The data was not lost from military systems, it was obtained by crackers who penetrated military contractor's commercial systems. Yes, that leads to a whole bunch of questions and is not by any means an absolution of the military's IT security. But your statement does not match the facts.
At least in this instantiation of the multiverse, nothing universe-destroying will happen. There will undoubtedly be many - perhaps an infinite number - that will be destroyed. But since I will be telling you I told you so, ipso facto it didn't happen here.
"Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best" makes one smile and sigh simultaneously. It's actually a time-proven principle, but of course the definition of "the best" is where you may have problems with the outcome.:-)
Since natural selection selects for those that survive, it can take any direction without regard to the individuals perception or judgment of what is desirable. For that matter, whatever the result is becomes "the best" by virtue of its occurrence.
And by the way, that is exactly what is going to happen, because all of our actions or omissions add up to natural selection anyway.
Driving this thread in a somewhat different direction... My interpretation of the original is that the writer is advocating a more considered approach to selecting the areas that we study in science, so that we do not develop a technology that lets an ill-considered action reduce the human population too much. Ignoring the inherent valuation of that as a "bad thing" we must recognize that while the ability of humans to predict the future distinguishes us from most other living things, we are much better at predicting what those in our social group will do in response to our individual actions than we are at predicting how a technology will affect the economy or how a new law will affect or society. The point being that we are so poor at it that in my opinion we should not even attempt to regulate what we investigate in basic science. Though an exception to that may be to encourage or even require investment in finding ways to predict what will happen if a given technology is developed. And even that is inherently unpredictable. Think about all the possibilities if we could reliably predict all of the outcomes from a given action. What would happen to markets? Certainly selling short would be a losing proposition. In the philosophical realm, what are the implications to the concept of free choice?
The mind boggles - at least this one does. Ah well, all we can do is hope for the best.
I worked with hall-effect devices which we used to build tensiometers in the textiles industry. One of the problems we had was loss of sensitivity over time. The service lifetime of a unit was a year or so before it was returned to me for rebuild and recalibration. The reason was that the unit was used in an industrial setting with lots of vibration and noise. The magnets lost strength.
All I had to do in many cases was to swap in a new set of magnets (and send the old ones out to be remagnetized). Then there were the clients that would turn the current up to compensate for the demagnetizing. They sent theirs back for a smoke refill after the smoke got out.
I think you answered your own question. Copper is the best conductor of the materials you mentioned. The engines are cooled by circulating the fuel around them prior to its introduction into the combustion chamber. Heat conduction is analogous to electrical conduction, so copper is probably the best combination of inherent strength and heat conduction available. Still probably alloyed because pure copper is soft.
For many years I lived and worked in places that lent themselves to bus commuting. It was great. I enjoyed kibitzing or reading on the way to work and home. When I had to be somewhere out of town during the day I would drive in and pay for parking. But then my employer moved to a suburban location. Instead of 30 minutes on the bus, it would have been 90 minutes minimum on the buses, with a transfer, and it was turn around and go home if the first bus didn't ge to the transfer point in time that I could catch the one bus that went within a half-mile (and that with no walking path beyond the shoulder of a 2-lane 45MPH road) of the new location. So I drove 22 miles each way. No car pool, nobody else going even close.
Now I have moved to another town, and I would be enduring a 47 mile commute. But I telecommute. Drive to client site once a week. The air is cleaner. I'm less stressed. But I still miss having the time to read or socialize that I had on the bus.
Those of you who shrink from the idea of mass-transit because of inflexibility etc are entirely correct in recognizing an issue. It was something I had to deal with. But you probably don't give enough weight to the plus side, because if you've never done it you just don't know why you might like it. (Try it, you'll like it.) If it's available and practical. Too often it's not.
And the walk out to the bus stop is good exercise too. Much more than I get going up a flight of steps to the home-office these days.
Substitute radical fundamentalist Christian, the ten commandments, certain cult leaders like Jim Jones and the Waco gang and values such as tolerance (of other races, sexualities or philosophies such as socialism or communism), free speech and freedom of and from religion (mandating Christian prayer in state legislatures like Delaware just did) and the above describes a significant percentage of the current American populace too.
I can see the next development, to assist in landings and to support the assembly for a true takeoff from land, put a tricycle landing gear on it, than make it a bit more comfortable for the flier by giving him a seat of better support. With a seat we can fasten the controls down and dress up the wiring and cabling some. Add a windshield because you really don't like being hit by other flying creatures at 100+ mph.
Good thought. The way I see it, it's management that is supposed to be the solution to the problem. They (we) use tools to manage. As you say, we get lazy and try to get the tool to be the solution. That's abdicating responsibility. In literature they call it deus ex machine, Arther Clarke called it "any sufficiently advanced technology." I call it F.M. - the cargo-cultish belief that someone (John Frum?) else will take care of the issues.
