If ID cards where introduced in the US or the UK,
then clearly they would only apply to citizens of these countries, I assume visitors from elsewhere would have to carry their passports at all times.
Now if assuming a terrorist is a citizen and get's challenged by a cop, all they have to do is produce a forged or stolen passport and claim to be a visitor from another country; the same applies to terrorists who come from abroad. If they get found out, they claim to be an illeagle migrant and the worst that happens to them is deportation.
This of course assumes that the claims made that the ID cars will have neat technology to make them forgery-proof are true. I suspect there'd be decent fakes available within months. After all, the snake-heads that run the world wide illeagle immigrants/people smuggling rackets would have a huge financianl interest in defeating this technology.
At worst, this will introduce a false sense of security. A terrorist who has a good fake card will find it even easier to walk onto an aircraft without question.
People assume the Hindenberg caused airships to be abandoned. But even if the accident had never occurred and WW2 had never happened, airships would have definately died out in the 40's. The reason? Well the Hindenberg had 61 crew and could
carry a maximum of 72 passangers. With that kind of ratio between people paying you fares and people you have to pay wages to, making it pay was always going to be tricky. Plus airships where hugely expensive to build. For example, the gas bags where made of a stuff called goldbeaters skin which is part of a cow intestine. You get roughly 1 sq.ft. from each cow so you can imagine how much it would cost to glue together several million of those with hopefuly leakproof seams.
By the late 30's, flying boats where already carrying passangers across the Atlantic. When land planes that could fly this far came along, airships would have had it. An 40's aircraft would have carried about the same number of passangers. Be twice as fast, only needed about 5 crew and would have cost about an order of magnitude less to build. You just can't argue with that.
Hitting targets with kinetic energy warheads is an interesting idea, though I wonder if
it wouldn't be simpler and easier to just have a
few Titan-2 rockets on standby with a couple of tons of lead and some dinky GPS guidence in the nose. OK, it'd cost about $80 million a shot, but it's not as if these would be used very often and it'd certainly be cheaper then pumping billions into the X-33.
Also, although it'd reach any point on Earth in 90 minutes, I suspect the time needed to actually prepare one for launch would be substantially more. The X-33 uses liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen so unlike an ICBM, it can't be kept on the pad, fueled up and ready to go at a moment's notice as the propellents would boil off.
I'm not knocking this. I think it'd be superb if the Pentagon foots the bill to get the X-33 flying, it's just I can see some serious flaws.
Since it was found in 91, this guy's body has probably been subjected to more intensive study then any other set of ancient human remains,
yet it takes 10 years for them to do a CT scan and
make this discovery.
I don't want to knock the people who did it. They deserve the credit. Yet wouldn't a flint arrowhead kind of stick out when using modern imaging technology? And wouldn't sticking the body through a CT scanner ot MRI machine be the first thing done by virtually any serious researcher who got access to it?
There must be more to the story then then what's been reported. I just can't understand why it took 10 years to find this arrowhead.
From the MSNBC story, is why the copmpany charges $18 per sq km for imaging N America $35 per sq km for imaging anywhere else. It's not as if the satellite has travelling expenses or anything.
OK. There may be mental differences between average male and females. These may be genetic, they may be due to upbringing, I really don't know. But even if they exist, they are buried by the vastly greater random differences between individuals. So when dealing with real people on a day to day basis, this is all pretty irrelivent.
Basically, I'm sure you'd find that a male geek and a female geek be mentally, fairly similar. Certainly they'd share many more similarities then say a male geek and a male actor.
Tracks are the last thing you need for a Mars rover. They require lot's of energy to drive and are mechanically, very unreliable. Modern tanks are lucky if they drive 200 miles without a breakdown.
The space station would be fairly basic. No need for life support that can keep people alive for months, smallish solar arrays because there's no need to supply power hungey scientific experiments. Perhaps he could even buy one of the spare Mir hulls the Russians still have.
The big bottleneck is getting people there. Assuming you still use Soyuz's, you could carry two passangers and one professional Cosmonaut. That'd split the fare Dennis Tito paid in half but that's still a lot of money. Are there enough people who can:
(a) Afford it
(b) Are fit enough (rich people are often old)
(c) Can spare the time to train (rich people are usually busy)
to make the whole thing worthwhile. Still, I hope this goes ahead.
