If 100,000 people walk down to a local store (say a Quick-i-Mart), walk up to the door, and knock on it without going in and doing anything else. This continues day in and day out for 3 months. The roads are blocked for miles all day every day, and every business for miles can't get any real customers in because of the others blocking the roads and sidewalks. Local residents can't get to or from their homes because of it. Would it be reasonable for the police to do something about it?
I would think it would be reasonable, although odd, for the police to put out signs along the way to say "Quick-i-Mart is out of business, go away", and block the illegitimate traffic from going towards it.
My friend hosts a lot of domains. The mail server was getting swamped with spam. Literally hundreds of thousands of spams an hour. I blackholed dozens of domains for email, which were idle. We were lucky that we could do it without effecting working accounts. To preserve the quality of service for most of the customers, we had to do this. From what I've read, this is what the situation was here too. It appeared to be a massive DDoS attack. To preserve the quality of service for the rest of the customers, unusual measures may have been taken.
I'm sure they've always said the same thing as today. Who am I to believe any differently. If I have to guess between my own memory and the truth that Big Brother has been kind enough to share with me, I will always believe him, as my own memory may be flawed.
6 states? We have Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. What are the other three?
I was completely thrown by that silly concept of 63 states. According to all the history books I've read, there have always been 3. I already verified this with the RecDep of Minitrue.
Myself, I'm going on with my regular life, since I never went there anyways.:)
But, since I was curious, I tried to go to their site from a Verizon FiOS line. Dead.
This almost reminds me of the wonders of folks playing in IRC back in the day. One kid pisses off another kid, and suddenly folks are getting flooded off the network, and other various DoS attacks. SSDD.
So, they're implying that evolutionary traits should disappear after a relatively short period? Why? I'd suspect they may fade away over centuries, but not necessarily.
You should read up on Tesla's work in Colorado Springs. His 8hz source would reach many miles.
Ideally, he wanted to set up quite a few transmitters world wide. I believe the number was in the dozens. That would sufficiently provide power around the planet.
There are a few fatal flaws with this. Once you make power available everywhere, it's impossible to meter. It didn't require much tech on the receiving side. A couple metal rods, if I remember correctly. Say you managed to get the population of a country to use some sort of metering device, rather than just using their own unmetered receivers. That doesn't mean a neighboring country would manage their own laws. Why should you give away your perfectly good power, and let third world countries have electricity? It's all economics, no one cares about the pesky "for the good of all mankind". Power generation is a capitalist business. They make power, so they can make money. Even if a tax was levied on every person in a country, you can't guarantee that the neighboring areas will tax appropriately. There would be no way to stop their service for failing to pay.
The second is tactical. If you want a tactical advantage over someone, you remove infrastructure services. On a small scale, like SWAT raiding a building, they may drop power to the building before they raid it. The target is now in the dark and disoriented. On a larger scale (like a country), one of the first stages of an invasion is to knock out their infrastructure. Power generation plants are frequently the first to go. In modern terms, that can be an air strike or covert operation. Some things will work on batteries and/or generators for a while, but that time is limited. If you can't eliminate their power source, because it's everywhere, you no longer have the tactical advantage.
The technology could have been perfected. It would never be implemented simply because there's no good profit in it.
I'm too lazy to find the news story, but on the Veteran's Expressway in Tampa, FL, there was a closer story.
There was a turn under the expressway with big signs indicating the turn was 25mph. I drove the route frequently. Big signs, flashing lights, it was really obvious. A tanker truck full of fuel was doing about 50mph, and realized at the last second that his choices were run straight into the bottom of the overpass, or try to turn hard and follow the road. He turned. The truck rolled. It caught fire. He got out safely, but the heat from the fire literally melted the concrete above. No one else was hurt. That section of road was closed for months while they rebuilt the overpass and embankments.
Actually, there are plenty of chances for people to screw things up.
This whole story is failure to plan. Or as I wanted to say. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
I strongly suspect they've been taking large trucks down old gravel trails, and that's a lot of what they're complaining about. They needed to take the proper vehicles on the proper roads, and plan their trips accordingly. This was apparently not done properly, which lead to problems.
I watched a charter bus get stuck across a major local road a few months ago. He thought he could pull into and out of a parking lot, where the parking lot was higher than the road. As he pulled out, the frame under the engine dragged on the ground, taking the weight off of the back wheels. That wasn't a problem with the bus, nor the road. It was a problem where he tried to do something with the vehicle that couldn't be done.
I've driven a lot of things, large and small. I can't say I've driven a 100'+ truck anywhere, but with what I have driven (up to 65'), I'm careful to evaluate where I'm going, so I don't get stuck. I've made some mistakes, such as pulling into a gas station with a 26' moving van and car trailer, and finding out that there was no way to pull through, but those were inconsequential mistakes that only cost me a couple minutes of navigating back the way I came.
I've seen plenty of large cargo like you've described, and have yet to see one get in trouble. They've planned their routes properly.
Mine is only slightly modified, because I'm happy with it.:) When the time comes and it needs something, like I finally wear the engine out at 150k to 200k miles, then I'll consider more stuff. Right now, I'm about to hit 100k miles, and the only thing it kinda needs is the spark plugs changed. It still has the original ones.
I've seen some very nicely modified cars. I'm sure yours is nice. Well, not positive, but I'm taking your word on it. More than likely if we met in a parking lot and started talking about cars, I'd be impressed.:)
I used to have the same problem with my '82 Firebird. That was my first car that I did substantial work to. It started out with a 2.8 V6, and ended up with a 4 bolt main 350, and absolutely every inch of the drivetrain had been modified or replaced. People would ask if it was a TransAm, and I'd have to try to explain that TransAm is a submodel of Firebird. This was the standard Firebird heavily modified so it was faster and handled better than the stock TransAm. La, la, la, they glazed over almost immediately so I was always wasting my breath.
