No, Bush is the guy who hires the Star Wars guy to run NASA, who then converts NASA into yet another Star Wars boondoggle.
Which is Bush's responsibility. That is, if anyone expected Bush to be responsible for anything.
You Republicans are really sad, like dogs chasing your own tails. Bush is your messiah, until his government screws everything up, and then he's just this guy, y'know?
You should stop voting for president. You should just turn out to vote for propaganda catapults. Oh, and Cheney. Nice job with that bastard, who actually is responsible for all this catastrophe, including telling Bush they'd pull it off. And, with the help of doubletalking Republicans like you, they're nearly done with just that.
You people owe us a huge (and expensive) apology. Not more of your lip, posing as if you knew anything about government except how to wreck it.
I couldn't help but notice that Bush can spend $million of our money every 13 minutes or less in Iraq, but expects NASA, our program that is most universally respected and admired around the world, to get free help in teaching our young people how to do it when they get their chance.
No, Anonymous illiterate Coward, I didn't deny that it could happen, I just pointed out the completely logical reason why I was skeptical. There is also plenty of evidence that some pilots fly drunk, and that some invent excuses blaming others for their bad inflight performance (also guessable logically). And on evidence, I'm perfectly willing to accept that blinding does happen. But that doesn't mean that we should just ban the lasers, or use a few incidents as a pretext for shaking down anyone who looks "suspiciously like they might have a laser".
I didn't claim any aviation experience. But you clearly shouldn't be practicing logic without a license.
Something must be done, but a blanket ban as pretext for frisking anyone the cops "think has a laser" is not what should be done. Unless you just like your government reactionary and your cops arbitrarily powerful, but your pilots still at risk of blinding by the jerks this approach won't stop at all.
The sovereign immunity protecting any state, whether the Feds, a geographically different state, or one's own, is tyranny. The part of the Constitution that claims it as some kind of protected right is wrong, and should be repealed. There is no basis whatsoever for state people having more rights than civilians. Even the name explains that it's merely a contrived privilege retained from some archaic "divine right of kings" era.
It seems from that report that it "blinds" them more by the surprise of a sudden bright light (briefly) in the cockpit than because the laser actually hits their eyes. The story we're getting is exaggerating by implication.
There is also already a $30 fine and jailtime for lasering a plane. So the question is one of enforcement. The "frisk anyone because they're suspected of having a laser" isn't going to do anything to catch the tiny fraction of people abusing these lasers with planes, so it's not going to help enforcement.
What it is going to do is give the cops a pretext to frisk people who the usual excuses don't work on: they're going to frisk geeks, who don't meet the descriptions cops usually keeep handy for frisking people they want to intimidate, which are usually poorer and rougher looking characters. A judge might not believe the geek was suspected of having a knife, but they might believe they were suspected of having a laser.
There is clearly a need for enforcing the existing laws prohibiting lasering planes. This law doesn't actually do that, but it does give the police much broader arbitary powers and clamp down on many thousands of people for the crimes of maybe a few dozen at most. That sounds like an even bigger problem than a few blinded pilots a year, though neither are acceptable.
Well, this is indeed about planes, as that is what the Australian government is invoking to justify it.
But as for using it on cars, which is a much more plausible abuse, I'd make it just as illegal as throwing battery acid between open windows in cars already is, which it probably is - the law probably doesn't specify what substance is thrown between the cars, but rather the effects on the other driver. Throw a few people trying it in jail, make a big stink about it on TV, and you won't see it happen again (any more than people throw battery acid).
No new laws, and no collective punishment of millions of people because a few dozen are criminals.
Have pilots really been blinded by lasers pointed from the ground? Because the pointer can't get within a thousand feed of a plane, and actually even more at the angles that can reach over the plane's body and into the pilot's windows. At that distance, these laser pointers' beams are spread out pretty wide, so the person pointing them can possibly see the dot from that far away. So the brightness on the tiny fraction of that dot's area that actually falls on the pilot's eye is pretty small. Even more problematic is that your hand shakes. It might be unnoticeable at close range, but tiny angular deflections at the base of an angle extending a quarter mile or more to a plane makes the dot wiggle all over the place. It's hard to aim the laser even close enough to stay anywhere on the whole plane, let alone through the refracting windows and into a pilot's eye, 1/8" across.
