...but members of my family recently moved to a small town in Alabama. It is a dry town in a dry county. In the heavily southern baptist area, they have outlawed the sale of alcohol because drinking is a sin.
Just curious, but would it bother you any less if they instead had overtly stated that their official reasons for outlawing the sale of alcohol in their county/town were because it led to health problems, social behaviour problems, family violence problems, drunken driving, etc, instead of "religion" reasons?
Last time I checked, both FDR and Truman were democrats. Not only did they perform warrantless spying on American citizens on a wholesale scale, they imprisoned thousands of them in concentration camps merely because of their ethnicity/ancestry.
You can find evidence of US federal government agencies illegally spying on its own citizens going back all the way to the days of the founding fathers in the late 1700's. Nothing new here at all indeed.
For the Nth time: in response to all the inevitable "far cheaper than NASA" posts; this is not an orbital launch - it just goes up to the edge of space, then straight down again.
...to sum it all up, this is just going to be a VERY expensive amusement park ride. Even though I'm usually all for technological advances such as this... but maybe just because it's the Christmas season or something... right now I can't help but wonder about stuff like how many Habitat for Humanity houses could be built instead with the money that people will be paying for a short ride to the edge of space.
Wow it was born the same year I as was in the same town.
:-) It's a full half-decade older than myself. But it's been well-cared for over its four decades of existance... probably is in better condition airplane-wise than I take care of myself living-being-wise. Probably will last a hundred years or longer if the next set of owners care for it as well as the past owners have. I've never been to Florida before, and hope to make it to my very first EAA Sun-N-Fun at Lakeland in April '06. I'd kinda like to visit the Piper factory someday too... I presume they offer tours.
I've thought of the homebuilt airplanes too, but I want an all-metal four-seater low-wing that's fast, and the only thing like right now is the Van's RV-10 and they are very expensive to build and will take a long time too. There are two of those under construction at my home airport right now, so I've got a "front row seat" at watching how much work and money goes into building them. I'm not that ambitious and will just settle for buying something ready-made and only costing half as much as my house... hence the interest in a Mooney.
It's only a little '65 Cherokee 140, built in Vero Beach for sure.
The "I can make it" line definitely doesn't apply much in this plane... the Cherokee will glide only slightly better than a steerable brick when the fan quits. I practice simulated engine-outs all the time so I've got a real good idea just how very limited amount of gliding distance I'll have if the real thing ever happens... especially if it ever happens on takeoff.
Still the little Cherokee is a lot of fun to fly, but someday I hope to trade up to something a lot faster, perhaps a Mooney.
I stayed several years at each job I've had in IT since graduating with my BSCS degree, and at each one I've resigned from, I worked hard until the very last day. Even two of the jobs, I retained systems access after I was gone and started at my new job, since I always helped train my replacements for the transition, and even did a bit of contract work on the side for the former employers afterwards too....but then the kind of IT jobs that the employers are such paranoid idiots, usually clue you in to that fact before you ever go to work for them in the first place in the wording of all their NDAs, non-compete contracts, etc, they try to make you sign before they give you the job. Read carefully all that stuff before you ever take the job with them, and you can usually gauge what kind of an outfit they really are before you ever get into bed with them, by "reading between the lines".
...to happen due to "cyber attacks" from "cyber terrorists". It's going to happen instead because the USA has abdicated control over its own technology destiny to foreign governments (e.g. China for hardware, India for software and tech support, etc.)
Any half-neuron can fly a plane....
on
Rat Brains Fly Planes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...in level flight. It's landing a plane that poses a bit more of a challenge.
For very small offices (up to 32 phones), take a look at TalkSwitch small PBX. Prices start around $700 for the entry-level 4 local extension POTS unit. The 8-extension unit with 4 VoIP ports is $1800.
How soon before we can blame everything we do on genetics?
About the same time that all these genetic dispositions can be easily and quickly detected and measured in an individual... and then used to discriminate against him to bar entry into the upper echelons of education, employment, and society in general.
My car is entirely made out of paper, except for the car part of it.
There is a long-standing joke in the aviation world about the two forces that are required to make an airplane fly.
The naiive beginner student pilot will always answer: (1)Lift and (2)Thrust. The more experienced pilot knows that it's actually: (1)Money and (2)FAA Paperwork.
For airplane builders, there is another famous quote: "An airplane cannot fly until the total weight of all the FAA paperwork is at least equal to or greater than the weight of the aircraft itself.
