This, however, is a way to toss the images into a black box and not let them come out except when the DoD wants to trot out selected images of their own choice. Not being classified, they wouldn't be requried to show the pictures to Congress, nor would they _ever_ become available to the public.
True, they might not ever become public (though are likely to do so eventually...). But Congress can subpoena any government info it wants to. And regularly does. Commercial proprietary info issues and classified info issues are handled all the time by congressional staff.
Calling it a black box is unreasonable. It's practically going to be less black than truly classified image intelligence, for example,
and that's coming out after 30 or so years of
delay from when it was taken.
Just because the mechanism isn't explicit doesn't mean it will stay black. Any future President or Secretary of Defense could at any time release the data hold on that data. And such things do happen, regularly.
The legislation doesn't make it illegal to redistribute any commercial satellite imagery.
It just makes it illegal to redistribute imagery that the US government purchased exclusive rights to but has not classified.
They're purchasing exlusive rights over certain image areas to avoid having to classify the data output from all the commercial satellite operators.
Maybe you could argue that they should just go classify it anyways, but the result will be the same. The Government reserves the right to tell commercial image satellite operators where they can't take pictures, or can't sell the images they do take. This is not news. The mechanism by which that is enforced is just adjusting a bit.
Should also fire all these quack jobs that think parachutes are the answer to everything. This isn't a freaking $260 million egg-drop contest. Kinda sad that these engineers would lose to most 4th graders. If it is landing in the desert, use thrusters, sheesh.
No.
Historically, parachutes are about
an order of magnitude more reliable in practice
than landing thruster rockets.
Parachtues just have to fire the deploy pyro and not get tangled up, and you can have more than one in case one gets tangled up.
With rockets, you have to control the orientation so you're thrusting down, you have to measure the altitude so that you slow down to land softly, the rocket motors have to start and run reliably, etc.
Please leave spacecraft design to people who actually study it. Knee-jerk uninformed reactions aren't going to help. It broke, but why it broke and the implications and possible lessons are important. Read some more.
Companies and the freemarket is what makes this country strong, throwing dirt in their eyes from the left through the courts only hurts us all.
Even die-hard libertarians admit that people and companies can in fact do wrong and should be held accountable for doing so.
At the very least, Diebold had people doing unauthorized management of voting machines in the last round of electons, and updated a number of voting machines with illegal (not California Secretary of State reviewed and approved) versions of the operating software for some of those machines.
An extremely good case can be made under product liability law that the machines were simply unfit for their stated purpose, and that Diebold knew or should have known that they were unfit.
The reason your post is a troll is that you're blaming California for the lawsuit with the presumption that a company can't do any wrong. I am generally a very enthusiastic free market booster and think that companies often get the shaft from the courts, politicians, and media.
But in this case, they have clearly done some illegal things, and making them out to be the victim is trollish.
Hold 'em accountable. If the courts decide that it wasn't in fact actionable then so be it. But the suit is entirely justified by the publically known facts, and I have little doubt that much more will come out in discovery...
The problem is that Diebold assured the technically inept California voting folks that they were perfectly able to build a good system. And then lied. And have been knowingly breaking the law. And are trying to still profit from this by charging as much as possible for printers so that there is a verifiable paper record of the votes, to fix *their* decided security holes.
I would agree except for the slam
technically inept California voting folks.
The California Secretary of State, and the local county Registrars of Voters, have been working to improve our voting systems quite dilligently.
They aren't technically inept. They aren't e-voting security experts. Which isn't suprising... the lesson of the last couple of years seems to be that only a few independent experts are e-voting security experts,
and that the companies doing it clearly aren't.
That was only really clear even to techies about a year ago...
Kx's database is column-based instead of row based. That makes it hugely efficient for some queries (which tradition row-based RDBMSs have trouble with) and incredibly bad at others (in which traditional RDBMSs shine). It's just a question of trade-offs.
Well, that's one major Kx feature, yeah. It's a bit more than just that, from reading the description.
Kx isn't the first column-based database, either.
Sybase's IQ product (formerly IQ-Multiplex) has been out for years now, with the exact same tens-to-hundreds of times faster response rate for data warehouse type column searches, and the same relative slowness in transaction based updates.
I'm not really a DB geek, but it seems to me that a database that could do both row and column based tables would be an interesting development, and even more interesting would be having a table be able to be stored and accessed both as rows and as columns in different areas of the table would be more interesting still...
