It's not just their ineptness dealing with the power problem last summer.
A few years ago, our sewer company raised rates from $14/month to $42/month - a threefold increase. As you might imagine, the auditorium was packetd with people who showed up at the puc hearing to complain about the rate increase. Instead of a 300% increase the PUC knocked a whole $5 off the increase and set the new rate at $37/month.
Just over a year ago, an oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Research Institute discovered high levels of e-coli in the tap water at Moss Landing. Another little town near here, Chualar, has water that is so polluted that the county trucks in drinking water. The PUC disavowed any responsibility in either case.
I don't mind government regulation if it results in tangible benefits to the populace but these cases have made it clear to me that the PUC is nothing more than a welfare program for clerks. Given their performance dealing with our water, power and sewer systems, I don't see any reason to expect they'll be effective regulating DSL.
Three comments that quite reasonably question Tom's Hardware's integrity get modded to zero while a comment that says there's a review at Tom's Hardware gets modded to a 5?
Looks to me like the moderating system has been hijacked by Intel employees. Whoops! There goes my karma....
This isn't the first time some idiots masquerading as lawyers have tried to bully someone.
Warner Brother's staff counsel made the mistake of threatening Groucho Marx because he had announced a new movie with the name "Casablanca" in it. Here is Groucho's initial response... What's truly amazing is that Warner Brother's didn't understand how stupid they looked after getting Groucho's initial letter. The exchange continued for several more letters until somebody at Warner Brothers finally got the message.
It was until the Europan's started broadcasting "General Hospitable" and "All My Critters" at which point the obelisk decided our solar system was a lost cause and took off for parts unknown.
I wondered about the "largest lifeform" claim as well. If the various critters are necessary for each others survival then "single lifeform" is probably defensible. After all, you depend on your lung cells to provide oxygen to your blood cells and so, depending on how you view yourself, you are a micro ecosystem or a single lifeform. I would be surprised if anyone has done the necessary biology to establish the 'rusticles' interdependence.
As to "biggest," there's a tree fungus somewhere on the East Coast that is believed to encompass an entire forest and as it's a single mat, some claim it's the biggest earthly life form.
The robots are remotely controlled by the fiber optic umbilical cords. JPL would presumably land a radio transponder on Europa's surface and relay the radio control from Earth to the transponder which would pass the signals on to the submerged robots via the fiber. Only problem is that Europa is over 30 light-minutes away so the control delay makes me wonder whether the idea is feasible. Imagine playing Unreal Tournament with 30 minute ping times...
....PURE copper runs 350-400 W/m-K...pure copper isn't usually used, an alloy is.
I was talking about copper alloys. At room temperature, Both copper 110 and 101 alloys have a thermal conductivity of 391 W/m-k. Phosphorous laced copper alloys will drop you down to around 380. The only reason I happen to have these numbers is I'm currently working on a heat sink.
The news article that got this thread going had so many inaccuracies that I'm prone to think that a marketeer at Poco got somebody at ABC News all excited with hype. Given the foam's poor thermal conductivity, I seriously doubt the national security agency is using it as a heat sink unless, possibly, it's on a satellite. But if that were the case, Poco would have been nda'd and the story wouldn't have made light of day. The story smells of marketeer-speak.
You're right about the density uneveness. There are several elemental foams available that have very uniform density. You can get metal silver foams for applications where surface area is very important. John Carnack (of doom fame) has been playing around with silver foams as a catalyst for hydrogen peroxide to drive his rocket.
However, as a heatsink, foams don't fare well because heat transfer is partially a function, not of surface area as you assert, but of the cross-sectional area perpendicular to heat flow. Foams have lots of surface area which is nice for catalysts but have lousy cross-sectional areas which is what is needed to transfer heat from one edge of the foam to the other. Once the heat is spread out over a heatsink's mass, THEN the heatsink's surface area comes into play. Foams suffer as heatsinks because they can't move heat well from the primary hot spot to their extremeties.
Having said all that, there's some experimental work going on with carbon heat sinks that are configured in standard heatsink geometries. Anandtech's Cebit report shows a few pictures of some carbon heatsinks. Carbon is attractive, because as an element, it does show promise. As a working material, it's difficult. If carbon nanotubes ever get out of the lab, there'll be a huge change - they've got great thermal conductivity - somewhere in the thousands of watts.
