but it is not the same shuttle that flew in the early 80s
You're right, it isn't. That one burned up on reentry a couple of years ago. The design, however, is fundamentally the same, modulo a few manufacturing refinements (TPS changes, etc) they came up with in the ones that flew in the mid 80s and beyond (and were all built in the late 70s/early 80s). Even Endeavour, the replacement for Challenger, is in large part made up of "structural spares" made during the original manufacturing run.
Of course they do pretty much tear down and completely overhaul each Orbiter between missions, which is another reason the dang things are so expensive to fly.
Seriously, getting around in a small plane is both faster and more fun than driving. It's almost faster than commercial air. (I once did a trip from Waterloo, Ont, to Denver -- and vice versa -- in a C-172RG. It took about 11 hours, with one customs and one fuel stop. By commercial air, I'd have to drive to Toronto (or Detroit), change planes in Chicago, and hang around for a couple of hours at each airport. Mind, if I'd hit bad weather I'd have been stuck.
The other problem is ground transportation at your destination, but you have that problem with commercial air travel too.
At the time I was a Canadian resident ("landed immigrant"), my brother's a Canadian citizen by birth. We were driving back from Ohio, heading to cross at Detroit/Windsor. About half way there I realized I'd left my (British) passport, along with some other papers, at my girlfriends house (where we'd been visiting). I was a little nervous about crossing without it, even though the usual routine when reentering in a vehicle with Ontario plates was just "where do live" and "how long were you gone".
As it happened, we (me driving) decided to cross through the downtown tunnel, rather than the bridge (I think we just missed the turnoff). Still just a little nervous, we pulled up to the Canadian C&I booth, and I waited for the -- I hoped usual -- questions.
The agent gives us both a look, leans over, and says "got any guns?"
"Uh, what? No."
"Okay, go ahead."
And away we went.
This was about 17 years ago, I imagine it's a little different now, even if that is a very busy crossing.
Bales of marijuana don't typically broadcast neutrons and other characteristic radiation signatures that can be detected from some distance.
Granted, a sufficiently shielded nuke won't either. However, smuggling a sufficiently shielded nuke is a different problem than just smuggling a warhead.
See also above comment about bullet-proof vests not protecting you from poisoning.
That's okay. Anything a missile developer does to try to defeat a BMD system also does some combination of: makes the missile heavier, reducing its payload and/or range; makes the missile harder to guide, thus reducing its accuracy (and/or range and/or payload); makes the missile more expensive to produce, thus reducing the number available for launch; and/or makes the missile less reliable, thus requiring more missiles for the desired effect, making them effectively more expensive.
Any and all of which makes it harder and more expensive for an enemy to launch a (successful) missile attack, and which confounds the enemy's planning.
The fact of the matter is that any missle defense system will be fooled by dummy warheads.
Well no, it won't. Unless, of course, you make your dummy warheads the exact same size and density, etc, as the real thing (otherwise they won't have the same flight characteristics.) Since ICBM launchers are expensive, you might as well, in that case, just use the real thing.
Either way, the cost of mounting an attack just went way up, and the certainty of it succeeding to the point where no retaliation is possible just went way down.
SDI never claimed to be impervious nor was it ever intended to let us launch a first strike without fear of retaliation. It was intended to prevent the other guy from launching a (massive) first strike without fear of retaliation. It would also defend against an accidental launch or rogue-state single missile attack.
(Further and more, many of the SDI technologies tested were aimed at interception during the boost phase, before the warheads were deployed. We had people straight-facedly suggesting that the Soviets could defend their ICBM boosters against lasers, for example, by "simply" spinning the booster so no one spot would get hot. I'll leave calculating the dynamics of steering a spinning booster -- and bear in mind the Soviets used liquid fueled ICBMs -- as an exercise for the reader.)
Does Quebec really want to separate? When I lived there (some years ago now), Levesque was pushing not for separation, but for "sovereignty association". That was (deliberately) never clearly defined, but as best anyone could figure out, it was trying to get all the best of being "sovereign" (independant laws, foreign policy, etc) while retaining any advantages of "association" (trade, national defense, federal tax money...). When I moved back to Ontario I felt like I was escaping.
My (politically incorrect) view was always to let them the hell separate if they really wanted to, but make it a full separation. And flex whatever muscle necessary to keep the St. Lawrence Seaway open.
