I remember telling some co-worker once that I had purchased a handgun over the weekend.
He asked, "And you registered it...?"
"No, of course not!" I replied.
Him: "You have an unregistered handgun?!?", in astonishment and horror.
It took some non-trivial convincing to get him to understand that _it is not possible to register a handgun in Virginia, because there is no handgun registry_.
What makes you think that these are personal devices? This article is about government-issued devices.
Industry may be big on BYOD (i.e. people using personal devices to do work) but in the DoD, that is still an odd idea that is uncomfortable to most security people. Personally I think we may get there eventually, but not without something like a separation kernel.
For example: I am a DoD employee; I have a government-issued blackberry. I use it to access my (unclassified) government email when I am not in the office. I also use the embedded GPS to help me get to meetings. Because it is a government-owned government-managed device, I cannot install apps on it, or change the security settings in any way. (There are a limited number of approved apps pre-installed.) When I am in the office I must have it turned off.
I can use my gov't blackberry to access my personal email through the web browser only. This is allowed as "incidental use", so long as it does not interfere with my duty performance. It's annoying and I rarely do it. I'm allowed to make both personal and business voice calls.
We still air-gap classified and unclassified systems. Much of what the DoD does is not classified - there are lots of lesser categories - "Controlled Unclassified Information", "Sensitive But Unclassified", or "For Official Use Only". (Which of course get acronymized to CUI, SBU and FOUO).
There have been programs in the past to have smartphones for classified email/web (e.g. SME-PED), but they've generally been horrible and unpopular.
No. At least not that conforms to the Open Source Definition, as published by the Open Source Initiative.
The OSD specifically says:
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Which very explicitly means I can use your software inside my Baby-Mulching Machine (Google for it).
I wrote this in 1997 in a comment file for my version of nenscript:
These changes were made on my own time and on my own computer, but could easily be construed as being part of my official duties as an AWACS software programmer/analyst. If this is the case, then any changes that I made are a work of the US government and are not subject to copyright protection in the United States, and furthermore are provided, free of charge, with no warantee. If my changes are not legally part of my official duties, then I hereby disclaim all rights to the aforementioned changes and explicitly put them in the public domain, and furthermore disclaim any warantee, express or implied. I am not an intellectual property lawyer, so I'm not sure which of these situations applies. Either way, the changes are free to you.
For the Defense Department, the contractor typically retains the copyright to whatever they develop, and the gov't gets "government purpose rights" to it, or in some cases "unlimited rights". This is the way rules are laid out in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. The DFARS read they way they do because Title 41, US Code says it should be that way. (Or in some cases, Title 10).
Individual procurements can be different, depending on the negotiated terms of the contract. The DFARS specifies what amounts to "default" clauses, that are usually in place.
Keep in mind that most gov't employees (and most gov't contractors) have never actually seen a real contract, much less read it. That's what lawyers and contracting officers do... so program/project managers frequently don't actually know what intellectual rights they own.
Also, it's different for the rest of the federal government (i.e. non-Defense). Copyrights are one of the areas where the FAR and DFARS differ.
I wrote the memo (mostly). Here's some historical context:
In 2001-2002 (or so), the Defense Information Systems Agency was in the process of certifying RHEL as being compliant with the Common Operating Environment, which was like a DoD-version of the LSB, sorta. Rumor has it (was before my time) that a certain OS vendor (popular in the desktop space) took exception to this fact and drafted an unsolicited memo for the DoD CIO, which effectively would have banned OSS.
The DoD CIO at the time was a guy named John Stenbit. Stenbit was (and is) a strong-willed visionary, who wasn't about to roll over for anybody, so he (through DISA) commissioned a survey of how much OSS was currently in use in DoD. The study got farmed out to MITRE, specifically a guy named Terry Bollinger. The results of the study were that OSS was being used in lots of places across DoD, in some cases for mission-critical things, and interestingly extensively by the information assurance community. (e.g. snort)
So Stenbit got someone to write a new memo, which he signed in 2003. It said roughly: OSS is okay, it's just like other software, but make sure that you get approval before you use it. (Same as anything else.) Stenbit retired from gov't in 2004.
