but it looks like it. First, look up the urban legend about planes exploding like popped balloons if someone fires a gun and it hits the fuselage. Quick answer: They don't.
Next, reread two parts of my "fix it cheap": 1> When did you last hear of an Israeli airliner getting hijacked? and 2> I said "right to keep and bear arms", not guns. When used as such, a knife is a weapon, so is a baseball bat. Any kind of weapon at all in the hands of other passengers would probably have prevented 9/11 from being successful. Knowledge that US citizens routinely go about armed may have even prevented 9/11 from being planned.
Weapons in the hands of law-abiding citizens would reduce crime all over America - including on planes. The reason is because all of the laws taking away weapons from law-abiding citizens have not had any noticeable impact on whether criminals are armed. Disarmament in the US has failed as utterly as Prohibition - but Prohibition was repealed.
The reason the Israelis don't have this trouble is because armed soldiers are on every Israeli flight. And the Israeli army has absolutely no doubts about whether to shoot terrorists.
As for "air marshalls", why do you trust government employees more than law abiding citizens? Because they passed the job-application process for a gov't job? Cuz they went thru a background check? Citizens go thru background checks for guns too. I'm not trying to antogonize you or flame-bait you here - I'm trying to get you to challenge your own assumptions.
A lot of people simply can't afford to hit the road for 4-5 days. In order to get away from a hurricane that's big enough to justify running away, (like Katrina), you must go *hundreds* of miles, and I don't mean 2 or 3 hundred.
A few years back, a hurricane that was Cat 2 when it hit Galveston (near my home), was still a Cat 1 hurricane when it got within a hundred miles of Dallas. (It had a male name, can't remember it - Allen? Daniel?)
And that was Cat ONE. Katrina, if it had followed the same path, would have been within a hundred miles of Dallas when the eye crossed the coast at Galveston. People see the flat weather map, and don't remember that the tropics are distorted to look smaller and the northern parts (like most of US and Europe) look larger. I've seen hurricane maps where the entire Gulf of Mexico was one big hurricane.
The hundreds of thousands of poor people in urban areas on the Gulf Coast can't go to Colorado for a week; that's what "poor" means.
There were LOTS of warnings - everyone knew it was coming. You were either ready to stay, or ready to go. If you weren't ready, life sucked, and maybe you died.
That's my point. You won't have to, cuz I've already been thru a Cat 5 hurricane. With the proper preparation, it's not a problem. Your house must be built right, surrounded by other houses and trees and strong fences. You stock up like the local news folks tell you too - but about triple; and a portable generator.
During the off season, build 2*4 reinforced, 3/4 inch plywood stormshutters, about 6" bigger than yer windows; so they fit snugly into the window hole in the brickwork...your house is brick, right? The kind without wheels?
Use 1/4" rebar, drilled thru the brick into the house's supporting studs to form large staple-shaped slots for the 2*4's to slide into. Once you have one for each window, set them aside while you wait for a hurricane. When it comes, securely nail up those suckers, inside the rebar. Use the 4 or 5 inch framer's nails, the kind you could use to crucify the Hulk.
Oh and one other thing - in the exact center of the plywood, cut a slot about 2 feet long and 4 inches wide. Several reasons: Handy for carrying the shutters; lets the hurricane winds go thru but not the debris; Perfect "see and shoot" slot for *after* the hurricane. The wind's comin thru no matter what you do; don't worry about broken glass - just block the stuff that comes with it. I seriously doubt the "disaster" movies on Discovery channel about how debris goes thru cinder block.
The kinetic energy is in the wind, but the momentum is not in most of the debris. In order to get thru the shutter, whatever hits it must: >Be better built than the shutters; >Have no where else to go; >Already being moving at more than 120 mph or so; >be in a high velocity wind that is flowing, not swirling, right near your window. See above about surrounding houses and trees.
It works; hurricanes can be survived, as long as you don't have FEMA helping you.
For 35 years, I've been part of family that PLANNED for these things. Now, cuz some idiots WON'T plan, the gov't decides it must take care of us - by forcing us onto roads th day before a CAT-5 WORLD-EATING HURRICANE hits. NO, 1 day is NOT enough time to prepare and leave and actually get far enough away to escape a hurricane that's big enough to justify it. Even if you're not competing for road space with 3 million other people. If Rita hadn't weakened and turned north, about a million (no exaggeration) people would have been caught in traffic on the freeways and highways of SE Texas, in 200 mph winds and a 20-30 foot storm surge. As it was, an unannounced number of people died on the roads due to heat, lack of food/water/gas, and most especially, lack of rest. The police on the evacuation routes were NOT LETTING PEOPLE PULL OVER, no matter how long they had been on the road, how old they were, heart conditions, etc. 20+ elderly died on the way to Dallas cuz an unmaintained bus overheated and caught fire; a coworker of mine was found in his car dead. The govt has never reported the loss of life, the damage or cost of the Texas evacuation for hurricane Rita.
