>When the RPG is first visible, it appears to be pointed at the gunship.
No, it's really not. I know the video is unclear, but this part isn't. At no time does this group of men acknowledge the presence of the helicopters. Pretty much everyone agrees on this. If they were targeting something, it wasn't up in the air.
But who were these gunships defending from these "insurgents"?
OK let's assume they had weapons. Don't you have to get near American troops before you're considered a threat?
The thing you don't see is who was around that corner that the "RPG" was aiming at. After watching the video 4-5 times, I'm inclined to conclude that around the corner was...not us.
Did you watch how long it took for "us" to get there? That was the most boring part of the video. It took forever!
However, there's more to ID'ing a weapon than length. The zoom lens is round, whereas an RPG is very pointy. That guy died for sticking a long object around a corner. We can agree on that much.
Also, he was not aiming at any American troops. We know because it took our troops MINUTES to arrive by car. And they had to be guided to the location.
I found an online calculator and apparently the energy squares with either the diameter OR the speed. The only linear input is mass.
So let's try this: A 100-meter wide flywheel, weighing 10 metric tons, spinning at 1hz, gets you 68 kWh, or double that if you move the mass to the outside (which I presume you would for something that big). Now that's probably light for something so big, so at 100 metric tons you could get up to 1.36 MWh.
This battery has 32 MWh.
You would need to spin it 5 times faster (300rpm) to get that kind of energy. That's frighteningly fast for a ferris wheel. Also it would need some serious electromagnets and one hell of a support structure that's also frictionless.
No matter how you slice it, flywheels are all about linear momentum. They're either big or they're fast and it's hard to both.
Here's what you do. Go down to the auto parts store and get yourself a bunch of car batteries. Put them in your basement. Get an alternator and a good switch. Find an electrician who can hook them up to your house. (I'm an electrical engineer so I can't help you. I make less money than an electrician and I also don't know anything about electricity, since an EE degree only covers calculus and some very basic RLC circuits.)
We all know that car batteries last 10-12 years of daily use, so this rig could potentially last you 20 years. Now the question is, what will you use it for? Power outages?
>Everything else was dull and uninteresting to me, but because of the class, I was required to read them.
If it makes you feel any better, we made sport of passing reading tests in H.S. English. The idea is that you don't read a single page of the book, but you get a passing grade (D or better) on the comprehension exam.
I assure you, it wasn't hard, and those who failed (by way of actually reading the book) were heavily mocked.
I was first introduced to the Chronicles of Narnia hand in hand with a lecture about identifying symbolism in literature. We read the book as a class and pointed out every Christian symbol and motif to be found (and there are many).
Actually, it turns out that C.S. Lewis was a Christian heretic. He believed in Christianity so long as he could define it himself, for his own greater-good purposes. Calling Narnia "Christian" is like calling Obama a Marxist; rather, he will pick and choose what elements suit his immediate purposes.
In short, Narnia is far from Christian, if anything anti-Christian, an attempt to re-purpose Christianity for a new generation.
I enjoyed the Narnia books not having any idea what religious idealism was going on behind the scenes. It turns out, in the final analysis, there was no attempt at conversion. If I were a pastor, I would have hated C.S. Lewis. He was sublimely arrogant on issues of the church.
Nowadays I'm much more aware of fiction as a potential TV/movie screenplay.
I was aware of this as a kid reading Michael Crichton, but it's become overwhelming. There are so many good movies to be made if you look at what books you enjoy.
My current picks would be these:
Haldeman's "The Forever War," where the hero relativistically travels into space battles until he becomes a 1000-year-old veteran.
Like much of real life, the trick is to be there for the beginning, and survive until people worship your experience. As you grow naturally, the world becomes more primitive through complexity that keeps the younger generation down. Imagine if you went away for 1000 years and when you came back, kids were tweeting their homies about the latest Jay-Z video. Suffice to say you would be rich and bored. This is from 1974. Things get worse.
Gibson's "Count Zero." This book has screenplay written all over it. A ten-year-old computer hacker, a thirteen-year-old love interest, numerous tactical encounters, advanced weapons, and only a semblance of AI. I have to wonder how many movies have been unofficially based on this.
If anyone can remember the names of the gangs in this book, I thought they were a hilarious (if apt) description of what Bobby was up against.
Not a great movie - I think the director bragged about the lack of plot.
The book shines by making Theo and the Warden friends from childhood. It's much more like Star Wars, where the fate of worlds revolves around a single family coming to grips with each other.
(In the movie, the Warden is replaced by Theo's rich, industrial friend, who has a brief role obtaining a passport. But they don't keep in touch during the film.)