(On my even less politically correct days, I think Britain should have done in Quebec what they did in Louisbourg and surrounding Acadia about the same time: ship them off to Louisiana (whence Cajuns). You don't hear the Nova Scotians calling for separation. At least, not very loudly.)
And just which part of the atom do you think "Radio-Isotopic" (I assume you mean decay of radioisotopes, converting either the heat or the motion of charged particles (specifically, beta) to electrical current) energy comes from if not the nucleus?
Where do you work that there's sockets in the parking lot to plug in cars???
That's not uncommon in some parts of Canada, and probably Alaska. It's for plugging in your car's block heater (in winter) so that you can actually start it when it's quitting time.
And in an unrelated aside, I see some RedHat fanboy with mod points has given my comment a -1 overrated and the reply a +1 underrated, and thus avoided metamoderation.
I wasn't talking about the fanboy let-me-be-your-beta-slave predominance of Fedora Core in the hobbyist set, I was talking about that same business sector, only desktop instead of server. RedHat wrote that off at RH9, and in general businesses don't do Debian or other no-commercial-support distros. (Certainly there are exceptions, and some businesses big enough may internally support several distros.)
Or were you trying to suggest that RedHat does not dominate the North American server business sector? (We are, of course, restricting the discussion to the Linux market.)
RedHat dominates (in North America) the server business sector. SUSE (Novell) is more popular in the desktop sector. Granted, the server sector is still bigger, but the desktop is growing.
Outside North America, RedHat isn't nearly so dominant even in the server sector.
I don't need it to last forever. I'll settle for until the protons in the media decay.
Re:There should be more online awards given.......
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The people who vote on the Hugos are self-selected. If you want to vote, all you need to do is buy a membership in that year's WorldCon (World Science Fiction Convention). No restrictions, other than coming up with the membership fee (cheaper if you're not actually attending the con).
Compare this with the Nebula, voted and awarded by members of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), which requires proof that you've made paid sales of SF (or F). That's closer to the Oscars, which is nominated and voted on by members of the Academy of Motion Pictures.
What's the point of online awards? It's too easy to rig the voting, or for the utterly unqualified to vote.
I figured he probably meant ragged overcast -- the choice of the word "dead" to modify "channel" adds a somber note appropriate to a grey sky, not a blue one.
But it did occur to me that there might be a whole generation of readers who got an entirely different impression.
Oh, and speaking of Gibson's Neuromancer, just what color was the sky above the port?
When I first read "The sky [...] was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel", I imagined the mottled grey of a screenful of static -- or a ragged overcast. Some years later, owning a newer TV, I read that as the vivid blue generated by the TV when it detects no signal -- the deep, clear blue of a sky utterly free of cloud or haze.
So, what color was the sky? It changes the whole atmosphere of that opening scene.
G. Harry Stine: If you don't know who he is, shame on you again. Go back to school. He's as important as Shelley.
I knew and liked Harry Stine, I've read a lot of his stuff, both fiction and non, and had quite a few conversations with him. He's certainly made significant contributions -- they don't call him the father of model rocketry for nothing -- but comparing him to Shelley? Why? I don't think Harry would have agreed with that.
Oh, and Vernor Vinge has a better claim than Gibson to inventing cyberpunk, with True Names back in 1981. Gibson's Neuromancer, while it won an SF triple crown (Hugo, Nebula and Phil K. Dick awards), wasn't published until 1984, although its success did put cyberpunk firmly on the map. (I might also be inclined to argue that John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and perhaps Shockwave Rider foreshadow Gibson stylisticly and thematically, but it's been too long since I've read those to be able to readily back that up.)
Science fiction does not have to be based on currently accepted theories
True, but it ought to at least handwave an explanation for doing something counter to known science, and must be internally consistent.
If ET could fly at the end of the movie, why didn't he do that at the beginning of the movie to escape?
Spielberg's movies in that vein aren't so much about SF as they are about SFX. Entertaining, sure, but hardly in the same vein as Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) or Stanley Kubrik (2001, A Clockwork Orange).
Yeah, if you could instantaneously materialize a big enough chunk of fissionable, it would spontaneously go boom.
