And no, Earth is not known to have two moons, unless you use a really weird definition of "moon". And if you use that weird definition, it would not be two, it would be three.
The article mentions how this could be useful for "first responders", like, presumably, the emergency workers who arrived at the WTC, where
the police radios couldn't talk to the FD radios.
Might using software radios introduce a new risk for emergency workers?
Might the software include a security hole vandals or terrorists could use to disrupt all the emergency services radios at once?
Yes, the Minister of Information's briefings would have been hilarious if innocent soldiers and civilians weren't dying.
I heard his last claim was that the statue of Saddam the US armored crane pulled down was not actually a statue of Saddam. It was actually just a statue of one of Saddam's body doubles.
I am going to challenge you though. Are you sure the patriots shot down any Scuds this time? Last time the US Army and Raytheon claimed that they intercepted almost 100% of the Scuds. But the truth was that the Patriots were almost completely ineffective, or possibly completely ineffective.
Scuds were poorly built. They fell apart upon re-entry. Falling apart meant multiple targets. Patriot couldn't deal with multiple targets. So long as it thought it hit one, it reported success.
A documentary shown on CBC television's "5th Estate", showed testimony before a US Congressional committee, where Army and Raytheon officials were trying to explain "successful interception". Their definition of a successful interception was if the Patriot's path passed nearby the Scud's path. The Patriot didn't have to destroy the Scud. It didn't even have pass by the Scud's path at the same time as the Scud.
Your tax dollars at work.
Later reports indicate that the missiles fired this time were not Scuds, but were shorter range missiles the Iraqis had. I am going to assume these were taken from the stores they were allowed to retain.
I thought Carter was too honest for politics. But his administration wasn't totally scandal free. He appointed Georgia crony Bert Lance as his director of the OMB. There was some comment when Carter showed him some loyalty instead of distancing himself when a scandal was revealed that eventually lead to Lance resigning.
I figured that Carter's support of him was due to his faith.
I joked that to a guy with a high moral tone like Carter all of us sinners look equally guilty.
There are, in my opinion, some compromises one should not make, even if that choice means the difference between winning and losing.
Note: It is not even as if von Braun was delivered to the rocket
lab every morning in a prison bus, on some kind of day parole.
His Nazi past was totally ignored, and this slave labour connection has only really been talked about in recent years.
Mitnick served his time. And after he got parole, he observed the provisions of his paroled release, and didn't touch a computer until
his parole was over.
As for whether Mitnick was just a script kiddie, and so we can discount his skills, as trivial? I used to think, like a lot of programmers, "those sales guys are paid way too much. All they do is chat up clients, take them to lunch. They have no real skills.
Then I met this smart, pretty gal. I encouraged her to apply for a support job at this small computer consulting company. She was supposed to be the assistant to the vice president who found clients. Well, it turns out that a personable, pretty gal, who actually liked and understood computers, was like a lightning rod for sales. She went to trade shows with her boss, and their booth was flooded with prospects.
They had to double the size of their programming team during the first eight months she was there.
What happened next? Her 40-something bosses kept promising that they would make sure she saw some of the commissions, "as soon as you go on a 'closing call'." But they never took her on these closing calls. Relations became strained, and she ended up getting fired. After she was fired, they hired a team of six people to try and replace her. It didn't work, and they had to lay off all those extra programmers they hired.
My analysis? [1] Yes, sales skills have value, and, if the right person can require a doubling of the size of the programming team, then that person is worth a princely salary. [2] Her 40-something bosses preferred to have their business shrink by half than acknowledge that a 25 year-old, with little real experience, could do as well in 8 months as they had in the previous 15 years.
What does this story have to do with Mitnick? Even if, as some claim, he was only a social engineer, with no technical skills, I think it is foolhardy to discount the importance of those skills.
I agree 100% and make a comparison with Werner Von Braun...
Here is one important difference between Mitnick and von Braun.
Mitnick was charged, and convicted for his crimes. And he then
served his time, and served his parole. Von Braun was never even
charged.