It just seem so unlikely. Is there any proven examples of this happening, or is it just paranoia, and maybe totally unrelated pilot errors they're conveniently blaming on something no one else saw, someone impossible to catch if they did exist?
No, I'm not glad that the tyrannical doctrine of Soverign Immunity is at all dignified, validated, or upheld as a basis for law:
Sovereign immunity, or crown immunity, is a type of immunity that in common law jurisdictions traces its origins from early English law. Generally speaking it is the doctrine that the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution; hence the saying, the king (or queen) can do no wrong.
I bet that kind of defense will become increasingly popular as the current president and his regime gradually lose the secrecy of their many crimes they've spent so much time and energy (and our money) to maintain.
So no, I'm not glad that some tiny copyright rule is dead, leaving intact the rest of the ridiculous regime of artificial government monopolies on imaginary property. Since it comes at the cost of treating the state as an unlimited tyranny, not as composed of laws creating limited powers subservient and accountable to the people.
One advantage of security as infrastructure rather than as products is that infrastructure is the foundation of a service, not just something bolted on afterwards.
The biggest problem with security is that it's added afterwards as a "deluxe feature", rather than integrated with every design and implementation detail. Adding security afterwards means always catching up with the original insecure condition. It means creating an insecure system that the bad guys like, then fighting your own system along with the bad guys while you labor to secure it.
But the "built-in" tech shouldn't become completely invisible. The bundles should be transparent, not closed and opaque. Because nothing has a higher risk of insecurity than something unknown that you can't inspect. And no matter how well a vendor inspects their own secure component, if it's properly secured no extra scrutiny makes it less secure, only more. Leaving it transparent, visible only when you inspect it, is the best, safest tech.
'The timetable is aggressive,' he said, but now there is a sense of urgency behind the program
After 7 years bleeding us all dry, making us more endangered, lying to us, wasting our time and squandering our advantages against our many real enemies, suddenly Homeland Security has "a sense of urgency"?
They're just going to spend as much money as they possibly can in the last 8 months Bush/Cheney control the Executive, all sent to their cronies, grabbing more power and cutting off as much communications inside the government as they can. They're going to botch this huge job to screw over the government's ability to even connect to the Internet, and the public's ability to connect to it, so the next administration will be locked out when it tries to govern the Bush crony empire that's returned to the private sector for their great reward.
Why should the last 8 months of Bush/Cheney be any different from the first 88 months?
Do you mean "early in the 21st Century"? Because even on Star Trek TNG, incorrectly predicting the past != correctly predicting the future. Even in the TV Show at the Edge of Being Entertaining.
Those USGS maps would be even cooler if they were just a layer in Google Maps or Google Earth. Then I could correlate them to all kinds of other local data, share them with other people, insert 3D buildings designed to handle the shocks...
While we both wait for someone informed to explain how we can or cannot currently fashion superconducting materials into transistors, we can speculated from an informed theoretical perspective:).
The answer to the problem you pose (other than how the device's physical chemistry actually makes a supersemiconductor) is just to cool the part that much lower than its superconducting point. The energy is still lost to the extra heat from imperfect resistance, and multiplied by the energy consumed in recooling the heated material. But at the extra energy cost, the material should still stay colder than the superconducting point, and continue to work. Superconduction is a nonlinear system, so we can win by getting below the threshold even though it continues to cost us to stay there.
I also note that infinite resistance is indeed physically possible, by introducing a vacuum. If these "supertransistors" are low voltage enough (which superconductors should make easy), small enough, perhaps a micromechanical (and nanovoltage) supertransistor could physically move between superconductor contact and vacuum insulator, depending on whether some electrons are sitting on its base/gate lead. There's a lot of engineering (and probably some science, too) before such a device could work. But we make do with less than perfect conventional transistors with conventional conductors and semiconductors, and still get well-formed 1s and 0s out of them (to which your reading this post attests:).
As the other reply to your message said, I'm not talking about upsetting the ecosystem in the arctic. I'm talking about melting the ice supporting the delicate machinery.
FWIW, the "environmentalist mottoes" are just fine. We are heating the planet, by stopping its natural cooling radiation with our thickened Greenhouse atmosphere. The same way I "warm up" by putting on a coat, even if the coat isn't that warm to start with. In fact we can directly heat the planet, and of course we do, though the effects of extra insulation increasing our retention of all the vast incoming sunlight are greater than the effects of the extra heat we're insulating.
