Unfortunately, out of the manufacturing stage, mixed, ready AP doesn't really explode, it just sits there and burns. You can contain it and make it explode with a very strong container (like you can with anything flammable with an oxidizer), but the large hobby rocket motors are "bare grains". *In a house fire, they WILL NOT cause an explosion*. Having a magnesium engine in a VW is far more dangerous than these things - not only will it burn just as badly, water from the fire department will INTENSIFY the burning.
Accidents with the stuff happen, and the track record speaks for itself, people with rocket motors just don't burn down houses like fear-mongers imagine. As for malicious intent, it doesn't happen either, because the substance is really ill-suited to malicious things that people want to do.
Again, I have nothing against keeping folks safe. If I thought for a second that rocket motors were a danger in any significant way, I'd be all for this sort of thing. I've used them, and I've known a very large number of people who use them, and there just isn't any significant danger.
The people who do represent a bit more of a danger are the folks who make them themselves. That, however, is a different matter.
One of the non-legislated alternatives is NO2-based motors. Having a large, compressed canister of NO2 in a house fire is going to be worse. Even knocking it over or opening it, without any detonation, can asphyxiate you far faster than most folks realize - because it actively displaces the O2 in your blood, you're out cold incredibly fast, often before you can even leave the room. The recreational possibilities are a plus or a negative, depending on your viewpoint.
Just because you have an interest in local fire codes doens't mean that your interest in AP is going to do any good for anyone.
We're *not* talking about someone handling dangerous materials in violation of the law. We're talking about someone handling something far less dangerous than gasoline, *IN ACCORDANCE* with the law.
Since you brought up fireworks as well, I'll point out that we are not talking about fireworks. In fact, AP is pretty much useless for fireworks. The fact that you equate AP with firworks means that for all of your good intentions, your lack of knowledge probably makes all of your effort even less useless in bringing to pass something which would harm and kill.
If you want to talk about someone handling dangerous substances when they shouldn't, again, act on gasoline. 10,000 times more people are burned playing with gasoline (intentionally playing with it, not an accident) than solid rocket fuel.
If you're that big of a fire-code man, look at where the real problems are, and solve those. Don't run around like a chicken with its head cut off, getting involved in every emotional, knee-jerk situation that you can think up.
... part of the lawsuit is because the ATF has failed to classify the stuff in accordance with the procedures required by law. If they followed the law, the stuff would not be classified as an explosive, but they have (in direct conflict with procedure) said "Too bad. We're going to call it an explosive anyway."
It hasn't been replicated because once you add active guidance, a model rocket is no longer a model rocket in the US, but a military weapon - even if it has no classified or controlled systems. That means that you end up spending a long time in federal prisons if you're lucky, or a secret CIA interrogation center if you're not.
Not only would terrorists find a way to do it anyway, they probably wouldn't do it at all. It takes enough effort, time, and money that they can get far more "bang for their buck" (awful pun) with other means. You don't see them building guided missiles to fire at US embassies and bases, you see them using dumb, cheap mortars and rockets - and trucks full of cheap explosives.
Banning AP because terrorists might build a rocket is like banning $10,000 Beretta single-shot shotguns because a terrorist might choose one instead of a $100 AK knock-off.
Ammonium nitrate is more dangerous than the stuff we're talking about. Had Timmy used a Rider truck full of ammonium perchlorate, the federal building would be just fine, but he would have burned a very big hole in the street.
As far as smokeless powder, it's been quite some time since I checked, but I think that you can't have very much of it before you fall under the same requirements, although since it doesn't take a permit to buy, most folks either don't obey or are unaware of the law.
If the person with the rocket fuel goes nuts, then given the expense and limitted use of the rocket fuel, he's likely to do what any other person bent on destruction would do: Use one of the many materials that are far cheaper, more dangerous, and easier to get.
As the most obvious and non-exotic example, you can cause a lot more damage with $5 gasoline than you can with $300 worth of rocket fuel.
One of the concerns that gets the most press is that advanced hobbiests use very big motors, and enough electronics that you could easily step over into a true guided missile. Again, by the time you've invested that much time and effort, there are far cheaper, easier ways of accomplishing your task.
I'm all for being safe. I just think we should focus our energies where they do substantial good.
I dunno. It's easy to get whipped up into believing that, but don't forget that in the 1960s, we had missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, owned by a sworn enemy of the United States, on the soil of a sworn enemy of the United States, all within range of very large population centers.
Sure, there is a very real threat of terrorism right now - but most folks don't realize just how close we came to all-out nuclear war - or just how often we came that close. Considering the difference in consequences between a terrorist blowing up a building, using a "dirty bomb", or even setting off one (or a few) warheads, it really pales in comparison to the entire arsenal of Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers. We're still a lot safer than we were then.
