The thing of it is, is that did they learn from their mistakes? Not by much, they are still backwards in a lot of fields. They are so tied into being a nation that stands alone, they have no idea of being adaptable and adjust to do what is best.
Several friends have visited China over the years and all of them have said the same thing: Things just don't fit right. I mean, it all looks modern, spit and polish, but it just not fit in or fit right with what China is. They promote what they call a "progressively minded society" but restrict their citizens on so many levels it does not make sense in any way, shape or form. Their political infrastructure hearkens back to the bad old days after the Second World War, and is so insular in their thinking they do not understand why we wish their people to have more freedom. They think of themselves as the "Middle Kingdom" and believe that they are so above everyone else that their rules do not matter, only theirs. I think it might take a revolution just to kick loose a few basic rights for their people to enjoy. They may have had their Cultural Revolution that happened back in the 60's and 70's, but they still do not grasp the base logic of having a strong nation; it starts with giving the people their basic freedoms to criticize without being prosecuted, to have peaceful assemblies to protest certain issues, to have multiple religions of light, peace and tranquility, and to vote in people to steer the country towards whatever future they may have in mind.
Several factors are going to sound the death knell of Blu-Ray;
First: DRM. Defective By Design, broken straight off the assembly line, yada, yada, yada. SSDD over security constraints all for PROFIT!
Second: Requirements to fully utilize its features. You need HDTV and blu ray DVD's. The former is expensive as sin, the latter not that many have been released so far.
Third: You guessed it, your wallet. The credit crunch and the Second Recession of the century has pretty much nuked everyone's budgets, forcing them to forgo their next big purchases and buy Ramen Noodles. The licensing just to cut blu-ray is ridiculously high, forcing others to use other formats that are more inexpensive. The equipment itself starts at 300 smackers just for a player, the consumer would have to wait until they could afford a HDTV just to see what they bought in the first place is worth all the hype.
I can see that DVD is going to stay with us for awhile longer.
Yet again! Each time he applies his ever-fertile mind to a project, something amazing emerges from his hangar. At first was his VariViggen, home built plane that made heads turn. Then to satisfy folks that wanted to go on rides in one, the VariEz and the LongEz. THEN his legendary Voyager that circumnavigated the world on one tank of gas, two engines and two bold, spirited souls, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, Burt's brother. He's tinkered with various projects that were minor show-stoppers until a certain Angel funder by the name of Allen dropped by with open mind, open checkbook and one word on his tougne: Spaceflight. Thus was born SpaceShip One and the wild rides the test pilots took on it to win the X-Prize.
That Big Hammer is starting to come down on their little empire that they have established, and I don't think there will be any survivors once the courts get done with them. RIAA has done little to adhere to the laws of the land and it has come time to pay the collector for their misdeeds.
I want front row, center seats when the judgment comes down on them, destroying their careers.
We had commanding officers sitting back in the States looking at overhead imagery, dishing out orders to the troops and that cost us dearly. The military spent years trying to get away from that mentality and the Age of Information threatens to raise the head of that specter again.
Keep in mind that the White House drove most of the air strikes and movements over the phone after looking at hours- or days-old photos. The time differences, and local conditions got a lot of good people killed. This new speed that information flows is not really going to help matters any, for there is more information to digest and once agian, minute to minute changes at the local theater is not going to help any either.
PAR systems have a bonus that CASA does not have: Active target tracking and targeting. You see, the SPY-1D system that is set up at NSSL Norman was pulled off of one of the Aegis nuclear-powered cruisers. Several advantages include graceful degradation. If something breaks on the panel, the system can adjust automatically to compensate, preventing an outage from knocking the unit out in case of a Major Event. One part breaks on the 99D's, game over until a tech gets out there to fix it. Another is no or few moving parts. PAR units are static, using electronic wizardry to steer the beam to the intended target. The other biggie is replacement or supplement for the ATC system. PAR's sensitivity and brute force have tracked targets at nearly over the horizon (OTH) range. That leads up the big item: cost savings on all fronts that need radar. Multitasking the beam can eliminate redundant installations, dramatically carving chunks off of budgets that can be used elsewhere.