In April 2008, the Deputy CIO (Dave Wennergren) got the idea that we ought to have updated DoD guidance on Open Source Software. I believe it was suggested to him by Scott McNealy (Sun), Art Money (former DoD CIO from 1999-2001), and Bill Vass (Sun, but former gov't executive under the DoD CIO). Dave asked around if there was anybody on the CIO staff at the time who knew much about OSS. That ended up being me.
I was a CS major at MIT, class of '95; used to work down the hall from Richard Stallman. I was on ROTC scholarship and later served about 6 years as an active-duty officer. I started working as a civilian in gov't in 2002, and in 2004 I took a position with the office of DoD CIO - partially so that I'd be in the right place to advocate OSS in gov't.
Four years later, I got an golden opportunity: I got the task to figure out what the updated OSS guidance should say.
I drafted the memo, with help from lots of folks, including David Wheeler, John Scott, LtCol John Barrette, Dave Emery, Terry Bollinger, MaryAnn Kiefer, Roger Loeb, Frank Petroski, Monique Pryce, JC Herz, and probably others I forgot to mention. I briefed the concept to Wennergren. Got feedback. Revised. Sent out to other offices in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for coordination. Sent to the Military Department CIO offices for coordination. Spent many, many hours coordinating and revising with the Office of General Counsel (OGC) for the OSD, the Army, USAF, and Dept of Navy. It was mostly done a year ago, but it kept getting held up because someone wanted to review and comment.
One paragraph in the memo is traceable to a particularly heinous licensing debacle with a particular software vendor (not Microsoft) that affected a particular software project, and could have been avoided by using OSS.
The lawyers were by far the biggest delay. I wanted to reference the Open Source Definition (published by the Open Source Initiative), but lawyers wouldn't let me, on the grounds that doing so could be considered an endorsement of a non-federal entity, which would violate the Joint Ethics Regulation. I argued that this was a ludicrous interpretation of the JER, and eviscerates the authority granted to the CIO by the Clinger-Cohen Act. But after months of no-progress, I compromised and the final memo does not reference the OSI.
There was no direct involvement by the White House for the 2009 memo, and I don't think for the 2003 memo either. The generally favorable attitude from the current administration toward "openness" meant that I (and I think Mr. Wennergren) felt a pro-open memo would be well received, but we didn't consult with the WH, nor does the WH get that deep into agency policy - even for an agency as big as DoD. If the WH wanted to push po
Concur. In my house, my wife spends much time playing the flash-based puzzle games from neopets. Second prize goes to my daughter who plays the flash games on sesamestreet.org. I don't play online games at all. If I'm at the keyboard, I'm reading or coding.
Certainly it's unfair to say that just because someone develops software for Windows, they wouldn't "get it", in terms of the open-source movement. But let me split a hair for a moment... in English, describing someone as a "Windows developer" denotes that the person develops software for Windows, but it also connotes that the person does not develop for other platforms, and therefore probably lacks the broad perspective of wider experience.
From his web site, the orignial poster here does appear to be a "Windows developer" in both senses.
On your other points, certainly Microsoft has many talented people and have developed some great software over the years. But be careful where you start throwing epithets. "CLONEWARE?" IE is just a copy of Netscape, which is just a copy of Mosaic. Word is clearly an expensive copy of Word Perfect. Outlook is a souped up version of Eudora. The Windows GUI is a copy of the Mac GUI which is a copy of the Xerox ALTO.
Let's face it, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. In my opinion, most of the innovations that one might attribute to Microsoft are trivial improvements of a transformational concept that they stole or bought from someone else. That's not a criticism. Take any software suite and it's basically cloneware. Any new feature that one vendor (or community) adds raises the bar for the others, and we users just expect it to be there in all of them.
Microsoft plays the game better than anybody else, that's clear. But the rules are changing; I'll be curious to see if they play the new game better too.
I took a dying laptop and made it into a digital picture frame for my grandparents. I spent a lot of time working out the software - more than was probably necessary. I called my resulting work PictureFrame Linux
I got the boot sequence down to about 5 seconds, including the BIOS check.
It was an educational process because I started from zero and included only what I thought was needed in an embedded linux application.
