Well, the problem is that huge, bulky plants are much more fragile - in terms of network disruptions - than a more distributed net of many smaller plants.
An opinion, not a fact.
Nuclear plants however are only available in the huge, bulky variation. In fact they come from some technological stone-age where the idea of giant-gigawatt-city-plants was considered the best solution imaginable.
Ah, yes. Back in the quaint old days when maximum efficiency, ROI, and lowered costs were king! Silly them to not do things in the most expensive and difficult way as you propose!
Nowadays one tries to break power generation up into much smaller parts - perhaps as far as to your own cellar.
You know they're talking about the apex of human technology when they control tenths of a degree of inclination of a robotic car running over another planet.
Nah. They don't control the inclination - they measure the inclination and park the rover at the best possible spot within various limits. Even measuring to a tenth of a degree isn't all that spectacular, I was measuring to a hundredth with electronic equipment nearly twenty years ago.
I can't even know the angle of the keyboard I'm writing this, with such precision.
Sure, it would be nice if there was some federal D.O.T. streets db for the entire country that your local streets department could upload all their changes into and all the GPS map folks would just that.
There already is. The problem is that mapmaking is much, much more difficult than many here at Slashdot seem to think.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I have made maps. Both as part of a professional work and at an amateur level. I've been a cartography geek for around thirty years.)
but we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of the job.
This simply cannot be repeated enough. There are millions of miles of roads in this country - of all different types.
It's not as simple as driving around with your GPSr is 'track' mode, as mapmakers also have to deal with converting between datums, etc...
Not to mention that your average GPSr is not all that accurate. At our local Geocaching gatherings we regularly have 'coordinate hunts', where a surveyor grade GPSr is used to located a set of coordinates - then cachers are given those coordinates and try to 'pin the the tail on the donkey' and place a flag at those coordinates using their own GPSr. Here is a bunch of people, many with high end consumer GPSr's and experience in using them... and the average CEP is around 5 yards. (Your common road navigation GPSr isn't nearly as accurate as my handheld.) Sometimes, if there are too many people, we run the hunt in two or more groups - and as the day wears on, you can see the center of the pattern shift as the satellites move.
I would argue that the USA's peak of scientific interest was during the late 1960s when the space program was a national obsession and every second kid had a Nasa poster on their bedroom wall.
That's what the myths say. But there isn't a shred of proof those myths are real - and tons of indications (like TV coverage and number of press passes issued per Apollo launch) that the opposite was true.
The current national obsessions (it there are any) are Britney Spears etc.
Mostly because the market for sending physical things long distances quite quickly died with the invention of the fax machine, and it's brief zombie form was given the silver bullet by the widespread adoption of the internet.
Or, in short, there is simply no significant market for sending things around the globe in the a couple of hours. (At least not a market that would support the billions of investment required to create the infrastructure.)
Sure it's brilliant - but it doesn't actually work all that well. It turns out that orbital mechanics demands a largish second stage to circularize the orbit... And that strengthening that second stage to withstand the stress of the gun launch means you end up with something far more expensive than a conventional rocket. (The same is true of a linear accelerator BTW.)
Germany, especially, which is launching an investigation into their practices.
Germany has been in the process of launching that investigation for (IIRC) a year or more now. How's it working out?
I've been keeping track of Anonymous for some time--they seem to be the origin of many of the various memes that end up getting popular, so they seem to work well as a sort of miner's canary when discerning the opinion of the internet in general. This is, to my knowledge, the first time that this particular phenomenon has occurred--an internet movement that has had significant international effect in the real world.
You delude yourself. Scientology has been under 'attack', been opposed, been investigated, etc... etc... Since at least the 1970's. Like so much else, this is a real world movement that is using the 'net to coordinate itself globally.
I think this hydrazine thing is a red-herring. Think about it for a minute. So they say it's frozen, and in a really strong tank. But once that tank starts re-entering, the valves and hoses to it will be torn free. The heat of re-entry is going to unfreeze at least part of it. Now you've got venting ROCKET FUEL in the heat of a re-entry. I say at that point, the tank goes BOOM and there is nothing left...
You can think that - but the facts are not on your side. These kinds of tanks routinely survive re-entry. The fact that the hydrazine is frozen only increases the chances - because as the outer layers boil off they will carry heat away from the remaining fuel mass.
Apparently man-made objects containing hydrazine propellant frequently rain down from the sky without incident, according to rocket scientists and space security experts who "scoff" at this rationale.
