One thing that I never understood was how you can tell altitude from a barometer. Wouldn't the weather changing make it completely inaccurate? I would imagine that air pressure changes fairly dramatically depending on the weather. How can it ever be remotely accurate? Or are weather-related pressure changes actually pretty minor as a percentage of average air pressure?
A quick google search turns up a little information that answers your questions. Changes in weather do cause large fluctuations in what a barometric altimeter reads (>100 feet). Pilots relying on barometric altimeters must regularly recalibrate against readings on the ground.
First of all, a 10,000 Lb (weight) B43 hydrogen bomb has a yield of a megaton (using TNT as the basis).
The 2100 Lb B43 is no longer in the US arsenal, having been replaced by the 2400 lb B83. Perhaps you have the weight confused with the 10,000 lb B41, which had a much higher yield.
However, the M110 General Purpose conventional bomb, weighing 10,000Kg or about 11 tons (US), is the heaviest bomb currently in the American conventional arsenal and it yields no more than 3 tons or so.
Firstly, I can find no evidence of a M110 bomb existing, other than one-line entries in copy/pasted lists on free hosting sites.
Secondly, the only aircraft capable of lifting and dropping a 7.5 ton Daisy Cutter is a C-130 (a B-52H's bomb racks aren't built to hold anything that big). This is enough to make me doubt the existance of a 11 ton bomb, which would require aircraft specially modified to handle it.
Ultra small nuclear weapons, like a W54 backpack nuke yielding about 22 tons, are about as close as you'll get to a bomb that yields 20 tons.
On this point, you're quite right. Getting a 20 ton yield out of conventional explosives is going to require a big bomb.
I'm sorry? What's the connection between the amount of storage on the device and the ability to read that storage from a long distance?
Because a device so small that it can only hold a few hundred bytes of information is unlikely to have the power to transmit a radio signal that can be detected from low earth orbit.
7 qubits!?!? Sheesh, Noah's Ark was 300 qubits long, by 50 wide, by 30 high. And seven is supposed to be impressive thousands of years later?
Seeing as Noah could still only count to two using the Ark, using 7 qubits to do basic math is impressive.
(Captain Nitpick is more than aware of the difference between a cubit and a qubit. Cubits have the remarkable property that one can use them to calculate =3)
Re:I've got an even better idea
on
Lunar Lasers
·
· Score: 1
Why not spend $50,000,000,000 on solar panels for use on Earth. This proposal has a number of cool features:
You don't have to send lots of equipment up to the moon
You don't have the hassle of building microwave transmitters and receivers to transmit the energy to the Earth
They couldn't easily be hijacked to make a nasty weapon
The equipment would be easy to service. You wouldn't need regular flights carrying crews to the moon.
Because it has a number of sucky features:
You have to secure lots and lots and lots of land to put the solar panels on. There goes all your money.
Ecosystem destruction. What, you thought all of the solar panels could be stuck in the Sahara? The problem of distributing power from one location on Earth to all others isn't any easier than beaming it back from the moon.
Reduced power generation. The Earth has a thick atmosphere with clouds of water vapor floating around in it. The moon effectively has no atmosphere to block incoming light. A power transmission beam can be tuned for minimal absorption by the atmosphere.
Increased service.
On the moon, you've got two factors causing maintenance. 1. the twice-monthly transition between hot and producing power and cold and not producing power. 2. General "wear" of the solar panels over their lifetimes.
On earth, you've still got those two problems, but you also have precipitation, a corrosive atmosphere, natural disasters, war, general human stupidity, and tiny mammals that decide that the control box is a great place to build a nest.
I think Space Balls had one of the more astute observations when it comes to movies...
Ê
it was the scene where Bill Pullman meets Yogurt in the underground desert complex and he's showing off all the SpaceBalls stuff..."Moychendising, Moychendising, Moychendising!"
I'm still waiting for Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money
Slashdot seems to crash a lot ?? What OS / Browser are you using? I have been "member" of/. for years ID 7110 and I can't remember having a slashdot Crash.