You're also not really right about the damage that the local heating can do. Of course all heating is "heat dissipation": that's simple thermodynamics, so all heating of any kind is just moving energy from one place to another, not "creating" it. Powering equipment in a sensitive frozen place that's already hovering near a tipping point can cause a lot more damage than you imply. All the phenomena we're talking about are nonlinear phase changes (even the superconducting, for thematic consistency). Some ice might be safely stuck in one attractor cycle, never rising above melting, but coming very close. Then the extra heat puts it over the edge, which melts water down through moulins, which lubricates the underside of the glacier, which lets gravity pull it faster and harder against the rock it sits on, which helps melt it more, also perhaps sliding it into nearby warmer water it used to sit away from. A little new energy in the wrong place can reorganize the energy of an entire large mass system. By the time that butterfly's wings are fully flapping, several tipping points can be crossed, amplifying the results and finding new, higher energy states in which to cycle around.
I'm not saying that "want of a nail the kingdom was lost" scenario is likely. But it is how things work, not the linear illusion that we'd like to stay used to. These environments are complex, and not at all well understood, especially their catastrophic failures and how to tell when they're close. I don't think that enough heat to keep a handful of operators alive year round would be a problem if it's designed properly and some warning signals (and mitigation reactions) are identified, but ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
I'd compare the energy of the incoming solar power, about 1KW:m^2 at sunny Solar Noon, to the vehicle's velocity after some time under solar power, applying the usual E = 1/2 * m * v^2 kinetic energy measurement.
That is the way we measure the energy efficiency of any machine.
Which means that the ice, even if it's only -80C, is only 55C hotter than the -135C superconducting point. Unlike the usual labs, which at about 24C (I doublechecked;) are 159C hotter. An even better case for arctic super(conducting computers).
Are these "not so low" temperature superconductors usable to make semiconductors for computers? Can such a superconducting computer be run at extremely high clock rates, or just extremely low circuit latency, to make really fast computers not limited by the heat inefficiencies of today's regular computer chemistry?
If so, how about building these computers buried in Antarctic ice? Winter air temperature drops to -80C; deep in the ice it's probably even lower. 138K is -211C. So the energy required to cool the superconductors would be much lower than in the usual labs, which start at about 24C - over 100K more than the 120K difference between the superconducting point and the natural arctic temperatures Cooling -80C to -211C should be a lot cheaper and easier than cooling 24C to -211C (though shlepping to the poles and digging isn't so easy or cheap).
The problem is what to do with the heat pumped out, which could damage the arctic nearby, maybe even melt the foundation. But if the total mass cooled is small (like a few dozen microchips), that byproduct heat could be used to keep some human operators alive.
If the arctic is the wrong location, how about launching them into orbit, behind a solar panel shield that powers the device (and its I/O radio) and shadows its temperature into the operating range?
Assumptions are not necessary. We're talking about a specific implementation of an ion engine, not it's theoretical efficiency.
This new engine has a power source that has its own efficiency converting its fuel to electricity, which is the starting point. Then there is the efficiency of the ion engine itself converting that electricity to the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle. Multiply those two (fractional) efficiencies together for the total fuel efficiency of this vehicle. That's what I want to know.
There is a larger question that is theoretical, the theoretical maximum fuel efficiency of any ion engine vehicle. What is the most efficient conversion of fuel by any power source into energy that an ion engine can use to convert into kinetic energy of the vehicle. It's the same exercise, but you don't have to build it to "measure" its efficiency. It's worth knowing because then we can see what percentage of theoretical efficiency this new actual engine gets, of its theoretical efficiency.
And then those efficiency answers can be used to tell whether this engine, and its whole class of engines, is really interesting as a useful device. Whether it's really better than chemical rockets. Or whether it's exciting only for Star Wars TIE Fighter reenactors.
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No, Bush is the guy who hires the Star Wars guy to run NASA, who then converts NASA into yet another Star Wars boondoggle.
Which is Bush's responsibility. That is, if anyone expected Bush to be responsible for anything.