I'm wondering if Slashdot is not really giving us an objective viewpoint here.
As a rule, no, Slashdot readers are monumentally biased.
That doesn't mean that SCO is not in huge trouble. They have recently laid off a bunch of fairly key middle managers in the profitable SCO UNIX branch. The engineers are not yet on the chopping block, but the end is near when you let go the marketing and product management people on products. They're going to decline from there.
I also know a bunch of corporate and intellecutal property attorneys in real life, one of whom is my father. They're all wondering what the heck SCO has been thinking with the filings over the last year. Both factually and legally very weak filings.
Management is not harder than coding per se. It is just harder for geeks whose talents and interests are more suited for coding. Most managers don't want to code, because for them it is HARDER than managing.
It appears to me that a larger segment of the base population can learn to code in an acceptable manner than can learn how to manage in an acceptable manner.
Management concepts are very easy to understand... a semester equivalent's worth of reading will more than do. But they're really hard for most people to impliment.
Particularly so for the sorts of people that generally end up in CS programs and/or selftought hackers, it seems. But that's completely ancedotal based on people I know.
Getting results from a "Apply people to problem" problem is very different than getting results from "Apply myself to this problem". And knowing what problems to attack, from the "this business has to succeed" sense, is even harder.
Sorry, but anyone who studied (and passed) chemistry ought to know what steric hindrance is.
I was not a chemistry major in college, but I took a few of the science track chem courses at a top level US university. And did a hell of a lot better than just passing them. I have a fairly deep background in Chemistry beyond college, my mother, aunt, and grandfather were all professionals (Granddad was a chemistry professor). I am technically active in several science and engineering fields not including Chemistry.
As far as I can tell, looking back through all my textbooks (which I kept), Steric never came up as a term.
Now that it's been defined it all makes sense; the issues you are describing are all fairly easy to understand. I am sure that I could have google'd the term as well.
But I didn't know it on first reading.
There is a very important difference between someone who is just unfamiliar with particular field specific terminology, and someone who is not aware of basic concepts in a specific field.
You are blurring the line, or do not understand it.
There has been a great failure of science education in the last decade or so (well, ok, going back further than that). Jargon, and a haughty attitude that encourage it, are proliferating. This is a terrible thing from a communications / education point of view.
Read up on the NSF's NAP proposal in case you have any doubt.
There were a lot of issues with the NAPs as originally conceived, but they came about long after the CIX was formed.
CIX initially had nothing to do with NSFNet. It was all about letting all the various commercial ISPs exchange traffic in a reasonable manner, and lobbying for the ISP industry in general.
By the time of the NAPs, it was evident that any attempt to uniquely monopolize peering points was going to die a horrible death, because the pool of people who knew how to build them had reached critical mass and the demand for them was high enough that people were already talking about doing them completely commercially if the government did not. There were already commercial alternatives, and those continued to grow and diversify after the NAPs came into existence.
Some people at regionals and NSF thought differently, but they were already far behind the growth curve at that point, whether they realized it or not.
It wasn't until later when money and politics caused some ISPs to stop wanting to peer profligately that the demand for open peering points started to drop off...
The mission is a complete lunacy. Their booster stage docks to Soyuz on its front and acceleration commences with the austronaughts hanging on the belts in their seats in the direction opposite to the normal. Even if the spacecraft survives, you will not. You will have your neck broken even prior to the "Return to Earth" phase.
How could anyone be so ignorant about human G tolerance?
People routinely survive 50-100 G impacts in the same direction as they're proposing. Car crashes, after all, usually result in you being flung forwards into your seatbelt (and on newer cars, airbag). Severe G load and G onset rate injuries start in the middle of that range, but people in good shape are expected to survive 100 G impacts in that axis.
Any textbook on human physiological tolerance, or any of the human spaceflight references, will show you people's tolerance for sustained Gs in the -Z axis. Which are significant, and better than head-to-foot and visa versa, if I recall (books are all at home at the moment).
John Carmack was planning on using this orientation on an earlier version of Armadillo Aerospace's X-prize rocket, the one with the crushable nosecone.
Um, Rutan's dumb choice of oxidizer means that he has a heavy oxidizer tank without getting a worthwhile ISP, and could never scale it up to orbital flight. On the other hand, LOX/Kerosene is a pretty darn good fuel/oxidizer combination.