That's not a "Slashdot made my browser crash" type of crash that corky6921 is referring to. It's a "!#%#!^ing Slashdot is down AGAIN!#?%" crash. Slashdot's servers go down far too frequently, although their stability seems to have improved somewhat.
Interesting. I'm still in favor of redundancy, though, at least in the data center. Sure, two power supplies means twice as many power supply failures, and twice as much power supply maintenance, but a single power supply failure doesn't result in a "catastrophic" system outage. And unless you're twice as unlucky[1], the chances of two power supplies failing at once are less than the chances of one power supply failing at once.
As long as either of the two engines can keep the craft airborne (e.g., the Fairchild A-10 [nandotimes.com]), I'd imagine the same "n points of failure" principle would apply to skycars as well.
Consider two aircraft. One has two engines, and either engine is capable of sustaining flight independently. The other has three engines, and requires two to stay airborne. The odds of two engines failing simultaneously on the three engine aircraft are much higher than the odds of both engines on the twin-engine aircraft failing. (See RISKS 8.16) The odds of an engine failing on a single-engine aircraft are even lower, but if it happens, the aircraft is making an unscheduled landing.
With eight engines, and a minimum of four (one in each of four nacelles) needed to keep a SkyCar airborne, and having so many means that the odds of one failing is increased greatly. I doubt the FAA is going to knowingly let anybody fly one of these things around with an engine or two non-functional.
Having eight engines also increases the cost and complexity of maintenance, which increases one of the biggest risk factors for catastrophic failure: improper maintenance. If one engine fails due to poor maintenance, the odds of the other engines failing due to the same are increased. Joe "how do you change the oil?" Blow isn't likely to take maintenance seriously, and I doubt that any amount of redundancy is going to keep him safely in the air.
(Of course, the probability of Skycars actually falling out of the sky depends greatly on the probability of Moeller actually getting them airworthy enough to fly long enough to experience a failure.)
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Read the history of the Manhatten Project. The FBI actually succeeded in its goal of not allowing a single leak of information out of the project [1].
You're kidding, right? Anyone who's read Feynman's book on the subject would know that the security was a joke. Fences with holes in them, inattentive guards, insecure safes, and poor whistleblowing policies were all part of the Manhattan Project's "security". Secondly, the security was handled by the military, not the FBI.
It was the lack of published information on atomic research in the US in 1940 and 1941 that told Kurchatov that something was "up"
Neat trick, since the Manhattan Project started in 1942. The absence of public information did tip off Kurchatov, but keeping your people from publishing in journals isn't hard. It's keeping spies from passing secrets to a foreign agent outside a diner 50 miles from the secure facility that presents a problem.
[1] OK, the Soviet Union had spies inside the project before it started, but that doesn't count!
David Greenglass, the mole who provided many of the secrets the Russians obtained from the Manhattan Project (and who served as a prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs), wasn't assigned to the project until 1944. There were of course other spies, and infiltrating before a project starts most definitely does count, but I felt like going after the factual error.
Why do hardware makers insist on using marketroid-designed names? I'm going to stay with PCI until somebody comes up with a new type of bus: the Magic Bus.
For example, the compound XeF6, xenon hexafloride. What it's good for? Dunno. Still doesn't change the fact it exists.)
Well, from what google can find, xenon hexafluoride is useful for two things. Serving as something for chemists to talk about, and making quartz detonate.
The idea of a free (libre), Unix-oid system is and was the core of
the GNU project. RMS was hacking on this before the Linux kernel was a gleam in Linus's eye - since 1984, for crying out loud.
Just because someone had an idea first, and started working on it first, does not necessarily mean they should get the credit for doing it first. GNU got most of the way there, but then dropped the ball on the kernel.
