No, GPS does takes General Relativity and Special Relativity into account, and confirms both nicely. Due to the motion of the spacecraft in orbit with respect to us on the ground, one would expect the GPS satellites to lose about 7 microseconds a day. However, because the satellites are further out of our gravity well, General Relativity predicts the satellites will gain about 45 microseconds a day. Basically, this means that if GR and SR were not taken into account, the GPS system would be useless after about 2 minutes.
However, the effect of Frame Dragging is many orders of magnitude smaller, to the point where it will not have a measurable effect on GPS. To even have a hope of measuring it, Gravity Probe B had gyroscopes made from a set of the most perfect spheres ever manufactured. If you were to scale these spheres up to the size of the earth, the tallest mountain would be less than 1 meter tall.
The real problem (not necessarily this situation, due to the federal regulations involved) is when your IT organization is run by a bunch of incompetent baboons. Our IT guy is appropriately paranoid, except that he's completely lost if you drop him in front of a command line. His attitude is that if the software didn't come from Redmond, and didn't cost some obscene amount of money, it must be evil!
In the end, the customer support team wound up going behind his back and setting up an RT server off-site to handle our trouble ticketing, and also to run the NMS we use to monitor the customer systems we're responsible for. After this had been successful for a few months, we finally got a slice of the DMZ to use as our personal playground, on condition that we ftp (shudder) a nightly copy of the database to him.
You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year?
You're forgetting that washing mirrors, especially ones that are low to the ground like this, is unskilled labour and therefore cheap. It doesn't take a university education to sling a bucket and a squeegee. Hell, just go and grab a bunch of the people that are hanging out at interesections harrasing motorists to wash ther windows.
Maintaining a nuclear plant, on the other hand, takes an incredible amount of education and training. Nuclear technicians do not come cheap. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would wager you could probably hire 5 to 10 mirror washers for every nuclear tech.
meets published NASA human rating standards, not sure yet about "unpublished" standards
That's when the weight of the paperwork associated with the rocket matches the weight of the fully fueled rocket itself.
In all seriousness though, the concept of "man rating" a rocket is a bit of a red herring. There's no real difference between a rocket used to launch humans vs one used to launch other payloads to orbit. Humans just happen to be a bit of a squishy, wet payload. The only real caveat is that we tend to limit the g-forces for human spaceflight to 3 to 4gs, while equiment launches can handle more.
Do you always vote for the most fiscally irresponsible party? Or do you just like a party that reduces individual rights and wants to enlarge the prison population because the crime rate isn't dropping fast enough? This is what always gets me about libertarians, they preach freedom and vote the opposite.
I vote for whomever will defeat Harper and his cronies. ABC. Anything But Conservative.
Not necessarily. There's no requirement for MPs to follow party lines. They could vote against it.
Well, if an MP wants to stay a member of a political party and get elected in the next election, they'll toe the party line. If they vote against their party, except when explicitly permitted to do so, they tend to get kicked out of caucus immediately, and lose all the rights and privileges that gives them.
Also has the benifit of being easy to completely destroy. Until recently, one of the common ways of distributing cryptographic keys was encoded on nitrated (flash) paper. Once the key was read into the encryption device, the user would ignite the paper, causing it to almost assuredly burn up completely, destroying any trace of the data on it. By the same token, if your position was compromised it was very quick to destroy and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
Company I work for builds portable satcoms sytems. I can pull up in my VW Jetta, pull the cases holding the terminal out of my trunk, and get you 4mbps of connectivity inside of 10 minutes, from anywhere. As a bonus, if I was powering it off of the inverter, I'd get about 72 hours of run-time.
I'm an amateur radio operator myself, but to claim it's useful for Emcom in the modern era is laughable. It's a great hobby, lots of really fascinating experimentation now that we're getting computer litterate amateurs out there. (WSPR, WJST, Olivia, other digital modes come to mind).
Eh, I thought that's what the Sea King helicopters were. Most countries drop torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare... we just cut to the chase and drop the whole damned helicopter.
I'm completely disgusted by this whole industry and their price gouging. What's worse, there is no competition really. I can't even tell xplornet to shove it and go elsewhere.
