You are correct: the G-suit is like a pair of pants that fills with air to pressurize the abdomen and legs, inhibiting the flow of blood to the lower extremities. This is not to protect the pilot's heart or to prevent other health problems, it's to keep the pilot from losing consciousness.
Not to have their bodies exposed to more forces and danger than most astronauts ever experience
From the original post:
the G-forces on coasters are considerably greater than even those experienced by astronauts and race car drivers...
I flew military jets for 9 years, and I think these comparisons are crap. When people used to ask me how jets compared to roller coasters, I would tell them that the two experiences are totally different. It's a matter of scale. Sustaining 4G or more for even 10 seconds, let alone 30 or 60 seconds or more, is an experience that simply cannot be reproduced by any rollercoaster that can fit in a theme park. The effects of the sustained G are DRAMATICALLY different than the one or two second hits (or three or four...whatever) felt on a high performance rollercoaster.
I recently road with my brother on a rollercoaster that I considered to be quite exciting, with corkscrews and consecutive loops, and when it was over he asked me how many G's he thought we had pulled. Based on the sensations I had felt (compared to my years in jets) I guessed 1.5-2. I was surprised to see a brochure later that claimed the ride pulled 6G. The two or three second hits just didn't have time to register.
Another example: a person using an ejection seat pulls an ongodly amount of G -- something like 30 or 60, although the actual number escapes me. Obviously this is enough to kill a man, but the brief time period involved make it survivable. I've known people who ejected and were able to walk around with no problem immediately afterward.
The point is that comparisons to astronauts and race car drivers is misleading. The maximum G must be examined only in conjunction with the period of time over which the G occurs. Brief hits DO NOT COMPARE to sustained G. Maybe rides should be limited and maybe they shouldn't, but the forces faced by astronauts are not part of the debate.
I'm not sure I see any good use for a laptop in a normal theater. But I did like the idea about the audience-driven content. If this could be done with a low-light handheld device, I could see this as a very popular system: the audience can choose the course of the story (does the guy die, does the girl get nekit, etc.) I would not be at all surprised to see this happen in the near future. I don't think this idea sucks ass.
Since theaters will probably be digital eventually, I propose a system by which the movie can be made to pause if anyone in the audience receives a phone call. This way, important audience members can receive their phone calls, and other viewers will not miss any of the movie.
This response fits into an annoying category that we see quite a bit on Slashdot: 'I don't have the same interests and ideas as you, so I'm going to go through your post point by point and explain that your ideas have alternatives and detractors and are therefore invalid.'
For Christ's sake, the poster listed a dozen possible uses for a new technology, some of which are personally interesting to me and some of which are not. Pointing out alternatives does not negate the creativity of the poster.
Perhaps you had this exchange in the early 90's:
Internet? Who needs it?
I can send email to my relatives! Why email when you can call or fax?
I can do my banking online! Why not just do it on the phone or in person?
I can check movie times online! Why not just call the theater or look in the paper?
I know you're tempted to go through my examples and rebutt each one by pointing out why the sample online activities are actually better than the alternatives provided. Go on, you know you want to.
The only thing more exciting about technology than emerging capabilities is the creativity and imagination that leads to more USES for those capabilities. When someone proposes new uses, you are free to embrace them or not. Taking the time to point out that you personally would not do each and every one is a waste of time and makes you sound like a close-minded philistine.
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists. This is how the real world works btw.
You're right. And in the real world, the guy who figured out how to do it himself is the one the others go to when they get stumped. His elegant new algorithm is the one that others cut and paste into their work to make it better and faster.
As with most disciplines, a professional coder will (and should) build on work that has already been done. But as a novice, learning how to figure things out for yourself is a very important part of the learning process.
We time-travel at our own peril...
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 3, Funny
There are many unspeakable horrors that await us if we begin to monkey with this technology; many bizarre paradoxes that we can't predict or even comprehend.
For instance, what if we use a time machine to travel back to the 70's, then we return to the present day. Everything appears normal, but then we go to download some pr0n, and all we can find is cheesey 70's pr0n with bad soundtracks and mediocre women. AAaarrrrgggghhhhh!