Well... This is one of those cases where there 'scientists' and 'experts' only tell half the truth - the half that supports an anti-Administration agenda. The other half of the truth is... all the cases they cite have roughly zip point nada in common with USA-193. In those cases, the tanks are empty or nearly so. In the case of USA-193, the tank is not only full - but frozen solid. The chances of it surviving re-entry intact or nearly so are much greater than previous incidents.
Insofar as the cost issue goes - it's pretty much a wash. Spend the money on the next test against a drone, or spend it on a test against USA-193.
That's pretty much a fair summary. When it comes to hard numbers and real facts (I.E. the stuff I know from my USN experience or from research matches their data closely), they are kinda trustworthy - but when it comes to analysis they are out to lunch. Way, way out to lunch.
I doubt the lunar eclipse has anything to do with it. The timing is almost certainly based on the need to get the SBX to sea and in position (it's not exactly a speedboat), and the best orbital conditions for the shot. The location was almost certainly based on the SBX being in Hawaii and having nice long empty stretches of ocean downrange for the SM-3 missile. (Both for the booster and for the payload to fall if it misses.)
Actually, I'm thinking the funniest part of this is, the Internet and filesharing has given these has-beens a new lease on life that they wouldn't have otherwise. C'mon, disco already???? There's a reason why we here in the States say "dead as disco".
Maybe you don't buy it. Maybe the [average notional] Slashdot demographic doesn't buy it... But neither you nor that demographic are the whole of the music market. Or even a noticeable portion thereof.
The most recent release of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is currently the 2,251st selling album on Amazon - which means it is selling pretty steadily, and nowhere near the 'long tail'. Clicking around shows quite a few other disco albums in the same sales range. Pretty impressive if you ask me. (My local big box music store dedicates a whole section to disco too...)
Disco may be dead according to comedy routines - but its selling awfully well.
I'll leave out the silliness of suing TPB for contributory copyright infringement, as I'm pretty sure we all agree that this isn't sane.
No, we don't all agree on that issue.
However, looking at the comments above, I see a horrible pattern: people excoriating ABBA, Prince, and TVP as "old timers" and "not producing anything recently" and therefore somehow immediately irrelevant and undeserving of receiving some compensation for their work.
The worst part is that one of those is still producing new material - but it's not on the charts so many people don't even realize it exists. They don't even bother to check.
And, to shove something back at this audience that it often trumpets: teenieboppers aren't the only music consumers! If the music industry is to survive, it has to realize that continuing to sell to 30/40/50 year olds is a viable market.
The music industry damn well knows this. That's why I (and anyone else who cares to) can buy tons of older music right off the racks. The last time I was at my local big box music retailer I could have filled a shopping cart with older bands - and not just the arena filling ones or the double platinum albums either. Heck, they even have a fairly nice (if small) selection of George Gershwin.
It's attitudes like that that mean we're not taken seriously.
Along with a generally carefree attitude towards facts to accompany the carefree attitude towards other peoples rights.
But going after file sharers just seems rather absurd to me especially since the artists considered haven't produced anything new in quite a while and so just wants free lunch. It DOES seem very greedy to me.
Just maybe you should check your facts before posting.
First, I think you will find many people (myself included), who have much more respect for PRINT journalists than TELEVISION journalists. It has been observed (on C-SPAN, don't have the reference unfortunately) that evening news typically rips stories from the pages of that morning's New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
And print journalists do the same thing - rip stories from the evening news and print them up the next day or so.
You are a "hyper-neurotic IT student". The reality is that while some people have made a fetish out of frantically worrying (or pretending to frantically worry) about the supermarket knowing what brand of salad dressing they buy and selling that information to someone else, the vast majority of people simply don't care.
And that's real key - the hyper-neurotic demographic on Slashdot haven't been able to come up with a reason to care. When pressed they either come up with some tinfoil hat variant on "well, don't you think the Jews would have liked to hide from Hitler" or go off an another tangent where they confuse privacy with security.
Not just psychological stress - but a huge legal stress as well. She very likely can't deposit any checks made out to him, she can't file taxes... The companies he owns/operates are in limbo... etc... etc...
Non-ionizing radiation (which is all that cell phones produce) has little to no impact on the human body.
Disable the interlocks on your microwave, stick your head in and turn it on. Microwave radiation is non ionizing - and thus has little to no effect, so it must be safe according to you!
The worst a cell phone can do to your body via radiation, is make you a few nano-joules more energetic.
And of course, adding energy to a system from an external source can never have any impact eh?
Your freaking smoke detectors are more likely to cause cancer than your cell phone.
If the radiation produced by the smoke detector had enough energy to penetrate a sheet of paper, and if you held it to head for hours a day... sure.
