Aircraft carriers are good for up to, what, 80% of a fighter's useful combat range? 1000 miles from shore perhaps? They're probably very good at what they do until someone uses one of the new "carrier ballistic missiles" with a 2500 mile range that everyone is developing. Supposedly China has had 1200 mile capability for a decade and recently rolled out their 2500 mile range model for operational duty. It won't reach quite to Hawaii, but it's a pretty big aerial/carrier denial tool. Then again, it's not a problem until someone actually sinks a carrier with one. The question is, will that day be five years, or 20 years from now?
The number of down-moderated comments that don't get additional mod points pushing their karma back up (if they're actually insightful, thought provoking comments, with reasoning and fact to back them up) is vanishingly small. I can count on one hand the number of downvoted comments I get that don't end up as 3 or higher by the end of the day. Groupthink on Slashdot is nowhere near as bad of a problem as it is on sites like Reddit, where you'll get buried in downvotes pretty quickly. A limited moderation system does have it's advantages.
That Dyna-Soar you linked to was designed in the 50's and prototypes were built in the 60's. It represented the baseline for the shuttle we got. The rationale is that we don't need to go in to space to abduct russian spy sattelites from orbit (AFAIK we never tested this capability), and we don't need a human pilotable craft to do it even if we did. Even the Russians were scratching their heads as to why the hell we built the shuttle. They only built the Buran because they figured there must be some inherent advantage over existing rocket tech. Even the Japanese cancelled their shuttle design, determining it unnecessary.
You curiously missed linking to the X-37B, which is probably the closest to a millitary successor of the Shuttle, and is unmanned. Also the X-33, which was a complete disaster. The reason we stopped going after enormous shuttles is because technology is equally as good as humans and doesn't require life support as a limiting factor to mission length. Sending probes and ISS modules on top of rockets seems to work very well, as does sending humans on separate human rated rockets.
A better question might be, why does the US continue developing shuttle variants when the rest of the world has not only decided they're a bad idea, but actively cancelled all research in that field?
The reason why they never built a "Shuttle 2" was because Shuttle 1 was absurdly enormous, NASA wanted a shuttle but the only way they were going to get funding for it was if they (and did) talk the Air Force in to paying for half of it by using it to launch all of their spy sattelites. Now that it had become a weapon of the cold war in space, it needed millitary capabilities like a 1,000 mile glide range (hence the giant wings, note that all the "stubby shuttles" barely have any wings at all) and a payload bay bigger than a greyhound bus. Instead of doing 100 missions each, they all managed closer to 20. As it turns out, you don't need enormous cargo bays to do science.
TL;DR What engineering science we learned from the shuttle was that shuttles are a bad idea. Which is why we stopped going in that direction.
Can you outline this in more detail? Everyone I know that was dragged kicking and screaming in to using Win7 stopped bickering within a day or so of using it. Win7 was the first Microsoft OS my linux buddy liked enough to switch back from linux to Windows for. Your experience is the complete opposite of every other story I've heard out there. I dislike Microsoft for the most part just as much as most people on this site.... but Win 7 is actually pretty nice... reliable even.
Generally they will just hail you on channel 16 if there's a problem. VHF carries much further than flags or voices. If you're on salt water chances are you at least have a handheld VHF marine radio, if not something that's permanently mounted to the boat. Channel 16 is a global standard, in fact, since the time of the Titanic.
Cat-5 has the advantage of being able to replace parts anywhere in the world, and not having the Gold Plated Marine Use Tax attached to it, as well as working with your existing network.
Generally people who sail around the world either do it themselves or with their spouse (Assuming their spouse goes the whole trip with them). Oceanic crossings are sometimes done with groups of friends, but it's difficult to find five or six people who can take off three to five weeks to make that sort of passage.
Circumnavigation attempts are almost always shorthanded. You don't want to be stuck on a 52' boat alone in the middle of the northern atlantic ever.
With the advent of cheap touchscreen devices in the last six years, Garmin and their like have really had to reinvent the wheel. Mapping technology is lightyears ahead of where it was even 15 years ago, Navionics is to the point where you can mark new obstructions on your map, and then upload them to the web for other people, and many are eventually included in newer additions. Digital maps and charts are no longer X months out of date when you buy them, they're X hours since your last synch.