You can't simply list the superior capabilities of particular aircraft and then declare that they can't lose in a fight. Your "hundred-miles-away" scenario assumes an air superiority fighter with long range weapons (a scenario in which the subject technology wouldn't be used anyway.) What about an F/A-18 flying CAP with AIM-7 and 9, who gets jumped by two MiG-21's who just launched undetected from the next valley over? What about LCDR Speicher, who was shot down by an enemy aircraft during the first night of the Gulf War, flying a state-of-the-art F/A-18? Was his targeting system "good enough?"
you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world
You seem to forget that this technology will be used primarily in situations where one man is trying to kill one other man. The one who loses dies. You apparently expect American pilots to make do with "good enough" since we're already the best. Being from the most technologically advanced military does you no good when an enemy pilot has managed to get behind you.
I recall reading recently that research was being done on a helmet like this that would be combined with external sensors so the pilot could "see" things that were not visible to him in the cockpit. For instance, he could look down by his feet and see an aircraft below him. They could couple this with a quick method of changing "views," like those flight simulator games that allow you to toggle between forward/left/right/aft view, to make a formidable fighting system.
By the way, for the whiners complaining that this will facilitate blue-on-blue kills: it's just a targeting system. The pilot still has to aim and pull the trigger.
Your auto-folder-making-and-filtering idea sounds good, but I firmly believe that all "automatic" functions in any software should default to "OFF!"
My primary desktop is linux/KDE, with a small stable of applications to provide for everyday needs (kmail, for instance.) Nothing frustrates me more than having to use a huge application that starts doing "useful" things that are not what I want, and I can't figure out why, or how to stop it. This is especially true of various big-name word-processors. All of a sudden I'm getting headers, and page numbers, and different line spacing here and there, and various freaky auto-formatting, because the application wants my work to look "professional." Bullshit. If I want to look professional, I'll take a class or read a book and pick and choose the functions myself. Until then, just give me the basics.
But this company says that the encryption is absolutly secure, which it is, but the key for the encyption isn't secure. So effectivly they are hiding behind semantics
This reminds me of military radios with encryption. The standard key is good for safeguarding information up to the 'Secret' level. For some missions, they use special keys that are good for 'Top Secret'. You may think that those special keys are inherently more secure, in terms of crackability. It turns out they are exactly the same strength, but they are handled through Top Secret channels (in other words, you can't keep the Top Secret keys in a Secret safe; they have to be kept in the special building down the street, and the guys who key the radios have to have Top Secret clearance, etc.)
These guys' scheme is only as secure as their 'secret' method of transferring the keys. You can't carry a top secret key in a secret briefcase.
Perhaps my best deal of all was survival training in Pensacola, when we went up in a modified parachute that was rigged like a parasail. We'd get up to altitude, maybe 200 feet or so, then cut loose and ride the chute into the water. I'd like to buy a beer for the guy who dreamed that one up.
I spent some time flying military jets (not the pilot, the 'other guy'.) The training for parachute descents is as you describe...wait for your feet to hit the water. I recall one time during carrier training, we were launched off the front and flew straight ahead for several miles. I looked out and wondered why we were skimming along just above the water...we appeared to be no higher than the flight deck we had just left. I checked the altimeter and it read 600 feet.
While I don't agree 100% with your disagreement, you did make me realize one thing: the ball being caught in the "laying on the back" experiment is accelerating, while the ball thrown in space is not. That may be a significant difference.
Your analysis of our use of 3-d observations to catch a ball is interesting, but I don't think that's the whole story. Your explanation is relevent to how we track the ball with our eyes, but it doesn't take into account the timely placement of our hand in a position to intercept the ball. It's not good enough to see where the ball is and put our hand there; we have to put our hand in the right spot before the ball gets there. To do this, I think our knowledge of how gravity affects the trajectory is very important. To use an example from above: a parachute landing. Sure, you can watch the ground and make a pretty accurate judgment about how high you are, but at the very last second you will most likely raise your feet too early because you are used to "falling" at a certain rate of acceleration. Change the acceleration, and your brain no longer knows how to compensate. I did 20 jumps years ago, and I jarred my shins every single time, even though the rate of descent was no greater than hopping of a picnic table.
by laying on your back and throwing a ball straight up. Once you get the hang of throwing it straight up, which is a challenge in its own right, you will be catching the ball with the same trajectory as the astronauts. It's difficult to throw it straight up for the same reason it's difficult to catch in space: your brain ends up compensating for gravity, so your first several (or several dozen) will probably go back over you head. I discovered this exercise when I was about 10; I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to catch at first.