NO FRICKEN THANX, FEMA, I can find much more pleasant ways to kill myself.
When Hurricane FEMA^H^H^H^HRita was due to hit the Texas coast, I received 3-4 phone calls in a 15-minute span telling me to leave. Forced evacuations mean the gov't won't allow individuals to plan for themselves. I've lived within 15 miles of the Gulf since 1967, and have never needed to leave for any hurricane. I could tell that Rita was going to weaken, from experience. Hurricanes that start up quickly in the Gulf also weaken quickly as they approach Houston. I spent 5 days on the road for no good f******* reason. That's abuse of power.
They were still using it in 1981, when I went in. They injected so much vaccine in one shot that you'd get a big knot on your arm. Skinny guys had to get it in the upper thigh. I used to have to get massive allergy injections when I was a kid, so I know what a *big* shot feels like. The military's air injected shots hit like a knuckle punch and felt like they were gonna make us immune to everything but bullets. Several guys fainted afterwards.
OK, but they don't have any money either - they get it from YOU. Any money used by any corporation and/or lobbyist comes "from viewers^H^H^H^Hconsumers like you" as they say on PBS.
The Premier of the Soviet Union was touring a factory, when he noticed his pipe was missing. He asked the factory manager if he had seen it, who says no.
Hours later, after the tour, the Premier enters his limo, and finds the pipe. He tells the manager "Here it is, it was on the car seat the whole time! Silly me!"
The manager says "But comrade, we know for a fact it was stolen. We've gotten 4 people to confess already!"
Because inside is trusted software, it will only initiate an "approved" conversation with outside. Outside's replies are verified good by protocol, encryption, keys, etc, and acknowledged by Inside's software before being allowed thru the firewall. Once outside has a working connection and keys, it can freely flow data thru the firewall to inside.
But: there is no trusted app inside that can flow data out of the secure inside, so your secret data stays secret, no matter what the hackers do (in theory, of course someone's gonna crack it eventually).
This eliminates the entire "user doesn't have to do anything to get pwned" (like MSBlast, ahhhhhh, fond memories...).
"User visits malicious website and gets pwned" won't happen cuz the nasty software has to get approval from trusted software before it can get thru the screen door. This protection is possible cuz the only way in is thru invisible software on the inside that has invisible requirements. Since the approval/acknowledgement going out is encrypted or uses an unknown protocol, the nasty doesn't even know when it gets a "yes", let alone how to misuse its connection.
Here's how to prevent any further misuse of airplanes, trains, subways, buses, etc. Please ask yourself first: When was the last time I heard about an Israeli airliner in terrorist trouble?
Here it is: Restore the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Not the "militia" (The National Guard is NOT a militia - it's part of the Federals we need a militia to protect ourselves from), but the people.
Think about it - On 9/11, where was the biggest concentration of unarmed people in indefensible groups? Yup, on planes. Terrorists couldn't attack a mall, too many people might be carrying, and besides, there's always plainsclothes police carrying guns to catch shoplifters. Sports Arenas? Nope, cops there too, and no one's searched going in (except for food/drink violations of local monopolies).
Schools? Most nowadays have at least one armed cop, and anyway, they have locked doors and any adult that doesn't belong is gonna stick out bigtime. Besides, the kids are too spread out, compared to an airplane - and there's always at least one or two that are packin' heat anyway.
Any other concentration of people you can think of will have cops present, or no certainty that all present would be unarmed. It is the security precautions at airports that made 9/11 possible - the very thing that was supposed to make us safe put us in danger. So what's the Gov't reaction? Tighten up the precautions that enabled the disastrous attacks, making airplanes even more vulnerable than before.
If Americans were not denied the right to protect themselves on 9/11, at least a few travellers would be armed. If it were even as few as 5%, that would mean about a dozen armed passengers on every flight that was hijacked. Could 4-5 terrorists have succeeded? Against a dozen armed citizens, could even 15 or 20 succeed? Probably not - a plane is a very enclosed space - hard to hide from the enemy. And the terrorists must show themselves first, in order to carry out their plan. The citizens could stay seated, quietly draw, lock and load. The terrorists would have to watch everyone at once.
