Slashdot Mirror


User: Jubedgy

Jubedgy's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
198
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 198

  1. Re:Not as fantastic as it seems on Every Satellite Tracked In Realtime Via Google Earth · · Score: 1

    In fact, you need to six variables (state vectors, classical orbital elements, etc...) to define an orbit. The standard distribution format is the two line element (TLE).

  2. Re:Bacchus Obama is still part of the problem... on Obama Answers Science Policy Questionnaire · · Score: 1

    I completely agree with your sentiment. The big problem preventing that from happening, as I see it, is the federal highway system. The states can't afford maintenance on their own so they can be forced into submission with the threat of a loss of federal funds (the typical example is MADD lobbying to raise the drinking age via the National Minimum Drinking Age Act).

  3. Re:Can we put the experience factor to rest? on McCain Picks Gov. Palin As Running Mate · · Score: 0

    Except an important fact is that the Dems are trying to elect someone as president who has little experience, while the Reps are placing their low-experience candidate in the #2 slot. Last I checked, people elect the presidential candidate to be the president vice electing the vice presidential candidate to be the president.

    People make a big deal of McCain's age, but the inexperienced Palin will see the presidency only on the chance that McCain dies whereas the inexperienced Obama has 100% chance to be president if elected.

  4. Re:Can we put the experience factor to rest? on McCain Picks Gov. Palin As Running Mate · · Score: 1

    And that person should be John McCain, who thiks people who make less than 5 million dollars/year aren't rich, and has so many houses he can't remember how many he has? Not exactly someone who's "one of us".

    When McCain said his 5 million thing during the Saddleback Church event he was making a joke while trying not to define who is rich or not. You accused the GP of not researching while you make the same mistake. It's good to see hypocrisy is still alive and well on these forums!

  5. Re:This is actually great on Iran Announces Manned Space Mission Plans · · Score: 1

    Not many countries will have 30-50 warheads and a viable delivery platform available in the next 50 years. The US does, Russia does (despite their recent SLBM test failures), Britain, France, and that's about it. China, Israel, Pakistan and the other countries have limited warheads but lack capable ballistic missile systems.

    There are doubts whether North Korea actually has nukes, however China provides the kind of protection you're talking about. As we saw in the Korean War, N.K. provides a buffer for China...and any attack on Kim Jong Il would likely result in China responding, possibly with their nukes.

  6. Re:This is actually great on Iran Announces Manned Space Mission Plans · · Score: 1

    MAD only applies if you have the weapons and means to completely decimate a country. Russia and the USA are currently the only countries that really have the capability to do that. Iran, having one or two first generation ICBMs and a few tens of warheads could not begin to really threaten the US, especially as our ballistic missile defense capability improves.

  7. Re:Space X on Iran Announces Manned Space Mission Plans · · Score: 1

    Trick question: they didn't actually manage to successfully launch it. Unless you count the launch in 2005 which was a Russian rocket. Though Iran claims it was successful, I haven't seen any footage of the success. That, coupled with the reports from USN and USAF assets in the area paints a bleak picture for that poor satellite.

    But hey, it's not that hard...it's just rocket science!

  8. Re:Stupid Question... on Why Shoot Down a Satellite? Analyzing an Analysis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wait, are you talking about the Chinese shot or the US shot? The debris field from the US shot was centered around 130 miles up (209 Km) in a rapidly decaying orbit, where the Chinese shot was about 500 miles up (804 Km) in a stable polar orbit (IIRC). The US debris field has disappeared, burned up in the atmosphere, while the Chinese debris field is still out there and will remain so for many, many years.

  9. Re:How? on USAF Counter-Terror Funds Buy "Comfort Capsules" · · Score: 4, Informative

    Coming up on the end of my 7th year in the Navy, and I can't recall any instances of religious discrimination. I'm an agnostic myself, and in my experience people just "do" (ie, complain about) their jobs regardless of their affiliation with Atheism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, Wicca, etc...