Linus didn't "borrow" from the GNU project. He fit the last piece into a puzzle that RMS and the GNU Project had been working on for over a decade. RMS would like this to be known and understood
The GNU project had a bunch of pieces of an OS lying around without a kernel. Linus (and the group that popped up around him), took those pieces, and combined them with a working kernel and a bunch of other software from other places to produce an actual functioning operating system. Many manufacturers take parts from many other sources and assemble them into products, but you don't see a IBM/Motorola/Power Mac G4. Apple gets to name the whole system, because Apple is the one that actually assembles everything into a working package. If you build your own x86 machine from parts, you can call it the Frobnitz if you want, and Intel isn't going to try to get you to call it the Intel/Frobnitz just because they made a few important pieces of it.
Either way, his request hardly makes his a raving loon.
I never said he was a raving loon, and at least on this issue, don't think he is (raving maybe, but not a loon). I just think his way of trying to get recognition for his work is clumsy, exclusionary, and ultimately too late. If RMS wanted people to think of Linux as being a kernel for the GNU project, rather than GNU being the support software for Linux, he should have acted sooner, and chosen a name that sounds better than 'guh-new lih-nucks' for the talking heads on CNBC to say.(Your pronunciation may vary)
(Does anybody else think slashdot should drop the html formatted text of the parent comment into the comment box, wrapped inside a <blockquote>?)
Well if someone who did a small percentage of the work is going to name an OS after himself,
Linus did not name it after himself. He originally released it as Freax, but the FTP site admin didn't like that, and changed it to Linux. The name stuck.
(That's how I heard it, anyway)
RMS didn't name an OS after himself that he based on other people's work.
No, but he did try to name one that was not his after his pet project that other people based on his, and other people's work. No matter how much was borrowed from GNU (and borrowing is encouraged), it simply is not his project to name. If RMS wanted the GNU project's contributions to be acknowledged in the name, he should have required it in the license. Otherwise, I'm going to continue calling it the reasonably catchy 'Linux', rather than the awkward 'GNU/Linux'.
Being Slashdot, I'm quite disappointed that no one saw the obvious mathematical glitch in this statement. A 3" CD should be quite a bit more than 185MB, because a 5" CD is 650MB. 3" being 60% of 5", no less than 390MB should be expected. But the pigs creating this "media" have diliberately hampered the storage capacity of this media.
Actually, a standard CD is roughly 4 3/4 inches. Thus, the uncrackable copy prevention technology requires about an additional 20 megabytes of space. Perhaps an encoded speech from Jack Valenti?
Re:Mob developed software - hmmmm...
on
Mob Software
·
· Score: 1
"I will give you a patch you cannot refuse"
Is this something like the proposals to use the IIS security holes to patch the IIS security holes?
I seem to recall the SR-71 Blackbird as being considered untouchable...until it was shot down.
As another poster has already pointed out, it was a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers that was famously shot down over the USSR. But I felt like pointing out that no SR-71 has been shot down.
Not that they didn't try. In 1981 it was reported that there had been over 1000 missile launches against the Blackbird. None successful. And the other guys would be more than happy to tell us that they managed to shoot down one, so it's unlikely to be some kind of closely guarded secret.
You'd be surprised.. I posted to the article about the world's top computers, noting that the top four are at.mil installations doing "energy research", and cracked that maybe they're working on 90 MPG engines or cold fusion, and two people let me know that nuclear simulations are energy research too. Sadly, one thing this medium doesn't convey so well is the subtleties of sarcasm, something which all true geeks are quite well-versed in.
(I am one of those "two people")
The problem is that with all the idiots around here, unless you're being blatantly sarcastic, you tend to blend in with the people who just don't get it. In text, sarcasm is barely distinguishable from stupidity.
And yes, I've seen enough idiotic posts here to be able to assume that a person who claims to think government "energy research" is about cold fusion may actually believe it. In asking where the ISS is located, CSC is a bit more obvious.
The seller is also selling his collection of "HARRY POTTER AUDIO CASSETTES" and some dolls. Most of his other items are under $20. This is quite a leap for this guy.
I saw this thing on Headline News this morning before it hit Slashdot. (Not that they're that trustworthy, but it's better evidence than just being on eBay)
(It didn't look quite as beat up on camera, but then, the lighting was different)
What I found interesting is that they say the top four computers are at.gov research facilities, doing "energy research" (90 MPG engines? Cold Fusion? heh)
Simulating nuclear weapons also falls under "energy research". And it also most certainly takes that kind of computing power. Just thought you should know.
