At a very basic level, a group of trained MMA fighters could do a lot of damage on a plane, even if everyone was forced to board naked.
Perhaps, but lots of people have martial arts training, and there are _lots_ of people on a jetliner, and there's something to be said for an overwhelming press of determined bodies in cramped quarters. Not to mention the fact that the pilot can dump fuel and, in at least some jetliners, drop the cabin pressure. Anyone who wants to hijack a plane to use as a missile is going to have to do a lot more than just outfight everyone on board.
cars are accessible to pretty much everyone, and any dumbass can take one through a crowd on a sidewalk and easily kill more people than even the most elite sniper
The most elite sniper was probably Simo Hayha, who killed at least 505 people. But the average sniper certainly couldn't compete.
They certainly were a lot less likely to fail on launch day. That doesn't mean that they couldn't and it was still possible when brand new. The issue with the contacts was a result of design flaws with the NES and with NES cartridges. It was a great game system, but it was far from technically perfect.
The problem is usually the surface under the jackstands. Ashphalt, especially on a typical driveway, is not high quality stuff. In the right conditions, especially a nice hot summer's day, the corner of one of the jackstands can cut its way right into the driveway if it's sitting directly on it. I've also seen people use them on gravel driveways and plain old dirt. There's also what happens if the front of the car is jacked up and the rear wheels aren't blocked because someone assumed that their parking brakes work. Then there's the fact that the presumed hard point that is resting on the jackstand may actually be all rust and the stand may punch right through. It also may be able to slip off. I simply go by the maxim better safe than sorry (or dead) and make sure that I have something that the car's weight can't possibly crush under the car if I'm going to be under there.
Sure, if you have crappy jackstands then it may not be quite safe.
The vast majority of people who do have jackstands have crappy jackstands. Even the good professional ones with wider bases still have bases that are narrower than the maximum extension of the stand. If someone asks me to stick my head under their car then I insist on something better than just jack stands.
I did say "uselessly blowing on the contacts". But, you heard by way of your friend that his brother's girlfriend's father's cousin swore that was what you needed to do, so you tried it anyway. Your trick that "works every single time" didn't work every single time either.
I certainly wouldn't rely on just cinderblocks, but I would certainly throw some under there as extra protection if I happened to have some lying around. If I don't have anything else completely reliable to use, I always put a wheel under the car.
I certainly wouldn't use the cinderblocks as the only method of support, but I wouldn't object to having some in addition to jacks+jackstands plus anything else that will stop the car from crushing you if anything else fails. I would imagine that the primary reason for cinderblocks to fail is that people put them under a part of the car where the pressure comes to a point. If you're using anything brittle, put some wood between it and the car, and use something else as well. If I don't have anything I feel I can 100% rely on, I always throw one of the car's wheels under the car.
Who said that? The prevailing opinion is that it was some variant of fentanyl. I strongly suspect you're joking, but I'll humor you. Xenon wouldn't make any sense for a number of reasons. Some of the hostage-takers used gas masks, but they weren't self contained breathing systems with their own oxygen supply from any report I've seen. If anything had been used that lowered the oxygen content of the air, the gas masks would have been ineffective. Also, reports are that hostages smelled the gas. Xenon is odorless. Also, Xenon is very dense compared to regular air, it could displace oxygen, sure, but you would have to fill the theater from the bottom up with a massive amount of it. Symptoms of the affected after the event are also not consistent with simple oxygen deprivation.
Zoom in! Enhance! Zoom in some more here! Enhance! Zoom in on that reflection! Enhance! Zoom in! Ehance! Rotate around so we can see his face in the reflection instead of the back of his head! Enhance! We've got him!
The kind of insane nuts that flood a theater full of hostages with nerve gas 'cause some terrorists might be inside.
Now now, you don't know that it was nerve gas. It's still officially a mystery gas. The authorities refused to release information about its makeup, even to the doctors who were desperately trying to save the poisoned hostages. In any case, the hostages were just lucky only about a quarter of them were killed. They could have all ended up summarily executed like the majority of the terrorists (most of whom were unconscious). Interestingly, even the terrorists who were captured alive turned out to have actually died in the theater afterwards, which has fueled speculation that the whole thing was set up by FSB agent provocateurs in the first place.
