Crowd control should be about de-escalating the chance for conflict. If you start burning people with microwaves, you radically and abruptly increase the chance for a peaceful protest to turn into a bloody lynching.
I imagine this device would be like existing methodologies - to be used when lesser means have failed. (Yes, I know it doesn't always work this way - but you hear more about the exceptions than the sucesses.)
During the protest against the invasion of Iraq in New York, just trying to deny all the intersections to protesters with sawhorses and mounted police caused surging to begin in the crowd, and the NYPD came within a hair's breadth of inciting a riot that would have burned out Midtown Manhattan and killed a lot of people.
I find the tone of this paragraph interesting - the protestors are the one interfering with everyone elses right to go about their business unmolested and unimpeded... But its the polices fault for trying to protect the rights of those other people.
And if any police department or government agency in the United States gets the bright idea to employ this kind of means here against people exercising their constitutional rights, they should think very carefully and deeply and consider that I and many of my patriotic countrymen are very jealous of our rights and also possess automatic weapons. How far do you want to push us, Mr. Man?
The greatest threat to our rights is hypersensitive assholes like yourself who believe that their rights trumps everyone elses - and that threats are the only adequate means of getting a point across.
If it's a choice between a loudspeaker saying "you guys need to leave here" and this, well, then I'd rather have the loudspeaker.
There is a middle ground - you could always have the loudspeaker play this. (If you can't hear this, then you're probably over 30. I'm 36, and I can't hear it. It annoys the @$#! out of those who can hear it, though. I have it bookmarked.:D )
I'm 43 and I can hear it quite clearly - but then I've never been in the habit of wearing earphones or listening to loud music. (OTOH, the range of sounds that I can hear is somewhat wider than the norm, I'm off on the right side of the bell curve somewhere. The other oddity in my hearing is a 'notch' around 400Hz - thanks to a decade in the USN working around equipment powered by 400Hz AC.)
It's as simply as burying the base under about 3 meters of lunar regolith.
Wow, you guys should tell NASA!
There's no need to tell NASA - as the error in your quoted paragraph as compared to my posting is obvious to anyone who can read and think.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/08sep_ra di oactivemoon.htm
Out in deep space, radiation comes from all directions. On the Moon, you might expect the ground, at least, to provide some relief, with the solid body of the Moon blocking radiation from below. Not so.
When galactic cosmic rays collide with particles in the lunar surface, they trigger little nuclear reactions that release yet more radiation in the form of neutrons. The lunar surface itself is radioactive!
So which is worse for astronauts: cosmic rays from above or neutrons from below? Igor Mitrofanov, a scientist at the Institute for Space Research and the Russian Federal Space Agency, Moscow, offers a grim answer: "Both are worse."
So apart from it being quite pointless to have astronauts sitting in an underground bunker, this doesn't work anyway.
When cosmic rays strike the surface of the moon - they produce neutrons. But the astronauts sitting in an underground bunker aren't on the surface are they? Three meters of lunar regolith is more than sufficient to protect from both cosmic radiation and secondary radiation.
The article, especially the portion you quoted, is extremely misleading - as lunar regolith is not radioactive in and of itself. It emits neutrons only when bombarded with cosmic rays - which only penetrate a meter or so. The neutrons themselves only penetrate a meter or so and produce low energy tertiary radiation - which means that three meters (at a minimum) is more quite sufficient shielding for medium length stays (six months or so). If you need to go longer - you merely heap on another meter or two of regolith and you are set.
Really, I don't get why ignorant comments are rated so highly.
The ignorant comment is one that quotes an article out of context that they didn't bother to read and understand the implications of in the first place.
With no magnetic field to shield them what kind of strategies will the base need to use to cope with solar radiation and not have the astronauts fried? Is it as simple as building the base in a crater permanently in shadow?
It's as simply as burying the base under about 3 meters of lunar regolith.
So, you're saying that our space program today is in the same place as the space program in 1956? 'Cos that was 14 years before 1970, but we hadn't even orbited a single tin can.
