Wikipedia already links to zillions of external websites for deeper cover on a topic - why should a detailed history of the Australian tech industry be any different?
This is a very popular opinion on Slashdot, but it's simply not true. Notability is determined by sources.
In other words, if you can pile up enough authoritative looking 'sources', the article becomes notable by sheer weight of footnotes.
In fact, your Pokemon example is particularly dated; in 2007 most of the Pokemon articles were deemed not notable and merged into what's now very well sourced coverage.
And here we see a symptom of exactly the reason that many people avoid dealing with Wikipedia, the endless nerd bureaucrat policy quoting - it's like a game of Magic: The Gathering gone nightmarishly wrong. One side lays down it's policy links, then other trumps them with their policy links, then first links more... Lather, rinse, repeat until your list of links and sock puppets is empty. Last nerd bureaucrat standing wins.
Further, even though Pokemon example may be dated, people refer to it because it's a symptom of the problems and even though it has been 'fixed' many other like it remain.
I'm not all talk, though. If anyone reading this ever actually is the victim of some beaurocrat's arbitrary preferences, leave me a message and I'll make sure any article that passes the inclusion requirements gets to stay. There's a whole Article Rescue Squadron full of people who are willing to do something about the problem instead of just whining about it on Slashdot. Yeah, I get it, "I don't have the time to join a Wikipedia group, Wikipedia can go fuck itself, it's a lost cause"... but you've got plenty of time to complain about it here.
You just don't get it - people talk here on Slashdot because they are tired of Wikipedia bureaucratic fights. They don't want to get involved because they've been wounded before and don't want to get shot at again.
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
Looking at the significant number of infodumps of "non-encyclopaedic" information that Wikipedia has... I really wonder about that. Every damm minor pornstar has his or her own article (usually a stub). Every damm player who ever wore a uniform for a major sports team has his or here on article (usually a stub). Not to mention stubs padded out to look like real articles for thousands of TV show episodes. Articles and stub on every serial killer, major media crime cases, etc... etc...
Wikipedia seems to very selective on what it dubs fancruft.
Um, San Jose (Opening Fall 2010), is right on the locations page.
I wouldn't put too much stock into it though, until fairly recently they listed "Portland Oregon (Opening Fall 2008)" as well as several other locations opening "soon".
Heck, at about 1:00 into the video you'll see something that looks like a submarine propeller - which were being machined on six axis machines back in the 80's. (In fact, there was a huge flap when Toshiba sold the fuSSR such a machine in 1987.)
Also, even in modest volumes, you don't start with plain blocks of metal. You cast or forge a blank and machine off the excess.
Um, a blank *is* a plain block of metal. (Although one made to specification.)
Scientists have been using aerial photography for such purposes practically since the dawn of aviation (when it was noticed that things could be seen from the air that couldn't from the ground).
Actually, capsules were a radical, new and quite unexpected solution; a solution that proved much better, considering rest of our tech, than fantasy spaceplanes.
Actually, capsules were [considered by the US to be] a short term stopgap intended to gain basic engineering, medical, operational, etc., experience. They then got a further boost by being on hand when space became political and stunts and penile enhancers became the order of the day.
Nor were they particularly radical - the basic design [for US capsules] was originally cribbed from the Thor IRBM's reentry body.
Again, if you were conversant with space history, you'd know that. Hint: There's a reason why NASA continued to fund studies and hardware for reusables throughout the 1960's, and signed the basic contract for what ultimately became the Space Shuttle on July 19, 1969. You might look up what happened the next day for additional perspective.
Can't you consider that the theorists (yeah, without much practical experience yet...) were simply wrong?
Yet, the builders of capsules (who don't have much practical experience either) are right? Here in the US, we're only on the fourth generation - and the Soviets aren't much better having contented themselves with tinkering with their second generation design for the last thirty odd years.
Not to mention the dearth of evidence that those theorists [who proposed reusables] are actually wrong.
(besides, portraying "spaceplanes" as the future wasn't nearly as universal as you make it to be; those from Werner von Braum, for example, were envisioned on the assumption that Mars has considerably denser atmoshpere)
Weren't universal? Close enough that difference is irrelevant.
