What would show the terrorists is refraining from terror and facing our future with our chins up as strong, free men, rather than as sniveling neurotics praying to Jesus to protect us while hiding in a self-imposed jail cell that the terrorists can still shoot us through the bars of.
I bite my thumb at them. They may shoot me while I do it, but they will have only my body, not my soul.
Freedom is not free. It has been paid for with the blood of patriots, but most of those patriots were not soldiers in the field, but rather just ordinary members of We the People steadfastly going about their daily lives in stubborn independence, bowing to and before no man, even though it cost them their lives.
Most particularly not to mere presidents and Rent-A-Cops.
That has always been the foundation of America's strength. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of money. It fell because it's people had nothing left to stand for. America had no economy and no military to speak of when a group of "backwoodsmen" defeated one of the finest professional armies in the world at Beamis Heights (you call it Saratoga). The Afghans have no money and no military to speak of, yet it takes all we can do just to keep the "Mayor of Kabul" (you call him the President of Afghanistan) alive.
Simply because they will not captiulate to an outside force. Not the British, not the Russians and not the Americans.
Even though it cost them their lives.
America is selling its freedom for "security" that no amount of money can buy, because we now live under the delusion that it is the security of our bodies that is at issue, when it is our spirit that is at stake.
It is a myth (created by the self-proclaimed winners of the cold war)
I know, my mother's family comes from Belarus, but it's still a useful rhetorical argument.
I have no sympathy for communism, and my country was invaded in 1968 by Russians. ..
We had a girl from Prague living with us in '68. My family tried to convice her to stay in the states but she got on a plane and went back to stand with her family during the troubles. We've never seen her again, but she's an MD now and we still hear from her now and then. Prettiest goddam large city in the world, Prague. I remember that it used to be called "The Paris of the East." I need to get back and see it again before it's ruined by neon signs and billboards.
. . . we all are going to pay a high price for the stupidity that rules the world now.
And may our great grandchildren find a way out, but I am no longer optimistic.
we outspent the Russians because we were in a better position economically to do so.
Well of course, but bear in mind that although we employed different strategies we were playing on the same field, by the same rules. The terrorists aren't.
What did they spend to bring down the WTC? What have we spent in response? Even a solid economy can be destroyed if you spend like a bunch of drunken sailors and we have transfered much of our economy from real wealth to paper "wealth" based on confidence, not "stuff."
There was this day in 1929 when the confidence went away. My grandparents were 20 years old on that day. My parents grew up in its aftermath (you can read a short description of conditions on my family's farm in the book Finding Dr. Schatz. Ask your library to buy a copy) and so, as a result, to an extent, did I. I have no illusions about the ultimate strength of our economy. In some ways we are stronger now than we were in the 20's, but in many ways we have made ourselves far, far weaker as well. Our strength is brittle and may thus be shattered.
I might also argue that it wasn't really the Soviet Union's economic philosophy that caused its collapse, but rather its social philosophy, which in response to the terrorist attacks we are daily moving closer and closer to adopting.
Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all?
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
$10B here and $10B there and pretty soon you're talking real money.
For a couple hundred thou the terrorists could drive America to complete, parnoiac economic ruin (not to mention social ruin) buying worthless "security."
. . . just push yourself to the center of the room.
Try it.
I don't think this is going to be the problem everyone thinks it will be. ..
It's not going to be a problem at all, but the solutions will obviate the free floating fantasy because the solutions all involve adding some form of retraint.
If you're 100x as likely to blow up on the way up or burn up on the way down than to have your space station smashed by space junk, it's not worth worrying about the space junk.
The world is full up with fussbudgets. Perhaps we should take all the phone sanatizers and . . .
It should be noted that the equivilence principle holds for experiments done under the same conditions. Put into the vernacular the equivilence principle (which is the foundation axiom of science and isn't "Einstein's") simply says that there are no miracles or magic, that things happen due to testable causes.
So, if the contants change there is no real violation of the equivlence principle, it simply implys that there is a cause we have yet to discover, an advance of science, but no reason to dive whole hog into CI (changing constants is one of the current tenets of some CI "theories"). Anything we have ever seen, even in our daily lives, supports the idea that the universe follows rules.
