It's been a long time since I was a tanker, but IIRC, the actual dimensions of a long rod penetrator are roughly 3cm by 75cm. Speed is ~1500 m/s, not Mach7
Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks:^)
Don't be so sure. My HP28 lasted through college and grad school with a lot of abuse alone the way, including dropping it hard enough to crack the case around the display. The ribbon cable was fine.
The keyboard was what finally went: the 2/5/8 row of buttons simply stopped working. Bought a 49, but hated the keys so much I went and got a 48G off of eBay.
Now, my 11C is still ticking along. I had to change the batteries the other day, for the second time since I got it back in 1983. Horrors!
If I could download music for a low cost (like iTunes) with no DRM, I would gladly pay for it!
Download from iTunes, stick in a CD-R, hit burn. Voila- no DRM.
Yes, I know it's an extra step, but I want a backup of my downloaded stuff anyway. (I just lost my HD, along with my library of ~2300 songs. Took a while to reimport everything...)
I'd like it if I didn't have DRM on iTunes stuff at all, but with RIAA around that's not going to happen. Apple's done a good job making it as transparent and easily removeable as it is.
The fault? A bug in Dell's RAID card firmware that would cause the card to eventually destroy the data beyond repair... A bug of the type that would NEVER get out the door in a HP or IBM product...
Don't be so sure. A few years ago my research group got a couple of brand new, top of the line RS6000 workstations. Set them up, ported the various apps and started running.
Oops, they fell off the network. Hmm. Only way to get it back was to reboot. They promptly fell off the network again. Anytime you tried to move a big file between machines they'd die.
IBM had removed a hardware check for malformed packets in the latest and greatest ethernet cards. Hey- they had software correction in the firmware, that would work fine. Except that nobody had actually bothered to test it, and it didn't work in some cases.
I agree IBM is better than some of the competition, but I don't trust anyone.
Serious answer: they probably had a number of small planes in the queue and your plane would have caused too much wake turbulence for them. They could hold you and let a bunch of small guys take off, or let you go and hold up a half dozen planes.
I think you need to go back and listen to some more Beatles. Ignore the early stuff as another poster mentioned, and plug your ears when Revolution#9 comes on, but their stuff *still* sounds fresh. People are still ripping off their riffs years later.
Having just listened through Sgt Pepper again an hour ago, I'll put "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" and "A Day In the Life" against anything coming out today. Some of the stuff today isn't half bad, but are people still going to be listening to it in 30 years? They'll still be playing the Beatles though.
It doesn't confuse scientists. They expect evolution to come up with suboptimal solutions that work "good enough". Once you've got something difficult working, it becomes very hard to modify it.
It would confuse creationists if they bothered to look at the evidence. Why would a perfect God botch the design of the single most important chemical on earth? See the vertebrate eye for another example of piss-poor design that works well enough.
3.2Ghz P4, 1Gig of RAM. Firebird takes easily 20-30 seconds to start. That's on Windows.
Then I can look at my testing web server. No load on this at all- I'm the only user 3.0Ghz P4, 1Gig RAM. Mozilla takes 15-20 seconds to start. But that's running Fedora Core 1.
Then there's the real web server- Dual Xeon, gig of RAM, RH9. 15-20 seconds to start.
Once it starts, it's fine on speed, but my kid gets up faster than it does.
Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world
Are you really sure about that? It works these days since geeks tend to be the only ones with netstumbler and similar.
But it's not going to be long before people start using this for less than savory purposes. Think a spammer would be happy to use a connection for free? How about someone looking for kiddie porn or visiting Al Quada websites? (I can't find the reference, but there was a story recently about a guy driving along a road, surfing porn off of unsecured WiFi.) You could get a lot of unwanted attention very, very rapidly.
It's not exactly true-to-life, but the Army has been using video games as training utilities for possibly 10 years.
It's a lot longer than that. I played SIMNET while at Ft. Knox back in 1988. Battalion on battalion combat in tanks, with add-ons to network in arty and helicopters from their bases.
That was predated by UCOFT, the Unit Conduct of Fire Trainer for tank crews. Don't know when that was introduced, but it was old news when I went there.
I'm sure that the pilots in all services were using sims long before that.
These were all stand-alone units since they had (reasonably) faithful controls, which are kind of hard to get in a PC.
I trained at Ft. Knox on SIMNET, the granddaddy of MMO war games. Battalion on battalion combat in full M1 mockups+3d virual world back in the late 1980s. (And people use "military intelligence" as an insult- they are vastly ahead of the civilian world in a lot of things.)