When it comes to satellite, you have to realize how horrendously expensive satellite capacity is. Please realize that it costs between $350,000,000 and $500,000,000 to launch a communications satellite, and they last at most 15 years before their thruster fuel runs out and solar panels degrade. Further, you've probably got a 10% to 15% chance that your $500,000,000 will literally go up in smoke when the rocket explodes on launch. The other fact is basic supply and demand. There are only about 25 to 30 locations where the satellites can be parked to service North America, and each satellite has a limited capacity. This is a natural limit, and there's pretty much nothing that can be done if you want continental coverage.
I work in this business, and my rule of thumb is that raw satellite data capacity costs approximately $6/kbps/month on a two year contract. Thus, enough capacity to run 1mbps over a satellite will cost you about $6000/month. If you're out in the boondocks of the high arctic running oil exploration, and need to get your data down to the south immediately, this is cost effective. if you're trying to run an internet service provider, you have to oversell it hugely in order for your average person to be able to afford it.
Not always. Our power utility (BC Hydro) has been strongly pushing power conservation here. This has gone so far as the power utility offering to give small municipalities/cities LED traffic lights at no cost. (The agreement is that the municipalities pay the utility the same price as they were paying on the old incandescent units for a period of 5 years, then the rates drop).
This is for two reasons:
1) It's cheaper than building a new power plant 2) They can sell the electrical power we don't use to California/Washington/Oregon at much higher prices. This type of arbitrage is where Hydro makes most of its profit. Turn off the hydro plants at night to save water, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. Run the hydro plants flat out during the day, and sell the power to California at inflated prices.
I've never understood why someone would spend hours online finding a site when a travel agent can do it all for you for almost nothing.
For someone like me, who flies > 120,000 miles a year, one of my conditions of employment is that I do my own travel booking. By the time I've explained to an agent which airline I want, which flights, which airports I want to transfer through and/or do not want to transfer through, etc etc etc... i might as well have booked it myself. Every time I've had something booked by an agent, it's had something wrong with it. (on a non-partner airline, crappy seat/no seat booked, wrong hotel, etc...)
OTOH, as someone who has top tier status with my airline (Air Canada), making a change is much simpler if I book directly with the airline. I can call the Super Elite desk, get a helpful and knowledgeable human within 30 seconds, and make the changes. If you book through an agent, you're often stuck dealing with them instead, and they keep shorter hours than the airline's call center does.
I haven't seen much consumer electronics equipment that could survive a combat environment. Seems like just the sand alone in Iraq would mess up a lot of devices pretty quick.
While I haven't actually seen combat (I'm a civilian) I've been over to that part of the world a number of times with both a ThinkPad (when they were still made by IBM) and my MacBook Pro. Both survived the deserts pretty much unscathed. I also had with my various iPods and DSLRs, and none of them really had that much of a problem with the dust. Yes, I was only there 3 months, but with some basic precautions, it's not hard. Will Private Snuffy take as good of care of his issued iPhone as he would his rifle? probably not, but really it's not *that* bad/
The simplest way to reform the patent system is to require a patent holder to produce a saleable product based on their patents. If they don't produce a saleable item the patent shold be null and void.
The actual geographic feature is named Cape Canaveral. It was temporarily changed to Cape Kennedy, but eventually reverted to Canaveral. The NASA installation there is named "Kennedy Space Center" while the US Air Force launch complex is Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and is immediately adjacent to KSC.
The western counterpart to CCAFS is Vandenberg Air Force Base. Due to geography, polar orbiting spacecraft can't be launched from Florida without either overflying land at low altitude (risky) or by doing a dog-leg flight (incurring a huge payload penalty). Vandenberg, on the other hand, allows for polar launches without overflying land.
Also, I would assume, rings and jewlery that may be on your hands. Being a Canadian Engineer, I wear an iron ring, though it's non-magnetic now (closer to stainless I suppose) so I don't know how much an induction cooktop would do to it.
Then again, I prefer the primal experience of cooking on a gas flame myself.
It's NOT normal to have the keys to someone else's house unless you're just trying to show off that you HAVE the keys to their house -- it's an amateur move made by attention whores.
