In ballistic mode, it only fine tunes the trajectory - you can't simply 'fire it in the general direction' and fix things up later. You already have to be in the basket, which isn't that large. The basket is larger for glide mode, but it's still not "in the general direction".
(Hint: Quoting from Wikipedia when you don't know jack shit doesn't make you look intelligent when you're replying to someone who does know what he's talking about.)
Instead, you have to store enough energy to fire the thing. I assure you - punching a hole in a capacitor bank charged up to fire one of these will not merely result in an 'arc flash' hazard...
A capacitor bank can be placed inside armor, or at least inside an enclosed volume, with minimal interfaces - historically, the access needed to transfer ammunition into or out of a magazine has been it's Achilles heel.
Imagine a shell that can adjust it's flight path, even slightly, which means you can fire in the general direction you want, then fine tune the aim in flight. (I assume they don't do that now..)
They don't, and even a railgun projectile probably won't either - because the force required to effect a significant change in trajectory (especially in azimuth) is simply too great.
It's not entirely clear what the advantage of a railgun would be
It means you don't have carry propellant for the shells - propellant that's volatile and dangerous to handle and store. (Historically, the vast majority of Naval ordinance casualties are related to the propellant, not the payload.) You reduce the size, weight, and complexity of the handling path as the size and weight of the round decreases. You also reduce the size of the magazines. (Yes, some of the saved space and weight will be spent on whatever provides the energy for the gun.)
Everyone running old specfialized hardware which is not compatible with windows 7 or later feel the pain of the XP end of life.
That is not the pain of XP EoL, it is the self inflicted torture by those who refuse to use free and open source software.
Bullshit. The free and open source software frequently simply doesn't exist for specialized hardware. Period. Not to mention, I find it very unlikely that free and open source will long continue to support XP - Firefox, for example, has already dropped support for everything prior to SP3.
F/OSS is not the universal panacea it's fanboy's would like to have us believe.
The copyright running out on XP wouldn't solve the problem of a lack of support.
Precisely this, support only happens where there is money or self interest in doing so. And the kind of people who've been coasting along on Microsoft's free patches aren't going to suddenly start paying Bob's Computer Support and Lawn Maintenance for patches just because the code was released into the public domain.
Hopefully, the recommendation engine will work better than Google's current one on YouTube. Yeah, it's a pretty low bar, but Google's record on building useful UI's is... spotty at best.
That's not much help when your rover is 10km from base.
Seriously, there's so much that's damn difficult about Martian exploration that we *know* we don't know.... that I can't help but laugh when people like Elon Musk or Mars One proposes doing it on the cheap and on a short timeline.
However, I thought that Roku (which I don't have) did exactly that - I seem to remember read they had a cross-channel search of some kind (though I would guess it had some limitations). Does anyone know if that's the case?
Roku does have a cross channel search - but it appears there are some channels which it doesn't search or don't allow themselves to be searched. Crunchyroll is one such. Amazon is another.
From TFS: ""Google's Project Ara, an effort to develop a modular smartphone platform, sounded at first as much like vaporware, but Google is actually making it happen. In an upbeat video, Dave Hakkens (the guy who created the Phonebloks design that appears to be the conceptual basis for Project Ara) visited the Google campus to see what progress is being made on the project."
How is this not vaporware? Kewl magnets and flashy app screens barely qualify as sizzle and are nowhere near steak.
I think the point was something more like, "We don't need to worry about genetic diversity if we can just pack embryos." That way, you can staff the spaceship with an appropriate number of people for making the trip and establishing a colony, and then use the embryos once you hit the point of needing genetic diversity.
Which misses the whole point of the article - you need genetic variation in flight, right from day one.
If you are willing to sacrifice the coolant, an atmosphere as feeble as Mars' shouldn't stop evaporative cooling
They've been using water as a sacrificial coolant for decades, the problem on the Martian surface (as opposed to on orbit) is the evaporation rate (and thus the heat carried away) is slowed just enough to require increasing the surface area of the evaporator to inconvenient dimensions. The physical effort expended in working in a space suit produces a lot of heat - and the suits are very well insulated to control the loss of heat.