Here's a little story about the pain of closed source:
I bought an ATA DVD burner largely for data backups and had it direct-attached to my Linux machine. I used it this way for months. I also have a Powerbook G4. At some point, I borrowed an ieee1394 (Firewire) camcorder, and I got iLife so I could make home-movie DVDs. Transferring my home video to the powerbook was a breeze. iMovie was very easy to use for editing the video. I anticipated that I would use iMovie/iDVD to master an ISO that I could scp to the Linux box for burning.
Alas, iDVD claimed it wouldn't even start without the "correct hardware present". I assumed that meant a DVD burner. So I bought a firewire enclosure for the drive, and a ieee1394 card for the linux machine, and I was all set up to share the DVD drive. Except that really, iDVD won't run without an Apple Superdrive present. (The error message didn't tell me that; I had to google for that.")
In the end, I used Kino, dvdauthor, and growisofs to make my first home-DVD. The fact that I bought the ieee1394 enclosure was a waste of money caused by Apple's insistence on iron-fist control.
Sure, iMovie and iDVD are easier and quicker to learn than the open-source tools. But the open source tools wouldn't have caused me to waste time and money buying hardware, and hours editing video with a tool that ultimately I had to abandon (iMovie). It took some doing to learn how to use kino and dvdauthor to do what I wanted. But less time than it took to ship the DVD enclosure and reconfigure all my hardware.
Anyone besides me struck by the irony that the news site for the Data Center Industry is significantly slashdotted? One would think that Data Center professionals would be a little more ready to handle the traffic than the average site that gets slashdotted.
Anyone know how heavy the device is expected to be? They don't list the weight in the specs. I really loathe it when companies release "specifications" for things without including what seem to me to be obvious metrics, like dimensions, weight, power consumption, heat output, etc.
Back in my flying days, I routinely pulled sustained 6.5 G turns without a G-suit or doing the proper Anti-G Straining Manouver. (AGSM) Some people just have a higher resting G-tolerance than others. Some of my classmates reported routinely "graying out" at as little as 4 G. ("Graying out" is where you progressively lose your peripheral vision.) With a proper G-strain (flexing leg and abdominal muscles to force blood up into cranium), pilots can easily do 6-7 G.
I only flew with a G suit once, and it was before I went to flight training (I was a back-seat passenger). We pulled 7 Gs on the sortie. The suit squeezed my legs hard enough that it felt like I would have bruises. I didn't black out.
It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some trained pilots could pull 9 Gs without a suit.
I have to agree with kwerle on this. I've used ppp over ssh across the internet. I've even used VNC over that link. Was it slow? Yes. Did it lag occasionally? Yes.
Was I on someone else's network with a restrictive firewall ruleset? Yes, my employer's, but strangely, TCP port 23 was allowed outbound, unproxied. I couldn't use any of the other, more robust solutions, nor did I particularly want to spend the time to understand and deploy them. Anything better would also have been harder than:
You know what realy pisses me off? When every damn parking spot in the mall lot is full except for the 50 empty handicapped spots closest to the door.
Once long ago I worked as a sales clerk at a mall. During Christmas season, when the lots were frequently filled to capacity, finding a parking spot for my job could take more than an hour. I grew to really resent those handicapped spots.
Check the facts. The US is below replacement values, as is every country in Europe. I used the 2001 estimates in the CIA World Factbook
The US, (at 2.06 children born/woman) while slightly higher than most European birthrates is still below the break-even number (considered to be 2.1) Mexico is 2.62. Columbia is 2.66. India is 3.04. Malaysia is 3.24. Kenya is 3.5. Saudi Arabia is 6.25.
The US ain't even coming close to outbreeding the rest of the world. To be honest, unless something changes, we're dying out.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude--
(Ammendment XV)
Artificial Wombs are a popular feature in many sci-fi novels. My favorite of these is the Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. In these books, Bujold uses the term "uterine replicator" instead of "artificial womb", and the term "decanted" instead of "born" or "hatched". Throughout most of the galaxy in her novels, uterine replicators are the norm for childbearing.
It seems clear to me that this technology has a ways to go yet, but I personally would look forward to the day that it is a commonplace technique, preferred to natural childbearing. Once developed, it would certainly be easier on the mother, less stressful for the father, and safer for the child.
