Yes, but 5000 children don't die because you do or do not have an electric hoover- they die because of a natural disease, that technology can at best control, and at worst can do nothing about (the best drugs are beginning not to work).
It's a pity that those children probably can't improve their chances with the best technology to fight Malaria, but that's basically an economic problem- and one that is probably improved by 3rd world workers working for foreign capital (every dollar they bring in, probably means that 5 dollars worth of business is created locally by the time the money has filtered through the local economy). Unless the workers really are slave labour, then that job is probably the best one they can do; their standard of living is higher with the job than without.
Eventually it picks up some heat and starts to boil, and that vapor pressure will go somewhere.
That only happens if you screw on a tight fitting lid- don't.
Also, it's critically important you don't carry it around in a confined space; like a car or an elevator. Most of the time it will be entirely safe, however if the elevator gets stuck or the thermos' vacuum goes 'soft' then the nitrogen will asphixiate you.
What privacy? It's not like he was doing 114 in his own home! He was doing it in public. And it's not even like he was stopped for speeding- he killed people with his car. That much is definite. The only question is how he came to do this.
This blackbox system only triggers in event of an accident. There are no significant privacy issues of such a system that I can see.
It's not against everything that open source stands for. For example it's anti-Microsoft, and whilst commercial software companies are not the enemy of OS, Microsoft is;-)
Orion would make an amazing interplanetary drive actually. But you'd never want to use it to launch directly from anywhere inhabited or inhabitable.
I think that Freeman Dyson worked out that if it was launched from the earth's surface, every time it launched between one and ten people would die, on average, from fallout. It got banned anyway (ironically, Freeman Dyson worked on the nuclear bomb treaty that ruled it out; and he did this, knowing that it would ban Orion.)
Ironically they made me disconnect it, before they laid me off;-)
I don't think there was a connection between the rogue LAN and getting laid off.
Atleast, I think laying off my manager and my manager's manager and my manager's manager's manager and everyone below was probably unrelated. Probably;-)
I think that there is just enough competition in Britain to stop BT being complete bastards, very much unlike Telestra by all accounts. Also, the regulator Oftel has real teeth, and do nibble at them occasionally which helps a lot.
The T&Cs and price for broadband aren't too bad, they are pretty enlightened really (with a few exceptions- 'no servers'???? Yeah right, like they check.); so far as I can tell they've never been doing any really terrible gouging on price, although you used to be able to get better deals elsewhere, that was in the dotcom era, when a load of venture capitalists were bankrolling it behind the scenes; the prices that BT offers are now fairly similar.
Having said that, there's still large areas of the country that don't have broadband, and BT aren't rushing to supply it.
At the last place I worked I installed a 'rogue' WiFi installation.
However, I did it fairly properly, I installed a Linux box configured as a firewall, configured the filtering on the firewall so that all the through traffic could only go off to the official company contivity VPN server (which happened to be on another site!), and ran VPN software on all the clients.
Basically, it was very secure, short of hacking the firewall (tricky, the filtering rules were pretty brutal), or one of the clients (I put personal firewalls on each of the clients too), there was no way in. Even the building was pretty much a Faraday shield due to metallised windows(!)
From the network side, the WiFi AP is very difficult to spot- the firewall just looks like a Linux box; which is what it is; it just NATs the AP off of itself. There may be ways to find it, but I can recompile the firewall to make it very difficult.
The only definite way to find it was if you knew it was there or went around with a WiFi receiver looking for networks. I suppose you might get a bit suspicious about the NATed network there are ways to spot those, but that depends on your network connectivity rules, they may well be legal anyway.
The whole thing only tied up 1 pc and only then because we didn't have a linux box hanging around we could configure to be a firewall. The network guys had put in some ridiculous estimate on how much it would cost to install... thousands of pounds.
The flip side is, the US will probably spend $XX on space technology and research, and if NASA funding drops
Who says it would drop? There's plenty of things to do in space- lunar/mars/asteroid exploration. I just think that NASA should get out of the launch business. They can put the money they save into lots of other space things.
