insurance settlement was a joke after months of haggling and threatening to sue.
Perhaps it was the fact that you had two cars stolen previously that made them reluctant to pay! Where were they parked? Out in the street with the keys in the ignition and a big "STEAL ME" sign on the front?
I live in Australia... but is that kind of theft normal where you live? It just boggles my mind - out of all the people and family I know, only one car has been stolen from them, and it was recovered the next day in the next suburb , with the thief's personal belongings still in it (bonus!)
Well.... it seems the 100km point is the top of the curve for them, so they're only going relatively slowly as they re-enter.
Still, they would fall an awfully long way before they can actually get any lift off those wings again. They mention approximately 180 seconds of free-fall - so at 9.8m/s^2... thats 1700m/s at the end of that stage, discounting any drag (which , if they're in free fall, implies none).
Shuttles generally begin de-orbit at about 6,000m/s or so , but they're in a 'proper' orbit, not suborbital.
Dry Chemical powder tends to ruin things electronic - it winds up being corrosive when exposed to normal humidity or something.
And the shit gets *everywhere*. A insurance guy said to me once if you ever have a fire in your office that had DCP used to extinguish it they'll replace any electronic gear in the room without any hassle.
CO2's pretty good for electrical gear - although it's capability at putting fires out is poor compared to dry chemical extinguishers.
Replying to my own post, and reading the graph mentioned previously, q at 80 seconds into the launch is about 500lbs per square foot of surface area. Thats a fucking lot of force exerted on a (1-5lb?) chunk of foam over the time it takes to get from tank to wing. I'm not bothered to work through the actual velocity change, but it's be a fair bit.
Search google for "shuttle max Q" - that's the maximum aerodynamic pressure exerted on the shuttle during launch.. and it's about 60 or seconds after liftoff.
Actually - look at the chart here which shows the typical pressures on the shuttle during lift-off. At 80 seconds, they're still only a little below max q. Still would be awfully windy outside at that point
Astronaut:"Let's see, we're in a 150km orbit, travelling at 7km/s. You want me to bail out and manually re-enter using something the size of a satellite dish strapped to my back?!"
Mission Control:"Er, yeah. Looks like the shuttle might break up on re-entry"
Astronaut:"Might!? I'll stick with the ride home I've got, thanks"
Do you remember what kind of computers we had in 1983? Yikes...
Ha! the shuttle uses 70's-era computers... at least they seem to function as intended.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 1
Another thing that should be working by now, and isn't, is turbines for small aircraft. Light aircraft are still putt-putting around on reciprocating engines, decades after the big iron switched over.
As I recall , scaling from bigger to smaller turbines doesn't work very well as losses from the edges of your fantips are proportionally higher to the total engine output. Seems like a real cow of a problem to solve, too.
Been compiling Mozilla non-stop in gcc for the last 3 hours with no problems..... on my 486. Oh look -./configure has just about finished! And who said you needed the latest hardware?
recombining hydrogen with oxygen produces water. Where does it go???
It appears as steam... or water vapour. I dunno - if you've got 4 hours of life in a cell, and the cell holds (say) 500mL, that's not a lot of vapour over 5 hours.
Perhaps a weather balloon with GPS would better suit your needs - there was an article here a few months back about a person who built one with a single board computer + GPS + radio link fairly cheap. His reached 30,000ft+ pretty quickly (1/2 hr?) and had a rope cutter to drop the package back down at a preset height.
Can you imagine Watts and kN-m? In Australia, vehicles have been rated in kW and kN-M for some years now (10-15 years)
All the car ads in the media mention vehicle specs in metric units. For example, the car (a Holden commodore) I drive has a 156kW buick-derived V6 in it, or you can get a 235kW V8.
Whilst I can convert kW to HP fairly easily in my head, why bother when everything else on the market uses the same units these days?
Telstra has a dial-up gateway to send SMS messages - you dial a number and get greeted with a little text menu that prompts you through the process of sending a SMS message. You get charged 10c or so for each message you send and you can (i think) send 4 messages at a time before needing to redial it.
There's also a "bulk" version of the above with start and end codes etc, you can send an unlimited number of messages in one go, but you need software to do so. There's quite a few SMS messengers for PC's and modems around the place.
As everyone else has said - get the sender to pay, or don't let them send messages. Easy as that. Most civilised;-) countries have peering arrangements with other telco's for SMS messaging, same as for normal phone connections.