Since what happened is considered a computer crime in many jurisdictions, then couldn't their attempt to recover (and most likely destroy) the discs also constitute an act of tampering with evidence?
...not to mention what many consider to be probably the absolutely coolest logo ever to come from a tech company... that is, the famous chrome cube, still seen here on/.
I'd love to get my hand on one of the real chrome-plated die-cast metal cubes that were to be available as paperweights, desk ornaments to a privileged few people back in the mid-late 1990's.
Re:Wished they never sold Unix
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And yet, Linux would have still kicked UNIX's ass.
Linux is a great *nix and all that alright, but where SBC->AT&T is coming from is:
1)AIX 2)Solaris 3)HP-UX 4)??? 5)Profit!
When you need a big-iron machine, such as on a big RS6000 machine with 6 or more 64-bit RISC processors, Linux still can't touch AIX for enterprise-level performance and features. Linux is perfect for small to midsize scale duty, but when you have 500+ users hitting nearly two hundred gigabytes worth of Oracle databases, you've got to use the primary o/s developed for that hardware. And even though IBM calles it AIX 5.xL (L- for Linux affinity) it ain't Linux at all, it just has a lot of Linux compatibility for recompiling written-for-Linux source code into native AIX binaries without as much hassle as in years past. Most SuSE app source code tarballs compile with ease under 5.xL and that's no coincidence.
Wished they never sold Unix
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just recently met with some SBC reps last week who are trying to sell my employer a new phone system, and heard the AT&T name change from them. I asked of them now that SBC owns AT&T if they wished that AT&T had retained ownership of Unix, in light of certain events that have transpired over the years. Their answer was "Absolutely!"
Got one or more Sony Trinitron monitors or TVs that are in great operating condition?
Quit using them now (to stop wear & tear on the tube) and stash them away. When CRT monitors and TVs disappear from the market after a few more years and there will be no more spare replacement tubes available, you'll be able to sell a good working unit to the CRT addicts for much more money than they are worth on the used equipment market right now.
I'm unsure if I'm being serious or sarcastically humorous on this comment;-)
Frankly the station is a great candidate for the addition of ion thruster engines to help maintain altitude.
Not only ion thrusters, but perhaps also 3 or 4 small conventional oxygen/hydrogen rocket engines strategically placed in case the station ever needs some higher amounts of thrust or steering manuvering capability for unforseen emergencies. The extra oxygen and hydrogen stored on board for those engines could also be diverted to fuel cells for emergency power needs and the oxygen for life support. (Scotty!!! we've got a breech of the outer hull from a meteor strike and shields have failed! Divert auxilary power from the thrusters to life support now!!!). The continuous low-level ion thrust could counter the additional drag from the extra weight to maintain orbital altitude, and the other engines would be there for "just-in-case", hoping you'd never really need them.
Of course, we'd need a ship big and reliable enough to get those engines, supplies and installation crew up there to install the stuff... but I digress...
A long time ago as a teenager, I used to repair keyboard synths. Anybody remember the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 keyboard from the 1980's? They used to put pictures in the printed circuit board masks such as gorilla faces and such. I thought it was pretty clever at the time.
The Moller Skycar will NEVER be able to fly the way he claims. First of all it's a purely vectored-thrust, powered-lift machine. All flying machines of this type are inherently unstable as hell. If any component in its controls or thrust systems fails, the machine will be wildly uncontrollable. Think bottle-rocket with the stick removed... wild unpredictable flight path... firey crashing death to any occupants of the vehicle. These kind of flying machines are very difficult to keep under control and are also *extremely* fuel-hungry. Look at the size of the Skycar, how much fuel tank capacity do you think it has. Not much? You're right. How many engines will the M400 have? EIGHT 150hp dual-rotor wankels. You know how much gasoline a 150hp engine uses? About 7.5 gallons per hour if you lean the mixture to the point where it barely runs, and of course is not putting out the full 150hp at that point. At full 150hp 100% output, such an engine will burn about 11 gallons per hour. At low altitudes, you'll need full power from all eight engines to keep the thing in the air since all the thrust will be doing the duty of lift vector. That's almost 90 gallons per hour fuel burn at full power! FAA regs say that an aircraft cannot even take off for daytime VFR flight without enough fuel to complete the flight plus a 1/2 hour reserve. Moller is now saying that he expects to run the engines on alcohol instead of gas. Well, any high school kid who has just begin to learn about engines and fuels can tell you that it takes almost 2 gallons of alcohol to do the work of 1 gallon of gasoline in an internal combustion engine. I call shenanigans on this machine. Anybody who thinks this is a viable flying machine is smoking crack.
