Consider: at 500mph, and that's a conservative estimate of the speed, you are flying at over 8 miles per minute.
The WTC is a big target, but at 8 miles away, even 4 miles away, you can't tell that's where you're going. It won't even look very large at that distance. Remember, the windows (except the cockpit) all face sideways. But suppose you realize where you're headed in the last 4 miles/30 seconds. Is that enough time to confer, decide, overwhelm several hijackers, bust a door down and wrest control away? I think not.
Add that to the fact that, in the past, hijackers want money or asylum or whatever. I'm sure airline employees have been trained to cooperate, get the plane down safely, ensure the safety of the passengers, and let a anti-terrorist squad handle the hijackers. This is what these guys took advantage of.
Hell, I suppose it's possible that only the guy flying knew they were a suicide mission, maybe the others thought it was a traditional hijacking ("traditional hijacking"? What a sick irony, but I can't think of a better term.). That way they only needed 4 suicidal pilots, not 20 suicidal guys.
Carly's a damn smart person. Met her at a function last year. She has a brain, and she had, as far as I could tell, a very good grasp of the industry and the condition of HP. She used almost no buzzword compliant language in her speech, and she didn't seem arrogant.
But what impressed me most was that she did not pick "yes-men" (or women) to surround herself with, unlike most CEO's I've seen.
Not sure anyone can pull HP out of the dive quickly, but she's got as good a shot as any, I think. Only question is whether she'll be allowed the time to make the changes. Probably not, looks like they need 3 or 4 years, most boards aren't that patient.
When I was quite young, I read many stories of his that made a lasting impression. One got me interested in relativity, which led to AP math, which led to engineering... and, well, here I am, doing fun tech stuff.
The story was about a ship (sublight) sent out into space, but with a teleporter on board. The idea was, they could send the ship to another star system, and while it might take a hundred years for the ship to reach the destination, they could rotate the crew every six months. Thus, when it arrived at the destination, they'd have an on-site teleporter, ready to transport men, materiel, etc. through for colonization.
Unfortunately, something goes wrong, and the guys on board have to figure out how to rig up a replacement teleporter.... quite a nailbiter. At least I think it was Poul... hard to get the name wrong, but I might have, it was so long ago...
OK, is it just me, or is there not something odd about tossing around phrases like: "GNOME trolls" in heated, serious discussions? And we wonder why the general public thinks we're weird...
Those are rhyming couplets, a direct lift of a technique that a certain Mr. Shakespeare used. I'm guessing that the director followed the lead of good ol' George Lucas on that:
"Always two there are, no more, no less:   a master and an apprentice.
But which was destroyed?   The master or the apprentice?"
There were some other lifts from Shakespeare that escape me at the moment.
That's actually appropriate, to some degree. Without going too overboard on the history lesson, those costumes that many people are complaining about are, of course, derivative of the clothes in the early Renaissance. If one is actually aware of the various class/status designations in the Renaissance, as well as differences btwn. places like Italy, France and England, and the importance of such clothes for rank designations and so forth, you immediately notice things like:
Spacing Guild members are dressed exactly like senior guild members from around 1600
Bene Gesserit (sp?) are wearing, I believe, clothes similar to what a Florentian assassin would wear, but with Dominican nun headwear. Cute.
Harkonnens are wearing clothes not dissimilar to Dutch merchants of the time - wealthy, but nouveau riche and considered crude and not really upper-class by most at the time.
Atreides, Imperial household and so forth are wearing clothes quite like European nobles, though it was a bit inconsistent...
Not entirely inappropriate, given Herbert's Machievellian world...
Also, considering the Fremen are sorta Arabic, and are looked down upon on by the European-styled people, that fits with the parallels.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they took the parallels far enough for them to work convincingly. Certainly they were distractingly goofy at times, though I got used to it. It wasn't nearly as annoying as the gratuitous and very uninformed use of Baroque styling in the original movie, which was just stupid. If you're going to copy period styles, get it right!