The infrastructure stateside to plan and carry out a 9/11 style attack against armed citizens would require so many people that even the FBI would notice something was up. They wouldn't have been able to take 4 planes, they'd have been lucky to take one with the people they used.
And the government refuses to use this enormously powerful, overwhelming sized resource. A cop with a gun is no safer to the public than a law abiding, informed citizen with a gun. There's no real reason, except the fear of people who are in control, for disarming citizens in a truly free democracy.
I haven't been in an airport since 9/11/2001. I don't plan on it, either.
One problem with many FOSS projects is that all the website talks about is "release x.y.z, bugs fixed: this ant, that gnat, yonder blunder," etc. I looked over the smoothie website quickly and didn't see a list of features. The main page talks about the history of the project, not features of the product. This is epidemic among open source projects and Linux distros.
So in answer to yer question, after reading the smoothie website, I can't tell if it's some newfangled firewall or an ice cream fruit drink.
Read claim 3: "The method of claim 2, wherein the configuring includes implementing the network interface system with distinct sets of first and second processors, the first and second processors having a shared memory."
This puts the firewall smack into the hardware, not on the extension cord going out of the building. This is a firewall between computers that are in the same cabinet, not on the same internet. It also provides for loadleveling in Claim 6: "...via an interprocessor communication channel;...configuring the interprocessor communication channel to communicate moving averages...and configuring the network interface system to prevent the shared memory from overflowing...by controlling the... network interface system. "
Further claims in the patent app show that the data is not transferred by just any program, but by an API on the firewall CPU and the boxen on either side of the firewall. This looks like some seriously secure stuff here.
Also, your normal firewall allows inside ("your" computer) to talk outside (the internet) freely, but prevents outside from getting in. This patent app specifies that the outside can talk freely to the inside, but the inside can't just blab to the world. This keeps the worms in the can. It also randomizes time signatures so that form of black box analysis won't tell you anything.
Having flown the astronaut training simulator at JSC quite a few times, I can assure that yes, an ordinary pilot can fly the bird down from 500K feet altitude. In fact, I suspect an average 10 year old can be trained to do it. What takes skill is doing the right thing quickly if something goes wrong, or if landing under unusual circumstances. It does come down fast, but the landing speed and approach is not much higher than a commercial passenger jet. The whole trick to it is using up excess energy. Since you have no thrust, if you slow down too quickly, you can't speed up again to make the runway. This results in a manuever called "lithobraking". If you don't waste enough of the excess energy, you overshoot the runway. If landing at the cape, this results in "gator baiting".
The brakes have always been manual/automatic. The problem with the breaks was that the carbon fiber pads were wearing too quickly, especially when landing at the shorter runway at the cape.
As for astronauts as "useless cargo", nope. The only way to fully automate a spacecraft is to know exactly how everything is going to work, what can go wrong, and how to fix it during a mission. There is no way that kind of knowledge can be built into something as complex as a spacecraft with untried technologies before the spacecraft flies into space even once.
The only people who think the astronauts are "trained monkeys" are those who know less about space travel than monkeys.
Unmanned landings have been a capability all along. Columbia originally was planned to fly the first flight back in 1980 unmanned. Lowering the landing gear was disabled from the automatic system for safety reasons. Once it's down, it can't go back up. The gear are moved to the "up" position by ground technicians before the shuttle is ferried back to the processing facility. Since a failure of the automatics that results in lowering the landing gear is irreversible, it was disabled. I suspect by removing the cable which has now been reinstalled.
Those who bash the Church's handling of Galileo do so from a 20th/21st century point of view. To adjust your viewpoint, please consider these facts also: 1> It was considered that the church, whether Catholic or Protestant, had legitimate authority to be "thought-control" police, moral monitors, etc, of its individuals members. After the reformation, each person in Europe was required to identify which church they belonged to, in part by attendance, but also by birth, public conversion, etc. Once you belonged to a church, you were expected to abide by its authority. Galileo was Catholic, but he could have converted to Lutheran or another denomination. 2> Galileo and the Pope had been boyhood friends. Galileo was an extraordinarily abrasive personality. Jesuit priests, under the authority of the Catholic church, were Galileo's chief supporters, and were even collecting measurements and data to support his work. He was dismissive of their efforts. 3> Copernicus, as a mathematician, recanted his theory 50 years earlier, saying that heliocentricity was a mathematical convienence for navigational purposes. His work was (forceably) categorized as a mathematical breakthru to speed computing, not a cosmological model. 4> "Natural Philosophers" ruled the world of "science", such as it was, and did not readily accept the idea that math could describe real world complexity. As such, Galileo's claim to be able to use MATH to prove something about the universe, especially the heavens, was a heresy more to the contemporary "scientists" than it was to the church. His field of study was considered to be equivalent to "accounting". His forced recantation was as much the result political pressures from outside the church as it was religious. 5> This was Galileo's REAL contribution - he started the avalanche of conceptuality that resulted in rigorous mathematical treatment of many topics that had previously been limited to philosophical modelling only.