Moller should've just stuck to making SuperTrapp mufflers for motorcycles, at least that is a successful design that works quite well. Or work some more on that wankel engine to finish getting it up to snuff for small conventional airplanes. If they could get that 150hp dual-rotor wankel to have at least a 1500 hour TBO and equipped with a planetary gear reduction drive to keep the prop at about 2700-2800 max rpm at full power, they could sell a lot of these engines to the experimental airplane homebuilders, and perhaps a de-rated 100-120hp version to the Light Sport aircraft makers That's where the real money could be.
...are the AIX, HP-UX and Solaris systems running Oracle, Informix and Sybase (and to a fairly substantial degree also Windows boxes runnning MS SQL) server-side databases with Windows fat-clients. These are getting hideously expensive to maintain nowadays, even though they were just implemented a few short years ago when firms were told that these kind of systems were the "way of the future" and the only way to implement I.T. to avoid the high costs of doing things the "legacy way" with older, experienced, and expensive IT staff.
It's a viscious cycle... in just a few more short years the next wave of "web services" -based technology that is presently trying to push client-server aside, will all too soon be staffed with aging folks who want to be paid more money that management wishes to pay.
Face it, corporate management always wants magic technology to solve all their problems, but never wishes to pay what the technology really costs to implement and operate fully properly for the entire duration of it's lifecycle, but are always far too eager to pay somebody else outside their organization a boatload of money for the empty promises of the "next wave that will supercede the dinosaur".
...not that my opinion really matters much to the world of astronomy but...
1) Spheroid shaped.
2) Orbits a star itself directly, and not primarily orbiting another planet (i.e a satellite of that other planet), though if a pair of planets orbit each other while the pair orbits their star then I'd give them both credit.
3) Big and massive enough to have a notable about of gravity itself, probably at least a quarter of the Earth's gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
...but members of my family recently moved to a small town in Alabama. It is a dry town in a dry county. In the heavily southern baptist area, they have outlawed the sale of alcohol because drinking is a sin.
Just curious, but would it bother you any less if they instead had overtly stated that their official reasons for outlawing the sale of alcohol in their county/town were because it led to health problems, social behaviour problems, family violence problems, drunken driving, etc, instead of "religion" reasons?
--
I think I'll have a drink myself.
But no Democrat has EVER done this.
Last time I checked, both FDR and Truman were democrats. Not only did they perform warrantless spying on American citizens on a wholesale scale, they imprisoned thousands of them in concentration camps merely because of their ethnicity/ancestry.
You can find evidence of US federal government agencies illegally spying on its own citizens going back all the way to the days of the founding fathers in the late 1700's. Nothing new here at all indeed.
For the Nth time: in response to all the inevitable "far cheaper than NASA" posts; this is not an orbital launch - it just goes up to the edge of space, then straight down again.
...to sum it all up, this is just going to be a VERY expensive amusement park ride. Even though I'm usually all for technological advances such as this... but maybe just because it's the Christmas season or something... right now I can't help but wonder about stuff like how many Habitat for Humanity houses could be built instead with the money that people will be paying for a short ride to the edge of space.
Wow it was born the same year I as was in the same town.
:-) It's a full half-decade older than myself. But it's been well-cared for over its four decades of existance... probably is in better condition airplane-wise than I take care of myself living-being-wise. Probably will last a hundred years or longer if the next set of owners care for it as well as the past owners have. I've never been to Florida before, and hope to make it to my very first EAA Sun-N-Fun at Lakeland in April '06. I'd kinda like to visit the Piper factory someday too... I presume they offer tours.
I've thought of the homebuilt airplanes too, but I want an all-metal four-seater low-wing that's fast, and the only thing like right now is the Van's RV-10 and they are very expensive to build and will take a long time too. There are two of those under construction at my home airport right now, so I've got a "front row seat" at watching how much work and money goes into building them. I'm not that ambitious and will just settle for buying something ready-made and only costing half as much as my house... hence the interest in a Mooney.
It's only a little '65 Cherokee 140, built in Vero Beach for sure.
The "I can make it" line definitely doesn't apply much in this plane... the Cherokee will glide only slightly better than a steerable brick when the fan quits. I practice simulated engine-outs all the time so I've got a real good idea just how very limited amount of gliding distance I'll have if the real thing ever happens... especially if it ever happens on takeoff.