Not sure where the 4-5 times copper efficiency comes from.
If you read Poco Graphite's tech specs on the material, you'll see that the thermal conductivity is between 100-150 W/m-K . Depending on alloy, copper runs 3 times better at between 350-400 W/m-K. Good aluminum gets close to 200 W/m-K.
You aren't going to see this stuff used in a radiator unless weight is a primary constraint. Looks to me like/. and ABC news got hyped into running non-news.
Feinstein, one of the Senators who support the SSSCA is from California. She also voted down a proposal to allow laptops on the Senate floor. Her house may be 30 miles from the Silicon Valley but it may as well be on the moon the way she votes.
She also was one of the clever people who said "I believe President Clinton when he said he didn't have an affair...." She was a little put out, but only a little, when she finally figured out that he had lied to her.
Perhaps. But there was a Nova segment on Kennewick Man who looks very much like an European. His skull is believed to be around 9000 years old and was found in Oregon.
The NY Times has this article that describes why there's a controversy over Science magazine publishing the article. As the original post alludes, there's quite a bit of skepticism because the referees were unable to duplicate the results. Interesting bit is that they're detecting some tritium which a referee attributes to "all kinds of crazy chemistry."
At the close of 1939, a woman sat on a snow covered log in a Swedish forest and re-read a letter from a chemist in Germany. The chemist had detected barium where he hadn't expected to find any. He wrote her because he couldn't figure out where the barium was coming from. The woman, Liese Mietner, figured out that the chemist, Otto Hahn, had split Uranium. Without Mietner's insight into the underlying physics, Hahn's observation might have been dismissed. So there might indeed be "some crazy chemistry..." taking place.
On the other hand, as soon as Mietner's nephew got back to England from his Christmas break, the British were reproducing Hahn's experiment. Without reproducible results, the results could just be background noise.
Why the coast? A colleague just sent me a miserere complaining about the snow and cold in St. Louis. Here on the coast, it's sunny and clear.
Why the coast? The air is so clean I can see three mountain ranges from my office and one of them is across some 50 miles of ocean.
Why the coast? If I walk down the street with a woman who isn't the same race as I am, I don't get a second look.
Why the coast? I was standing in a grocery store checkout line and overheard 7 different languages. With those speakers come different perspectives and that makes for some really interesting dinner conversations.
Why the coast? Did I mention the physical beauty of the place? This country is unbelievably gorgeous and varied. We've got ocean and mountains right next to each other.
Why the coast? John Steinbeck called this country Eden and he wasn't too far off the mark.
A close read of the IBM article reveals their solution is to use a heat pipe instead of what most hobbyist are doing. Heat pipes are sealed cooling systems that exploit the fact that it takes 100's of times more heat to vaporize water (or other coolants) than it does to raise water 1 degree. To get water to vaporize at around 25-30 degrees C, you have to create a vacuum inside the coolant pipes.
Heat pipes are an old idea - they were used in the Apollo program. IBM's key addition to the technology is developing a hinge that efficiently transfers heat between the laptop's body (the heat source) and the display (the heat radiator). There isn't much info in the article referenced in the original post to figure out just what Hitachi thinks is original.
There are a couple of flags in this review that raise my skepticism. For example,
An interesting development in the market is in regard to the memory prices: currently, DDR SDRAM costs just as much as RDRAM. The high price of Rambus, which we have mentioned in many articles previously, should no longer be a purchase barrier.
Mushkin prices for 256 MB DDR 2700 is $116 and Mushkin 256 MB RIMM is $149. Who knows how much the un-available 533MHZ RIMM will run but it's certainly going to be more than $149.
Secondly, his benchmark charts don't jibe with other reviews where the 2000 XP is pitted against a 2.2 GHZ P4. He's got the P4 trouncing the Athlon whereas Anandtech is giving a only a slight edge to the P4.
Maybe Tom's gone to the Steve Jobs School of Benchmarks?
Fact is, the limit du jour has been overcome repeatedly in the past. Years ago, diffraction was perceived as a fundamental limit. We were never going to see sub micron technology because the optics couldn't image without diffracting. The industry has not only passed sub-micron, it's now looking to go below.1 micron.