We were explicitly told not to ever drive off the map. Doing so reset your height variable to 0. Driving back onto the map didn't change this, so you became a "submarine tank", able to see (and kill) everyone but nobody else could see you. They'd had several simulations ruined by people doing this, and SIMNET was very, very expensive to run in terms of time, money and personnel. It was cause for serious disciplinary action.
If you run all your code on that VM, then all you have to do is secure that VM. Not trivial of course, but you put your expert, paranoid coders on that VM and leave the user world programs to the monkeys that can't understand why gets() and finite length char strings might not be a good idea. That reduces the code that might be vulnerable by several orders of magnitude.
.Based upon reading this and some small knowledge of what it is they are attempting, tell me why scieintifically this is impossible??
Hook it up to a generator. Power the motor with the generator. You can run the motor forever while still tapping power. You get out more energy than you put in. In this Universe, we obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics- the motor cannot exist.
All the crap about permanent magents is just a smoke screen; it seems all of these miracle motor inventors love to talk either about how they tap the amazing power of permanent magnets or zero point energy. The instant you start reading someone talking about either being used in a great new invention put up your strongest crap filter.
We already know there are alternatives - it's just that at the moment, they aren't competitive, economically speaking. Like I said, Europe doesn't hold a patent on fission reactors.
Certainly, in some cases (like this) there are alternatives. But I'm not sure fission power is a viable alternative in today's political climate, although technologically/environmentally it's far better than almost anything else.
I have your work to build off of, and to serve as a benchmark for my own. The people who developed amoxicillin had a pretty good idea of how to proceed and how much it would cost, simply by looking at the development paths and costs of similar solutions - e.g., ampicillin.
Again, no. The drug I mentioned before my dad worked on was a simple modification of an existing class of compounds, very similar to the situation you describe. Whoops-it wasn't worth anything. This is the norm in drug development.
While I was working as a chemist, I got to analyze a great new compound that the head of the HIV project was very excited about. It was very similar to a class of compounds that worked great in a test tube but weren't tolerated by the body. The synthetic chemists had made some careful tweaks that the modelers promised would enhance bioabsorption without affecting the effectiveness. Weeks of high-end workstation time and a ~3week synthesis got ~0.5mg of white powder that was injected into a bunch of rats to see what happened.
Not even a blip on my HPLC. Toss that idea, start again.
Meanwhile, Pfizer is making a fortune on a failed drug for chest pain that has, um, other uses. The best anti-baldness drug on the market was developed for people with prostate enlargement. Research often doesn't work the way you expect.
it has to be lower than what it costs me to use the pre-existing alternates, or I use those, save money, and I win.
Depending on the technology in question, there may well not be alternatives. This is true for many blockbuster drugs for example
Even if it was the only alternative, your asking price still has to be lower than what it would cost for me to develop my own solution, or I'll develop my own, save money, and I win.
R&D is not a fixed cost. You have no idea how much it is going to cost or how long it will take to develop that alternative, especially in the drug field. My father was also a chemist: 35 years of work and nothing he worked has ever been sold to a customer. He did get one into human testing: after ~7 years of development and ~$300million in expense the compound flopped- it was no better than existing, cheaper alternatives. (Although in a staggering display of corporate idiocy, the noted side effect of "it's also a non-sedating antihistamine" wasn't deemed commercially interesting since nobody would ever care about something like that. This was 10 years before the chemically similar Seldane and Claritin came on the market.)
Even worse, you might spend a ton of money only to find that Monsanto filed the patent on your chemical a week before you did. Too bad. Start over from scratch.
R&D is way risky. The only reason companies bother is because the payoff can be so huge.
I don't think you understand how this works. If I, as a third-world country, want to make antibiotics, I don't have to wait for a native version of Alexander Fleming to spring up, and then start from scratch - I just have to read the literature thoughtfully provided by the real Alexander Fleming and his first-world successors. Nothing truly groundbreaking is going to stay secret for long, patent or not.
Having been a chemist for a major drug maker, I understand *exactly* how this works.
