Slashdot Mirror


User: wagnerrp

wagnerrp's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
2,465
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 2,465

  1. Re:My money is on SpaceX on Battle of the Heavy Lift Rockets · · Score: 1

    Did the satellite get delivered to its intended orbit? Then it's a successful launch. That makes twelve successful launches, one partial success (primary delivered, secondary failed), and three failures.

  2. Re:The coral will need guard rails around it on For $1.5M, DeepFlight Dragon Is an "Aircraft for the Water" · · Score: 1

    Any kind of sonar that is actually useful for this purpose will be far more damaging to the reef's ecosystem than having the occasional sub bump into it.

    You're not trying to find submarines hiding on the other side of a thermocline. You're just trying to track any obstructions within a couple dozen feet.

  3. Re:The coral will need guard rails around it on For $1.5M, DeepFlight Dragon Is an "Aircraft for the Water" · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So give the thing a low power sonar system and automatic collision avoidance system. Give it instructions that if the battery gets below a certain point, it shuts down the engines, auto-surfaces, and starts up a rescue beacon.

  4. Re:Who pays the ticket? on Google's Driverless Cars Capable of Exceeding Speed Limit · · Score: 1

    You are "driving" a Google automated car. You get pulled over for doing 10 over the speed limit.

    Won't happen, barring a software bug, and a software bug IS an unavoidable liability of writing software. Google allows their autonomous vehicles to maintain pace with the flow of traffic, up to ten miles per hour above the posted speed limit. If the average flow of traffic exceeds the posted speed limit, it indicates the posted speed limit is much too low for the conditions of the road. Further, it would require everyone on the road to be similarly breaking the speed limit, which would mean those other hundreds of vehicles would all have to be simultaneously pulled over and ticketed, which is a logistical impossibility.

  5. Re:Why speed only a little? on Google's Driverless Cars Capable of Exceeding Speed Limit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Come now. What percentage of people on the road actually have any situational awareness? They're not looking around to track voids in traffic should they need to change lanes in an emergency. They're not looking downstream to see that accident half a mile away and traffic backing up. They're watching no further than the brake lights in front of them. Even if they are trying to pay attention, it takes a hell of a lot of concentration and practice to constantly track a dozen cars around you in all directions, and a hell of a lot more to anticipate movements when those cars leave line of sight. This sort of thing is trivial for a computer.

    As for "self", are you referring to the current state of the car? Surely autonomous control tied into your vehicle's data bus with direct access to engine sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, suspension deflectometers, and all manner of other equipment would have a much better chance of assessing the current state of the vehicle than the driver.

  6. Re:Left or Right? on Google's Driverless Cars Capable of Exceeding Speed Limit · · Score: 2

    The US has no hard limit. If you're breaking the speed limit, you're breaking the speed limit, and it's the discretion of the office how bored/lazy/behind_on_quota they are as to whether you get pulled over and ticketed. The fact that the UK has actually codified this is absurd. Why not just bump the signage by that much, and make the signs themselves the hard limit?

  7. Re:Wow. on The Flight of Gifted Engineers From NASA · · Score: 1

    The implication is that as a student, they moved her around to many different projects in many different areas to get a wider breadth of experience, but only a couple of them were ever likely to come to fruition.

  8. Re:The Death Ray Hotel on Correcting Killer Architecture · · Score: 1

    If it's not structural, it's cosmetic. As long as you adhere to weight and attachment limitations, the facade can be changed on a whim.

  9. Re: Cloud Computing! on Gartner: Internet of Things Has Reached Hype Peak · · Score: 1

    It's still nothing more than a cluster. The only difference is your high availability and dynamic allocation is now performed at the (virtual) machine level, rather than the application level.

  10. Re: There we go again on DARPA Wants To Kill the Password · · Score: 2

    The point he was making is that with proper procedure, a hash could never be attacked offline. As soon as the hash database were compromised, all hashes contained therein would be invalidated. The attacker could brute force that database to their heart's content, and no valid passwords would ever result from it.

    This of course assumes the administrators are paying close enough attention to notice in short order when the database has been compromised, and that all users define a secondary means of contact through which to send a reset password. It also ignores the issue that most users use the same username and password across multiple sites, such that a pair compromised on one site and invalidated as described would still be valid on another site.

  11. Re: Would YOU be able to sleep in space?? on Study Finds That Astronauts Are Severely Sleep Deprived · · Score: 1

    For the first couple of seconds you are in a true freefall, relatively unencumbered by air resistance, accelerating.

    You're already experiencing significant drag when you jump out of that aircraft at 100 knots. You're only in something closely resembling freefall when you jump from a balloon, or base jump.

  12. Re:Why bother? on SpaceX Chooses Texas Site For Private Spaceport · · Score: 2

    Florida is a good thousand miles away from the Texas launch facility. It would take more fuel to continue downrange and land in Florida than it would to turn back and land in Texas. Florida might be a good landing site for a recoverable Falcon Heavy center stage, but they're likely only around 100mi down range by first stage cutoff.