    Personally, I found the evidence presented in that article to be fairly weak. When asked to sit somewhere else at Thanksgiving, was it because he was being obnoxious about his belief rather than just sitting there silently while other people did their thing? How is being asked if he believed in Jesus after a near death experience evidence of discrimination?

    I've had hours and hours of training in religious tolerance and whatnot, I can't imagine that the Army is much different. But this is America, so if people want to make fun of his atheism, he's more than welcome to make fun of their prostrations to FSM so long as it does not affect anyone's job, evidence of which I did not see in that article.

  10. Re:WTFOMGBBQ? on USAF Counter-Terror Funds Buy "Comfort Capsules" · · Score: 1

    The Commander in Chief is the president, a civilian. He has ultimate control over the military. Congress controls the purse strings of the federal government, but that is usually limited to giving the DoD such and such amount with a portion of that earmarked for, say, ship building or aircraft acquisition. They also decide when to promote flag officers.

    Post WWII, I'd say Adm. Rickover is the only one who really had any completely autonomous control of any part of the military. He had his little fiefdom in the Nuclear Navy, but after he left the Submarine Mafia has slowly been losing control. IMHO, it's more a case of the tail starting to wag the dog as 50 years of bureaucratic inertia has built up.

  11. Re:Some intelligent conversation on Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles · · Score: 1

    And the type of alarmism displayed above is ridiculous. The very fact that we *know* about the incidents above indicates that there is healthy oversight in the nuclear power industry. The design of modern plants is such that they will fail safe. Operators are trained for many, many hours to follow correct procedures and what to do in the event of a casualty. Every minor incident causes a critique which is turned into a lesson learned for the entire industry.

    Any dose of ionization radiation does raise the probability of cancer, however the radiation received by the vast majority of workers at nuclear plants comes from natural sources (cosmic radiation, the sun, Rn-223) and amounts to ~300 mrem per year (if I remember correctly).

    "There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder."

    Statistically, I as a radiation worker am more likely to die from being hit by a car you drive then I am to get cancer from the normal ionizing radiation received at my job. Deterministic limits do exist to prevent receiving a dose that can cause immediate effects on tissue. Stochastic limits do exist to reduce the potential for biological effects over time to what amounts to an insignificant level when compared to the rest of the dangers of the modern world.

    Frankly, I'm more worried about a misinformed mob storming my plant and lynching me than I am about working there.

  12. Re:Carriers, so big, so beautiful, so dead on Chinese Sub Pops Up Amid US Navy Exercise · · Score: 1

    Doom and gloom put out by main stream media. Notice how violence has dropped off to the lowest level in 21 months or so and it's not getting reported as much as when car bombs are going off.

  13. Re:The truth hurts. on NASA Knows How To Party · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Query: How does paying welfare to someone who has no intention of ever being productive make make them more valuable? By keeping them alive to leech more money?

    I'd rather my tax money go towards throwing parties for NASA employees than towards food stamps for joe-blow white trash McFatty who uses them to buy cigarettes and alcohol on the way to the unemployment line to pick up his (or her) check for being worthless.

  14. Re:Ok, someone explain it to me on NSSO on Space Based Solar Power · · Score: 5, Informative

    Portability and extensibility. The sun provides, about 1367 W/m^2 in space (courtesy, Space Mission Analysis and Design third edition, page 432) and about 250 W/m^2 on the Earth's surface (FTFA). In any case...

    Portability:

    By using an orbital energy collection system, you can simply re-route the beam to any place on the planet within the system's FOV...done right, you can get full 4*pi sr coverage of the Earth 24/7. Design a portable ground station, and you can provide power to a disaster area that has been removed from the rest of the power grid (paraphrased directly FTA).

    Extensibility:

    If, once in place and a standard orbital collection platform design has been established, more power is required, simply launch the spare unit. Proper formation flying techniques (something currently at about the cutting edge of orbital design) should allow the new unit to 'hook in' to the system to boost the amount of available power. This may be in the article, I have not finished reading it yet.