As far as Wernher Von Braun goes, it helps to actually be conversant with space history.
The moment US decided to go for the shuttle the game was over. Form over function is ok for household gadgets but not for space exploration.
Actually, NASA was 'going for the Shuttle' as far back as 1958, and it's predecessors and space theorists were proposing them earlier than that. If you actually go back and study space history, you find that the general plan was to start with aircraft, and go ever higher and faster until you ended up with a reusable in orbit. All that changed when space became political. Getting there first and fastest became all important, and form over function became critical, and reusables were shoved onto the back burner in favor of expendables.
The US had did have the best launch system and just tossed it aside because it was more cool with a rocket with a bolted on hip looking spacecraft.
Best at what? Sure the Saturn V (assuming that's what you're referring to, as folks usually do), was great at heaving heavy payloads around. But it was extremely expensive and heavy payloads only come around once in a great while. Which means you're paying for guys to sit around on their asses for four years out five in order to lift a heavy payload that fifth year. (Which means a Saturn V based launch systems ends up being hideously expensive.)
In most democratic countries, there are very healthy and active reform and fringe parties that regularly get a significant percentage of the popular vote.
And sometime even a significant enough percentage to get an insignificant number of seats.
Where are these parties in the USA?
Generally somewhere in the fringe area between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. For whatever reason, and going back virtually to the birth of the Republic, fringe parties have a very hard time gaining traction in the US. That virtually all of them tend to be lunatic fringe, single issue, or narrow demographic doesn't help much.
Look beyond the USA to see how democracy works.
We have. And there's virtually nothing less democratic than a small percentage of the seats wielding power out of proportion to their numbers because a larger party (or parties) need their cooperation in order to form a coalition and gain power.
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
Hmm - launching a bunch of nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union, with non-functional warheads, doesn't exactly sound like a good idea.
The safeguards the OP refers to [with regards to the lost weapon] are different between missiles and bombs (and aren't PALs), and are intended to prevent detonation unless the weapon is properly and intentionally used. Arming plugs and breakaway wires on bombs, accelerometers and arming sequencers on missiles, etc... etc... Even if you circumvent the requirement for NCA authority, even if you circumvent the PAL - there's still the arming/fusing/firing safeties to bypass. (And it's the last of these three levels that prevented the lost weapon from detonating - the bomb had not been properly armed.)
I think that many people don't understand that there are multiple levels/types of safety/security devices on the bombs and their delivery systems that work in concert to ensure the bomb only goes off when properly authorized and properly executed. It's an interlocking chain, and like any chain the failure of a single link stops the whole thing cold.
With all the trouble that goes into PKI I can see why the air force didn't like the idea of having to juggle all kinds of arming codes in a war that is decided in 15 minutes. Still, there had to be a better solution than zeros...
Except you're looking for a solution to a problem whose existence is questionable anyhow. PALs don't add materially to the safety/security of a system where there is little to no chance of that system falling into unauthorized hands.
The people most likey to use a nuke (small states and non-state actors) are the least likely to have more than one nuclear weapon. For those people, a US nuclear arsenal of 2,500 is no more intimidating than an arsenal of 25.
That's true for 'those people'. Then there is a different set of people with many more than one nuke.
Second, the Shuttle doesn't serve a useful role in any serious US space program. The only argument for it is ro provide "downmass" from the ISS (that is, returning mass from the ISS safely to Earth)
Downmass, assembly and supply capabilities not matched by existing or planned vehicles, reboost, etc... etc...
I'm unsure exactly what's newsworthy here. The Russians have known where the wreck lies since the day it was lost. Computer generated imagery from high resolution sonar has been around for over a decade, as have ROV's carrying said high resolution sonars, as well as the sonars themselves.
Or, IOW, move along - nothing to see here but a 'news' story based on a self serving puff piece press release.
Remember, the aerodynamic shape of the F-104 was designed by Clarence "Kelly" Johnson with a slide rule. No computers at all. Actually he designed the whole thing in about a month without any computer modeling.