It is entirely possible to fly to orbit using Nitrous Oxide oxidizer.
Nitrous has a somewhat lower energy content than LOX, but performance is not everything. The overall size of the vehicle increases, but you do away with pumps in the rocket motors, since nitrous self pressurizes. You may need to cool it to get to reasonable pressures... around -40 C gets you down to 150 PSI, in very very rough numbers... but it's entirely workable.
SpaceDev, the company that supplies the hybrid motors for Space Ship One, is developing a Nitrous oxidizer hybrid multistage launch vehicle for the US Air Force under contract to the Air Force Research Lab, the Streaker launch vehicle.
My company bid a Nitrous/Propane liquid multistage rocket for the AFRL/DARPA FALCON project, which SpaceDev's contact came from originally.
The idea that rockets need to have the absolute highest performance materials and propellants used everywhere is exactly why it costs five thousand dollars a pound to launch things instead of five hundred or less. A large number of bright people have been working on changing that for the last decade or so, and we're getting close to having some of us flying things that prove the point.
Use the right technology for minimum cost depending on your design approach.
I have to concur. Armadillo is way off - reading their test diary makes this quite clear. I really have to question their design philosophy. While I'm not fond of cryogenic fuels (especially LOX/LH), peroxide as an oxidizer is no simple task. The stabilizing chemicals tend to ruin your catalysts. The way to get around this is what the Germans did - inject ample liquid catalysts into the fuel that you burn with peroxide as the oxidizer.
Armadillo was using high purity non-stabilized
peroxide up until roughly a year ago. It does not
need injected liquid catalysts: just using silver
and platinum, or various other solid catalysts,
works just fine.
Now, Armadillo is using a mixture of 50% unstabilized peroxide and methanol. It has about
the same energy per unit mass/volume as 90%
peroxide does, but is a fraction of the cost
and handling issues of 90% plus unstabilized
peroxide. Still a monopropellant, but very
much simpler and cheaper.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Armadillo isn't even using a fuel - it looks to be a straight peroxide rocket, as I haven't seen them mention a fuel since May 2003. So, not only do you have a chemical that's hard to work with, you have a very low ISP, too. I'd never dream of going that route.
Please read harder. Armadillo has been describing
their rocket motors in detail repeatedly.
Isp is not everything. For a first stage, density impulse is much more important. And for a non orbital rocket vehicle, handling and ease of design and construction are also very important.
Amateurs talk Isp; Professionals start with density impulse and then system design tradeoffs
on the overall vehicle; Experts talk development cost and timeline to get vehicles that meet the minimum requirements flying successfully.
Not that I think that Rutan's choice of fuel and oxidizer are all that incredible (why on earth NO3 as an oxidizer???), but they're better.
Not NO3. N2O; Nitrous Oxide.
Why? It's not a bad oxidizer, that's why.
It has less oxygen than LOX or peroxide
or nitrogen tetroxide or nitric acid, true.
But like peroxide and hydrazine, it's got
internal energy, so when it starts to react
the dissassociation adds energy to the
reactions. That evens it out. Nitrous is
decent overall performance and self pressurizing,
which none of the other oxidizers are.
Also, vaned thrust deflection instead of gimballing, while it may look great on paper, just seems like a problem waiting to happen, as far as rockets go. It's no shock that they've been having big problem with that system... it's fine for jet engines, but with rocket engines, you're dealing with far more intense, far hotter exhaust in a high vibration environment. Also, vaned thrust deflection loses more energy than gimballing due to drag, which is something that they just can't afford, especially with a monopropellant rocket.
Again: Specific Impulse is not everything.
It's a lot simpler, safer, easier to develop
a vanes system than a fully gimballing motor.
Less mass is moving, no propellant lines
are moving.
Real rocket innovators have been looking
at jet vanes on and off continuously for
the last decade. Most chose to go another
direction, but they are not a bad choice
for certain sets of vehicle design and
development assumptions. Carmack's group
called that one right: it is a good choice
for their vehicle and their development
program.
In short, I don't much care for their design.
Well, fine, but at the very least you could
read up on the actual details and see what
other people who actually know something
about rocket design think about it.
