There are two important differences here that will protect you from being Bubba's bitch for hopping up your CPU. First, the P/S2 is a proprietary machine, and SONY specifically states that modifications are verboten. There's nothing they can realistically do if you wish to modify it, but if you sell parts designed to modify it, you're in for it. Second, it's not "unauthorized" to overclock your CPU. Intel (and AMD) specifically state that if you do it and vaporize your CPU, they won't give you a new one, but they never specifically forbid overclocking, so you're not breaking the law by doing it.
The article is very short on details, but if it is what it seems to be, it's just an old modem exploit, not hacked code. The idea is to send a ping with "+++ATH0" and then a modem command to dial 911 in the ping data. When the system responds to the ping, it sends back the data (including the escape string). Since the outgoing data goes over a dialup link, the return ping gets handed to the modem, and the modem sees the +++ATH0 in the data stream as an escape sequence/command sequence and responds by doing what it's told (in this case, hanging up and dialing 911).
It's bad, both to do such a hack (tying up 911 is very bad) and to have a modem that's not init'ed to prevent it, but it's not really a code hack.
Consider this: this exploit has been around for more than a decade. Also, not all modems are affected by this. Also, it's fairly easy to fix this hole in the modem's init string, so even if you have affected hardware it's a simple fix to disable the escape sequence.
Now, considering these three points, and most strongly the first, the case can easily be made that due diligence was not used. I have little difficulty believing that somebody working on this project in Redmond ran a BBS at some point in the past (BBS operators know about this because schmucks would knock your board out all the time if you didn't compensate for it). Therefore, it was either willfully ignored for some reason, or nobody tested it who was qualified to test systems that use modems to communicate.
There are two others with three digits. 411 is directory assistance. 611 is the number to call for phone system problems (you figure out the logic in that one...).
So, the creator of this prank could tie up lines that someone needs it for a real, life-threatening emergency, instead of playing a funny prank. I hope they nail his/her ass to the wall.
There are two ways the digital fridge can work, outside of failure monitoring. First, you tell the fridge what's in it, and it tells you when you run out of it (an extension of this is that you tell it when you bought your milk or eggs, and based on the date it tells you when you should consider throwing it away). The other way is that you tell it when you want to buy stuff and it tells you what to get. The most common method of this is that you tell the fridge when you put stuff in it, then you tell it what you're making, and based on the recipe, it advises you as to what ingredients you're missing.
In short, it knows what you want because you tell it.
Not crackers as in computers, crackers as in safe, so that when all of the bank computers failed he could send them to get the gold from the vaults and porn from the safe deposit boxes. With that, who'd need electricity?
This story sounds like bunk, because of two things. First, if anybody can provide any proof at all of Winchester drives with six foot platters I'd like to see it, since the largest drive I've heard of or worked with is 18 inches across. Second, "forcibly clamped down"? How, exactly? These old drives had brakes on the spindle (the operator would stop them and lift them out with a handle on occasion, which led to another urban legend about a guy who opened the case, and the brake interlock failed, and he put a clamp down on a spinning platter stack and got his arm twisted off), but those brakes were nowhere near strong enough to stop the platters cold, and these were only a foot and a half across.
The truth of this, however, is strange in and of itself. It was indeed possible to drop a platter stack in crooked, such that when you removed the clamp, closed the lid and spun them up the drive housing would start banging around like an out-of-balance washing machine. It was also possible to design seek programs for the step motor (the one that moves the head across the platter) such that you could cause the drive housing to move. With a properly designed progam and a near-felonious disregard for the equipment, you could move a drive housing several feet. I was privy to a contest some time ago where several programmers competed to try to get the drive housing to move to certain places in the lab (using an old, blown-out platter pack, of course, since we really didn't want to be wiping out a good one).
...it'd be fairly easy to demonstrate prior use on all three of these patents.
In the same vein, I was going to patent making claims about patents on/. but there's a ton of prior use there, too. Oh, well, I guess I gotta keep working.
Or, hey, how about a patent on claiming prior use exemptions on a patent? Wouldn't this allow a corporation to patent anything and make money on either side of the patent fight? Oh, shit, now I've done it...
> Most Linux distributions are far more feature-rich than Windows, that much I will agree on, but you would have to be -incredibly- naive, or incredibly biased, to state that your standard Linux distribution is easier to install, maintain and use than, say, Windows XP.