The thing is, you can't. You have to build the pile up from smaller chunks. All the while, the pile is getting hotter (more fissions are taking place within it as there's more opportunity for a neutron to hit a fissionable nucleus). If you do it too slowly, the pile just melts. Do it a bit faster, and the pile gets hot enough to vaporize and you might get a fizzle explosion which spreads the rest of the fissionable stuff (and a few reaction products) around, but not the real boom of a detonation. You have to do it really fast to get it go BANG! rather than Ffzzzll... (The latter will still kill people in the immediate vicinity, from neutrons, but the explosive yield is more in the pounds of TNT range rather than kilotons.)
A uranium "gun type" bomb (eg "Little Boy") doesn't increase the density of the material, it just slams one chunk of U235 into another. It's the plutonium "Fat Man" type that uses a carefully choreographed imploding detonation wave (through a precisely constructed series of different high explosives with different detonation rates to shape the wavefront) to compress the plutonium sphere into a higher density (and, coincidentally, crush the beryllium-polonium trigger at the center to produce a burst of neutrons -- at least in primitive designs).
Back in WW-II, they didn't even bother testing the Little Boy design before using it on Japan because they were so sure it would work; it was a simple mechanism. (Well, that and the fact that they had a limited supply of U235, not that they had a lot of plutonium either.)
A big enough meteorite impact will do that too, even unto the level of radiactivity depending on the composition of the meteorite and the temperature of the plasma.
The Romans didn't even have gunpowder, nor cannons, which would be the very least level of technology to get two pieces of U235 (assuming they'd even had pure U235, given to them by some passing alien or time traveller) to slam together fast enough to detonate rather than just flashing to radioactive slag as the pieces got near each other. Doing it with plutonium is even harder. The Romans didn't have (and had no way of getting) the right two pieces of metal, and had no way of banging them together fast enough.
Or if you're used to (from an office phone) dialing '9' to get an outside line, then '1' to start a long-distance call, and then happen to hit '1' again by accident... Happened to me, I was really surprised when in the middle of dialing the rest of the number, I heard a voice answering "911". I apologized, said it was a mistake and figured out what had happened.
A little while later a cop showed up at the office anyway, just checking that everything was okay.
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but it is not the same shuttle that flew in the early 80s
You're right, it isn't. That one burned up on reentry a couple of years ago. The design, however, is fundamentally the same, modulo a few manufacturing refinements (TPS changes, etc) they came up with in the ones that flew in the mid 80s and beyond (and were all built in the late 70s/early 80s). Even Endeavour, the replacement for Challenger, is in large part made up of "structural spares" made during the original manufacturing run.
Of course they do pretty much tear down and completely overhaul each Orbiter between missions, which is another reason the dang things are so expensive to fly.
Time to spare? Go by air.
Seriously, getting around in a small plane is both faster and more fun than driving. It's almost faster than commercial air. (I once did a trip from Waterloo, Ont, to Denver -- and vice versa -- in a C-172RG. It took about 11 hours, with one customs and one fuel stop. By commercial air, I'd have to drive to Toronto (or Detroit), change planes in Chicago, and hang around for a couple of hours at each airport. Mind, if I'd hit bad weather I'd have been stuck.
The other problem is ground transportation at your destination, but you have that problem with commercial air travel too.
My favorite Canadian Customs/Immigration story:
At the time I was a Canadian resident ("landed immigrant"), my brother's a Canadian citizen by birth. We were driving back from Ohio, heading to cross at Detroit/Windsor. About half way there I realized I'd left my (British) passport, along with some other papers, at my girlfriends house (where we'd been visiting). I was a little nervous about crossing without it, even though the usual routine when reentering in a vehicle with Ontario plates was just "where do live" and "how long were you gone".
As it happened, we (me driving) decided to cross through the downtown tunnel, rather than the bridge (I think we just missed the turnoff). Still just a little nervous, we pulled up to the Canadian C&I booth, and I waited for the -- I hoped usual -- questions.
The agent gives us both a look, leans over, and says "got any guns?"
"Uh, what? No."
"Okay, go ahead."
And away we went.
This was about 17 years ago, I imagine it's a little different now, even if that is a very busy crossing.
Bales of marijuana don't typically broadcast neutrons and other characteristic radiation signatures that can be detected from some distance.
Granted, a sufficiently shielded nuke won't either. However, smuggling a sufficiently shielded nuke is a different problem than just smuggling a warhead.
See also above comment about bullet-proof vests not protecting you from poisoning.
That's okay. Anything a missile developer does to try to defeat a BMD system also does some combination of: makes the missile heavier, reducing its payload and/or range; makes the missile harder to guide, thus reducing its accuracy (and/or range and/or payload); makes the missile more expensive to produce, thus reducing the number available for launch; and/or makes the missile less reliable, thus requiring more missiles for the desired effect, making them effectively more expensive.