The term "MILNET" is deprecated. It's now referred to as "NIPRNET" (for Non-secure Internet Protocol Routing NETwork). There's also a "SIPRNET", the acronym expansion of which is left to the reader.
Read my comment again. I explicitly said the speed of spound in air is a function of temperature, rather than density. Clearly, it's not strictly true to say that the speed of sound isn't dependent on density or pressure, since temperature, density and pressure are related through the ideal gas law.
Since you want to be pedantic, the speed of sound is theoretically derived to be v = SQRT(gamma*P_0/rho_0) where:
gamma is the ratio of the specific heat of the fluid at constant pressure over the specific heat of the fluid at constant volume. For air, this is typically taken as 1.4.
P_0 (P naught)is the undisturbed pressure
rho_O (rho naught) is the undisturbed density.
Applying the ideal gas law, (obviously skipping some steps) this becomes v = SQRT(gamma*R*T/M) where:
gamma is as before
R is the universal gas constant
T is the temperature in kelvin
M is the molecular weight of the gas
So, for the purposes of aerodynamics, the speed of sound in a gas depends on the temperature, molecular weight, and molecular structure, but not on the pressure of the gas. For a given fluid, the speed of sound is preportional to the square root of the temperature.
The speed of sound in air is dependent on the temperature of the air. Not the density. In the troposphere (that's where we are), the speed of sound decreases with altitude, but it's because the temperature decreases (at about 6.5 deg C per km), not the pressure or density.
Don't feel bad; both the other two responses to your comment and the NASA web page linked by the story also got it wrong... this is a common mistake. You can see this somewhat from their data. If you look at the chart labeled "I.C.A.O. Standard Atmosphere", note that the density decreases monotonically with atmosphere, but the speed of sound plateaus at the tropopause.
From a molecular dynamics standpoint, this make sense. The speed of sound is the rate that waves propagate through the medium, in the form of molecules bouncing against each other. Higher temperatures means the average molecular speed is higher, and a pressure wave therefore propagates faster.
The Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) issued a warning that automobile and truck accessories sold by AutoZone Inc.(NYSE:AZO) did not have a license for the interfaces on Ford vehicles.
"We're especially upset by the release of inexpensive `Yosemite Sam - Back Off!' and `Naked Girl Silhouette' mudflaps. They have no right to sell those things and put them on Ford Vehicles.", a Ford spokesman was quoted as saying. AutoZone officials declined to comment on the threatened lawsuit, but an inside source claimed that they regarded Ford's move as "asinine".
Slashdot Mirror
I remember telling some co-worker once that I had purchased a handgun over the weekend.
He asked, "And you registered it...?"
"No, of course not!" I replied.
Him: "You have an unregistered handgun?!?", in astonishment and horror.
It took some non-trivial convincing to get him to understand that _it is not possible to register a handgun in Virginia, because there is no handgun registry_.
What makes you think that these are personal devices? This article is about government-issued devices.
Industry may be big on BYOD (i.e. people using personal devices to do work) but in the DoD, that is still an odd idea that is uncomfortable to most security people. Personally I think we may get there eventually, but not without something like a separation kernel.
For example: I am a DoD employee; I have a government-issued blackberry. I use it to access my (unclassified) government email when I am not in the office. I also use the embedded GPS to help me get to meetings. Because it is a government-owned government-managed device, I cannot install apps on it, or change the security settings in any way. (There are a limited number of approved apps pre-installed.) When I am in the office I must have it turned off.
I can use my gov't blackberry to access my personal email through the web browser only. This is allowed as "incidental use", so long as it does not interfere with my duty performance. It's annoying and I rarely do it. I'm allowed to make both personal and business voice calls.
We still air-gap classified and unclassified systems. Much of what the DoD does is not classified - there are lots of lesser categories - "Controlled Unclassified Information", "Sensitive But Unclassified", or "For Official Use Only". (Which of course get acronymized to CUI, SBU and FOUO).
There have been programs in the past to have smartphones for classified email/web (e.g. SME-PED), but they've generally been horrible and unpopular.