Still the little Cherokee is a lot of fun to fly, but someday I hope to trade up to something a lot faster, perhaps a Mooney.
I stayed several years at each job I've had in IT since graduating with my BSCS degree, and at each one I've resigned from, I worked hard until the very last day. Even two of the jobs, I retained systems access after I was gone and started at my new job, since I always helped train my replacements for the transition, and even did a bit of contract work on the side for the former employers afterwards too. ...but then the kind of IT jobs that the employers are such paranoid idiots, usually clue you in to that fact before you ever go to work for them in the first place in the wording of all their NDAs, non-compete contracts, etc, they try to make you sign before they give you the job. Read carefully all that stuff before you ever take the job with them, and you can usually gauge what kind of an outfit they really are before you ever get into bed with them, by "reading between the lines".
Speed is life.
Altitude is life.
Actually it's "Airspeed is life... Altitude is life insurance".
The two most dangerous words a pilot can say: "Watch this".
The single most dangerous word a pilot can say: "Yeehaw!".
--
BTW, I am a pilot and own an antique Piper Cherokee.
...to happen due to "cyber attacks" from "cyber terrorists". It's going to happen instead because the USA has abdicated control over its own technology destiny to foreign governments (e.g. China for hardware, India for software and tech support, etc.)
...in level flight. It's landing a plane that poses a bit more of a challenge.
For very small offices (up to 32 phones), take a look at TalkSwitch small PBX. Prices start around $700 for the entry-level 4 local extension POTS unit. The 8-extension unit with 4 VoIP ports is $1800.
How soon before we can blame everything we do on genetics?
About the same time that all these genetic dispositions can be easily and quickly detected and measured in an individual... and then used to discriminate against him to bar entry into the upper echelons of education, employment, and society in general.
My car is entirely made out of paper, except for the car part of it.
There is a long-standing joke in the aviation world about the two forces that are required to make an airplane fly.
The naiive beginner student pilot will always answer: (1)Lift and (2)Thrust.
The more experienced pilot knows that it's actually: (1)Money and (2)FAA Paperwork.
For airplane builders, there is another famous quote: "An airplane cannot fly until the total weight of all the FAA paperwork is at least equal to or greater than the weight of the aircraft itself.
Since what happened is considered a computer crime in many jurisdictions, then couldn't their attempt to recover (and most likely destroy) the discs also constitute an act of tampering with evidence?
...so basically the rules (laws) apply to everyone, except for them whenever those rules get in thier way.
SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:
...not to mention what many consider to be probably the absolutely coolest logo ever to come from a tech company... that is, the famous chrome cube, still seen here on /.
I'd love to get my hand on one of the real chrome-plated die-cast metal cubes that were to be available as paperweights, desk ornaments to a privileged few people back in the mid-late 1990's.
And yet, Linux would have still kicked UNIX's ass.
Linux is a great *nix and all that alright, but where SBC->AT&T is coming from is:
1)AIX
2)Solaris
3)HP-UX
4)???
5)Profit!
When you need a big-iron machine, such as on a big RS6000 machine with 6 or more 64-bit RISC processors, Linux still can't touch AIX for enterprise-level performance and features. Linux is perfect for small to midsize scale duty, but when you have 500+ users hitting nearly two hundred gigabytes worth of Oracle databases, you've got to use the primary o/s developed for that hardware. And even though IBM calles it AIX 5.xL (L- for Linux affinity) it ain't Linux at all, it just has a lot of Linux compatibility for recompiling written-for-Linux source code into native AIX binaries without as much hassle as in years past. Most SuSE app source code tarballs compile with ease under 5.xL and that's no coincidence.
I just recently met with some SBC reps last week who are trying to sell my employer a new phone system, and heard the AT&T name change from them. I asked of them now that SBC owns AT&T if they wished that AT&T had retained ownership of Unix, in light of certain events that have transpired over the years. Their answer was "Absolutely!"
Got one or more Sony Trinitron monitors or TVs that are in great operating condition?
;-)
Quit using them now (to stop wear & tear on the tube) and stash them away. When CRT monitors and TVs disappear from the market after a few more years and there will be no more spare replacement tubes available, you'll be able to sell a good working unit to the CRT addicts for much more money than they are worth on the used equipment market right now.
I'm unsure if I'm being serious or sarcastically humorous on this comment
Frankly the station is a great candidate for the addition of ion thruster engines to help maintain altitude.