Hmm, I read that article in Queue more than a month ago. I think we are pretty far afield from the original....hence my sig: To hear the gods laugh, tell them your plans...
My company did a pilot for a year and then bought the right for all employees to use Books 24X7, unlimited. This is a large (65,000 employees) computing services & outsourcing firm. I use eBooks routinely. I just wish that I could more easily load larger chunks of the books onto local storage, but I'm certain that threatens the revenue stream or digital rights management for B24X7.
I don't read hardcopy newspapers any more but I read the Washington Post and most of the NY Times daily. I also load and read from the Gutenberg library and read Corey Doctorow's electronic novel.
Am I abnormal? I'm definitely old-school, being 53. I suspect that the Gen-X & Gen-Y cohorts don't read much of anything, compared to my and previous cohorts. It takes too much undivided attention. But then I don't track a whole lot of things at once, like you learn to do in most games now. So you win some and you lose some.
how the ability to intercept communications equates to 1)real time monitoring, and 2) the capability to participate in the communication.
Certainly if you can do 1 and 2, you have achieved the intercept capability, but you don't need to go through that kind of expense and effort if you only need to know what was said.
This sounds a lot more like a really unusual form of cross-talk.
I've done just what you are talking about. Took a Ford Aerostar 3.0 v6 through Yellowstone, and across the Beartooth pass. Lots of wheezing. Why? At that altitude it's generating maybe half the power it would at sea level. But do the same with a turbo and it will generate the same power it did at sea level, because the turbo precompresses the intake air so that it's being fed the same amount of air at 10,000 ft that it was getting at sea level.
I didn't see anything in the article that referred to power output - maybe I just missed it. But I think that there may be lots of applications where the kind of power you are thinking about isn.t needed, Military units need maximum range, and range is often hundreds of miles. But to spot another car in the fog all you need is a hundred yards or so.
And the beam-focusing aspect means that 100 mW can go a long way.
I was thinking that the communications aspect may be the big payoff, think what this would do for a cell-phone. No external antenna, and the comm beam always aimed in a direction other than the user's head. Cuts the radiation exposure by orders of magnitude. Of course you might not want to step in from of one...
or raptor silhoettes, both are available at reasonable cost from bird enthusiast suppliers. Theory is that these are things that birds notice. Raptors because they are dangerous, cobwebs because birds don't like having to clean them off their feathers. Of course, I don't know how many birds will be looking out for cobwebs at 250 ft altitude.
I understand that supersonic combustion is a neat trick, basically the flamefront has to keep up with the aircraft as it moves through the air. Since normally a flamefront is limited in its speed by the speed with which the molecules can contact each other and thus react chemically, getting that flamefront to keep up with the aircraft involves getting the local pressure high enough that molecules can bump together at "supersonic" speed (I doubt it is actually supersonic in the region and under the temperature/pressure conditions of the combustion).
But how does one exert pressure against something that is not there? Imagine the classic balloon we blow up and then release. The pressure differential between the front of the ballon and the area where the air is escaping causes the balloon to move. Pop the balloon with a pin and it goes nowhere, because the pressure is released everywhere at once. A ramjet compresses purely from the ramming of air into the combustion pipe. Without a compressor against which to enclose the combusting mixture, how is thrust generated?
Something I'm missing. We know it works, we've seen it. It just doesn't make sense yet.
Whoever modded this as interesting knows even less about physics and aerospace technology than did the writer. The heat generated by friction at high speed is an issue that must be addressed, but while there will be drag it's not going to rip anything apart unless it's not designed properly in the first place. That's one of the things wind tunnels and computer modeling help deal with long before a model is test-flown.
The SR-71's fusalage expanded from heat, true. The material is going to have to deal with heat, true. The NASA shuttle deals with the heat of mach 25 on re-entry, and it is not torn apart by drag unless something goes wrong, but the same happens when a commecial airliner gets seriously out of shape in-flight. Like the one that lost its rudder over Long Island Sound a couple years ago.
The stealth bomber (B-2) is subsonic. Carbon fiber is used due to its strength-to-weight and radio-frequency transparency, not heat resistance. I would be looking at exotic metal alloys, metal composites, ceramics (which is what the space shuttle tiles are) and use of circulating fuel for cooling of critical areas. The flight profile for a long duration hypersonic craft would probably involve extended flight at altitudes where drag is less of an issue, further reducing friction heating.
Though I also wish this AC had provided some insight into where current thought in this field has gone since.
It also occurs to me that the original critique describes a group of people and an intellectual discourse that bears at least some resemblance to the state of institutions of higher learning in the Islamic world. It has been alleged that more than half of all student in universities in the Islamic world are studying Islam, with a low - or relatively low - component of business, engineering, medicine and other worldly pursuits. The worldly pursuits, of course, are those which tend to run hard aground when they lose touch with reality, whereas religious or philosophical studies can remain afloat in illusion for far longer, if not indefinitely.