No. At least not that conforms to the Open Source Definition, as published by the Open Source Initiative.
The OSD specifically says:
Which very explicitly means I can use your software inside my Baby-Mulching Machine (Google for it).
I wrote this in 1997 in a comment file for my version of nenscript:
These changes were made on my own time and on my own computer, but
could easily be construed as being part of my official duties as an
AWACS software programmer/analyst. If this is the case, then any
changes that I made are a work of the US government and are not
subject to copyright protection in the United States, and furthermore
are provided, free of charge, with no warantee. If my changes are not
legally part of my official duties, then I hereby disclaim all rights
to the aforementioned changes and explicitly put them in the public
domain, and furthermore disclaim any warantee, express or implied. I
am not an intellectual property lawyer, so I'm not sure which of these
situations applies. Either way, the changes are free to you.
Daniel Risacher, 2Lt, USAF
It was 2008, not 2007. Wennergren proposed the memo in April 2008. I thought it would be out by Thanksgiving 2008, and I was only wrong by a year...
For the Defense Department, the contractor typically retains the copyright to whatever they develop, and the gov't gets "government purpose rights" to it, or in some cases "unlimited rights". This is the way rules are laid out in the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. The DFARS read they way they do because Title 41, US Code says it should be that way. (Or in some cases, Title 10).
Individual procurements can be different, depending on the negotiated terms of the contract. The DFARS specifies what amounts to "default" clauses, that are usually in place.
Keep in mind that most gov't employees (and most gov't contractors) have never actually seen a real contract, much less read it. That's what lawyers and contracting officers do... so program/project managers frequently don't actually know what intellectual rights they own.
Also, it's different for the rest of the federal government (i.e. non-Defense). Copyrights are one of the areas where the FAR and DFARS differ.
I wrote the memo (mostly). Here's some historical context:
In 2001-2002 (or so), the Defense Information Systems Agency was in the process of certifying RHEL as being compliant with the Common Operating Environment, which was like a DoD-version of the LSB, sorta. Rumor has it (was before my time) that a certain OS vendor (popular in the desktop space) took exception to this fact and drafted an unsolicited memo for the DoD CIO, which effectively would have banned OSS.
The DoD CIO at the time was a guy named John Stenbit. Stenbit was (and is) a strong-willed visionary, who wasn't about to roll over for anybody, so he (through DISA) commissioned a survey of how much OSS was currently in use in DoD. The study got farmed out to MITRE, specifically a guy named Terry Bollinger. The results of the study were that OSS was being used in lots of places across DoD, in some cases for mission-critical things, and interestingly extensively by the information assurance community. (e.g. snort)
So Stenbit got someone to write a new memo, which he signed in 2003. It said roughly: OSS is okay, it's just like other software, but make sure that you get approval before you use it. (Same as anything else.) Stenbit retired from gov't in 2004.
In April 2008, the Deputy CIO (Dave Wennergren) got the idea that we ought to have updated DoD guidance on Open Source Software. I believe it was suggested to him by Scott McNealy (Sun), Art Money (former DoD CIO from 1999-2001), and Bill Vass (Sun, but former gov't executive under the DoD CIO). Dave asked around if there was anybody on the CIO staff at the time who knew much about OSS. That ended up being me.
I was a CS major at MIT, class of '95; used to work down the hall from Richard Stallman. I was on ROTC scholarship and later served about 6 years as an active-duty officer. I started working as a civilian in gov't in 2002, and in 2004 I took a position with the office of DoD CIO - partially so that I'd be in the right place to advocate OSS in gov't.
Four years later, I got an golden opportunity: I got the task to figure out what the updated OSS guidance should say.
I drafted the memo, with help from lots of folks, including David Wheeler, John Scott, LtCol John Barrette, Dave Emery, Terry Bollinger, MaryAnn Kiefer, Roger Loeb, Frank Petroski, Monique Pryce, JC Herz, and probably others I forgot to mention. I briefed the concept to Wennergren. Got feedback. Revised. Sent out to other offices in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for coordination. Sent to the Military Department CIO offices for coordination. Spent many, many hours coordinating and revising with the Office of General Counsel (OGC) for the OSD, the Army, USAF, and Dept of Navy. It was mostly done a year ago, but it kept getting held up because someone wanted to review and comment.