Not only ion thrusters, but perhaps also 3 or 4 small conventional oxygen/hydrogen rocket engines strategically placed in case the station ever needs some higher amounts of thrust or steering manuvering capability for unforseen emergencies. The extra oxygen and hydrogen stored on board for those engines could also be diverted to fuel cells for emergency power needs and the oxygen for life support. (Scotty!!! we've got a breech of the outer hull from a meteor strike and shields have failed! Divert auxilary power from the thrusters to life support now!!!). The continuous low-level ion thrust could counter the additional drag from the extra weight to maintain orbital altitude, and the other engines would be there for "just-in-case", hoping you'd never really need them.
Of course, we'd need a ship big and reliable enough to get those engines, supplies and installation crew up there to install the stuff... but I digress...
A long time ago as a teenager, I used to repair keyboard synths. Anybody remember the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5 keyboard from the 1980's? They used to put pictures in the printed circuit board masks such as gorilla faces and such. I thought it was pretty clever at the time.
We've already had a Flying Car since 1979.
The Moller Skycar will NEVER be able to fly the way he claims. First of all it's a purely vectored-thrust, powered-lift machine. All flying machines of this type are inherently unstable as hell. If any component in its controls or thrust systems fails, the machine will be wildly uncontrollable. Think bottle-rocket with the stick removed... wild unpredictable flight path... firey crashing death to any occupants of the vehicle. These kind of flying machines are very difficult to keep under control and are also *extremely* fuel-hungry. Look at the size of the Skycar, how much fuel tank capacity do you think it has. Not much? You're right. How many engines will the M400 have? EIGHT 150hp dual-rotor wankels. You know how much gasoline a 150hp engine uses? About 7.5 gallons per hour if you lean the mixture to the point where it barely runs, and of course is not putting out the full 150hp at that point. At full 150hp 100% output, such an engine will burn about 11 gallons per hour. At low altitudes, you'll need full power from all eight engines to keep the thing in the air since all the thrust will be doing the duty of lift vector. That's almost 90 gallons per hour fuel burn at full power! FAA regs say that an aircraft cannot even take off for daytime VFR flight without enough fuel to complete the flight plus a 1/2 hour reserve. Moller is now saying that he expects to run the engines on alcohol instead of gas. Well, any high school kid who has just begin to learn about engines and fuels can tell you that it takes almost 2 gallons of alcohol to do the work of 1 gallon of gasoline in an internal combustion engine. I call shenanigans on this machine. Anybody who thinks this is a viable flying machine is smoking crack.
Moller should've just stuck to making SuperTrapp mufflers for motorcycles, at least that is a successful design that works quite well. Or work some more on that wankel engine to finish getting it up to snuff for small conventional airplanes. If they could get that 150hp dual-rotor wankel to have at least a 1500 hour TBO and equipped with a planetary gear reduction drive to keep the prop at about 2700-2800 max rpm at full power, they could sell a lot of these engines to the experimental airplane homebuilders, and perhaps a de-rated 100-120hp version to the Light Sport aircraft makers That's where the real money could be.
...are the AIX, HP-UX and Solaris systems running Oracle, Informix and Sybase (and to a fairly substantial degree also Windows boxes runnning MS SQL) server-side databases with Windows fat-clients. These are getting hideously expensive to maintain nowadays, even though they were just implemented a few short years ago when firms were told that these kind of systems were the "way of the future" and the only way to implement I.T. to avoid the high costs of doing things the "legacy way" with older, experienced, and expensive IT staff.
It's a viscious cycle... in just a few more short years the next wave of "web services" -based technology that is presently trying to push client-server aside, will all too soon be staffed with aging folks who want to be paid more money that management wishes to pay.
Face it, corporate management always wants magic technology to solve all their problems, but never wishes to pay what the technology really costs to implement and operate fully properly for the entire duration of it's lifecycle, but are always far too eager to pay somebody else outside their organization a boatload of money for the empty promises of the "next wave that will supercede the dinosaur".
...not that my opinion really matters much to the world of astronomy but...
1) Spheroid shaped.
2) Orbits a star itself directly, and not primarily orbiting another planet (i.e a satellite of that other planet), though if a pair of planets orbit each other while the pair orbits their star then I'd give them both credit.
3) Big and massive enough to have a notable about of gravity itself, probably at least a quarter of the Earth's gravity.
4) ???
5) Planet!