"Engineers say the baby Concordes will herald a new supersonic age, something that seemed impossible when the Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris just over a year ago."
Maybe it's just me, but I recall that the Concorde flew supersonically for years before one of them crashed, and the one that bit the dust was due to metal on the runway, not a major design flaw. When the first automobile crashed, did we mourn the end of the age of the car?
This is exactly the kind of "lets mess around with anything we want, damn the consequences" kind of attitude that could land us in real trouble some day. Scientists don't even know the mechanics of a hurricane in any great detail. Shouldn't we understand something as powerful as this before we go screwing around with it?
the water cycle is not harmed in any way (as if it could be)
It sure could be. If every time a tropical storm develops, we crush it in its infancy, a huge amount of water will fall - on the ocean. This water will not travel to wherever it's going, and the weather patterns of wherever these storms are will change. Look what happened to the Sahara - it's not too hard for local climates to change drastically in response to weather change. If Cuba doesn't get as much moisture falling out of the sky because it was all dumped in the middle of the ocean, their sugar cane will die and -bad things- will happen.
It's not worth considering such a drastic use for this technology until we know more about the weather.
Maybe a certain Federal Bureau should adopt this as a security policy. Although it might be hard to catch international terrorists when you have a 50kg lump of concrete hanging out of your holster.
When I was at Caltech Prefrosh, we took a tour of JPL and I noticed that in the main control room they had two "official JPL time" clocks - really big digital displays that hang over the workstations - that were off by one second.
Also, the lady at the reception desk in their space exploration museum had her passwords on a Post-it note on her monitor. And that was just the tour...
You know, this reminds me of a time when I had a mallet, and this was a really great mallet that lots of other people liked. And then one day I lost my mallet, or it broke. I don't remember. But the funny thing was how heavy it felt.
This relates to Slashdot being down because a lot of people were also disappointed and bummed out when I lost my mallet.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Slashdot not SlashDot... now that wasn't hard was it?
"Engineers say the baby Concordes will herald a new supersonic age, something that seemed impossible when the Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris just over a year ago."
Maybe it's just me, but I recall that the Concorde flew supersonically for years before one of them crashed, and the one that bit the dust was due to metal on the runway, not a major design flaw. When the first automobile crashed, did we mourn the end of the age of the car?
This is exactly the kind of "lets mess around with anything we want, damn the consequences" kind of attitude that could land us in real trouble some day. Scientists don't even know the mechanics of a hurricane in any great detail. Shouldn't we understand something as powerful as this before we go screwing around with it?
the water cycle is not harmed in any way (as if it could be)
It sure could be. If every time a tropical storm develops, we crush it in its infancy, a huge amount of water will fall - on the ocean. This water will not travel to wherever it's going, and the weather patterns of wherever these storms are will change. Look what happened to the Sahara - it's not too hard for local climates to change drastically in response to weather change. If Cuba doesn't get as much moisture falling out of the sky because it was all dumped in the middle of the ocean, their sugar cane will die and -bad things- will happen.
It's not worth considering such a drastic use for this technology until we know more about the weather.
Maybe a certain Federal Bureau should adopt this as a security policy. Although it might be hard to catch international terrorists when you have a 50kg lump of concrete hanging out of your holster.
When I was at Caltech Prefrosh, we took a tour of JPL and I noticed that in the main control room they had two "official JPL time" clocks - really big digital displays that hang over the workstations - that were off by one second.
Also, the lady at the reception desk in their space exploration museum had her passwords on a Post-it note on her monitor. And that was just the tour...
You know, this reminds me of a time when I had a mallet, and this was a really great mallet that lots of other people liked. And then one day I lost my mallet, or it broke. I don't remember. But the funny thing was how heavy it felt.
This relates to Slashdot being down because a lot of people were also disappointed and bummed out when I lost my mallet.