So what? It was a *very* simple aircraft with a fairly undemanding set of performance specifications - go fast in a straight line, carry a couple of missiles, shoot down bombers. (Not to mention every other project of the day was built with slide rules and without computers or computer modeling.)
I wonder what it would take now, to do what he did.
Probably like designing a computer from that era, it could be done in a few days by a grad student on his laptop. But nobody would bother other than a grad student with time on his hands, because there really isn't much of a point to doing so.
Don't get me wrong, Kelly Johnson was a very gifted engineer, but much of the 'cult' that surrounds him is because people rarely understand the context and that he worked in a very different era than today.
Except that aerogel really doesn't do anything to hasten the decay of small pieces either, not without accepting collisions that generate even more debris.
Seriously, aerogel capture of space debris is one of these memes running around that everybody accepts as true - but really has little to no scientific basis behind it.
if the laser was intense enough to be visible on the ground in the day, how intense would it be at 40,000 feet? would we be frying pilots eyeballs?
The difference in distance to the laser between the ground and 40,000 feet is only a couple of percent. So no, it would likely not be noticeably brighter and insufficient to damage anyone's eyes.
The existing lab racks are being regularly used, but their schedule is full and thus cannot support rapid turn around experiments which these cubes can do.
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
The Air Force kept the codes at all zeros so they could launch without presidential authority.
PALs are not intended to prevent launch without Presidential authority, PALs are intended to prevent weapons that fall into unauthorized hands from being used. Which is why the USAF kept PALs active on gravity bombs and disabled them on the silos and why the Army used them on their AFAPs - and why USN SSBN's never had them in the first place.
So the first successful one? And who knows what the soviets did
Anyone who has actually paid attention to space history, especially with the massive amounts of information that has come out since the end of the Cold War, or who has the ability (and intelligence) to use Google.
The first Soviet weather birds were the Meteor series, with the first test launches being in 1964 and reaching full operation in 1969.
Its harder to get good photographs of weather at high latitudes because you either have to do it from high altitude and an oblique angle, or from low altitude in a high inclination orbit.
You missed options three and four. You can also use a high inclination Molnyia orbit. (Which the Russians have used at various times.) You can also use a polar orbit (which most US birds use), which can get photos every couple of hours.
So high latitude weather photography is really only difficult if you choose to make it so.
At the rate we are creating space junk, 50 years from now it would be nearly impossible for anyone to keep their bird flying up there safely.
That's what urban legend, the professionally panics, and those whose livelihoods depends on getting eyeballs on column ink (electrons?) would have you believe. As usual, the reality is far different. Launchers and spacecraft today are required to minimize debris production. Separation hardware is now retained rather than being jettisoned. Spent stages vent rather than being allowed to explode. Etc. Etc..
Is the problem solved? No. Is progress being made? Yes, quite a bit. Statements like the one quoted above are just ill informed alarmism.
PS to the guy who suggested aerogel: Unless you match velocities with the debris, all you'll have is aerogel with a hole in it. Once you've matched velocities, you could capture the debris in a brown paper bag and you won't need aerogel, which is only any good for capturing debris a small fraction of the size that causes the most worries. I wish the comment about aerogel would stop getting moderated up - it's like suggesting containing a nuclear explosion by wrapping the bomb in chewing gum wrappers.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia already links to zillions of external websites for deeper cover on a topic - why should a detailed history of the Australian tech industry be any different?
In other words, if you can pile up enough authoritative looking 'sources', the article becomes notable by sheer weight of footnotes.
And here we see a symptom of exactly the reason that many people avoid dealing with Wikipedia, the endless nerd bureaucrat policy quoting - it's like a game of Magic: The Gathering gone nightmarishly wrong. One side lays down it's policy links, then other trumps them with their policy links, then first links more... Lather, rinse, repeat until your list of links and sock puppets is empty. Last nerd bureaucrat standing wins.
Further, even though Pokemon example may be dated, people refer to it because it's a symptom of the problems and even though it has been 'fixed' many other like it remain.