I propose that future astronauts perform this exercise for 15 days before their flight. That way, they will be able to play catch right away, with no "warmup period," thus making them more productive. And to think my Mom said I was wasting time!
a keyboard. It would be easy to remember where to click, because I could remember it as a string of alphanumeric characters. I think this technology has promise.
It'll be interesting to see
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 5, Funny
how they design the new, thinner cable so it just barely reaches, then falls short when you have to flip it 180 degrees to get pin 1 in the right place. If it can't do that, I don't want it.
1. A keyboard like this, except nothing is actually projected on the table; only I see it because it's projected on my retina by the virtual monitor from yesterday's story.
2. Oh by the way, my computer's display is also projected on my retina.
3. A microphone/earplug that allows me to issue voice commands to the computer without a visible mic.
4. Wireless network, of course.
I could sit in Barnes and Noble freaking people out, talking to myself and tapping on the table.
Alright, maybe those security people are a bunch of doofuses. But this story is screaming "hyper exageration." Come on...they just up and ripped off electrodes? Now, I don't know any more about this story than what's written above, but it sounds to me like he had so much metal and equipment attached to him that they pulled him aside to check him out. He starts to get steamed, then they start to get steamed, and maybe a couple of his electrodes comes off while they're moving him around. Or maybe they ask him to detach the equipment, and some of them come off as the wires are tugged.
And "equipment scattered around the room?" Big deal. What are they supposed to do, just give it a once over, then let him through? If he really had that much stuff, they have to check out each piece, and to do that properly, it has to come off his body. Arguing otherwise is like saying that you want them to check all handbags, but only while they are still hanging on the shoulders of the passengers. At any rate, I would bet GOOD MONEY that there are definitely two sides to this story.
And by the way, everyone's calling these people idiots, but then the overwhelming implication here is that they shouldn't thoroughly check out a guy who tries to get on with machinery attached to his body? Get real. Be reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct: the G-suit is like a pair of pants that fills with air to pressurize the abdomen and legs, inhibiting the flow of blood to the lower extremities. This is not to protect the pilot's heart or to prevent other health problems, it's to keep the pilot from losing consciousness.
Not to have their bodies exposed to more forces and danger than most astronauts ever experience
From the original post:
the G-forces on coasters are considerably greater than even those experienced by astronauts and race car drivers...
I flew military jets for 9 years, and I think these comparisons are crap. When people used to ask me how jets compared to roller coasters, I would tell them that the two experiences are totally different. It's a matter of scale. Sustaining 4G or more for even 10 seconds, let alone 30 or 60 seconds or more, is an experience that simply cannot be reproduced by any rollercoaster that can fit in a theme park. The effects of the sustained G are DRAMATICALLY different than the one or two second hits (or three or four...whatever) felt on a high performance rollercoaster.
I recently road with my brother on a rollercoaster that I considered to be quite exciting, with corkscrews and consecutive loops, and when it was over he asked me how many G's he thought we had pulled. Based on the sensations I had felt (compared to my years in jets) I guessed 1.5-2. I was surprised to see a brochure later that claimed the ride pulled 6G. The two or three second hits just didn't have time to register.
Another example: a person using an ejection seat pulls an ongodly amount of G -- something like 30 or 60, although the actual number escapes me. Obviously this is enough to kill a man, but the brief time period involved make it survivable. I've known people who ejected and were able to walk around with no problem immediately afterward.
The point is that comparisons to astronauts and race car drivers is misleading. The maximum G must be examined only in conjunction with the period of time over which the G occurs. Brief hits DO NOT COMPARE to sustained G. Maybe rides should be limited and maybe they shouldn't, but the forces faced by astronauts are not part of the debate.
I'm not sure I see any good use for a laptop in a normal theater. But I did like the idea about the audience-driven content. If this could be done with a low-light handheld device, I could see this as a very popular system: the audience can choose the course of the story (does the guy die, does the girl get nekit, etc.) I would not be at all surprised to see this happen in the near future. I don't think this idea sucks ass.
Since theaters will probably be digital eventually, I propose a system by which the movie can be made to pause if anyone in the audience receives a phone call. This way, important audience members can receive their phone calls, and other viewers will not miss any of the movie.