No - because that's not the whole story. Budget matters too.
Let's face facts: when you announce a 14 year schedule to go to the Moon, you're announcing "We have not intention of going to the Moon."
Whatever happened to "before this decade is out"? Why the hell could we go to the moon almost from scratch in the 1960's and do we need almost 20 years now?
We didn't go to the moon from scratch in the 1960's. By the time Kennedy made his announcement considerable work was already in progress (and had been for some years) on various things that could be repurposed to going to the moon. (Most importantly the F-1 engine and Apollo capsule.) Additionally, NASA of that era had essentially a blank check (the Apollo program consumed on average 1% of the GNP by itself over the period 1963-69), where the NASA of today has live on a much tighter budget - with very little of the precursor work done.
A direct transfer orbit (which is nowhere near a straight line) to Mars is the fastest way to reach Mars, but it's also one of the least fuel efficient ways. For this reason, large payloads such as the orbiter, rover, etc. have been sent to Mars via gravity assisted transfer orbits instead. These usually involve multiple trips around the sun and a couple close passes with other planetary bodies.
Not true at all - every US Mars mission to date with the exception of Mariner 10 has been a direct launch. (What few gravity assist missions the US has flown have been mostly because the mission budget couldn't be stretched to cover the cost of a larger booster.)
Even if we had the money to spare nobody makes rockets big enough to send large payloads to Mars "directly".
Nobody in their right mind would launch a 'large' (presumably manned) Mars payload directly - it would be assembled in and launched from Earth orbit.
Given that there's little chance we'll ever build a rocket big enough to blast off directly for mars,we'll have to assemble the ship that goes to mars in orbit or on the moon. The moon's low-gravity environment may well prove to be an easier and safer environment for assembling an interplanetary space vessel.
No, it would be much harder and much more dangerous. (As well as *much* more expensive.) A launcher than can put 100 tons of Mars bound components into LEO can only put 12 or so tons of the same into Lunar orbit or 5 tons onto the lunar surface - which means many more launches, both of components and of support for the assembly crew. Worse yet - you waste a great deal of mass and fuel on your Mars craft because assembling it on the surface means it has to be strong enough to withstand being assembled and launched from the surface rather than the far more benign assembly and launch enviroment of orbit. (This alone will boost the number of launches by 20-30% *over and above* the already vastly increased number required by moving it to the Moon in the first place.)
And that's just the problems caused by the weight issue - the problems caused by the lunar surface thermal enviroment, potential dust contamination, etc... etc... make the issue even worse.
Just look at the steaming pile of crap that is the ISS and there's your Moon Base Alpha right there. Grandiose dreams and visions reduced to a paltry 3-man crew that spends most of its time trying to stay alive. Rah farkin' rah.
Welcome to the real world of exploration. Its not grandiose, and its not inspiring - its hard and boring. Every schoolkid learns about the Brave and Bold voyages of exploration - but they never learn about the tens and hundreds of voyages that followed that did the real work of exploration. Between that and Star Trek, they end up with a view of exploration that's not so much wrong as it is utterly disconnected from reality.
He was the Russian space program. It all went downhill after that. The US had no way of knowing, of course, but his death signalled the end of the space race and the US had won.
No - the race was over before he died. They lost about 1963-64 when they didn't take the US effort seriously, and didn't get either their large boosters going or mount a serious challenge to Gemini. (This wasn't clear then, and has only really become clear with the information available after the fall of the Soviet Union.)
Even without a heavy lift vehicle, I think Korolev could have beat Von Braun to The Moon. He had the contingency all planned out. This is the plan that the Russian space agency announced last year: take a Souyez up to a space station, refuel it, do a flyby of the Moon. With another refueling in Lunar orbit, you can land and takeoff.
That's a Brave and Bold plan - but it has one gaping hole in it. At the time, the Soviets didn't have a booster big enough to launch the needed TLI stage. (Nor did they have a booster big enough to hoist a space station of any size.) It also has a second, less obvious hole, in that the Soviets had essentially zero experience in rendezvous until the early 70's.