Yes, I can read the literature. Yes, this will give me ideas. *Every* *single* *one* of those ideas developed by industry (and lately academia as well) will be patented up the wazoo. Pretty much every commercially viable idea is these days. I now have three options
Pay $$$$ to use this idea
Wait until the patent runs out. (And unlike copyright, they do, despite many tricks used by companies to extend their life- look at what's happened with generic drugs after patent expiration)
Ignore the patent. If I'm in a first world state (US/Canada/Japan/Europe) I'm going to get squished like a bug under an army of patent lawyers. If I'm in Outer Elbownia and start using this idea to get around the high prices of stuff developed elsewhere, expect that nation to get a visit from the various trade representatives of the country holding the patent. You can get away with this
a few times if you're big enough, but it's not going to endear you to anyone. (Unless, of course, you're the United States and badly need Cipro during an anthrax scare.)
Oh well. The military knows what they are doing, right?
Actually, in many cases they do.
Speaking as an ex-tanker, tank gunnery qualification involves numerous "degraded mode" exercises. Some engagements you have everything- computer, thermal sight, rangefinder, healthy gunner, etc. For others you only have parts of that, or perhaps just the backup optical telescope with an aiming reticule (M105D for my tank).
Very very smart. Then again, I knew a fair number of gunners who *only* used the M105D in every daylight exercise, no matter what they were allowed to use. (It's obviously useless at night) They generally got good scores- you can guesstimate the target distance pretty well and with a bit of windage correction you can get shots off a lot faster than with all the bells and whistles.
And how many of these companies crushed themselves?
Netscape: made most of its money with the server, not the browser. Crushed by IIS. Oh wait, it wasn't IIS, it was Apache that crushed it. As for the browser, doesn't anyone remember just how bad Netscape sucked before Mozilla? I switched to IE because it was *better*, not because it was from MS- Netscape was a bloated, unstable mess that had miserable support for web standards. (Remember, Netscape pioneered "embrace and extend" when it came to WWW standards.) I'm back on Firefox now because it's better, but we'll see if that changes again.
Real: real deserves every bit of painful death it brought on itself. Perhaps if they hadn't made an amazingly sucky product that doubled as spyware, rewrote all of your file mappings and hid "Sign me up to every mailing list on earth" checkboxes on install they might be in a better place.
Wordperfect: Yeah, I like it better than Word, but the first few versions of WP for Windows sucked rocks. They stuck with DOS for too long and got slain for it.
I'd feel a lot worse about MS crushing people that actually made decent products. Somehow most of those companies are surviving- see Apple in the past few years, Adobe and the like
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Volume of penetrator =~530cc
Uranium density=19g/cc so the penetrator weighs ~10kg
Kinetic energy = 0.5*10*(1500)^2 =~11MJ
Dynamite is 4.3GJ/ton, so this is 0.0023 ton or 4.6 pounds of dynamite.
11MJ are applied in roughly 5e-4 seconds, so total power is 1.65GW. Cross sectional area is about 7cm^2. Not quite as extreme as you have-the penetrator is a lot heavier but a lot slower.
I've got an older M392A2 spin stabilized sabot round in my office. Heavier than it looks :^)
The keyboard was what finally went: the 2/5/8 row of buttons simply stopped working. Bought a 49, but hated the keys so much I went and got a 48G off of eBay.
Now, my 11C is still ticking along. I had to change the batteries the other day, for the second time since I got it back in 1983. Horrors!
If I could download music for a low cost (like iTunes) with no DRM, I would gladly pay for it!
Download from iTunes, stick in a CD-R, hit burn. Voila- no DRM.
Yes, I know it's an extra step, but I want a backup of my downloaded stuff anyway. (I just lost my HD, along with my library of ~2300 songs. Took a while to reimport everything...)
I'd like it if I didn't have DRM on iTunes stuff at all, but with RIAA around that's not going to happen. Apple's done a good job making it as transparent and easily removeable as it is.
The fault? A bug in Dell's RAID card firmware that would cause the card to eventually destroy the data beyond repair... A bug of the type that would NEVER get out the door in a HP or IBM product...
Don't be so sure. A few years ago my research group got a couple of brand new, top of the line RS6000 workstations. Set them up, ported the various apps and started running.
Oops, they fell off the network. Hmm. Only way to get it back was to reboot. They promptly fell off the network again. Anytime you tried to move a big file between machines they'd die.
IBM had removed a hardware check for malformed packets in the latest and greatest ethernet cards. Hey- they had software correction in the firmware, that would work fine. Except that nobody had actually bothered to test it, and it didn't work in some cases.
I agree IBM is better than some of the competition, but I don't trust anyone.
Sitting right next to the $20 extension cable is a 4 port USB with, you guessed it, a 6' cable bundled. They were running a sale: the hub was $18.