A. Chances are pretty good, in this day and age, that they use some sort of fax service rather than a physical plain paper fax on their end, so you wouldn't achieve much other than a mild DOS attack on their incoming faxes. Not to mention that there are laws against that sort of thing now, and they can track you down pretty easily.
B. Why does it need to be a mobius strip rather than just a plain loop? I mean, if you were sending a repeating message, I suppose you could get twice the message length for the same amount of paper, but you're just planning to send entirely black pages, so what's the point? For that matter, preventing the twist from jamming in the machine would be a pain. You would have to use a longer loop of paper and probably rig up some rollers to keep the twist away from the paper in slot on the Fax machine.
You can jack up a car and then put the ramp under the car, then lower it until it rests on the ramp, or any other solid object that can support the weight of the car and is far more reliable than jacks or jackstands.
I've seen jack stands slip sideways under cars leaving the car to fall. Go one further and use something solid with a base wide enough that it's effectively impossible for it to tip over. Use a log, or some cinderblocks, or take off one of the car's wheels, even if you don't need to, or use an old wheel you have lying around and throw it under so that the car won't crush you even if it falls.
So, you don't have fond memories of inserting and removing NES cartridges over and over and over, uselessly blowing on the contacts in between, hoping against hope that, this next time, the game would come up and stay up? I loved the NES and have many fond memories, but I could never afford the special edition Deluxe Set which came with not only R.O.B., but also the rose colored glasses you seem to have gotten.
The $20,000/hour is pretty much certain to be the kind of naive accounting that's often seen with these sorts of things. It's pretty certain to be the amortized cost of the equipment, plus maintenance and operating costs, divided by the time you're actually using it. The problem with accounting like that is that it means that, if you use the equipment less, the cost per hour goes up. When you're stacking additional uses on top of the primary function, the proper way to measure things like this is to use just the operational and maintenance costs it incurs as a result of the particular use. The amortized cost of the equipment should only be figured into the decision of whether to use the equipment or not. If it would otherwise be sitting idle, or being used for training excercises for which the alternate use would be suitable, then you use it. If you have a better use, then you don't use it.
Of course, you obviously can't dedicate such an expensive piece of equipment purely to fighting forest fires. You shouldn't need to in any case, as there are far, far cheaper solutions. In fact, the satellite discussed in this article may well be a cheaper solution than a single Global Hawk. In fact, since it would take quite a few of those drones to cover the same area as the satellite, the satellite would be a much cheaper solution. For that matter, any number of other cheaper drones could probably do the job as well.
Since there are no enemies today that have the Soviet's first-strike capability that we feared so much, there's no real need to keep live weapons in the air.
Except, say Russia, perhaps. You can point out that you said "enemies", but then I can point out that the US and Russia were never really officially enemies either. Also, I never said that they were in the air for practice.
On a good note the US and USSR have an agreement to not fly nukes in their warplanes in time of peace. That is one of the reason for the freak out when a B52 flew with cruise missiles from Barksdale to Minot.
See, I see incidents like that and have a hard time seeing more than two possibilities: A. They knew perfectly well they were flying nuclear armed cruise missiles, but lied about it being an accident to cover themselves when the story got out. B. They didn't know and simply lost control of some nuclear weapons.
The plane isn't the only cost. Pilots are rather expensive too.
Absolutely true. Of course, if they converted an F-16 to a drone rather than starting from the ground up, they wouldn't have to worry about losing a pilot. As for the sensor suite, etc. for remote control, there would be an entire cockpit to install one.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly think there's a place for both kinds of planes. I was just really surprised to find costs were so similar between the two planes. I was expecting that I was going to find out that you could get a small fleet of reapers for the cost of one F-16, I was just very surprised by what I found out.
Wait, what? An F-16 capable of carrying near 18,000 lbs of weapons and flying at mach 2+ is replaced by a drone flying at 240Mph carrying 3800lbs?
It wouldn't be so bad if the Reaper were actually cheaper than an F-16. It looks like it's presently more expensive than some models of F-16, although the price may come down over time. You would think someone would have just come up with a remote control module for the F-16.
1. Do you know how rarely aircraft fly with live air to ground ordinance in US air space?
No. Mostly because that sort of thing would be kept a military secret. We know more about what sort of things happened in the past, from declassified records. The 1961 Goldsboro NC loss of two 2.5 Megaton nukes springs to mind. At least one of them had all but one of its safety mechanisms triggered and nearly detonated, which would have killed everything in a 17 mile radius. The core of one of the stages of one of the bombs is still buried deep below the site.