I'm not so sure that this isn't a case of familiarity versus true ease-of-use. To give you an example, if your car had controls like an airplane (with the obvious exclusion of controls for pitch), would your car be harder to use? You bet it would. Is that because aircraft controls are intrinsically harder to handle than automobile controls? Not really. Once you've practiced with them, they're actually pretty easy to use.
By the same token, I think that a large portion of ease-of-use for MS OSes (and computers in general) is that the general public is so used to them, John Q. Public perceives the Windows interface as the "standard" against which to measure everything else. To go point by point, installing WinXP is not an easy task. It's a LOT better than it was in Win95 or WinNT, but it still isn't something that John Q. is going to want to try to do. Maintaining is the same story. Most of the people I know who aren't computer-based (hobbyists or those who work with (not just on) computers daily) do very little to maintain their machines. It's easy to say that this is because they don't need to, but that's not really true. Every time I visit a neighbor's house and do something on their computer, I find that there's a lot of cruft and such on the machine that interferes with how it runs. It's just so subtle as it happens that they don't really notice the loss of performance until I get in and clean up (note that this is true of all computers, Macs, WinPCs and LinPCs alike). As for using them, see my note above about familiarity. It's an ugly reality that since Windows is the ruler, everything Linux gets measured against it, but that doesn't make it a given that Linux really is harder to use. For those who grew up around UNIX systems, Linux is a breeze and Windows is a pain.
> If you're not sure what you can do to help, ASK!
Ask whom? If I'm in a position not to know what to do to help, I'm likely also in the position not to know who to go to to offer. Can you provide links (or even some Google search phrases or something) to get us all started? I personally know how to find these resources, but I've met a number of people with some valuable skills to contribute (graphic work and copyediting, to name two) who aren't as adept at it.
Point conceded, although I will close my defense by stating that the Aerobee is a hybrid (liquid and solid fuel) rocket, so when I went digging in my sources for liquid fuel rockets sans guidance I came up dry (pun intended).
Still, I hope this guy is planning on using something a bit more complex than this design, which seems to be only one step better than a big bottle rocket.
> Nasa has used a range of unguided sounding rockets using liquid fuel carrying payloads of up to 500lbs up to altitudes of up 200 miles...
"Unguided sounding"?!? I can't even guess what that's supposed to mean. Can you provide some links or something to these designs? I've done the Google search, and ran back through my library as well, and I found not one single device since Goddard's designs back in the Forties that flies unguided. There are plenty of designs for missiles and such that travel ballistically after takeoff, but even those rockets use guidance systems to keep the frame stable as it leaves the pad. By all evidence I could drum up, everything that uses rocket power and liquid fuel to get more than 100 miles up uses some derivative of a gyrobalancing guidance system for launch.
> so don't tell me you can't build an unguided liquid fuel rocket. Try a google search next time you want to make bold declarations of impossibility.
Just as a side note, I never claim impossibility for anything. What I said was, in two parts, it's not feasible to build such a device, and nobody has done it yet. While it may not be impossible, there are better ways to skin this cat, and they all involve active guidance systems.
Your design is a step in the right direction, but the original discussion was not how to design these things, and the discussion (with three replies telling me how to build slush cells) has wandered offtopic. The point I made originally was that model rocketeers do not have to deal with the stability issues that large-scale rocketeers do. In real life, slush cells aren't necessary, because fluid tanks with baffles work fine, as long as the guidance system is up to the task. Also in my original discussion was my questioning whether a guidance system designed and built by someone unstudied in engineering would be "up to the task" and I still don't think it will be.
I agree that slush tanks can be built, but that's a different story.
> They would have slammed into the ground at 30 MPH with no seatbelt, possibly injuring themselves on such things as the propeller.
That's tough to say, but remember that they crashed several of the gliders they used for testing, at about the same speed, from higher up since they were gliding down off a hill at Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, and the flight of the motor-driven craft was on flat, level ground. The two things that stand out in my head is that the flyer would not have dug in like a plane these days (5 feet up and 30 mph, it would fall to the ground and skid). Also, the pilot was in the plane prone, and the propellers were behind him, so when he hit, he'd slide forward out of the craft, which would stop before overtaking him, so injury was more likely from impact with the ground than the plane. That all said, it would not have been a pleasant experience, but it's not very likely to have been lethal. It's certainly many degrees safer than being on a home-brewed rocket miles off the ground, by any measure.
>...missiles using similar liquid fuel using only aerodynamic surfaces and relatively simply gyroscopic guidance systems.
Both of your examples are not capable of getting high enough for this guy.
> None of this technology is new or complex by modern standards.