An Interesting Story....
on
Nostrildamus
·
· Score: 3
When Apollo 8 splashed down after flying round the moon in December 1968, the diver who had the job of opening the hatch as the capsule bobbed up and down in the ocean came close to throwing up from the smell inside.
Three guys in a small, sealed space for 12 days, using toilets that where essentially hi-tech plastic bags. Makes you shudder just to think aboout it.
Would be roughly the same as spending a week in a hemetrically sealed, small office cubicle with two other people. Imagine what that would be like after a few days and spaceflight rapidly loses it's glamour.
This is an extract from a book called Apollo, The Race to the Moon which I'm currently reading
Chris Kraft's console in the Mercury Control Center included a screen showing a live television shot of the launch pad. During simulations, the Redstone or Atlas of course just sat there but the camera was nontheless always turned on. One day a controller names John Hatcher substituted a tape of a launch for the live picture. Hatcher synchronized the tape with the simulated countdown and waited for the moment of the pretend launch. As always during Mercury, Chris Kraft was the flight director. At T-0, as Kraft pushed the lever that started the clocks, the Redstone on the screen belched smoke and fire and lifted of the pad.
The lever wasn't connected to anything that could have conceivably have launched a rocket but the sight was too compellingly realistic to be discounted. "Look at that!" Kraft yelled in dismay to Kranz, who was sitting beside him at the assistant flight directors console. "Did you see that?!" Kraft cried again, pointing insistently at the screen.
I bet about 5000 horny slashdot geeks are fantasising about getting a time machine and heading back to Seattle in 1994 to pick up a Wizards of the Coast job application form.
Designing the look of this would be horribly
difficult. If it's say 100 years pre-TOS, then
it'll be 100 years (give or take) in our future
and by our standards be outrageously high-tech. But at the same time, it's got to be cruder then
TOS, which to us today, looks rediculously cheesie
and old-fashioned.
The trouble is, visions of the future are always warped by the era in which they where invented and so go out of date rediculously fast.
I always liked the idea of a series based on a Federation Black Ops unit. But it seems to contradict the Federations
boy scout ethos too much for the suits to buy it.
Trans-Atlantic transit time is a bit of a sore point for me and I guess also for a lot of people in the UK and Europe who order stuff from the US online. Basically it goes like this:
Surface - Theoretical transit time, around 10 days, total delivery time 6-8 weeks.
Air - Theoretical transit time, 7-12 hours, total delivery time 10-14 days.
Basically what I'm saying, is that a ship that can
cross the Atlantic in 3 days would be the most pointless thing imagineable if the cargo is just going to sit in a warehouse when it arrives. Sorting out the appallingly bad distribution networks at each end would be much more useful.
According to this article on Wired. The really dangerous people aren't likely to be
recognized bacause no records of them will exist. In fact they will go out of their way to appear law abiding model citizens. Especially as levels of background surveilence are increasing.
All the system will do is pick out Jimmy the Dip who as 3 convictions for pickpockting. As Jimmy has served his time, can you stop him going in without any evidence he has criminal intent?
When it re-enters the first thing to go will be the solar panels, they have a huge surface area and aren't strongly attached so aerodynamic forces will quickly rip them off. Next the individual modules will probably seperate as the docking ports that connect them will be something of a weak link. Finally the modules will break apart as the frictional heating and aerodynamic loads peak (the graph of these values agains time for a re-entering body looks like a bell curve). What will survive will be things like heavily built electronic boxes and fuel and oxygen tanks. Spherical, titanium tanks are notoriously good at surviving re-entry, even when they aren't supposed to, Mir has quite a few of these mounted on the outside which will probably detach quite early on to land seperately.
And of cource in the weeks following, we're bound to see a steady stream of people trying to eBay rusty bits of junk they dug up in their yard. Claiming that these are genuine Mir fragments.
The factor that's always forgotten when the impact of early printing is discussed is the role played by the introduction of cheap, plant fibre based paper.