Save urself bucks next time you upgrade - use OOo and apply part of the savings to a faster CPU. STFU, M$. Even better savings: CPU upgrade About $500 NOT Windows About -$200 (don't know exactly) NOT Office About -$500 NOT M$ server apps About -$500 Rethink CPU upgrade About $300
Savings over M$ upgrade About $400 All just guesswork, my numbers may be completely wrong, ymmv, etc.
The deputy chief of police of Joliet said there wasn't a threat. The school was asked "If you thought there was a threat, did you call the police or FBI?". The school said they didn't contact FBI or Police. How threatened did the school admins really feel? apparently not much. Comparing your current situation to a past situation where something really bad happened is not threatening. It's a comparison. Regardless of the kid's history, the school has *no*frickin*authority* to control the behavior of kids outside of school. NONE WHATEVER, even if the kids are talking about school or using school books to do homework, or whatever. No level of government, from school teachers to the US president, has the authority to dictate to anyone what they put on their own website outside of school. And yes, this constitutes governmental bullying of someone with a dissenting opinion.
Several years ago, I was working in my garden in Houston, and got jabbed deeply with a rose thorn that was within 1 or 2 inches of the ground (i.e, likely covered with dirt and soil nasties). It hurt like any jab would, and I thought nothing of it. That night, it itched like crazy. Next day, a circle about 2 inch diameter around the jab (on the heel of my palm) had tiny dozens of pin-prick sized bubbles, deep under the skin. Long story short - I made a DR appt for three days later (total, 5 days from the jab). By the time I got there, my palm and part of my wrist had hundreds of these tiny bubbles all over them, itching like hell, bursting sometimes. Also, my feet, back, scalp, elbows and knees itched badly. He said "Oh yeah, it's a soil fungus. I used to practice up in NY, and saw this once or twice a year. I see it 2-3 times a week in Houston during the summer." He gave me a shot and a topical ointment. It cleared up almost immediately, but for about five years, every time I got hot and sweaty outside and didn't clean up promptly and meticulously, the itch would come back. Any doc who hears of these kind of symptoms and says "it's in their head" oughta lose his license. In the semi-tropics at least, creeping crud like that can grow by-golly fast.
It's not terrorism. Terrorism, as the name implies, is using TERROR, that is, "intense, overpowering fear" (www.dictionary.com) to achieve a goal. It used to mean that the goal was politcal, that is, to change a government's policies or force political leaders to do something.
It's a pissing contest. Nothing more, other than the cost incurred to the legitimate businesses being attacked.
J.C. in jackboots, everytime someone does something bad to someone else nowadays it's called terrorism. Lighten up, everybody.
If I am ever forced to accept an implanted RFID, I'm gonna make'em put it in my butt so that the cops can KMA if they ever arrest me. Also, I think it'll be fun riding the scanner at the grocery store.
No matter what Congress decides. Wireless modems and cell phone modems, traffic that does not go thru cell towers or central servers unless there's no other way, and network traffic decentralized and out of the control of big bloodsuckers. No backbone until it comes time to leave the local urban area - no local ISPs at all. Networking becomes networking, not nodeworking. There would be no way to charge for local access at all, and long distance could only be charged by the backbone providers that your box actually used. No, that's entirely too workable, too cheap, to FREE. There will certainly be a law against it, if we tried it.
Yes, but it turns to plasma as it punctures. Reactive armor of any type attempts to start this process before the projectile hits a solid surface. Hot plasma blowing through a hole burns the hole bigger as it expands. (Remember Columbia?)
Hot plasma hitting a plate of cold armor is just a blast of very hot air that gets deflected.
Then there's this loud THUNK as the rest of the projectile, by now just a blunt brick, bounces off.
What I'd like to see is not a test of the reactive armor, but their attempts to convince some poor private to be the first human soldier to sit in the tank during a live fire test. Someone had to be first. "Soldier, see that tank out in the field? We'd like you to go sit in it."
"Then what, sir?"
"You'll hear a very loud noise."
"And if I don't, sir?"
"Then we'll pay off your GI life insurance policy. Semper Fi!"
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but it looks like it. First, look up the urban legend about planes exploding like popped balloons if someone fires a gun and it hits the fuselage. Quick answer: They don't.
