First, demonstrate she has abused her position - using facts rather than the word of a rich guy who was already frustrated and upset because the delivery of his shiny toy had already been delayed twice.
This just smacks of a functionary that enjoys being a pain.
And you know this... how? Because of the word of a rich guy who was already frustrated because the delivery of his shiny new toy had already been twice delayed?
Seriously Slashdot, it's annoying as hell how your critical faculties go out the window the moment a story that agrees with your biases gets posted.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure this all happened because of the 9/11 mess
So, no. Customs has been around a very long time.
as he said, he is rich and he will get it back
Even if you're not rich, you eventually get it back. Paperworks screwups happen, and they're routinely fixed with little fuss. Having dealt with customs many times, I suspect there's more to the story than Arrington is telling. (Not the least of which, the phrasing of his blog leads me to believe he was *already* frustrated that his shiny toy had been kept from him.)
How many people have shit like this happen who aren't rich and don't have a popular blog and slashdot to publicize it?
The publicity hasn't accomplished shit except to excite the exiteable and confirm the biases of ignoramuses like yourself.
Did you miss the point where the government had screwed up?
No, I didn't
So, the government screwed up, producing an incorrect form, refused to correct the form, then confiscated the boat when he refused to sign the incorrect form (while signing it would probably have been a felony) and somehow he doesn't have the right to be upset?
I didn't say he didn't have a right to be upset. I said he didn't have a right to be a self centered, self entitled, spoiled little jackass because he was (briefly) denied access to his shiny new toy.
A person in a position of power abused that power?
That's not exactly unusual on the 'net - once you have influence... the temptation to use it for your own personal hobbyhorses rises exponentially. (Heck, most of my friends use their blogs and Facebook feeds as platforms for their personal views - and they have pretty much no influence even over their own friends.)
Oh, wait... you were talking about the DHS agent? No. She didn't abuse her power. She, as he insisted, followed the letter of the law. No paperwork, no boat.
As TFA notes, he will hire a lawyer and get it back.
Yep. It's a paper SNAFU... it happens all the time, and routinely gets quietly resolved with no lawyers and very little fuss. Unless you're a jackass with a case of self-entitlement and widely followed blog who decides that the proper response to a minor incident is to use his influence to 'spin' the event as some vast government conspiracy.
Seriously - what the eff did he think would happen if he refused to sign the form? They'd just be all smiles and sunshine and hand the boat over? You can't hold them to the letter of one part of the law (ensuring the paperwork is correct) and then be upset when they follow the rest of the law (requiring the boat be impounded until the paperwork is cleared up). Grow the eff up and deal with the consequences of your choices.
The only variable is when; my guess is that within two weeks, he'll be sailing around.
It would usually have been just a couple of weeks - until he clicked the 'publish' button on his blog. Now, they're going to ensure that every box is ticked, every procedure punctiliously followed to the very letter - precisely as he insisted they do... so, a couple of months at least.
In other words - you completely miss my point. Worse yet, such ignorance seems to be willing... faced with facts that don't accord with your world view, you simply ignore them and fall back on stupid semantic arguments.
We took 8 years to go from never having launched a man in a rocket to landing them on the moon and bringing them back safely.
Um... no. The development of the booster started a couple of years before the decision to go to the moon. The development of the engines for the booster started a couple of years before *that*. The capsule (but not the lander) was also well underway in study and development before the decision was made to go to the moon.
Reality isn't like the neat progression you see in popular history books and Discovery channel specials. NASA didn't start with a clean sheet of paper after Kennedy's announcement - Kennedy made the choice of a moon landing rather than other options *because* all the preparatory work already in progress made it possible.
Although the scope of this mission is a lot bigger, we are also clued up on many aspects of space travel we had no idea about back then. 5 years is *ample* time to train a crew.
True, but the problem isn't training a crew - it's qualifying the Dragon for a mission many times it's currently contemplated duration, and creating and qualifying all the other hardware that will be required... hardware that development hasn't event started on yet.
As this is chemical, and not combustion, (yes yes, sealed chamber...) it should not take up as nearly as much land as required by current plants.
Since it's the coal storage yard, the electrical switchgear, and the turbine hall that takes up most of the area - what on earth would lead you to believe that generating the same amount of energy will take up less land?
Also, just think of all the job creation all those small power plants will require!!!
Also think of all the problem's you'll create in controlling the grid. More generators to keep in sync, more plants to restart in the event of a major blackout... Not to mention more high tension power lines, more trucks or rail lines delivering the fuel...