One paragraph in the memo is traceable to a particularly heinous licensing debacle with a particular software vendor (not Microsoft) that affected a particular software project, and could have been avoided by using OSS.
The lawyers were by far the biggest delay. I wanted to reference the Open Source Definition (published by the Open Source Initiative), but lawyers wouldn't let me, on the grounds that doing so could be considered an endorsement of a non-federal entity, which would violate the Joint Ethics Regulation. I argued that this was a ludicrous interpretation of the JER, and eviscerates the authority granted to the CIO by the Clinger-Cohen Act. But after months of no-progress, I compromised and the final memo does not reference the OSI.
There was no direct involvement by the White House for the 2009 memo, and I don't think for the 2003 memo either. The generally favorable attitude from the current administration toward "openness" meant that I (and I think Mr. Wennergren) felt a pro-open memo would be well received, but we didn't consult with the WH, nor does the WH get that deep into agency policy - even for an agency as big as DoD. If the WH wanted to push po
Concur. In my house, my wife spends much time playing the flash-based puzzle games from neopets. Second prize goes to my daughter who plays the flash games on sesamestreet.org. I don't play online games at all. If I'm at the keyboard, I'm reading or coding.
Certainly it's unfair to say that just because someone develops software for Windows, they wouldn't "get it", in terms of the open-source movement. But let me split a hair for a moment... in English, describing someone as a "Windows developer" denotes that the person develops software for Windows, but it also connotes that the person does not develop for other platforms, and therefore probably lacks the broad perspective of wider experience.
From his web site, the orignial poster here does appear to be a "Windows developer" in both senses.
On your other points, certainly Microsoft has many talented people and have developed some great software over the years. But be careful where you start throwing epithets. "CLONEWARE?" IE is just a copy of Netscape, which is just a copy of Mosaic. Word is clearly an expensive copy of Word Perfect. Outlook is a souped up version of Eudora. The Windows GUI is a copy of the Mac GUI which is a copy of the Xerox ALTO.
Let's face it, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. In my opinion, most of the innovations that one might attribute to Microsoft are trivial improvements of a transformational concept that they stole or bought from someone else. That's not a criticism. Take any software suite and it's basically cloneware. Any new feature that one vendor (or community) adds raises the bar for the others, and we users just expect it to be there in all of them.
Microsoft plays the game better than anybody else, that's clear. But the rules are changing; I'll be curious to see if they play the new game better too.
I got the boot sequence down to about 5 seconds, including the BIOS check.
It was an educational process because I started from zero and included only what I thought was needed in an embedded linux application.
I bought an ATA DVD burner largely for data backups and had it direct-attached to my Linux machine. I used it this way for months. I also have a Powerbook G4. At some point, I borrowed an ieee1394 (Firewire) camcorder, and I got iLife so I could make home-movie DVDs. Transferring my home video to the powerbook was a breeze. iMovie was very easy to use for editing the video. I anticipated that I would use iMovie/iDVD to master an ISO that I could scp to the Linux box for burning.
Alas, iDVD claimed it wouldn't even start without the "correct hardware present". I assumed that meant a DVD burner. So I bought a firewire enclosure for the drive, and a ieee1394 card for the linux machine, and I was all set up to share the DVD drive. Except that really, iDVD won't run without an Apple Superdrive present. (The error message didn't tell me that; I had to google for that.")
In the end, I used Kino, dvdauthor, and growisofs to make my first home-DVD. The fact that I bought the ieee1394 enclosure was a waste of money caused by Apple's insistence on iron-fist control.
Sure, iMovie and iDVD are easier and quicker to learn than the open-source tools. But the open source tools wouldn't have caused me to waste time and money buying hardware, and hours editing video with a tool that ultimately I had to abandon (iMovie). It took some doing to learn how to use kino and dvdauthor to do what I wanted. But less time than it took to ship the DVD enclosure and reconfigure all my hardware.
Anyone besides me struck by the irony that the news site for the Data Center Industry is significantly slashdotted? One would think that Data Center professionals would be a little more ready to handle the traffic than the average site that gets slashdotted.