You just don't get it - people talk here on Slashdot because they are tired of Wikipedia bureaucratic fights. They don't want to get involved because they've been wounded before and don't want to get shot at again.
Looking at the significant number of infodumps of "non-encyclopaedic" information that Wikipedia has... I really wonder about that. Every damm minor pornstar has his or her own article (usually a stub). Every damm player who ever wore a uniform for a major sports team has his or here on article (usually a stub). Not to mention stubs padded out to look like real articles for thousands of TV show episodes. Articles and stub on every serial killer, major media crime cases, etc... etc...
Wikipedia seems to very selective on what it dubs fancruft.
On the flipside, why should they contribute to the Wikipedia?
Quite the contrary. The internet has show us again and again that One Site To Rule Them All is an idea that simply doesn't work all that well.
Um, San Jose (Opening Fall 2010), is right on the locations page.
I wouldn't put too much stock into it though, until fairly recently they listed "Portland Oregon (Opening Fall 2008)" as well as several other locations opening "soon".
Heck, at about 1:00 into the video you'll see something that looks like a submarine propeller - which were being machined on six axis machines back in the 80's. (In fact, there was a huge flap when Toshiba sold the fuSSR such a machine in 1987.)
Um, a blank *is* a plain block of metal. (Although one made to specification.)
Scientists have been using aerial photography for such purposes practically since the dawn of aviation (when it was noticed that things could be seen from the air that couldn't from the ground).
Actually, capsules were [considered by the US to be] a short term stopgap intended to gain basic engineering, medical, operational, etc., experience. They then got a further boost by being on hand when space became political and stunts and penile enhancers became the order of the day.
Nor were they particularly radical - the basic design [for US capsules] was originally cribbed from the Thor IRBM's reentry body.
Again, if you were conversant with space history, you'd know that. Hint: There's a reason why NASA continued to fund studies and hardware for reusables throughout the 1960's, and signed the basic contract for what ultimately became the Space Shuttle on July 19, 1969. You might look up what happened the next day for additional perspective.
Yet, the builders of capsules (who don't have much practical experience either) are right? Here in the US, we're only on the fourth generation - and the Soviets aren't much better having contented themselves with tinkering with their second generation design for the last thirty odd years.
Not to mention the dearth of evidence that those theorists [who proposed reusables] are actually wrong.
Weren't universal? Close enough that difference is irrelevant.
As far as Wernher Von Braun goes, it helps to actually be conversant with space history.
(Hint: you haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about.)
Actually, NASA was 'going for the Shuttle' as far back as 1958, and it's predecessors and space theorists were proposing them earlier than that. If you actually go back and study space history, you find that the general plan was to start with aircraft, and go ever higher and faster until you ended up with a reusable in orbit. All that changed when space became political. Getting there first and fastest became all important, and form over function became critical, and reusables were shoved onto the back burner in favor of expendables.
Best at what? Sure the Saturn V (assuming that's what you're referring to, as folks usually do), was great at heaving heavy payloads around. But it was extremely expensive and heavy payloads only come around once in a great while. Which means you're paying for guys to sit around on their asses for four years out five in order to lift a heavy payload that fifth year. (Which means a Saturn V based launch systems ends up being hideously expensive.)
And sometime even a significant enough percentage to get an insignificant number of seats.
Generally somewhere in the fringe area between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. For whatever reason, and going back virtually to the birth of the Republic, fringe parties have a very hard time gaining traction in the US. That virtually all of them tend to be lunatic fringe, single issue, or narrow demographic doesn't help much.
We have. And there's virtually nothing less democratic than a small percentage of the seats wielding power out of proportion to their numbers because a larger party (or parties) need their cooperation in order to form a coalition and gain power.
The safeguards the OP refers to [with regards to the lost weapon] are different between missiles and bombs (and aren't PALs), and are intended to prevent detonation unless the weapon is properly and intentionally used. Arming plugs and breakaway wires on bombs, accelerometers and arming sequencers on missiles, etc... etc... Even if you circumvent the requirement for NCA authority, even if you circumvent the PAL - there's still the arming/fusing/firing safeties to bypass. (And it's the last of these three levels that prevented the lost weapon from detonating - the bomb had not been properly armed.)