NEXRAD's are aged, old units, and NOAA knows it. The klystron transmitter modules have been replaced more than once in the shacks and the rest of the hardware probably replaced or repaired several times over.
Webvan - "Drove off a cliff." @Home - "Dug itself a nice hole with overloaded circuits and awful service." The Webbies - "Fizzled after 3 years of glitz." WorldCom - "Gross mismanagement and too much of the bubbly taken in by the accountants." They left behind a butt-load of dark fiber, most of which still is. EToys - "Stock did a yo-yo from $80 on its IPO on October 1999, then was delisted at $1 Feb 2001 when they folded." Enron - "Need I say more?"
As Warren Buffet said back in '01 "I Told You So".
Here's that ages-old question: Where are you going to be able to safely and efficiently operate a powered suit without sinking up to your waist in muck, tipping over due to unstable or uneven terrain, and be able to lift a working payload at the same time.
'Suits have this problem called weight distribution. Their footprints are about on par with a small car overloaded. When try to move loads on poor terrain, you'll wind up either getting dug out or being picked back up because the soil could not hold you up. Tracks that can handle twice their load can dance on that kind of terrain, even BobCats with tracks can handle soft sands that would try to swallow an average joes' foot.
I can see powersuits working on prepared grounds, Asphalt, cement concrete, macadam with treated substrates, but not thrown into a active combat situation where they would have to slog through mud or soft soils.
They just grate on my nerves, saying that their drivers are hung up in the Vista approval process. I'd say that they are just buying time to release new products so they can make more profit off of NEW product instead of spending cash on support for old. The pattern shows in the forums as well as their support pages. I've seen more than a few companies simply bypass vista's certification process and release their updates, with instructions on how to circumvent Vista security checks. Good for them, bad for vista.
You are onto something there. "Pelletized" Hydrogen or Deuterium in a high pressure, semi metallic or metallic state, do you think that there might be a energy bonus there?
One thing is that theoretics will blow singularities out the window. One theory holds that Jupiter's core is a solid mass of crystallized carbon. Yep, you can guess what that is, Diamond. Another theory, with a more stable foundation, is that hydrogen at that pressure and temperature, becomes metallic. Essentially within your little buckyball, you would have a sphere of hydrogen metal. If your buckyball can handle > 100GPa,(over one million atmospheres) then the hydrogen atoms will undergo a phase change and become metallic.
If this is practical and it's energy potential can be tapped, we'll have at our fingertips, an unlimited power source that won't kill you with radiation.
You need to get that squeeze just right or it'll fizzle or burn too fast. The use of tritium gas was tested during the mid 50's, but the two fizzled due to H3 poisoning. You put a pure enough Tritium gas in the void, you will get something on par with the Upshot-Knothole BADGER test of 25Kt. What is suggested here is called a Cyrogenic Weapon. They really don't have much of a shelf life, taking into consideration the gases it uses.
I'd suggest looking into the "hollow core" designs. Easier on materials, just a bit more work at the mill.
Partly why Gen. Groves wanted to drop it after it was put together. That and politics as well. He wanted to show Truman that his device could do what he promised and convince Truman not to commit on the invasion.
Penny's design was a copycat from the Teller/Oppenheimer implosion design. In reality there was no way possible to improve upon perfection with the materials they had at the time. When the 50's rolled around, they simply took the basic sphere design and added more heavy metals and "tampers", added a cyclotron called the "zipper" and turned it into a 3 stage Hydrogen or "Super" device. It took awhile though.
The U235 gun design was super simple. All they had to do was figure out the precise velocity in which the uranium pieces would go critical without premature detonation or fizzling. The downside to this design that it was a very poor design when it comes to generating a criticality with a minimal amount of material. An inefficient design in comparison to the "Fat Man" device.