    The LISA mission provides a pretty good overview of how I see the entire system distributing power from the collectors to the emitters (the things that will transmit the power down to the surface), though I may be totally off base from what the authors have in mind. The LISA mission will consist of three satellites forming an equilateral triangle with leg lengths of 5 million Km shooting lasers at each other. Last time I checked, anyway.

    It is currently not economical, nor is it really achievable yet. I encourage you to at least browse through the article as it does discuss some of your questions in a more cogent manner than I have.

  15. Re:How Do I Find A Dark Place on Making War On Light Pollution · · Score: 1

    1. Buy a sailboat
    2. Sail out to the middle of an ocean (Pacific, Atlantic, etc...)
    3. Wait for a cloudless night with no moon.
    4. Lie down and be amazed!
    5. ...
    6. Profit!

    (and if you bring a sextant and an almanac with you, you can work on your celestial navigation to boot)

  16. Re:LOAD = on Spider-Like Catamaran Travels 5,000 Miles On One Tank · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Possibly, but doubtful. IANANA (Naval Architect) but I do have a fair amount of sailing experience. The center of effort looks like it would be very high above the water, so I think you'd have a hard time bringing the center of gravity down far enough to make the boat safe in heavy weather.

    Of course, I tend to keep a wary eye on those multi-hulled sailboats when the weather gets rough since they have a tendency to flip if you aren't careful (and a 50-60 foot catamaran is not something you can right very easily by yourself!).

  17. Re:This is why there are legitimate concerns on Nuclear Info Kept From Congress and the Public · · Score: 1

    There once was a guy named Hyman Rickover who thought putting reactors into ships was a good idea. He formed Naval Reactors, and gave it such a sense of accountability with itself that every single operator hates it to death. But it provided the basis for the US Navy to have a stellar safety record WRT to running nuclear reactors. Continual training, good design, and smart operation pretty much ensures things should stay that way for a while yet.

    And these are with relatively compact and dangerous highly enriched cores. The civilian cores are much safer (and a good portion of nuke workers are ex-navy to boot). Things are very transparent in the nuke power industry, and though mistakes get made every now and then, they get corrected and reported in a timely manner. Can you name the last major incident in the US? The only one I can think of off-hand is Three Mile Island, and the body count from that was projected to be (IIRC) a grand total of 1 (based on the statistics of exposure causing cancer etc...etc...).

    I'll take your word for the UK nuclear power safety situation, but I am pretty much satisfied with it in the US.

  18. Re:Since when... on Verizon Claims Free Speech Over NSA Wiretapping · · Score: 1

    Correct, from what I understand corporations have no natural rights as they are not 'natural' people. I couldn't give you any specifics, but I'm pretty sure that case law and congressional acts are the main source of corporate rights (it's a bold statement, I know).

    It's too bad no one has come out with something like a Corporate Rights for Dummies book so that we can get all these questions answered. And maybe get some public support for curtailing those rights, or at least better accountability. Investor penalties for corporate mistakes? Jail for CEOs?

  19. Re:Since when... on Verizon Claims Free Speech Over NSA Wiretapping · · Score: 1

    Corporations are essentially considered people and given similar rights, with a few tweaks here and there. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation).

  20. Re:Bad idea verizon, bad reporting /. on Verizon Claims Free Speech Over NSA Wiretapping · · Score: 1

    I don't understand where the 4th amendment comes in to this case. The 4th protects us from illegal search and seizure by government actors (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a mendment04/01.html#4). In other words, it only applies if you have:

    1. A government actor
    2. On a quest for evidence
    3. In an area where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy

    So by handing over personal information, Verizon violated...what? There may have been a contractual violation where they would agree to keep the personal information in confidence yadda yadda yadda, but that has nothing to do with the 4th amendment.