Slashdot Mirror
Bob Ross is the only person I can picture playing Tom Bombadil. Unfortunately, he has been dead for quite some time.
A quick google search turns up a little information that answers your questions. Changes in weather do cause large fluctuations in what a barometric altimeter reads (>100 feet). Pilots relying on barometric altimeters must regularly recalibrate against readings on the ground.
The 2100 Lb B43 is no longer in the US arsenal, having been replaced by the 2400 lb B83. Perhaps you have the weight confused with the 10,000 lb B41, which had a much higher yield.
Firstly, I can find no evidence of a M110 bomb existing, other than one-line entries in copy/pasted lists on free hosting sites.
Secondly, the only aircraft capable of lifting and dropping a 7.5 ton Daisy Cutter is a C-130 (a B-52H's bomb racks aren't built to hold anything that big). This is enough to make me doubt the existance of a 11 ton bomb, which would require aircraft specially modified to handle it.
On this point, you're quite right. Getting a 20 ton yield out of conventional explosives is going to require a big bomb.
Because a device so small that it can only hold a few hundred bytes of information is unlikely to have the power to transmit a radio signal that can be detected from low earth orbit.
Seeing as Noah could still only count to two using the Ark, using 7 qubits to do basic math is impressive.
(Captain Nitpick is more than aware of the difference between a cubit and a qubit. Cubits have the remarkable property that one can use them to calculate =3)
Because it has a number of sucky features:
On the moon, you've got two factors causing maintenance. 1. the twice-monthly transition between hot and producing power and cold and not producing power. 2. General "wear" of the solar panels over their lifetimes.
On earth, you've still got those two problems, but you also have precipitation, a corrosive atmosphere, natural disasters, war, general human stupidity, and tiny mammals that decide that the control box is a great place to build a nest.
I'm still waiting for Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money
For the video camera you've rigged to point at people standing at the front door? My uncle did that in his new house, it's spiffy.
That's not a "Slashdot made my browser crash" type of crash that corky6921 is referring to. It's a "!#%#!^ing Slashdot is down AGAIN!#?%" crash. Slashdot's servers go down far too frequently, although their stability seems to have improved somewhat.
Can I get a key to your house if I move? I'd rather not have to kick in the door just to get a quick puff.
(Captain Nitpick does not actually smoke.)
Consider two aircraft. One has two engines, and either engine is capable of sustaining flight independently. The other has three engines, and requires two to stay airborne. The odds of two engines failing simultaneously on the three engine aircraft are much higher than the odds of both engines on the twin-engine aircraft failing. (See RISKS 8.16) The odds of an engine failing on a single-engine aircraft are even lower, but if it happens, the aircraft is making an unscheduled landing.
With eight engines, and a minimum of four (one in each of four nacelles) needed to keep a SkyCar airborne, and having so many means that the odds of one failing is increased greatly. I doubt the FAA is going to knowingly let anybody fly one of these things around with an engine or two non-functional.
Having eight engines also increases the cost and complexity of maintenance, which increases one of the biggest risk factors for catastrophic failure: improper maintenance. If one engine fails due to poor maintenance, the odds of the other engines failing due to the same are increased. Joe "how do you change the oil?" Blow isn't likely to take maintenance seriously, and I doubt that any amount of redundancy is going to keep him safely in the air.
(Of course, the probability of Skycars actually falling out of the sky depends greatly on the probability of Moeller actually getting them airworthy enough to fly long enough to experience a failure.)
airplane rule . n.
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.
You're kidding, right? Anyone who's read Feynman's book on the subject would know that the security was a joke. Fences with holes in them, inattentive guards, insecure safes, and poor whistleblowing policies were all part of the Manhattan Project's "security". Secondly, the security was handled by the military, not the FBI.