Nor is it very useful for this guy. The guidance systems used by V-2 rockets were (unsurprisingly) designed to stabilize V-2s, and as I said before, simply lifting a design from a different frame usually doesn't work.
> I don't believe I suggested making a full size rocket out of cardboard tubes either I'm fully aware of the fact that as the scale increases so do the stresses on the airframe.
The example I provided was more to illustrate that one of the major problems with big-scale rockets is that the guidance system can't be "good", it has to be "great" because the stress forces from pivoting just a tiny bit out of flight line are sufficient to demolish all but the heaviest designs, something model rockets simply don't suffer from.
> Try taking your tube - filling it with a sponge like material and then adding the water. Not such a great design problem when you think about it.
This one is actually on the books, because a few builders thought that a saturated medium would make for low-splash fuel tanks (when it was proposed, sloshing fuel was a major guidance problem, as most rockets at that time burned kerosene). However, the design failed miserably, for two reasons. First, it was very difficult to get the fuel out of the medium when you needed it to burn (something my experiment doesn't address, but that a liquid-fueled engine must do). Second, When the medium was subjected to the G-forces of launch, it would simply squash down to the bottom of the tank, which caused the top portion of the tank to be only liquid (back to the sloshing fuel problem) and putting severe stress on the bottom of the tank (which caused more than one tank rupture with resultant kaboom). So, it's a good idea, but I must send you back to the drawing board.
> When I put together an Estes kit, I don't worry about the construction of the engine, I just buy a $2 engine and plug it in.
This isn't the same by a long shot. When you built your model rocket, where'd you put the fuel tanks? Oh, and how did you stabilize the frame when you filled it with liquid? This guy isn't building a solid rocket booster, so comparing it to your local model rocket will just get you a busted-up pile of rocket debris. Also, as I stated in another post, if you want comparable stress-test ratios build your next model rocket out of drinking straws and construction paper, and let me know how the launch goes.
It's the "detail work" where the engineering knowledge comes in.
I really don't want to sound insulting, but being a model rocket hobbyist alone does not qualify you as a rocket scientist except in the most basic sense (if you're also an engineer, my apologies). Contrary to your experience, building a stable rocket frame capable of lifting more than 100 pounds is not only not easy, it's never been done. One of the things you're not dealing with is liquid fuel. To find out how hard it is to stabilize that, do this experiment (which I've done several times). Build a 6 foot frame about 2 inches in diameter. Put as much engine on the tail as you wish, and put an eight ounce weight in the nosecone. make the center two feet of the rocket a plastic tank, and half-fill it with water. Then launch. If your rocket gets more than twenty feet off the ground before it falls 20 degrees off launch vector, you can count yourself one heck of a designer (and I'd love to see your tank design). The other thing you're not used to handling is fragile airframes. A cardboard tube doesn't seem like much, but if you want to try building a rocket where the power-to-stress ratios are the same as a full size launch vehicle, build your next rocket out of drinking straws and construction paper. Also, keep in mind that a model rocket turning twenty degrees off its flight vector will fly in the wrong direction, but a full size rocket doing the same thing will generally collapse from the shear force. This is what makes the ability to design a complex guidance system so difficult. He makes no mention of his methods, but someone who does not have any engineering experience cannot typically design a functional gyrobalancing guidance system. Hell, people who are rocket scientists work on these things for years, and most guidance systems are designed for specific frames, so it's not very easy to "borrow" someone else's design for your own frame.
I wish him all the luck in the world, but not calling in some engineering expertise for review is asking for trouble.
Well, the tests the Wright brothers did took place on a flat spot at Kitty Hawk, so since they were going about 30 mph about five feet off the ground, I'd say the safety level is a bit higher.
Still, this guy seems to understand his limitations, he's taking as many precautions as he can realistic take and he doesn't sound like an overzealous lunatic, so I think he stands a good chance of coming out of this alive. He may have to abort his flight, but saying his death is a foregone conclusion is short-sighted.
I know he wasn't paying attention to the article like he should, but calling him an "itwasalink" is completely uncalled for. Keep your epithets to yourself, punk.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two important differences here that will protect you from being Bubba's bitch for hopping up your CPU. First, the P/S2 is a proprietary machine, and SONY specifically states that modifications are verboten. There's nothing they can realistically do if you wish to modify it, but if you sell parts designed to modify it, you're in for it. Second, it's not "unauthorized" to overclock your CPU. Intel (and AMD) specifically state that if you do it and vaporize your CPU, they won't give you a new one, but they never specifically forbid overclocking, so you're not breaking the law by doing it.