Many high-power rocketeers that I know are more than happy to build the storage sheds. In fact, if you talk to folks who have actually gone through the process, some of the local officials and fire marshalls have been helpful, and been willing to look into variances when appropriate, some are just anal and don't want anything to do with it. In other words, it's just like any other government process! =)
If you would work to keep that position maintained, then you either have nothing but free time to waste, or don't put your energy in the right direction.
Solid rocket fuel is expensive, and the people who buy it go to great lengths to store and use it safely. People who aren't so responsible use things that are (a) far cheaper, (b) far more plentiful, and (c) far more dangerous to themselves and the community. And that's not even getting into people who *want* to cause problems.
Shoot, if you wanted to protect your community ("Please, won't someone please think of the children!"), you'd spend your time convincing people to safely store substances like gasoline with explosive vapors. You'd save at least 10,000 times more lives and homes - and that's not an exageration.
This reminds me of a conversation I had about ten years ago with a coworker. One of us brought up the new 1-gig drives that had been released. He let out a slow whistle, and with a grin on his face, said "Boy.... that is big. It would take me at least three weeks to fill that up."
Other than a few apps like Photoshop, most commonly-used things don't really work well filling a 30" screen. In our office, we've found that a pair of 19" CRTs does a marvelous job of increasing productivity, and doesn't cost nearly as much as the 30" monstrosities...
(Don't get me wrong, I'd still like a 30" Cinema display.)
Of course they oversell. If they wanted to *gaurantee* each user 6 megabits, you certainly wouldn't be paying $50/month for it.
I don't even care how much they oversell - as long as they do upgrades based on actual usage. If actual usage on their DSLAM is 10 megabits with spikes to 30, I don't care if they have 300 lines running from a single T3.
It's twice as good, so it's worth it. Don't get me wrong, a 45mbit T3 would be nice, but doubling what I have now would still be a significant improvement.
So far, I've never had a problem getting full rate from DSL or cable. Neither have any of my friends except one: They live in a neighborhood crammed with about a thousand tiny homes on 0.05 acre lots, with many of them doing huge bittorrents all day. It's a pretty worst-case scenario.
I would personally trade my current 6mbps/768kbps line for even a 1.5mbit line if it were symmetric. When rsync finds 8 gigs of new non-comrpessible data to upload to my off-site backup, 768k just doesn't cut it.
Around my neck of the woods, Qwest had abominable service and outrageous prices... until ComCast stepped in, wired up the entire city, and started kicking their trash. Within a year and a half, Qwest's prices were less than half what they were before ComCast's big move.
Putting it on your roof doesn't make sense - sure, you avoid a few thousand in tower costs, but you also cut your power generation to at most 1/4 of what you would get on a decent tower.
While power companies may be required to pay you for your excess power, most places aren't required to pay you any more than a trivial, token amount. One fellow said that his local power company charged 14 cents/kWH, but only paid him 2 cents for his power.
Usually, folks just get set up with "net metering", where any power they dump back into the grid is deducted from how much they use. At best, you never pay for power, at worst, you only pay for what you can't generate. With a large turbine, a good, windy week could zero out your electric bill for a month or two, yet you don't have to maintain the battery banks to store that excess energy (or worry about using a "dump load" on your turbine.)
If you have a reasonable amount of wind, then wind power can be far cheaper than solar, especially if you build your own like the guys at Other Power. For $2,000, they put together a wind turbine that can provide up to 4 kilowatts.
The reason it's probably *not* worth it is because you need a very tall tower to use wind generators effectively, and if you live in a city, chances are slim to none that you will get a permit to install the tower and put a generator on top of it. Not only would your neighbors complain, but the issue of it falling onto a neighbor's house is something that the city inspectors get uptight about.
The only folks I know who have received permits to install a wind generator live in fairly rural areas - in which case, yes, it's well worth their while.
I don't have specifics for that chip, but I would guess 100-150 watts. In both performance-per-cycle and performance-per-watt, it far outstrips using a general-purpose CPU.
20x-40x the performance at 1x-3x the power usage is pretty good.
1) While virtualization is immensely useful to a small number of people, it is virtually useless to most end-users. 2) While DDR2 offers greatly increased bandwidth, it does so at the expense of latency, and in many common applications, doesn't really perform much (if any) better than the 128-bit DDR memory of the socket 939 Opterons did.
When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible", there aren't really any benefits to *most* end users, and if there aren't any benefits, why would they upgrade?
The Athlon64/Opteron chips were popular because they were innovative in useful ways, which gave the end user something more for his money. The AM2 hasn't kept with that tradition.
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Nuclear, coal, natural gas, even peat if we have to. And when all of those run out, solar and wind.
(The sarcasm may be too subtle for some folks.)