WTF?
Serious answer: they probably had a number of small planes in the queue and your plane would have caused too much wake turbulence for them. They could hold you and let a bunch of small guys take off, or let you go and hold up a half dozen planes.
Having just listened through Sgt Pepper again an hour ago, I'll put "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" and "A Day In the Life" against anything coming out today. Some of the stuff today isn't half bad, but are people still going to be listening to it in 30 years? They'll still be playing the Beatles though.
It would confuse creationists if they bothered to look at the evidence. Why would a perfect God botch the design of the single most important chemical on earth? See the vertebrate eye for another example of piss-poor design that works well enough.
I haven't been keeping up- I predicted the end of the year. Then again, reading the review I'm not sure I'd want one now anyway.
Then I can look at my testing web server. No load on this at all- I'm the only user 3.0Ghz P4, 1Gig RAM. Mozilla takes 15-20 seconds to start. But that's running Fedora Core 1.
Then there's the real web server- Dual Xeon, gig of RAM, RH9. 15-20 seconds to start.
Once it starts, it's fine on speed, but my kid gets up faster than it does.
Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world
Are you really sure about that? It works these days since geeks tend to be the only ones with netstumbler and similar.
But it's not going to be long before people start using this for less than savory purposes. Think a spammer would be happy to use a connection for free? How about someone looking for kiddie porn or visiting Al Quada websites? (I can't find the reference, but there was a story recently about a guy driving along a road, surfing porn off of unsecured WiFi.) You could get a lot of unwanted attention very, very rapidly.
It's not exactly true-to-life, but the Army has been using video games as training utilities for possibly 10 years.
It's a lot longer than that. I played SIMNET while at Ft. Knox back in 1988. Battalion on battalion combat in tanks, with add-ons to network in arty and helicopters from their bases.
That was predated by UCOFT, the Unit Conduct of Fire Trainer for tank crews. Don't know when that was introduced, but it was old news when I went there.
I'm sure that the pilots in all services were using sims long before that.
These were all stand-alone units since they had (reasonably) faithful controls, which are kind of hard to get in a PC.
We were explicitly told not to ever drive off the map. Doing so reset your height variable to 0. Driving back onto the map didn't change this, so you became a "submarine tank", able to see (and kill) everyone but nobody else could see you. They'd had several simulations ruined by people doing this, and SIMNET was very, very expensive to run in terms of time, money and personnel. It was cause for serious disciplinary action.
Methinks that very few members of AKA will be named Bambi Vanderbilt
If you run all your code on that VM, then all you have to do is secure that VM. Not trivial of course, but you put your expert, paranoid coders on that VM and leave the user world programs to the monkeys that can't understand why gets() and finite length char strings might not be a good idea. That reduces the code that might be vulnerable by several orders of magnitude.
- Days of the New 2
- Tori Amos: Scarlet's Walk
Both are clearly designed to be played in order: shuffle doesn't work well.Hook it up to a generator. Power the motor with the generator. You can run the motor forever while still tapping power. You get out more energy than you put in. In this Universe, we obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics- the motor cannot exist.
All the crap about permanent magents is just a smoke screen; it seems all of these miracle motor inventors love to talk either about how they tap the amazing power of permanent magnets or zero point energy. The instant you start reading someone talking about either being used in a great new invention put up your strongest crap filter.
We already know there are alternatives - it's just that at the moment, they aren't competitive, economically speaking. Like I said, Europe doesn't hold a patent on fission reactors.
Certainly, in some cases (like this) there are alternatives. But I'm not sure fission power is a viable alternative in today's political climate, although technologically/environmentally it's far better than almost anything else.
I have your work to build off of, and to serve as a benchmark for my own. The people who developed amoxicillin had a pretty good idea of how to proceed and how much it would cost, simply by looking at the development paths and costs of similar solutions - e.g., ampicillin.
Again, no. The drug I mentioned before my dad worked on was a simple modification of an existing class of compounds, very similar to the situation you describe. Whoops-it wasn't worth anything. This is the norm in drug development.
While I was working as a chemist, I got to analyze a great new compound that the head of the HIV project was very excited about. It was very similar to a class of compounds that worked great in a test tube but weren't tolerated by the body. The synthetic chemists had made some careful tweaks that the modelers promised would enhance bioabsorption without affecting the effectiveness. Weeks of high-end workstation time and a ~3week synthesis got ~0.5mg of white powder that was injected into a bunch of rats to see what happened.