Virg
The article is very short on details, but if it is what it seems to be, it's just an old modem exploit, not hacked code. The idea is to send a ping with "+++ATH0" and then a modem command to dial 911 in the ping data. When the system responds to the ping, it sends back the data (including the escape string). Since the outgoing data goes over a dialup link, the return ping gets handed to the modem, and the modem sees the +++ATH0 in the data stream as an escape sequence/command sequence and responds by doing what it's told (in this case, hanging up and dialing 911).
It's bad, both to do such a hack (tying up 911 is very bad) and to have a modem that's not init'ed to prevent it, but it's not really a code hack.
Virg
Sollt Ihre name nicht "gutentag" sein? Was bedeudet "guttentag"?
Virg
Consider this: this exploit has been around for more than a decade. Also, not all modems are affected by this. Also, it's fairly easy to fix this hole in the modem's init string, so even if you have affected hardware it's a simple fix to disable the escape sequence.
Now, considering these three points, and most strongly the first, the case can easily be made that due diligence was not used. I have little difficulty believing that somebody working on this project in Redmond ran a BBS at some point in the past (BBS operators know about this because schmucks would knock your board out all the time if you didn't compensate for it). Therefore, it was either willfully ignored for some reason, or nobody tested it who was qualified to test systems that use modems to communicate.
In either case, they're at fault.
Virg
There are two others with three digits. 411 is directory assistance. 611 is the number to call for phone system problems (you figure out the logic in that one...).
So, the creator of this prank could tie up lines that someone needs it for a real, life-threatening emergency, instead of playing a funny prank. I hope they nail his/her ass to the wall.
Virg
There are two ways the digital fridge can work, outside of failure monitoring. First, you tell the fridge what's in it, and it tells you when you run out of it (an extension of this is that you tell it when you bought your milk or eggs, and based on the date it tells you when you should consider throwing it away). The other way is that you tell it when you want to buy stuff and it tells you what to get. The most common method of this is that you tell the fridge when you put stuff in it, then you tell it what you're making, and based on the recipe, it advises you as to what ingredients you're missing.
In short, it knows what you want because you tell it.
Virg
Not crackers as in computers, crackers as in safe, so that when all of the bank computers failed he could send them to get the gold from the vaults and porn from the safe deposit boxes. With that, who'd need electricity?
Virg
This story sounds like bunk, because of two things. First, if anybody can provide any proof at all of Winchester drives with six foot platters I'd like to see it, since the largest drive I've heard of or worked with is 18 inches across. Second, "forcibly clamped down"? How, exactly? These old drives had brakes on the spindle (the operator would stop them and lift them out with a handle on occasion, which led to another urban legend about a guy who opened the case, and the brake interlock failed, and he put a clamp down on a spinning platter stack and got his arm twisted off), but those brakes were nowhere near strong enough to stop the platters cold, and these were only a foot and a half across.
The truth of this, however, is strange in and of itself. It was indeed possible to drop a platter stack in crooked, such that when you removed the clamp, closed the lid and spun them up the drive housing would start banging around like an out-of-balance washing machine. It was also possible to design seek programs for the step motor (the one that moves the head across the platter) such that you could cause the drive housing to move. With a properly designed progam and a near-felonious disregard for the equipment, you could move a drive housing several feet. I was privy to a contest some time ago where several programmers competed to try to get the drive housing to move to certain places in the lab (using an old, blown-out platter pack, of course, since we really didn't want to be wiping out a good one).
Virg
I really hope your comment title was an intentional double-entendre.
Virg
...it'd be fairly easy to demonstrate prior use on all three of these patents.
/. but there's a ton of prior use there, too. Oh, well, I guess I gotta keep working.
In the same vein, I was going to patent making claims about patents on
Or, hey, how about a patent on claiming prior use exemptions on a patent? Wouldn't this allow a corporation to patent anything and make money on either side of the patent fight? Oh, shit, now I've done it...
Virg
Nuggz, you deserve karma just for your choice of title.
Virg
...which would be something else if Unisys hadn't had the good sense to drop the whole "we're going to charge everyone to use .GIF" idea.
Virg
> Most Linux distributions are far more feature-rich than Windows, that much I will agree on, but you would have to be -incredibly- naive, or incredibly biased, to state that your standard Linux distribution is easier to install, maintain and use than, say, Windows XP.