I wonder how abrasive the dust storms are? There are some pretty decent wind speeds, so you could get away with using big radiators, lightly built, unless the grit eats them.
The windstorms aren't that abrasive, while the wind speeds are high the atmosphere is very tenuous. I think I read somewhere that a 100mph wind on the Martian surface is the equivalent of a 5mph wind on the Earth's surface. (That's why Martian dust is closer to Lunar dust than terrestrial.) The problem is that big (suit) radiators push up the size of the airlocks, cause balance and movement problems, etc.... as it requires some damn big radiators to transfer sufficient heat. (Tenuous atmosphere == very low efficiency transfer.)
ersonally I think it'd make a really interesting reality show. In fact, they could fund the Mars trip like that.
A global hit on the scale of Dr Who would only barely pay the interest and a bit of the principal. You'd need global income on the scale of the Olympics to take a serious bite out of the principal - and you'd need that income for the better part of a decade. Not happening.
It wouldn't be as bad as orbit(where the nominal temperature is also damn low; but where being cooked alive because you've got nothing but black-body radiation to shed heat from your metabolic processes
Actually, being on Mar's surface is worse than being on orbit. On orbit, you can use evaporation to carry away heat (radiation is a minor component). On the surface, the atmosphere is *just* thick enough to screw up evaporation cooling but not thick enough to enable pure convective/conductive cooling.
There's only one piece of advice those who think they may be suffering from anxiety or depression need: Seek professional help as soon as possible, and ignore the ignorant fuckers who tell you to just man up and move on.
The level and type of professional help you'll need may be a counselor, may be full on treatment - but you'll never regret it.
"From the book description and cover, one would get the impression that this is an all new work. But it is not until ones reads the preface, that it is detailed that the book is simple an assemblage of collected articles."
And what's wrong with that? Collections and anthologies have a long a distinguished history in non-fiction as well as fiction - for a reason. Books are far less ephemeral than magazine (and especially web!) articles, and seeing all the material at once or having it collected in one place is often advantageous for study and research.
Sneer because the material is faulty or lacking, or because the author is wrong or clueless. But don't sneer because a book doesn't live up to the very recent conceit that something must be all-new to be of any value.
"Would you like to see a half-million-dollar TV show in which four teams of indie developers and Youtube personalities compete to create amazing videogames?"
No. And I can't imagine what drugs somebody was smoking to even think it was a good idea in the first place. It's boring as hell to watch people talk and pound on keyboards. Essentially internal processes (like the excitement of creating a game) are invisible to the third party observer. There's a reason why reality shows are filled with drama real, fake, and everywhere else on the spectrum between the two extremes. That's what pays the bills.
The production company grasped that, the self absorbed prima-donna "indies" did not. Seriously, when the introductory paragraph and a good chunk of the overall text is the narcissistic writer bragging on himself and how cool the "scene" was... I could see the train wreck coming.
They will fight and bribe all the politicians in city hall to keep their little, very very very high profit turfs.
If you think the taxi business is high profit... you're even more clueless than I thought. (Not realizing that vehicles for hire go back at *least* well into the 19th century was the first.)
"And two seconds later you conflate the terms again."
If you can't tell the difference in meaning by the difference in phraseology, I seriously don't know what to say.
"I didn't notice anyone arguing about a photographers artistic ability except you. The argument seems to be specifically about the technical merits of smaller optics and sensor versus larger optics and sensor."
True, and while that rig will give you higher picture quality (in an absolute objective technical sense), that doesn't necessarily translate into better pictures (in the artistic sense). Many think, as the grandparents seems to, that the former is a synonym for the latter - it isn't. While a better light capturing box will allow the photographer to do more things, ultimately the quality of a picture is set by the eye, hand, and brain... not the box.
There have never been any with a well the size and depth of a camera bayonet (the only real recess looking at my phone now is the silence button, which is too narrow to get much link or other debris)
ROTFLMAO. Let's see... There's the speakers, the earphone jack, the charging jack, the silence switch, the on-off switch... Yeah, there's no real recesses on the iPhone.
Look, I've used MANY external lenses with the iPhone and iPad. It doesn't have to be perfect, a magnet would easily place it within tolerance with great precision
Look, no, a magnet can't - because it can't enforce lateral alignment.
