if I remember correctly, only four of the eight wires in an ethernet cable are used
The difference between CAT5e UTP network cabling and "phone wire" is a lot more than conductor count. For one thing, there's the whole twisted pair thing. If you wanted to drive ethernet over untwisted POTS copper your first problem is resistance. The longer the wire, the lower the voltage will be when the signal comes out the other end. Raise the voltage? Then you've increased inductive interference wherever two of your conductors are parallel to one another (hence the twisted pair-- they're never parallel). I have, in an absolute pinch, temporarily rigged up a 10baseT connection over old phone cabling. It worked, but it only had to go 20' on untwisted wire. Even so, we ran tests and found the error rate was noticeably higher.
The simple solution to that is not being such a stupid fuckwit at school so you can get a proper job and not join the army, with all the other fuck-ups and dead-end retards.
Crawl back into your time machine, ya' hippy. The Army isn't a last-chance job pool for dumbshits. One has not been permitted to join the regular army without a high school diploma (that's a DIPLOMA-- not a GED) for over 15 years. Additionally, I was hardly a "fuckwit at school". And what's a proper job? How about something in Military Intelligence? Like "98C - Signal Intelligence Analyst"? I doubt your chosen vocation is even half as mentally challenging. As for me being a "fuck-up" or "retard", I was trained by the army as a Russian linguist. You think a fuckwit can learn to read, write, speak, and understand Russian in 11 months? Get a fucking clue, numbnuts. Besides, if you had any real balls and/or brains you wouldn't have hidden behind an AC post.
My most vivid memory of it is still that it is really heavy and a bitch to carry long distances.
Heh. Yeah, as I recall from my Army time, when we trained on a new weapon/radio/etc the phrase we most hated to hear was "man-portable". All that meant was that some damn fool put a shoulder strap on it or squeezed it into a box small enough to jam into a ruck or strap to a pack frame. Of course, nothing compares to the sinking feeling that comes with the realization that "light infantry" means "no vehicles-- you carry it".
with the right maps, following terrain really shouldn't be that hard. Just plot your way points in such a manner as to avoid major terrain features.
True, but flying 100' AGL doesn't give you a lot of room for vertical error, which is what'll really get you. Combine the fact that GPS altitude resolution will get you less than 100' accuracy and that you can't slave your altitude to the altimiter without damping the corrections somewhat and you get a situation where flying over anything but Nebraska is all but impossible. Imagine flying over a city: your radar altitude will vary by like 50 feet (5 stories!) based on the buildings below. Even with a preprogrammed course, 100' AGL is too low for a non-active mapping unmanned craft.
They had the equipment, they just didn't use it for some reason that only they know.
I suspect they knew that the second they fired up a search radar, or sent up a MiG, there'd be HARMs or AMRAAMs coming and bringing guaranteed destruction with them. Maybe they were hoping to "save" the stuff? Doesn't make sense to me either.
or for them to get an old russian sub -- with nukes, and take out NY or LA.
1) None of the old russian SLBM subs are seaworthy.
2) A sub is not a toyota truck. It takes dozens of trained people to operate a sub, and such training isn't readily available
3) The old russian subs don't have missiles in them and even if they did, there's more to launching an SLBM than typing in a lat-lon and pressing the big red "fire" button.
and you could surely add a radar altimeter to the plane to allow it to do some basic terrain-following.
Radar altimeters only see the ground below. This isn't enough to do even rudimentary terrain-following. Let's assume an extraordinarily generous 1:1 sustained climb-travel ratio (climbing 1 foot up for every foot traveled horizontally). At 100 feet AGL, all it would take is a hill with a 2:1 slope over 100 feet tall and your missile augers in. If you're launching in Oklahoma, no worries. Anywhere else, forget it. Better be flying at over 1000 feet.
With a nuclear, biologic or chemical payload, you don't really need to aim that accurately.
On what do you base that statement? Effective delivery is the hardest part of using NBC weapons. You can't just fill a Ziploc[tm] freezer bag full of anthrax spores or VX nerve agent or radioactive dust. They need to be aerosolized. A waterballoon full of sarin will realistically only kill the person it hits, the dozen that run to his aid, and a couple passers-by. Hardly an effective weapon.
I'm not worried about NBC weapons. I'm realistic. I worry about truck bombs.
The world already has enough nuclear bombs to destroy the whole world many times over.