I don't know about that. I travel a lot, so I've given a good friend whom I trust the keys to my apartment. Should there be any problems in my apartment while I'm away (or should I lose my own keys while away) there is someone local who has a set of keys. If there's ever a problem in my apartment (burst pipes, RAID disk failure, etc...) while I'm away, he can come in and deal with it.
It will cause deformations to the underlying rock strata, but that strata will still be visible and measurable. At the Haughton Impact crater in northern Canada, the cliffs that make up the crater rim maintain their structure. The material that was ejected has wound up as big breccia hills within the crater, and was also distributed around outside the crater.
Also, most of the hydrological (and dare I say hydrodynamical?) features actually come up after the impact, and can tell you a lot about the underlying mineralogy. As the heat from the impact dissipates, it heats water, which dissolves some minerals, which then bubble up to the surface. These hydro-thermal events that occur after the impact is also where you can best expect to find microbial life. In effect, you have all the needed ingredients for life present in a hydrothermal vent... warm, running water and associated minerals.
You've got this right on a number of levels. Most obviously because the probe was a JPL project, not NASA. Despite their close ties, they are separate entities.
Secondly, it was not a JPL mistake either. JPL is a pure metric shop. This pervades everything they do; if you walk in the front door and ask the receptionist where the toilet is, he'll tell you that it is "Thirty meters down the hall and to your left"
So what happened? How was this mistake made? Politics. When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
The trouble is this contractor would have normally failed JPL's requirements, as they did not operate metric internally, and being a good patriotic defense contractor, there was no way they were going to make an exception. As such, the contractor hired an intern who's job it was to interface the two cultures (meteric and imperial) and that intern screwed up. Had the contractor stuck to metric as normally required by JPL, we would still have another probe in orbit around the red planet.
Not in this list, but probably the best SSIDs I've seen.
Given that all my devices are named after sailing vessels that explored the West Coast of North America during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, my own SSID is "Pacific".
Slashdot Mirror
No, GPS does takes General Relativity and Special Relativity into account, and confirms both nicely. Due to the motion of the spacecraft in orbit with respect to us on the ground, one would expect the GPS satellites to lose about 7 microseconds a day. However, because the satellites are further out of our gravity well, General Relativity predicts the satellites will gain about 45 microseconds a day. Basically, this means that if GR and SR were not taken into account, the GPS system would be useless after about 2 minutes.
Source: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
However, the effect of Frame Dragging is many orders of magnitude smaller, to the point where it will not have a measurable effect on GPS. To even have a hope of measuring it, Gravity Probe B had gyroscopes made from a set of the most perfect spheres ever manufactured. If you were to scale these spheres up to the size of the earth, the tallest mountain would be less than 1 meter tall.
The real problem (not necessarily this situation, due to the federal regulations involved) is when your IT organization is run by a bunch of incompetent baboons. Our IT guy is appropriately paranoid, except that he's completely lost if you drop him in front of a command line. His attitude is that if the software didn't come from Redmond, and didn't cost some obscene amount of money, it must be evil!
In the end, the customer support team wound up going behind his back and setting up an RT server off-site to handle our trouble ticketing, and also to run the NMS we use to monitor the customer systems we're responsible for. After this had been successful for a few months, we finally got a slice of the DMZ to use as our personal playground, on condition that we ftp (shudder) a nightly copy of the database to him.
You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year?
You're forgetting that washing mirrors, especially ones that are low to the ground like this, is unskilled labour and therefore cheap. It doesn't take a university education to sling a bucket and a squeegee. Hell, just go and grab a bunch of the people that are hanging out at interesections harrasing motorists to wash ther windows.
Maintaining a nuclear plant, on the other hand, takes an incredible amount of education and training. Nuclear technicians do not come cheap. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would wager you could probably hire 5 to 10 mirror washers for every nuclear tech.
meets published NASA human rating standards, not sure yet about "unpublished" standards
That's when the weight of the paperwork associated with the rocket matches the weight of the fully fueled rocket itself.
In all seriousness though, the concept of "man rating" a rocket is a bit of a red herring. There's no real difference between a rocket used to launch humans vs one used to launch other payloads to orbit. Humans just happen to be a bit of a squishy, wet payload. The only real caveat is that we tend to limit the g-forces for human spaceflight to 3 to 4gs, while equiment launches can handle more.