The Little Joe series was a set of clustered solid two stage boosters designed to test the Mercury and Apollo capsules. Little Joe I was initially had clusters of four Sergeant solids, later the addition of Recruit motors for added "kick". Little Joe II had a bigger kick though, using 2 Algol 465 Kn motors in each stage. I can see a new Little Joe being built to loft Orion "boilerplates" on a new series of tests.
There was one last Little Joe II on display at JSC in Houston. Situated beside the Saturn V display building, sitting on its transport jig, rusting from the inside out, in dire need of restoration.
Space elevators are still out until a cable made out of a continuous single fiber of nanotubes can be fabricated, then woven into a braid capable of withstanding the extreme environment of near-space and space itself. We're not talking a regular 5-strand weave here folks, this new weave will need to be able to resolve any problems by itself. If that cable fails, we're talking 200+ miles of weighty fiber and payload coming down onto the ground at terminal velocity. Even with the light weight to length ratio, we're talking metric tons of fiber impacting the ground at 80MPH.
Sounds familiar, right along with the right to sentence to long jail terms, a few victims that got raped, letting the rapists go nearly scot-free. They might as well isolate the country, keeping them from experiencing the interwebs altogether, it'll be impossible to keep their youth from being corrupted.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing of it is, is that did they learn from their mistakes? Not by much, they are still backwards in a lot of fields. They are so tied into being a nation that stands alone, they have no idea of being adaptable and adjust to do what is best.
Several friends have visited China over the years and all of them have said the same thing: Things just don't fit right. I mean, it all looks modern, spit and polish, but it just not fit in or fit right with what China is. They promote what they call a "progressively minded society" but restrict their citizens on so many levels it does not make sense in any way, shape or form. Their political infrastructure hearkens back to the bad old days after the Second World War, and is so insular in their thinking they do not understand why we wish their people to have more freedom. They think of themselves as the "Middle Kingdom" and believe that they are so above everyone else that their rules do not matter, only theirs. I think it might take a revolution just to kick loose a few basic rights for their people to enjoy. They may have had their Cultural Revolution that happened back in the 60's and 70's, but they still do not grasp the base logic of having a strong nation; it starts with giving the people their basic freedoms to criticize without being prosecuted, to have peaceful assemblies to protest certain issues, to have multiple religions of light, peace and tranquility, and to vote in people to steer the country towards whatever future they may have in mind.
Several factors are going to sound the death knell of Blu-Ray;
First: DRM. Defective By Design, broken straight off the assembly line, yada, yada, yada. SSDD over security constraints all for PROFIT!
Second: Requirements to fully utilize its features. You need HDTV and blu ray DVD's. The former is expensive as sin, the latter not that many have been released so far.
Third: You guessed it, your wallet. The credit crunch and the Second Recession of the century has pretty much nuked everyone's budgets, forcing them to forgo their next big purchases and buy Ramen Noodles. The licensing just to cut blu-ray is ridiculously high, forcing others to use other formats that are more inexpensive. The equipment itself starts at 300 smackers just for a player, the consumer would have to wait until they could afford a HDTV just to see what they bought in the first place is worth all the hype.
I can see that DVD is going to stay with us for awhile longer.
Yet again! Each time he applies his ever-fertile mind to a project, something amazing emerges from his hangar.
At first was his VariViggen, home built plane that made heads turn. Then to satisfy folks that wanted to go on rides in one, the VariEz and the LongEz.
THEN his legendary Voyager that circumnavigated the world on one tank of gas, two engines and two bold, spirited souls, Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan, Burt's brother.
He's tinkered with various projects that were minor show-stoppers until a certain Angel funder by the name of Allen dropped by with open mind, open checkbook and one word on his tougne: Spaceflight. Thus was born SpaceShip One and the wild rides the test pilots took on it to win the X-Prize.
URL to drivers? I went to their site and all they have is a note saying that they do not DIRECTLY provide drivers for their products.