What is the phrase Americans use? Mitnick "paid his debt to society."
As for the deaths von Braun was responsible for? Some of the later
correspondents in this thread are allowing him the defense Tom Lehrer suggested in his satirical song,
"
Ze go up in the air, but where they come down, 'Zat's not my department!' say Werner von Braun."
Von Braun wasn't just in charge of a big research project. He was also a Nazi party member. I have heard people defend his Nazi party membership. They say something like this, "C'mon, he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to build rockets."
Well, von Braun wasn't just a Nazi. He oversaw the construction of the rockets too. And, as such, he was responsible for the employment of
slave labor.
The Nazis held captive members of ethnic groups they didn't like, political prisoners, and homosexuals, and they worked them to death.
15,000 slave labourers worked in von Braun's factories
I heard.
"Von Braun's complicity in Nazi atrocities is less clear, Neufeld said. But there is at least one document _ a letter _ in which von Braun discusses a trip to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he apparently spoke to the commandant about obtaining more skilled laborers to use at Mittelwerk."
We don't use gas turbines because they require (again) heat exchangers to be most efficient, and (for vehicles) nobody's come up with a design which isn't either too bulky or loses too much efficiency to leakage; for road vehicles, turbines remain the province of superchargers, not the main power producers.
I am not trying to challenge you. I'd really like to know. Why does the M1 Abrams tank use a turbine? And if there is a good reason for it doing so, why doesn't the M2 Bradley AIFV? I know they use the same fuel.
(I have heard the exhaust from an Abrams can be so hot that if it is trying to hide in undergrowth, the exhaust can ignite a brush fire.)
I thought the article was trying to distinguish the Wankel from this engine, implying the Wankel wasn't truly as rotary as this one.
It said the Wankel was inherently vibration prone. I tried to figure out why that would be. The Wankel piston is like a triangular spirograph. Its edges sweep out a figure eight shaped cavity. I could see how the mass of the piston sweeping out first one lobe of the figure eight, and then the other, would cause the engine to vibrate.
This engine has the pistons rotate around their axis of rotation without having the piston's mass swing from side to side.
Does this really make it more rotary than a Wankel?
Re:It's great they're beginning to research hydrat
on
Gas Goes Solid
·
· Score: 1
Make that 11,000 gigatons. There is also a significant amount of
Clathrate locked up in the Permafrost. The cited article says there is more than twice as much energy locked up in Clathrates than in all other fossil fuels put together.
look - the only way i'm going to buy any new electronic equiptment, particularly stuff that relies on the inherently insecure TCP protocol is if it implements some of the new TCP security features.
Specifically, does anyone know if this supports RFC 3514?
y is this funny?
Hey moderators, would you please consider modding Ender Wiggins post up?
Isn't it a good point? Isn't TCP potentially vulnerable to packet sniffing?
Why is this funny, asks an anonymous coward? Because the link to RFC 3514 is a link to an April Fool's spoof.
That's disingenuous. If he were writing a book about what happened around that time in the valley, then and only then would he have the obligation to mention what may or may not have happened.
I didn't say he had an obligation to give the history of his family's terrible contact with the natives in his dedication.
How do you think Nicole Simpson's family would feel if O.J. wrote a book, and wrote a loving dedication to Nicole at the front of it?
Or take Thomas Jefferson, who modern DNA testing now seems to confirm, kept his wife's half-sister, and body-servant, as his concubine, after his wife's death. Wouldn't it be unseemly if he dedicated a book to her for her "faithful service", without mentioning she was a slave?
Maybe Orson Scott Card didn't know the history of this controversy? This is hard to imagine. There is a chain of grocery stores here in Canada, called "I.G.A." -- short for "Independent Grocer's Alliance". But every time my bosses's children were with me, and we drove past the I.G.A. in Cardston, her kids said, "I.G.A., do you know what that means? It means 'Indians Go Away'." If Card is in contact with any of his relatives back in Cardston I find it hard to imagine he could be unaware of this tension.