Your prof is in good company when attempting to forecast the future...Rutherford didn't think anything would ever come of atomic energy.
I'm checking out the 1.4Ghz Athlon with 256MB ram for $499 there right now.
Watch out for the power supply. The only 250 watt psu AMD recommends is aopen's FSP250-60GTA. All the others power supplies are 300 watts, or more. I think you're asking for trouble going for a bottom of the line psu on an Athlon, especially one as fast as the 1.4.
I was talking to two women before Christmas who were wondering what to buy their husbands. Since both men are TV_holics, I suggested a Tivo. Neither woman had heard of it so I said "It lets you pause TV...."
Two blank stares. They didn't have a clue what I meant.
So I said, "If the phone rings, you can push a button...answer the phone, talk as long as you like and come back to the TV right where you left off."
"OOOOHHH!" in two voice harmony.
Then one of them took half a second and said, "And if I tell him to do something, he can't say...'But, I'll miss what I'm watching!'"
Both men got Tivos last Christmas.
A little bit of knowledge gleaned from Apollo
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Richard Muller at Berkeley used lunar soil gathered by the Apollo astronauts to demonstrate that impact cratering significantly increased around 500 million years ago. Moreover, the craters appear to cluster around every 26 million years (last cluster occured 13 million years ago.)
Muller hypothesized that the periodic cratering is due to a star that orbits the sun. Every 26 million years, it comes swinging closer into the sundragging debris from the Oort cloud. Some of that debris ends up hitting either the earth or the moon.
500 million years ago is referred to as the Cambrian explosion because the fossil record shows a huge proliferation of different species. There have been a number of hypothesis as to what precipated the increase in life forms and Muller's data does an excellent job of supporting comet/asteroid impact. There's more at Lawrence Livermore
It may be that the Apollo program has yielded a significant clue as to why we aren't all just a bunch of jellyfish.
There's some irony in the fact that Carly will be a keynote speaker at the next Linux World expo while she's killing off MPE/ix - HP's OS for the 3000. If there ever was a reluctant poster child for open source, HP is it.
HP has lost interest in MPE/iX and so the existing users have asked that HP release the source to them so that they can continue to support it. HP is hemming and hawing which sounds an awful like "No."
Instead, HP prattles on about "earning your continued trust..." while the larger HP3000 customers wonder how they'll recoup the enormous migration expense that HP has foisted on them.
If HP was serious about wanting to retain their customer's trust, HP would hand over the source and be done with it. It's one thing to say "we can't make money any more on the 3000, here's the source to the software you've been using" and quite another to say "We can't make money any more on the 3000. We're not going to let you have the source because we want you to buy this other solution instead."
Carly's tenure is in jeopardy not so much because of the Compaq merger but because of the enormous damage that's happened to the HP brand during her watch. The failed Price Waterhouse merger, closing the calculator division, throwing away PA-Risc (an amazing CPU!), screwing the HP3000 users, and now the Compaq mess look like more than 3 strikes to me.
A reference in the article about the equivalence principle reminded me that Einstein stated that there's no experiment that would enable an observer in a constantly accelerating, windowless vehicle to determine that they weren't stationary in a gravitional field.
I have never heard why a tidal force experiment wouldn't distinquish between the two cases. What is happening in the accelerating vehicle that mimics gravitational tides?
Put another way, if you're standing next to and perpendicular to a black hole, your feet are going to be ripped away from you. If you're standing in an accelerating elevator with an equivalent g force, what's ripping you to shreds? Aren't you getting scrunched instead?
In 1919, my father and Roy Adams, were 10 years old. My grandmother gave my father a small lathe which he and Roy used to fabricate a small, air-powered, motor. The motor is amazing, especially given that it was designed and built by two 10 year olds.
Roy's parents were poor so he didn't get to go college. However, he was so self-evidently bright, it didn't matter. JPL eventually hired him and he ended his career as a project manager on the Galileo. My father always got a kick out of the fact that Roy, with his high school diploma, had a raft of rocket science Ph.D.'s reporting to him.
The little air-powered motor still works. It, like the Galileo, way outlived its intended design life. Rest In Peace Roy, you did good.