A lot of people wonder why it's worth bothering with such trivia. On one level, it isn't, but getting the details "right", by which I suppose I mean consistent and rich, tends to add a lot of depth to the movie. It's the same reason that Tolkien's books (and Herbert's) are so much better than most of their contemporaries. Unlike Tolkien, Herbert didn't explicitly describe a lot of stuff, so it's up to the director to figure out how to create a sense of richness. (That's also a strength of Dune: though written in the 1960's, it doesn't seem dated, like most scifi from the period. He cleverly avoided using contemporary words, or describing advanced technology, realizing that:
It would sound dated in 10 years, cf. how Niven uses computers in stories back then, and
understanding that to a society, technology is an everyday thing; characters don't give the tools they use a second thought, so neither should the reader. Fancy words and terms are a distraction, not an asset.)
I didn't care for the later books much, but perhaps they'll make for a decent series.
There's one interesting tidbit of information that is frequently neglected, probably because with the decline of nuclear in the 80's, it wasn't directly relevant any longer...
[Disclaimer: I'm at work, and haven't access to my data, so my #'s are indubiably off by a fair margin. Close enough for government work, ha, ha.]
There is precious little uranium. It's not that common, and the high-grade ores are approaching exhaustion. Even the Canadians have nearly stripped their deposits (remember that almost all of France's power, and >5% of U.S. power is from nuclear, and still requires fuel! Just 'cause we ain't building new ones, doesn't mean we're not fuelling the old ones! But I digress...).
Assuming power prices stay high, and the lower-grade ore deposits are economical to process, we have about 50-years of ore left. If we start building new plants, or use a significant amount in these spacecraft, we drop that figure even lower. We have more oil left than uranium (using energy as the equivalency measure).
OTOH, we have >500 years of coal in the U.S. alone. Sure, we'll choke to death, but we'll have power! It's difficult to imagine using nuclear over coal, when coal is _so_ much cheaper (BTW, coal burning releases, in the form of concentrated potassium isotopes, more radiation each year than 3-Mile Island, almost as much as Cherynobyl. Dissipated over more area/time, thankfully.).
Are there solutions? You bet! One poster already mentioned the lithium reactor that was scrapped (by Bush Senior, not by Gore, I should point out). It had the nifty capability to burn, to some degree, spent fuel from our "standard" reactors, and was passivly regulated (i.e. far safer).
Not sure why these issues aren't being mentioned, most likely because 50-years is way too long term for most people, and new designs require thought, development, and an initially higher expense.
Similarly, after high school, when I was having a blast (I'd say 9th grade was the low point, and it got better thereafter), I was chatting with my boss, and posed the question "why do they say high school are the best years of your life?"
He thought a moment, then: "Well, consider who is saying that; former football players, former cheerleaders. For the most part, after high school, they have nothing. All their time is spent trying to recover their former glory, and of course it becomes more glorious in memory with each year. They did nothing in high school that will allow them to grow and enrich their lives now, and they probably can't even understand that this is not the case for other people. So the football player remembers his victories as he works a dead-end job and gets fat and shapeless, and the cheerleader who married him remembers how pretty she was, as she spends more and more on cosmetics, surgery, and babysitters, trying to remain 18 forever. And life for them sucks. For them, high school was the best years of their lives, and it's imperative that they, and everyone they know, maintain that belief."
He was also the football coach, albeit a good one. He made sure the quarterback got into college on a math scholarship, NOT a sports scholarship. And yes, the team had a winning record.
Actually, the large oil companies aren't as much of a problem as one might think. Better have a look at on of the largest solar cell researcher/manufacturers in the world - it's ARCO! And some of the best solar energy/hydrogen research is being done by Shell.
The biggest problems come from the smaller (relatively) oil companies that do the actual exploration/drilling/etc. They are not large enough to be diversified, and they must keep the "oil dependency" in order to survive. Ask George W. about it.
I'm not a fan of large corporations, but the big guys are well aware of the limited supply, and are putting a lot of money into other systems/fuels. They win either way, and so they're relatively neutral in the fight. We need to watch out for the 2nd tier corporations and their buddies. They're less well known, and consequently are able to avoid public scrutiny, while they pay off politicians and buy barrelfulls of lobbyists.
Yeah. 1 meter at the target area. So? What if you're standing in a pre-target zone where the beam is smaller? That's a slightly more likely occurance. I really don't think it's unsafe if done properly, but I also doubt that they're thinking carefully about the installation technician skills and whatnot. And that's a serious issue.