It looks like he just doesn't care. And I maintain that is insensitive.
I have a copy of a really cool book, by Canadian Science journalist, called "Thesizesaurus". It is intended to be a kind of thesaurus for sizes. It talks about the compromises one needs to make to bring quantities from science into a everyday context ordinary readers can understand.
25 or 30 years ago, when Pulsars were a relatively new phenomenon, I attended a presentation at the old McLaughlin Planetarium, where the presenter gave a very memorable presentation. He was explaining how the Crab Nebula could contain a pulsar, without us ever noticing.
He projected a flashing light on to the simulcrm of the sky. And he had a tone generator generating ticks in synch with the flashing light. Then he turned up the frequency of the flashes. The flashes all blended into one continuous light long before the ticks became indistinguishable. My recollection was that it took about three times the frequency before the ticks blended together. Okay -- it made an impression on me.
Well... when you ever wanted the answer to Fermi's Paradox ("if they existed, they'd be here") - this may well be it. More-or-less regular events like this, purging a sphere of maybe 5000 LY clean of any higher forms of life may explain why we never see any traces of other advanced lifeforms
Stars aren't all packed at the same density in our galaxy, or others. Where stars are less dense, these purging events would be less common, and Fermi's aliens would have a chance to continue existing. Of course, in that case, they'd be there not here.
But how did you come up with the 5,000 lightyear figure? I went to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and looked for
eta Carinae. This helped me find this
link to a 1999 note on hypernovae. It says a hypernova would be about ten times more destructive than a supernova. IIRC a supernova's civilization killing ability is confined to a sphere 30 to 100 lightyears in diameter. Do you have a more recent, or alarming, link to the destructive power of a hypernova?
When we are a bit older we can impress our juniors by calling their PDAs
"dynabooks".
Grandpa! Why do you always call my PDA a "dynabook"?
"Well sonny, long before you were born, there was a really smart guy named, Alan Kay, and he was the first person to think up a powerful, portable computer a kid could draw on, and ask questions."
How? THOUSANDS of people died in the incident he mentions. Yet all he mentions is his own immediate ancestor. Thousands of people resent the role they imagine his ancestors played in the loss of their relatives and the loss of their land.
Yes, you are correct, when you say he can choose to ignore the feelings of those who feel his ancestors robbed them. You suggest that no one can make him care over this historical injustice. And I would say this is, by definition, insensitive.
...Me telling people about my anime web-site in virtually every post I make to Slashdot, I guess, falls into the category of spam...
Are you sure? This classic
definition of SPAM is the one I like best -- SPAM explained in simple sentences.
I just checked out half a dozen of your comments. Half didn't mention your site at all. And others mentioned it only in passing, sometimes in an amusing way. I don't think this makes you a spam artist.
And I disagree with whatever moderator moderated your comment "off-topic".
There is a small town in Southern Alberta called Cardston. I lived there for a while, when I worked on the
neighbouring Reserve(*). I didn't realized there was a connection with Orson Scott Card.
Maybe I should have. I knew Card was a Mormon. So was the founder of Cardston, one Joseph Ora Card. His little homestead is preserverd at the southern end of town. There is a little plaque there, saying he was the first Mormon to leave Utah and settle in Canada.
Orson Scott Card's book "Seventh Son" takes place around 200 years ago in a parallel universe where magic works -- little magic -- not world-shaking magic. In the sequel his little hero spends some time learning native magic.
And Scott dedicates that book to an ancestor of his, whose life was saved by natives on the Canadian frontier.
Well, I heard the native's version of this story too.
First a little context. The Blood Reserve is about 600 square miles. Their own name for themselves is Kainai, which translates as "Many Cheifs". They were part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. They were one of the Plains Nations which had depended on the Buffalo.
Well, their version is that Joseph Ora Card arrived on the land Treaty Seven had granted them, and threw himself on their mercy. His wives and children were ill. Would the natives feed them? Would the natives let them stay, over the winter, in this little valley?