You don't need a heavy launch vehicle to do a Moonshot.. it just makes it a lot easier.
That's a nice theory - but it doesn't work unless you have rendezvous experience and the ability to salvo launches with a very short turnaround. Additionally it leads to a fairly complex mission plan - one with many more chances of failure than using a heavy lift booster. Heavy lift boosters not only make it easier - they make it simpler as well. (And to some degree cheaper - as booster cost scales only very weakly with size.)
I'd like to take this opportunity, after countless Slashdot posts about "Everybody should know how computers work", that perhaps what would be more useful if everybody instead learned a bit about how business works. I think that the OSS community has pooh-poohed the importance of basic business knowledge long enough, as is obvious from the overwhelming non-success of OSS companies.
The OSS community knows quite well how business works. Their failing is that they confuse a philosophy/belief system with business.
At the end of the financial year, there is no profit to be paid out to the owners. It all goes back into the company.
True
Realistically, in this case, you're right... a lot of it goes to salaries. Although, you can't claim to be a "non-profit" company, and pay the CEO a kajillion dollars.
False. There are no limits to the salaries than can be paid to the employees of a non-profit. (Being the CEO or Chairman of a large charity can be quite lucrative.)
Once you're a non-profit, then the IRS watches closely to make sure that people are paid reasonable amounts.
False. The IRS doesn't scrutinize the return of any single non-profit than do any single individual or business.
You can't use it as a tax loophole (otherwise, every company on the planet would be a "non-profit") company.
Partly correct - non profits are chartered, and must operate within that charter. Theu can't be chartered unless they are a (generally speaking) charitable, social (fraternal), or educational organization.
What Wikipedia editors determined wasn't worthy of an entry, Washington Post editors deemed worthy of an article. Much like in the accuracy comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wikipedia has once again demonstrated that they are the ones practicing higher standards.
That would be true - in some world where the deletion or retention of a Wikipedia article is based on rational and objective grounds. The reality is that the process is as much a lottery as anything else - and the game is rigged to serve up the winning numbers to 'well known' editors and contributors willing to outstubborn everyone else.
According to the strictest definition of Wikipedia's notability guides, I'm apparently notable by Google. Searching for my real name shows mostly matches for me, and a few hundred of them at that; that's a specific notability criteria.
Another sure way to get 'noted' at Wikipedia is to be a murder or rape victim and make the front page of CNN.com, even if its only once and only for one day.
A port is, in transportation terminology, a place where commerce occurs and goods or people are transshipped. This isn't a port - it's an amusement park.
Except that I disagree with your statement that it takes only common sense is required. The evidence is not in your favor. If common sense were all that was required, then most folks wouldn't have a problem with this.
Here in the real world, common sense is not all that common.
If you're going to insult me, then you might as well go ahead and do it. What does this say about me that is so bad?
That not only are you utterly clueless - you are proud of being clueless and actively seek ways to make your seem more clueless.
There was nothing to warn the populace at large about - and no actions you needed to take immediately.
Besides, when there are simultaneous attacks on NYC and DC, without anyone knowing when they will end, that's a "local" emergency everywhere in the country.
Within an hour or two, the FAA had all aircraft accounted for and the ongoing ground stop followed by the mass grounding - it was pretty clear the attacks were almost certainly over. Secondly, only in some paranoid fantasy did these attacks constitute some kind of 'emergency' across the entire country.
FCC Part 15 Class B covers: -residential use -digital devices (computing devices/"unintentional radiators")
A wireless door opener is designed for wireless transmission, and is not a computer, therefore it does not enjoy Class B protections.
Here's a clue for you: garage door openers are for residential use and class 'B' protection is not limited to digital devices. In fact, the FCC themselves cite part 15 in this press release about garage door interference.
Building such a large foundation is no small task, it just seems like a waste to dissolve all the work that went into it just because the founders aren't alive.