They are? Ever see what it takes to cremate a body?
Unfortunately, out of the manufacturing stage, mixed, ready AP doesn't really explode, it just sits there and burns. You can contain it and make it explode with a very strong container (like you can with anything flammable with an oxidizer), but the large hobby rocket motors are "bare grains". *In a house fire, they WILL NOT cause an explosion*. Having a magnesium engine in a VW is far more dangerous than these things - not only will it burn just as badly, water from the fire department will INTENSIFY the burning.
Accidents with the stuff happen, and the track record speaks for itself, people with rocket motors just don't burn down houses like fear-mongers imagine. As for malicious intent, it doesn't happen either, because the substance is really ill-suited to malicious things that people want to do.
Again, I have nothing against keeping folks safe. If I thought for a second that rocket motors were a danger in any significant way, I'd be all for this sort of thing. I've used them, and I've known a very large number of people who use them, and there just isn't any significant danger.
The people who do represent a bit more of a danger are the folks who make them themselves. That, however, is a different matter.
One of the non-legislated alternatives is NO2-based motors. Having a large, compressed canister of NO2 in a house fire is going to be worse. Even knocking it over or opening it, without any detonation, can asphyxiate you far faster than most folks realize - because it actively displaces the O2 in your blood, you're out cold incredibly fast, often before you can even leave the room. The recreational possibilities are a plus or a negative, depending on your viewpoint.
Just because you have an interest in local fire codes doens't mean that your interest in AP is going to do any good for anyone.
We're *not* talking about someone handling dangerous materials in violation of the law. We're talking about someone handling something far less dangerous than gasoline, *IN ACCORDANCE* with the law.
Since you brought up fireworks as well, I'll point out that we are not talking about fireworks. In fact, AP is pretty much useless for fireworks. The fact that you equate AP with firworks means that for all of your good intentions, your lack of knowledge probably makes all of your effort even less useless in bringing to pass something which would harm and kill.
If you want to talk about someone handling dangerous substances when they shouldn't, again, act on gasoline. 10,000 times more people are burned playing with gasoline (intentionally playing with it, not an accident) than solid rocket fuel.
If you're that big of a fire-code man, look at where the real problems are, and solve those. Don't run around like a chicken with its head cut off, getting involved in every emotional, knee-jerk situation that you can think up.
It hasn't been replicated because once you add active guidance, a model rocket is no longer a model rocket in the US, but a military weapon - even if it has no classified or controlled systems. That means that you end up spending a long time in federal prisons if you're lucky, or a secret CIA interrogation center if you're not.
Not only would terrorists find a way to do it anyway, they probably wouldn't do it at all. It takes enough effort, time, and money that they can get far more "bang for their buck" (awful pun) with other means. You don't see them building guided missiles to fire at US embassies and bases, you see them using dumb, cheap mortars and rockets - and trucks full of cheap explosives.
Banning AP because terrorists might build a rocket is like banning $10,000 Beretta single-shot shotguns because a terrorist might choose one instead of a $100 AK knock-off.
Ammonium nitrate is more dangerous than the stuff we're talking about. Had Timmy used a Rider truck full of ammonium perchlorate, the federal building would be just fine, but he would have burned a very big hole in the street.
As far as smokeless powder, it's been quite some time since I checked, but I think that you can't have very much of it before you fall under the same requirements, although since it doesn't take a permit to buy, most folks either don't obey or are unaware of the law.
steve
If the person with the rocket fuel goes nuts, then given the expense and limitted use of the rocket fuel, he's likely to do what any other person bent on destruction would do: Use one of the many materials that are far cheaper, more dangerous, and easier to get.
As the most obvious and non-exotic example, you can cause a lot more damage with $5 gasoline than you can with $300 worth of rocket fuel.
One of the concerns that gets the most press is that advanced hobbiests use very big motors, and enough electronics that you could easily step over into a true guided missile. Again, by the time you've invested that much time and effort, there are far cheaper, easier ways of accomplishing your task.
I'm all for being safe. I just think we should focus our energies where they do substantial good.
I dunno. It's easy to get whipped up into believing that, but don't forget that in the 1960s, we had missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, owned by a sworn enemy of the United States, on the soil of a sworn enemy of the United States, all within range of very large population centers.
Sure, there is a very real threat of terrorism right now - but most folks don't realize just how close we came to all-out nuclear war - or just how often we came that close. Considering the difference in consequences between a terrorist blowing up a building, using a "dirty bomb", or even setting off one (or a few) warheads, it really pales in comparison to the entire arsenal of Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers. We're still a lot safer than we were then.
steve
Many high-power rocketeers that I know are more than happy to build the storage sheds. In fact, if you talk to folks who have actually gone through the process, some of the local officials and fire marshalls have been helpful, and been willing to look into variances when appropriate, some are just anal and don't want anything to do with it. In other words, it's just like any other government process! =)
steve
If you would work to keep that position maintained, then you either have nothing but free time to waste, or don't put your energy in the right direction.