So, there's at least a little historical precedent to be a little concerned about this sort of thing.
The wikipedia article on marriage in ancient rome has a quote:
Later the jurist Ulpian wrote on the Lex Julia et Papia, “Only those women with whom intercourse is not unlawful can be kept in concubinage without the fear of committing a crime”.[45] He also said that “anyone can keep a concubine of any age unless she is less than twelve years old.
So, that pretty strongly indicates that the permissable age for sex (not going to call it the age of consent, because consent certainly didn't have much to do with it in many arranged marriages) was typically 12 years old. Once again, this would have varied depending on the times, although it probably didn't go higher than 12. Naturally it would also vary depending on who was getting married. For marriages that were important for business or political reasons, exceptions surely would have been made.
The 7 times its mass in TNT that I came up with was technically an upper bound more than a realistic yield. Less than half that is probably the most that could ever be expected. So, a few times the yield of TNT puts it pretty much into the area of plain TNT. As I mentioned, it also would lose most of its energy ineffectually ploughing into the ground rather than destroying targets. For that matter, one of the things that makes high explosives so effective is the tremendous impulse. Most of the energy is delivered in a really small slice of time. It's not clear that this method would be able to achieve that. So, basically, explosives beat this in almost every possible way, except for the delivery. I'm also not sure that it would actually be that impossible to stop relative to other delivery methods. One of the things a telephone-pole sized spear of super-dense material lacks is any sort of maneuverability whatsoever. It might be possible to simply put some sort of spread of small projectiles in its path and watch it shred itself to vapor well before it reaches its target.
That's a law against incest that broadens the definition of incest to include adopted and foster children and godchildren, wards, etc. That clearly covers special cases and not the general case. From what I can find from a little searching, it looks like the Catholic church mostly adopted the pre-christian Roman marriage age of 12 years old, but allowed marriages at 7 years old or younger in medieval Europe.
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At a very basic level, a group of trained MMA fighters could do a lot of damage on a plane, even if everyone was forced to board naked.
Perhaps, but lots of people have martial arts training, and there are _lots_ of people on a jetliner, and there's something to be said for an overwhelming press of determined bodies in cramped quarters. Not to mention the fact that the pilot can dump fuel and, in at least some jetliners, drop the cabin pressure. Anyone who wants to hijack a plane to use as a missile is going to have to do a lot more than just outfight everyone on board.
How exactly do you think people get drugs/cellphones/cellphone chargers/etc. into prisons?
What if you want an iPad?
cars are accessible to pretty much everyone, and any dumbass can take one through a crowd on a sidewalk and easily kill more people than even the most elite sniper
The most elite sniper was probably Simo Hayha, who killed at least 505 people. But the average sniper certainly couldn't compete.
They certainly were a lot less likely to fail on launch day. That doesn't mean that they couldn't and it was still possible when brand new. The issue with the contacts was a result of design flaws with the NES and with NES cartridges. It was a great game system, but it was far from technically perfect.
The problem is usually the surface under the jackstands. Ashphalt, especially on a typical driveway, is not high quality stuff. In the right conditions, especially a nice hot summer's day, the corner of one of the jackstands can cut its way right into the driveway if it's sitting directly on it. I've also seen people use them on gravel driveways and plain old dirt. There's also what happens if the front of the car is jacked up and the rear wheels aren't blocked because someone assumed that their parking brakes work. Then there's the fact that the presumed hard point that is resting on the jackstand may actually be all rust and the stand may punch right through. It also may be able to slip off. I simply go by the maxim better safe than sorry (or dead) and make sure that I have something that the car's weight can't possibly crush under the car if I'm going to be under there.
Sure, if you have crappy jackstands then it may not be quite safe.
The vast majority of people who do have jackstands have crappy jackstands. Even the good professional ones with wider bases still have bases that are narrower than the maximum extension of the stand. If someone asks me to stick my head under their car then I insist on something better than just jack stands.
I did say "uselessly blowing on the contacts". But, you heard by way of your friend that his brother's girlfriend's father's cousin swore that was what you needed to do, so you tried it anyway. Your trick that "works every single time" didn't work every single time either.