The program has been in the development and test phase since about 2000, and undergoing tests of increasing difficulty, but always under predefined conditions. The tests are also expensive to orchestrate, typically involving several naval vessels, and a lot of ground support from both the navy and contractors, a lot of documentation, and a target missile that itself probably costs several million dollars. Here they've got a target that won't behave as predictably and costs nothing (well sort of...It's a spy satellite that failed to reach the proper orbit).
Almost completely incorrect. You don't think a quasi operational test like this won't also involve multiple ships, ground support, documentation, etc... etc...? Furthermore, the target is behaving perfectly predictable over the short term (days).
I don't buy the can't be shot down point. It it were to be hit (hard) from the front relative to it velocity vector there would be enough loss of momentum to cause it to come down.
Other than the fact that delivering that amount of energy in that small an area is roughly equivalent to a small nuclear weapon.... that's an excellent plan.
Hint: This is what we call sarcasm. Your plan sucks and is based on utter and complete ignorance of science. You don't even have any common sense - you seem to not noticed that it takes a huge honkin' rocket to get it up there, which implies it takes a huge honkin' amount of energy to reverse that situation. You aren't even smart enough to know that you don't know - you state your ignorant opinion as though it was fact.
Unless this is some highly-controlled demolition of the internal structures, "blowing up" means pieces will expand away from the satellite's center of gravity at very high velocities. Some will be blown towards earth, some will remain in the decaying orbit, and some will be projected away from earth at very high velocity, possibly to assume new non-decaying orbits and thus contributing to space junk.
If you were to blow up the bird using a contact fuse, such that the warhead exploded inside the bird... sure. (Aside from the fact that both bird and impactor would be destroyed by the impact.) But using a proximity fuse such that the explosion is entirely outside and to one side of the target... no. You won't have bits propelled into non decaying orbits.
Even if you do have an explosion inside the bird - you make it a small one such that there isn't enough energy to propel anything towards a stable orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
The contents of my house are considered property as well - yet I don't pay tax on them.
I had thought better of the LA Times - that they wouldn't indulge in these kinds of semantic games.
An opinion, not a fact.
Ah, yes. Back in the quaint old days when maximum efficiency, ROI, and lowered costs were king! Silly them to not do things in the most expensive and difficult way as you propose!
Another opinion you hope to pawn off as fact.
They share data regularly. Your local problems appear to be... local.
And just where do you think Google and Mapquest get their data from?
Nah. They don't control the inclination - they measure the inclination and park the rover at the best possible spot within various limits. Even measuring to a tenth of a degree isn't all that spectacular, I was measuring to a hundredth with electronic equipment nearly twenty years ago.
You could - if you bothered to try.
There already is. The problem is that mapmaking is much, much more difficult than many here at Slashdot seem to think.
(Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I have made maps. Both as part of a professional work and at an amateur level. I've been a cartography geek for around thirty years.)
This simply cannot be repeated enough. There are millions of miles of roads in this country - of all different types.
It's not as simple as driving around with your GPSr is 'track' mode, as mapmakers also have to deal with converting between datums, etc...
Not to mention that your average GPSr is not all that accurate. At our local Geocaching gatherings we regularly have 'coordinate hunts', where a surveyor grade GPSr is used to located a set of coordinates - then cachers are given those coordinates and try to 'pin the the tail on the donkey' and place a flag at those coordinates using their own GPSr. Here is a bunch of people, many with high end consumer GPSr's and experience in using them... and the average CEP is around 5 yards. (Your common road navigation GPSr isn't nearly as accurate as my handheld.) Sometimes, if there are too many people, we run the hunt in two or more groups - and as the day wears on, you can see the center of the pattern shift as the satellites move.
That's what the myths say. But there isn't a shred of proof those myths are real - and tons of indications (like TV coverage and number of press passes issued per Apollo launch) that the opposite was true.
Yeah, nobody cared about the Beatles.
Mostly because the market for sending physical things long distances quite quickly died with the invention of the fax machine, and it's brief zombie form was given the silver bullet by the widespread adoption of the internet.
Or, in short, there is simply no significant market for sending things around the globe in the a couple of hours. (At least not a market that would support the billions of investment required to create the infrastructure.)
Sure it's brilliant - but it doesn't actually work all that well. It turns out that orbital mechanics demands a largish second stage to circularize the orbit... And that strengthening that second stage to withstand the stress of the gun launch means you end up with something far more expensive than a conventional rocket. (The same is true of a linear accelerator BTW.)
Germany has been in the process of launching that investigation for (IIRC) a year or more now. How's it working out?