I would never have developed exactly their
vehicle, however, Armadillo are making incremental
good choices and have a clue about both ultimate
performance and doing development on
Since when did handing out cash to shareholders ever add value to a company? Pretty silly idea, and has no basis in reality.
The shareholders own the company.
It's for their benefit that it exists in
the first place.
Dividends and stock buybacks are an important
part of real world corporate activities.
Not all companies do either or both, but they
are extremely important.
Class 125 is the temperature rating which
is low enough to keep media from being damaged
in the fire. Normal fire safes are just intended
to keep paper from getting fried. Class 125 is
intended to keep everything cool enough to prevent
loss of data off tape etc.
Tested is critical to ensure that
it's not just designed, but tested and
verified to meet the specification.
The UL specs are listed on among other places
FireKing media safe (note: this is a safe vendor's website).
To summarize:
UL Fire and Impact Tests
The data portion of the safe must maintain an interior temperature less than 125F and an interior relative humidity less than 80% for class 125, when exposed to fire as per the Standard Time Temperature Curve for 3 hours to 1925F. It must undergo all other requirements for the Fire Endurance Test, the Explosion Hazard Test, the Humidity Test, and the Fire and Impact Test. Basically, no explosion through 30 minutes to exposure to a 2000F fire and immediate 30 foot drop test and a standard reheating for one hour to 1700F.
The UL test for the records portion calls for the safe to be heated to 1550 for 30 minutes then dropped onto concrete rubble from a height of 30 feet. Then it is inverted and reheated for another 30 minutes. The safe must maintain its integrity throughout the test and protect all contents.
[...] What kind of damage do you think a 22,240 mile high structure would cause?
Nothing.
It's a ribbon. It's literally nearly equal
to the weight of an equal width of Saran Wrap.
How much unrolled saran wrap do you have to drop on someone before it hurts them?
How many buildings will be devastated by having
something that flimsy dropped on them?
The devastating space elevator fall
is bad science fiction. If it breaks, stuff above will stay in orbit, and stuff below the break will fall harmlessly.
Fortunately, if you don't use Zinc in your
circuits themselves, this won't be a problem.
Zinc whiskers coming off the environment....
datacenter floor blocks etc... are where the
current risk is. And that, is a risk when they
contact exposed traces or contacts in the computer
or its power supplies.
Those, now, conformal coating of the boards
and components, will keep the whiskers floating
in the air from doing any damage to.
So yes, conformal coat your boards and
it may help you.
I disagree; the more extreme the claim,
the better the evidence needs to be.
This is true in science as well as
real life.
In this particular case, there is plenty
of good evidence, which the poster who
orginally went off on whiskers simply
was unaware of and appeared to be unwilling
to believe existed or could exist.
Being absolutely sure you know everything
is a great way of surely being mistaken.
"check out and read entire books via the internet"
Searches for Anne McCafferey, R.A. Salvatore and Ray Bradbury all resulted in No results. This is not what AT&T promised, nor would it be classified as "soon".
[...]
The real kicker of it all is that I got modded Troll for making a legitimate comment on failed promises and you got modded Insightful for linking to three articles that did not actually demonstrate anything other than I was right.
You cannot fairly blame AT&T for not every technology developing on a predetermined schedule. They have legitimately been working on advancing topics such as the ones in the ad. Cutting into someone's chest with a robot arm because it's 2004 and the ad said this is the year for that isn't a good excuse for killing someone if the arm isn't actually good enough yet.
You cannot fairly blame AT&T for not every published book being available in ebook format yet. There are significant quantities of electronic books out there, and there are a fair number of books whose authors and publishers have put free copies up for download as well. And have been for years now.
You may not have thought you were trolling, but you are not being entirely reasonable either. You can define arbitrarily narrow versions of the ebooks question in which your answer is correct, but it is not generally true.
It's not particularly insightful to note that not every technology prediction made 5 or 10 years ago has come completely literally true, whether it was made in print or in a televised advertisement. Picking some very narrow interpretations in order to beat up on AT&T for that is, if not trolling, very troll-like.
Other autonomous duties don't seem like such a stretch when it only takes a second to communicate
They are a big deal.
Spacecraft control automation has been a huge
problem for decades. The ability to manage
failures and continue degraded operations rather
than safemode the spacecraft (and stop collecting
data in many cases) is still unproven.