I've heard this statement repeated over and over for decades. On what math is this based? There aren't enough nuclear weapons to target even a quarter of the major cities on the planet, much less "destroy the world". Even a carefully planned attack using everything against the most sizable targets would leave 75% of the world's population alive.
Of course, the traditional argument usually does a hand-wave towards the absurd notion of "nuclear winter" to account for the world ending, but this is hogwash. The nuclear winter believers pointed at the oil well fires in Kuwait in '91 and predicted a "mini-nuclear winter style" enviromental disaster, but as it turns out, opaque particulate matter lowers temperatures, increasing precipitation, which removes said matter from the atmosphere.
> +- 100 yards. YARDS, people. a football field either way
All americans will thank you for converting this to an understandable format!
Hey, if foreigners weren't so darn disorganized, their football* field size would be a unit of measurement too. But no, a football pitch can be anything from 100 to 130 yards long, and from 50 to 100 yards wide! Come on, you guys, make up your minds!
* to U.S. readers: foreigners don't play real football, like us. What they call "football" is really soccer. Silly foreigners!
Why can't we give these same people advanced windmills and solar cells? (Then teach them maintenance)
Solar and wind power aren't going to be the answer. At this point, both are dilute power sources. Additionally, maintenance of solar and wind generating facilities requires more than just "teach[ing] them maintenance". It requires spare/replacement parts which are usually very expensive and have short lifespans.
I think I have less than $100 invested in my home network
I always laughed about hom much my friends spent on their setups a couple years ago. With the exception of my Athlon 850 box, my ENTIRE SETUP (4-6 boxes + 100Mbps BayStack switch + CAT5 patch panel + cabling) was put together using stuff other people were throwing away. Most of my stuff was literally pulled out of dumpsters. Last year, though, I did a few quick calculations and found out that I was spending about $600 a year on electricity for all those old power hogs. So much for "free computers", eh?
You're misidentifying the definition of 'recommendation'. Maybe 'the orbit phase' has always previously been considered part of one long trip. We're talking about recommendations for future flights here. That might mean (gasp!) doing things differently or thinking about things differently to avoid the same outcome.
Don't be ridiculous. No amount of "recommending" or "thinking differently" is going to make space repairs possible. Do you have any idea what it would take to repair a damaged carbon-fiber leading edge assembly? It would take months here on earth! There's no magic toolbox they can devise that would make major structural repairs possible. Until we have a Real Space Station(tm), the orbital phase will be "mid-flight". The only real solution to the problem is to 1) check the craft mid-flight for catastrophic-failure inducing damage, and 2) have a second shuttle ready to go up and give the astronauts a "ride home" if such damage is found.
I've read that it is no longer possible to build another shuttle, the facilities no longer exist. You would have to ramp up the production facility from scratch, something they didn't have to do to replace Challenger.
You know, a bizarre side effect of this occured to me as I read your post. Now that shuttles are no longer replaceable, and they're proving to be less (ahem) "durable" than it first appeared, we should soon reach the point where we run low on shuttles and finally have to develop and field a better oribiter design like so many of us have been waiting for.
I mean, they go over it with a fine-toothed comb before they launch, and then a couple of weeks later they just say "OK, everybody buckle in, we're heading home". Sheesh, it takes more than that to fly a private plane, doesn't it? You do a pre-flight check, you fly, you land, then you do another pre-flight before you fly home again. Is that so hard a concept to apply here?
You're misidentifying the orbit phase of the mission. The orbit phase is not the same as landing at your destination in a plane. It's still part of the flying through the air stage. The difference is, you only have the passengers/pilots of the vehicle available to check the thing over while you're in orbit, and any repeairs you might attempt are a little trickier than sending for the NASA contracted grease monkey from Rockwell to bang on the fuel pump of the engine with a wrench. Think about it.
Heck, here's another opportunity for Canada to come to the rescue, just add another attachment on to the big shuttle bay crane arm.
The arm already HAS a camera attachment. The problem is that the arm is quite heavy and takes up space in the cargo bay. This is fine when they're just going up to launch a satellite, but when they go up with a lab module, there isn't enough room or weight capacity to bring it along so they have to LEAVE THE ARM AT HOME.
It can be said that Bill is a visionary -- his visualisations of piles of money have worked rather well so far
Oh, stop it. I despise Bill as much as the next guy, but clearly Bill was a visionary in his time. At a time when everyone else (Apple, IBM, etc.) thought the way to Get Ahead was by being a hardware manufacturer, Bill had the visionary insight that making the software was where the money was going to be.