Strangely, the book stayed with me. I'd give it an A for effort, but it explains even less than the movie. Plotting a B, trailing to a C by the end, Star Wars encounters notwithstanding.
I don't enjoy reading plays and certainly Shakespeare's language is difficult. I imagine it's a bit like reading code. There's a certain satisfaction in figuring it out, but it's not exactly recreational.
That said, Shakespeare supposedly is a history of the English monarchy. Considering how much the language was evolving in that period, we're lucky someone made such an emotionally indelible imprint for us.
2001 is basically an action (suspense? horror?) movie. HAL is trying to kill them, and Dave has to fight for his survival. From that perspective, it's nearly identical to The Shining.
Not to say it doesn't have a lot of fluff, but the middle is pretty intense.
Thanks. In my Wiki post, I was careful to say that firing to the side would be "difficult and unnecessary" for an Apache rather than impossible.
Right now I'm pinning this on misidentification. There doesn't seem to be any hard documentation that it was an Apache (or even two), just Wikileaks summation.
But the deeper thought is that leaks like this are designed to test our knowledge and attention span.
Gunships circle lazily over a target. They can carry a 105mm tank gun, but that's not what was used here. This is a typical AC-130 gunsight video from the days when CNN covered Afghanistan. Guy walks on ground, guy dies in a hail of bullets.
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, the only model AC-130 that carries 30mm Bushmaster cannons was "cancelled", but on the video they are clearly referring to each other as "Bushmaster."
It's not a pair of Apache's, it's an AC-130. No matter how expensive this war has become, there's no way we'd have the money to throw a pair of Apaches against a soft target. They've been showing these AC-130 videos from Afghanistan for years now.
I guess that's the real story here - five years ago, this would have been on CNN.
I'm really not sure why people are calling it an Apache helicopter or why they think there's more than one. This has all the signs of an AC-130 gunship (a plane).
Notice all the weapons are on the left side of the plane. If it was a helicopter, they wouldn't have had that problem with the building being in the way. Also, an AC-130 explains why there was more than one gunner.
What's worse, dumb civilians don't realize the severity of the "cargo plane" hovering overhead. It looks utterly harmless and fires from a great distance. If civilians saw an Apache, they would fucking run. And it's doubtful any has - Apaches are way too expensive to use in that role.
It's too bad this discussion has 900 comments. I'd love to see how many readers know what they're watching.
I would never build anything with sheet rock. That stuff is fucking disgusting. Everywhere I want to live it always eventually becomes little more than a mold substrate. I want to build an earthbag+mud plaster home topped with decks and greenhouses
Fucking hilarious. After living in the suburbs for so many years, you start to realize that what most people consider a "house" is really an "apartment," seeing as how they're all identical and jammed right next to each other. You'd think Tony Soprano (rich, suburbanite), with all his concerns about security, wouldn't have his swimming pool 30 feet from Cooze's backyard.
But you know, building standards have improved from the 1960's. They seem to do interior walls and doors nowadays. (If tract housing has solid interior walls it qualifies as a "McMansion," a la the Sopranos.) Or how about them "railroad" apartments, or worse. One of my bosses growing up in Brooklyn had to go outside his apartment to go to the bathroom. So much for Abe Lincoln, huh?
Well the issue is that beachgoers in particular are disconnected from the net, so sending out a text warning isn't going to work. You can have the lifeguards call everyone in, but lifeguards only watch the swimming area - not the whole beach - and I don't think a country like Bangladesh (notoriously wet) has lifeguards on every streetcorner.
Tsunamis may take hours to reach their destination, but given the vagaries of the decision-making process, the actual warning might be just a half-hour. And in that time, you may have to move several miles inland to be safe.
It's far more. There were 132 cases in just the 2002 model year of the Lexus E300. Extrapolating from that, there could be thousands or over nine thousand. At least 100 though.
>here was precisely ONE laptop in the entire United States that was capable of reading the blackbox data.
Indeed, this is supported by the Motor Trend article I read on this discussion. Of course, being that it's software, you have to wonder why there's only one.
"Hey Steve, can you copy this DVD for me?"
"Excuse me, but there is only ONE computer that can copy dvd's in the WHOLE country!"
Slashdot Mirror
>When the RPG is first visible, it appears to be pointed at the gunship.
No, it's really not. I know the video is unclear, but this part isn't. At no time does this group of men acknowledge the presence of the helicopters. Pretty much everyone agrees on this. If they were targeting something, it wasn't up in the air.
But who were these gunships defending from these "insurgents"?
OK let's assume they had weapons. Don't you have to get near American troops before you're considered a threat?