The SF geek was never charged, and eventually
did get all his equipment back. No, these arrests
are other people.
Just to confirm that, "The SF geek" is online
right now / today, presumably not from jail,
so it does appear to be someone else completely
different busted.
Space Elevators == folly.
The problem is, you have to keep it up and stable. Major danger given the forces involved.
I wish ignorant people would stop saying that.
They're almost certainly dynamically stable
in position and tension.
And when it fails, it's a total catastrophe.
I wish ignorant people would stop saying that, too.
It's going to be a thin ribbon of probably
carbon nanotube fibers. How much ribbon do you
need to drop on someone to hurt them?
Common retort: Oh, but it's falling from orbit
What is the terminal velocity of a strand of ribbon? Do you have a one story building's
roof available to demonstrate this to yourself?
Most of it, falling down, will burn up in the
upper atmosphere. That which does not, will fall
so slowly by the time it reaches ground level as
to pose no threat to anyone on the ground,
unless you tangle yourself up in it after it
lands or it happens to catch an airplane on
the way down.
Screaming terror scenarios of huge swaths of
land ruined by explosive impact are bad science
fiction not fact. No competent professional has ever said such a thing.
It just plain will not happen.
No amount of code review, open source or proprietary, can guarantee that there isn't some lurking bug in the application. We have probably not yet
found all the ways there can be security holes,
much less all the actual holes in any given thing.
Developers and admins have to keep security aware constantly, which is one of the hardest problems in real production environments.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling it a black box is unreasonable. It's practically going to be less black than truly classified image intelligence, for example, and that's coming out after 30 or so years of delay from when it was taken.
Just because the mechanism isn't explicit doesn't mean it will stay black. Any future President or Secretary of Defense could at any time release the data hold on that data. And such things do happen, regularly.
They're purchasing exlusive rights over certain image areas to avoid having to classify the data output from all the commercial satellite operators.
Maybe you could argue that they should just go classify it anyways, but the result will be the same. The Government reserves the right to tell commercial image satellite operators where they can't take pictures, or can't sell the images they do take. This is not news. The mechanism by which that is enforced is just adjusting a bit.
Historically, parachutes are about an order of magnitude more reliable in practice than landing thruster rockets.
Parachtues just have to fire the deploy pyro and not get tangled up, and you can have more than one in case one gets tangled up.
With rockets, you have to control the orientation so you're thrusting down, you have to measure the altitude so that you slow down to land softly, the rocket motors have to start and run reliably, etc.
Please leave spacecraft design to people who actually study it. Knee-jerk uninformed reactions aren't going to help. It broke, but why it broke and the implications and possible lessons are important. Read some more.
At the very least, Diebold had people doing unauthorized management of voting machines in the last round of electons, and updated a number of voting machines with illegal (not California Secretary of State reviewed and approved) versions of the operating software for some of those machines.
An extremely good case can be made under product liability law that the machines were simply unfit for their stated purpose, and that Diebold knew or should have known that they were unfit.
The reason your post is a troll is that you're blaming California for the lawsuit with the presumption that a company can't do any wrong. I am generally a very enthusiastic free market booster and think that companies often get the shaft from the courts, politicians, and media.
But in this case, they have clearly done some illegal things, and making them out to be the victim is trollish.
Hold 'em accountable. If the courts decide that it wasn't in fact actionable then so be it. But the suit is entirely justified by the publically known facts, and I have little doubt that much more will come out in discovery...
The California Secretary of State, and the local county Registrars of Voters, have been working to improve our voting systems quite dilligently.
They aren't technically inept. They aren't e-voting security experts. Which isn't suprising... the lesson of the last couple of years seems to be that only a few independent experts are e-voting security experts, and that the companies doing it clearly aren't.
That was only really clear even to techies about a year ago...
Kx isn't the first column-based database, either. Sybase's IQ product (formerly IQ-Multiplex) has been out for years now, with the exact same tens-to-hundreds of times faster response rate for data warehouse type column searches, and the same relative slowness in transaction based updates.
I'm not really a DB geek, but it seems to me that a database that could do both row and column based tables would be an interesting development, and even more interesting would be having a table be able to be stored and accessed both as rows and as columns in different areas of the table would be more interesting still...
That doesn't mean that SCO is not in huge trouble. They have recently laid off a bunch of fairly key middle managers in the profitable SCO UNIX branch. The engineers are not yet on the chopping block, but the end is near when you let go the marketing and product management people on products. They're going to decline from there.