Now that I have a WS/6, they still glaze over when I'm talking but in their mind my car may as well be a rocket ship.:)
What kind of collector bought a 70's car in the 70's? Not too many.
You're usually looking at 25 to 30 years out when people start getting nostalgic. So, buy a brand new Camaro SS Transformers edition, park it in a garage, and take it out once a month to keep it alive. In 30 years it'll be worth significantly more than it was bought for today. Well, assuming the economy doesn't completely collapse in the next few years.:)
I wasn't saying that customization is a bad thing. Hell, that's how modern cars came about. If people weren't taking stock cars and turning them into hotrods back in the day, most of the performance cars on the road today simply wouldn't exist.
It just a matter of the value of the vehicle. A new Camaro SS will continue being worth more than a regular Camaro with the SS badge and mods, even if they're effectively the same.
I've done some things to my TransAm WS/6. Most collectors won't mind, but my work, since it's all fairly standard for this kind of vehicle. I'm coming up on 100,000 miles on it, so in about another 50,000 miles I need to consider swapping the motor for a new one anyways.:) I'm thinking a 383 would be nice. And of course ported and polished heads, improved intake, etc. You know the rule, right? There's no replacement for displacement. After that, I know I'd ruin the collector value, but I'd be ok with it.
I look at it this way. I have a 2000 TransAm WS/6 edition. It's a special edition car, and always will be.
I've known of people who buy the V6 Firebird. They'll swap in the LS1 engine. Then they'll get the body parts from aftermarket vendors to match (nose, hood, tail wing, etc). Then they'll get the logos, decals, etc. They'll put it all together, and have pretty much the same car. Sometimes they'll forget something, like the suspension, exhaust, original wheels, etc. It won't quite be a WS/6, even though it will look like it. Regardless of how perfectly they reproduce it, mine will always be an original WS/6. Theirs will be a modified car similar to the WS/6.
If they ever go to sell it, a VIN search will show that it has the wrong engine, and that particular one didn't come with WS/6 performance package.
To a collector, my car with very few modifications is worth a whole lot more than a car made to emulate it.
In my area, with the mileage and options my car has is will sell retail for $11,300. Someone who modified a regular Firebird (Formula) to look like my WS/6, assuming the dealer overlooked the fact that it was modified from original (which lowers the value), it would only retail for $8,400. As a private sale, the modified car may go for more, but that's all in your salesmanship.
You're not only paying for $20 worth of plastic trim, you're paying for the fact that a particular vehicle was originally sold as that vehicle.
Would I buy the Transformers special package? Probably not. It's kinda silly and childish. But hey, whatever. Some people may like that. It will remain a special edition car, which will always have it's bragging rights. What if someone just adds on their own parts later, and says it's the special edition? Well, when you look it up, you'll find that it isn't. You'll also likely find that they missed some detail in their conversion.
When I work on cars, that's something I hate more than anything. Someone along the line will have converted something, and then you have to figure out what they did so you can get a replacement part that fits. I don't know how many hours I've spent in parts stores with a broken part, asking them to look up various years and models of similar cars to see what some small part came off of.
Oh my..... You know radioman, I hadn't really thought, but....
I hadn't bothered to look, but if you look a little bit... Well, lets just make a trail.
From the posting, you see his Slashdot username.
From the username, you can look at his public Slashdot profile.
From his profile, you can see his site.
From his site, you can see where he's deployed; what he brought with him; the names, types, brands and models of equipment; the type of satellite uplinks he's using; the way he's distributing his traffic for his unit; the military unit size and his position; and HIS REAL NAME. With that, you can find his rank, home town, and the community college he graduated from.
Sorry. I wasn't trying, and I'm not a bad guy. I have no special clearances, no secret methods of finding information. I'm just some guy out there. The bad guys can be worse. Don't expect that your only enemy is a sitting in the shade under his camel cleaning his AK-47. Your enemy could come from anywhere. Keep your secrets SECRET. It could be a matter of life or death. Each little slip up builds the big picture of who you are. You gave up a whole lot of stuff just in your question, that shouldn't be otherwise known.
If I were the DoD investigating this leak, there would already be someone dispatched to your tent.
If I were the enemy, I may be looking to eavesdrop on your communications.
Since I'm just an American civilian, I'm saying "Oh shit, he said too much."
Ya, I'm pretty sure that's a no-no. Unless he didn't really work for DoD, and he was just hoping that blurb would make him browny points with the Slashdot crowd. Reading the comments so far, it doesn't look like it made him any new friends.:)
If I was working on something that needed real security, I'd prefer a steel reinforced concrete gap with armed guards outside. But I guess an air gap would do. It doesn't do much for the physical security though.:)
"Sorry, I can't be bothered with finding this, so I'll ask Slashdot how to do it without trying."
I would think his problem should be pretty simple. SuSE does have a package manager, right? You can uninstall the vendor package, and install your own. Voila, problem gone.
I've been known to do both the tarball method, and the source method. It's really not *that* painful to build things from source directly on the machines in question. Writing a script to log in and do something like
rpm --erase somepkg >>/tmp/somemsg cd/usr/src/ wget http://internal.dod.gov/srcs/somepkg.tar.gz tar xpzf somepkg.tar.gz cd somepkg./configure && make && make install >>/tmp/somemsg sendmail -t/tmp/somemsg
You're looking for more of something like a 12 gauge slug. You don't need to sling a small round a long range, you're looking for the short range stopping power. If the body armor does stop it, they'll be flat on their backs regardless. Then again, any decent bullet hitting any body armor is going to really hurt, so it's only really good for saving their lives, not pretending that they weren't shot at.
Here's some approximate effective ranges of various ammunition.
9mm pistol - 50 yards
45 cal pistol - 100 yards
12 gauge slug - 100 yards
AK-47 (7.26x39mm) - 400 yards
AR-15/M-16 (5.56x45mm) - 600 yards
30-06 (7.62x33mm) - 800+ yards
These vary by the weapon, ammunition, shooter, and conditions.