So you are saying that thousands of still active missiles in former Russian and newer stuff in places like China are NOT direct threat to us ? Nope, never said that. I just happen to agree with the logic that got us to badger the Soviets into signing the ABM treaty back in 1972. Made sense then...still does.
See, the fundamental problem with missile defense is that no matter how you decide to defend, the attacker can come up with a counter attack much more cheaply than you can defend against it. Missile defense is a losing game. Our MIRVed warheads were a direct response to the Soviets building a defensive perimeter around Moscow. We'd just overwhelm their defense. We only needed to get 1 or 2 warheads through and Moscow was toast, whereas, they had to get ALL our warheads to survive. To make it harder to see the warheads, we made the warhead shells out of carbon. Carbon doesn't show up on radar very well. So the Soviets figured they would track the pressure wave the warhead made as it re-entered and aim at the leading edge of the wave. No problem. We made our warheads spin like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. The warhead ablates evenly as it hits the atmosphere so it stays very sharp. Result is you can't track the damn things until they're on top of you. Remember - only one or two out of 100's has to get through and you lose.
This is what was going in in the 60's and we realized the damn game would never stop unless we got together with the Soviets and called a halt. That's what led to the ABM treaty. The only folks unhappy with the ABM treaty were the companies that had been pigging out at the money trough.
Now asteroids, that's a different story. They're not being hurled by sentient beings who are trying to defeat your defense. They're predictable - if we see them - and if we see them soon enough, we can do something about it. That's why we look for them and that's why we need to be thinking about what to do about them when we do see one headed our way. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
You might find this reading on comet showers worth looking at. Pay attention to the authors - they're not lightweights in the field.
The same morons who think that an anti ballistic missile weapon is a waste of time now want us to intercept asteroids.
I'm one of those morons who thinks asteroids can't drive nuke-laden-Ryder trucks or steer a rusty old nuke-bearing freighter into a harbor. Moreover, I so stupid I don't believe asteroids will take evasive maneuvers to avoid being intercepted. I'm even stupider in that I don't believe spending $200 billion on Star Wars - The Sequel, would have saved the WTC.
The only reason Star Wars is back is there are plenty of hogs and Bush has rung the Treasury's dinner bell announcing the pig trough is full.
In two different physics classes, the profs made a point of saying that an explosion doesn't change the object's center of gravity. Even though the mass goes flying off helter skelter, the mass'es cg remains where it was or was headed. The equations are still solved as if the mass was compact.
Why would this scenario be any different?
What's even more curious is what happens to matter's ability to attract other matter when the matter is converted to photons? Does the ability to attract matter vanish when matter transmutes to photons?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just their ineptness dealing with the power problem last summer.
A few years ago, our sewer company raised rates from $14/month to $42/month - a threefold increase. As you might imagine, the auditorium was packetd with people who showed up at the puc hearing to complain about the rate increase. Instead of a 300% increase the PUC knocked a whole $5 off the increase and set the new rate at $37/month.
Just over a year ago, an oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Research Institute discovered high levels of e-coli in the tap water at Moss Landing. Another little town near here, Chualar, has water that is so polluted that the county trucks in drinking water. The PUC disavowed any responsibility in either case.
I don't mind government regulation if it results in tangible benefits to the populace but these cases have made it clear to me that the PUC is nothing more than a welfare program for clerks. Given their performance dealing with our water, power and sewer systems, I don't see any reason to expect they'll be effective regulating DSL.
----
Need a sig? Have this one..
Intel Bullies Yogis
Three comments that quite reasonably question Tom's Hardware's integrity get modded to zero while a comment that says there's a review at Tom's Hardware gets modded to a 5?
Looks to me like the moderating system has been hijacked by Intel employees. Whoops! There goes my karma....
----
Need a Sig? Here, take this one...
Intel Wants Your Inside
This isn't the first time some idiots masquerading as lawyers have tried to bully someone.
Warner Brother's staff counsel made the mistake of threatening Groucho Marx because he had announced a new movie with the name "Casablanca" in it. Here is Groucho's initial response... What's truly amazing is that Warner Brother's didn't understand how stupid they looked after getting Groucho's initial letter. The exchange continued for several more letters until somebody at Warner Brothers finally got the message.
Need a sig? Here, have this one...