This response fits into an annoying category that we see quite a bit on Slashdot: 'I don't have the same interests and ideas as you, so I'm going to go through your post point by point and explain that your ideas have alternatives and detractors and are therefore invalid.'
For Christ's sake, the poster listed a dozen possible uses for a new technology, some of which are personally interesting to me and some of which are not. Pointing out alternatives does not negate the creativity of the poster.
Perhaps you had this exchange in the early 90's:
Internet? Who needs it?
I can send email to my relatives!
Why email when you can call or fax?
I can do my banking online!
Why not just do it on the phone or in person?
I can check movie times online!
Why not just call the theater or look in the paper?
I know you're tempted to go through my examples and rebutt each one by pointing out why the sample online activities are actually better than the alternatives provided. Go on, you know you want to.
The only thing more exciting about technology than emerging capabilities is the creativity and imagination that leads to more USES for those capabilities. When someone proposes new uses, you are free to embrace them or not. Taking the time to point out that you personally would not do each and every one is a waste of time and makes you sound like a close-minded philistine.
if cars are made so they don't exceed the speed limit. We can just blame it on the speeders.
going to make my penis bigger for the web's youngest teen babes?
Results are all that matter. Effort is for masochists.
This is how the real world works btw.
You're right. And in the real world, the guy who figured out how to do it himself is the one the others go to when they get stumped. His elegant new algorithm is the one that others cut and paste into their work to make it better and faster.
As with most disciplines, a professional coder will (and should) build on work that has already been done. But as a novice, learning how to figure things out for yourself is a very important part of the learning process.
There are many unspeakable horrors that await us if we begin to monkey with this technology; many bizarre paradoxes that we can't predict or even comprehend.
For instance, what if we use a time machine to travel back to the 70's, then we return to the present day. Everything appears normal, but then we go to download some pr0n, and all we can find is cheesey 70's pr0n with bad soundtracks and mediocre women. AAaarrrrgggghhhhh!
But how would that happen in the first place?
You can't simply list the superior capabilities of particular aircraft and then declare that they can't lose in a fight. Your "hundred-miles-away" scenario assumes an air superiority fighter with long range weapons (a scenario in which the subject technology wouldn't be used anyway.) What about an F/A-18 flying CAP with AIM-7 and 9, who gets jumped by two MiG-21's who just launched undetected from the next valley over? What about LCDR Speicher, who was shot down by an enemy aircraft during the first night of the Gulf War, flying a state-of-the-art F/A-18? Was his targeting system "good enough?"
you must concede that the United States already has by far the most technologically advanced military in the world
You seem to forget that this technology will be used primarily in situations where one man is trying to kill one other man. The one who loses dies. You apparently expect American pilots to make do with "good enough" since we're already the best. Being from the most technologically advanced military does you no good when an enemy pilot has managed to get behind you.
I recall reading recently that research was being done on a helmet like this that would be combined with external sensors so the pilot could "see" things that were not visible to him in the cockpit. For instance, he could look down by his feet and see an aircraft below him. They could couple this with a quick method of changing "views," like those flight simulator games that allow you to toggle between forward/left/right/aft view, to make a formidable fighting system.
By the way, for the whiners complaining that this will facilitate blue-on-blue kills: it's just a targeting system. The pilot still has to aim and pull the trigger.
It needs to be all automatic!!
Your auto-folder-making-and-filtering idea sounds good, but I firmly believe that all "automatic" functions in any software should default to "OFF!"
My primary desktop is linux/KDE, with a small stable of applications to provide for everyday needs (kmail, for instance.) Nothing frustrates me more than having to use a huge application that starts doing "useful" things that are not what I want, and I can't figure out why, or how to stop it. This is especially true of various big-name word-processors. All of a sudden I'm getting headers, and page numbers, and different line spacing here and there, and various freaky auto-formatting, because the application wants my work to look "professional." Bullshit. If I want to look professional, I'll take a class or read a book and pick and choose the functions myself. Until then, just give me the basics.
But this company says that the encryption is absolutly secure, which it is, but the key for the encyption isn't secure. So effectivly they are hiding behind semantics
This reminds me of military radios with encryption. The standard key is good for safeguarding information up to the 'Secret' level. For some missions, they use special keys that are good for 'Top Secret'. You may think that those special keys are inherently more secure, in terms of crackability. It turns out they are exactly the same strength, but they are handled through Top Secret channels (in other words, you can't keep the Top Secret keys in a Secret safe; they have to be kept in the special building down the street, and the guys who key the radios have to have Top Secret clearance, etc.)