Any of these weapons are going to go straight through a standard interior wall with no problems. Don't take my word on it, There's a much better resource available.
They have an interesting page where they show shooting through 4 interior walls. Pistols all do a fine job of going straight through them. The AR-15 (civilian M-16) actually has a problem with accuracy through the walls.
Pretty much, if anyone decides to just start shooting at an intruder, if the bullet doesn't stop in the intruder, it will very likely continue to travel through the structure until it hits something hard. That could be a family member or neighbor.
Most houses in neighborhoods are oriented so the front and back doors face another house. Just because an intruder breaks into your house is not a reason to spray the doorway and possibly kill your neighbor in the process. Gun control is a very important thing. I'm not talking about limiting access to weapons. I'm talking about proper application of the tool. TV has shown that you just shoot and hopefully one will hit. In real life, you have to take shots very carefully, because it's not just your target who may be in your line of fire. Using a firearm is an absolute last resort, and as such must be used with extreme caution. Will you be able to live with yourself because you shot at an intruder, and killed a neighbors kid?
Back to the video, it's terrible. Anti-guns versus gun nuts. I've heard these arguments, and when you get extremes on both sides talking, it never comes to a friendly compromise.
The answer isn't in the care and feeding of NASA. NASA is just another government agency. There are huge numbers of well paid workers, and fortunes that come and go through contracts that may never be fulfilled.
Obviously cutting NASA back can't help at all. Throwing huge amounts into NASA likely won't happen either. It's a bureaucracy, and will live and die as such.
I was going to cite one of the marvels of the 20th century in a previous post, but maybe it's better here. Edsel. The $400,000,000 abortion that Ford created.
Government development budgets are shaped by political decisions. While the 12 million dollar pen is just an urban legand, Gemini Titan 3 did utilize $128 pencils. There are plenty of places that A is a great option, but B would work just fine. You know, if someone could build a "good enough" spacecraft for $1 million that could safely go up and back down, I'd be first in line to fly in it. The space shuttle costs roughly $1,700,000,000 ($1.7 billion), and all the costs divided among the launches, it costs roughly $1,500,000 ($1.5 million) per launch. Roughly $170,000,000,000 ($170 billion) has been spent on the Space Shuttle program so far.
If I had a choice of standing in line to take the Mercedes limousine of spacecraft where only a handful existed in the world, or the family sedan version that 10,000 were being produced every year, it'd be nice to take the Mercedes, but I'd take anything that'll get me from point A to point S.
The Shuttle was built as the redundant bloated do-all of space craft, and now that it's been done it was carved in stone. I'm not disputing the Shuttle is a really nifty piece of engineering, but we have a lot more to do than ego fluff our old technology. And no, the 1960's era capsule that is to replace the Shuttle is a freakin' joke.
I'd be willing to bet if you took a couple dozen of the best engineers from NASA and told them "Look, we want something newer, better, faster, and massively reproducible, get it done. We won't ask questions, we just want results. Do it right this time, and you get to do it better next time. Use COTS when you can to keep costs and development time to a minimum", there would be some amazing progress done for an amazingly small fraction of what it cost before. I'd be willing to bet that they could get something manned in orbit and back in a year for under $100 million.
FY 2008 NASA budget for space operations was $5.4 billion. FY 2009 NASA budget for space operations was $5.9 billion. FY 2010 NASA budget request for space operations is $6.1 billion.
Anyone wishing to argue this point, especially with the government, has to give me open discretion to which engineers to use, and no questions asked until they're done and the work is given to the public domain by the end of the 1st FY. Yes, it's the American tax dollar, so the public deserves to have everything involved when it's done.
>What you suggest would essentially cast our current > situation concerning space travel in stone.
Actually, I was suggesting taking our current space travel and expand on it. Every generation of anything is (or at least should be) better than the last. Mistakes will be made and learned from.
There is lots of money to be made from space. No, I'm not suggesting mining the moon for cheese, but I am saying that there are a LOT of dollars to be had by expanding outward. No one reading this can afford a ticket to play in space. If there is anyone here who can, I could use a small loan of a few million dollars.:) What if tickets to space were available for $2,000. I'd be fairly confident a large percentage of Slashdot readers, and other folks world wide would scramble for them. What if the ticket didn't just take you to the edge of space and back? What if it made the colony on Mars accessible. What if it were to take you to the Heliopause? What if you could collect rare space gems caught in Saturn's rings? Nothing says love like a gemstone you plucked from the heavens yourself.
Who's to say what we'd find out there with enough looking. Sure we've brought back a tiny sampling of what's in our own solar system. What we know of what's out there is nothing. Imagine dropping sensor packages from an observatory over Jupiter and finally seeing what's at ground level. Sure the first one didn't make it far (Galileo, 1995), but learning from mistakes and observations would eventually make something that could do it. Right now we'd spend billions to send a single test. What if the subsequent tests were "Drop this out the airlock and see what happens."
There's lots of things to find out there, and we're still piddling around rather than exploring them. I don't want us locked into what we have, I want to have the opportunity to explore.
Well, we were discussing smart appliances in general. Just because they barely exist right now doesn't mean that they won't be increasing over time. I know quite a few power companies offer smart control over a few things, like the air conditioning. They're kind of dumb actually. They disable air conditioners for periods, similar to a rolling blackout.
Now, if all air conditioners were "smart" controlled by the power company, imagine the chaos that could happen. Air conditioners cycle on and off throughout the day. They are controlled by their thermostat not to be allowed to cycle on too soon after they cycle off, to avoid surging the system. Rapid and repeated cycling could cause (and would) failures of the compressor. That was a nasty trick to do to PC's too. At least with AT power supplies, you could flick the power switch on and off, and burn it out very quickly. I haven't heard of that working on ATX power supplies, probably because they use the soft on switch. Back to the original premise. What if... What if evil hacker guy (or bad script kiddie) were to tell all air conditioners in a city (say Los Angeles in mid-summer) to cycle off at noon. They could sit idle until 1pm. Just about every thermostat would then be in place to cycle on. If they were all instructed to turn on simultaneously, the surge of demand would be huge.