Do you always vote for the most fiscally irresponsible party? Or do you just like a party that reduces individual rights and wants to enlarge the prison population because the crime rate isn't dropping fast enough?
This is what always gets me about libertarians, they preach freedom and vote the opposite.
I vote for whomever will defeat Harper and his cronies. ABC. Anything But Conservative.
Not necessarily. There's no requirement for MPs to follow party lines. They could vote against it.
Well, if an MP wants to stay a member of a political party and get elected in the next election, they'll toe the party line. If they vote against their party, except when explicitly permitted to do so, they tend to get kicked out of caucus immediately, and lose all the rights and privileges that gives them.
Better than Harper and his cronies. It's time we kicked him to the curb.
Hey now.. this isn't Mythbusters.
Also has the benifit of being easy to completely destroy. Until recently, one of the common ways of distributing cryptographic keys was encoded on nitrated (flash) paper. Once the key was read into the encryption device, the user would ignite the paper, causing it to almost assuredly burn up completely, destroying any trace of the data on it. By the same token, if your position was compromised it was very quick to destroy and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
Company I work for builds portable satcoms sytems. I can pull up in my VW Jetta, pull the cases holding the terminal out of my trunk, and get you 4mbps of connectivity inside of 10 minutes, from anywhere. As a bonus, if I was powering it off of the inverter, I'd get about 72 hours of run-time.
I'm an amateur radio operator myself, but to claim it's useful for Emcom in the modern era is laughable. It's a great hobby, lots of really fascinating experimentation now that we're getting computer litterate amateurs out there. (WSPR, WJST, Olivia, other digital modes come to mind).
Eh, I thought that's what the Sea King helicopters were. Most countries drop torpedoes for anti-submarine warfare... we just cut to the chase and drop the whole damned helicopter.
I'm completely disgusted by this whole industry and their price gouging. What's worse, there is no competition really. I can't even tell xplornet to shove it and go elsewhere.
When it comes to satellite, you have to realize how horrendously expensive satellite capacity is. Please realize that it costs between $350,000,000 and $500,000,000 to launch a communications satellite, and they last at most 15 years before their thruster fuel runs out and solar panels degrade. Further, you've probably got a 10% to 15% chance that your $500,000,000 will literally go up in smoke when the rocket explodes on launch. The other fact is basic supply and demand. There are only about 25 to 30 locations where the satellites can be parked to service North America, and each satellite has a limited capacity. This is a natural limit, and there's pretty much nothing that can be done if you want continental coverage.
I work in this business, and my rule of thumb is that raw satellite data capacity costs approximately $6/kbps/month on a two year contract. Thus, enough capacity to run 1mbps over a satellite will cost you about $6000/month. If you're out in the boondocks of the high arctic running oil exploration, and need to get your data down to the south immediately, this is cost effective. if you're trying to run an internet service provider, you have to oversell it hugely in order for your average person to be able to afford it.
Not always. Our power utility (BC Hydro) has been strongly pushing power conservation here. This has gone so far as the power utility offering to give small municipalities/cities LED traffic lights at no cost. (The agreement is that the municipalities pay the utility the same price as they were paying on the old incandescent units for a period of 5 years, then the rates drop).
This is for two reasons:
1) It's cheaper than building a new power plant
2) They can sell the electrical power we don't use to California/Washington/Oregon at much higher prices. This type of arbitrage is where Hydro makes most of its profit. Turn off the hydro plants at night to save water, and buy dirt cheap nuclear power from California. Run the hydro plants flat out during the day, and sell the power to California at inflated prices.
I've never understood why someone would spend hours online finding a site when a travel agent can do it all for you for almost nothing.
For someone like me, who flies > 120,000 miles a year, one of my conditions of employment is that I do my own travel booking. By the time I've explained to an agent which airline I want, which flights, which airports I want to transfer through and/or do not want to transfer through, etc etc etc... i might as well have booked it myself. Every time I've had something booked by an agent, it's had something wrong with it. (on a non-partner airline, crappy seat/no seat booked, wrong hotel, etc...)