Next, reread two parts of my "fix it cheap": 1> When did you last hear of an Israeli airliner getting hijacked? and 2> I said "right to keep and bear arms", not guns. When used as such, a knife is a weapon, so is a baseball bat. Any kind of weapon at all in the hands of other passengers would probably have prevented 9/11 from being successful. Knowledge that US citizens routinely go about armed may have even prevented 9/11 from being planned.
Weapons in the hands of law-abiding citizens would reduce crime all over America - including on planes. The reason is because all of the laws taking away weapons from law-abiding citizens have not had any noticeable impact on whether criminals are armed. Disarmament in the US has failed as utterly as Prohibition - but Prohibition was repealed.
The reason the Israelis don't have this trouble is because armed soldiers are on every Israeli flight. And the Israeli army has absolutely no doubts about whether to shoot terrorists.
As for "air marshalls", why do you trust government employees more than law abiding citizens? Because they passed the job-application process for a gov't job? Cuz they went thru a background check? Citizens go thru background checks for guns too. I'm not trying to antogonize you or flame-bait you here - I'm trying to get you to challenge your own assumptions.
A lot of people simply can't afford to hit the road for 4-5 days. In order to get away from a hurricane that's big enough to justify running away, (like Katrina), you must go *hundreds* of miles, and I don't mean 2 or 3 hundred.
A few years back, a hurricane that was Cat 2 when it hit Galveston (near my home), was still a Cat 1 hurricane when it got within a hundred miles of Dallas. (It had a male name, can't remember it - Allen? Daniel?)
And that was Cat ONE. Katrina, if it had followed the same path, would have been within a hundred miles of Dallas when the eye crossed the coast at Galveston . People see the flat weather map, and don't remember that the tropics are distorted to look smaller and the northern parts (like most of US and Europe) look larger. I've seen hurricane maps where the entire Gulf of Mexico was one big hurricane.
The hundreds of thousands of poor people in urban areas on the Gulf Coast can't go to Colorado for a week; that's what "poor" means.
There were LOTS of warnings - everyone knew it was coming. You were either ready to stay, or ready to go. If you weren't ready, life sucked, and maybe you died.
That's my point. You won't have to, cuz I've already been thru a Cat 5 hurricane. With the proper preparation, it's not a problem. Your house must be built right, surrounded by other houses and trees and strong fences. You stock up like the local news folks tell you too - but about triple; and a portable generator.
During the off season, build 2*4 reinforced, 3/4 inch plywood stormshutters, about 6" bigger than yer windows; so they fit snugly into the window hole in the brickwork...your house is brick, right? The kind without wheels?
Use 1/4" rebar, drilled thru the brick into the house's supporting studs to form large staple-shaped slots for the 2*4's to slide into. Once you have one for each window, set them aside while you wait for a hurricane. When it comes, securely nail up those suckers, inside the rebar. Use the 4 or 5 inch framer's nails, the kind you could use to crucify the Hulk.
Oh and one other thing - in the exact center of the plywood, cut a slot about 2 feet long and 4 inches wide. Several reasons: Handy for carrying the shutters; lets the hurricane winds go thru but not the debris; Perfect "see and shoot" slot for *after* the hurricane. The wind's comin thru no matter what you do; don't worry about broken glass - just block the stuff that comes with it. I seriously doubt the "disaster" movies on Discovery channel about how debris goes thru cinder block. The kinetic energy is in the wind, but the momentum is not in most of the debris. In order to get thru the shutter, whatever hits it must: >Be better built than the shutters; >Have no where else to go; >Already being moving at more than 120 mph or so; >be in a high velocity wind that is flowing, not swirling, right near your window. See above about surrounding houses and trees.
It works; hurricanes can be survived, as long as you don't have FEMA helping you.
For 35 years, I've been part of family that PLANNED for these things. Now, cuz some idiots WON'T plan, the gov't decides it must take care of us - by forcing us onto roads th day before a CAT-5 WORLD-EATING HURRICANE hits. NO, 1 day is NOT enough time to prepare and leave and actually get far enough away to escape a hurricane that's big enough to justify it. Even if you're not competing for road space with 3 million other people.
If Rita hadn't weakened and turned north, about a million (no exaggeration) people would have been caught in traffic on the freeways and highways of SE Texas, in 200 mph winds and a 20-30 foot storm surge. As it was, an unannounced number of people died on the roads due to heat, lack of food/water/gas, and most especially, lack of rest. The police on the evacuation routes were NOT LETTING PEOPLE PULL OVER, no matter how long they had been on the road, how old they were, heart conditions, etc. 20+ elderly died on the way to Dallas cuz an unmaintained bus overheated and caught fire; a coworker of mine was found in his car dead. The govt has never reported the loss of life, the damage or cost of the Texas evacuation for hurricane Rita.