That said, as of two years ago you couldn't buy a whole system (engine/nav/radar/battery/depth sounder etc) that used Cat-5 for less than $15,000. Now they're getting to be under the $8,000 range, and even offer a non-proprietary VGA out for your Nav station. You can get 12" primary waterproof displays with decent resolutions for under $1200 now.
There's been a huge turnover in the industry with the advent of cheap GPS enabled electronics (Smartphones) and the industry is scrambling to catch up, with prices finally falling. You can buy a 4" B&W chart plotter for $172-199 online these days, medium resolution US costal & lakes charts included.
Go check out what Garmin had for marine GPS 12 years ago. Big squishy backlit numpads with B&W LCD displays that made a TI-83 look high tech. There are major changes happening in Marine technology these days. You can pick up low end radar equipment new for $1000 these days. That used to be $10,000 ten, fifteen years ago.
Quoth the Seraffyn, "go now and go small" - Lin and Larry Pardey
18m (52') is hugely way too enormous for less than five people. I would seriously consider a 42' boat at the high end. At some point you're going to be tasked with reefing the main by yourself in 30kts of wind and trusting that your systems are working correctly. I've reefed the main with four other people on a 46' boat in 25 kts of wind and even with a fancy expensive duch reefing system, it's still not a walk in the park.
That said, Garmin (of course) makes a wide variety of systems, as do quite a few others. I'm curious to see if anyone with real experience chimes in here, but while you can get by navigating along the coast with an iPad or Android phone (we do this in our boat), that's not a system you want to rely on for years on end in a marine environment.
Laptops make up something like 50% of the consumer market. Integrated graphics are what go in most dells for corporate users. An HD4000 has no problem pushing a dual or triple screen setup. The triple head displays at my work choke on anything more than word processing. Dragging a youtube video across all three makes things very choppy. Also, the HD4000 is an actually usable chipset. It's nothing like the old integrated graphics of old like the GMA950 which couldn't even load TF2. HD4000 will do TF2 at 250-300fps.
This is probably the most interesting article about HFT I've read yet, also comes with lots of interesting graphs regarding the rise of HFT over the last six years:
I am getting 22x2mb for $30 a month here in Dallas. They have a "faster tier" for $20 more, but I think they're the same level of service, the faster tier is either an idiot tax or there's a flaw in their QoS system.
My mom out in the suburbs of north Dallas gets 50x10mb for $50/mo.
I think if you live in a tech/finance oriented city makes a huge difference in the QoS. Dallas is home to dozens (if not hundreds) of enormous data centers, plus several large finance companies' headquarters, a major branch of the federal reserve bank and a bunch of regional branches of federal agencies, all of whom need fat pipes. If you live in the country, or in a declining industrial center, or worse, the suburbs of a declining industrial center, the commercial demand for fat pipes isn't going to be there to prop up the residential speeds. The only reason Cincinnati and Detroit have halfway decent internet is because they're directly between Chicago and New York.
Tech "journalism" is crap and easily swayed by terrible companies to get good reviews. Remember when Rock Star was flying tech journalists to a resort from LAX via helicopter to ensure good reviews for one of their GTA games? Big newspapers like the NYT....and any major regional newspaper, really, don't get much advertising money from companies like EA and Activision, so they have much less incentive to write an article biased towards the company. When you want good reviews you send press releases to tech "journalism" websites. Most tech journalists don't even have journalism degrees and write as a side job to help them afford their run down apartment and ramen diet. When you have a solid product or are getting ready to change the direction of your company, you cash in one of your favors owed to you by a big newspaper for coverage. If your company gets covered in the NYT, that means someone managed to convince an adult that it was newsworthy, beyond the simple "wow factor" that would get them published in a desperate tech website.
Keep in mind that people who are 40 were playing Doom and Doom II in college.
I always looked at it as a more sustainable, less toxic way of growing food. Any nutrition improvements would be a bonus, but I don't know of any literature that said definitively that organic was somehow healthier for your digestive tract.
Clearly you've never used a blackberry for any length of time. Technically the droid has a keyboard, but it's not something you'd want to regularly pound out two page emails with.