I certainly wouldn't rely on just cinderblocks, but I would certainly throw some under there as extra protection if I happened to have some lying around. If I don't have anything else completely reliable to use, I always put a wheel under the car.
I certainly wouldn't use the cinderblocks as the only method of support, but I wouldn't object to having some in addition to jacks+jackstands plus anything else that will stop the car from crushing you if anything else fails. I would imagine that the primary reason for cinderblocks to fail is that people put them under a part of the car where the pressure comes to a point. If you're using anything brittle, put some wood between it and the car, and use something else as well. If I don't have anything I feel I can 100% rely on, I always throw one of the car's wheels under the car.
Who said that? The prevailing opinion is that it was some variant of fentanyl. I strongly suspect you're joking, but I'll humor you. Xenon wouldn't make any sense for a number of reasons. Some of the hostage-takers used gas masks, but they weren't self contained breathing systems with their own oxygen supply from any report I've seen. If anything had been used that lowered the oxygen content of the air, the gas masks would have been ineffective. Also, reports are that hostages smelled the gas. Xenon is odorless. Also, Xenon is very dense compared to regular air, it could displace oxygen, sure, but you would have to fill the theater from the bottom up with a massive amount of it. Symptoms of the affected after the event are also not consistent with simple oxygen deprivation.
Zoom in! Enhance! Zoom in some more here! Enhance! Zoom in on that reflection! Enhance! Zoom in! Ehance! Rotate around so we can see his face in the reflection instead of the back of his head! Enhance! We've got him!
The kind of insane nuts that flood a theater full of hostages with nerve gas 'cause some terrorists might be inside.
Now now, you don't know that it was nerve gas. It's still officially a mystery gas. The authorities refused to release information about its makeup, even to the doctors who were desperately trying to save the poisoned hostages. In any case, the hostages were just lucky only about a quarter of them were killed. They could have all ended up summarily executed like the majority of the terrorists (most of whom were unconscious). Interestingly, even the terrorists who were captured alive turned out to have actually died in the theater afterwards, which has fueled speculation that the whole thing was set up by FSB agent provocateurs in the first place.
A. Chances are pretty good, in this day and age, that they use some sort of fax service rather than a physical plain paper fax on their end, so you wouldn't achieve much other than a mild DOS attack on their incoming faxes. Not to mention that there are laws against that sort of thing now, and they can track you down pretty easily.
B. Why does it need to be a mobius strip rather than just a plain loop? I mean, if you were sending a repeating message, I suppose you could get twice the message length for the same amount of paper, but you're just planning to send entirely black pages, so what's the point? For that matter, preventing the twist from jamming in the machine would be a pain. You would have to use a longer loop of paper and probably rig up some rollers to keep the twist away from the paper in slot on the Fax machine.
You can jack up a car and then put the ramp under the car, then lower it until it rests on the ramp, or any other solid object that can support the weight of the car and is far more reliable than jacks or jackstands.
I've seen jack stands slip sideways under cars leaving the car to fall. Go one further and use something solid with a base wide enough that it's effectively impossible for it to tip over. Use a log, or some cinderblocks, or take off one of the car's wheels, even if you don't need to, or use an old wheel you have lying around and throw it under so that the car won't crush you even if it falls.
So, you don't have fond memories of inserting and removing NES cartridges over and over and over, uselessly blowing on the contacts in between, hoping against hope that, this next time, the game would come up and stay up? I loved the NES and have many fond memories, but I could never afford the special edition Deluxe Set which came with not only R.O.B., but also the rose colored glasses you seem to have gotten.
The $20,000/hour is pretty much certain to be the kind of naive accounting that's often seen with these sorts of things. It's pretty certain to be the amortized cost of the equipment, plus maintenance and operating costs, divided by the time you're actually using it. The problem with accounting like that is that it means that, if you use the equipment less, the cost per hour goes up. When you're stacking additional uses on top of the primary function, the proper way to measure things like this is to use just the operational and maintenance costs it incurs as a result of the particular use. The amortized cost of the equipment should only be figured into the decision of whether to use the equipment or not. If it would otherwise be sitting idle, or being used for training excercises for which the alternate use would be suitable, then you use it. If you have a better use, then you don't use it.