So long as the unit they're trying to talk to is straight above them, sure. The 99.99% of the time that's not true... well, then transmitting straight up doesn't help you much.
Which means a lot... and it means nothing. Sure the prototype first flew over twenty years ago - but that doesn't mean that everything in their aircraft has remained fixed and unchanging since then. Designs are updated and installed equipment upgraded and replaced routinely.
I served on a submarine in the mid 80's whose design was from circa 1962 (and which was a direct descendant of a 1958 design that was based on a 1956 design) but the age of the technology onboard varied all over the place... from the 1930's to the 1980's.
I never mentioned decryption for exactly that reason.
The F-22 has spread spectrum radios precisely to avoid the transmission being detected - the problem is that those radios are not compatible with those in the Typhoon, requiring them to use their (much more easily detected) single frequency mode.
Transmitting any sort of signal would allow a third party to triangulate its position.
That sure sounds Really Scary... but technical jargon and buzzwords always do when thrown about by people who don't really know what they're talking about. (Note that the bit about triangulation was added by the submitter - it does not appear in the original article.)
Triangulation against a jet is just barely this side of useless - the damm thing is flying at several hundred miles an hour. A second or two after he stops transmitting, your triangulation solution has lost significant value because he's miles away from the datum point. Your solution just degrades from there and by ten seconds or so you might as well have been using a Ouija board.* Has anyone actually deployed the RDF gear that would be required for high speed tactical 3D triangulation? It's not particularly high tech, but it's also something that can't be cobbled together on short notice out of 'stone knives and bearskins'. To be any kind of useful, you need high accuracy (within +/- a degree or so), which means sophisticated antenna designs and significant signal processing. (Real life RDF isn't a simple as it is in the movies.)
Another problem you face is that you can't use triangulation to fire weapons... you need some way of handing the track off to the radar needed for SAM's or AA guns, or off to the fighter which will then need to obtain radar or IR lock to fire a missile or to obtain visual contact.
So, the real problem isn't triangulation... it's breaking stealth. An unsecured transmission can provide a raid warning. It can warn radar operators to pay really close attention to the 'fluff' on their screens. Etc... etc...
* Yes, I have experience with using triangulation tactically... it was sonar and ASW, so the timescale was longer but the general principles remain the same.
Secondly, the impact area simply can't be computed until relatively shortly before impact. That is, if we detect the incoming meteor 48 hours ahead of time, it will take a couple of hours to compute a rough impact zone (meaning, just which part of the GLOBE it will hit), and likely you won't have a decent small error probability zone (meaning, something less than 100 miles across) until 12 hours or less before impact.
And even that's of limited use (at best), or completely useless (at worst). This weekend's event is a prime example of that... The effects were felt along the ground track and below the point where it exploded - miles from it's "impact point' (had it survived to impact intact).
Don't confuse "problems with the Electoral College system" (of which there aren't any really) with "problems created by the way the big parties have divvied up the pie" (slowly moving more and more states to the 'all electors go to the party that carried the state' system is what has created the travesty of swing states).
Oh, indeed. Ogalla isn't much better off than Salt Lake. Northern Canaveral is going to be equally unhappy being dominated by the southern portion. Shasta on the other hand will be dominated by *it's* northern half. Half or more of the map seems to be deliberately created to encourage regional political warfare.
And I wish you could zoom in further... So Cal looks to be pretty hinky, and New England is unreadable at this scale.
In rare and unusual cases, yes. The vast majority of the time they relied and locks and guards just like we did today. Back in medieval times, most of their wealth generally wasn't in coins or other easily portable means anyhow... You should get less of your history from TV or the DM's guide.
and in actuallity, we have the tech right now to build a colony or exploration ship, to get it started. its an engineering problem, and its largely solved
Your idea of the current state of scientific and engineering development is... ludicrously disconnected from reality. The engineering problems aren't "largely solved", not by a long shot. Hell, we have problems keeping the life support system on the ISS functioning at 100% over the long term - and that system is a LEGO model compared with what would be required for a colony or generation ship. We don't even have a tested design for a Mars ship's ECS... let alone one many times more complex and that must operate over a vastly longer time span.
I'm not surprised your reply starts with "Uh.. what?" - because that sound you just heard was my point whooshing over your head.
I didn't say we shouldn't get started, I said the answers don't lie in an ever improved space "program". Access to space is the least important and most trivial part of the problem of building a colony that can survive the loss of the Earth.
And even if we multiplied out current space program's budget by ten times... it still wouldn't be enough. A thousand times? That might be enough for a half ass program with a slim-to-none chance of survival.