NO FRICKEN THANX, FEMA, I can find much more pleasant ways to kill myself.
When Hurricane FEMA^H^H^H^HRita was due to hit the Texas coast, I received 3-4 phone calls in a 15-minute span telling me to leave. Forced evacuations mean the gov't won't allow individuals to plan for themselves. I've lived within 15 miles of the Gulf since 1967, and have never needed to leave for any hurricane. I could tell that Rita was going to weaken, from experience. Hurricanes that start up quickly in the Gulf also weaken quickly as they approach Houston.
I spent 5 days on the road for no good f******* reason.
That's abuse of power.
They don't get air bubbles cuz stuff hits so hard it comes out the other side of yer arm. Or at least it feels that way.
They were still using it in 1981, when I went in. They injected so much vaccine in one shot that you'd get a big knot on your arm. Skinny guys had to get it in the upper thigh. I used to have to get massive allergy injections when I was a kid, so I know what a *big* shot feels like. The military's air injected shots hit like a knuckle punch and felt like they were gonna make us immune to everything but bullets. Several guys fainted afterwards.
OK, but they don't have any money either - they get it from YOU.
Any money used by any corporation and/or lobbyist comes "from viewers^H^H^H^Hconsumers like you" as they say on PBS.
The Premier of the Soviet Union was touring a factory, when he noticed his pipe was missing. He asked the factory manager if he had seen it, who says no.
Hours later, after the tour, the Premier enters his limo, and finds the pipe. He tells the manager "Here it is, it was on the car seat the whole time! Silly me!"
The manager says "But comrade, we know for a fact it was stolen. We've gotten 4 people to confess already!"
Because inside is trusted software, it will only initiate an "approved" conversation with outside. Outside's replies are verified good by protocol, encryption, keys, etc, and acknowledged by Inside's software before being allowed thru the firewall. Once outside has a working connection and keys, it can freely flow data thru the firewall to inside.
But: there is no trusted app inside that can flow data out of the secure inside, so your secret data stays secret, no matter what the hackers do (in theory, of course someone's gonna crack it eventually).
This eliminates the entire "user doesn't have to do anything to get pwned" (like MSBlast, ahhhhhh, fond memories...).
"User visits malicious website and gets pwned" won't happen cuz the nasty software has to get approval from trusted software before it can get thru the screen door. This protection is possible cuz the only way in is thru invisible software on the inside that has invisible requirements. Since the approval/acknowledgement going out is encrypted or uses an unknown protocol, the nasty doesn't even know when it gets a "yes", let alone how to misuse its connection.
The dreaded lemon meringue bomb. Blast the sticky, sickly sweet goo up their noses until their farts smell lemony fresh.
Here's how to prevent any further misuse of airplanes, trains, subways, buses, etc. Please ask yourself first: When was the last time I heard about an Israeli airliner in terrorist trouble?
Here it is: Restore the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Not the "militia" (The National Guard is NOT a militia - it's part of the Federals we need a militia to protect ourselves from), but the people.
Think about it - On 9/11, where was the biggest concentration of unarmed people in indefensible groups? Yup, on planes. Terrorists couldn't attack a mall, too many people might be carrying, and besides, there's always plainsclothes police carrying guns to catch shoplifters. Sports Arenas? Nope, cops there too, and no one's searched going in (except for food/drink violations of local monopolies).
Schools? Most nowadays have at least one armed cop, and anyway, they have locked doors and any adult that doesn't belong is gonna stick out bigtime. Besides, the kids are too spread out, compared to an airplane - and there's always at least one or two that are packin' heat anyway.
Any other concentration of people you can think of will have cops present, or no certainty that all present would be unarmed.
It is the security precautions at airports that made 9/11 possible - the very thing that was supposed to make us safe put us in danger. So what's the Gov't reaction? Tighten up the precautions that enabled the disastrous attacks, making airplanes even more vulnerable than before.
If Americans were not denied the right to protect themselves on 9/11, at least a few travellers would be armed. If it were even as few as 5%, that would mean about a dozen armed passengers on every flight that was hijacked. Could 4-5 terrorists have succeeded? Against a dozen armed citizens, could even 15 or 20 succeed? Probably not - a plane is a very enclosed space - hard to hide from the enemy. And the terrorists must show themselves first, in order to carry out their plan. The citizens could stay seated, quietly draw, lock and load. The terrorists would have to watch everyone at once.