You Republicans are really sad, like dogs chasing your own tails. Bush is your messiah, until his government screws everything up, and then he's just this guy, y'know?
You should stop voting for president. You should just turn out to vote for propaganda catapults. Oh, and Cheney. Nice job with that bastard, who actually is responsible for all this catastrophe, including telling Bush they'd pull it off. And, with the help of doubletalking Republicans like you, they're nearly done with just that.
You people owe us a huge (and expensive) apology. Not more of your lip, posing as if you knew anything about government except how to wreck it.
I couldn't help but notice that Bush can spend $million of our money every 13 minutes or less in Iraq, but expects NASA, our program that is most universally respected and admired around the world, to get free help in teaching our young people how to do it when they get their chance.
No, Anonymous illiterate Coward, I didn't deny that it could happen, I just pointed out the completely logical reason why I was skeptical. There is also plenty of evidence that some pilots fly drunk, and that some invent excuses blaming others for their bad inflight performance (also guessable logically). And on evidence, I'm perfectly willing to accept that blinding does happen. But that doesn't mean that we should just ban the lasers, or use a few incidents as a pretext for shaking down anyone who looks "suspiciously like they might have a laser".
I didn't claim any aviation experience. But you clearly shouldn't be practicing logic without a license.
Something must be done, but a blanket ban as pretext for frisking anyone the cops "think has a laser" is not what should be done. Unless you just like your government reactionary and your cops arbitrarily powerful, but your pilots still at risk of blinding by the jerks this approach won't stop at all.
The sovereign immunity protecting any state, whether the Feds, a geographically different state, or one's own, is tyranny. The part of the Constitution that claims it as some kind of protected right is wrong, and should be repealed. There is no basis whatsoever for state people having more rights than civilians. Even the name explains that it's merely a contrived privilege retained from some archaic "divine right of kings" era.
It seems from that report that it "blinds" them more by the surprise of a sudden bright light (briefly) in the cockpit than because the laser actually hits their eyes. The story we're getting is exaggerating by implication.
There is also already a $30 fine and jailtime for lasering a plane. So the question is one of enforcement. The "frisk anyone because they're suspected of having a laser" isn't going to do anything to catch the tiny fraction of people abusing these lasers with planes, so it's not going to help enforcement.
What it is going to do is give the cops a pretext to frisk people who the usual excuses don't work on: they're going to frisk geeks, who don't meet the descriptions cops usually keeep handy for frisking people they want to intimidate, which are usually poorer and rougher looking characters. A judge might not believe the geek was suspected of having a knife, but they might believe they were suspected of having a laser.
There is clearly a need for enforcing the existing laws prohibiting lasering planes. This law doesn't actually do that, but it does give the police much broader arbitary powers and clamp down on many thousands of people for the crimes of maybe a few dozen at most. That sounds like an even bigger problem than a few blinded pilots a year, though neither are acceptable.
Well, this is indeed about planes, as that is what the Australian government is invoking to justify it.
But as for using it on cars, which is a much more plausible abuse, I'd make it just as illegal as throwing battery acid between open windows in cars already is, which it probably is - the law probably doesn't specify what substance is thrown between the cars, but rather the effects on the other driver. Throw a few people trying it in jail, make a big stink about it on TV, and you won't see it happen again (any more than people throw battery acid).
No new laws, and no collective punishment of millions of people because a few dozen are criminals.
Have pilots really been blinded by lasers pointed from the ground? Because the pointer can't get within a thousand feed of a plane, and actually even more at the angles that can reach over the plane's body and into the pilot's windows. At that distance, these laser pointers' beams are spread out pretty wide, so the person pointing them can possibly see the dot from that far away. So the brightness on the tiny fraction of that dot's area that actually falls on the pilot's eye is pretty small. Even more problematic is that your hand shakes. It might be unnoticeable at close range, but tiny angular deflections at the base of an angle extending a quarter mile or more to a plane makes the dot wiggle all over the place. It's hard to aim the laser even close enough to stay anywhere on the whole plane, let alone through the refracting windows and into a pilot's eye, 1/8" across.
It just seem so unlikely. Is there any proven examples of this happening, or is it just paranoia, and maybe totally unrelated pilot errors they're conveniently blaming on something no one else saw, someone impossible to catch if they did exist?