The elders were compassionate. They let Card, and his sick family, stay over for the winter.
That winter they were struck by a horrible smallpox epidemic. Two thirds of the natives died that winter. They had more serious problems to deal with than to wonder why the Card family had not left, as they had promised.
In their version Card wrote to Utah, and invited all his friends to come join him.
The Oldman River forks just upstream from Lethbridge.
The natives oral tradition is that Treaty Seven granted them all the land between the two branches of the Oldman River,
to the border with the USA. There is a Blackfoot Reservation just the other side of the border there. Is possession 90% of the law? Mormons settled all the land south of Cardston, to the US border.
The natives believe that Card stole a big strip of their land.
Personally I think Orson Scott Card was extremely insensitive to write that dedication, given the animosity between the natives and the Mormons in that part of the world.
What is the genocide connection? Where did the natives get smallpox? Might it have been from Card's family? His wives and children were sick. That would certainly be tragic. In fairness, there are other theories of how the natives came to become infected. Still Joseph Ora Card doesn't seem to have hesitated to take advantage of the natives who had been kind to him.
(*) The Canadian government calls them "reserves". The American government calls them "reservations".
In addition to the challenges Smidge204 has to your assertions I would question your assertion about heat. Metals are excellent conductors of heat.
If I were building a wooden, ceramic, or plastic case I would line it with window screen, or reasonable equivalent, to sheild the rest of the world from the radio-frequency interference the computer generated.
I bought a waity-waity-wait IBM-XT clone in 1985 from my buddy. He had been forced to build a faraday cage to surround it, because it was noisy, both acoustically and electronically.
He built it out of particle board, lined with alumninum foil, lined with foam.
Heating was a serious problem. The foam insulation that lined the faraday cage, held in place a one litre coffee can, with both ends removed. Fitted over the exhaust fan from the power supply it was just the right size to form a snorkel to direct the exhaust air out of the cage. But on a couple of occasions the can got knocked out of position. On those occasions when I opened the faraday cage a few hours later, it was like an oven.
The clone still worked, but some of the components had scorch marks, and my Six-pack-plus card is noticably warped.
If you want to abandon those turns, then how else do you suggest slowing down the orbiter? I think you are maybe trying to compare this to an airplane and there is little comparison.
What role do the "S" turns play in dissipating the orbiter's kinetic energy?
My understanding was that the orbiter dissipated energy by presenting its heat-sheilded belly to the upper atmosphere. My understanding was that there was a narrow envelope of relatively stable orientations where the orbiter could safely bare its belly, without risking tumbling out of control.
So, how are the turns executed? Yes, I know that the upper atmosphere is too thin for the shuttle to fly like an airplane. But my understanding, and Ron Dittemore's comments at that press conference I mentioned seemed to verify this, was that some limited amount of steering was possible by changing the orientation within that narrow envelope. Ah, "pitch". Maybe "pitch" is what NASA types call it.
Dittemore said if the orbiter was experiencing unusual drag it would first use its elevons to try to compensate, and, if that didn't prove sufficient, it would use its control jets.
The first sign of damage that was noticed that day was that the left wing was experiencing unusual drag.
The orbiter's control programs tried to compensate for this drag.
In terms of extending Columbia's working life right up to the 100 missions it was originally specified to fly, this, on the surface, this seems the correct approach. Under normal circumstances making sure wear and tear is spread evenly on both wings makes sense. That lazy left wing was holding back. The control program worked to plunge the left wing into the full plasma stream.
Under the abnormal circumstance, where it can be recognized that a wing is damaged, it seems to me this was the wrong thing to do. It seems to me that the control program should have adopted a descent profile which put as much of the thermal burden as possible on the intact wing. And that means abandoning the "S" turns, and turning in just a single direction.
The most recent reports seem to indicate that Columbia lost a large, essential, chunk of the leading edge tile, and that nothing could save her. But there are three remaining orbiters, and they will probably be put to work again.