I also know a bunch of corporate and intellecutal property attorneys in real life, one of whom is my father. They're all wondering what the heck SCO has been thinking with the filings over the last year. Both factually and legally very weak filings.
Management concepts are very easy to understand... a semester equivalent's worth of reading will more than do. But they're really hard for most people to impliment.
Particularly so for the sorts of people that generally end up in CS programs and/or selftought hackers, it seems. But that's completely ancedotal based on people I know.
Getting results from a "Apply people to problem" problem is very different than getting results from "Apply myself to this problem". And knowing what problems to attack, from the "this business has to succeed" sense, is even harder.
As far as I can tell, looking back through all my textbooks (which I kept), Steric never came up as a term.
Now that it's been defined it all makes sense; the issues you are describing are all fairly easy to understand. I am sure that I could have google'd the term as well.
But I didn't know it on first reading.
There is a very important difference between someone who is just unfamiliar with particular field specific terminology, and someone who is not aware of basic concepts in a specific field.
You are blurring the line, or do not understand it.
There has been a great failure of science education in the last decade or so (well, ok, going back further than that). Jargon, and a haughty attitude that encourage it, are proliferating. This is a terrible thing from a communications / education point of view.
No, Word's (in)compatability with its own file formats is one of its own major weaknesses.
CIX initially had nothing to do with NSFNet. It was all about letting all the various commercial ISPs exchange traffic in a reasonable manner, and lobbying for the ISP industry in general.
By the time of the NAPs, it was evident that any attempt to uniquely monopolize peering points was going to die a horrible death, because the pool of people who knew how to build them had reached critical mass and the demand for them was high enough that people were already talking about doing them completely commercially if the government did not. There were already commercial alternatives, and those continued to grow and diversify after the NAPs came into existence.
Some people at regionals and NSF thought differently, but they were already far behind the growth curve at that point, whether they realized it or not.
It wasn't until later when money and politics caused some ISPs to stop wanting to peer profligately that the demand for open peering points started to drop off...
People routinely survive 50-100 G impacts in the same direction as they're proposing. Car crashes, after all, usually result in you being flung forwards into your seatbelt (and on newer cars, airbag). Severe G load and G onset rate injuries start in the middle of that range, but people in good shape are expected to survive 100 G impacts in that axis.
Any textbook on human physiological tolerance, or any of the human spaceflight references, will show you people's tolerance for sustained Gs in the -Z axis. Which are significant, and better than head-to-foot and visa versa, if I recall (books are all at home at the moment).
John Carmack was planning on using this orientation on an earlier version of Armadillo Aerospace's X-prize rocket, the one with the crushable nosecone.
Nitrous has a somewhat lower energy content than LOX, but performance is not everything. The overall size of the vehicle increases, but you do away with pumps in the rocket motors, since nitrous self pressurizes. You may need to cool it to get to reasonable pressures... around -40 C gets you down to 150 PSI, in very very rough numbers... but it's entirely workable.
SpaceDev, the company that supplies the hybrid motors for Space Ship One, is developing a Nitrous oxidizer hybrid multistage launch vehicle for the US Air Force under contract to the Air Force Research Lab, the Streaker launch vehicle.
My company bid a Nitrous/Propane liquid multistage rocket for the AFRL/DARPA FALCON project, which SpaceDev's contact came from originally.
The idea that rockets need to have the absolute highest performance materials and propellants used everywhere is exactly why it costs five thousand dollars a pound to launch things instead of five hundred or less. A large number of bright people have been working on changing that for the last decade or so, and we're getting close to having some of us flying things that prove the point.
Use the right technology for minimum cost depending on your design approach.
Armadillo was using high purity non-stabilized peroxide up until roughly a year ago. It does not need injected liquid catalysts: just using silver and platinum, or various other solid catalysts, works just fine.
Now, Armadillo is using a mixture of 50% unstabilized peroxide and methanol. It has about the same energy per unit mass/volume as 90% peroxide does, but is a fraction of the cost and handling issues of 90% plus unstabilized peroxide. Still a monopropellant, but very much simpler and cheaper.
Please read harder. Armadillo has been describing their rocket motors in detail repeatedly.