You delude yourself. Scientology has been under 'attack', been opposed, been investigated, etc... etc... Since at least the 1970's. Like so much else, this is a real world movement that is using the 'net to coordinate itself globally.
You can think that - but the facts are not on your side. These kinds of tanks routinely survive re-entry. The fact that the hydrazine is frozen only increases the chances - because as the outer layers boil off they will carry heat away from the remaining fuel mass.
Well... This is one of those cases where there 'scientists' and 'experts' only tell half the truth - the half that supports an anti-Administration agenda. The other half of the truth is... all the cases they cite have roughly zip point nada in common with USA-193. In those cases, the tanks are empty or nearly so. In the case of USA-193, the tank is not only full - but frozen solid. The chances of it surviving re-entry intact or nearly so are much greater than previous incidents.
Insofar as the cost issue goes - it's pretty much a wash. Spend the money on the next test against a drone, or spend it on a test against USA-193.
That's pretty much a fair summary. When it comes to hard numbers and real facts (I.E. the stuff I know from my USN experience or from research matches their data closely), they are kinda trustworthy - but when it comes to analysis they are out to lunch. Way, way out to lunch.
I doubt the lunar eclipse has anything to do with it. The timing is almost certainly based on the need to get the SBX to sea and in position (it's not exactly a speedboat), and the best orbital conditions for the shot. The location was almost certainly based on the SBX being in Hawaii and having nice long empty stretches of ocean downrange for the SM-3 missile. (Both for the booster and for the payload to fall if it misses.)
Maybe you don't buy it. Maybe the [average notional] Slashdot demographic doesn't buy it... But neither you nor that demographic are the whole of the music market. Or even a noticeable portion thereof.
The most recent release of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is currently the 2,251st selling album on Amazon - which means it is selling pretty steadily, and nowhere near the 'long tail'. Clicking around shows quite a few other disco albums in the same sales range. Pretty impressive if you ask me. (My local big box music store dedicates a whole section to disco too...)
Disco may be dead according to comedy routines - but its selling awfully well.
No, we don't all agree on that issue.
The worst part is that one of those is still producing new material - but it's not on the charts so many people don't even realize it exists. They don't even bother to check.
The music industry damn well knows this. That's why I (and anyone else who cares to) can buy tons of older music right off the racks. The last time I was at my local big box music retailer I could have filled a shopping cart with older bands - and not just the arena filling ones or the double platinum albums either. Heck, they even have a fairly nice (if small) selection of George Gershwin.
Along with a generally carefree attitude towards facts to accompany the carefree attitude towards other peoples rights.
Just maybe you should check your facts before posting.
And print journalists do the same thing - rip stories from the evening news and print them up the next day or so.
And that's real key - the hyper-neurotic demographic on Slashdot haven't been able to come up with a reason to care. When pressed they either come up with some tinfoil hat variant on "well, don't you think the Jews would have liked to hide from Hitler" or go off an another tangent where they confuse privacy with security.
"Privacy" != "Security".
Not just psychological stress - but a huge legal stress as well. She very likely can't deposit any checks made out to him, she can't file taxes... The companies he owns/operates are in limbo... etc... etc...
Disable the interlocks on your microwave, stick your head in and turn it on. Microwave radiation is non ionizing - and thus has little to no effect, so it must be safe according to you!
And of course, adding energy to a system from an external source can never have any impact eh?
If the radiation produced by the smoke detector had enough energy to penetrate a sheet of paper, and if you held it to head for hours a day... sure.
Almost completely incorrect. You don't think a quasi operational test like this won't also involve multiple ships, ground support, documentation, etc... etc...? Furthermore, the target is behaving perfectly predictable over the short term (days).
Other than the fact that delivering that amount of energy in that small an area is roughly equivalent to a small nuclear weapon.... that's an excellent plan.
Hint: This is what we call sarcasm. Your plan sucks and is based on utter and complete ignorance of science. You don't even have any common sense - you seem to not noticed that it takes a huge honkin' rocket to get it up there, which implies it takes a huge honkin' amount of energy to reverse that situation. You aren't even smart enough to know that you don't know - you state your ignorant opinion as though it was fact.
If you were to blow up the bird using a contact fuse, such that the warhead exploded inside the bird... sure. (Aside from the fact that both bird and impactor would be destroyed by the impact.) But using a proximity fuse such that the explosion is entirely outside and to one side of the target... no. You won't have bits propelled into non decaying orbits.
Even if you do have an explosion inside the bird - you make it a small one such that there isn't enough energy to propel anything towards a stable orbit.