I am not an American. My tax dollars don't pay for this. But, I'd sure like to see the orbiters programmed to recognize damaged wings, and adapt to the situation.
Re:More questions than answers
on
Clothes That Kill
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Do these molecules ever come unanchored, becoming little fat-seeking molecules of death?
The article said that the "daggers" work the same way as free-floating detergent. I assumed this meant the broken or dislodged "daggers" were no more toxic than regular detergent residue.
How many washing does it take to dislodge enough of these daggers that they don't keep your clothes free of fatty microbes?
Ha ha. April fools, go to page 4 of the.pdf "white paper".
Says this is a "gas-dynamic" laser. (Wazzat?) It throws in buzzwords, like "aerospike".
The laser is triggered with a release of hot gas. So, what is the thermal signature of this weapon? The GI is carrying around a reservoir of gas at 2173 degrees Kelvin. The nuclear power source is pouring out heat at 104kilowatts. How much waste heat is that? Let's see, the bulb in my desklamp is 60 watts.
Ouch, its hot!
And this laser's power system is continually pouring out 104kw? Why that is only a bit more than 1000 times as much.
Better issue that GI with an asbestos uniform, as all the undergrowth they try to hide behind is probably going to burst into flame.
Polonium's half-life is 138 days. So far only produced in microgram quantitites.
Slashdot Mirror
And no, Earth is not known to have two moons, unless you use a really weird definition of "moon". And if you use that weird definition, it would not be two, it would be three.
Somebody mod this up...
Also reported in the RISKS digest.
Might using software radios introduce a new risk for emergency workers? Might the software include a security hole vandals or terrorists could use to disrupt all the emergency services radios at once?
Hmm. Google isn't helping today. My vague recollection was allegations of insider trading...
I heard his last claim was that the statue of Saddam the US armored crane pulled down was not actually a statue of Saddam. It was actually just a statue of one of Saddam's body doubles.
I am going to challenge you though. Are you sure the patriots shot down any Scuds this time? Last time the US Army and Raytheon claimed that they intercepted almost 100% of the Scuds. But the truth was that the Patriots were almost completely ineffective, or possibly completely ineffective.
Scuds were poorly built. They fell apart upon re-entry. Falling apart meant multiple targets. Patriot couldn't deal with multiple targets. So long as it thought it hit one, it reported success.
A documentary shown on CBC television's "5th Estate", showed testimony before a US Congressional committee, where Army and Raytheon officials were trying to explain " successful interception ". Their definition of a successful interception was if the Patriot's path passed nearby the Scud's path. The Patriot didn't have to destroy the Scud. It didn't even have pass by the Scud's path at the same time as the Scud.
Your tax dollars at work.
Later reports indicate that the missiles fired this time were not Scuds, but were shorter range missiles the Iraqis had. I am going to assume these were taken from the stores they were allowed to retain.
I figured that Carter's support of him was due to his faith. I joked that to a guy with a high moral tone like Carter all of us sinners look equally guilty.
Note: It is not even as if von Braun was delivered to the rocket lab every morning in a prison bus, on some kind of day parole. His Nazi past was totally ignored, and this slave labour connection has only really been talked about in recent years.
Mitnick served his time. And after he got parole, he observed the provisions of his paroled release, and didn't touch a computer until his parole was over.
As for whether Mitnick was just a script kiddie, and so we can discount his skills, as trivial? I used to think, like a lot of programmers, "those sales guys are paid way too much. All they do is chat up clients, take them to lunch. They have no real skills. Then I met this smart, pretty gal. I encouraged her to apply for a support job at this small computer consulting company. She was supposed to be the assistant to the vice president who found clients. Well, it turns out that a personable, pretty gal, who actually liked and understood computers, was like a lightning rod for sales. She went to trade shows with her boss, and their booth was flooded with prospects. They had to double the size of their programming team during the first eight months she was there.