Right now, I'm working on installing a particular type of fiber loop, and the 100mW transmitter diodes are in housings of 24 each. The not-in-use ports must be be capped, as every 22 minutes comes a self-diagnostic test. It's nearly impossible to get ALL of the technicians to check port capping. They don't care. Guess who got a zap in the eye from a misaligned and uncapped port? Which was focussed nicely by my glasses. Unpleasant and not permanent, but the point is, people find a way of sticking their face in front at inappropriate distances, even those who should know better. The design should account for that. Theirs doesn't.
Let's see, on earth, sunlight is about... 1.2mW per square mm.
Now, let's suppose it's a 5mm diameter laser beam, not unrealistic at the extremes of its range. For a 100mW beam, that's, uh, 5mW/mm^2.
Hey, they're right! It's only 4 times more intense than sunlight! It must be safe!
Well, that doesn't account for scattering, but intensity will be much higher near the source, as the initial diameter is often around 1mm or so, or over 100mW/mm^2 - about 75 times the sun's intensity.
I do think it will be useful, but they'll find it destroyed by lawsuits in about a week if they don't take safety considerations a little more seriously.
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The WTC is a big target, but at 8 miles away, even 4 miles away, you can't tell that's where you're going. It won't even look very large at that distance. Remember, the windows (except the cockpit) all face sideways. But suppose you realize where you're headed in the last 4 miles/30 seconds. Is that enough time to confer, decide, overwhelm several hijackers, bust a door down and wrest control away? I think not.
Add that to the fact that, in the past, hijackers want money or asylum or whatever. I'm sure airline employees have been trained to cooperate, get the plane down safely, ensure the safety of the passengers, and let a anti-terrorist squad handle the hijackers. This is what these guys took advantage of.
Hell, I suppose it's possible that only the guy flying knew they were a suicide mission, maybe the others thought it was a traditional hijacking ("traditional hijacking"? What a sick irony, but I can't think of a better term.). That way they only needed 4 suicidal pilots, not 20 suicidal guys.
But what impressed me most was that she did not pick "yes-men" (or women) to surround herself with, unlike most CEO's I've seen.
Not sure anyone can pull HP out of the dive quickly, but she's got as good a shot as any, I think. Only question is whether she'll be allowed the time to make the changes. Probably not, looks like they need 3 or 4 years, most boards aren't that patient.
When I was quite young, I read many stories of his that made a lasting impression. One got me interested in relativity, which led to AP math, which led to engineering... and, well, here I am, doing fun tech stuff.
The story was about a ship (sublight) sent out into space, but with a teleporter on board. The idea was, they could send the ship to another star system, and while it might take a hundred years for the ship to reach the destination, they could rotate the crew every six months. Thus, when it arrived at the destination, they'd have an on-site teleporter, ready to transport men, materiel, etc. through for colonization.
Unfortunately, something goes wrong, and the guys on board have to figure out how to rig up a replacement teleporter.... quite a nailbiter. At least I think it was Poul... hard to get the name wrong, but I might have, it was so long ago...
That ring any bells with anyone?
Good-bye, Mr. Anderson.
OK, is it just me, or is there not something odd about tossing around phrases like: "GNOME trolls" in heated, serious discussions? And we wonder why the general public thinks we're weird...
"Always two there are, no more, no less:
  a master and an apprentice.
But which was destroyed?
  The master or the apprentice?"
There were some other lifts from Shakespeare that escape me at the moment.
That's actually appropriate, to some degree. Without going too overboard on the history lesson, those costumes that many people are complaining about are, of course, derivative of the clothes in the early Renaissance. If one is actually aware of the various class/status designations in the Renaissance, as well as differences btwn. places like Italy, France and England, and the importance of such clothes for rank designations and so forth, you immediately notice things like:
Not entirely inappropriate, given Herbert's Machievellian world...
Also, considering the Fremen are sorta Arabic, and are looked down upon on by the European-styled people, that fits with the parallels.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure they took the parallels far enough for them to work convincingly. Certainly they were distractingly goofy at times, though I got used to it. It wasn't nearly as annoying as the gratuitous and very uninformed use of Baroque styling in the original movie, which was just stupid. If you're going to copy period styles, get it right!