Intel Hires Idiots
It was until the Europan's started broadcasting "General Hospitable" and "All My Critters" at which point the obelisk decided our solar system was a lost cause and took off for parts unknown.
I wondered about the "largest lifeform" claim as well. If the various critters are necessary for each others survival then "single lifeform" is probably defensible. After all, you depend on your lung cells to provide oxygen to your blood cells and so, depending on how you view yourself, you are a micro ecosystem or a single lifeform. I would be surprised if anyone has done the necessary biology to establish the 'rusticles' interdependence.
As to "biggest," there's a tree fungus somewhere on the East Coast that is believed to encompass an entire forest and as it's a single mat, some claim it's the biggest earthly life form.
The robots are remotely controlled by the fiber optic umbilical cords. JPL would presumably land a radio transponder on Europa's surface and relay the radio control from Earth to the transponder which would pass the signals on to the submerged robots via the fiber. Only problem is that Europa is over 30 light-minutes away so the control delay makes me wonder whether the idea is feasible. Imagine playing Unreal Tournament with 30 minute ping times...
....PURE copper runs 350-400 W/m-K...pure copper isn't usually used, an alloy is.
I was talking about copper alloys. At room temperature, Both copper 110 and 101 alloys have a thermal conductivity of 391 W/m-k. Phosphorous laced copper alloys will drop you down to around 380. The only reason I happen to have these numbers is I'm currently working on a heat sink.
The news article that got this thread going had so many inaccuracies that I'm prone to think that a marketeer at Poco got somebody at ABC News all excited with hype. Given the foam's poor thermal conductivity, I seriously doubt the national security agency is using it as a heat sink unless, possibly, it's on a satellite. But if that were the case, Poco would have been nda'd and the story wouldn't have made light of day. The story smells of marketeer-speak.
You're right about the density uneveness. There are several elemental foams available that have very uniform density. You can get metal silver foams for applications where surface area is very important. John Carnack (of doom fame) has been playing around with silver foams as a catalyst for hydrogen peroxide to drive his rocket.
However, as a heatsink, foams don't fare well because heat transfer is partially a function, not of surface area as you assert, but of the cross-sectional area perpendicular to heat flow. Foams have lots of surface area which is nice for catalysts but have lousy cross-sectional areas which is what is needed to transfer heat from one edge of the foam to the other. Once the heat is spread out over a heatsink's mass, THEN the heatsink's surface area comes into play. Foams suffer as heatsinks because they can't move heat well from the primary hot spot to their extremeties.
Having said all that, there's some experimental work going on with carbon heat sinks that are configured in standard heatsink geometries. Anandtech's Cebit report shows a few pictures of some carbon heatsinks. Carbon is attractive, because as an element, it does show promise. As a working material, it's difficult. If carbon nanotubes ever get out of the lab, there'll be a huge change - they've got great thermal conductivity - somewhere in the thousands of watts.
Not sure where the 4-5 times copper efficiency comes from.
/. and ABC news got hyped into running non-news.
If you read Poco Graphite's tech specs on the material, you'll see that the thermal conductivity is between 100-150 W/m-K . Depending on alloy, copper runs 3 times better at between 350-400 W/m-K. Good aluminum gets close to 200 W/m-K.
You aren't going to see this stuff used in a radiator unless weight is a primary constraint. Looks to me like
Silly Senator Sells-out CAlifornia?
Feinstein, one of the Senators who support the SSSCA is from California. She also voted down a proposal to allow laptops on the Senate floor. Her house may be 30 miles from the Silicon Valley but it may as well be on the moon the way she votes.
She also was one of the clever people who said "I believe President Clinton when he said he didn't have an affair...." She was a little put out, but only a little, when she finally figured out that he had lied to her.
She's clueless and powerful - what a combination.
the Vikings never made it past "new found land."
Perhaps. But there was a Nova segment on Kennewick Man who looks very much like an European. His skull is believed to be around 9000 years old and was found in Oregon.
At the close of 1939, a woman sat on a snow covered log in a Swedish forest and re-read a letter from a chemist in Germany. The chemist had detected barium where he hadn't expected to find any. He wrote her because he couldn't figure out where the barium was coming from. The woman, Liese Mietner, figured out that the chemist, Otto Hahn, had split Uranium. Without Mietner's insight into the underlying physics, Hahn's observation might have been dismissed. So there might indeed be "some crazy chemistry..." taking place.