I haven't seen the exact figures yet, but from the information in the article the strength/weight ratio of this particular material is not twice as good as Kevlar.
You need about very roughly 20+ times as good as Kevlar for a space-elevator. Single carbon nanotubes seem to have a limiting strength, in practice, of slightly more than what you need for an elevator, but this is the first cable using them to even beat Kevlar.
I actually think that the Shuttle program should be closed down. They should keep the ISS though; that at least is a somewhat sensible use of NASA. Ok, I lie, the ISS is pretty useless, but it doesn't seem to be standing in private industries way, unlike the shuttle; and you need some way of deflecting the pork barrel stuff away from the launch sector, which are very capable of doing the right things if you take NASA away. They can probably do manned space flight for a tiny fraction of the price NASA can (as in, 10x cheaper, as in about $200,000 per person).
If there's a launch gap, an American company should buy a bunch of Soyuz and launch them from the cape; it would still wind up cheaper and American labour would be used for the launch servicing, and the Soyuz itself is dirt cheap, so hardly any money ends up going to the soviets.
Also the indignant moral outrage that using Soviet tech (which in many ways is better anyway) would cause is guaranteed to kick start private industry;-)
Hmm. Wonder why I'm not in charge, that sounds like a decent plan. Oh yeah, I remember, I'm not American.
Launching the Shuttle into a low orbit is pretty easy
Not really, atleast the manual doesn't seem to think so, and I've found in practice that it was fairly tricky until I understood the characteristics of that particular vehicle (part of the problem I had is that I've been studying kerosene/LOX vehicles, it turns out that the Shuttle behaves rather differently). Anyway, once I figured out the differences I managed a highly eccentric orbit, just, perigee turned out to be 90 km, by some miracle I didn't reenter;-)
The other problems I've had with it is that it seems reasonably buggy. By pushing some common combinations of keys it appears to crash, and an earlier version didn't seem to run at all on my system for no very obvious reason. Still, the graphics are cool; but some of the physics is a bit dodgy, particularly crashes and high speeds. Also the UI is not the best, although parts of it are well thought out; it's a real curate's egg.
Actually, spinny hard drives are surprisingly robust- you wouldn't want it spinning at the high g points, but otherwise it would survive; you could certainly boot off it on the ground; however:
The hard drive uses a head that sits on a cushion of air, there is a small vent that leads to the outside through a filter. As the rocket climbs the air pressure will go down until the cushion of air no longer works- cue head crash! Still, as I say, if you spin it down before launch; no problem.
Even so, I'd stick with the flash card myself, no moving parts and lighter and probably less power to boot (no pun intended); and the coup de gras- you can write the final will and testament of the on-board computer before it noses into the ground at mach 2;-) (can you say cheap black box?)
Neither NASA nor the US Government is preventing anyone else from pursuing manned space flight, they just are not supporting any private companies to develop manned flight projects.
Yeah they are preventing. The government is using its extremely deep pockets to fund the Shuttle- which is after all a direct competitor to private efforts. Investors usually take one good look at the situation, and get extremely cold feet; which they warm up by running away very fast.
Ok, admittedly you got off to a good start: Well, there are a lot of reasons thing go wrong.
NASA started to go with faster, cheaper, better.
Yes, well the normal saying is 'pick any two'. NASA tried to pick all three. Guess what happened?
So, the answer is, NASA has hit some bad luck.
We make our own luck in this life.
But NASA-haters will always have some missions to point to as a "waste" of money, and try to cut funding as it's mismanaged; other space junkies will insst that anything under 100% is unacceptble, and costs should double to move from 80% to 100%.
Right, so you are implying that everyone who criticises NASA is a NASA hater. Uh huh.
I don't which attitude is more damaging.
Probably the one that assumes that NASA is golden, everything they touch is high-tech wizardry and they are just unlucky when things go wrong.
These things are clearly not true- on the other hand they are not clearly false either- try to avoid the binary thinking mistake.