The infrastructure stateside to plan and carry out a 9/11 style attack against armed citizens would require so many people that even the FBI would notice something was up. They wouldn't have been able to take 4 planes, they'd have been lucky to take one with the people they used.
And the government refuses to use this enormously powerful, overwhelming sized resource. A cop with a gun is no safer to the public than a law abiding, informed citizen with a gun. There's no real reason, except the fear of people who are in control, for disarming citizens in a truly free democracy.
I haven't been in an airport since 9/11/2001. I don't plan on it, either.
One problem with many FOSS projects is that all the website talks about is "release x.y.z, bugs fixed: this ant, that gnat, yonder blunder," etc.
I looked over the smoothie website quickly and didn't see a list of features. The main page talks about the history of the project, not features of the product.
This is epidemic among open source projects and Linux distros.
So in answer to yer question, after reading the smoothie website, I can't tell if it's some newfangled firewall or an ice cream fruit drink.
Read claim 3: "The method of claim 2, wherein the configuring includes implementing the network interface system with distinct sets of first and second processors, the first and second processors having a shared memory." ...configuring the interprocessor communication channel to communicate moving averages ...and configuring the network interface system to prevent the shared memory from overflowing ...by controlling the ... network interface system. "
This puts the firewall smack into the hardware, not on the extension cord going out of the building. This is a firewall between computers that are in the same cabinet, not on the same internet. It also provides for loadleveling in Claim 6:
"...via an interprocessor communication channel;
Further claims in the patent app show that the data is not transferred by just any program, but by an API on the firewall CPU and the boxen on either side of the firewall. This looks like some seriously secure stuff here.
Also, your normal firewall allows inside ("your" computer) to talk outside (the internet) freely, but prevents outside from getting in. This patent app specifies that the outside can talk freely to the inside, but the inside can't just blab to the world. This keeps the worms in the can. It also randomizes time signatures so that form of black box analysis won't tell you anything.
Having flown the astronaut training simulator at JSC quite a few times, I can assure that yes, an ordinary pilot can fly the bird down from 500K feet altitude. In fact, I suspect an average 10 year old can be trained to do it. What takes skill is doing the right thing quickly if something goes wrong, or if landing under unusual circumstances.
It does come down fast, but the landing speed and approach is not much higher than a commercial passenger jet.
The whole trick to it is using up excess energy. Since you have no thrust, if you slow down too quickly, you can't speed up again to make the runway. This results in a manuever called "lithobraking".
If you don't waste enough of the excess energy, you overshoot the runway. If landing at the cape, this results in "gator baiting".
The brakes have always been manual/automatic. The problem with the breaks was that the carbon fiber pads were wearing too quickly, especially when landing at the shorter runway at the cape.
As for astronauts as "useless cargo", nope. The only way to fully automate a spacecraft is to know exactly how everything is going to work, what can go wrong, and how to fix it during a mission. There is no way that kind of knowledge can be built into something as complex as a spacecraft with untried technologies before the spacecraft flies into space even once.
The only people who think the astronauts are "trained monkeys" are those who know less about space travel than monkeys.
Unmanned landings have been a capability all along.
Columbia originally was planned to fly the first flight back in 1980 unmanned.
Lowering the landing gear was disabled from the automatic system for safety reasons. Once it's down, it can't go back up. The gear are moved to the "up" position by ground technicians before the shuttle is ferried back to the processing facility.
Since a failure of the automatics that results in lowering the landing gear is irreversible, it was disabled. I suspect by removing the cable which has now been reinstalled.
Those who bash the Church's handling of Galileo do so from a 20th/21st century point of view. To adjust your viewpoint, please consider these facts also:
1> It was considered that the church, whether Catholic or Protestant, had legitimate authority to be "thought-control" police, moral monitors, etc, of its individuals members. After the reformation, each person in Europe was required to identify which church they belonged to, in part by attendance, but also by birth, public conversion, etc. Once you belonged to a church, you were expected to abide by its authority. Galileo was Catholic, but he could have converted to Lutheran or another denomination.
2> Galileo and the Pope had been boyhood friends. Galileo was an extraordinarily abrasive personality. Jesuit priests, under the authority of the Catholic church, were Galileo's chief supporters, and were even collecting measurements and data to support his work. He was dismissive of their efforts.
3> Copernicus, as a mathematician, recanted his theory 50 years earlier, saying that heliocentricity was a mathematical convienence for navigational purposes. His work was (forceably) categorized as a mathematical breakthru to speed computing, not a cosmological model.