I would buy an Android powered Blackberry curve in a second. I loved my Blackberry to death, but using it made me feel like I had an Apple II in my pocket, when everyone else had a sparcstation. Dat keyboard.... to this day I'm still slower (even with Swype, Swiftkey, etc... I've tried them all) on a touchscreen than I ever was on my physical keyboard blackberry. Sadly the only android phones that come with a physical keyboard are marketed towards teenagers and thus manufactured as one grade up from trash.
If virgin uses GSM then you should be fine, I was able to use my phone while roaming all over South America (I made a call from Macchu Pictures on this thing) and most of Mexico. Supports edge and 3g here stateside.
I had originally written 2009 in my post, but decided to fact check myself. I deleted the bit in my post with the numbered year, but forgot to change three to two in the post.
Google sells bare phones direct to consumers. Really good, well supported models with lots of high end features. Consumers have the choice to buy these, or defer the large upfront cost of the phone over a year by paying higher monthly rates. I've had my Nexus S for almost three years and it's paid for itself (actually I'm about $60 ahead at this point) by choosing a plan that reflects my up front purchase cost. Telcos are taking advantage of lazy consumers, but there are also competitors in the market who are serving more informed consumers. There's nothing to worry about here.
According to Wikipedia, the Tokyo metro area is 35 million people. That's 1/10th the population of the US, or almost 5% of the population (and certainly larger than most countries) of Europe. This is on top of a country who is still reeling from a crippled power generation grid and a national disaster in the north. Considering their auto and electronics exports, not to mention financial markets, that's not a small consequence if something blows up.
Then again, it is hard to argue with kilometre+ high lava fountains.
The Thinkpad fingerprint utility allows you to set high and low verification requirements. The high req requires me to swipe 2-3 times often before it will let me in.
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Aircraft carriers are good for up to, what, 80% of a fighter's useful combat range? 1000 miles from shore perhaps? They're probably very good at what they do until someone uses one of the new "carrier ballistic missiles" with a 2500 mile range that everyone is developing. Supposedly China has had 1200 mile capability for a decade and recently rolled out their 2500 mile range model for operational duty. It won't reach quite to Hawaii, but it's a pretty big aerial/carrier denial tool. Then again, it's not a problem until someone actually sinks a carrier with one. The question is, will that day be five years, or 20 years from now?
The number of down-moderated comments that don't get additional mod points pushing their karma back up (if they're actually insightful, thought provoking comments, with reasoning and fact to back them up) is vanishingly small. I can count on one hand the number of downvoted comments I get that don't end up as 3 or higher by the end of the day. Groupthink on Slashdot is nowhere near as bad of a problem as it is on sites like Reddit, where you'll get buried in downvotes pretty quickly. A limited moderation system does have it's advantages.
That Dyna-Soar you linked to was designed in the 50's and prototypes were built in the 60's. It represented the baseline for the shuttle we got. The rationale is that we don't need to go in to space to abduct russian spy sattelites from orbit (AFAIK we never tested this capability), and we don't need a human pilotable craft to do it even if we did. Even the Russians were scratching their heads as to why the hell we built the shuttle. They only built the Buran because they figured there must be some inherent advantage over existing rocket tech. Even the Japanese cancelled their shuttle design, determining it unnecessary.
You curiously missed linking to the X-37B, which is probably the closest to a millitary successor of the Shuttle, and is unmanned. Also the X-33, which was a complete disaster. The reason we stopped going after enormous shuttles is because technology is equally as good as humans and doesn't require life support as a limiting factor to mission length. Sending probes and ISS modules on top of rockets seems to work very well, as does sending humans on separate human rated rockets.
A better question might be, why does the US continue developing shuttle variants when the rest of the world has not only decided they're a bad idea, but actively cancelled all research in that field?
The reason why they never built a "Shuttle 2" was because Shuttle 1 was absurdly enormous, NASA wanted a shuttle but the only way they were going to get funding for it was if they (and did) talk the Air Force in to paying for half of it by using it to launch all of their spy sattelites. Now that it had become a weapon of the cold war in space, it needed millitary capabilities like a 1,000 mile glide range (hence the giant wings, note that all the "stubby shuttles" barely have any wings at all) and a payload bay bigger than a greyhound bus. Instead of doing 100 missions each, they all managed closer to 20. As it turns out, you don't need enormous cargo bays to do science.