It doesn't matter a damn if printing enables you to slash the labour cost of producing books if you still have to use (very expensive) vellum. The material costs would make sure books still stay rare and expensive.
Printing was only one of two technologies that where needed,but which luckily came along at roughly the same time.
After all, if history was only slightly different we might all be right now plodding along in a field holding a plow and looking at the rear end of an ox.
For the ultimate adrenaline rush, check out Project MOOSE. A system that was developed in the early 60's that would have enabled a person wearing a space suit to re-enter the atmosphere and land from low Earth orbit.
What is utterly amazing is that Eros has loose rocks lying on its surface, with their size ranging down to below the camera resolution.
How did they come to be there given the level of Eros's gravity? If a meteor hit Eros, the debris from the impact would fly off far too fast to be recaptured by Eros, yet if the rocks aren't impact debris, where did they come from?
What happens when you move your head, even slightly? Basically your inner ear is detecting motion but your eyes are viewing a virtual 19" screen that appears static. When your brain receives these conflicting signals the result is often acute motion sickness. I've heard this from several people who've used similar devices. One said he simply could not use one for more then 30 minutes without feeling nauseous. I suspect it's like zero-g sickness, some people will be susceptible, others will have no problems.
Wat it means, is that balloons become simpler and easier. You can now imagine a lander carrying half a dozen balloons with 1kg payloads that get released one by one. One problem with baloons though is tracking, for good science data, you need to know what the readings are and where they where taken. Until something like Marsnet is up and running, the full potential of balloons won't be fulfilled
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Now if assuming a terrorist is a citizen and get's challenged by a cop, all they have to do is produce a forged or stolen passport and claim to be a visitor from another country; the same applies to terrorists who come from abroad. If they get found out, they claim to be an illeagle migrant and the worst that happens to them is deportation.
This of course assumes that the claims made that the ID cars will have neat technology to make them forgery-proof are true. I suspect there'd be decent fakes available within months. After all, the snake-heads that run the world wide illeagle immigrants/people smuggling rackets would have a huge financianl interest in defeating this technology.
At worst, this will introduce a false sense of security. A terrorist who has a good fake card will find it even easier to walk onto an aircraft without question.
By the late 30's, flying boats where already carrying passangers across the Atlantic. When land planes that could fly this far came along, airships would have had it. An 40's aircraft would have carried about the same number of passangers. Be twice as fast, only needed about 5 crew and would have cost about an order of magnitude less to build. You just can't argue with that.
Also, although it'd reach any point on Earth in 90 minutes, I suspect the time needed to actually prepare one for launch would be substantially more. The X-33 uses liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen so unlike an ICBM, it can't be kept on the pad, fueled up and ready to go at a moment's notice as the propellents would boil off.
I'm not knocking this. I think it'd be superb if the Pentagon foots the bill to get the X-33 flying, it's just I can see some serious flaws.
I don't want to knock the people who did it. They deserve the credit. Yet wouldn't a flint arrowhead kind of stick out when using modern imaging technology? And wouldn't sticking the body through a CT scanner ot MRI machine be the first thing done by virtually any serious researcher who got access to it?
There must be more to the story then then what's been reported. I just can't understand why it took 10 years to find this arrowhead.
From the MSNBC story, is why the copmpany charges $18 per sq km for imaging N America $35 per sq km for imaging anywhere else. It's not as if the satellite has travelling expenses or anything.
Basically, I'm sure you'd find that a male geek and a female geek be mentally, fairly similar. Certainly they'd share many more similarities then say a male geek and a male actor.
LOLOAQICI82QB4IP Just say it out loud, and no I no longer use it.
Tracks are the last thing you need for a Mars rover. They require lot's of energy to drive and are mechanically, very unreliable. Modern tanks are lucky if they drive 200 miles without a breakdown.
The big bottleneck is getting people there. Assuming you still use Soyuz's, you could carry two passangers and one professional Cosmonaut. That'd split the fare Dennis Tito paid in half but that's still a lot of money. Are there enough people who can:
(a) Afford it
(b) Are fit enough (rich people are often old)
(c) Can spare the time to train (rich people are usually busy)
to make the whole thing worthwhile. Still, I hope this goes ahead.