I'm not really paranoid about the smart appliances. I'm just practical about the misuse of them. Just like phone phreaks manipulated the telephone networks for years, power hackers could abuse the system. Securing such a system is one thing, but ensuring that it could never happen by the ability simply not being there is another. I barely like the thermostats that exist on air conditioners these days. The old bimetalic strips worked very well. I've changed several "smart" thermostats, because they've not functioned correctly. The only ancient bimetalic strip thermostats I've changed were because people wanted the pretty digital display. Very few people that I've known use the advanced features of modern thermostats, like automatically adjusting the temps based on time of day or the day of the week.
I agree totally on the hot water situation. Unfortunately, point of use heaters are more expensive. Home builders still only build one into a home, and that's almost always in the garage. Where I'm staying now, it takes about 3 minutes to get hot water in the shower, and since the pipes were not well insulated, if you shut it off for 5 minutes, you need to repeat the 3 minute cycle to get hot water again. There are systems which will flow hot water through the pipes all the time, but those still waste energy by letting it dissipate in the uninsulated areas.
In case you haven't been keeping score, the space program has been stagnant for decades.
The "Space Shuttle" program was conceived in the late 1960's and brought to life in the early 1970's. It's first flight was in 1981. So, the most advanced spacecraft humanity has is 28 years old.
The "International Space Station" platform was announced in 1993, and orbital assembly began in 1998. The base of it is 11 years old.
I was discussing the space program with some folks not too long ago. We discussed several things about it.
If NASA designs and builds the absolutely latest greatest spacecraft, with the ability to fly deep into space at the fastest we can conceive now, AND handle life support (air, water, food, etc) for an infinite time, how good would it be?
We are always discovering new little things about any technology. What's the huge difference between a 1920's car and a 2009 car? Not a lot other than electronics and plastics. The fundamentals of the car are still the same, yet the performance and safety has substantially increased.
If we had built newer and better spacecraft every year since our first manned space flight in the early 1960's, we'd have over 40 generations of spacecraft. Just since the inception of the Space Shuttle program, we should have 28 newer generations of spacecraft, each with improvements from the previous designs.
The theoretical max speed and infinite lifesupport spacecraft that was launched in 1985 would have been superseded by a much bigger and faster one by 1990, and for the astronauts who were speeding off to check out the next solar system, they would have already been picked up by the 1990 ship, then the 1995 ship. The probably would have been picked up and returned back to earth by the 2000 ship, because that old technology was so slow. By 2005 it would have been towed back and put in a museum. Instead, virtually every human on the planet hasn't had an opportunity to leave, and even if they did leave the atmosphere (or most of it), they had nowhere to go. There is no Moon, Mars, or Io colony yet. Humans haven't even been there yet.
People expect a new cell phone every few months, and cell phones have gone from being an expensive brick, to being a tiny piece of electronics that easily fits on your pocket that everyone has.
Why hasn't the space program become the same thing?
It's partly because of the government control over space. If there were a financial incentive, corporations would already have their spacecraft going. The governments are also a major cause of the problem. If the governments of the world had been cooperating since day 1, things would be substantially different. There were some great moves made because the US and USSR were competing to get the bigger better craft up. After that died, so did our serious advancement.
I'm not saying eliminate NASA or the other space agencies. Consider NASA like the FAA for space. The FAA doesn't own or fly many of their own planes, but they sure know just about everything about every aircraft up there. If the FAA owned and operated every aircraft, there would be maybe 6 commuter flights daily instead of the world wide network of flights that we have available now. Why do we accept this?
For water heaters, there are better ones that monitor their own usage and attempt to predict utilization. I had one like this, which worked very well. I'm not 100% sure on the timing, but it went something like this. It was able to recognize there is hot water usage for a 4 hour window around 7am and 5pm. If it saw water wasn't being consumed, it would then reconfigure itself. For example, if you went on vacation and forgot to tell it, it would use less power. There was also an manual switch so you could tell it you were going on vacation. That would be useful for the winter, so the water heater wouldn't freeze, but I wouldn't be wasting money heating it much above freezing.:)
You can actually have some flex room with a fridge too. If the power is cheaper, and the usage lower (like, less opening and closing), you could let the cycles run less frequently. Say you're running 38F to 42F degrees normally, you could run 36F to 44F through peak time.
I don't like the whole idea though. I see subsidized appliances. Buy a new refrigerator for $1 and pay their easy $20/mo ez-payment plan for the next 10 years. Failure to pay for service will result in termination of the service immediately. What good is a fridge that won't run. I'm the DMCA or some future law will be used to prevent the reverse engineering of any components. Circumventing the remote control parts to make it "just work" would be a criminal offense.
There are good reasons for the whole smart power grid to go into effect. I'm not just worried, I'm positive, that it will be abused by corporations.
Just wait until the hacks come though. Just imagine a gas stove turning on with it's pilot light off, and then the pilot igniting. How about an electric stove and oven going to full power for no reason. I hope nothing was left on top of it. If every dumb item in a house could be controlled, I'm sure there would be plenty of bad things that could happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite get your little posts, even though you've been tagging them on my posts for a while now. What the hell are you on about?
If 100,000 people walk down to a local store (say a Quick-i-Mart), walk up to the door, and knock on it without going in and doing anything else. This continues day in and day out for 3 months. The roads are blocked for miles all day every day, and every business for miles can't get any real customers in because of the others blocking the roads and sidewalks. Local residents can't get to or from their homes because of it. Would it be reasonable for the police to do something about it?