NASA has a "good" track record since Observer, unfortunately, the highest profile missions have generally failed.
Yes, well you said it; I didn't. Actually, I don't think NASA is quite that bad; but there's something about a pork-barrel government monopoly on manned space flight, or anything really, that does not sit right in America- especially in America; other countries have the same disease, all governments have the same problems, but not nearly as acute as with NASA.
With NASA it's not what they do, it's the way they do it, and what that does to what they do.
I'm personally not so very worried about it. The earth has been a lot hotter before than it's ever going to be when we've run out of oil. The biggest problem is that people will get very upset when their patch of ground gets local problems from any global warming.
I've seen atleast one suggestion that the power consumption difference is mostly caused by the fact that bluetooth adjusts the transmitter power according to the range.
WiFi transmitters can very likely be made to do that as well.
I've also been using WiFi on my laptop, I haven't noticed any reduction on the battery life; compared to the disk or the processor it seems to take hardly any power; cell phones are a different ball game, but just using less power and hence giving lower range seems doable.
We aren't going to run out of oil. We're only going to run out of petrochemicals. There's always going to be oil; you can run diesel engines on vegetable oil for example.
Not to be a wet blanket, but while Helios is really neat it's not terribly useful. Only 762 pounds of payload available, minus mandatory equipment. For the cost to build and operate the vehicle it clearly doesn't have any commercial potential. It might be cheaper than launching a satellite in some cases, if it can provide the same functionality, but that's about it.
Yes, well, cost per kg of a satellite is atleast $4600/kg (~$10,000/lb, and that's to low earth orbit which is only over the horizon for a few minutes at a time- GEO sats are visible all the time but are 3x more expensive). But you usually don't get these satellites back again, and if anything goes wrong up there, you're screwed. With Helios you can bring it down, fix it and send it back up.
The biggest problem is that it's still more or less a solar powered craft -- and solar energy just doesn't have the density to do anything useful and still be mobile.
Well, it's 1.5kw/m^2. That's more power than a 1 bar electric fire. Ok, so solar panels at the moment are at most getting to around 40-60% efficient (for lab samples, small production/expensive ones are more like 20%, cheap ones are 10% or so), but that's still quite a bit of power.
Although... maybe something like this could make a reasonable alternative to those Broadband Broadcasting Balloons (say that three times fast!), since these craft can fly at higher altitudes and make roam to areas where they may be needed more.
Yes, very probably would work. That's the point of the fuel cell; they can keep it up there 24 hours a day; previously it was coming down at night. 762 pounds of radio equipment should be plenty; provided it doesn't suck too much juice. It might even be possible to build a passive system- just bounce the radio waves off the underside of the vehicle.
And yes, Gates will be credited by making software big business.
Probably the lucky sod; but he didn't. That was probably IBM, way before Gates; or Visicalc, which came out before MS-DOS, and was the killer app for microcomputers.
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It's a pity that those children probably can't improve their chances with the best technology to fight Malaria, but that's basically an economic problem- and one that is probably improved by 3rd world workers working for foreign capital (every dollar they bring in, probably means that 5 dollars worth of business is created locally by the time the money has filtered through the local economy). Unless the workers really are slave labour, then that job is probably the best one they can do; their standard of living is higher with the job than without.
That only happens if you screw on a tight fitting lid- don't.
Also, it's critically important you don't carry it around in a confined space; like a car or an elevator. Most of the time it will be entirely safe, however if the elevator gets stuck or the thermos' vacuum goes 'soft' then the nitrogen will asphixiate you.
This blackbox system only triggers in event of an accident. There are no significant privacy issues of such a system that I can see.
It's not against everything that open source stands for. For example it's anti-Microsoft, and whilst commercial software companies are not the enemy of OS, Microsoft is ;-)
I think that Freeman Dyson worked out that if it was launched from the earth's surface, every time it launched between one and ten people would die, on average, from fallout. It got banned anyway (ironically, Freeman Dyson worked on the nuclear bomb treaty that ruled it out; and he did this, knowing that it would ban Orion.)