Would you rather trust scientific equipment that, by its nature, was designed for finding that which was being sought? Or, would you rather trust the perception and judgement of a human being that was able to see something that was unfathomed?
I'd prefer a good dose of *both* personally.
Sadly, no-one's leaving earth anytime soon unless there's a profit to be had and it'd have to be a damned big profit too for anyone to try. I'd rather not see the chicken-and-egg problem occur... (There's not enough data to see if there's any worth in sending men out, but we can't get enough data because we need to send men out)
Human beings still only have five senses. By the use of technology, they can be relatively easily be remote from you (unless you really want to go around tasting other worlds).Why send a man at great expense, when you've got a whole bunch of Really Smart Guys back at mission control to go over your data from your probes again , and again and again if necessary?
Maybe in the future when it costs $100 bucks to get someone to LEO we can start with the real human exploration, and I can go kick some rocks on Mars. Can't see it happening anytime soon though:-(
Oh come on - have you been reading too much Sci-Fi?
Hands up all those who honestly believe that in the near future we will encounter some place in our solar system that has some spooky mind-bending properties completely unknown and undetectable to current science.
No doubt there would be a *lot* of scientific curiosity if that ever happened. And you can count me out for the role of second man on mars , too;-)
Back to the discussion - the brain , blessed as it is for the ability of perception, is inadequate if you need the hard numbers to decide whether you want to spend $billions$ in developing something. An astronauts... "yeah looks fine to me here" does not give good justification for that amount of cash spent.
Depends on your definition of perception. For the physical details, oh yes.
And are the non-tactile, "feelings" (for want of a better word,sorry) really worth it at this point in time?
eg - an expedition to Mars:
(Man on Mars)... "Well, I feel kinda lighter, place sure looks cold and desolate The sun's a lot dimmer. There's a lot of small to medium red boulders around the place... lets go for a drive! Oh , and I'll switch the probe on, too."
(Probe on Mars)... "Gravity 0.4G , air pressure 15 millbar, temperature -14 deg C, solar radiation 22.5W/m2... (scans a rock) that rock over there.. it's a form of basalt, size 45x40x15cm, composition 45%Si 23%Al 14%Fe 5%Ca, and here's a picture for posterity."
(Probe moves on to next sample site)
So, the expedition to Mars costs 3 billion, Half of which is for life support design and construction. Oh , but you get a person who can tell you what it's like to be on Mars, I suppose.
He'd better be a hell of a lot more descriptive than "Cold. Red. Dusty"
dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram
Fucking hell! That pretty much defines overkill for what you want to do....
I've a old compaq proliant P166 server with 192MB ram and about 20GB of storage, which works fine for web sites (small, with some PHP) and email for about 100 people.
Email (being store-and-forward) isn't a hassle with that size group unless they're sending 10MB attachments around the place.
Dual P4 2.8's might be able to serve a page up a second or so faster than my old piece of crap, but they aren't the bottleneck here, I'd say your network is.
I wasn't trying to say that this process is no good - I was just pointing out that there's a lot of code out there that's just like that. It's good to have that code no matter how buggy (or strangely commented!).
I've been *very* glad at times to have someone's quick hack available (even if it doesn't work for half the time) when I need to do my own quick hack.
I remember having an OS/2 2.1 box at work for some sort of Big Project - someone put some nudy wallpaper on it, and the boss decided to just delete the file (without removing the reference to it in the desktop settings). That was a *BIG* mistake - OS/2 just wouldn't boot after that. And all the bosses were coming around in the afternoon to have a look at this great new project that was supposed to be running on this now-dead box. Boss' buttocks clenched so tight together they nearly left a mark on the chair when he realised it wouldn't boot and it was his fault!
We didn't have a boot disk, and none of us knew much about OS/2 (this was a mechanical workshop).... but I did have 2.0 on floppies at home, so I frantically did a quick install of that and reloaded our Big Project, with about 5 minutes to spare.
Moral of the story? Don't mess with OS/2's wallpaper... it'll make you pay.
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insurance settlement was a joke after months of haggling and threatening to sue.
Perhaps it was the fact that you had two cars stolen previously that made them reluctant to pay! Where were they parked? Out in the street with the keys in the ignition and a big "STEAL ME" sign on the front?
I live in Australia... but is that kind of theft normal where you live? It just boggles my mind - out of all the people and family I know, only one car has been stolen from them, and it was recovered the next day in the next suburb , with the thief's personal belongings still in it (bonus!)
Well.... it seems the 100km point is the top of the curve for them, so they're only going relatively slowly as they re-enter.