I would think it would be reasonable, although odd, for the police to put out signs along the way to say "Quick-i-Mart is out of business, go away", and block the illegitimate traffic from going towards it.
My friend hosts a lot of domains. The mail server was getting swamped with spam. Literally hundreds of thousands of spams an hour. I blackholed dozens of domains for email, which were idle. We were lucky that we could do it without effecting working accounts. To preserve the quality of service for most of the customers, we had to do this. From what I've read, this is what the situation was here too. It appeared to be a massive DDoS attack. To preserve the quality of service for the rest of the customers, unusual measures may have been taken.
I'm sure they've always said the same thing as today. Who am I to believe any differently. If I have to guess between my own memory and the truth that Big Brother has been kind enough to share with me, I will always believe him, as my own memory may be flawed.
You wouldn't believe differently, would you?
6 states? We have Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. What are the other three?
I was completely thrown by that silly concept of 63 states. According to all the history books I've read, there have always been 3. I already verified this with the RecDep of Minitrue.
Oh my gosh.. Not 4chan... What shall we do?
Myself, I'm going on with my regular life, since I never went there anyways. :)
But, since I was curious, I tried to go to their site from a Verizon FiOS line. Dead.
This almost reminds me of the wonders of folks playing in IRC back in the day. One kid pisses off another kid, and suddenly folks are getting flooded off the network, and other various DoS attacks. SSDD.
Are you sad about hearing it, or sad knowing that it's the truth?
If we as a people could live and work for the benefit of humanity rather than money, the world would be a much different place.
A few people actually embrace that idea. Unfortunately, it will be a long time before it becomes the rule rather than the exception.
So, they're implying that evolutionary traits should disappear after a relatively short period? Why? I'd suspect they may fade away over centuries, but not necessarily.
You should read up on Tesla's work in Colorado Springs. His 8hz source would reach many miles.
Ideally, he wanted to set up quite a few transmitters world wide. I believe the number was in the dozens. That would sufficiently provide power around the planet.
There are a few fatal flaws with this. Once you make power available everywhere, it's impossible to meter. It didn't require much tech on the receiving side. A couple metal rods, if I remember correctly. Say you managed to get the population of a country to use some sort of metering device, rather than just using their own unmetered receivers. That doesn't mean a neighboring country would manage their own laws. Why should you give away your perfectly good power, and let third world countries have electricity? It's all economics, no one cares about the pesky "for the good of all mankind". Power generation is a capitalist business. They make power, so they can make money. Even if a tax was levied on every person in a country, you can't guarantee that the neighboring areas will tax appropriately. There would be no way to stop their service for failing to pay.
The second is tactical. If you want a tactical advantage over someone, you remove infrastructure services. On a small scale, like SWAT raiding a building, they may drop power to the building before they raid it. The target is now in the dark and disoriented. On a larger scale (like a country), one of the first stages of an invasion is to knock out their infrastructure. Power generation plants are frequently the first to go. In modern terms, that can be an air strike or covert operation. Some things will work on batteries and/or generators for a while, but that time is limited. If you can't eliminate their power source, because it's everywhere, you no longer have the tactical advantage.
The technology could have been perfected. It would never be implemented simply because there's no good profit in it.
I'm too lazy to find the news story, but on the Veteran's Expressway in Tampa, FL, there was a closer story.
There was a turn under the expressway with big signs indicating the turn was 25mph. I drove the route frequently. Big signs, flashing lights, it was really obvious. A tanker truck full of fuel was doing about 50mph, and realized at the last second that his choices were run straight into the bottom of the overpass, or try to turn hard and follow the road. He turned. The truck rolled. It caught fire. He got out safely, but the heat from the fire literally melted the concrete above. No one else was hurt. That section of road was closed for months while they rebuilt the overpass and embankments.
Actually, there are plenty of chances for people to screw things up.
This whole story is failure to plan. Or as I wanted to say. Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
I strongly suspect they've been taking large trucks down old gravel trails, and that's a lot of what they're complaining about. They needed to take the proper vehicles on the proper roads, and plan their trips accordingly. This was apparently not done properly, which lead to problems.
I watched a charter bus get stuck across a major local road a few months ago. He thought he could pull into and out of a parking lot, where the parking lot was higher than the road. As he pulled out, the frame under the engine dragged on the ground, taking the weight off of the back wheels. That wasn't a problem with the bus, nor the road. It was a problem where he tried to do something with the vehicle that couldn't be done.
I've driven a lot of things, large and small. I can't say I've driven a 100'+ truck anywhere, but with what I have driven (up to 65'), I'm careful to evaluate where I'm going, so I don't get stuck. I've made some mistakes, such as pulling into a gas station with a 26' moving van and car trailer, and finding out that there was no way to pull through, but those were inconsequential mistakes that only cost me a couple minutes of navigating back the way I came.
I've seen plenty of large cargo like you've described, and have yet to see one get in trouble. They've planned their routes properly.
As a great man once said.....
I'm not compensating for anything, other than the fact that I can't run at over 150mph.
Mine is only slightly modified, because I'm happy with it. :) When the time comes and it needs something, like I finally wear the engine out at 150k to 200k miles, then I'll consider more stuff. Right now, I'm about to hit 100k miles, and the only thing it kinda needs is the spark plugs changed. It still has the original ones.
I've seen some very nicely modified cars. I'm sure yours is nice. Well, not positive, but I'm taking your word on it. More than likely if we met in a parking lot and started talking about cars, I'd be impressed. :)
I used to have the same problem with my '82 Firebird. That was my first car that I did substantial work to. It started out with a 2.8 V6, and ended up with a 4 bolt main 350, and absolutely every inch of the drivetrain had been modified or replaced. People would ask if it was a TransAm, and I'd have to try to explain that TransAm is a submodel of Firebird. This was the standard Firebird heavily modified so it was faster and handled better than the stock TransAm. La, la, la, they glazed over almost immediately so I was always wasting my breath.