Or, like Richard Nixon said as an excuse for his tyrannies:
I bet that kind of defense will become increasingly popular as the current president and his regime gradually lose the secrecy of their many crimes they've spent so much time and energy (and our money) to maintain.
So no, I'm not glad that some tiny copyright rule is dead, leaving intact the rest of the ridiculous regime of artificial government monopolies on imaginary property. Since it comes at the cost of treating the state as an unlimited tyranny, not as composed of laws creating limited powers subservient and accountable to the people.
One advantage of security as infrastructure rather than as products is that infrastructure is the foundation of a service, not just something bolted on afterwards.
The biggest problem with security is that it's added afterwards as a "deluxe feature", rather than integrated with every design and implementation detail. Adding security afterwards means always catching up with the original insecure condition. It means creating an insecure system that the bad guys like, then fighting your own system along with the bad guys while you labor to secure it.
But the "built-in" tech shouldn't become completely invisible. The bundles should be transparent, not closed and opaque. Because nothing has a higher risk of insecurity than something unknown that you can't inspect. And no matter how well a vendor inspects their own secure component, if it's properly secured no extra scrutiny makes it less secure, only more. Leaving it transparent, visible only when you inspect it, is the best, safest tech.
After 7 years bleeding us all dry, making us more endangered, lying to us, wasting our time and squandering our advantages against our many real enemies, suddenly Homeland Security has "a sense of urgency"?
They're just going to spend as much money as they possibly can in the last 8 months Bush/Cheney control the Executive, all sent to their cronies, grabbing more power and cutting off as much communications inside the government as they can. They're going to botch this huge job to screw over the government's ability to even connect to the Internet, and the public's ability to connect to it, so the next administration will be locked out when it tries to govern the Bush crony empire that's returned to the private sector for their great reward.
Why should the last 8 months of Bush/Cheney be any different from the first 88 months?
Yes, exactly like that. You deserve a prize, but the USGS deserves a big budget increase.
Gee, a call to arms at 11:30PM on a lovely Spring Friday night.
This manifesto is going nowhere. At least not this weekend.
But the LinkSys products aren't vaporware, so I don't know if it's a fit.
Do you mean "early in the 21st Century"? Because even on Star Trek TNG, incorrectly predicting the past != correctly predicting the future. Even in the TV Show at the Edge of Being Entertaining.
These adshows are perfect showcases for all the vaporware Microsoft and Intel are always promising, but never delivering.
Cisco doesn't pitch vaporware so much, so I'm a little disappointed they're going to start defining themselves into that category for the mass market.
Those USGS maps would be even cooler if they were just a layer in Google Maps or Google Earth. Then I could correlate them to all kinds of other local data, share them with other people, insert 3D buildings designed to handle the shocks...
While we both wait for someone informed to explain how we can or cannot currently fashion superconducting materials into transistors, we can speculated from an informed theoretical perspective :).
:).
The answer to the problem you pose (other than how the device's physical chemistry actually makes a supersemiconductor) is just to cool the part that much lower than its superconducting point. The energy is still lost to the extra heat from imperfect resistance, and multiplied by the energy consumed in recooling the heated material. But at the extra energy cost, the material should still stay colder than the superconducting point, and continue to work. Superconduction is a nonlinear system, so we can win by getting below the threshold even though it continues to cost us to stay there.
I also note that infinite resistance is indeed physically possible, by introducing a vacuum. If these "supertransistors" are low voltage enough (which superconductors should make easy), small enough, perhaps a micromechanical (and nanovoltage) supertransistor could physically move between superconductor contact and vacuum insulator, depending on whether some electrons are sitting on its base/gate lead. There's a lot of engineering (and probably some science, too) before such a device could work. But we make do with less than perfect conventional transistors with conventional conductors and semiconductors, and still get well-formed 1s and 0s out of them (to which your reading this post attests
As the other reply to your message said, I'm not talking about upsetting the ecosystem in the arctic. I'm talking about melting the ice supporting the delicate machinery.
FWIW, the "environmentalist mottoes" are just fine. We are heating the planet, by stopping its natural cooling radiation with our thickened Greenhouse atmosphere. The same way I "warm up" by putting on a coat, even if the coat isn't that warm to start with. In fact we can directly heat the planet, and of course we do, though the effects of extra insulation increasing our retention of all the vast incoming sunlight are greater than the effects of the extra heat we're insulating.