That cause may well turn out to be our lack of understanding of quasars, i.e. some of our numbers/assumptions about them are wrong and thus our deductions from them are wrong. Perhaps, in part, because we are relying on data made at the threshold of measurment which is always a Bad Thing.
If the measurments turn out to be correct, remember, Einstein did not overthrow Newton, he refined Newton on the basis of causes and effects of which Newton was unaware (although Newton was aware they existed). Newton's "laws" still hold within their limits; and within the equivilence principle, even though they are "wrong."
I think it's a bit premature to get excited and there is no reason whatever to get our panties in a knot over the imminent collapse of science, even science as we know it. The next time you throw a baseball it will still follow a parabolic arc down to the ground.
Doubtless that was to meet minimum mass requirements of the sanctioning body, not for safety.
And yet the car was both lighter and more rigid than the model it replaced. Chapman had to resort to adding dead weight because the rules makers had made certain false assumptions about what made a safe car (the mass requirment itself was inteneded to promote safety, forcing the makers to use a minimum amount of raw material in the car).
As a general rule the rules makers are always running a generation or two behind the engineers. They're looking back while the engineers are looking forward.
. . . active safety . ..
Ahhhhhhh, another issue entirely, although one dear to my heart. My wife actually thanked me for saving her life once when a big ass American sedan came at us out of a driveway. I wasn't able to entirely avoid the collision, but I was able to turn it into a glancing blow on a fender instead of a direct hit on her door (we were in a first gen Capri).
The failure of carbon fiber is that when it fails it fails catastrophically. Like glass breaking. See the model posing for publicity photos standing on the front wing of a car, which failed.
The failure of steel is that it doesn't fail, but deforms and crushes you inside of it.
You are best off in an uncrushable carbon safety cell surrounded by energy absorbing structure that is optimized for energy absorbtion, not carrying structural load. A box wrapped in foam, or perhaps accordian steel.
Deceleration is bad because the organs and brain smack into their surrounding bone structure, and rip apart arteries and organ structures.
And the movement of internal organs is complex. They actually go through multiple collisions in an impact event.
But what the Stan Fox collision taught us is that the limiting factor of survival is the brain. Stan's car protected his body, even from internal injury, even though it ripped open and exposed his legs (the only external injury he suffered was a bruise to his heel where it struck another car), but he spent months in a coma from his brain bouncing around in his skull.
This is your brain... this is your brain in a Cooper Mini.
Just so. However, since the issue is the safety of lightweight materials for construction of chassis; and the lightweight materials are the strongest and safest, if you want safety from mass the best way to achive it is to build a strong, light chassis and then add weight (a Lotus F1 once had a thirty pound foot rest in order to make weight), not by using heavier, but structurally inferior, materials.
Of course the steel roll cages in the cars likely help too.
I take it you've never seen one of those photographs of a skinny little fashion model holding up an F1 chassis? They weigh about 80 lbs. There is no steel roll cage. What purpose would it serve when the carbon honeycomb safety cell is a godzillion times stiffer, not to mention infinately more puncture resistant?
When F1s were made of steel tubing they crumpled like alumuminum foil when they hit something. Then they started making them out of aluminum foil! A few drivers a year were likely to die. After the introduction of carbon chassis F1 went 10 years without a single fatality and that fatality wasn't due to a safety cell failure (doing 137 mph at the time he actually hit the wall).
You only need those steel roll cages they put in saloons, because. ..the cars are made of steel.
I still ride a steel bicycle by choice. I only drive a steel car by necessity. Hell, wood is safer in a crash. In fact the combat aircraft most famous for being able to take a pounding and still bring you home was made out of wood.
Well, that or you plan your route such that you can purchase more bananas every so often along your trip, and then you pick them up as you need them.:)
There's a whoooooooole lot of frickin' nothin' in the middle of the country, no matter the route. Dakotas/Montana to the north, Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado/Utah mid, Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico/Arizona south. Thank God for trail mix. Finding safe water is the tough nut, or even just finding water at all. There's a reason that grass is the only thing that grows on the Great Plains.
And your need for water is inversely proportional to its availability. You may not notice you're sweating in an arid climate, but its being sucked right out of you at a tremendous rate.
. ..you're likely to require new inner tubes, tires, and brake pads by that point.