OTOH, as someone who has top tier status with my airline (Air Canada), making a change is much simpler if I book directly with the airline. I can call the Super Elite desk, get a helpful and knowledgeable human within 30 seconds, and make the changes. If you book through an agent, you're often stuck dealing with them instead, and they keep shorter hours than the airline's call center does.
I haven't seen much consumer electronics equipment that could survive a combat environment. Seems like just the sand alone in Iraq would mess up a lot of devices pretty quick.
While I haven't actually seen combat (I'm a civilian) I've been over to that part of the world a number of times with both a ThinkPad (when they were still made by IBM) and my MacBook Pro. Both survived the deserts pretty much unscathed. I also had with my various iPods and DSLRs, and none of them really had that much of a problem with the dust. Yes, I was only there 3 months, but with some basic precautions, it's not hard. Will Private Snuffy take as good of care of his issued iPhone as he would his rifle? probably not, but really it's not *that* bad/
The simplest way to reform the patent system is to require a patent holder to produce a saleable product based on their patents. If they don't produce a saleable item the patent shold be null and void.
I think it would be fair if, say, you're on a Spanish SIM and traveling in the UK, you pay the same rates as a holder of a UK phone would pay.
The actual geographic feature is named Cape Canaveral. It was temporarily changed to Cape Kennedy, but eventually reverted to Canaveral. The NASA installation there is named "Kennedy Space Center" while the US Air Force launch complex is Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and is immediately adjacent to KSC.
The western counterpart to CCAFS is Vandenberg Air Force Base. Due to geography, polar orbiting spacecraft can't be launched from Florida without either overflying land at low altitude (risky) or by doing a dog-leg flight (incurring a huge payload penalty). Vandenberg, on the other hand, allows for polar launches without overflying land.
Also, I would assume, rings and jewlery that may be on your hands. Being a Canadian Engineer, I wear an iron ring, though it's non-magnetic now (closer to stainless I suppose) so I don't know how much an induction cooktop would do to it.
Then again, I prefer the primal experience of cooking on a gas flame myself.
Another vote for this solution.
Another benefit is that the aTV is an incredibly quiet package. While it does contain a fan, I have never actually heard it run.
Or if you're Canadian it's really the Pacific South-West... North West would be Prince Rupert or some such. /pedant
It's NOT normal to have the keys to someone else's house unless you're just trying to show off that you HAVE the keys to their house -- it's an amateur move made by attention whores.
I don't know about that. I travel a lot, so I've given a good friend whom I trust the keys to my apartment. Should there be any problems in my apartment while I'm away (or should I lose my own keys while away) there is someone local who has a set of keys. If there's ever a problem in my apartment (burst pipes, RAID disk failure, etc...) while I'm away, he can come in and deal with it.
It will cause deformations to the underlying rock strata, but that strata will still be visible and measurable. At the Haughton Impact crater in northern Canada, the cliffs that make up the crater rim maintain their structure. The material that was ejected has wound up as big breccia hills within the crater, and was also distributed around outside the crater.
Also, most of the hydrological (and dare I say hydrodynamical?) features actually come up after the impact, and can tell you a lot about the underlying mineralogy. As the heat from the impact dissipates, it heats water, which dissolves some minerals, which then bubble up to the surface. These hydro-thermal events that occur after the impact is also where you can best expect to find microbial life. In effect, you have all the needed ingredients for life present in a hydrothermal vent... warm, running water and associated minerals.
You've got this right on a number of levels. Most obviously because the probe was a JPL project, not NASA. Despite their close ties, they are separate entities.
Secondly, it was not a JPL mistake either. JPL is a pure metric shop. This pervades everything they do; if you walk in the front door and ask the receptionist where the toilet is, he'll tell you that it is "Thirty meters down the hall and to your left"
So what happened? How was this mistake made? Politics. When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
The trouble is this contractor would have normally failed JPL's requirements, as they did not operate metric internally, and being a good patriotic defense contractor, there was no way they were going to make an exception. As such, the contractor hired an intern who's job it was to interface the two cultures (meteric and imperial) and that intern screwed up. Had the contractor stuck to metric as normally required by JPL, we would still have another probe in orbit around the red planet.
Not in this list, but probably the best SSIDs I've seen.
Given that all my devices are named after sailing vessels that explored the West Coast of North America during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, my own SSID is "Pacific".