I don't think there was a connection between the rogue LAN and getting laid off.
Atleast, I think laying off my manager and my manager's manager and my manager's manager's manager and everyone below was probably unrelated. Probably ;-)
The T&Cs and price for broadband aren't too bad, they are pretty enlightened really (with a few exceptions- 'no servers'???? Yeah right, like they check.); so far as I can tell they've never been doing any really terrible gouging on price, although you used to be able to get better deals elsewhere, that was in the dotcom era, when a load of venture capitalists were bankrolling it behind the scenes; the prices that BT offers are now fairly similar.
Having said that, there's still large areas of the country that don't have broadband, and BT aren't rushing to supply it.
However, I did it fairly properly, I installed a Linux box configured as a firewall, configured the filtering on the firewall so that all the through traffic could only go off to the official company contivity VPN server (which happened to be on another site!), and ran VPN software on all the clients.
Basically, it was very secure, short of hacking the firewall (tricky, the filtering rules were pretty brutal), or one of the clients (I put personal firewalls on each of the clients too), there was no way in. Even the building was pretty much a Faraday shield due to metallised windows(!)
From the network side, the WiFi AP is very difficult to spot- the firewall just looks like a Linux box; which is what it is; it just NATs the AP off of itself. There may be ways to find it, but I can recompile the firewall to make it very difficult.
The only definite way to find it was if you knew it was there or went around with a WiFi receiver looking for networks. I suppose you might get a bit suspicious about the NATed network there are ways to spot those, but that depends on your network connectivity rules, they may well be legal anyway.
The whole thing only tied up 1 pc and only then because we didn't have a linux box hanging around we could configure to be a firewall. The network guys had put in some ridiculous estimate on how much it would cost to install... thousands of pounds.
Who says it would drop? There's plenty of things to do in space- lunar/mars/asteroid exploration. I just think that NASA should get out of the launch business. They can put the money they save into lots of other space things.
You need about very roughly 20+ times as good as Kevlar for a space-elevator. Single carbon nanotubes seem to have a limiting strength, in practice, of slightly more than what you need for an elevator, but this is the first cable using them to even beat Kevlar.
If there's a launch gap, an American company should buy a bunch of Soyuz and launch them from the cape; it would still wind up cheaper and American labour would be used for the launch servicing, and the Soyuz itself is dirt cheap, so hardly any money ends up going to the soviets.
Also the indignant moral outrage that using Soviet tech (which in many ways is better anyway) would cause is guaranteed to kick start private industry ;-)
Hmm. Wonder why I'm not in charge, that sounds like a decent plan. Oh yeah, I remember, I'm not American.
Not really, atleast the manual doesn't seem to think so, and I've found in practice that it was fairly tricky until I understood the characteristics of that particular vehicle (part of the problem I had is that I've been studying kerosene/LOX vehicles, it turns out that the Shuttle behaves rather differently). Anyway, once I figured out the differences I managed a highly eccentric orbit, just, perigee turned out to be 90 km, by some miracle I didn't reenter ;-)
The other problems I've had with it is that it seems reasonably buggy. By pushing some common combinations of keys it appears to crash, and an earlier version didn't seem to run at all on my system for no very obvious reason. Still, the graphics are cool; but some of the physics is a bit dodgy, particularly crashes and high speeds. Also the UI is not the best, although parts of it are well thought out; it's a real curate's egg.
The hard drive uses a head that sits on a cushion of air, there is a small vent that leads to the outside through a filter. As the rocket climbs the air pressure will go down until the cushion of air no longer works- cue head crash! Still, as I say, if you spin it down before launch; no problem.
Even so, I'd stick with the flash card myself, no moving parts and lighter and probably less power to boot (no pun intended); and the coup de gras- you can write the final will and testament of the on-board computer before it noses into the ground at mach 2 ;-) (can you say cheap black box?)