You have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Worse yet, you're too ignorant to realize it.
I don't know why Apple would ever add a bayonet mount to a camera, it really messes with the smooth look they go for and makes for something really easy to break on a camera. Also anything recessed on a camera is going to get really dirty, and be very hard to clean - so this would mess with the camera for most people who never wanted to attach other lenses.
I'm guessing you don't actually own an iPhone and have never actually handled one - they're anything but smooth overall. In particular, there's already protrusions which haven't been easily broken and there's already recesses which haven't shown any propensity to get really dirty.
Instead I would expect them to do something like a magnetic mount - they could easily place a steel ring around the lens opening, even just under the surface, that lenses could clamp onto via magnets. External lenses don't need to be mounted in any particular orientation, just straight over the camera lens...
It's the "straight over" part that's the bitch - because it has to be almost exactly dead over for the attached lens to work. If it's not, your image will be crap. Magnets won't work, they don't provide accurate enough alignment.
Seriously, most of the responses to this article have been nothing but monuments to pure cluelessness.
Slashdot Mirror
In ballistic mode, it only fine tunes the trajectory - you can't simply 'fire it in the general direction' and fix things up later. You already have to be in the basket, which isn't that large. The basket is larger for glide mode, but it's still not "in the general direction".
(Hint: Quoting from Wikipedia when you don't know jack shit doesn't make you look intelligent when you're replying to someone who does know what he's talking about.)
A capacitor bank can be placed inside armor, or at least inside an enclosed volume, with minimal interfaces - historically, the access needed to transfer ammunition into or out of a magazine has been it's Achilles heel.
They don't, and even a railgun projectile probably won't either - because the force required to effect a significant change in trajectory (especially in azimuth) is simply too great.
It means you don't have carry propellant for the shells - propellant that's volatile and dangerous to handle and store. (Historically, the vast majority of Naval ordinance casualties are related to the propellant, not the payload.) You reduce the size, weight, and complexity of the handling path as the size and weight of the round decreases. You also reduce the size of the magazines. (Yes, some of the saved space and weight will be spent on whatever provides the energy for the gun.)
Bullshit. The free and open source software frequently simply doesn't exist for specialized hardware. Period. Not to mention, I find it very unlikely that free and open source will long continue to support XP - Firefox, for example, has already dropped support for everything prior to SP3.
F/OSS is not the universal panacea it's fanboy's would like to have us believe.
Precisely this, support only happens where there is money or self interest in doing so. And the kind of people who've been coasting along on Microsoft's free patches aren't going to suddenly start paying Bob's Computer Support and Lawn Maintenance for patches just because the code was released into the public domain.
Bullshit. Even a single day of reading /. will rapidly disabuse anyone with any intelligence of that notion.
Hopefully, the recommendation engine will work better than Google's current one on YouTube. Yeah, it's a pretty low bar, but Google's record on building useful UI's is... spotty at best.
That's not much help when your rover is 10km from base.
Seriously, there's so much that's damn difficult about Martian exploration that we *know* we don't know.... that I can't help but laugh when people like Elon Musk or Mars One proposes doing it on the cheap and on a short timeline.
Roku does have a cross channel search - but it appears there are some channels which it doesn't search or don't allow themselves to be searched. Crunchyroll is one such. Amazon is another.
From TFS: ""Google's Project Ara, an effort to develop a modular smartphone platform, sounded at first as much like vaporware, but Google is actually making it happen. In an upbeat video, Dave Hakkens (the guy who created the Phonebloks design that appears to be the conceptual basis for Project Ara) visited the Google campus to see what progress is being made on the project."
How is this not vaporware? Kewl magnets and flashy app screens barely qualify as sizzle and are nowhere near steak.
Which misses the whole point of the article - you need genetic variation in flight, right from day one.
They've been using water as a sacrificial coolant for decades, the problem on the Martian surface (as opposed to on orbit) is the evaporation rate (and thus the heat carried away) is slowed just enough to require increasing the surface area of the evaporator to inconvenient dimensions. The physical effort expended in working in a space suit produces a lot of heat - and the suits are very well insulated to control the loss of heat.