Three guys in a small, sealed space for 12 days, using toilets that where essentially hi-tech plastic bags. Makes you shudder just to think aboout it.
Would be roughly the same as spending a week in a hemetrically sealed, small office cubicle with two other people. Imagine what that would be like after a few days and spaceflight rapidly loses it's glamour.
I wonder if that's what they call the edited out
cuss words?
This is an extract from a book called Apollo, The Race to the Moon which I'm currently reading
Chris Kraft's console in the Mercury Control Center included a screen showing a live television shot of the launch pad. During simulations, the Redstone or Atlas of course just sat there but the camera was nontheless always turned on. One day a controller names John Hatcher substituted a tape of a launch for the live picture. Hatcher synchronized the tape with the simulated countdown and waited for the moment of the pretend launch. As always during Mercury, Chris Kraft was the flight director. At T-0, as Kraft pushed the lever that started the clocks, the Redstone on the screen belched smoke and fire and lifted of the pad.
The lever wasn't connected to anything that could have conceivably have launched a rocket but the sight was too compellingly realistic to be discounted. "Look at that!" Kraft yelled in dismay to Kranz, who was sitting beside him at the assistant flight directors console. "Did you see that?!" Kraft cried again, pointing insistently at the screen.
I bet about 5000 horny slashdot geeks are fantasising about getting a time machine and heading back to Seattle in 1994 to pick up a Wizards of the Coast job application form.
The trouble is, visions of the future are always warped by the era in which they where invented and so go out of date rediculously fast.
I always liked the idea of a series based on a Federation Black Ops unit. But it seems to contradict the Federations boy scout ethos too much for the suits to buy it.
2001-03-12 12:54:36 EST
First Listing in eBay of some piece of scrap metal that somebody is claiming is "Mir Debris":
2001-03-14 18:45:23 EST
Surface - Theoretical transit time, around 10 days, total delivery time 6-8 weeks.
Air - Theoretical transit time, 7-12 hours, total delivery time 10-14 days.
Basically what I'm saying, is that a ship that can cross the Atlantic in 3 days would be the most pointless thing imagineable if the cargo is just going to sit in a warehouse when it arrives. Sorting out the appallingly bad distribution networks at each end would be much more useful.
All the system will do is pick out Jimmy the Dip who as 3 convictions for pickpockting. As Jimmy has served his time, can you stop him going in without any evidence he has criminal intent?
14 May 2015 Press Scare Stories about possible health effects of high intensity magnetic fields.
17 May 2015 First lawsuit against the maglev operating company by a person who claims it gave him brain cancer.
And of cource in the weeks following, we're bound to see a steady stream of people trying to eBay rusty bits of junk they dug up in their yard. Claiming that these are genuine Mir fragments.
It doesn't matter a damn if printing enables you to slash the labour cost of producing books if you still have to use (very expensive) vellum. The material costs would make sure books still stay rare and expensive.
Printing was only one of two technologies that where needed,but which luckily came along at roughly the same time.
After all, if history was only slightly different we might all be right now plodding along in a field holding a plow and looking at the rear end of an ox.
For the ultimate adrenaline rush, check out Project MOOSE. A system that was developed in the early 60's that would have enabled a person wearing a space suit to re-enter the atmosphere and land from low Earth orbit.
How did they come to be there given the level of Eros's gravity? If a meteor hit Eros, the debris from the impact would fly off far too fast to be recaptured by Eros, yet if the rocks aren't impact debris, where did they come from?
What happens when you move your head, even slightly? Basically your inner ear is detecting motion but your eyes are viewing a virtual 19" screen that appears static. When your brain receives these conflicting signals the result is often acute motion sickness. I've heard this from several people who've used similar devices. One said he simply could not use one for more then 30 minutes without feeling nauseous. I suspect it's like zero-g sickness, some people will be susceptible, others will have no problems.
Wat it means, is that balloons become simpler and easier. You can now imagine a lander carrying half a dozen balloons with 1kg payloads that get released one by one. One problem with baloons though is tracking, for good science data, you need to know what the readings are and where they where taken. Until something like Marsnet is up and running, the full potential of balloons won't be fulfilled