Isp is not everything. For a first stage, density impulse is much more important. And for a non orbital rocket vehicle, handling and ease of design and construction are also very important.
Amateurs talk Isp; Professionals start with density impulse and then system design tradeoffs on the overall vehicle; Experts talk development cost and timeline to get vehicles that meet the minimum requirements flying successfully.
Not NO3. N2O; Nitrous Oxide.
Why? It's not a bad oxidizer, that's why. It has less oxygen than LOX or peroxide or nitrogen tetroxide or nitric acid, true. But like peroxide and hydrazine, it's got internal energy, so when it starts to react the dissassociation adds energy to the reactions. That evens it out. Nitrous is decent overall performance and self pressurizing, which none of the other oxidizers are.
Again: Specific Impulse is not everything. It's a lot simpler, safer, easier to develop a vanes system than a fully gimballing motor. Less mass is moving, no propellant lines are moving.
Real rocket innovators have been looking at jet vanes on and off continuously for the last decade. Most chose to go another direction, but they are not a bad choice for certain sets of vehicle design and development assumptions. Carmack's group called that one right: it is a good choice for their vehicle and their development program.
Well, fine, but at the very least you could read up on the actual details and see what other people who actually know something about rocket design think about it.
I would never have developed exactly their vehicle, however, Armadillo are making incremental good choices and have a clue about both ultimate performance and doing development on
Dividends and stock buybacks are an important part of real world corporate activities. Not all companies do either or both, but they are extremely important.
UL Tested Class 125 Fire Safe
Class 125 is the temperature rating which is low enough to keep media from being damaged in the fire. Normal fire safes are just intended to keep paper from getting fried. Class 125 is intended to keep everything cool enough to prevent loss of data off tape etc.
Tested is critical to ensure that it's not just designed, but tested and verified to meet the specification.
The UL specs are listed on among other places FireKing media safe (note: this is a safe vendor's website).
To summarize:
Nothing.
It's a ribbon. It's literally nearly equal to the weight of an equal width of Saran Wrap.
How much unrolled saran wrap do you have to drop on someone before it hurts them?
How many buildings will be devastated by having something that flimsy dropped on them?
The devastating space elevator fall is bad science fiction. If it breaks, stuff above will stay in orbit, and stuff below the break will fall harmlessly.
Those, now, conformal coating of the boards and components, will keep the whiskers floating in the air from doing any damage to.
So yes, conformal coat your boards and it may help you.
This is true in science as well as real life.
In this particular case, there is plenty of good evidence, which the poster who orginally went off on whiskers simply was unaware of and appeared to be unwilling to believe existed or could exist.
Being absolutely sure you know everything is a great way of surely being mistaken.
terminal via 9600 serial, into a real box?
Or do you have the KA9Q TCP/IP stack running?
You may not have thought you were trolling, but you are not being entirely reasonable either. You can define arbitrarily narrow versions of the ebooks question in which your answer is correct, but it is not generally true.
It's not particularly insightful to note that not every technology prediction made 5 or 10 years ago has come completely literally true, whether it was made in print or in a televised advertisement. Picking some very narrow interpretations in order to beat up on AT&T for that is, if not trolling, very troll-like.
They are a big deal.
Spacecraft control automation has been a huge problem for decades. The ability to manage failures and continue degraded operations rather than safemode the spacecraft (and stop collecting data in many cases) is still unproven.
Just to confirm that, "The SF geek" is online right now / today, presumably not from jail, so it does appear to be someone else completely different busted.
They're almost certainly dynamically stable in position and tension.
I wish ignorant people would stop saying that, too.
It's going to be a thin ribbon of probably carbon nanotube fibers. How much ribbon do you need to drop on someone to hurt them?
Common retort: Oh, but it's falling from orbit
What is the terminal velocity of a strand of ribbon? Do you have a one story building's roof available to demonstrate this to yourself?
Most of it, falling down, will burn up in the upper atmosphere. That which does not, will fall so slowly by the time it reaches ground level as to pose no threat to anyone on the ground, unless you tangle yourself up in it after it lands or it happens to catch an airplane on the way down.
Screaming terror scenarios of huge swaths of land ruined by explosive impact are bad science fiction not fact. No competent professional has ever said such a thing. It just plain will not happen.
Developers and admins have to keep security aware constantly, which is one of the hardest problems in real production environments.