Anyone know how heavy the device is expected to be? They don't list the weight in the specs. I really loathe it when companies release "specifications" for things without including what seem to me to be obvious metrics, like dimensions, weight, power consumption, heat output, etc.
Back in my flying days, I routinely pulled sustained 6.5 G turns without a G-suit or doing the proper Anti-G Straining Manouver. (AGSM) Some people just have a higher resting G-tolerance than others. Some of my classmates reported routinely "graying out" at as little as 4 G. ("Graying out" is where you progressively lose your peripheral vision.) With a proper G-strain (flexing leg and abdominal muscles to force blood up into cranium), pilots can easily do 6-7 G.
I only flew with a G suit once, and it was before I went to flight training (I was a back-seat passenger). We pulled 7 Gs on the sortie. The suit squeezed my legs hard enough that it felt like I would have bruises. I didn't black out.
It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some trained pilots could pull 9 Gs without a suit.
I have to agree with kwerle on this. I've used ppp over ssh across the internet. I've even used VNC over that link. Was it slow? Yes. Did it lag occasionally? Yes.
/usr/bin/ssh -2 user@host.yi.org -p 23 sudo /usr/sbin/pppd notty passive` local 192.168.1.5:192.168.1.1
Was I on someone else's network with a restrictive firewall ruleset? Yes, my employer's, but strangely, TCP port 23 was allowed outbound, unproxied. I couldn't use any of the other, more robust solutions, nor did I particularly want to spend the time to understand and deploy them. Anything better would also have been harder than:
pppd `pty-redir
Which was the first solution that popped into my head, and met all of my needs. (Newer versions of pppd have options that make this even simpler.)
So what is bad about a solution that works?
You know what realy pisses me off? When every damn parking spot in the mall lot is full except for the 50 empty handicapped spots closest to the door.
Once long ago I worked as a sales clerk at a mall. During Christmas season, when the lots were frequently filled to capacity, finding a parking spot for my job could take more than an hour. I grew to really resent those handicapped spots.
The ADA needs more reasonability built into it.
Check the facts. The US is below replacement values, as is every country in Europe. I used the 2001 estimates in the CIA World Factbook
The US, (at 2.06 children born/woman) while slightly higher than most European birthrates is still below the break-even number (considered to be 2.1) Mexico is 2.62. Columbia is 2.66. India is 3.04. Malaysia is 3.24. Kenya is 3.5. Saudi Arabia is 6.25.
The US ain't even coming close to outbreeding the rest of the world. To be honest, unless something changes, we're dying out.
It seems clear to me that this technology has a ways to go yet, but I personally would look forward to the day that it is a commonplace technique, preferred to natural childbearing. Once developed, it would certainly be easier on the mother, less stressful for the father, and safer for the child.
The term "MILNET" is deprecated. It's now referred to as "NIPRNET" (for Non-secure Internet Protocol Routing NETwork). There's also a "SIPRNET", the acronym expansion of which is left to the reader.
Oddly though, the Capitol and Pentagon do not. Well, they didn't until 9/11, anyway.
Since you want to be pedantic, the speed of sound is theoretically derived to be v = SQRT(gamma*P_0/rho_0) where:
Applying the ideal gas law, (obviously skipping some steps) this becomes v = SQRT(gamma*R*T/M) where:
So, for the purposes of aerodynamics, the speed of sound in a gas depends on the temperature, molecular weight, and molecular structure, but not on the pressure of the gas. For a given fluid, the speed of sound is preportional to the square root of the temperature.
It's too bad browsers don't implement MathML.
They even have this video clip, but it doesn't look like much, I warn ya.
Don't feel bad; both the other two responses to your comment and the NASA web page linked by the story also got it wrong... this is a common mistake. You can see this somewhat from their data. If you look at the chart labeled "I.C.A.O. Standard Atmosphere", note that the density decreases monotonically with atmosphere, but the speed of sound plateaus at the tropopause.
From a molecular dynamics standpoint, this make sense. The speed of sound is the rate that waves propagate through the medium, in the form of molecules bouncing against each other. Higher temperatures means the average molecular speed is higher, and a pressure wave therefore propagates faster.
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