You're also not really right about the damage that the local heating can do. Of course all heating is "heat dissipation": that's simple thermodynamics, so all heating of any kind is just moving energy from one place to another, not "creating" it. Powering equipment in a sensitive frozen place that's already hovering near a tipping point can cause a lot more damage than you imply. All the phenomena we're talking about are nonlinear phase changes (even the superconducting, for thematic consistency). Some ice might be safely stuck in one attractor cycle, never rising above melting, but coming very close. Then the extra heat puts it over the edge, which melts water down through moulins, which lubricates the underside of the glacier, which lets gravity pull it faster and harder against the rock it sits on, which helps melt it more, also perhaps sliding it into nearby warmer water it used to sit away from. A little new energy in the wrong place can reorganize the energy of an entire large mass system. By the time that butterfly's wings are fully flapping, several tipping points can be crossed, amplifying the results and finding new, higher energy states in which to cycle around.
I'm not saying that "want of a nail the kingdom was lost" scenario is likely. But it is how things work, not the linear illusion that we'd like to stay used to. These environments are complex, and not at all well understood, especially their catastrophic failures and how to tell when they're close. I don't think that enough heat to keep a handful of operators alive year round would be a problem if it's designed properly and some warning signals (and mitigation reactions) are identified, but ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away.
I'd compare the energy of the incoming solar power, about 1KW:m^2 at sunny Solar Noon, to the vehicle's velocity after some time under solar power, applying the usual E = 1/2 * m * v^2 kinetic energy measurement.
That is the way we measure the energy efficiency of any machine.
You're right, 138K == -135C, thanks.
;) are 159C hotter. An even better case for arctic super(conducting computers).
Which means that the ice, even if it's only -80C, is only 55C hotter than the -135C superconducting point. Unlike the usual labs, which at about 24C (I doublechecked
I know Apple makes little "nano" iPods, but is it shipping actual Macintoshes small enough to be "used internally"? Byte-sized, even?
(*rimshot* - I'm here all weekend, folks - try the veal)
Are these "not so low" temperature superconductors usable to make semiconductors for computers? Can such a superconducting computer be run at extremely high clock rates, or just extremely low circuit latency, to make really fast computers not limited by the heat inefficiencies of today's regular computer chemistry?
If so, how about building these computers buried in Antarctic ice? Winter air temperature drops to -80C; deep in the ice it's probably even lower. 138K is -211C. So the energy required to cool the superconductors would be much lower than in the usual labs, which start at about 24C - over 100K more than the 120K difference between the superconducting point and the natural arctic temperatures Cooling -80C to -211C should be a lot cheaper and easier than cooling 24C to -211C (though shlepping to the poles and digging isn't so easy or cheap).
The problem is what to do with the heat pumped out, which could damage the arctic nearby, maybe even melt the foundation. But if the total mass cooled is small (like a few dozen microchips), that byproduct heat could be used to keep some human operators alive.
If the arctic is the wrong location, how about launching them into orbit, behind a solar panel shield that powers the device (and its I/O radio) and shadows its temperature into the operating range?
Assumptions are not necessary. We're talking about a specific implementation of an ion engine, not it's theoretical efficiency.
This new engine has a power source that has its own efficiency converting its fuel to electricity, which is the starting point. Then there is the efficiency of the ion engine itself converting that electricity to the kinetic energy of the moving vehicle. Multiply those two (fractional) efficiencies together for the total fuel efficiency of this vehicle. That's what I want to know.
There is a larger question that is theoretical, the theoretical maximum fuel efficiency of any ion engine vehicle. What is the most efficient conversion of fuel by any power source into energy that an ion engine can use to convert into kinetic energy of the vehicle. It's the same exercise, but you don't have to build it to "measure" its efficiency. It's worth knowing because then we can see what percentage of theoretical efficiency this new actual engine gets, of its theoretical efficiency.
And then those efficiency answers can be used to tell whether this engine, and its whole class of engines, is really interesting as a useful device. Whether it's really better than chemical rockets. Or whether it's exciting only for Star Wars TIE Fighter reenactors.
That's because you watch too much TV. And because Zimbabwean scammers are abusing the Psychic Friends Network, so Scully is required.