Naaaaaaaaah, I get about 10k out of 'em, even got that out of a silk sewup on the rear wheel once, but then I'm light and don't use the brakes much. I've discovered that they only slow you down. Staying off the road in the heat of the day helps preserve them; and you. Siesta is a positive adaptation. If I do any significant riding in the rain I actually go through chains faster. The road grit gets to 'em.
Of gasoline? Damn straight. In fact I prefer not to. I express my fuel use in mpb (miles per banana; about 3. Thus not as inexpensive as you might think).
Can these vehicles even cover 3,145 miles?
Shit no. They'd fall apart.
Can I cover 3,145 miles on a bicycle? Shit yeah, and neither I nor it would fall apart, but, ummmmmmmmmm, I might need a van to follow me, to carry all those damned bananas.
. . . your chances of survival are better in 100 pounds of carbon fiber than in 1000 pounds of steel (assuming both are properly designed).
In the steel car you will die not from the g forces, but because the passenger compartment deforms and crushes you. This ability of steel to plastically deform is what makes it an inexpensive material to make cars out of in the first place.
It helps if you've got a proper safety harness to hold you in place, not the crap they put in road cars. I hit a tree head on at 30 mph once upon a time and even with the belt done up as tight as I could the steering wheel put a dent in the brim of my hat (it had a wire bead). A HANS device would have saved me three days of not being able to lift my head off my pillow without using my hands, not that I'd actually recommend one for road use.
I used to have a friend who hit by a truck head on in a vehicle weighing only 240 lbs. He was only doing 20 but the truck was doing 90. Took him three days to die. If he'd had just 40 lbs. of carbon fiber around him he probably would have come out ok.
Of course if your hypothetical truck got hit head on by a train. ..so maybe we should all just drive trains. Its the arms race model of safety. You're welcome to it if it makes you feel more secure. I prefer safe materials and design myself.
Unless you're the biggest thing on the road there's always going to be something bigger than you and if the train hit a train station head on . ..well, you'd have a really good movie. Was that cool or what?!
I remember him as well. I saw the crash on TV. I know people who saw it in person. I read the autopsy report.
Ayrton's death had nothing to do with the lightweight materials of the car. The chassis did its job as intended and Ayrton's body was essentially unharmed, but that doesn't help if your brain is subjected to an "in the shell egg beater."
They dont usually take a wall at 200MPH, they take the grass, the gravel, and the tires....
You're young. I have a friend who got to watch Helmut Koinigg's helmet bouncing down the track, with his head still in it, the "wall" (ARMCO barrier) took it off. Indy Cars and American saloons still typically take the wall, Mario Andretti's backflip not withstanding.
Don't try Andretti's trick in your family saloon. Andretti's car was made of much lighter, and much stronger, materials.
On the other hand, this thing is probably even less confortable than a F1
Probably not much worse than a Lotus 25/33, and "this thing" doesn't pull 1.2 lateral g's. I've been in a number of single seaters and it's the HPV's that are the most uncomfortable, because you have to actually work in them.
. ..switched to a distance/volume measurement in the metric conversion.
The seemingly odd metric measures given aren't the conversion, they're the original. The competition is run across a fixed distance with a fixed amount of starting fuel and the amount of fuel burned is then determined by measuring what is left.
So the competition results are expressed in liters burned per the reference distance, with the lowest number the best.
That is converted into mpg for consumption by the unwashed masses (the press) and the public.
Slashdot Mirror
I just can't wrap my head around why ISP's need a NEW chargable interaction.
We need fatter pipes so we can put less down them, for more money.
Sheesh, it's frickin' obvious. Get a clue.
KFG
was the article lacking any significant text? It gave me no clue of what he have done
Allow me to elucidate the process for you:
1) Plug iPod into powered speakers.
2) Go get a beer while you listen to it.
You could, of course, simply buy an iPod soundstation, but that would deprive you above hardware hacking fun.
KFG
What would show the terrorists is refraining from terror and facing our future with our chins up as strong, free men, rather than as sniveling neurotics praying to Jesus to protect us while hiding in a self-imposed jail cell that the terrorists can still shoot us through the bars of.
I bite my thumb at them. They may shoot me while I do it, but they will have only my body, not my soul.