Any and all of which makes it harder and more expensive for an enemy to launch a (successful) missile attack, and which confounds the enemy's planning.
Well, and a bullet-proof vest won't keep you from being poisoned, either.
It still limits the ways in which you might be attacked, or limits the damage if attacked that way.
The fact of the matter is that any missle defense system will be fooled by dummy warheads.
Well no, it won't. Unless, of course, you make your dummy warheads the exact same size and density, etc, as the real thing (otherwise they won't have the same flight characteristics.) Since ICBM launchers are expensive, you might as well, in that case, just use the real thing.
Either way, the cost of mounting an attack just went way up, and the certainty of it succeeding to the point where no retaliation is possible just went way down.
SDI never claimed to be impervious nor was it ever intended to let us launch a first strike without fear of retaliation. It was intended to prevent the other guy from launching a (massive) first strike without fear of retaliation. It would also defend against an accidental launch or rogue-state single missile attack.
(Further and more, many of the SDI technologies tested were aimed at interception during the boost phase, before the warheads were deployed. We had people straight-facedly suggesting that the Soviets could defend their ICBM boosters against lasers, for example, by "simply" spinning the booster so no one spot would get hot. I'll leave calculating the dynamics of steering a spinning booster -- and bear in mind the Soviets used liquid fueled ICBMs -- as an exercise for the reader.)
Does Quebec really want to separate? When I lived there (some years ago now), Levesque was pushing not for separation, but for "sovereignty association". That was (deliberately) never clearly defined, but as best anyone could figure out, it was trying to get all the best of being "sovereign" (independant laws, foreign policy, etc) while retaining any advantages of "association" (trade, national defense, federal tax money...). When I moved back to Ontario I felt like I was escaping.
My (politically incorrect) view was always to let them the hell separate if they really wanted to, but make it a full separation. And flex whatever muscle necessary to keep the St. Lawrence Seaway open.
(On my even less politically correct days, I think Britain should have done in Quebec what they did in Louisbourg and surrounding Acadia about the same time: ship them off to Louisiana (whence Cajuns). You don't hear the Nova Scotians calling for separation. At least, not very loudly.)
Obviously you do, or you wouldn't have made the comment in the first place.
Plus you leave those beautiful forests alone...
Well, until you start cutting them down so you can grow more grass...
I think you mean "Radio-Isotopic", not "Nuclear"
And just which part of the atom do you think "Radio-Isotopic" (I assume you mean decay of radioisotopes, converting either the heat or the motion of charged particles (specifically, beta) to electrical current) energy comes from if not the nucleus?
Where do you work that there's sockets in the parking lot to plug in cars???
That's not uncommon in some parts of Canada, and probably Alaska. It's for plugging in your car's block heater (in winter) so that you can actually start it when it's quitting time.
Smallpox and plague are viruses
Nope. Smallpox is, but plague is a bacillus, Yersinia pestis (formerly Pasteurella pestis).
And in an unrelated aside, I see some RedHat fanboy with mod points has given my comment a -1 overrated and the reply a +1 underrated, and thus avoided metamoderation.
Interesting behaviour, that.
Observation.
I wasn't talking about the fanboy let-me-be-your-beta-slave predominance of Fedora Core in the hobbyist set, I was talking about that same business sector, only desktop instead of server. RedHat wrote that off at RH9, and in general businesses don't do Debian or other no-commercial-support distros. (Certainly there are exceptions, and some businesses big enough may internally support several distros.)
Or were you trying to suggest that RedHat does not dominate the North American server business sector? (We are, of course, restricting the discussion to the Linux market.)
RedHat dominates (in North America) the server business sector. SUSE (Novell) is more popular in the desktop sector. Granted, the server sector is still bigger, but the desktop is growing.
Outside North America, RedHat isn't nearly so dominant even in the server sector.
I don't need it to last forever. I'll settle for until the protons in the media decay.
The people who vote on the Hugos are self-selected. If you want to vote, all you need to do is buy a membership in that year's WorldCon (World Science Fiction Convention). No restrictions, other than coming up with the membership fee (cheaper if you're not actually attending the con).