What happened next? Her 40-something bosses kept promising that they would make sure she saw some of the commissions, "as soon as you go on a 'closing call'." But they never took her on these closing calls. Relations became strained, and she ended up getting fired. After she was fired, they hired a team of six people to try and replace her. It didn't work, and they had to lay off all those extra programmers they hired.
My analysis? [1] Yes, sales skills have value, and, if the right person can require a doubling of the size of the programming team, then that person is worth a princely salary. [2] Her 40-something bosses preferred to have their business shrink by half than acknowledge that a 25 year-old, with little real experience, could do as well in 8 months as they had in the previous 15 years.
What does this story have to do with Mitnick? Even if, as some claim, he was only a social engineer, with no technical skills, I think it is foolhardy to discount the importance of those skills.
You can use this kind of reasoning to rationalize any moral compromise.
Here is one important difference between Mitnick and von Braun. Mitnick was charged, and convicted for his crimes. And he then served his time, and served his parole. Von Braun was never even charged.
What is the phrase Americans use? Mitnick "paid his debt to society."
As for the deaths von Braun was responsible for? Some of the later correspondents in this thread are allowing him the defense Tom Lehrer suggested in his satirical song,
Von Braun wasn't just in charge of a big research project. He was also a Nazi party member. I have heard people defend his Nazi party membership. They say something like this, "C'mon, he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to build rockets."
Well, von Braun wasn't just a Nazi. He oversaw the construction of the rockets too. And, as such, he was responsible for the employment of slave labor.
The Nazis held captive members of ethnic groups they didn't like, political prisoners, and homosexuals, and they worked them to death. 15,000 slave labourers worked in von Braun's factories I heard.
This site says one of his plants contained a concentration camp that employed 40,000 slave laborers.
I am not trying to challenge you. I'd really like to know. Why does the M1 Abrams tank use a turbine? And if there is a good reason for it doing so, why doesn't the M2 Bradley AIFV? I know they use the same fuel.
(I have heard the exhaust from an Abrams can be so hot that if it is trying to hide in undergrowth, the exhaust can ignite a brush fire.)
It said the Wankel was inherently vibration prone. I tried to figure out why that would be. The Wankel piston is like a triangular spirograph. Its edges sweep out a figure eight shaped cavity. I could see how the mass of the piston sweeping out first one lobe of the figure eight, and then the other, would cause the engine to vibrate.
This engine has the pistons rotate around their axis of rotation without having the piston's mass swing from side to side.
Does this really make it more rotary than a Wankel?
Make that 11,000 gigatons. There is also a significant amount of Clathrate locked up in the Permafrost. The cited article says there is more than twice as much energy locked up in Clathrates than in all other fossil fuels put together.
Hey moderators, would you please consider modding Ender Wiggins post up? Isn't it a good point? Isn't TCP potentially vulnerable to packet sniffing?
Why is this funny, asks an anonymous coward? Because the link to RFC 3514 is a link to an April Fool's spoof.
I didn't say he had an obligation to give the history of his family's terrible contact with the natives in his dedication.
How do you think Nicole Simpson's family would feel if O.J. wrote a book, and wrote a loving dedication to Nicole at the front of it?
Or take Thomas Jefferson, who modern DNA testing now seems to confirm, kept his wife's half-sister, and body-servant, as his concubine, after his wife's death. Wouldn't it be unseemly if he dedicated a book to her for her "faithful service", without mentioning she was a slave?
Maybe Orson Scott Card didn't know the history of this controversy? This is hard to imagine. There is a chain of grocery stores here in Canada, called "I.G.A." -- short for "Independent Grocer's Alliance". But every time my bosses's children were with me, and we drove past the I.G.A. in Cardston, her kids said, "I.G.A., do you know what that means? It means 'Indians Go Away'." If Card is in contact with any of his relatives back in Cardston I find it hard to imagine he could be unaware of this tension.
It looks like he just doesn't care. And I maintain that is insensitive.