Freedom is not free. It has been paid for with the blood of patriots, but most of those patriots were not soldiers in the field, but rather just ordinary members of We the People steadfastly going about their daily lives in stubborn independence, bowing to and before no man, even though it cost them their lives.
Most particularly not to mere presidents and Rent-A-Cops.
That has always been the foundation of America's strength. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of money. It fell because it's people had nothing left to stand for. America had no economy and no military to speak of when a group of "backwoodsmen" defeated one of the finest professional armies in the world at Beamis Heights (you call it Saratoga). The Afghans have no money and no military to speak of, yet it takes all we can do just to keep the "Mayor of Kabul" (you call him the President of Afghanistan) alive.
Simply because they will not captiulate to an outside force. Not the British, not the Russians and not the Americans.
Even though it cost them their lives.
America is selling its freedom for "security" that no amount of money can buy, because we now live under the delusion that it is the security of our bodies that is at issue, when it is our spirit that is at stake.
If we lose our spirit we shall fall.
I believe that's why they call it "terrorism."
KFG
It is a myth (created by the self-proclaimed winners of the cold war)
.
I know, my mother's family comes from Belarus, but it's still a useful rhetorical argument.
I have no sympathy for communism, and my country was invaded in 1968 by Russians. .
We had a girl from Prague living with us in '68. My family tried to convice her to stay in the states but she got on a plane and went back to stand with her family during the troubles. We've never seen her again, but she's an MD now and we still hear from her now and then. Prettiest goddam large city in the world, Prague. I remember that it used to be called "The Paris of the East." I need to get back and see it again before it's ruined by neon signs and billboards.
. . . we all are going to pay a high price for the stupidity that rules the world now.
And may our great grandchildren find a way out, but I am no longer optimistic.
KFG
we outspent the Russians because we were in a better position economically to do so.
Well of course, but bear in mind that although we employed different strategies we were playing on the same field, by the same rules. The terrorists aren't.
What did they spend to bring down the WTC? What have we spent in response? Even a solid economy can be destroyed if you spend like a bunch of drunken sailors and we have transfered much of our economy from real wealth to paper "wealth" based on confidence, not "stuff."
There was this day in 1929 when the confidence went away. My grandparents were 20 years old on that day. My parents grew up in its aftermath (you can read a short description of conditions on my family's farm in the book Finding Dr. Schatz. Ask your library to buy a copy) and so, as a result, to an extent, did I. I have no illusions about the ultimate strength of our economy. In some ways we are stronger now than we were in the 20's, but in many ways we have made ourselves far, far weaker as well. Our strength is brittle and may thus be shattered.
I might also argue that it wasn't really the Soviet Union's economic philosophy that caused its collapse, but rather its social philosophy, which in response to the terrorist attacks we are daily moving closer and closer to adopting.
KFG
Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all?
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
$10B here and $10B there and pretty soon you're talking real money.
For a couple hundred thou the terrorists could drive America to complete, parnoiac economic ruin (not to mention social ruin) buying worthless "security."
I think that's why they call it "terrorism."
KFG
this technology has never actually worked in a carefully controlled test, but it will be on sale!
Kinda like Oracle.
KFG
What if your ducts are made of Kapton?
KFG
. . . just push yourself to the center of the room.
.
Try it.
I don't think this is going to be the problem everyone thinks it will be. .
It's not going to be a problem at all, but the solutions will obviate the free floating fantasy because the solutions all involve adding some form of retraint.
KFG
having sex in 0 G does sound fun.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Think about it.
Or maybe you're into bondage.
KFG
If you're 100x as likely to blow up on the way up or burn up on the way down than to have your space station smashed by space junk, it's not worth worrying about the space junk.
The world is full up with fussbudgets. Perhaps we should take all the phone sanatizers and . . .
KFG
If you've never used stone age technology to accomplish a goal it is just as "new" to you, and your enzymes, as the "latest" gadget.
KFG
It should be noted that the equivilence principle holds for experiments done under the same conditions. Put into the vernacular the equivilence principle (which is the foundation axiom of science and isn't "Einstein's") simply says that there are no miracles or magic, that things happen due to testable causes.