Not even a blip on my HPLC. Toss that idea, start again.
Meanwhile, Pfizer is making a fortune on a failed drug for chest pain that has, um, other uses. The best anti-baldness drug on the market was developed for people with prostate enlargement. Research often doesn't work the way you expect.
it has to be lower than what it costs me to use the pre-existing alternates, or I use those, save money, and I win.
Depending on the technology in question, there may well not be alternatives. This is true for many blockbuster drugs for example
Even if it was the only alternative, your asking price still has to be lower than what it would cost for me to develop my own solution, or I'll develop my own, save money, and I win.
R&D is not a fixed cost. You have no idea how much it is going to cost or how long it will take to develop that alternative, especially in the drug field. My father was also a chemist: 35 years of work and nothing he worked has ever been sold to a customer. He did get one into human testing: after ~7 years of development and ~$300million in expense the compound flopped- it was no better than existing, cheaper alternatives. (Although in a staggering display of corporate idiocy, the noted side effect of "it's also a non-sedating antihistamine" wasn't deemed commercially interesting since nobody would ever care about something like that. This was 10 years before the chemically similar Seldane and Claritin came on the market.)
Even worse, you might spend a ton of money only to find that Monsanto filed the patent on your chemical a week before you did. Too bad. Start over from scratch.
R&D is way risky. The only reason companies bother is because the payoff can be so huge.
Apple created a piece of software that doesn't allow people to play the music their paid for on the devices of their choice.
You know how hard it is to format-shift those DRM equipped AAC files in iTunes?
Congrats, you now have a standard audio CD. No DRM, plays in any machine that will play a CD. Feel free to rip it to MP3, OGG or anything else.
All PlayFair saves is $0.25 on a blank CD and about 5 minutes. If that's a serious problem for you, perhaps you should buy something else.
I don't think you understand how this works. If I, as a third-world country, want to make antibiotics, I don't have to wait for a native version of Alexander Fleming to spring up, and then start from scratch - I just have to read the literature thoughtfully provided by the real Alexander Fleming and his first-world successors. Nothing truly groundbreaking is going to stay secret for long, patent or not.
Having been a chemist for a major drug maker, I understand *exactly* how this works.
Yes, I can read the literature. Yes, this will give me ideas. *Every* *single* *one* of those ideas developed by industry (and lately academia as well) will be patented up the wazoo. Pretty much every commercially viable idea is these days. I now have three options
US simply borrows whatever magic solution the Euros have discovered in the mean time.
I think you mean "Pay through the nose for the patented technology the Euros have discovered in the mean time."
Let's outsource all R&D to other places! It's just a drag on the bottom line! We can always borrow some more to pay for it.
You got two songs, so the price is a little closer than what you imply: two songs off of iTunes is $1.98
Oh well. The military knows what they are doing, right?
Actually, in many cases they do.
Speaking as an ex-tanker, tank gunnery qualification involves numerous "degraded mode" exercises. Some engagements you have everything- computer, thermal sight, rangefinder, healthy gunner, etc. For others you only have parts of that, or perhaps just the backup optical telescope with an aiming reticule (M105D for my tank).
Very very smart. Then again, I knew a fair number of gunners who *only* used the M105D in every daylight exercise, no matter what they were allowed to use. (It's obviously useless at night) They generally got good scores- you can guesstimate the target distance pretty well and with a bit of windage correction you can get shots off a lot faster than with all the bells and whistles.
Netscape: made most of its money with the server, not the browser. Crushed by IIS. Oh wait, it wasn't IIS, it was Apache that crushed it. As for the browser, doesn't anyone remember just how bad Netscape sucked before Mozilla? I switched to IE because it was *better*, not because it was from MS- Netscape was a bloated, unstable mess that had miserable support for web standards. (Remember, Netscape pioneered "embrace and extend" when it came to WWW standards.) I'm back on Firefox now because it's better, but we'll see if that changes again.
Real: real deserves every bit of painful death it brought on itself. Perhaps if they hadn't made an amazingly sucky product that doubled as spyware, rewrote all of your file mappings and hid "Sign me up to every mailing list on earth" checkboxes on install they might be in a better place.
Wordperfect: Yeah, I like it better than Word, but the first few versions of WP for Windows sucked rocks. They stuck with DOS for too long and got slain for it.
I'd feel a lot worse about MS crushing people that actually made decent products. Somehow most of those companies are surviving- see Apple in the past few years, Adobe and the like