But foundations have a tendency to lose their way quickly after the benefactors die. There are no reality checks when it comes to a foundation, there is no feedback cycle that keeps them healthy.
Indeed - the Ford Foundation has also come under scrutiny for its donation patterns.
The town I live in suffers greatly because nearly a third of it's downtown real estate is owned by a charitable trust - but the trustees seem to have no ambition beyond getting enough money to pay the property taxes (and their own salaries) each year - plus a minimal amount of income for their nominal purpose. Redevelopment plan after redevelopment plan founders because the trust owns properties in key locations - and they simply aren't interested in playing. (On average, buildings owned by the trust have now stood empty for 15 years.)
So the test was a total success. Because it proved, in undeniable public, that in the event of an emergency, the first responders around essential Air Force bases would be getting jammed by people opening their garage doors.
Nope. Garage door openers are Class B (or Part 15) devices - which mean they are extremely low power. The first responders would only be jammed if someone pointed a garage door opener right at them from less than 30-40 feet away.
These tests are important. That's why I was stunned when I realized (3 years later) that on September 11, 2001, I didn't hear a single transmission of the Emergency Broadcast System. If ever there were an emergency during my lifetime that the public needed broadcasts to know what what was happening and what to do, it was multiple aerial bombings of NYC and the Pentagon. But there was nothing.
Unless you lived in NYC or DC - I'm hardly surpised you didn't hear EPS broadcasts. The EPS is for local use - and thus would not have been activated unless the attacks were local to you.
Technically, the Air Force has the right to the frequency, which it began using nearly three years ago at some bases.
what about all those people who have probably owned garage door openers for much longer than 3 years ago. Oh thats right they are just citizens and have as much right as dogs in the eyes of the government.
Ah yes - the immediate assumption that the citizens are in the right, and the goverment in the wrong. Only in this case, that assumption is wrong.
Garage door openers are what are called class 'B' devices - devices that transmit using extremely low power and are unlicensed and unregulated. Because they are extremely low power, they can pretty much use any band they want. In exchange for this freedom from licensing and regulation however, theres a catch - owners of class 'B' devices may not interfere with legal and/or licensed users of the band in question, and must accept any interference from said legal and/or licensed users of the band in question. This is usually spelled out in tiny, tiny print in the users manual.
That being said - you'd be surprised how much class 'B' (sometimes called 'part 15') devices you have in your house. I bet if you check the manuals for your computer (or motherboard), your stereo, your TV, any radios, etc... I bet they all carry the appropriate disclaimers.
Use a *good* knife, a little common sense, and a little patience and you'll have the contents of the package out in no time with no injury and no damage to the product.
None of which is ever explained or printed on the package. That's the problem. I shouldn't have to be an expert in knives in order to open a package a ink cartidges.
One need not be an expert on knives - you'll note that I did say that common sense was required.
Packages sold to the general public should be openable by the GENERAL PUBLIC.
A good pocketknife can be found at virtually any hardware or sportsmens store. No license or background check is required. There are no restrictions on their ownership.
Your type of condesending attitude is simply unreasonable and rude.
That you regard simple facts of life as 'unreasonable and rude', says much about you - and what it says isn't pretty.
I love it - you are about the 3rd person to excuse the dishonesty of the OP by explaining how dishonest Microsoft is. Yet more proof of why OSS is getting such a bad rep - too often their recourse is to name calling and finger pointing.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine this device would be like existing methodologies - to be used when lesser means have failed. (Yes, I know it doesn't always work this way - but you hear more about the exceptions than the sucesses.)
I find the tone of this paragraph interesting - the protestors are the one interfering with everyone elses right to go about their business unmolested and unimpeded... But its the polices fault for trying to protect the rights of those other people.
The greatest threat to our rights is hypersensitive assholes like yourself who believe that their rights trumps everyone elses - and that threats are the only adequate means of getting a point across.
I'm 43 and I can hear it quite clearly - but then I've never been in the habit of wearing earphones or listening to loud music. (OTOH, the range of sounds that I can hear is somewhat wider than the norm, I'm off on the right side of the bell curve somewhere. The other oddity in my hearing is a 'notch' around 400Hz - thanks to a decade in the USN working around equipment powered by 400Hz AC.)