4> "Natural Philosophers" ruled the world of "science", such as it was, and did not readily accept the idea that math could describe real world complexity. As such, Galileo's claim to be able to use MATH to prove something about the universe, especially the heavens, was a heresy more to the contemporary "scientists" than it was to the church. His field of study was considered to be equivalent to "accounting". His forced recantation was as much the result political pressures from outside the church as it was religious.
5> This was Galileo's REAL contribution - he started the avalanche of conceptuality that resulted in rigorous mathematical treatment of many topics that had previously been limited to philosophical modelling only.
(Disclaimer: I am a recovering Catholic)
Save urself bucks next time you upgrade - use OOo and apply part of the savings to a faster CPU. STFU, M$.
Even better savings:
CPU upgrade About $500
NOT Windows About -$200 (don't know exactly)
NOT Office About -$500
NOT M$ server apps About -$500
Rethink CPU upgrade About $300
Savings over M$ upgrade About $400
All just guesswork, my numbers may be completely wrong, ymmv, etc.
The deputy chief of police of Joliet said there wasn't a threat. The school was asked "If you thought there was a threat, did you call the police or FBI?". The school said they didn't contact FBI or Police. How threatened did the school admins really feel? apparently not much. Comparing your current situation to a past situation where something really bad happened is not threatening. It's a comparison.
Regardless of the kid's history, the school has *no*frickin*authority* to control the behavior of kids outside of school. NONE WHATEVER, even if the kids are talking about school or using school books to do homework, or whatever.
No level of government, from school teachers to the US president, has the authority to dictate to anyone what they put on their own website outside of school.
And yes, this constitutes governmental bullying of someone with a dissenting opinion.
Several years ago, I was working in my garden in Houston, and got jabbed deeply with a rose thorn that was within 1 or 2 inches of the ground (i.e, likely covered with dirt and soil nasties). It hurt like any jab would, and I thought nothing of it. That night, it itched like crazy. Next day, a circle about 2 inch diameter around the jab (on the heel of my palm) had tiny dozens of pin-prick sized bubbles, deep under the skin.
Long story short - I made a DR appt for three days later (total, 5 days from the jab). By the time I got there, my palm and part of my wrist had hundreds of these tiny bubbles all over them, itching like hell, bursting sometimes. Also, my feet, back, scalp, elbows and knees itched badly.
He said "Oh yeah, it's a soil fungus. I used to practice up in NY, and saw this once or twice a year. I see it 2-3 times a week in Houston during the summer."
He gave me a shot and a topical ointment. It cleared up almost immediately, but for about five years, every time I got hot and sweaty outside and didn't clean up promptly and meticulously, the itch would come back.
Any doc who hears of these kind of symptoms and says "it's in their head" oughta lose his license. In the semi-tropics at least, creeping crud like that can grow by-golly fast.
It's not terrorism. Terrorism, as the name implies, is using TERROR, that is, "intense, overpowering fear" (www.dictionary.com) to achieve a goal. It used to mean that the goal was politcal, that is, to change a government's policies or force political leaders to do something.
It's a pissing contest. Nothing more, other than the cost incurred to the legitimate businesses being attacked.
J.C. in jackboots, everytime someone does something bad to someone else nowadays it's called terrorism.
Lighten up, everybody.
If I am ever forced to accept an implanted RFID, I'm gonna make'em put it in my butt so that the cops can KMA if they ever arrest me.
Also, I think it'll be fun riding the scanner at the grocery store.
No matter what Congress decides. Wireless modems and cell phone modems, traffic that does not go thru cell towers or central servers unless there's no other way, and network traffic decentralized and out of the control of big bloodsuckers.
No backbone until it comes time to leave the local urban area - no local ISPs at all. Networking becomes networking, not nodeworking.
There would be no way to charge for local access at all, and long distance could only be charged by the backbone providers that your box actually used.
No, that's entirely too workable, too cheap, to FREE.
There will certainly be a law against it, if we tried it.
Yes, but it turns to plasma as it punctures. Reactive armor of any type attempts to start this process before the projectile hits a solid surface. Hot plasma blowing through a hole burns the hole bigger as it expands. (Remember Columbia?) Hot plasma hitting a plate of cold armor is just a blast of very hot air that gets deflected. Then there's this loud THUNK as the rest of the projectile, by now just a blunt brick, bounces off.
What I'd like to see is not a test of the reactive armor, but their attempts to convince some poor private to be the first human soldier to sit in the tank during a live fire test.
Someone had to be first. "Soldier, see that tank out in the field? We'd like you to go sit in it."
"Then what, sir?"
"You'll hear a very loud noise."
"And if I don't, sir?"
"Then we'll pay off your GI life insurance policy. Semper Fi!"