These guys' scheme is only as secure as their 'secret' method of transferring the keys. You can't carry a top secret key in a secret briefcase.
Perhaps my best deal of all was survival training in Pensacola, when we went up in a modified parachute that was rigged like a parasail. We'd get up to altitude, maybe 200 feet or so, then cut loose and ride the chute into the water. I'd like to buy a beer for the guy who dreamed that one up.
I spent some time flying military jets (not the pilot, the 'other guy'.) The training for parachute descents is as you describe...wait for your feet to hit the water. I recall one time during carrier training, we were launched off the front and flew straight ahead for several miles. I looked out and wondered why we were skimming along just above the water...we appeared to be no higher than the flight deck we had just left. I checked the altimeter and it read 600 feet.
Interesting...
While I don't agree 100% with your disagreement, you did make me realize one thing: the ball being caught in the "laying on the back" experiment is accelerating, while the ball thrown in space is not. That may be a significant difference.
Your analysis of our use of 3-d observations to catch a ball is interesting, but I don't think that's the whole story. Your explanation is relevent to how we track the ball with our eyes, but it doesn't take into account the timely placement of our hand in a position to intercept the ball. It's not good enough to see where the ball is and put our hand there; we have to put our hand in the right spot before the ball gets there. To do this, I think our knowledge of how gravity affects the trajectory is very important. To use an example from above: a parachute landing. Sure, you can watch the ground and make a pretty accurate judgment about how high you are, but at the very last second you will most likely raise your feet too early because you are used to "falling" at a certain rate of acceleration. Change the acceleration, and your brain no longer knows how to compensate. I did 20 jumps years ago, and I jarred my shins every single time, even though the rate of descent was no greater than hopping of a picnic table.
by laying on your back and throwing a ball straight up. Once you get the hang of throwing it straight up, which is a challenge in its own right, you will be catching the ball with the same trajectory as the astronauts. It's difficult to throw it straight up for the same reason it's difficult to catch in space: your brain ends up compensating for gravity, so your first several (or several dozen) will probably go back over you head. I discovered this exercise when I was about 10; I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to catch at first.
I propose that future astronauts perform this exercise for 15 days before their flight. That way, they will be able to play catch right away, with no "warmup period," thus making them more productive. And to think my Mom said I was wasting time!
a keyboard. It would be easy to remember where to click, because I could remember it as a string of alphanumeric characters. I think this technology has promise.
is find AOL in general inadequate.
how they design the new, thinner cable so it just barely reaches, then falls short when you have to flip it 180 degrees to get pin 1 in the right place. If it can't do that, I don't want it.
1. A keyboard like this, except nothing is actually projected on the table; only I see it because it's projected on my retina by the virtual monitor from yesterday's story.
2. Oh by the way, my computer's display is also projected on my retina.
3. A microphone/earplug that allows me to issue voice commands to the computer without a visible mic.
4. Wireless network, of course.
I could sit in Barnes and Noble freaking people out, talking to myself and tapping on the table.
We have the technology to give us some protection against this type of thing.
Which technology is that, please?
Rather than a link, I'll just post a quote from the BBC article linked above:
However, the picture generally in Antarctica is a complicated one with temperatures in the interior actually falling over the same period.
Alright, maybe those security people are a bunch of doofuses. But this story is screaming "hyper exageration." Come on...they just up and ripped off electrodes? Now, I don't know any more about this story than what's written above, but it sounds to me like he had so much metal and equipment attached to him that they pulled him aside to check him out. He starts to get steamed, then they start to get steamed, and maybe a couple of his electrodes comes off while they're moving him around. Or maybe they ask him to detach the equipment, and some of them come off as the wires are tugged.
And "equipment scattered around the room?" Big deal. What are they supposed to do, just give it a once over, then let him through? If he really had that much stuff, they have to check out each piece, and to do that properly, it has to come off his body. Arguing otherwise is like saying that you want them to check all handbags, but only while they are still hanging on the shoulders of the passengers. At any rate, I would bet GOOD MONEY that there are definitely two sides to this story.
And by the way, everyone's calling these people idiots, but then the overwhelming implication here is that they shouldn't thoroughly check out a guy who tries to get on with machinery attached to his body? Get real. Be reasonable.