There's no need to tell NASA - as the error in your quoted paragraph as compared to my posting is obvious to anyone who can read and think.
When cosmic rays strike the surface of the moon - they produce neutrons. But the astronauts sitting in an underground bunker aren't on the surface are they? Three meters of lunar regolith is more than sufficient to protect from both cosmic radiation and secondary radiation.
The article, especially the portion you quoted, is extremely misleading - as lunar regolith is not radioactive in and of itself. It emits neutrons only when bombarded with cosmic rays - which only penetrate a meter or so. The neutrons themselves only penetrate a meter or so and produce low energy tertiary radiation - which means that three meters (at a minimum) is more quite sufficient shielding for medium length stays (six months or so). If you need to go longer - you merely heap on another meter or two of regolith and you are set.
The ignorant comment is one that quotes an article out of context that they didn't bother to read and understand the implications of in the first place.
It's as simply as burying the base under about 3 meters of lunar regolith.
No - because that's not the whole story. Budget matters too.
That's an opinion, not a fact.
We didn't go to the moon from scratch in the 1960's. By the time Kennedy made his announcement considerable work was already in progress (and had been for some years) on various things that could be repurposed to going to the moon. (Most importantly the F-1 engine and Apollo capsule.) Additionally, NASA of that era had essentially a blank check (the Apollo program consumed on average 1% of the GNP by itself over the period 1963-69), where the NASA of today has live on a much tighter budget - with very little of the precursor work done.
Not true at all - every US Mars mission to date with the exception of Mariner 10 has been a direct launch. (What few gravity assist missions the US has flown have been mostly because the mission budget couldn't be stretched to cover the cost of a larger booster.)
Nobody in their right mind would launch a 'large' (presumably manned) Mars payload directly - it would be assembled in and launched from Earth orbit.
No, it would be much harder and much more dangerous. (As well as *much* more expensive.) A launcher than can put 100 tons of Mars bound components into LEO can only put 12 or so tons of the same into Lunar orbit or 5 tons onto the lunar surface - which means many more launches, both of components and of support for the assembly crew. Worse yet - you waste a great deal of mass and fuel on your Mars craft because assembling it on the surface means it has to be strong enough to withstand being assembled and launched from the surface rather than the far more benign assembly and launch enviroment of orbit. (This alone will boost the number of launches by 20-30% *over and above* the already vastly increased number required by moving it to the Moon in the first place.)
And that's just the problems caused by the weight issue - the problems caused by the lunar surface thermal enviroment, potential dust contamination, etc... etc... make the issue even worse.
Welcome to the real world of exploration. Its not grandiose, and its not inspiring - its hard and boring. Every schoolkid learns about the Brave and Bold voyages of exploration - but they never learn about the tens and hundreds of voyages that followed that did the real work of exploration. Between that and Star Trek, they end up with a view of exploration that's not so much wrong as it is utterly disconnected from reality.
No - the race was over before he died. They lost about 1963-64 when they didn't take the US effort seriously, and didn't get either their large boosters going or mount a serious challenge to Gemini. (This wasn't clear then, and has only really become clear with the information available after the fall of the Soviet Union.)
That's a Brave and Bold plan - but it has one gaping hole in it. At the time, the Soviets didn't have a booster big enough to launch the needed TLI stage. (Nor did they have a booster big enough to hoist a space station of any size.) It also has a second, less obvious hole, in that the Soviets had essentially zero experience in rendezvous until the early 70's.
That's a nice theory - but it doesn't work unless you have rendezvous experience and the ability to salvo launches with a very short turnaround. Additionally it leads to a fairly complex mission plan - one with many more chances of failure than using a heavy lift booster. Heavy lift boosters not only make it easier - they make it simpler as well. (And to some degree cheaper - as booster cost scales only very weakly with size.)