    Furthermore, one could argue that by handling over personal data, verizon has violated your rights, except that, from my understanding of law, your rights cannot be violated by proxy (you have no 'standing' I think is the term). In other words, if the police illegally search my house and find my big book of people I sell drugs to, they can use that as evidence in trials against everyone in that book EXCEPT me, because my rights, and my rights alone, were violated. No one else named in that book has standing, and therefore the evidence against them was obtained 'lawfully' insofar as the courts would be concerned. Thus, I don't see how verizon could be considered to have violated your right against illegal search and seizure for you.

    So while I agree that the release of personal information by a corporation is an egregious offense and one that is not (or should not) be protected by the 1st amendment, I don't see how the 4th amendment applies at all.

  21. Re:Yet another hypothesis of Three-Dimensional Tim on Six-Dimensional Space-Time Theory · · Score: 1

    "c) As it seems that no known natural process except, perhaps, neutron star or black hole collisions could cause a sufficiently large quantity of matter to undergo a sufficient acceleration to produce graviton bosons in detectable quantities, we shall never easily detect gravity waves (subject only to falsification)."

    Gravitational waves, rather. Gravity waves are an atmospheric phenomenon!

    But what I really wanted to ask: what do you mean by 'easily detect'? Is he suggesting that the LISA mission (http://lisa.nasa.gov, a large interferometer in space) is doomed to failure? Or is he saying that any gravitational waves emitted by a lower energy system (say, the Earth orbiting the Sun) are to minuscule to detect?

  22. Re:it's very simple on Ex-judge Gets 27 Months on Evidence From Hacked PC · · Score: 1

    Maintaining the rights of the general public is paramount to even punishing "high crimes" (by which I assume you mean felonies?). In the US, the 4th amendment Right to Privacy CAN be used to hide possession of child porn. However, all these rights apply to government vs private citizen. If you have a stack of illegal pictures and I break into your house and find those pictures and call the police...you can be prosecuted with those pictures as evidence. But so can I for breaking and entering or whatnot (and we both _should_ be). If the police break into your house without a proper warrant and find your pictures, they cannot be used as evidence against you (in general).

    And that, imho, is how it should be. Bad things and bad people will fall through the cracks in the protection of the greater good of maintaining our full and proper rights.

  23. Re:I thought it was more the pilot... on The US Navy Says Goodbye to the Tomcat · · Score: 1

    Marine pilots go through The Basic School where they learn the basics of ground warfare, but they don't go through infantry training specifically. That is reserved for those Marine officers who go into the infantry (believe it or not!). All Marine officers go through TBS. Every last one as far as I know.

  24. Re:Our government's response to the terrorism prob on Charter Flight Websites / Services? · · Score: 1

    ...but the job of a good leader is to minimize that chance. If you had a kid in the Air Force, would you want him in a crappy plane, relying on mere luck to survive a sortie? Personally, I'd rather have my money spent on some expensive piece of flying techno-wonder that'll improve the chance of survival.

    The era of carpet bombings went out with guided munitions became available. A SEAL team on the ground lazing an important target to be demolished from afar by an F-35...guided artillery rounds...rocket assisted rounds fired from ships 50 miles away...the goal and focus in this day and age is precision strikes causing maximum effect rather than general bombing causing maximum physical damage. It's just somewhat weak against assymetric warefare, unfortunately.

  25. Re:SM4 needed on NASA Hopes Discovery's Move Is Not The Last · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "They handle unmanned space missions here."

    They handle *some* unmanned space missions here. JPL out in Pasadena, handles quite a few unmanned missions as well. There used to be a fairly strong rivalry between the two, in fact, but I believe that that has started to go the way of the Hatfield vs McCoy rivalry.

    The GSFC campus *is* huge, by the way, and the JPL campus is relatively small and on a hill.

    One of the best things about the JWST (James Web Space Telescope, the follow-on to Hubble) is that it will primarily detect infrared frequencies (iirc) so it will be much more suited to do cosmological observations than Hubble. Will we finally nail down the true value of the Hubble Constant? Can we determine the values for the constants of integration from solutions to Einstein's Field Equations? Will Snakes on a Plane truly be the summer blockbuster movie that its name implies?