A lot of people wonder why it's worth bothering with such trivia. On one level, it isn't, but getting the details "right", by which I suppose I mean consistent and rich, tends to add a lot of depth to the movie. It's the same reason that Tolkien's books (and Herbert's) are so much better than most of their contemporaries. Unlike Tolkien, Herbert didn't explicitly describe a lot of stuff, so it's up to the director to figure out how to create a sense of richness. (That's also a strength of Dune: though written in the 1960's, it doesn't seem dated, like most scifi from the period. He cleverly avoided using contemporary words, or describing advanced technology, realizing that:
I didn't care for the later books much, but perhaps they'll make for a decent series.
[Disclaimer: I'm at work, and haven't access to my data, so my #'s are indubiably off by a fair margin. Close enough for government work, ha, ha.]
There is precious little uranium. It's not that common, and the high-grade ores are approaching exhaustion. Even the Canadians have nearly stripped their deposits (remember that almost all of France's power, and >5% of U.S. power is from nuclear, and still requires fuel! Just 'cause we ain't building new ones, doesn't mean we're not fuelling the old ones! But I digress...).
Assuming power prices stay high, and the lower-grade ore deposits are economical to process, we have about 50-years of ore left. If we start building new plants, or use a significant amount in these spacecraft, we drop that figure even lower. We have more oil left than uranium (using energy as the equivalency measure).
OTOH, we have >500 years of coal in the U.S. alone. Sure, we'll choke to death, but we'll have power! It's difficult to imagine using nuclear over coal, when coal is _so_ much cheaper (BTW, coal burning releases, in the form of concentrated potassium isotopes, more radiation each year than 3-Mile Island, almost as much as Cherynobyl. Dissipated over more area/time, thankfully.).
Are there solutions? You bet! One poster already mentioned the lithium reactor that was scrapped (by Bush Senior, not by Gore, I should point out). It had the nifty capability to burn, to some degree, spent fuel from our "standard" reactors, and was passivly regulated (i.e. far safer).
Not sure why these issues aren't being mentioned, most likely because 50-years is way too long term for most people, and new designs require thought, development, and an initially higher expense.
He thought a moment, then: "Well, consider who is saying that; former football players, former cheerleaders. For the most part, after high school, they have nothing. All their time is spent trying to recover their former glory, and of course it becomes more glorious in memory with each year. They did nothing in high school that will allow them to grow and enrich their lives now, and they probably can't even understand that this is not the case for other people. So the football player remembers his victories as he works a dead-end job and gets fat and shapeless, and the cheerleader who married him remembers how pretty she was, as she spends more and more on cosmetics, surgery, and babysitters, trying to remain 18 forever. And life for them sucks. For them, high school was the best years of their lives, and it's imperative that they, and everyone they know, maintain that belief."
He was also the football coach, albeit a good one. He made sure the quarterback got into college on a math scholarship, NOT a sports scholarship. And yes, the team had a winning record.
The biggest problems come from the smaller (relatively) oil companies that do the actual exploration/drilling/etc. They are not large enough to be diversified, and they must keep the "oil dependency" in order to survive. Ask George W. about it.
I'm not a fan of large corporations, but the big guys are well aware of the limited supply, and are putting a lot of money into other systems/fuels. They win either way, and so they're relatively neutral in the fight. We need to watch out for the 2nd tier corporations and their buddies. They're less well known, and consequently are able to avoid public scrutiny, while they pay off politicians and buy barrelfulls of lobbyists.
Right now, I'm working on installing a particular type of fiber loop, and the 100mW transmitter diodes are in housings of 24 each. The not-in-use ports must be be capped, as every 22 minutes comes a self-diagnostic test. It's nearly impossible to get ALL of the technicians to check port capping. They don't care. Guess who got a zap in the eye from a misaligned and uncapped port? Which was focussed nicely by my glasses. Unpleasant and not permanent, but the point is, people find a way of sticking their face in front at inappropriate distances, even those who should know better. The design should account for that. Theirs doesn't.
Let's see, on earth, sunlight is about... 1.2mW per square mm.
Now, let's suppose it's a 5mm diameter laser beam, not unrealistic at the extremes of its range. For a 100mW beam, that's, uh, 5mW/mm^2.
Hey, they're right! It's only 4 times more intense than sunlight! It must be safe!
Well, that doesn't account for scattering, but intensity will be much higher near the source, as the initial diameter is often around 1mm or so, or over 100mW/mm^2 - about 75 times the sun's intensity.
I do think it will be useful, but they'll find it destroyed by lawsuits in about a week if they don't take safety considerations a little more seriously.