Still, they would fall an awfully long way before they can actually get any lift off those wings again. They mention approximately 180 seconds of free-fall - so at 9.8m/s^2... thats 1700m/s at the end of that stage, discounting any drag (which , if they're in free fall, implies none).
Shuttles generally begin de-orbit at about 6,000m/s or so , but they're in a 'proper' orbit, not suborbital.
Dry Chemical powder tends to ruin things electronic - it winds up being corrosive when exposed to normal humidity or something.
And the shit gets *everywhere*.
A insurance guy said to me once if you ever have a fire in your office that had DCP used to extinguish it they'll replace any electronic gear in the room without any hassle.
CO2's pretty good for electrical gear - although it's capability at putting fires out is poor compared to dry chemical extinguishers.
If I was Sony, all I'd do is send out an addendum to the manual that says "Do NOT do this - You'll get zapped"
Replying to my own post, and reading the graph mentioned previously, q at 80 seconds into the launch is about 500lbs per square foot of surface area. Thats a fucking lot of force exerted on a (1-5lb?) chunk of foam over the time it takes to get from tank to wing. I'm not bothered to work through the actual velocity change, but it's be a fair bit.
Search google for "shuttle max Q" - that's the maximum aerodynamic pressure exerted on the shuttle during launch.. and it's about 60 or seconds after liftoff.
Actually - look at the chart here which shows the typical pressures on the shuttle during lift-off. At 80 seconds, they're still only a little below max q. Still would be awfully windy outside at that point
Would you really want to use MOOSE?
:"Let's see, we're in a 150km orbit, travelling at 7km/s. You want me to bail out and manually re-enter using something the size of a satellite dish strapped to my back?!"
Astronaut
Mission Control:"Er, yeah. Looks like the shuttle might break up on re-entry"
Astronaut:"Might!? I'll stick with the ride home I've got, thanks"
Do you remember what kind of computers we had in 1983? Yikes...
Ha! the shuttle uses 70's-era computers... at least they seem to function as intended.
Another thing that should be working by now, and isn't, is turbines for small aircraft. Light aircraft are still putt-putting around on reciprocating engines, decades after the big iron switched over.
As I recall , scaling from bigger to smaller turbines doesn't work very well as losses from the edges of your fantips are proportionally higher to the total engine output. Seems like a real cow of a problem to solve, too.
Been compiling Mozilla non-stop in gcc for the last 3 hours with no problems..... ./configure has just about finished! And who said you needed the latest hardware?
on my 486. Oh look -
I like winzip for this - right click on blah.doc , select "winzip" select "zip and email blah.zip".
Three clicks - and an you end up with an open blank email message with your file attached. groovy.
I know ,you're kidding.
But if he got into it and reduced costs the way he demolished airfares in my town I'm all for it.
Return Flight, 1000km (Mackay-Brisbane):
Pre-Virgin - $400-$600
Post-Virgin - $60 (specials) to $199 (last-minute)
Bring it on, Richard!
recombining hydrogen with oxygen produces water. Where does it go???
It appears as steam... or water vapour. I dunno - if you've got 4 hours of life in a cell, and the cell holds (say) 500mL, that's not a lot of vapour over 5 hours.
Perhaps a weather balloon with GPS would better suit your needs - there was an article here a few months back about a person who built one with a single board computer + GPS + radio link fairly cheap. His reached 30,000ft+ pretty quickly (1/2 hr?) and had a rope cutter to drop the package back down at a preset height.
Can you imagine Watts and kN-m?
In Australia, vehicles have been rated in kW and kN-M for some years now (10-15 years)
All the car ads in the media mention vehicle specs in metric units. For example, the car (a Holden commodore) I drive has a 156kW buick-derived V6 in it, or you can get a 235kW V8.
Whilst I can convert kW to HP fairly easily in my head, why bother when everything else on the market uses the same units these days?
Telstra has a dial-up gateway to send SMS messages - you dial a number and get greeted with a little text menu that prompts you through the process of sending a SMS message. You get charged 10c or so for each message you send and you can (i think) send 4 messages at a time before needing to redial it.
;-) countries have peering arrangements with other telco's for SMS messaging, same as for normal phone connections.
There's also a "bulk" version of the above with start and end codes etc, you can send an unlimited number of messages in one go, but you need software to do so. There's quite a few SMS messengers for PC's and modems around the place.