Solid rocket fuel is expensive, and the people who buy it go to great lengths to store and use it safely. People who aren't so responsible use things that are (a) far cheaper, (b) far more plentiful, and (c) far more dangerous to themselves and the community. And that's not even getting into people who *want* to cause problems.
Shoot, if you wanted to protect your community ("Please, won't someone please think of the children!"), you'd spend your time convincing people to safely store substances like gasoline with explosive vapors. You'd save at least 10,000 times more lives and homes - and that's not an exageration.
steve
This reminds me of a conversation I had about ten years ago with a coworker. One of us brought up the new 1-gig drives that had been released. He let out a slow whistle, and with a grin on his face, said "Boy.... that is big. It would take me at least three weeks to fill that up."
Other than a few apps like Photoshop, most commonly-used things don't really work well filling a 30" screen. In our office, we've found that a pair of 19" CRTs does a marvelous job of increasing productivity, and doesn't cost nearly as much as the 30" monstrosities...
(Don't get me wrong, I'd still like a 30" Cinema display.)
steve
Of course they oversell. If they wanted to *gaurantee* each user 6 megabits, you certainly wouldn't be paying $50/month for it.
I don't even care how much they oversell - as long as they do upgrades based on actual usage. If actual usage on their DSLAM is 10 megabits with spikes to 30, I don't care if they have 300 lines running from a single T3.
steve
It's twice as good, so it's worth it. Don't get me wrong, a 45mbit T3 would be nice, but doubling what I have now would still be a significant improvement.
So far, I've never had a problem getting full rate from DSL or cable. Neither have any of my friends except one: They live in a neighborhood crammed with about a thousand tiny homes on 0.05 acre lots, with many of them doing huge bittorrents all day. It's a pretty worst-case scenario.
I would personally trade my current 6mbps/768kbps line for even a 1.5mbit line if it were symmetric. When rsync finds 8 gigs of new non-comrpessible data to upload to my off-site backup, 768k just doesn't cut it.
Around my neck of the woods, Qwest had abominable service and outrageous prices... until ComCast stepped in, wired up the entire city, and started kicking their trash. Within a year and a half, Qwest's prices were less than half what they were before ComCast's big move.
That's a pretty puny unit. 400 watt max output? That means that in more reasonable winds (say, 10mph), you'd be lucky to get 25 watts.
steve
Putting it on your roof doesn't make sense - sure, you avoid a few thousand in tower costs, but you also cut your power generation to at most 1/4 of what you would get on a decent tower.
While power companies may be required to pay you for your excess power, most places aren't required to pay you any more than a trivial, token amount. One fellow said that his local power company charged 14 cents/kWH, but only paid him 2 cents for his power.
Usually, folks just get set up with "net metering", where any power they dump back into the grid is deducted from how much they use. At best, you never pay for power, at worst, you only pay for what you can't generate. With a large turbine, a good, windy week could zero out your electric bill for a month or two, yet you don't have to maintain the battery banks to store that excess energy (or worry about using a "dump load" on your turbine.)
steve
If you have a reasonable amount of wind, then wind power can be far cheaper than solar, especially if you build your own like the guys at Other Power. For $2,000, they put together a wind turbine that can provide up to 4 kilowatts.
The reason it's probably *not* worth it is because you need a very tall tower to use wind generators effectively, and if you live in a city, chances are slim to none that you will get a permit to install the tower and put a generator on top of it. Not only would your neighbors complain, but the issue of it falling onto a neighbor's house is something that the city inspectors get uptight about.
The only folks I know who have received permits to install a wind generator live in fairly rural areas - in which case, yes, it's well worth their while.
I don't have specifics for that chip, but I would guess 100-150 watts. In both performance-per-cycle and performance-per-watt, it far outstrips using a general-purpose CPU.
20x-40x the performance at 1x-3x the power usage is pretty good.
steve
Does that mean that you really only get three cores?
(Q3's "quad damage" really only tripled the damage, if I recall.)
1) While virtualization is immensely useful to a small number of people, it is virtually useless to most end-users.
2) While DDR2 offers greatly increased bandwidth, it does so at the expense of latency, and in many common applications, doesn't really perform much (if any) better than the 128-bit DDR memory of the socket 939 Opterons did.
When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible", there aren't really any benefits to *most* end users, and if there aren't any benefits, why would they upgrade?
The Athlon64/Opteron chips were popular because they were innovative in useful ways, which gave the end user something more for his money. The AM2 hasn't kept with that tradition.
steve