According to this thread http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&message.id=43688#M43688 the stereo mix drivers that Dell was supplied by SigmaTel (now Freescale Semiconductor) are being rejected by Vista on installation. The techs are working on it, but odds are SignaTel (not Dell) is being threatened by RIAA as not to supply the fix.
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66120/Correct_Sigmatel_audio_drivers_Stereo_Mix#
http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_audio&thread.id=40127&jump=true
That Big Hammer is starting to come down on their little empire that they have established, and I don't think there will be any survivors once the courts get done with them. RIAA has done little to adhere to the laws of the land and it has come time to pay the collector for their misdeeds.
I want front row, center seats when the judgment comes down on them, destroying their careers.
We had commanding officers sitting back in the States looking at overhead imagery, dishing out orders to the troops and that cost us dearly.
The military spent years trying to get away from that mentality and the Age of Information threatens to raise the head of that specter again.
Keep in mind that the White House drove most of the air strikes and movements over the phone after looking at hours- or days-old photos. The time differences, and local conditions got a lot of good people killed. This new speed that information flows is not really going to help matters any, for there is more information to digest and once agian, minute to minute changes at the local theater is not going to help any either.
PAR systems have a bonus that CASA does not have: Active target tracking and targeting. You see, the SPY-1D system that is set up at NSSL Norman was pulled off of one of the Aegis nuclear-powered cruisers. Several advantages include graceful degradation. If something breaks on the panel, the system can adjust automatically to compensate, preventing an outage from knocking the unit out in case of a Major Event. One part breaks on the 99D's, game over until a tech gets out there to fix it. Another is no or few moving parts. PAR units are static, using electronic wizardry to steer the beam to the intended target. The other biggie is replacement or supplement for the ATC system. PAR's sensitivity and brute force have tracked targets at nearly over the horizon (OTH) range. That leads up the big item: cost savings on all fronts that need radar. Multitasking the beam can eliminate redundant installations, dramatically carving chunks off of budgets that can be used elsewhere.
NEXRAD's are aged, old units, and NOAA knows it. The klystron transmitter modules have been replaced more than once in the shacks and the rest of the hardware probably replaced or repaired several times over.
Even the military is looking into it.
http://www.roc.noaa.gov/eng/docs/Solid_State/Solid_State_Transmitter_PIWG_Brief.pdf
Webvan - "Drove off a cliff."
@Home - "Dug itself a nice hole with overloaded circuits and awful service."
The Webbies - "Fizzled after 3 years of glitz."
WorldCom - "Gross mismanagement and too much of the bubbly taken in by the accountants." They left behind a butt-load of dark fiber, most of which still is.
EToys - "Stock did a yo-yo from $80 on its IPO on October 1999, then was delisted at $1 Feb 2001 when they folded."
Enron - "Need I say more?"
As Warren Buffet said back in '01 "I Told You So".
Hey, if someone can figure out how to slow down a curling stone, or similar object without getting knocked about or crunched, it's on!
Shuffleboard, darts, bumper pool...
Here's that ages-old question: Where are you going to be able to safely and efficiently operate a powered suit without sinking up to your waist in muck, tipping over due to unstable or uneven terrain, and be able to lift a working payload at the same time.
'Suits have this problem called weight distribution. Their footprints are about on par with a small car overloaded. When try to move loads on poor terrain, you'll wind up either getting dug out or being picked back up because the soil could not hold you up. Tracks that can handle twice their load can dance on that kind of terrain, even BobCats with tracks can handle soft sands that would try to swallow an average joes' foot.
I can see powersuits working on prepared grounds, Asphalt, cement concrete, macadam with treated substrates, but not thrown into a active combat situation where they would have to slog through mud or soft soils.
He's going to rack up a helluva SMS bill considering they love to roam.
They just grate on my nerves, saying that their drivers are hung up in the Vista approval process. I'd say that they are just buying time to release new products so they can make more profit off of NEW product instead of spending cash on support for old. The pattern shows in the forums as well as their support pages.