  13. Re:Oh so close... on SpaceShipTwo Flies Again · · Score: 2

    The difference between something able to reach 100km, and something able to reach that altitude with enough energy to make it a quarter of the way around the world, is significant. They are really not close at all to being a useful transportation mechanism.

  14. Re:So was the landing successful? on SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Blasts Off From Florida · · Score: 1

    Especially when you have a hot bell and combustion chamber that suddenly come into contact with salt water.

  15. Re:Hey smart guys on Scotland Could Become Home To Britain's First Spaceport · · Score: 1

    Does Virgin Galactic even have plans for a vehicle capable of LEO insertion? All that SpaceShipOne/Two nonsense barely even qualifies as reaching space, and achieves about a 50th the energy necessary for actual orbit.

  16. Re:Silly season much on Chinese Couple Sells Children To Support Online Game Addiction · · Score: 1

    Officer Zau kicks over the wood stove, lifts open a patch of the tile floor and shines his light into the darkness below.

    Officer Zau unholsters her Type 15 pistol, takes aim at Han and puts her finger on the trigger.

    I think there's something more interesting going on here than simple population control...

  17. Re:Subject bait on A Skeptical View of Israel's Iron Dome Rocket Defense System · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Stay on topic and discuss the technical aspects of the missile system, at least that is what should be discussed here.

    The article itself hardly touches on the technical merits of the missile system. It mentions how there are hardly any public releases of technical aspect to discuss, and that the handful of images of the system in operation show intercept angles that are highly unlikely to be successful. The core argument of the article is that the whole situation is nothing more than a PR campaign on both sides.

    Hamas fires inaccurate artillery rockets, unlikely to actually hit anything, at Israel, under the hopes Israel counter-attacks and causes lots of collateral damage that looks bad to international press.

    Israel produces a defense system and makes precision counter-attacks to prove their technological and military prowess, and restraint in its use, to international press.

  18. It looked like the SB card performed well within the 20-20K range, and unless you're looking to do further processing on the analog output from the card, anything more than that is unnecessary.

  19. Re:Dual or quadricopters on Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph · · Score: 1

    Because they don't scale up.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law

    Smaller rotors means lower mass flow rate, requiring higher flow velocity to produce the necessary thrust. Higher flow velocity means higher power requirements. The larger your aircraft, the more difficult it becomes to produce the necessary amount of power to remain airborne.

  20. Re:not that surprising. on Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph · · Score: 2

    More importantly, a pair of counter-rotating rotors gets around the pesky roll issue caused by rotor stall on the retreating side at high speed. The rotor may still stall, but it doesn't matter nearly as much since you're still balanced.

  21. Re:Those rotor blades have no air to move! on ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers · · Score: 1

    You're going the complete wrong direction. If you want to have any change in hell of actually having enough power to get this thing in the air, you need to get your blade loading down, and that means a huge rotor. Huge rotors mean you need to be running low RPMs to keep it subsonic at the tip, and remember that the colder and higher molecular weight atmosphere means the speed of sound is going to be ~30% lower.

  22. Re:Why a separate rover? on ESA Shows Off Quadcopter Landing Concept For Mars Rovers · · Score: 1

    The quadrotor design paradigm exists because small electric motors are cheap, and the power-to-weight ratios available in the couple pound range are absurd to the point that good engineering is unnecessary. In the couple thousand pound range, power becomes far more scarce, and the small, inefficient rotors just won't cut it. They have lowered the minimum barrier to entry for hobbyists, and research projects that need a simple airborne platform. They don't work well for full scale aircraft.

  23. Re: Incoming international flights on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 1

    once your cell voltage drops below a certain critical value, a protection circuit disconnects it from the rest of the pack.

    Makes it hard to charge it, eh?

    Yes. It does. That's why a Li-Ion battery is permanently dead if you allow it to self-discharge too far.

  24. Re: Incoming international flights on TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes · · Score: 1
    Since you don't seem to be getting bored of yourself, it's the fundamental principle of thermionic emission.

    Hey what is the terminal voltage of a discharged Liion battery? Of a LiPO?

    Zero. In a multi-cell Li-Ion battery, once your cell voltage drops below a certain critical value, a protection circuit disconnects it from the rest of the pack. A fully discharged battery will simply be a short circuit bypassing all the individual cells.

  25. Re: Failsafe? on Airbus Patents Windowless Cockpit That Would Increase Pilots' Field of View · · Score: 1

    Catastrophic failures can happen. There's no way to predict all eventualities, and trying to do so will bankrupt you. All you can do is provide enough redundancy to bring your statistical failure rate to an acceptable level.

    Flight 232 was simply a poor design. The three hydraulic systems all had lines that ran right next to each other, and had no shut off valves. When the tail engine had an uncontained failure, it severed lines on all three systems, which then depressurized throughout the aircraft.