I think that many people don't understand that there are multiple levels/types of safety/security devices on the bombs and their delivery systems that work in concert to ensure the bomb only goes off when properly authorized and properly executed. It's an interlocking chain, and like any chain the failure of a single link stops the whole thing cold.
Except you're looking for a solution to a problem whose existence is questionable anyhow. PALs don't add materially to the safety/security of a system where there is little to no chance of that system falling into unauthorized hands.
At those power scales, they probably use a motor generator rather than an inverter.
Haven't the Mythbusters proven again and again that operating a vehicle from 'non standard' driving perspectives is quite difficult?
That's true for 'those people'. Then there is a different set of people with many more than one nuke.
Downmass, assembly and supply capabilities not matched by existing or planned vehicles, reboost, etc... etc...
I'm unsure exactly what's newsworthy here. The Russians have known where the wreck lies since the day it was lost. Computer generated imagery from high resolution sonar has been around for over a decade, as have ROV's carrying said high resolution sonars, as well as the sonars themselves.
Or, IOW, move along - nothing to see here but a 'news' story based on a self serving puff piece press release.
So what? It was a *very* simple aircraft with a fairly undemanding set of performance specifications - go fast in a straight line, carry a couple of missiles, shoot down bombers. (Not to mention every other project of the day was built with slide rules and without computers or computer modeling.)
Probably like designing a computer from that era, it could be done in a few days by a grad student on his laptop. But nobody would bother other than a grad student with time on his hands, because there really isn't much of a point to doing so.
Don't get me wrong, Kelly Johnson was a very gifted engineer, but much of the 'cult' that surrounds him is because people rarely understand the context and that he worked in a very different era than today.
Except that aerogel really doesn't do anything to hasten the decay of small pieces either, not without accepting collisions that generate even more debris.
Seriously, aerogel capture of space debris is one of these memes running around that everybody accepts as true - but really has little to no scientific basis behind it.
The difference in distance to the laser between the ground and 40,000 feet is only a couple of percent. So no, it would likely not be noticeably brighter and insufficient to damage anyone's eyes.
The existing lab racks are being regularly used, but their schedule is full and thus cannot support rapid turn around experiments which these cubes can do.
Which pretty much is explained right in TFA.
The safeguards the OP refers to are the ones that prevent detonation, not the ones that prevent launch. Different safeguards for different purposes.
PALs are not intended to prevent launch without Presidential authority, PALs are intended to prevent weapons that fall into unauthorized hands from being used. Which is why the USAF kept PALs active on gravity bombs and disabled them on the silos and why the Army used them on their AFAPs - and why USN SSBN's never had them in the first place.
Anyone who has actually paid attention to space history, especially with the massive amounts of information that has come out since the end of the Cold War, or who has the ability (and intelligence) to use Google.
The first Soviet weather birds were the Meteor series, with the first test launches being in 1964 and reaching full operation in 1969.
You missed options three and four. You can also use a high inclination Molnyia orbit. (Which the Russians have used at various times.) You can also use a polar orbit (which most US birds use), which can get photos every couple of hours.
So high latitude weather photography is really only difficult if you choose to make it so.
That's what urban legend, the professionally panics, and those whose livelihoods depends on getting eyeballs on column ink (electrons?) would have you believe. As usual, the reality is far different. Launchers and spacecraft today are required to minimize debris production. Separation hardware is now retained rather than being jettisoned. Spent stages vent rather than being allowed to explode. Etc. Etc..
Is the problem solved? No. Is progress being made? Yes, quite a bit. Statements like the one quoted above are just ill informed alarmism.
PS to the guy who suggested aerogel: Unless you match velocities with the debris, all you'll have is aerogel with a hole in it. Once you've matched velocities, you could capture the debris in a brown paper bag and you won't need aerogel, which is only any good for capturing debris a small fraction of the size that causes the most worries. I wish the comment about aerogel would stop getting moderated up - it's like suggesting containing a nuclear explosion by wrapping the bomb in chewing gum wrappers.