I've seen more than a few companies simply bypass vista's certification process and release their updates, with instructions on how to circumvent Vista security checks. Good for them, bad for vista.
You are onto something there. "Pelletized" Hydrogen or Deuterium in a high pressure, semi metallic or metallic state, do you think that there might be a energy bonus there?
One thing is that theoretics will blow singularities out the window. One theory holds that Jupiter's core is a solid mass of crystallized carbon. Yep, you can guess what that is, Diamond. Another theory, with a more stable foundation, is that hydrogen at that pressure and temperature, becomes metallic. Essentially within your little buckyball, you would have a sphere of hydrogen metal. If your buckyball can handle > 100GPa,(over one million atmospheres) then the hydrogen atoms will undergo a phase change and become metallic.
If this is practical and it's energy potential can be tapped, we'll have at our fingertips, an unlimited power source that won't kill you with radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen
You need to get that squeeze just right or it'll fizzle or burn too fast. The use of tritium gas was tested during the mid 50's, but the two fizzled due to H3 poisoning. You put a pure enough Tritium gas in the void, you will get something on par with the Upshot-Knothole BADGER test of 25Kt.
What is suggested here is called a Cyrogenic Weapon. They really don't have much of a shelf life, taking into consideration the gases it uses.
I'd suggest looking into the "hollow core" designs. Easier on materials, just a bit more work at the mill.
Sweet Emotion, baby!
Dream On Bitches, but if you can Get a Grip, Turn the Page. Before we Eat The Rich.
Absolutely, Amazing.
OK, troll me now.. But admit it, you Don't Want to Miss this for the world.
Partly why Gen. Groves wanted to drop it after it was put together. That and politics as well. He wanted to show Truman that his device could do what he promised and convince Truman not to commit on the invasion.
Penny's design was a copycat from the Teller/Oppenheimer implosion design. In reality there was no way possible to improve upon perfection with the materials they had at the time. When the 50's rolled around, they simply took the basic sphere design and added more heavy metals and "tampers", added a cyclotron called the "zipper" and turned it into a 3 stage Hydrogen or "Super" device. It took awhile though.
The U235 gun design was super simple. All they had to do was figure out the precise velocity in which the uranium pieces would go critical without premature detonation or fizzling. The downside to this design that it was a very poor design when it comes to generating a criticality with a minimal amount of material. An inefficient design in comparison to the "Fat Man" device.
Jig's up, asshats. Payment in full upon the sound of the gavel on wood.
Or on your head, it'll sound the same due to the fact that it's made of the same stuff as the bench is. XD
The Little Joe series was a set of clustered solid two stage boosters designed to test the Mercury and Apollo capsules. Little Joe I was initially had clusters of four Sergeant solids, later the addition of Recruit motors for added "kick". Little Joe II had a bigger kick though, using 2 Algol 465 Kn motors in each stage.
I can see a new Little Joe being built to loft Orion "boilerplates" on a new series of tests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Joe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Joe_II
There was one last Little Joe II on display at JSC in Houston. Situated beside the Saturn V display building, sitting on its transport jig, rusting from the inside out, in dire need of restoration.
Space elevators are still out until a cable made out of a continuous single fiber of nanotubes can be fabricated, then woven into a braid capable of withstanding the extreme environment of near-space and space itself. We're not talking a regular 5-strand weave here folks, this new weave will need to be able to resolve any problems by itself. If that cable fails, we're talking 200+ miles of weighty fiber and payload coming down onto the ground at terminal velocity. Even with the light weight to length ratio, we're talking metric tons of fiber impacting the ground at 80MPH.
Sounds familiar, right along with the right to sentence to long jail terms, a few victims that got raped, letting the rapists go nearly scot-free.
They might as well isolate the country, keeping them from experiencing the interwebs altogether, it'll be impossible to keep their youth from being corrupted.