ROTFL. Fox is, at best, in a distant second place - as CNN was asking average people to send in photographs/video a decade before Fox even existed.
The OSS community knows quite well how business works. Their failing is that they confuse a philosophy/belief system with business.
True
False. There are no limits to the salaries than can be paid to the employees of a non-profit. (Being the CEO or Chairman of a large charity can be quite lucrative.)
False. The IRS doesn't scrutinize the return of any single non-profit than do any single individual or business.
Partly correct - non profits are chartered, and must operate within that charter. Theu can't be chartered unless they are a (generally speaking) charitable, social (fraternal), or educational organization.
That would be true - in some world where the deletion or retention of a Wikipedia article is based on rational and objective grounds. The reality is that the process is as much a lottery as anything else - and the game is rigged to serve up the winning numbers to 'well known' editors and contributors willing to outstubborn everyone else.
Another sure way to get 'noted' at Wikipedia is to be a murder or rape victim and make the front page of CNN.com, even if its only once and only for one day.
A port is, in transportation terminology, a place where commerce occurs and goods or people are transshipped. This isn't a port - it's an amusement park.
As I said - you live in some ignorant paranoid fantasy land utterly unconnected with reality.
Here in the real world, common sense is not all that common.
That not only are you utterly clueless - you are proud of being clueless and actively seek ways to make your seem more clueless.
For all low end and many mid range openers - yes.
There was nothing to warn the populace at large about - and no actions you needed to take immediately.
Within an hour or two, the FAA had all aircraft accounted for and the ongoing ground stop followed by the mass grounding - it was pretty clear the attacks were almost certainly over. Secondly, only in some paranoid fantasy did these attacks constitute some kind of 'emergency' across the entire country.
Here's a clue for you: garage door openers are for residential use and class 'B' protection is not limited to digital devices. In fact, the FCC themselves cite part 15 in this press release about garage door interference.
Indeed - the Ford Foundation has also come under scrutiny for its donation patterns.
The town I live in suffers greatly because nearly a third of it's downtown real estate is owned by a charitable trust - but the trustees seem to have no ambition beyond getting enough money to pay the property taxes (and their own salaries) each year - plus a minimal amount of income for their nominal purpose. Redevelopment plan after redevelopment plan founders because the trust owns properties in key locations - and they simply aren't interested in playing. (On average, buildings owned by the trust have now stood empty for 15 years.)
Nope. Garage door openers are Class B (or Part 15) devices - which mean they are extremely low power. The first responders would only be jammed if someone pointed a garage door opener right at them from less than 30-40 feet away.
Unless you lived in NYC or DC - I'm hardly surpised you didn't hear EPS broadcasts. The EPS is for local use - and thus would not have been activated unless the attacks were local to you.
Ah yes - the immediate assumption that the citizens are in the right, and the goverment in the wrong. Only in this case, that assumption is wrong.
Garage door openers are what are called class 'B' devices - devices that transmit using extremely low power and are unlicensed and unregulated. Because they are extremely low power, they can pretty much use any band they want. In exchange for this freedom from licensing and regulation however, theres a catch - owners of class 'B' devices may not interfere with legal and/or licensed users of the band in question, and must accept any interference from said legal and/or licensed users of the band in question. This is usually spelled out in tiny, tiny print in the users manual.
That being said - you'd be surprised how much class 'B' (sometimes called 'part 15') devices you have in your house. I bet if you check the manuals for your computer (or motherboard), your stereo, your TV, any radios, etc... I bet they all carry the appropriate disclaimers.
One need not be an expert on knives - you'll note that I did say that common sense was required.
A good pocketknife can be found at virtually any hardware or sportsmens store. No license or background check is required. There are no restrictions on their ownership.
That you regard simple facts of life as 'unreasonable and rude', says much about you - and what it says isn't pretty.
I love it - you are about the 3rd person to excuse the dishonesty of the OP by explaining how dishonest Microsoft is. Yet more proof of why OSS is getting such a bad rep - too often their recourse is to name calling and finger pointing.