As everyone else has said - get the sender to pay, or don't let them send messages. Easy as that. Most civilised
Would you rather trust scientific equipment that, by its nature, was designed for finding that which was being sought? Or, would you rather trust the perception and judgement of a human being that was able to see something that was unfathomed?
... (There's not enough data to see if there's any worth in sending men out, but we can't get enough data because we need to send men out)
:-(
I'd prefer a good dose of *both* personally.
Sadly, no-one's leaving earth anytime soon unless there's a profit to be had and it'd have to be a damned big profit too for anyone to try. I'd rather not see the chicken-and-egg problem occur
Human beings still only have five senses. By the use of technology, they can be relatively easily be remote from you (unless you really want to go around tasting other worlds).Why send a man at great expense, when you've got a whole bunch of Really Smart Guys back at mission control to go over your data from your probes again , and again and again if necessary?
Maybe in the future when it costs $100 bucks to get someone to LEO we can start with the real human exploration, and I can go kick some rocks on Mars. Can't see it happening anytime soon though
Oh come on - have you been reading too much Sci-Fi?
;-)
Hands up all those who honestly believe that in the near future we will encounter some place in our solar system that has some spooky mind-bending properties completely unknown and undetectable to current science.
No doubt there would be a *lot* of scientific curiosity if that ever happened. And you can count me out for the role of second man on mars , too
Back to the discussion - the brain , blessed as it is for the ability of perception, is inadequate if you need the hard numbers to decide whether you want to spend $billions$ in developing something. An astronauts... "yeah looks fine to me here" does not give good justification for that amount of cash spent.
Depends on your definition of perception. For the physical details, oh yes.
And are the non-tactile, "feelings" (for want of a better word,sorry) really worth it at this point in time?
eg - an expedition to Mars:
(Man on Mars)... "Well, I feel kinda lighter, place sure looks cold and desolate The sun's a lot dimmer. There's a lot of small to medium red boulders around the place... lets go for a drive! Oh , and I'll switch the probe on, too."
(Probe on Mars)... "Gravity 0.4G , air pressure 15 millbar, temperature -14 deg C, solar radiation 22.5W/m2... (scans a rock) that rock over there.. it's a form of basalt, size 45x40x15cm, composition 45%Si 23%Al 14%Fe 5%Ca, and here's a picture for posterity."
(Probe moves on to next sample site)
So, the expedition to Mars costs 3 billion, Half of which is for life support design and construction. Oh , but you get a person who can tell you what it's like to be on Mars, I suppose.
He'd better be a hell of a lot more descriptive than "Cold. Red. Dusty"
The consumer complains, we change the product. But its regretful that certain users use that as a form of extortion against us."
Au contraire, Luiz Bannitz, it sounds more like you are changing the CD format to extort US.
I bought a CD and it didn't work in my car either.... SUE!! SUE!!! SUUUUUE!!!!!
:-)
I just won't mention to the judge that I don't have a cd player in my car
dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram
Fucking hell! That pretty much defines overkill for what you want to do....
I've a old compaq proliant P166 server with 192MB ram and about 20GB of storage, which works fine for web sites (small, with some PHP) and email for about 100 people.
Email (being store-and-forward) isn't a hassle with that size group unless they're sending 10MB attachments around the place.
Dual P4 2.8's might be able to serve a page up a second or so faster than my old piece of crap, but they aren't the bottleneck here, I'd say your network is.
I wasn't trying to say that this process is no good - I was just pointing out that there's a lot of code out there that's just like that. It's good to have that code no matter how buggy (or strangely commented!).
I've been *very* glad at times to have someone's quick hack available (even if it doesn't work for half the time) when I need to do my own quick hack.
Better would be to have the whole spiel and then just have a button that says "No"
That'd blow their tiny-one-track-learned-by-rote minds.
I remember having an OS/2 2.1 box at work for some sort of Big Project - someone put some nudy wallpaper on it, and the boss decided to just delete the file (without removing the reference to it in the desktop settings). That was a *BIG* mistake - OS/2 just wouldn't boot after that. And all the bosses were coming around in the afternoon to have a look at this great new project that was supposed to be running on this now-dead box. Boss' buttocks clenched so tight together they nearly left a mark on the chair when he realised it wouldn't boot and it was his fault!
.... but I did have 2.0 on floppies at home, so I frantically did a quick install of that and reloaded our Big Project, with about 5 minutes to spare.
We didn't have a boot disk, and none of us knew much about OS/2 (this was a mechanical workshop)
Moral of the story? Don't mess with OS/2's wallpaper... it'll make you pay.