TL;DR What engineering science we learned from the shuttle was that shuttles are a bad idea. Which is why we stopped going in that direction.
Can you outline this in more detail? Everyone I know that was dragged kicking and screaming in to using Win7 stopped bickering within a day or so of using it. Win7 was the first Microsoft OS my linux buddy liked enough to switch back from linux to Windows for. Your experience is the complete opposite of every other story I've heard out there. I dislike Microsoft for the most part just as much as most people on this site.... but Win 7 is actually pretty nice... reliable even.
Generally they will just hail you on channel 16 if there's a problem. VHF carries much further than flags or voices. If you're on salt water chances are you at least have a handheld VHF marine radio, if not something that's permanently mounted to the boat. Channel 16 is a global standard, in fact, since the time of the Titanic.
Cat-5 has the advantage of being able to replace parts anywhere in the world, and not having the Gold Plated Marine Use Tax attached to it, as well as working with your existing network.
Generally people who sail around the world either do it themselves or with their spouse (Assuming their spouse goes the whole trip with them). Oceanic crossings are sometimes done with groups of friends, but it's difficult to find five or six people who can take off three to five weeks to make that sort of passage.
Circumnavigation attempts are almost always shorthanded. You don't want to be stuck on a 52' boat alone in the middle of the northern atlantic ever.
With the advent of cheap touchscreen devices in the last six years, Garmin and their like have really had to reinvent the wheel. Mapping technology is lightyears ahead of where it was even 15 years ago, Navionics is to the point where you can mark new obstructions on your map, and then upload them to the web for other people, and many are eventually included in newer additions. Digital maps and charts are no longer X months out of date when you buy them, they're X hours since your last synch.
That said, as of two years ago you couldn't buy a whole system (engine/nav/radar/battery/depth sounder etc) that used Cat-5 for less than $15,000. Now they're getting to be under the $8,000 range, and even offer a non-proprietary VGA out for your Nav station. You can get 12" primary waterproof displays with decent resolutions for under $1200 now.
There's been a huge turnover in the industry with the advent of cheap GPS enabled electronics (Smartphones) and the industry is scrambling to catch up, with prices finally falling. You can buy a 4" B&W chart plotter for $172-199 online these days, medium resolution US costal & lakes charts included.
Go check out what Garmin had for marine GPS 12 years ago. Big squishy backlit numpads with B&W LCD displays that made a TI-83 look high tech. There are major changes happening in Marine technology these days. You can pick up low end radar equipment new for $1000 these days. That used to be $10,000 ten, fifteen years ago.
Quoth the Seraffyn, "go now and go small" - Lin and Larry Pardey
18m (52') is hugely way too enormous for less than five people. I would seriously consider a 42' boat at the high end. At some point you're going to be tasked with reefing the main by yourself in 30kts of wind and trusting that your systems are working correctly. I've reefed the main with four other people on a 46' boat in 25 kts of wind and even with a fancy expensive duch reefing system, it's still not a walk in the park.
That said, Garmin (of course) makes a wide variety of systems, as do quite a few others. I'm curious to see if anyone with real experience chimes in here, but while you can get by navigating along the coast with an iPad or Android phone (we do this in our boat), that's not a system you want to rely on for years on end in a marine environment.
Laptops make up something like 50% of the consumer market. Integrated graphics are what go in most dells for corporate users. An HD4000 has no problem pushing a dual or triple screen setup. The triple head displays at my work choke on anything more than word processing. Dragging a youtube video across all three makes things very choppy. Also, the HD4000 is an actually usable chipset. It's nothing like the old integrated graphics of old like the GMA950 which couldn't even load TF2. HD4000 will do TF2 at 250-300fps.
This is probably the most interesting article about HFT I've read yet, also comes with lots of interesting graphs regarding the rise of HFT over the last six years:
http://nanex.net/aqck/2804.html
I am getting 22x2mb for $30 a month here in Dallas. They have a "faster tier" for $20 more, but I think they're the same level of service, the faster tier is either an idiot tax or there's a flaw in their QoS system.