The windstorms aren't that abrasive, while the wind speeds are high the atmosphere is very tenuous. I think I read somewhere that a 100mph wind on the Martian surface is the equivalent of a 5mph wind on the Earth's surface. (That's why Martian dust is closer to Lunar dust than terrestrial.) The problem is that big (suit) radiators push up the size of the airlocks, cause balance and movement problems, etc.... as it requires some damn big radiators to transfer sufficient heat. (Tenuous atmosphere == very low efficiency transfer.)
A global hit on the scale of Dr Who would only barely pay the interest and a bit of the principal. You'd need global income on the scale of the Olympics to take a serious bite out of the principal - and you'd need that income for the better part of a decade. Not happening.
Actually, being on Mar's surface is worse than being on orbit. On orbit, you can use evaporation to carry away heat (radiation is a minor component). On the surface, the atmosphere is *just* thick enough to screw up evaporation cooling but not thick enough to enable pure convective/conductive cooling.
Mod parent up!
There's only one piece of advice those who think they may be suffering from anxiety or depression need: Seek professional help as soon as possible, and ignore the ignorant fuckers who tell you to just man up and move on.
The level and type of professional help you'll need may be a counselor, may be full on treatment - but you'll never regret it.
"From the book description and cover, one would get the impression that this is an all new work. But it is not until ones reads the preface, that it is detailed that the book is simple an assemblage of collected articles."
And what's wrong with that? Collections and anthologies have a long a distinguished history in non-fiction as well as fiction - for a reason. Books are far less ephemeral than magazine (and especially web!) articles, and seeing all the material at once or having it collected in one place is often advantageous for study and research.
Sneer because the material is faulty or lacking, or because the author is wrong or clueless. But don't sneer because a book doesn't live up to the very recent conceit that something must be all-new to be of any value.
"Would you like to see a half-million-dollar TV show in which four teams of indie developers and Youtube personalities compete to create amazing videogames?"
No. And I can't imagine what drugs somebody was smoking to even think it was a good idea in the first place. It's boring as hell to watch people talk and pound on keyboards. Essentially internal processes (like the excitement of creating a game) are invisible to the third party observer. There's a reason why reality shows are filled with drama real, fake, and everywhere else on the spectrum between the two extremes. That's what pays the bills.
The production company grasped that, the self absorbed prima-donna "indies" did not. Seriously, when the introductory paragraph and a good chunk of the overall text is the narcissistic writer bragging on himself and how cool the "scene" was... I could see the train wreck coming.
One of Slashdot's most beloved features - the hourly Two Minute Hate.
If you think the taxi business is high profit... you're even more clueless than I thought. (Not realizing that vehicles for hire go back at *least* well into the 19th century was the first.)
"And two seconds later you conflate the terms again."
If you can't tell the difference in meaning by the difference in phraseology, I seriously don't know what to say.
"I didn't notice anyone arguing about a photographers artistic ability except you. The argument seems to be specifically about the technical merits of smaller optics and sensor versus larger optics and sensor."
Look at the title of this subthread. Seriously.
True, and while that rig will give you higher picture quality (in an absolute objective technical sense), that doesn't necessarily translate into better pictures (in the artistic sense). Many think, as the grandparents seems to, that the former is a synonym for the latter - it isn't. While a better light capturing box will allow the photographer to do more things, ultimately the quality of a picture is set by the eye, hand, and brain... not the box.
ROTFLMAO. Let's see... There's the speakers, the earphone jack, the charging jack, the silence switch, the on-off switch... Yeah, there's no real recesses on the iPhone.
Look, no, a magnet can't - because it can't enforce lateral alignment.
You have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Worse yet, you're too ignorant to realize it.
I'm guessing you don't actually own an iPhone and have never actually handled one - they're anything but smooth overall. In particular, there's already protrusions which haven't been easily broken and there's already recesses which haven't shown any propensity to get really dirty.
It's the "straight over" part that's the bitch - because it has to be almost exactly dead over for the attached lens to work. If it's not, your image will be crap. Magnets won't work, they don't provide accurate enough alignment.
Seriously, most of the responses to this article have been nothing but monuments to pure cluelessness.