So, if the contants change there is no real violation of the equivlence principle, it simply implys that there is a cause we have yet to discover, an advance of science, but no reason to dive whole hog into CI (changing constants is one of the current tenets of some CI "theories"). Anything we have ever seen, even in our daily lives, supports the idea that the universe follows rules.
That cause may well turn out to be our lack of understanding of quasars, i.e. some of our numbers/assumptions about them are wrong and thus our deductions from them are wrong. Perhaps, in part, because we are relying on data made at the threshold of measurment which is always a Bad Thing.
If the measurments turn out to be correct, remember, Einstein did not overthrow Newton, he refined Newton on the basis of causes and effects of which Newton was unaware (although Newton was aware they existed). Newton's "laws" still hold within their limits; and within the equivilence principle, even though they are "wrong."
I think it's a bit premature to get excited and there is no reason whatever to get our panties in a knot over the imminent collapse of science, even science as we know it. The next time you throw a baseball it will still follow a parabolic arc down to the ground.
KFG
KFG
FTA: Faster Than Ants
KFG
Who lost his legs, but retained his life.
Try telling that to Mike Hailwood. You can't.
KFG
Doubtless that was to meet minimum mass requirements of the sanctioning body, not for safety.
.
And yet the car was both lighter and more rigid than the model it replaced. Chapman had to resort to adding dead weight because the rules makers had made certain false assumptions about what made a safe car (the mass requirment itself was inteneded to promote safety, forcing the makers to use a minimum amount of raw material in the car).
As a general rule the rules makers are always running a generation or two behind the engineers. They're looking back while the engineers are looking forward.
. . . active safety . .
Ahhhhhhh, another issue entirely, although one dear to my heart. My wife actually thanked me for saving her life once when a big ass American sedan came at us out of a driveway. I wasn't able to entirely avoid the collision, but I was able to turn it into a glancing blow on a fender instead of a direct hit on her door (we were in a first gen Capri).
KFG
Think of it as a lottery with your integrity against winning a fast car. . .
.with egg all over it . . . and maybe "SCO Ho" spraypainted on the side.
. .
Not advocating, just sayin' is all.
KFG
The failure of carbon fiber is that when it fails it fails catastrophically. Like glass breaking. See the model posing for publicity photos standing on the front wing of a car, which failed.
The failure of steel is that it doesn't fail, but deforms and crushes you inside of it.
You are best off in an uncrushable carbon safety cell surrounded by energy absorbing structure that is optimized for energy absorbtion, not carrying structural load. A box wrapped in foam, or perhaps accordian steel.
KFG
Deceleration is bad because the organs and brain smack into their surrounding bone structure, and rip apart arteries and organ structures.
And the movement of internal organs is complex. They actually go through multiple collisions in an impact event.
But what the Stan Fox collision taught us is that the limiting factor of survival is the brain. Stan's car protected his body, even from internal injury, even though it ripped open and exposed his legs (the only external injury he suffered was a bruise to his heel where it struck another car), but he spent months in a coma from his brain bouncing around in his skull.
This is your brain... this is your brain in a Cooper Mini.
Just so. However, since the issue is the safety of lightweight materials for construction of chassis; and the lightweight materials are the strongest and safest, if you want safety from mass the best way to achive it is to build a strong, light chassis and then add weight (a Lotus F1 once had a thirty pound foot rest in order to make weight), not by using heavier, but structurally inferior, materials.
KFG
Of course the steel roll cages in the cars likely help too.
.the cars are made of steel.
I take it you've never seen one of those photographs of a skinny little fashion model holding up an F1 chassis? They weigh about 80 lbs. There is no steel roll cage. What purpose would it serve when the carbon honeycomb safety cell is a godzillion times stiffer, not to mention infinately more puncture resistant?
When F1s were made of steel tubing they crumpled like alumuminum foil when they hit something. Then they started making them out of aluminum foil! A few drivers a year were likely to die. After the introduction of carbon chassis F1 went 10 years without a single fatality and that fatality wasn't due to a safety cell failure (doing 137 mph at the time he actually hit the wall).
You only need those steel roll cages they put in saloons, because. .
I still ride a steel bicycle by choice. I only drive a steel car by necessity. Hell, wood is safer in a crash. In fact the combat aircraft most famous for being able to take a pounding and still bring you home was made out of wood.