The thing you don't see is who was around that corner that the "RPG" was aiming at. After watching the video 4-5 times, I'm inclined to conclude that around the corner was...not us.
Did you watch how long it took for "us" to get there? That was the most boring part of the video. It took forever!
>They had weapons -- including an RPG.
Nope.
>Even Wikileaks admits that.
Nope!
>A US unit was engaged a block away.
Er...nope. Not even close!
Flamebait is the wrong mod. You're a troll because you got all your facts wrong.
Long objects shown.
However, there's more to ID'ing a weapon than length. The zoom lens is round, whereas an RPG is very pointy. That guy died for sticking a long object around a corner. We can agree on that much.
Also, he was not aiming at any American troops. We know because it took our troops MINUTES to arrive by car. And they had to be guided to the location.
So, weapons or not, what's your point?
Is he 27? Where does it say his age in the article?
I found an online calculator and apparently the energy squares with either the diameter OR the speed. The only linear input is mass.
So let's try this: A 100-meter wide flywheel, weighing 10 metric tons, spinning at 1hz, gets you 68 kWh, or double that if you move the mass to the outside (which I presume you would for something that big). Now that's probably light for something so big, so at 100 metric tons you could get up to 1.36 MWh.
This battery has 32 MWh.
You would need to spin it 5 times faster (300rpm) to get that kind of energy. That's frighteningly fast for a ferris wheel. Also it would need some serious electromagnets and one hell of a support structure that's also frictionless.
No matter how you slice it, flywheels are all about linear momentum. They're either big or they're fast and it's hard to both.
Here's what you do. Go down to the auto parts store and get yourself a bunch of car batteries. Put them in your basement. Get an alternator and a good switch. Find an electrician who can hook them up to your house. (I'm an electrical engineer so I can't help you. I make less money than an electrician and I also don't know anything about electricity, since an EE degree only covers calculus and some very basic RLC circuits.)
We all know that car batteries last 10-12 years of daily use, so this rig could potentially last you 20 years. Now the question is, what will you use it for? Power outages?
>Everything else was dull and uninteresting to me, but because of the class, I was required to read them.
If it makes you feel any better, we made sport of passing reading tests in H.S. English. The idea is that you don't read a single page of the book, but you get a passing grade (D or better) on the comprehension exam.
I assure you, it wasn't hard, and those who failed (by way of actually reading the book) were heavily mocked.
I was first introduced to the Chronicles of Narnia hand in hand with a lecture about identifying symbolism in literature. We read the book as a class and pointed out every Christian symbol and motif to be found (and there are many).
Actually, it turns out that C.S. Lewis was a Christian heretic. He believed in Christianity so long as he could define it himself, for his own greater-good purposes. Calling Narnia "Christian" is like calling Obama a Marxist; rather, he will pick and choose what elements suit his immediate purposes.
In short, Narnia is far from Christian, if anything anti-Christian, an attempt to re-purpose Christianity for a new generation.
I enjoyed the Narnia books not having any idea what religious idealism was going on behind the scenes. It turns out, in the final analysis, there was no attempt at conversion. If I were a pastor, I would have hated C.S. Lewis. He was sublimely arrogant on issues of the church.
Nowadays I'm much more aware of fiction as a potential TV/movie screenplay.
I was aware of this as a kid reading Michael Crichton, but it's become overwhelming. There are so many good movies to be made if you look at what books you enjoy.
My current picks would be these:
Haldeman's "The Forever War," where the hero relativistically travels into space battles until he becomes a 1000-year-old veteran.
Like much of real life, the trick is to be there for the beginning, and survive until people worship your experience. As you grow naturally, the world becomes more primitive through complexity that keeps the younger generation down. Imagine if you went away for 1000 years and when you came back, kids were tweeting their homies about the latest Jay-Z video. Suffice to say you would be rich and bored. This is from 1974. Things get worse.
Gibson's "Count Zero." This book has screenplay written all over it. A ten-year-old computer hacker, a thirteen-year-old love interest, numerous tactical encounters, advanced weapons, and only a semblance of AI. I have to wonder how many movies have been unofficially based on this.
If anyone can remember the names of the gangs in this book, I thought they were a hilarious (if apt) description of what Bobby was up against.
>For example I hated the movie "Children of Men"
Not a great movie - I think the director bragged about the lack of plot.
The book shines by making Theo and the Warden friends from childhood. It's much more like Star Wars, where the fate of worlds revolves around a single family coming to grips with each other.
(In the movie, the Warden is replaced by Theo's rich, industrial friend, who has a brief role obtaining a passport. But they don't keep in touch during the film.)