My mom out in the suburbs of north Dallas gets 50x10mb for $50/mo.
I think if you live in a tech/finance oriented city makes a huge difference in the QoS. Dallas is home to dozens (if not hundreds) of enormous data centers, plus several large finance companies' headquarters, a major branch of the federal reserve bank and a bunch of regional branches of federal agencies, all of whom need fat pipes. If you live in the country, or in a declining industrial center, or worse, the suburbs of a declining industrial center, the commercial demand for fat pipes isn't going to be there to prop up the residential speeds. The only reason Cincinnati and Detroit have halfway decent internet is because they're directly between Chicago and New York.
My vote would be for a bunch of tacos. And a millitary commander of sorts. A tribute to CmdrTaco, the founder of the site. We miss you, Rob!
Tech "journalism" is crap and easily swayed by terrible companies to get good reviews. Remember when Rock Star was flying tech journalists to a resort from LAX via helicopter to ensure good reviews for one of their GTA games? Big newspapers like the NYT....and any major regional newspaper, really, don't get much advertising money from companies like EA and Activision, so they have much less incentive to write an article biased towards the company. When you want good reviews you send press releases to tech "journalism" websites. Most tech journalists don't even have journalism degrees and write as a side job to help them afford their run down apartment and ramen diet. When you have a solid product or are getting ready to change the direction of your company, you cash in one of your favors owed to you by a big newspaper for coverage. If your company gets covered in the NYT, that means someone managed to convince an adult that it was newsworthy, beyond the simple "wow factor" that would get them published in a desperate tech website.
Keep in mind that people who are 40 were playing Doom and Doom II in college.
I always looked at it as a more sustainable, less toxic way of growing food. Any nutrition improvements would be a bonus, but I don't know of any literature that said definitively that organic was somehow healthier for your digestive tract.
Clearly you've never used a blackberry for any length of time. Technically the droid has a keyboard, but it's not something you'd want to regularly pound out two page emails with.
Yes, the response where I updated wikipedia to reflect the correct date of winter 2010 literally minutes before making my post on slashdot.
See my response to the exact same topic someone else pointed out, immediately before yours, and written six hours ago
I would buy an Android powered Blackberry curve in a second. I loved my Blackberry to death, but using it made me feel like I had an Apple II in my pocket, when everyone else had a sparcstation. Dat keyboard.... to this day I'm still slower (even with Swype, Swiftkey, etc... I've tried them all) on a touchscreen than I ever was on my physical keyboard blackberry. Sadly the only android phones that come with a physical keyboard are marketed towards teenagers and thus manufactured as one grade up from trash.
If virgin uses GSM then you should be fine, I was able to use my phone while roaming all over South America (I made a call from Macchu Pictures on this thing) and most of Mexico. Supports edge and 3g here stateside.
Indeed, where did you get that date from? Wikipedia? Go check the edit log for that article. Pay close attention to the time/date stamp.
I had originally written 2009 in my post, but decided to fact check myself. I deleted the bit in my post with the numbered year, but forgot to change three to two in the post.
Google sells bare phones direct to consumers. Really good, well supported models with lots of high end features. Consumers have the choice to buy these, or defer the large upfront cost of the phone over a year by paying higher monthly rates. I've had my Nexus S for almost three years and it's paid for itself (actually I'm about $60 ahead at this point) by choosing a plan that reflects my up front purchase cost. Telcos are taking advantage of lazy consumers, but there are also competitors in the market who are serving more informed consumers. There's nothing to worry about here.
According to Wikipedia, the Tokyo metro area is 35 million people. That's 1/10th the population of the US, or almost 5% of the population (and certainly larger than most countries) of Europe. This is on top of a country who is still reeling from a crippled power generation grid and a national disaster in the north. Considering their auto and electronics exports, not to mention financial markets, that's not a small consequence if something blows up.
Then again, it is hard to argue with kilometre+ high lava fountains.
The Thinkpad fingerprint utility allows you to set high and low verification requirements. The high req requires me to swipe 2-3 times often before it will let me in.