We could roll twenty Falcon 9's and fifteen Dragon's off the assembly lines and launch them every hour if we really wanted to. It's just a matter of writing a big enough check - but it wouldn't be enough. The space program isn't the problem. The problem is that building an off-Earth colony that can survive the loss of the Earth indefinitely is a Very Very Hard Problem - a problem whose shape and scope we have only the faintest ideas of the outline of and filled with known unknowns and even more unknown unknowns. And pretty much none of those are in any way related to the current space program.
Grow up and stop using cosmic impacts to fuel your fanboi masturbatory fantasies.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that not all routers are attached to capped cable modems?
First, demonstrate she has abused her position - using facts rather than the word of a rich guy who was already frustrated and upset because the delivery of his shiny toy had already been delayed twice.
And you know this... how? Because of the word of a rich guy who was already frustrated because the delivery of his shiny new toy had already been twice delayed?
Seriously Slashdot, it's annoying as hell how your critical faculties go out the window the moment a story that agrees with your biases gets posted.
So, no. Customs has been around a very long time.
Even if you're not rich, you eventually get it back. Paperworks screwups happen, and they're routinely fixed with little fuss. Having dealt with customs many times, I suspect there's more to the story than Arrington is telling. (Not the least of which, the phrasing of his blog leads me to believe he was *already* frustrated that his shiny toy had been kept from him.)
The publicity hasn't accomplished shit except to excite the exiteable and confirm the biases of ignoramuses like yourself.
Well, your sarcasm wasn't all the subtle, or well written. It pretty much deserves to be moderated into oblivion.
No, I didn't
I didn't say he didn't have a right to be upset. I said he didn't have a right to be a self centered, self entitled, spoiled little jackass because he was (briefly) denied access to his shiny new toy.
That's not exactly unusual on the 'net - once you have influence... the temptation to use it for your own personal hobbyhorses rises exponentially. (Heck, most of my friends use their blogs and Facebook feeds as platforms for their personal views - and they have pretty much no influence even over their own friends.)
Oh, wait... you were talking about the DHS agent? No. She didn't abuse her power. She, as he insisted, followed the letter of the law. No paperwork, no boat.
Yep. It's a paper SNAFU... it happens all the time, and routinely gets quietly resolved with no lawyers and very little fuss. Unless you're a jackass with a case of self-entitlement and widely followed blog who decides that the proper response to a minor incident is to use his influence to 'spin' the event as some vast government conspiracy.
Seriously - what the eff did he think would happen if he refused to sign the form? They'd just be all smiles and sunshine and hand the boat over? You can't hold them to the letter of one part of the law (ensuring the paperwork is correct) and then be upset when they follow the rest of the law (requiring the boat be impounded until the paperwork is cleared up). Grow the eff up and deal with the consequences of your choices.
It would usually have been just a couple of weeks - until he clicked the 'publish' button on his blog. Now, they're going to ensure that every box is ticked, every procedure punctiliously followed to the very letter - precisely as he insisted they do... so, a couple of months at least.
In other words - you completely miss my point. Worse yet, such ignorance seems to be willing... faced with facts that don't accord with your world view, you simply ignore them and fall back on stupid semantic arguments.
Um... no. The development of the booster started a couple of years before the decision to go to the moon. The development of the engines for the booster started a couple of years before *that*. The capsule (but not the lander) was also well underway in study and development before the decision was made to go to the moon.
Reality isn't like the neat progression you see in popular history books and Discovery channel specials. NASA didn't start with a clean sheet of paper after Kennedy's announcement - Kennedy made the choice of a moon landing rather than other options *because* all the preparatory work already in progress made it possible.
True, but the problem isn't training a crew - it's qualifying the Dragon for a mission many times it's currently contemplated duration, and creating and qualifying all the other hardware that will be required... hardware that development hasn't event started on yet.
Since it's the coal storage yard, the electrical switchgear, and the turbine hall that takes up most of the area - what on earth would lead you to believe that generating the same amount of energy will take up less land?
Also think of all the problem's you'll create in controlling the grid. More generators to keep in sync, more plants to restart in the event of a major blackout... Not to mention more high tension power lines, more trucks or rail lines delivering the fuel...
So long as the unit they're trying to talk to is straight above them, sure. The 99.99% of the time that's not true... well, then transmitting straight up doesn't help you much.
Which means a lot... and it means nothing. Sure the prototype first flew over twenty years ago - but that doesn't mean that everything in their aircraft has remained fixed and unchanging since then. Designs are updated and installed equipment upgraded and replaced routinely.