Dunno how it's set up now, but when I was a signal intelligence analyst in the army 10 years ago, we had a small safe in the back of the truck we worked out of that held all our written notes and such. The top part of the safe held a thermite grenade that could be set off by pulling a ring, even with the safe shut. From what I heard, when they started giving 'em laptops in the field, they had to keep the hard drives in the safe when not in use. I reckon 1000+ degree molten iron would erase most any magnetic media.
No aircraft built since, not even military, can sustain a mach 2 flight speed for over 3 hours.
I would add the important caveat "no aircraft we know about". Despite US Defense Department claims that all aerial reconaissance is handled by satellites now that the SR-71 is retired, aircraft enthusiasts have noticed quite a few indications that "black projects" in this area are in operation.
The link seems to indicate that the Tu144 was the original , debuting slightly before the Concorde itself.
The Tu-144 only flew first. Although it had a few novel ideas to it, it was pretty much just a cheap knockoff of the Concorde they rushed through production. One glaring shortcoming of it was that the Soviets couldn't build a jet engine that would give the '144 enough thrust to go supersonic without afterburners. It was just a shameless propaganda pitch, really. It should never have been built.
There are dozens of reasons to abandon x86 as a hardware platform, not the least of which being its absolutely anemic memory subsystem and its lack of efficient multiprocessor design.
Hammer/Opteron from AMD fixes both of those and retains x86 compatibility. It's easy for Apple to change hardware because they control it completely. The best part of the x86/PC line is its ubiquity. Switching to a totally different design would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Orson Scott Card is one of the best writers in todays time.
Personally, I liked "Ender's Game" the FIRST time I read it-- when it was called "Starship Troopers" and written by Heinlein. Card took a short story with an already weak-premise (generals can be made from 6-year olds!) and further watered it down with the most sophomoric of philosophy, science, and military strategy. Ender's siblings overthrow the government by essentially posting to USENET under pseudonyms? Gimme a freakin' break man...
no sane company wants to have to dig up a 2 mile stretch of trench to fix the line every time it goes dark.
Hah! The company I work for does. We also want our customers to dump Diet Coke on their phones, block the air intakes on their network hubs, and hire moron painters who spray EVERYTHING in the phone closet (KSU, 66 blocks, HDSL backplanes) a nice semi-gloss beige. We have one client so penny-wise and pound-foolish that they've insisted upon 2-pair wire runs instead of 4-pair because it was CHEAPER by 4 cents a foot. Of course, they had to pay for a SECOND installation of wire when the 2-pair turned out to be inadequate, but hey, they saved almost 40 dollars up front!
How about "don't litter the battlefield with large quantities of highly radioactive material..."
From the spec sheet:
An Integrated High Energy Density Power Source (Po-210) That Provides Continuous Energy, And
Resultant Weapons Use, For Over 60 Days.
With a 2-month lifespan, the power packs would hardly "litter the battlefield", and besides the military is already very conscious of the necessity of not leaving behind anything that can be used as a weapon. When I was in the army, I found it quite amusing that the LAW rocket was designed to be a "disposable one-shot" design, but then they cautioned us that we were to never leave even so little as a fiberglass tube (e.g. LAW rocket launcher) behind, lest the enemy convert it into a mortar or something.
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The difference between CAT5e UTP network cabling and "phone wire" is a lot more than conductor count. For one thing, there's the whole twisted pair thing. If you wanted to drive ethernet over untwisted POTS copper your first problem is resistance. The longer the wire, the lower the voltage will be when the signal comes out the other end. Raise the voltage? Then you've increased inductive interference wherever two of your conductors are parallel to one another (hence the twisted pair-- they're never parallel). I have, in an absolute pinch, temporarily rigged up a 10baseT connection over old phone cabling. It worked, but it only had to go 20' on untwisted wire. Even so, we ran tests and found the error rate was noticeably higher.
Crawl back into your time machine, ya' hippy. The Army isn't a last-chance job pool for dumbshits. One has not been permitted to join the regular army without a high school diploma (that's a DIPLOMA-- not a GED) for over 15 years. Additionally, I was hardly a "fuckwit at school". And what's a proper job? How about something in Military Intelligence? Like "98C - Signal Intelligence Analyst"? I doubt your chosen vocation is even half as mentally challenging. As for me being a "fuck-up" or "retard", I was trained by the army as a Russian linguist. You think a fuckwit can learn to read, write, speak, and understand Russian in 11 months? Get a fucking clue, numbnuts. Besides, if you had any real balls and/or brains you wouldn't have hidden behind an AC post.