Now that I have a WS/6, they still glaze over when I'm talking but in their mind my car may as well be a rocket ship. :)
What kind of collector bought a 70's car in the 70's? Not too many.
You're usually looking at 25 to 30 years out when people start getting nostalgic. So, buy a brand new Camaro SS Transformers edition, park it in a garage, and take it out once a month to keep it alive. In 30 years it'll be worth significantly more than it was bought for today. Well, assuming the economy doesn't completely collapse in the next few years. :)
I wasn't saying that customization is a bad thing. Hell, that's how modern cars came about. If people weren't taking stock cars and turning them into hotrods back in the day, most of the performance cars on the road today simply wouldn't exist.
It just a matter of the value of the vehicle. A new Camaro SS will continue being worth more than a regular Camaro with the SS badge and mods, even if they're effectively the same.
I've done some things to my TransAm WS/6. Most collectors won't mind, but my work, since it's all fairly standard for this kind of vehicle. I'm coming up on 100,000 miles on it, so in about another 50,000 miles I need to consider swapping the motor for a new one anyways. :) I'm thinking a 383 would be nice. And of course ported and polished heads, improved intake, etc. You know the rule, right? There's no replacement for displacement. After that, I know I'd ruin the collector value, but I'd be ok with it.
I look at it this way. I have a 2000 TransAm WS/6 edition. It's a special edition car, and always will be.
I've known of people who buy the V6 Firebird. They'll swap in the LS1 engine. Then they'll get the body parts from aftermarket vendors to match (nose, hood, tail wing, etc). Then they'll get the logos, decals, etc. They'll put it all together, and have pretty much the same car. Sometimes they'll forget something, like the suspension, exhaust, original wheels, etc. It won't quite be a WS/6, even though it will look like it. Regardless of how perfectly they reproduce it, mine will always be an original WS/6. Theirs will be a modified car similar to the WS/6.
If they ever go to sell it, a VIN search will show that it has the wrong engine, and that particular one didn't come with WS/6 performance package.
To a collector, my car with very few modifications is worth a whole lot more than a car made to emulate it.
In my area, with the mileage and options my car has is will sell retail for $11,300. Someone who modified a regular Firebird (Formula) to look like my WS/6, assuming the dealer overlooked the fact that it was modified from original (which lowers the value), it would only retail for $8,400. As a private sale, the modified car may go for more, but that's all in your salesmanship.
You're not only paying for $20 worth of plastic trim, you're paying for the fact that a particular vehicle was originally sold as that vehicle.
Would I buy the Transformers special package? Probably not. It's kinda silly and childish. But hey, whatever. Some people may like that. It will remain a special edition car, which will always have it's bragging rights. What if someone just adds on their own parts later, and says it's the special edition? Well, when you look it up, you'll find that it isn't. You'll also likely find that they missed some detail in their conversion.
When I work on cars, that's something I hate more than anything. Someone along the line will have converted something, and then you have to figure out what they did so you can get a replacement part that fits. I don't know how many hours I've spent in parts stores with a broken part, asking them to look up various years and models of similar cars to see what some small part came off of.
Oh my ..... You know radioman, I hadn't really thought, but....
I hadn't bothered to look, but if you look a little bit ... Well, lets just make a trail.
From the posting, you see his Slashdot username.
From the username, you can look at his public Slashdot profile.
From his profile, you can see his site.
From his site, you can see where he's deployed; what he brought with him; the names, types, brands and models of equipment; the type of satellite uplinks he's using; the way he's distributing his traffic for his unit; the military unit size and his position; and HIS REAL NAME. With that, you can find his rank, home town, and the community college he graduated from.
Sorry. I wasn't trying, and I'm not a bad guy. I have no special clearances, no secret methods of finding information. I'm just some guy out there. The bad guys can be worse. Don't expect that your only enemy is a sitting in the shade under his camel cleaning his AK-47. Your enemy could come from anywhere. Keep your secrets SECRET. It could be a matter of life or death. Each little slip up builds the big picture of who you are. You gave up a whole lot of stuff just in your question, that shouldn't be otherwise known.
If I were the DoD investigating this leak, there would already be someone dispatched to your tent.
If I were the enemy, I may be looking to eavesdrop on your communications.
Since I'm just an American civilian, I'm saying "Oh shit, he said too much."
Ya, I'm pretty sure that's a no-no. Unless he didn't really work for DoD, and he was just hoping that blurb would make him browny points with the Slashdot crowd. Reading the comments so far, it doesn't look like it made him any new friends. :)
If I was working on something that needed real security, I'd prefer a steel reinforced concrete gap with armed guards outside. But I guess an air gap would do. It doesn't do much for the physical security though. :)
Really....
"Sorry, I can't be bothered with finding this, so I'll ask Slashdot how to do it without trying."
I would think his problem should be pretty simple. SuSE does have a package manager, right? You can uninstall the vendor package, and install your own. Voila, problem gone.
I've been known to do both the tarball method, and the source method. It's really not *that* painful to build things from source directly on the machines in question. Writing a script to log in and do something like
echo "To: me@dod.gov\nSubject: " > /tmp/somemsg /tmp/somemsg /tmp/somemsg
hostname >>
echo "somepkg\n\n\n" >>
rpm --erase somepkg >> /tmp/somemsg /usr/src/ ./configure && make && make install >> /tmp/somemsg /tmp/somemsg
cd
wget http://internal.dod.gov/srcs/somepkg.tar.gz
tar xpzf somepkg.tar.gz
cd somepkg
sendmail -t
cd .. /tmp/somemsg
rm -rf somepkg
rm somepkg.tar.gz
rm
You're looking for more of something like a 12 gauge slug. You don't need to sling a small round a long range, you're looking for the short range stopping power. If the body armor does stop it, they'll be flat on their backs regardless. Then again, any decent bullet hitting any body armor is going to really hurt, so it's only really good for saving their lives, not pretending that they weren't shot at.