Neat trick, since the Manhattan Project started in 1942. The absence of public information did tip off Kurchatov, but keeping your people from publishing in journals isn't hard. It's keeping spies from passing secrets to a foreign agent outside a diner 50 miles from the secure facility that presents a problem.
David Greenglass, the mole who provided many of the secrets the Russians obtained from the Manhattan Project (and who served as a prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs), wasn't assigned to the project until 1944. There were of course other spies, and infiltrating before a project starts most definitely does count, but I felt like going after the factual error.
Just so long as it doesn't come with Lily Tomlin or those annoying kids.
Well, from what google can find, xenon hexafluoride is useful for two things. Serving as something for chemists to talk about, and making quartz detonate .
Just because someone had an idea first, and started working on it first, does not necessarily mean they should get the credit for doing it first. GNU got most of the way there, but then dropped the ball on the kernel.
The GNU project had a bunch of pieces of an OS lying around without a kernel. Linus (and the group that popped up around him), took those pieces, and combined them with a working kernel and a bunch of other software from other places to produce an actual functioning operating system. Many manufacturers take parts from many other sources and assemble them into products, but you don't see a IBM/Motorola/Power Mac G4. Apple gets to name the whole system, because Apple is the one that actually assembles everything into a working package. If you build your own x86 machine from parts, you can call it the Frobnitz if you want, and Intel isn't going to try to get you to call it the Intel/Frobnitz just because they made a few important pieces of it.
I never said he was a raving loon, and at least on this issue, don't think he is (raving maybe, but not a loon). I just think his way of trying to get recognition for his work is clumsy, exclusionary, and ultimately too late. If RMS wanted people to think of Linux as being a kernel for the GNU project, rather than GNU being the support software for Linux, he should have acted sooner, and chosen a name that sounds better than 'guh-new lih-nucks' for the talking heads on CNBC to say.(Your pronunciation may vary)
(Does anybody else think slashdot should drop the html formatted text of the parent comment into the comment box, wrapped inside a <blockquote>?)Linus did not name it after himself. He originally released it as Freax, but the FTP site admin didn't like that, and changed it to Linux. The name stuck.
(That's how I heard it, anyway)
No, but he did try to name one that was not his after his pet project that other people based on his, and other people's work. No matter how much was borrowed from GNU (and borrowing is encouraged), it simply is not his project to name. If RMS wanted the GNU project's contributions to be acknowledged in the name, he should have required it in the license. Otherwise, I'm going to continue calling it the reasonably catchy 'Linux', rather than the awkward 'GNU/Linux'.
This is just the old truism. Even numbered Trek films don't suck.
I think using it to run a spell/grammar checker on all slashdot articles and comments prior to posting would be a laudable goal.
Actually, a standard CD is roughly 4 3/4 inches. Thus, the uncrackable copy prevention technology requires about an additional 20 megabytes of space. Perhaps an encoded speech from Jack Valenti?
Is this something like the proposals to use the IIS security holes to patch the IIS security holes?
As another poster has already pointed out, it was a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers that was famously shot down over the USSR. But I felt like pointing out that no SR-71 has been shot down.
Not that they didn't try. In 1981 it was reported that there had been over 1000 missile launches against the Blackbird. None successful. And the other guys would be more than happy to tell us that they managed to shoot down one, so it's unlikely to be some kind of closely guarded secret.
(I am one of those "two people")
The problem is that with all the idiots around here, unless you're being blatantly sarcastic, you tend to blend in with the people who just don't get it. In text, sarcasm is barely distinguishable from stupidity.
And yes, I've seen enough idiotic posts here to be able to assume that a person who claims to think government "energy research" is about cold fusion may actually believe it. In asking where the ISS is located, CSC is a bit more obvious.
(What's an average nitpicker to do? Help!)
I saw this thing on Headline News this morning before it hit Slashdot. (Not that they're that trustworthy, but it's better evidence than just being on eBay)
(It didn't look quite as beat up on camera, but then, the lighting was different)
Simulating nuclear weapons also falls under "energy research". And it also most certainly takes that kind of computing power. Just thought you should know.