I served on a submarine in the mid 80's whose design was from circa 1962 (and which was a direct descendant of a 1958 design that was based on a 1956 design) but the age of the technology onboard varied all over the place... from the 1930's to the 1980's.
I never mentioned decryption for exactly that reason.
The F-22 has spread spectrum radios precisely to avoid the transmission being detected - the problem is that those radios are not compatible with those in the Typhoon, requiring them to use their (much more easily detected) single frequency mode.
What makes you assume they were 'genuine' in days past?
That sure sounds Really Scary... but technical jargon and buzzwords always do when thrown about by people who don't really know what they're talking about. (Note that the bit about triangulation was added by the submitter - it does not appear in the original article.)
Triangulation against a jet is just barely this side of useless - the damm thing is flying at several hundred miles an hour. A second or two after he stops transmitting, your triangulation solution has lost significant value because he's miles away from the datum point. Your solution just degrades from there and by ten seconds or so you might as well have been using a Ouija board.* Has anyone actually deployed the RDF gear that would be required for high speed tactical 3D triangulation? It's not particularly high tech, but it's also something that can't be cobbled together on short notice out of 'stone knives and bearskins'. To be any kind of useful, you need high accuracy (within +/- a degree or so), which means sophisticated antenna designs and significant signal processing. (Real life RDF isn't a simple as it is in the movies.)
Another problem you face is that you can't use triangulation to fire weapons... you need some way of handing the track off to the radar needed for SAM's or AA guns, or off to the fighter which will then need to obtain radar or IR lock to fire a missile or to obtain visual contact.
So, the real problem isn't triangulation... it's breaking stealth. An unsecured transmission can provide a raid warning. It can warn radar operators to pay really close attention to the 'fluff' on their screens. Etc... etc...
* Yes, I have experience with using triangulation tactically... it was sonar and ASW, so the timescale was longer but the general principles remain the same.
And even that's of limited use (at best), or completely useless (at worst). This weekend's event is a prime example of that... The effects were felt along the ground track and below the point where it exploded - miles from it's "impact point' (had it survived to impact intact).
Don't confuse "problems with the Electoral College system" (of which there aren't any really) with "problems created by the way the big parties have divvied up the pie" (slowly moving more and more states to the 'all electors go to the party that carried the state' system is what has created the travesty of swing states).
Oh, indeed. Ogalla isn't much better off than Salt Lake. Northern Canaveral is going to be equally unhappy being dominated by the southern portion. Shasta on the other hand will be dominated by *it's* northern half. Half or more of the map seems to be deliberately created to encourage regional political warfare.
And I wish you could zoom in further... So Cal looks to be pretty hinky, and New England is unreadable at this scale.
In rare and unusual cases, yes. The vast majority of the time they relied and locks and guards just like we did today. Back in medieval times, most of their wealth generally wasn't in coins or other easily portable means anyhow... You should get less of your history from TV or the DM's guide.
Oh, that's the great part - despite all the nerd rage and teeth gnashing, they'll all flock to see it in record numbers.
Truth is not an insult.
Your idea of the current state of scientific and engineering development is... ludicrously disconnected from reality. The engineering problems aren't "largely solved", not by a long shot. Hell, we have problems keeping the life support system on the ISS functioning at 100% over the long term - and that system is a LEGO model compared with what would be required for a colony or generation ship. We don't even have a tested design for a Mars ship's ECS... let alone one many times more complex and that must operate over a vastly longer time span.
Did I say that an off world colony was the only solution? No, I did not - learn to read and comprehend.
What I said was a space program was a trivial precursor to the OP's idea that we need to get off this rock.
I'm not surprised your reply starts with "Uh.. what?" - because that sound you just heard was my point whooshing over your head.
I didn't say we shouldn't get started, I said the answers don't lie in an ever improved space "program". Access to space is the least important and most trivial part of the problem of building a colony that can survive the loss of the Earth.
And even if we multiplied out current space program's budget by ten times... it still wouldn't be enough. A thousand times? That might be enough for a half ass program with a slim-to-none chance of survival.
We could roll twenty Falcon 9's and fifteen Dragon's off the assembly lines and launch them every hour if we really wanted to. It's just a matter of writing a big enough check - but it wouldn't be enough. The space program isn't the problem. The problem is that building an off-Earth colony that can survive the loss of the Earth indefinitely is a Very Very Hard Problem - a problem whose shape and scope we have only the faintest ideas of the outline of and filled with known unknowns and even more unknown unknowns. And pretty much none of those are in any way related to the current space program.
Grow up and stop using cosmic impacts to fuel your fanboi masturbatory fantasies.