Here's some approximate effective ranges of various ammunition.
9mm pistol - 50 yards
45 cal pistol - 100 yards
12 gauge slug - 100 yards
AK-47 (7.26x39mm) - 400 yards
AR-15/M-16 (5.56x45mm) - 600 yards
30-06 (7.62x33mm) - 800+ yards
These vary by the weapon, ammunition, shooter, and conditions.
Any of these weapons are going to go straight through a standard interior wall with no problems. Don't take my word on it, There's a much better resource available.
They have an interesting page where they show shooting through 4 interior walls. Pistols all do a fine job of going straight through them. The AR-15 (civilian M-16) actually has a problem with accuracy through the walls.
Pretty much, if anyone decides to just start shooting at an intruder, if the bullet doesn't stop in the intruder, it will very likely continue to travel through the structure until it hits something hard. That could be a family member or neighbor.
Most houses in neighborhoods are oriented so the front and back doors face another house. Just because an intruder breaks into your house is not a reason to spray the doorway and possibly kill your neighbor in the process. Gun control is a very important thing. I'm not talking about limiting access to weapons. I'm talking about proper application of the tool. TV has shown that you just shoot and hopefully one will hit. In real life, you have to take shots very carefully, because it's not just your target who may be in your line of fire. Using a firearm is an absolute last resort, and as such must be used with extreme caution. Will you be able to live with yourself because you shot at an intruder, and killed a neighbors kid?
Back to the video, it's terrible. Anti-guns versus gun nuts. I've heard these arguments, and when you get extremes on both sides talking, it never comes to a friendly compromise.
The answer isn't in the care and feeding of NASA. NASA is just another government agency. There are huge numbers of well paid workers, and fortunes that come and go through contracts that may never be fulfilled.
Obviously cutting NASA back can't help at all. Throwing huge amounts into NASA likely won't happen either. It's a bureaucracy, and will live and die as such.
I was going to cite one of the marvels of the 20th century in a previous post, but maybe it's better here. Edsel. The $400,000,000 abortion that Ford created.
Government development budgets are shaped by political decisions. While the 12 million dollar pen is just an urban legand, Gemini Titan 3 did utilize $128 pencils. There are plenty of places that A is a great option, but B would work just fine. You know, if someone could build a "good enough" spacecraft for $1 million that could safely go up and back down, I'd be first in line to fly in it. The space shuttle costs roughly $1,700,000,000 ($1.7 billion), and all the costs divided among the launches, it costs roughly $1,500,000 ($1.5 million) per launch. Roughly $170,000,000,000 ($170 billion) has been spent on the Space Shuttle program so far.
If I had a choice of standing in line to take the Mercedes limousine of spacecraft where only a handful existed in the world, or the family sedan version that 10,000 were being produced every year, it'd be nice to take the Mercedes, but I'd take anything that'll get me from point A to point S.
The Shuttle was built as the redundant bloated do-all of space craft, and now that it's been done it was carved in stone. I'm not disputing the Shuttle is a really nifty piece of engineering, but we have a lot more to do than ego fluff our old technology. And no, the 1960's era capsule that is to replace the Shuttle is a freakin' joke.
I'd be willing to bet if you took a couple dozen of the best engineers from NASA and told them "Look, we want something newer, better, faster, and massively reproducible, get it done. We won't ask questions, we just want results. Do it right this time, and you get to do it better next time. Use COTS when you can to keep costs and development time to a minimum", there would be some amazing progress done for an amazingly small fraction of what it cost before. I'd be willing to bet that they could get something manned in orbit and back in a year for under $100 million.
FY 2008 NASA budget for space operations was $5.4 billion.
FY 2009 NASA budget for space operations was $5.9 billion.
FY 2010 NASA budget request for space operations is $6.1 billion.
Anyone wishing to argue this point, especially with the government, has to give me open discretion to which engineers to use, and no questions asked until they're done and the work is given to the public domain by the end of the 1st FY. Yes, it's the American tax dollar, so the public deserves to have everything involved when it's done.
>What you suggest would essentially cast our current
> situation concerning space travel in stone.
Actually, I was suggesting taking our current space travel and expand on it. Every generation of anything is (or at least should be) better than the last. Mistakes will be made and learned from.
There is lots of money to be made from space. No, I'm not suggesting mining the moon for cheese, but I am saying that there are a LOT of dollars to be had by expanding outward. No one reading this can afford a ticket to play in space. If there is anyone here who can, I could use a small loan of a few million dollars. :) What if tickets to space were available for $2,000. I'd be fairly confident a large percentage of Slashdot readers, and other folks world wide would scramble for them. What if the ticket didn't just take you to the edge of space and back? What if it made the colony on Mars accessible. What if it were to take you to the Heliopause? What if you could collect rare space gems caught in Saturn's rings? Nothing says love like a gemstone you plucked from the heavens yourself.
Who's to say what we'd find out there with enough looking. Sure we've brought back a tiny sampling of what's in our own solar system. What we know of what's out there is nothing. Imagine dropping sensor packages from an observatory over Jupiter and finally seeing what's at ground level. Sure the first one didn't make it far (Galileo, 1995), but learning from mistakes and observations would eventually make something that could do it. Right now we'd spend billions to send a single test. What if the subsequent tests were "Drop this out the airlock and see what happens."
There's lots of things to find out there, and we're still piddling around rather than exploring them. I don't want us locked into what we have, I want to have the opportunity to explore.
Well, we were discussing smart appliances in general. Just because they barely exist right now doesn't mean that they won't be increasing over time. I know quite a few power companies offer smart control over a few things, like the air conditioning. They're kind of dumb actually. They disable air conditioners for periods, similar to a rolling blackout.