I'm not so sure that this isn't a case of familiarity versus true ease-of-use. To give you an example, if your car had controls like an airplane (with the obvious exclusion of controls for pitch), would your car be harder to use? You bet it would. Is that because aircraft controls are intrinsically harder to handle than automobile controls? Not really. Once you've practiced with them, they're actually pretty easy to use.
By the same token, I think that a large portion of ease-of-use for MS OSes (and computers in general) is that the general public is so used to them, John Q. Public perceives the Windows interface as the "standard" against which to measure everything else. To go point by point, installing WinXP is not an easy task. It's a LOT better than it was in Win95 or WinNT, but it still isn't something that John Q. is going to want to try to do. Maintaining is the same story. Most of the people I know who aren't computer-based (hobbyists or those who work with (not just on) computers daily) do very little to maintain their machines. It's easy to say that this is because they don't need to, but that's not really true. Every time I visit a neighbor's house and do something on their computer, I find that there's a lot of cruft and such on the machine that interferes with how it runs. It's just so subtle as it happens that they don't really notice the loss of performance until I get in and clean up (note that this is true of all computers, Macs, WinPCs and LinPCs alike). As for using them, see my note above about familiarity. It's an ugly reality that since Windows is the ruler, everything Linux gets measured against it, but that doesn't make it a given that Linux really is harder to use. For those who grew up around UNIX systems, Linux is a breeze and Windows is a pain.
Virg
> If you're not sure what you can do to help, ASK!
Ask whom? If I'm in a position not to know what to do to help, I'm likely also in the position not to know who to go to to offer. Can you provide links (or even some Google search phrases or something) to get us all started? I personally know how to find these resources, but I've met a number of people with some valuable skills to contribute (graphic work and copyediting, to name two) who aren't as adept at it.
Virg
You're here, so I'd say you already have.
Virg
Point conceded, although I will close my defense by stating that the Aerobee is a hybrid (liquid and solid fuel) rocket, so when I went digging in my sources for liquid fuel rockets sans guidance I came up dry (pun intended).
Still, I hope this guy is planning on using something a bit more complex than this design, which seems to be only one step better than a big bottle rocket.
Virg
The word you seek, about sexual attraction to teenagers, is hebephilia.
Virg
> Nasa has used a range of unguided sounding rockets using liquid fuel carrying payloads of up to 500lbs up to altitudes of up 200 miles...
"Unguided sounding"?!? I can't even guess what that's supposed to mean. Can you provide some links or something to these designs? I've done the Google search, and ran back through my library as well, and I found not one single device since Goddard's designs back in the Forties that flies unguided. There are plenty of designs for missiles and such that travel ballistically after takeoff, but even those rockets use guidance systems to keep the frame stable as it leaves the pad. By all evidence I could drum up, everything that uses rocket power and liquid fuel to get more than 100 miles up uses some derivative of a gyrobalancing guidance system for launch.
> so don't tell me you can't build an unguided liquid fuel rocket. Try a google search next time you want to make bold declarations of impossibility.
Just as a side note, I never claim impossibility for anything. What I said was, in two parts, it's not feasible to build such a device, and nobody has done it yet. While it may not be impossible, there are better ways to skin this cat, and they all involve active guidance systems.
Virg
Your design is a step in the right direction, but the original discussion was not how to design these things, and the discussion (with three replies telling me how to build slush cells) has wandered offtopic. The point I made originally was that model rocketeers do not have to deal with the stability issues that large-scale rocketeers do. In real life, slush cells aren't necessary, because fluid tanks with baffles work fine, as long as the guidance system is up to the task. Also in my original discussion was my questioning whether a guidance system designed and built by someone unstudied in engineering would be "up to the task" and I still don't think it will be.
I agree that slush tanks can be built, but that's a different story.
Virg
> They would have slammed into the ground at 30 MPH with no seatbelt, possibly injuring themselves on such things as the propeller.
That's tough to say, but remember that they crashed several of the gliders they used for testing, at about the same speed, from higher up since they were gliding down off a hill at Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, and the flight of the motor-driven craft was on flat, level ground. The two things that stand out in my head is that the flyer would not have dug in like a plane these days (5 feet up and 30 mph, it would fall to the ground and skid). Also, the pilot was in the plane prone, and the propellers were behind him, so when he hit, he'd slide forward out of the craft, which would stop before overtaking him, so injury was more likely from impact with the ground than the plane. That all said, it would not have been a pleasant experience, but it's not very likely to have been lethal. It's certainly many degrees safer than being on a home-brewed rocket miles off the ground, by any measure.