Heh. Yeah, as I recall from my Army time, when we trained on a new weapon/radio/etc the phrase we most hated to hear was "man-portable". All that meant was that some damn fool put a shoulder strap on it or squeezed it into a box small enough to jam into a ruck or strap to a pack frame. Of course, nothing compares to the sinking feeling that comes with the realization that "light infantry" means "no vehicles-- you carry it".
True, but flying 100' AGL doesn't give you a lot of room for vertical error, which is what'll really get you. Combine the fact that GPS altitude resolution will get you less than 100' accuracy and that you can't slave your altitude to the altimiter without damping the corrections somewhat and you get a situation where flying over anything but Nebraska is all but impossible. Imagine flying over a city: your radar altitude will vary by like 50 feet (5 stories!) based on the buildings below. Even with a preprogrammed course, 100' AGL is too low for a non-active mapping unmanned craft.
I suspect they knew that the second they fired up a search radar, or sent up a MiG, there'd be HARMs or AMRAAMs coming and bringing guaranteed destruction with them. Maybe they were hoping to "save" the stuff? Doesn't make sense to me either.
1) None of the old russian SLBM subs are seaworthy.
2) A sub is not a toyota truck. It takes dozens of trained people to operate a sub, and such training isn't readily available
3) The old russian subs don't have missiles in them and even if they did, there's more to launching an SLBM than typing in a lat-lon and pressing the big red "fire" button.
Radar altimeters only see the ground below. This isn't enough to do even rudimentary terrain-following. Let's assume an extraordinarily generous 1:1 sustained climb-travel ratio (climbing 1 foot up for every foot traveled horizontally). At 100 feet AGL, all it would take is a hill with a 2:1 slope over 100 feet tall and your missile augers in. If you're launching in Oklahoma, no worries. Anywhere else, forget it. Better be flying at over 1000 feet.
On what do you base that statement? Effective delivery is the hardest part of using NBC weapons. You can't just fill a Ziploc[tm] freezer bag full of anthrax spores or VX nerve agent or radioactive dust. They need to be aerosolized. A waterballoon full of sarin will realistically only kill the person it hits, the dozen that run to his aid, and a couple passers-by. Hardly an effective weapon.
I'm not worried about NBC weapons. I'm realistic. I worry about truck bombs.
I've heard this statement repeated over and over for decades. On what math is this based? There aren't enough nuclear weapons to target even a quarter of the major cities on the planet, much less "destroy the world". Even a carefully planned attack using everything against the most sizable targets would leave 75% of the world's population alive.
Of course, the traditional argument usually does a hand-wave towards the absurd notion of "nuclear winter" to account for the world ending, but this is hogwash. The nuclear winter believers pointed at the oil well fires in Kuwait in '91 and predicted a "mini-nuclear winter style" enviromental disaster, but as it turns out, opaque particulate matter lowers temperatures, increasing precipitation, which removes said matter from the atmosphere.
Destroy the world, my ass...
All americans will thank you for converting this to an understandable format!
Hey, if foreigners weren't so darn disorganized, their football* field size would be a unit of measurement too. But no, a football pitch can be anything from 100 to 130 yards long, and from 50 to 100 yards wide! Come on, you guys, make up your minds!
* to U.S. readers: foreigners don't play real football, like us. What they call "football" is really soccer. Silly foreigners!
Solar and wind power aren't going to be the answer. At this point, both are dilute power sources. Additionally, maintenance of solar and wind generating facilities requires more than just "teach[ing] them maintenance". It requires spare/replacement parts which are usually very expensive and have short lifespans.
I always laughed about hom much my friends spent on their setups a couple years ago. With the exception of my Athlon 850 box, my ENTIRE SETUP (4-6 boxes + 100Mbps BayStack switch + CAT5 patch panel + cabling) was put together using stuff other people were throwing away. Most of my stuff was literally pulled out of dumpsters. Last year, though, I did a few quick calculations and found out that I was spending about $600 a year on electricity for all those old power hogs. So much for "free computers", eh?
Don't be ridiculous. No amount of "recommending" or "thinking differently" is going to make space repairs possible. Do you have any idea what it would take to repair a damaged carbon-fiber leading edge assembly? It would take months here on earth! There's no magic toolbox they can devise that would make major structural repairs possible. Until we have a Real Space Station(tm), the orbital phase will be "mid-flight". The only real solution to the problem is to 1) check the craft mid-flight for catastrophic-failure inducing damage, and 2) have a second shuttle ready to go up and give the astronauts a "ride home" if such damage is found.