25 or 30 years ago, when Pulsars were a relatively new phenomenon, I attended a presentation at the old McLaughlin Planetarium, where the presenter gave a very memorable presentation. He was explaining how the Crab Nebula could contain a pulsar, without us ever noticing.
He projected a flashing light on to the simulcrm of the sky. And he had a tone generator generating ticks in synch with the flashing light. Then he turned up the frequency of the flashes. The flashes all blended into one continuous light long before the ticks became indistinguishable. My recollection was that it took about three times the frequency before the ticks blended together. Okay -- it made an impression on me.
Here is the original article, from the Globe and Mail.
Stars aren't all packed at the same density in our galaxy, or others. Where stars are less dense, these purging events would be less common, and Fermi's aliens would have a chance to continue existing. Of course, in that case, they'd be there not here .
But how did you come up with the 5,000 lightyear figure? I went to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and looked for eta Carinae. This helped me find this link to a 1999 note on hypernovae. It says a hypernova would be about ten times more destructive than a supernova. IIRC a supernova's civilization killing ability is confined to a sphere 30 to 100 lightyears in diameter. Do you have a more recent, or alarming, link to the destructive power of a hypernova?
Grandpa! Why do you always call my PDA a "dynabook"?
"Well sonny, long before you were born, there was a really smart guy named, Alan Kay, and he was the first person to think up a powerful, portable computer a kid could draw on, and ask questions."
"Really? Did you know him Grandpa?"
(chuckle) "What do you think?"
How? THOUSANDS of people died in the incident he mentions. Yet all he mentions is his own immediate ancestor. Thousands of people resent the role they imagine his ancestors played in the loss of their relatives and the loss of their land.
Yes, you are correct, when you say he can choose to ignore the feelings of those who feel his ancestors robbed them. You suggest that no one can make him care over this historical injustice. And I would say this is, by definition, insensitive.
Are you sure? This classic definition of SPAM is the one I like best -- SPAM explained in simple sentences.
I just checked out half a dozen of your comments. Half didn't mention your site at all. And others mentioned it only in passing, sometimes in an amusing way. I don't think this makes you a spam artist.
And I disagree with whatever moderator moderated your comment "off-topic".
Maybe I should have. I knew Card was a Mormon. So was the founder of Cardston, one Joseph Ora Card. His little homestead is preserverd at the southern end of town. There is a little plaque there, saying he was the first Mormon to leave Utah and settle in Canada.
Orson Scott Card's book "Seventh Son" takes place around 200 years ago in a parallel universe where magic works -- little magic -- not world-shaking magic. In the sequel his little hero spends some time learning native magic.
And Scott dedicates that book to an ancestor of his, whose life was saved by natives on the Canadian frontier.
Well, I heard the native's version of this story too.
First a little context. The Blood Reserve is about 600 square miles. Their own name for themselves is Kainai, which translates as "Many Cheifs". They were part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. They were one of the Plains Nations which had depended on the Buffalo.
Well, their version is that Joseph Ora Card arrived on the land Treaty Seven had granted them, and threw himself on their mercy. His wives and children were ill. Would the natives feed them? Would the natives let them stay, over the winter, in this little valley?
The elders were compassionate. They let Card, and his sick family, stay over for the winter.
That winter they were struck by a horrible smallpox epidemic. Two thirds of the natives died that winter. They had more serious problems to deal with than to wonder why the Card family had not left, as they had promised.
In their version Card wrote to Utah, and invited all his friends to come join him.
The Oldman River forks just upstream from Lethbridge. The natives oral tradition is that Treaty Seven granted them all the land between the two branches of the Oldman River, to the border with the USA. There is a Blackfoot Reservation just the other side of the border there. Is possession 90% of the law? Mormons settled all the land south of Cardston, to the US border.
The natives believe that Card stole a big strip of their land.
Personally I think Orson Scott Card was extremely insensitive to write that dedication, given the animosity between the natives and the Mormons in that part of the world.