Now, if all air conditioners were "smart" controlled by the power company, imagine the chaos that could happen. Air conditioners cycle on and off throughout the day. They are controlled by their thermostat not to be allowed to cycle on too soon after they cycle off, to avoid surging the system. Rapid and repeated cycling could cause (and would) failures of the compressor. That was a nasty trick to do to PC's too. At least with AT power supplies, you could flick the power switch on and off, and burn it out very quickly. I haven't heard of that working on ATX power supplies, probably because they use the soft on switch. Back to the original premise. What if... What if evil hacker guy (or bad script kiddie) were to tell all air conditioners in a city (say Los Angeles in mid-summer) to cycle off at noon. They could sit idle until 1pm. Just about every thermostat would then be in place to cycle on. If they were all instructed to turn on simultaneously, the surge of demand would be huge.
I'm not really paranoid about the smart appliances. I'm just practical about the misuse of them. Just like phone phreaks manipulated the telephone networks for years, power hackers could abuse the system. Securing such a system is one thing, but ensuring that it could never happen by the ability simply not being there is another. I barely like the thermostats that exist on air conditioners these days. The old bimetalic strips worked very well. I've changed several "smart" thermostats, because they've not functioned correctly. The only ancient bimetalic strip thermostats I've changed were because people wanted the pretty digital display. Very few people that I've known use the advanced features of modern thermostats, like automatically adjusting the temps based on time of day or the day of the week.
I agree totally on the hot water situation. Unfortunately, point of use heaters are more expensive. Home builders still only build one into a home, and that's almost always in the garage. Where I'm staying now, it takes about 3 minutes to get hot water in the shower, and since the pipes were not well insulated, if you shut it off for 5 minutes, you need to repeat the 3 minute cycle to get hot water again. There are systems which will flow hot water through the pipes all the time, but those still waste energy by letting it dissipate in the uninsulated areas.
In case you haven't been keeping score, the space program has been stagnant for decades.
The "Space Shuttle" program was conceived in the late 1960's and brought to life in the early 1970's. It's first flight was in 1981. So, the most advanced spacecraft humanity has is 28 years old.
The "International Space Station" platform was announced in 1993, and orbital assembly began in 1998. The base of it is 11 years old.
I was discussing the space program with some folks not too long ago. We discussed several things about it.
If NASA designs and builds the absolutely latest greatest spacecraft, with the ability to fly deep into space at the fastest we can conceive now, AND handle life support (air, water, food, etc) for an infinite time, how good would it be?
We are always discovering new little things about any technology. What's the huge difference between a 1920's car and a 2009 car? Not a lot other than electronics and plastics. The fundamentals of the car are still the same, yet the performance and safety has substantially increased.
If we had built newer and better spacecraft every year since our first manned space flight in the early 1960's, we'd have over 40 generations of spacecraft. Just since the inception of the Space Shuttle program, we should have 28 newer generations of spacecraft, each with improvements from the previous designs.
The theoretical max speed and infinite lifesupport spacecraft that was launched in 1985 would have been superseded by a much bigger and faster one by 1990, and for the astronauts who were speeding off to check out the next solar system, they would have already been picked up by the 1990 ship, then the 1995 ship. The probably would have been picked up and returned back to earth by the 2000 ship, because that old technology was so slow. By 2005 it would have been towed back and put in a museum. Instead, virtually every human on the planet hasn't had an opportunity to leave, and even if they did leave the atmosphere (or most of it), they had nowhere to go. There is no Moon, Mars, or Io colony yet. Humans haven't even been there yet.
People expect a new cell phone every few months, and cell phones have gone from being an expensive brick, to being a tiny piece of electronics that easily fits on your pocket that everyone has.
Why hasn't the space program become the same thing?
It's partly because of the government control over space. If there were a financial incentive, corporations would already have their spacecraft going. The governments are also a major cause of the problem. If the governments of the world had been cooperating since day 1, things would be substantially different. There were some great moves made because the US and USSR were competing to get the bigger better craft up. After that died, so did our serious advancement.
I'm not saying eliminate NASA or the other space agencies. Consider NASA like the FAA for space. The FAA doesn't own or fly many of their own planes, but they sure know just about everything about every aircraft up there. If the FAA owned and operated every aircraft, there would be maybe 6 commuter flights daily instead of the world wide network of flights that we have available now. Why do we accept this?
For water heaters, there are better ones that monitor their own usage and attempt to predict utilization. I had one like this, which worked very well. I'm not 100% sure on the timing, but it went something like this. It was able to recognize there is hot water usage for a 4 hour window around 7am and 5pm. If it saw water wasn't being consumed, it would then reconfigure itself. For example, if you went on vacation and forgot to tell it, it would use less power. There was also an manual switch so you could tell it you were going on vacation. That would be useful for the winter, so the water heater wouldn't freeze, but I wouldn't be wasting money heating it much above freezing. :)
You can actually have some flex room with a fridge too. If the power is cheaper, and the usage lower (like, less opening and closing), you could let the cycles run less frequently. Say you're running 38F to 42F degrees normally, you could run 36F to 44F through peak time.
I don't like the whole idea though. I see subsidized appliances. Buy a new refrigerator for $1 and pay their easy $20/mo ez-payment plan for the next 10 years. Failure to pay for service will result in termination of the service immediately. What good is a fridge that won't run. I'm the DMCA or some future law will be used to prevent the reverse engineering of any components. Circumventing the remote control parts to make it "just work" would be a criminal offense.
There are good reasons for the whole smart power grid to go into effect. I'm not just worried, I'm positive, that it will be abused by corporations.
Just wait until the hacks come though. Just imagine a gas stove turning on with it's pilot light off, and then the pilot igniting. How about an electric stove and oven going to full power for no reason. I hope nothing was left on top of it. If every dumb item in a house could be controlled, I'm sure there would be plenty of bad things that could happen.