KFG
Well, that or you plan your route such that you can purchase more bananas every so often along your trip, and then you pick them up as you need them. :)
.you're likely to require new inner tubes, tires, and brake pads by that point.
There's a whoooooooole lot of frickin' nothin' in the middle of the country, no matter the route. Dakotas/Montana to the north, Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado/Utah mid, Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico/Arizona south. Thank God for trail mix. Finding safe water is the tough nut, or even just finding water at all. There's a reason that grass is the only thing that grows on the Great Plains.
And your need for water is inversely proportional to its availability. You may not notice you're sweating in an arid climate, but its being sucked right out of you at a tremendous rate.
. .
Naaaaaaaaah, I get about 10k out of 'em, even got that out of a silk sewup on the rear wheel once, but then I'm light and don't use the brakes much. I've discovered that they only slow you down. Staying off the road in the heat of the day helps preserve them; and you. Siesta is a positive adaptation. If I do any significant riding in the rain I actually go through chains faster. The road grit gets to 'em.
KFG
Of gasoline? Damn straight. In fact I prefer not to. I express my fuel use in mpb (miles per banana; about 3. Thus not as inexpensive as you might think).
Can these vehicles even cover 3,145 miles?
Shit no. They'd fall apart.
Can I cover 3,145 miles on a bicycle? Shit yeah, and neither I nor it would fall apart, but, ummmmmmmmmm, I might need a van to follow me, to carry all those damned bananas.
KFG
If you hit a truck head on at 60 mph . . .
.so maybe we should all just drive trains. Its the arms race model of safety. You're welcome to it if it makes you feel more secure. I prefer safe materials and design myself.
.well, you'd have a really good movie. Was that cool or what?!
. . . your chances of survival are better in 100 pounds of carbon fiber than in 1000 pounds of steel (assuming both are properly designed).
In the steel car you will die not from the g forces, but because the passenger compartment deforms and crushes you. This ability of steel to plastically deform is what makes it an inexpensive material to make cars out of in the first place.
It helps if you've got a proper safety harness to hold you in place, not the crap they put in road cars. I hit a tree head on at 30 mph once upon a time and even with the belt done up as tight as I could the steering wheel put a dent in the brim of my hat (it had a wire bead). A HANS device would have saved me three days of not being able to lift my head off my pillow without using my hands, not that I'd actually recommend one for road use.
I used to have a friend who hit by a truck head on in a vehicle weighing only 240 lbs. He was only doing 20 but the truck was doing 90. Took him three days to die. If he'd had just 40 lbs. of carbon fiber around him he probably would have come out ok.
Of course if your hypothetical truck got hit head on by a train. .
Unless you're the biggest thing on the road there's always going to be something bigger than you and if the train hit a train station head on . .
KFG
I remember him as well. I saw the crash on TV. I know people who saw it in person. I read the autopsy report.
Ayrton's death had nothing to do with the lightweight materials of the car. The chassis did its job as intended and Ayrton's body was essentially unharmed, but that doesn't help if your brain is subjected to an "in the shell egg beater."
They dont usually take a wall at 200MPH, they take the grass, the gravel, and the tires....
You're young. I have a friend who got to watch Helmut Koinigg's helmet bouncing down the track, with his head still in it, the "wall" (ARMCO barrier) took it off. Indy Cars and American saloons still typically take the wall, Mario Andretti's backflip not withstanding.
Don't try Andretti's trick in your family saloon. Andretti's car was made of much lighter, and much stronger, materials.
On the other hand, this thing is probably even less confortable than a F1
Probably not much worse than a Lotus 25/33, and "this thing" doesn't pull 1.2 lateral g's. I've been in a number of single seaters and it's the HPV's that are the most uncomfortable, because you have to actually work in them.
KFG
. . .switched to a distance/volume measurement in the metric conversion.
The seemingly odd metric measures given aren't the conversion, they're the original. The competition is run across a fixed distance with a fixed amount of starting fuel and the amount of fuel burned is then determined by measuring what is left.
So the competition results are expressed in liters burned per the reference distance, with the lowest number the best.
That is converted into mpg for consumption by the unwashed masses (the press) and the public.
KFG