Compare this with the Nebula, voted and awarded by members of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), which requires proof that you've made paid sales of SF (or F). That's closer to the Oscars, which is nominated and voted on by members of the Academy of Motion Pictures.
What's the point of online awards? It's too easy to rig the voting, or for the utterly unqualified to vote.
I figured he probably meant ragged overcast -- the choice of the word "dead" to modify "channel" adds a somber note appropriate to a grey sky, not a blue one.
But it did occur to me that there might be a whole generation of readers who got an entirely different impression.
Oh, and speaking of Gibson's Neuromancer, just what color was the sky above the port?
When I first read "The sky [...] was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel", I imagined the mottled grey of a screenful of static -- or a ragged overcast. Some years later, owning a newer TV, I read that as the vivid blue generated by the TV when it detects no signal -- the deep, clear blue of a sky utterly free of cloud or haze.
So, what color was the sky? It changes the whole atmosphere of that opening scene.
G. Harry Stine: If you don't know who he is, shame on you again. Go back to school. He's as important as Shelley.
I knew and liked Harry Stine, I've read a lot of his stuff, both fiction and non, and had quite a few conversations with him. He's certainly made significant contributions -- they don't call him the father of model rocketry for nothing -- but comparing him to Shelley? Why? I don't think Harry would have agreed with that.
Oh, and Vernor Vinge has a better claim than Gibson to inventing cyberpunk, with True Names back in 1981. Gibson's Neuromancer, while it won an SF triple crown (Hugo, Nebula and Phil K. Dick awards), wasn't published until 1984, although its success did put cyberpunk firmly on the map. (I might also be inclined to argue that John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and perhaps Shockwave Rider foreshadow Gibson stylisticly and thematically, but it's been too long since I've read those to be able to readily back that up.)
Science fiction does not have to be based on currently accepted theories
True, but it ought to at least handwave an explanation for doing something counter to known science, and must be internally consistent.
If ET could fly at the end of the movie, why didn't he do that at the beginning of the movie to escape?
Spielberg's movies in that vein aren't so much about SF as they are about SFX. Entertaining, sure, but hardly in the same vein as Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) or Stanley Kubrik (2001, A Clockwork Orange).
Yeah, if you could instantaneously materialize a big enough chunk of fissionable, it would spontaneously go boom.
The thing is, you can't. You have to build the pile up from smaller chunks. All the while, the pile is getting hotter (more fissions are taking place within it as there's more opportunity for a neutron to hit a fissionable nucleus). If you do it too slowly, the pile just melts. Do it a bit faster, and the pile gets hot enough to vaporize and you might get a fizzle explosion which spreads the rest of the fissionable stuff (and a few reaction products) around, but not the real boom of a detonation. You have to do it really fast to get it go BANG! rather than Ffzzzll... (The latter will still kill people in the immediate vicinity, from neutrons, but the explosive yield is more in the pounds of TNT range rather than kilotons.)
A uranium "gun type" bomb (eg "Little Boy") doesn't increase the density of the material, it just slams one chunk of U235 into another. It's the plutonium "Fat Man" type that uses a carefully choreographed imploding detonation wave (through a precisely constructed series of different high explosives with different detonation rates to shape the wavefront) to compress the plutonium sphere into a higher density (and, coincidentally, crush the beryllium-polonium trigger at the center to produce a burst of neutrons -- at least in primitive designs).
Back in WW-II, they didn't even bother testing the Little Boy design before using it on Japan because they were so sure it would work; it was a simple mechanism. (Well, that and the fact that they had a limited supply of U235, not that they had a lot of plutonium either.)
A big enough meteorite impact will do that too, even unto the level of radiactivity depending on the composition of the meteorite and the temperature of the plasma.
The Romans didn't even have gunpowder, nor cannons, which would be the very least level of technology to get two pieces of U235 (assuming they'd even had pure U235, given to them by some passing alien or time traveller) to slam together fast enough to detonate rather than just flashing to radioactive slag as the pieces got near each other. Doing it with plutonium is even harder. The Romans didn't have (and had no way of getting) the right two pieces of metal, and had no way of banging them together fast enough.
Or if you're used to (from an office phone) dialing '9' to get an outside line, then '1' to start a long-distance call, and then happen to hit '1' again by accident... Happened to me, I was really surprised when in the middle of dialing the rest of the number, I heard a voice answering "911". I apologized, said it was a mistake and figured out what had happened.
A little while later a cop showed up at the office anyway, just checking that everything was okay.