On the other hand, as soon as Mietner's nephew got back to England from his Christmas break, the British were reproducing Hahn's experiment. Without reproducible results, the results could just be background noise.
Why the coast? A colleague just sent me a miserere complaining about the snow and cold in St. Louis. Here on the coast, it's sunny and clear.
Why the coast? The air is so clean I can see three mountain ranges from my office and one of them is across some 50 miles of ocean.
Why the coast? If I walk down the street with a woman who isn't the same race as I am, I don't get a second look.
Why the coast? I was standing in a grocery store checkout line and overheard 7 different languages. With those speakers come different perspectives and that makes for some really interesting dinner conversations.
Why the coast? Did I mention the physical beauty of the place? This country is unbelievably gorgeous and varied. We've got ocean and mountains right next to each other.
Why the coast? John Steinbeck called this country Eden and he wasn't too far off the mark.
That's why the coast.
Heat pipes are an old idea - they were used in the Apollo program. IBM's key addition to the technology is developing a hinge that efficiently transfers heat between the laptop's body (the heat source) and the display (the heat radiator). There isn't much info in the article referenced in the original post to figure out just what Hitachi thinks is original.
An interesting development in the market is in regard to the memory prices: currently, DDR SDRAM costs just as much as RDRAM. The high price of Rambus, which we have mentioned in many articles previously, should no longer be a purchase barrier.
Mushkin prices for 256 MB DDR 2700 is $116 and Mushkin 256 MB RIMM is $149. Who knows how much the un-available 533MHZ RIMM will run but it's certainly going to be more than $149.
Secondly, his benchmark charts don't jibe with other reviews where the 2000 XP is pitted against a 2.2 GHZ P4. He's got the P4 trouncing the Athlon whereas Anandtech is giving a only a slight edge to the P4.
Maybe Tom's gone to the Steve Jobs School of Benchmarks?
Your prof is in good company when attempting to forecast the future...Rutherford didn't think anything would ever come of atomic energy.
Watch out for the power supply. The only 250 watt psu AMD recommends is aopen's FSP250-60GTA. All the others power supplies are 300 watts, or more. I think you're asking for trouble going for a bottom of the line psu on an Athlon, especially one as fast as the 1.4.
...white sharks?
I was talking to two women before Christmas who were wondering what to buy their husbands. Since both men are TV_holics, I suggested a Tivo. Neither woman had heard of it so I said "It lets you pause TV...."
Two blank stares. They didn't have a clue what I meant.
So I said, "If the phone rings, you can push a button...answer the phone, talk as long as you like and come back to the TV right where you left off."
"OOOOHHH!" in two voice harmony.
Then one of them took half a second and said, "And if I tell him to do something, he can't say...'But, I'll miss what I'm watching!'"
Both men got Tivos last Christmas.
Richard Muller at Berkeley used lunar soil gathered by the Apollo astronauts to demonstrate that impact cratering significantly increased around 500 million years ago. Moreover, the craters appear to cluster around every 26 million years (last cluster occured 13 million years ago.)
Muller hypothesized that the periodic cratering is due to a star that orbits the sun. Every 26 million years, it comes swinging closer into the sundragging debris from the Oort cloud. Some of that debris ends up hitting either the earth or the moon.
500 million years ago is referred to as the Cambrian explosion because the fossil record shows a huge proliferation of different species. There have been a number of hypothesis as to what precipated the increase in life forms and Muller's data does an excellent job of supporting comet/asteroid impact. There's more at Lawrence Livermore
It may be that the Apollo program has yielded a significant clue as to why we aren't all just a bunch of jellyfish.
There's some irony in the fact that Carly will be a keynote speaker at the next Linux World expo while she's killing off MPE/ix - HP's OS for the 3000. If there ever was a reluctant poster child for open source, HP is it.
HP has lost interest in MPE/iX and so the existing users have asked that HP release the source to them so that they can continue to support it. HP is hemming and hawing which sounds an awful like "No."
Instead, HP prattles on about "earning your continued trust..." while the larger HP3000 customers wonder how they'll recoup the enormous migration expense that HP has foisted on them.