What is the genocide connection? Where did the natives get smallpox? Might it have been from Card's family? His wives and children were sick. That would certainly be tragic. In fairness, there are other theories of how the natives came to become infected. Still Joseph Ora Card doesn't seem to have hesitated to take advantage of the natives who had been kind to him.
(*) The Canadian government calls them "reserves". The American government calls them "reservations".
If I were building a wooden, ceramic, or plastic case I would line it with window screen, or reasonable equivalent, to sheild the rest of the world from the radio-frequency interference the computer generated.
I bought a waity-waity-wait IBM-XT clone in 1985 from my buddy. He had been forced to build a faraday cage to surround it, because it was noisy, both acoustically and electronically.
He built it out of particle board, lined with alumninum foil, lined with foam.
Heating was a serious problem. The foam insulation that lined the faraday cage, held in place a one litre coffee can, with both ends removed. Fitted over the exhaust fan from the power supply it was just the right size to form a snorkel to direct the exhaust air out of the cage. But on a couple of occasions the can got knocked out of position. On those occasions when I opened the faraday cage a few hours later, it was like an oven.
The clone still worked, but some of the components had scorch marks, and my Six-pack-plus card is noticably warped.
What role do the "S" turns play in dissipating the orbiter's kinetic energy?
My understanding was that the orbiter dissipated energy by presenting its heat-sheilded belly to the upper atmosphere. My understanding was that there was a narrow envelope of relatively stable orientations where the orbiter could safely bare its belly, without risking tumbling out of control.
So, how are the turns executed? Yes, I know that the upper atmosphere is too thin for the shuttle to fly like an airplane. But my understanding, and Ron Dittemore's comments at that press conference I mentioned seemed to verify this, was that some limited amount of steering was possible by changing the orientation within that narrow envelope. Ah, "pitch". Maybe "pitch" is what NASA types call it.
Dittemore said if the orbiter was experiencing unusual drag it would first use its elevons to try to compensate, and, if that didn't prove sufficient, it would use its control jets.
The first sign of damage that was noticed that day was that the left wing was experiencing unusual drag.
The orbiter's control programs tried to compensate for this drag.
In terms of extending Columbia's working life right up to the 100 missions it was originally specified to fly, this, on the surface, this seems the correct approach. Under normal circumstances making sure wear and tear is spread evenly on both wings makes sense. That lazy left wing was holding back. The control program worked to plunge the left wing into the full plasma stream.
Under the abnormal circumstance, where it can be recognized that a wing is damaged, it seems to me this was the wrong thing to do. It seems to me that the control program should have adopted a descent profile which put as much of the thermal burden as possible on the intact wing. And that means abandoning the "S" turns, and turning in just a single direction.
The most recent reports seem to indicate that Columbia lost a large, essential, chunk of the leading edge tile, and that nothing could save her. But there are three remaining orbiters, and they will probably be put to work again.
I am not an American. My tax dollars don't pay for this. But, I'd sure like to see the orbiters programmed to recognize damaged wings, and adapt to the situation.
The article said that the "daggers" work the same way as free-floating detergent. I assumed this meant the broken or dislodged "daggers" were no more toxic than regular detergent residue.
How many washing does it take to dislodge enough of these daggers that they don't keep your clothes free of fatty microbes?
Says this is a "gas-dynamic" laser. (Wazzat?) It throws in buzzwords, like "aerospike".
The laser is triggered with a release of hot gas. So, what is the thermal signature of this weapon? The GI is carrying around a reservoir of gas at 2173 degrees Kelvin. The nuclear power source is pouring out heat at 104kilowatts. How much waste heat is that? Let's see, the bulb in my desklamp is 60 watts.
Ouch, its hot!
And this laser's power system is continually pouring out 104kw? Why that is only a bit more than 1000 times as much.
Better issue that GI with an asbestos uniform, as all the undergrowth they try to hide behind is probably going to burst into flame.
Polonium's half-life is 138 days. So far only produced in microgram quantitites.