 550 paper airplanes made by Oklahoma school kids.
I'm a JPA member. I was there as part of the crew in Oklahoma. I drove both payloads back to the launch site in my truck. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the time off work to do the Texas flight or I'd be there now too.
Who would use it? Amateur Radio operators have been doing satellite and "moonbounce" (using the Moon as a communications satellite by bouncing radio signals off it) communications for decades. It would be a whole new technical challenge to make contact via a satellite in Mars orbit. Not to mention the accomplishment of just getting a non-government spacecraft to Mars. The Physics to do this are well-known.
They'll undoubtedly also get some funding from universities who would like to put research payloads on the spacecraft. For example, AMSAT's P3D/AO-40 satellite carried a research payload from NASA (to map GPS reception from above the GPS satellites.) since it was going into a highly-elliptical "Molniya" orbit that NASA didn't have any birds in.
There are also other national AMSAT organizations in countries around the world.
China still has zero minutes of manned space flight time. Don't forget they also said they'd have people in orbit before the year 2000 - they still haven't gotten there yet. Let them get some manned space flight time before even considering claims they're going to the Moon. You can't skip any technological hurdles on the way there. Otherwise some is certain to fail and/or you'll lose some people in the process. The Soviets tried to leapfrog some technological steps on the way to the Moon and it cost them when the N1 project failed because of it.
I'm not saying they can't eventually do this. China has a viable satellite launch industry. But their propaganda machine has many times gotten ahead of themselves. I simply cannot believe schedules for putting a person on the Moon from any country or company that has not yet launched a person into orbit or at least on a suborbital space flight. First things first, please...
(Some minor credentials to mention... just a week and a half ago some friends and I got back video of the curvature of the Earth from a balloon we launched to 90,000'. We tracked and recovered the flight package, including 60 experiments from some California grade schools on board, 20 minutes after it landed in the northern Nevada Desert. This was mainly to test electronics for an upcoming rocket launch from one of these balloons to attempt the first amateur rocket launch to space confirmed by electronic telemetry. We're not making any claims for a date to land on the Moon yet! :-)
One thing we always have to remember in volunteer projects is that people come and go. The only respectful thing that can be done at times like this is to be supportive of our contributors' choices and let them pursue their own courses in life.
The Linux kernel is riding on more than enough popularity that it's not in any danger of failing to find new contributors. But for smaller Open Source projects, this kind of thing is why you'd want to always recruit new volunteers and try to build up a core of leaders in your projects. Then you're able to get through the inevitable times when volunteers need to take a break or go do something else.
Scott Mewett presented a paper at LinuxWorld Expo in August on Cisco's "Kickstart Tools" which it uses to do network installs of customizable Linux systems in a large enterprise environment.
We're celebrating the anniversary of the announcement which got the community involved in Linux. The first beta testers and offers for help came in after this announcement. August 25, 1991 was when Linux changed from being just Linus' hobby to involving others. Yes, it does pre-date the first kernel posting by a few weeks.
You can choose different criteria and arrive at a different day. Linux10.org will respect your choice and still link to your local celebration's web site if you pick a different day based on Linux history. The first involvement of the community was what we thought made this date stand out among other candidates. But as a counterexample, SSLUG in Copenhagen chose Sept 17 based on the actual posting of Linux 0.01. As long as you have a reason grounded in Linux history, it's an equally good choice. (Though I think Aug 25 and Sept 17 are the only two you're going to find.)
For those who tried to argue one date over the other, don't bother. You will never settle it because there are different criteria by which these dates can be picked. However, I urge you to respect the choices of the volunteers who go to the time and effort to organize a Linux 10th anniversary event in your area.
(BTW, sorry that I didn't post this earlier. I was at the Moffett Air Show all day.)
The $50,000 was put up by his employer. The way bail works is that it's returned if you show up for your court date(s).
Part of the conditions with which Dmitry was allowed out on bail (even though he is a foreign national) was because the defense had arranged for a "custodian", someone at whose home he will stay who accepts some responsibilities under the arrangement. The judge briefly questioned the custodian before accepting him. The deal had already been agreed upon between the prosecutors and the defense so the judge just approved it.
The custodian is a Russian immigrant who has lived in Cupertino (a city adjacent to San Jose on the western side of Silicon Valley, best known as home of Apple Computer) for 8 years.
BlueCat looks like a nice embedded development system and probably excels in that area. It would undoubtedly be suitable for a PDA or an appliance. But it isn't a real-time system. And you need that for flight control.
For reference of what we were looking for, our application is a flight control computer for a model aircraft. Among our criteria was "hard real-time" (stringent timing tolerances on OS response to interrupts. Milliseconds matter. Consistent response times matter.announcedannouncedannounced) An unmodified Linux kernel has some real-time features, but only "soft real-time" which isn't good enough for flight software. So we looked at a number of systems including RTLinux, TimeSys and MontaVista which do offer hard real-time extensions to Linux.
We selected MontaVista's real-time scheduler and kernel-preemption patches because they offer hard real-time without losing access to the POSIX interfaces of Linux. TimeSys also fit that description but MontaVista was better documented and more recently updated (including one in LWN this week.)
I'm surprised that the FlightLinux project didn't have hard real-time criteria at least somewhat similar to ours.
From what I've been reading in the comments here, some fears are warranted and some aren't. The danger of a 9+ quake only occurs at a plate boundary where subduction is occurring (one plate being forced under another and melting in the Earth's mantle.) That's going on along the southern coast of Alaska. But don't forget that Alaska is a huge state, several times the size of Texas. Alaska is usually drawn to a smaller scale on diagrams/maps of the continential US since it's too big to fit.