Virg
> ...missiles using similar liquid fuel using only aerodynamic surfaces and relatively simply gyroscopic guidance systems.
Both of your examples are not capable of getting high enough for this guy.
> None of this technology is new or complex by modern standards.
Nor is it very useful for this guy. The guidance systems used by V-2 rockets were (unsurprisingly) designed to stabilize V-2s, and as I said before, simply lifting a design from a different frame usually doesn't work.
> I don't believe I suggested making a full size rocket out of cardboard tubes either I'm fully aware of the fact that as the scale increases so do the stresses on the airframe.
The example I provided was more to illustrate that one of the major problems with big-scale rockets is that the guidance system can't be "good", it has to be "great" because the stress forces from pivoting just a tiny bit out of flight line are sufficient to demolish all but the heaviest designs, something model rockets simply don't suffer from.
> Try taking your tube - filling it with a sponge like material and then adding the water. Not such a great design problem when you think about it.
This one is actually on the books, because a few builders thought that a saturated medium would make for low-splash fuel tanks (when it was proposed, sloshing fuel was a major guidance problem, as most rockets at that time burned kerosene). However, the design failed miserably, for two reasons. First, it was very difficult to get the fuel out of the medium when you needed it to burn (something my experiment doesn't address, but that a liquid-fueled engine must do). Second, When the medium was subjected to the G-forces of launch, it would simply squash down to the bottom of the tank, which caused the top portion of the tank to be only liquid (back to the sloshing fuel problem) and putting severe stress on the bottom of the tank (which caused more than one tank rupture with resultant kaboom). So, it's a good idea, but I must send you back to the drawing board.
Virg
> When I put together an Estes kit, I don't worry about the construction of the engine, I just buy a $2 engine and plug it in.
This isn't the same by a long shot. When you built your model rocket, where'd you put the fuel tanks? Oh, and how did you stabilize the frame when you filled it with liquid? This guy isn't building a solid rocket booster, so comparing it to your local model rocket will just get you a busted-up pile of rocket debris. Also, as I stated in another post, if you want comparable stress-test ratios build your next model rocket out of drinking straws and construction paper, and let me know how the launch goes.
It's the "detail work" where the engineering knowledge comes in.
Virg
I really don't want to sound insulting, but being a model rocket hobbyist alone does not qualify you as a rocket scientist except in the most basic sense (if you're also an engineer, my apologies). Contrary to your experience, building a stable rocket frame capable of lifting more than 100 pounds is not only not easy, it's never been done. One of the things you're not dealing with is liquid fuel. To find out how hard it is to stabilize that, do this experiment (which I've done several times). Build a 6 foot frame about 2 inches in diameter. Put as much engine on the tail as you wish, and put an eight ounce weight in the nosecone. make the center two feet of the rocket a plastic tank, and half-fill it with water. Then launch. If your rocket gets more than twenty feet off the ground before it falls 20 degrees off launch vector, you can count yourself one heck of a designer (and I'd love to see your tank design). The other thing you're not used to handling is fragile airframes. A cardboard tube doesn't seem like much, but if you want to try building a rocket where the power-to-stress ratios are the same as a full size launch vehicle, build your next rocket out of drinking straws and construction paper. Also, keep in mind that a model rocket turning twenty degrees off its flight vector will fly in the wrong direction, but a full size rocket doing the same thing will generally collapse from the shear force. This is what makes the ability to design a complex guidance system so difficult. He makes no mention of his methods, but someone who does not have any engineering experience cannot typically design a functional gyrobalancing guidance system. Hell, people who are rocket scientists work on these things for years, and most guidance systems are designed for specific frames, so it's not very easy to "borrow" someone else's design for your own frame.
I wish him all the luck in the world, but not calling in some engineering expertise for review is asking for trouble.
Virg
Well, the tests the Wright brothers did took place on a flat spot at Kitty Hawk, so since they were going about 30 mph about five feet off the ground, I'd say the safety level is a bit higher.
Still, this guy seems to understand his limitations, he's taking as many precautions as he can realistic take and he doesn't sound like an overzealous lunatic, so I think he stands a good chance of coming out of this alive. He may have to abort his flight, but saying his death is a foregone conclusion is short-sighted.
I, for one, hope that he gets his ride to space.
Virg
> he mentioned osX in the article (itwasalink)
I know he wasn't paying attention to the article like he should, but calling him an "itwasalink" is completely uncalled for. Keep your epithets to yourself, punk.
Virg