You know, a bizarre side effect of this occured to me as I read your post. Now that shuttles are no longer replaceable, and they're proving to be less (ahem) "durable" than it first appeared, we should soon reach the point where we run low on shuttles and finally have to develop and field a better oribiter design like so many of us have been waiting for.
You're misidentifying the orbit phase of the mission. The orbit phase is not the same as landing at your destination in a plane. It's still part of the flying through the air stage. The difference is, you only have the passengers/pilots of the vehicle available to check the thing over while you're in orbit, and any repeairs you might attempt are a little trickier than sending for the NASA contracted grease monkey from Rockwell to bang on the fuel pump of the engine with a wrench. Think about it.
Heck, here's another opportunity for Canada to come to the rescue, just add another attachment on to the big shuttle bay crane arm.
The arm already HAS a camera attachment. The problem is that the arm is quite heavy and takes up space in the cargo bay. This is fine when they're just going up to launch a satellite, but when they go up with a lab module, there isn't enough room or weight capacity to bring it along so they have to LEAVE THE ARM AT HOME.
Oh, stop it. I despise Bill as much as the next guy, but clearly Bill was a visionary in his time. At a time when everyone else (Apple, IBM, etc.) thought the way to Get Ahead was by being a hardware manufacturer, Bill had the visionary insight that making the software was where the money was going to be.
Dunno how it's set up now, but when I was a signal intelligence analyst in the army 10 years ago, we had a small safe in the back of the truck we worked out of that held all our written notes and such. The top part of the safe held a thermite grenade that could be set off by pulling a ring, even with the safe shut. From what I heard, when they started giving 'em laptops in the field, they had to keep the hard drives in the safe when not in use. I reckon 1000+ degree molten iron would erase most any magnetic media.
I would add the important caveat "no aircraft we know about". Despite US Defense Department claims that all aerial reconaissance is handled by satellites now that the SR-71 is retired, aircraft enthusiasts have noticed quite a few indications that "black projects" in this area are in operation.
The Tu-144 only flew first. Although it had a few novel ideas to it, it was pretty much just a cheap knockoff of the Concorde they rushed through production. One glaring shortcoming of it was that the Soviets couldn't build a jet engine that would give the '144 enough thrust to go supersonic without afterburners. It was just a shameless propaganda pitch, really. It should never have been built.
Hammer/Opteron from AMD fixes both of those and retains x86 compatibility. It's easy for Apple to change hardware because they control it completely. The best part of the x86/PC line is its ubiquity. Switching to a totally different design would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Personally, I liked "Ender's Game" the FIRST time I read it-- when it was called "Starship Troopers" and written by Heinlein. Card took a short story with an already weak-premise (generals can be made from 6-year olds!) and further watered it down with the most sophomoric of philosophy, science, and military strategy. Ender's siblings overthrow the government by essentially posting to USENET under pseudonyms? Gimme a freakin' break man...
Hah! The company I work for does. We also want our customers to dump Diet Coke on their phones, block the air intakes on their network hubs, and hire moron painters who spray EVERYTHING in the phone closet (KSU, 66 blocks, HDSL backplanes) a nice semi-gloss beige. We have one client so penny-wise and pound-foolish that they've insisted upon 2-pair wire runs instead of 4-pair because it was CHEAPER by 4 cents a foot. Of course, they had to pay for a SECOND installation of wire when the 2-pair turned out to be inadequate, but hey, they saved almost 40 dollars up front!
We've never had either in the past. Why do you expect the future to have any?
Slashdot Karma Whore Business Plan:
1) say something about [hot AMD CPUs/how Microsoft sucks/Linux is best for task X]
2) ?????
3) Karma Profit!!!
Didja know the latest Pentium4's put out more heat than the Athlon XP?
From the spec sheet:
An Integrated High Energy Density Power Source (Po-210) That Provides Continuous Energy, And Resultant Weapons Use, For Over 60 Days.
With a 2-month lifespan, the power packs would hardly "litter the battlefield", and besides the military is already very conscious of the necessity of not leaving behind anything that can be used as a weapon. When I was in the army, I found it quite amusing that the LAW rocket was designed to be a "disposable one-shot" design, but then they cautioned us that we were to never leave even so little as a fiberglass tube (e.g. LAW rocket launcher) behind, lest the enemy convert it into a mortar or something.