Yeah they are preventing. The government is using its extremely deep pockets to fund the Shuttle- which is after all a direct competitor to private efforts. Investors usually take one good look at the situation, and get extremely cold feet; which they warm up by running away very fast.
Yeah, but think of the 'nicotine' patches ;-)
NASA started to go with faster, cheaper, better.
Yes, well the normal saying is 'pick any two'. NASA tried to pick all three. Guess what happened?
So, the answer is, NASA has hit some bad luck.
We make our own luck in this life.
But NASA-haters will always have some missions to point to as a "waste" of money, and try to cut funding as it's mismanaged; other space junkies will insst that anything under 100% is unacceptble, and costs should double to move from 80% to 100%.
Right, so you are implying that everyone who criticises NASA is a NASA hater. Uh huh.
I don't which attitude is more damaging.
Probably the one that assumes that NASA is golden, everything they touch is high-tech wizardry and they are just unlucky when things go wrong.
These things are clearly not true- on the other hand they are not clearly false either- try to avoid the binary thinking mistake.
NASA has a "good" track record since Observer, unfortunately, the highest profile missions have generally failed.
Yes, well you said it; I didn't. Actually, I don't think NASA is quite that bad; but there's something about a pork-barrel government monopoly on manned space flight, or anything really, that does not sit right in America- especially in America; other countries have the same disease, all governments have the same problems, but not nearly as acute as with NASA.
With NASA it's not what they do, it's the way they do it, and what that does to what they do.
Yeah, Rubiks clock is fairly easy. I solved it in about 20 minutes or so IRC.
I'm personally not so very worried about it. The earth has been a lot hotter before than it's ever going to be when we've run out of oil. The biggest problem is that people will get very upset when their patch of ground gets local problems from any global warming.
That's precisely the point; the transmitter is lower power, so the batteries last longer.
Also, bluetooth is much slower, maxing out at around 700kb/s.
Yes, but WiFi transmits faster, so doesn't transmit as long. Ten times the power and speed for 1/10 of the time is the same power.
WiFi transmitters can very likely be made to do that as well.
I've also been using WiFi on my laptop, I haven't noticed any reduction on the battery life; compared to the disk or the processor it seems to take hardly any power; cell phones are a different ball game, but just using less power and hence giving lower range seems doable.
Oh, ok, my bad $4600 (Russian Proton) / 2.2 = ~$2000/lb.
Yeah, they could add vitamin THC into tobacco. That would sell rather well I would think.
We aren't going to run out of oil. We're only going to run out of petrochemicals. There's always going to be oil; you can run diesel engines on vegetable oil for example.
Yes, well, cost per kg of a satellite is atleast $4600/kg (~$10,000/lb, and that's to low earth orbit which is only over the horizon for a few minutes at a time- GEO sats are visible all the time but are 3x more expensive). But you usually don't get these satellites back again, and if anything goes wrong up there, you're screwed. With Helios you can bring it down, fix it and send it back up.
The biggest problem is that it's still more or less a solar powered craft -- and solar energy just doesn't have the density to do anything useful and still be mobile.
Well, it's 1.5kw/m^2. That's more power than a 1 bar electric fire. Ok, so solar panels at the moment are at most getting to around 40-60% efficient (for lab samples, small production/expensive ones are more like 20%, cheap ones are 10% or so), but that's still quite a bit of power.
Although... maybe something like this could make a reasonable alternative to those Broadband Broadcasting Balloons (say that three times fast!), since these craft can fly at higher altitudes and make roam to areas where they may be needed more.
Yes, very probably would work. That's the point of the fuel cell; they can keep it up there 24 hours a day; previously it was coming down at night. 762 pounds of radio equipment should be plenty; provided it doesn't suck too much juice. It might even be possible to build a passive system- just bounce the radio waves off the underside of the vehicle.
Probably the lucky sod; but he didn't. That was probably IBM, way before Gates; or Visicalc, which came out before MS-DOS, and was the killer app for microcomputers.