At the Bering Strait, you'd have to ask a Geologist what's happenning at the plate boundary. Subduction usually results in mountain formation but there's sea at this one so I think it isn't subducting there. So your biggest quakes would be about an 8. (Not small itself, but 10 times smaller than a 9.)
I think a bigger problem from what I've been reading is this permafrost. If you have to drive piles to bedrock (as others said was done on the oil pipeline) for a surface railway, it'll cost about as much per mile as an elevated railway. And that's a lot of miles to multiply that over.
Again, you'd need to consult a Geologist to determine if there's a route that circumvents these hazards. If they're serious about this, they'll do that.
Seriously though... The author made some obvious research errors on this. Though many trolley systems were dismantled decades ago, in more recent decades, they've been slowly building them back in places. But the marketing guys now call it... " light rail ". They're still trolleys.
Actually, on several of these things, the technology continues to exist. It just moved on from the original implementation as technology tends to do. Amiga inspired many current desktop video production systems. WordStar is the ancestor of features found in most word processors today.
Then again, he's also getting nostalgic about some technologies that had good reason to fade away. Like airships... Set aside the Hindenburg for a moment and realize that the US Navy had already given up on them before that accident because, even when filled with Helium, they're very sensitive to bad weather. Nearly all the Navy's airships (which were flying aircraft carriers) went down in storms.
I could go on. But it's pretty obvious that the author is calling things dead just because he hasn't followed where the technology went. Or he gets nostalgic about things that he didn't bother to look up the reasons why other technologies left them behind.
It's just another case of a so-called journalist failing to do his homework before writing about technology. Happens all the time.
From what I read in this article, MAPS RBL was correct to pursue a spammer-software site whose web site is what they advertise but is not where they send their spams from. The Slashdot author who posted this story is being naive about the war on spam and trying to make an academic argument out of it.
Even for residential sites, RBL is one of a number of tools which block significant amounts of spam when used in combination. (If you're looking for censorship, you should pick on ORBS, not MAPS.)
It's very difficult to keep ahead in this battle. I condemn Slashdot for posting such a poorly-researched article to make life difficult on volunteers who are trying to help us all in the war on spam!
Be more careful with our volunteers. Shame on you!
People who knew anything about the company had high hopes to be watching manned commercial space launches and landings at the Mojave Airport.
The company is currently looking for enough investment money to build and fly the space flight version of Roton, which was esitmated to run $1000/lb on a 7000lb payload capacity to low-Earth orbit. The Space Access Newsletter that this Slashdot article refers to mentions that Hudson recently left Rotary Rocket, which of course indicates that things have not been going well there. Since the company is still in business, one can assume that a large investor could still rescue it. But I don't know what to think about the chances of that happenning...
When trying to determine if a license is necessary for transmitting on any given frequency, you have to look at the FCC regulations for that part of the radio spectrum. In general, there is nowhere that you have free reign to transmit anything you want. This is a very old problem whose solution is well known. They tried the free-for-all thing 100 years ago when radio was new and found that everyone just interferes with each other and can't do anything, unless they group similar users in certain bands (frequency ranges) of the radio spectrum. So there's a reason why they do that.
On Amateur Radio frequencies, you need an Amateur Radio license. They're not hard to get. Dave lists a good start on his web page on how to study to get one.
On 802.11 Wireless Ethernet, you have to stay on low power to avoid interfering with the licensed users of those frequencies. So even though you don't have a license, that's the condition under which you may transmit. Other commercial uses require commercial licenses that you probably can't afford for a hobby project.
Don't just flaunt the rules. You'll undoubtedly end up interfering with someone who belongs there, which just isn't nice. It may take them a lot of work to find you and they won't be happy when they do because of all the work you caused them. And the FCC started doing enforcement again last year after neglecting it since 1993. Some people are still of the attitude that there's no enforcement. They won't accept ignorance as a defense.
I can just picture mouse ears on the sperical liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks by Pads 39A and 39B.
If you have a legitimate use for it, you can get a waiver for one (and only one) of the limits. Amateur rocket experimenters have used this to waive the altitude restriction so the receiver starts reporting data again when it goes subsonic while the rocket is coasting near its apogee (highest altitude.) Then they can prove how high it went.
The current amateur rocketry altitude record is 72,000 feet, set in May 1999 by JP Aerospace, a non-profit amateur rocket group from Sacramento, CA. It was measured by GPS. The launch was also taped and aired by CNN.
I photographed it out the window of a Delta Airlines Boeing 757 at 38,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to San Jose. The flight went to the north of the base.
At 7.5 miles in altitude, you can see the base from unrestricted airspace. Look for a round dry lakebed with a straight line (runway) across the southern third of it. There is also a shorter parallel runway that doesn't go onto the lakebed. It's north of Las Vegas and east of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. It helps to have some practice spotting runways from the air - ask any private pilot for help with that.
Back in 1997, I was able to see the base (but didn't have film in my camera) from the south on an American Airlines 757 from San Jose to Dallas around 39,000 feet. I saw sunlight glint/sparkle off the windows of buildings south of the lakebed indicating a small city's worth of a base there. (Couldn't see the buildings themselves but reflected sunlight can give away stuff like that.) So I know it can be seen from both the north and the south from unrestricted airspace.
Personally, I'm not interested in the conspiracy theory stuff. But as an aviation enthusiast, I'd be curious to find out some day what airplane needs/needed a 4-mile-long runway. Was it just the SR-71 or were there more? :-)