Strangely, the book stayed with me. I'd give it an A for effort, but it explains even less than the movie. Plotting a B, trailing to a C by the end, Star Wars encounters notwithstanding.
I don't enjoy reading plays and certainly Shakespeare's language is difficult. I imagine it's a bit like reading code. There's a certain satisfaction in figuring it out, but it's not exactly recreational.
That said, Shakespeare supposedly is a history of the English monarchy. Considering how much the language was evolving in that period, we're lucky someone made such an emotionally indelible imprint for us.
2001 is basically an action (suspense? horror?) movie. HAL is trying to kill them, and Dave has to fight for his survival. From that perspective, it's nearly identical to The Shining.
Not to say it doesn't have a lot of fluff, but the middle is pretty intense.
>and yeah that might just be how it looks
Correct. Try R'ing T one-page FA. The back 8m is snapped off. That's the part they didn't show.
Thanks. In my Wiki post, I was careful to say that firing to the side would be "difficult and unnecessary" for an Apache rather than impossible.
Right now I'm pinning this on misidentification. There doesn't seem to be any hard documentation that it was an Apache (or even two), just Wikileaks summation.
But the deeper thought is that leaks like this are designed to test our knowledge and attention span.
Gunships circle lazily over a target. They can carry a 105mm tank gun, but that's not what was used here. This is a typical AC-130 gunsight video from the days when CNN covered Afghanistan. Guy walks on ground, guy dies in a hail of bullets.
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, the only model AC-130 that carries 30mm Bushmaster cannons was "cancelled", but on the video they are clearly referring to each other as "Bushmaster."
Well, clearly from the video, if you have a gun, it's OK for us to shoot you.
I guess if you walked down the street with a rifle in the U.S., you'd get a similar reaction, but...only in the cities.
It's not a pair of Apache's, it's an AC-130. No matter how expensive this war has become, there's no way we'd have the money to throw a pair of Apaches against a soft target. They've been showing these AC-130 videos from Afghanistan for years now.
I guess that's the real story here - five years ago, this would have been on CNN.
I'm really not sure why people are calling it an Apache helicopter or why they think there's more than one. This has all the signs of an AC-130 gunship (a plane).
Notice all the weapons are on the left side of the plane. If it was a helicopter, they wouldn't have had that problem with the building being in the way. Also, an AC-130 explains why there was more than one gunner.
What's worse, dumb civilians don't realize the severity of the "cargo plane" hovering overhead. It looks utterly harmless and fires from a great distance. If civilians saw an Apache, they would fucking run. And it's doubtful any has - Apaches are way too expensive to use in that role.
It's too bad this discussion has 900 comments. I'd love to see how many readers know what they're watching.
>We can, safe behind our computers, armchair-quarterback the decisions
But that's exactly how these people were killed....safe, behind our computers.
I would never build anything with sheet rock. That stuff is fucking disgusting. Everywhere I want to live it always eventually becomes little more than a mold substrate. I want to build an earthbag+mud plaster home topped with decks and greenhouses
Fucking hilarious. After living in the suburbs for so many years, you start to realize that what most people consider a "house" is really an "apartment," seeing as how they're all identical and jammed right next to each other. You'd think Tony Soprano (rich, suburbanite), with all his concerns about security, wouldn't have his swimming pool 30 feet from Cooze's backyard.
But you know, building standards have improved from the 1960's. They seem to do interior walls and doors nowadays. (If tract housing has solid interior walls it qualifies as a "McMansion," a la the Sopranos.) Or how about them "railroad" apartments, or worse. One of my bosses growing up in Brooklyn had to go outside his apartment to go to the bathroom. So much for Abe Lincoln, huh?
Well the issue is that beachgoers in particular are disconnected from the net, so sending out a text warning isn't going to work. You can have the lifeguards call everyone in, but lifeguards only watch the swimming area - not the whole beach - and I don't think a country like Bangladesh (notoriously wet) has lifeguards on every streetcorner.
Tsunamis may take hours to reach their destination, but given the vagaries of the decision-making process, the actual warning might be just a half-hour. And in that time, you may have to move several miles inland to be safe.
Suck.com hasn't published since 2001.
Boy was it good though.
It's far more. There were 132 cases in just the 2002 model year of the Lexus E300. Extrapolating from that, there could be thousands or over nine thousand. At least 100 though.
>here was precisely ONE laptop in the entire United States that was capable of reading the blackbox data.
Indeed, this is supported by the Motor Trend article I read on this discussion. Of course, being that it's software, you have to wonder why there's only one.
"Hey Steve, can you copy this DVD for me?"
"Excuse me, but there is only ONE computer that can copy dvd's in the WHOLE country!"