If HP was serious about wanting to retain their customer's trust, HP would hand over the source and be done with it. It's one thing to say "we can't make money any more on the 3000, here's the source to the software you've been using" and quite another to say "We can't make money any more on the 3000. We're not going to let you have the source because we want you to buy this other solution instead."
Carly's tenure is in jeopardy not so much because of the Compaq merger but because of the enormous damage that's happened to the HP brand during her watch. The failed Price Waterhouse merger, closing the calculator division, throwing away PA-Risc (an amazing CPU!), screwing the HP3000 users, and now the Compaq mess look like more than 3 strikes to me.
A reference in the article about the equivalence principle reminded me that Einstein stated that there's no experiment that would enable an observer in a constantly accelerating, windowless vehicle to determine that they weren't stationary in a gravitional field.
I have never heard why a tidal force experiment wouldn't distinquish between the two cases. What is happening in the accelerating vehicle that mimics gravitational tides?
Put another way, if you're standing next to and perpendicular to a black hole, your feet are going to be ripped away from you. If you're standing in an accelerating elevator with an equivalent g force, what's ripping you to shreds? Aren't you getting scrunched instead?
In 1919, my father and Roy Adams, were 10 years old. My grandmother gave my father a small lathe which he and Roy used to fabricate a small, air-powered, motor. The motor is amazing, especially given that it was designed and built by two 10 year olds.
Roy's parents were poor so he didn't get to go college. However, he was so self-evidently bright, it didn't matter. JPL eventually hired him and he ended his career as a project manager on the Galileo. My father always got a kick out of the fact that Roy, with his high school diploma, had a raft of rocket science Ph.D.'s reporting to him.
The little air-powered motor still works. It, like the Galileo, way outlived its intended design life. Rest In Peace Roy, you did good.
So you are saying that thousands of still active missiles in former Russian and newer stuff in places like China are NOT direct threat to us ?
Nope, never said that. I just happen to agree with the logic that got us to badger the Soviets into signing the ABM treaty back in 1972. Made sense then...still does.
See, the fundamental problem with missile defense is that no matter how you decide to defend, the attacker can come up with a counter attack much more cheaply than you can defend against it. Missile defense is a losing game. Our MIRVed warheads were a direct response to the Soviets building a defensive perimeter around Moscow. We'd just overwhelm their defense. We only needed to get 1 or 2 warheads through and Moscow was toast, whereas, they had to get ALL our warheads to survive. To make it harder to see the warheads, we made the warhead shells out of carbon. Carbon doesn't show up on radar very well. So the Soviets figured they would track the pressure wave the warhead made as it re-entered and aim at the leading edge of the wave. No problem. We made our warheads spin like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. The warhead ablates evenly as it hits the atmosphere so it stays very sharp. Result is you can't track the damn things until they're on top of you. Remember - only one or two out of 100's has to get through and you lose.
This is what was going in in the 60's and we realized the damn game would never stop unless we got together with the Soviets and called a halt. That's what led to the ABM treaty. The only folks unhappy with the ABM treaty were the companies that had been pigging out at the money trough.
Now asteroids, that's a different story. They're not being hurled by sentient beings who are trying to defeat your defense. They're predictable - if we see them - and if we see them soon enough, we can do something about it. That's why we look for them and that's why we need to be thinking about what to do about them when we do see one headed our way. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
You might find this reading on comet showers worth looking at. Pay attention to the authors - they're not lightweights in the field.
I'm one of those morons who thinks asteroids can't drive nuke-laden-Ryder trucks or steer a rusty old nuke-bearing freighter into a harbor. Moreover, I so stupid I don't believe asteroids will take evasive maneuvers to avoid being intercepted. I'm even stupider in that I don't believe spending $200 billion on Star Wars - The Sequel, would have saved the WTC.
The only reason Star Wars is back is there are plenty of hogs and Bush has rung the Treasury's dinner bell announcing the pig trough is full.
In two different physics classes, the profs made a point of saying that an explosion doesn't change the object's center of gravity. Even though the mass goes flying off helter skelter, the mass'es cg remains where it was or was headed. The equations are still solved as if the mass was compact.
Why would this scenario be any different?
What's even more curious is what happens to matter's ability to attract other matter when the matter is converted to photons? Does the ability to attract matter vanish when matter transmutes to photons?