Of course, you obviously can't dedicate such an expensive piece of equipment purely to fighting forest fires. You shouldn't need to in any case, as there are far, far cheaper solutions. In fact, the satellite discussed in this article may well be a cheaper solution than a single Global Hawk. In fact, since it would take quite a few of those drones to cover the same area as the satellite, the satellite would be a much cheaper solution. For that matter, any number of other cheaper drones could probably do the job as well.
The case is solid so changes in external pressure would not cause the internal pressure to vary.
I think perhaps you think that the cases of hard drives are a lot thicker than they actually are.
Since there are no enemies today that have the Soviet's first-strike capability that we feared so much, there's no real need to keep live weapons in the air.
Except, say Russia, perhaps. You can point out that you said "enemies", but then I can point out that the US and Russia were never really officially enemies either. Also, I never said that they were in the air for practice.
On a good note the US and USSR have an agreement to not fly nukes in their warplanes in time of peace. That is one of the reason for the freak out when a B52 flew with cruise missiles from Barksdale to Minot.
See, I see incidents like that and have a hard time seeing more than two possibilities:
A. They knew perfectly well they were flying nuclear armed cruise missiles, but lied about it being an accident to cover themselves when the story got out.
B. They didn't know and simply lost control of some nuclear weapons.
Neither A nor B are very comforting.
The plane isn't the only cost. Pilots are rather expensive too.
Absolutely true. Of course, if they converted an F-16 to a drone rather than starting from the ground up, they wouldn't have to worry about losing a pilot. As for the sensor suite, etc. for remote control, there would be an entire cockpit to install one.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly think there's a place for both kinds of planes. I was just really surprised to find costs were so similar between the two planes. I was expecting that I was going to find out that you could get a small fleet of reapers for the cost of one F-16, I was just very surprised by what I found out.
Wait, what? An F-16 capable of carrying near 18,000 lbs of weapons and flying at mach 2+ is replaced by a drone flying at 240Mph carrying 3800lbs?
It wouldn't be so bad if the Reaper were actually cheaper than an F-16. It looks like it's presently more expensive than some models of F-16, although the price may come down over time. You would think someone would have just come up with a remote control module for the F-16.
1. Do you know how rarely aircraft fly with live air to ground ordinance in US air space?
No. Mostly because that sort of thing would be kept a military secret. We know more about what sort of things happened in the past, from declassified records. The 1961 Goldsboro NC loss of two 2.5 Megaton nukes springs to mind. At least one of them had all but one of its safety mechanisms triggered and nearly detonated, which would have killed everything in a 17 mile radius. The core of one of the stages of one of the bombs is still buried deep below the site.
So, there's at least a little historical precedent to be a little concerned about this sort of thing.
The wikipedia article on marriage in ancient rome has a quote:
Later the jurist Ulpian wrote on the Lex Julia et Papia, “Only those women with whom intercourse is not unlawful can be kept in concubinage without the fear of committing a crime”.[45] He also said that “anyone can keep a concubine of any age unless she is less than twelve years old.
So, that pretty strongly indicates that the permissable age for sex (not going to call it the age of consent, because consent certainly didn't have much to do with it in many arranged marriages) was typically 12 years old. Once again, this would have varied depending on the times, although it probably didn't go higher than 12. Naturally it would also vary depending on who was getting married. For marriages that were important for business or political reasons, exceptions surely would have been made.
The 7 times its mass in TNT that I came up with was technically an upper bound more than a realistic yield. Less than half that is probably the most that could ever be expected. So, a few times the yield of TNT puts it pretty much into the area of plain TNT. As I mentioned, it also would lose most of its energy ineffectually ploughing into the ground rather than destroying targets. For that matter, one of the things that makes high explosives so effective is the tremendous impulse. Most of the energy is delivered in a really small slice of time. It's not clear that this method would be able to achieve that. So, basically, explosives beat this in almost every possible way, except for the delivery. I'm also not sure that it would actually be that impossible to stop relative to other delivery methods. One of the things a telephone-pole sized spear of super-dense material lacks is any sort of maneuverability whatsoever. It might be possible to simply put some sort of spread of small projectiles in its path and watch it shred itself to vapor well before it reaches its target.
That's a law against incest that broadens the definition of incest to include adopted and foster children and godchildren, wards, etc. That clearly covers special cases and not the general case. From what I can find from a little searching, it looks like the Catholic church mostly adopted the pre-christian Roman marriage age of 12 years old, but allowed marriages at 7 years old or younger in medieval Europe.