Having seen multiple reviews of the book but not having time or opportunity to read it...
Whether or not the globe is warming is less the issue than whether humans are affecting the rate, and if so can we do anything about it. Personally, I don't think we have sufficient evidence and understanding to say that humans are affecting temperatures on a global scale. And even if they are, anyone planning on persuading people to stop having children, reduce their standard of living and in general make dramatic sacrifices for the possible benefit of others they will never see, is living in a different world than the one I see around me. The kind of money proposed to be spent to reduce "greenhouse-gas" emissions will not be made available until people see an immediate need for it. Better to take what can be squeezed out of government and university research budgets to plan how to deal with increasing sea level and the changes in agriculture that will result from changes in climate in the food-growing regions.
I would guess that it's more likely that we will see significant changes in climate than that we will be hit by a large space rock. In both cases we need to have a plan, not just pie-in-the-sky fantasies.
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The data was not lost from military systems, it was obtained by crackers who penetrated military contractor's commercial systems. Yes, that leads to a whole bunch of questions and is not by any means an absolution of the military's IT security. But your statement does not match the facts.
At least in this instantiation of the multiverse, nothing universe-destroying will happen. There will undoubtedly be many - perhaps an infinite number - that will be destroyed. But since I will be telling you I told you so, ipso facto it didn't happen here.
Else we'll never know - nor care.
"Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best" makes one smile and sigh simultaneously. It's actually a time-proven principle, but of course the definition of "the best" is where you may have problems with the outcome. :-)
Since natural selection selects for those that survive, it can take any direction without regard to the individuals perception or judgment of what is desirable. For that matter, whatever the result is becomes "the best" by virtue of its occurrence.
And by the way, that is exactly what is going to happen, because all of our actions or omissions add up to natural selection anyway.
Driving this thread in a somewhat different direction... My interpretation of the original is that the writer is advocating a more considered approach to selecting the areas that we study in science, so that we do not develop a technology that lets an ill-considered action reduce the human population too much. Ignoring the inherent valuation of that as a "bad thing" we must recognize that while the ability of humans to predict the future distinguishes us from most other living things, we are much better at predicting what those in our social group will do in response to our individual actions than we are at predicting how a technology will affect the economy or how a new law will affect or society. The point being that we are so poor at it that in my opinion we should not even attempt to regulate what we investigate in basic science. Though an exception to that may be to encourage or even require investment in finding ways to predict what will happen if a given technology is developed. And even that is inherently unpredictable. Think about all the possibilities if we could reliably predict all of the outcomes from a given action. What would happen to markets? Certainly selling short would be a losing proposition. In the philosophical realm, what are the implications to the concept of free choice?
The mind boggles - at least this one does. Ah well, all we can do is hope for the best.
I worked with hall-effect devices which we used to build tensiometers in the textiles industry. One of the problems we had was loss of sensitivity over time. The service lifetime of a unit was a year or so before it was returned to me for rebuild and recalibration. The reason was that the unit was used in an industrial setting with lots of vibration and noise. The magnets lost strength.
All I had to do in many cases was to swap in a new set of magnets (and send the old ones out to be remagnetized). Then there were the clients that would turn the current up to compensate for the demagnetizing. They sent theirs back for a smoke refill after the smoke got out.
I think you answered your own question. Copper is the best conductor of the materials you mentioned. The engines are cooled by circulating the fuel around them prior to its introduction into the combustion chamber. Heat conduction is analogous to electrical conduction, so copper is probably the best combination of inherent strength and heat conduction available. Still probably alloyed because pure copper is soft.
For many years I lived and worked in places that lent themselves to bus commuting. It was great. I enjoyed kibitzing or reading on the way to work and home. When I had to be somewhere out of town during the day I would drive in and pay for parking. But then my employer moved to a suburban location. Instead of 30 minutes on the bus, it would have been 90 minutes minimum on the buses, with a transfer, and it was turn around and go home if the first bus didn't ge to the transfer point in time that I could catch the one bus that went within a half-mile (and that with no walking path beyond the shoulder of a 2-lane 45MPH road) of the new location. So I drove 22 miles each way. No car pool, nobody else going even close.
Now I have moved to another town, and I would be enduring a 47 mile commute. But I telecommute. Drive to client site once a week. The air is cleaner. I'm less stressed. But I still miss having the time to read or socialize that I had on the bus.
Those of you who shrink from the idea of mass-transit because of inflexibility etc are entirely correct in recognizing an issue. It was something I had to deal with. But you probably don't give enough weight to the plus side, because if you've never done it you just don't know why you might like it. (Try it, you'll like it.) If it's available and practical. Too often it's not.
And the walk out to the bus stop is good exercise too. Much more than I get going up a flight of steps to the home-office these days.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Isaac_Newton/
Know what the second engine is for in GA aircraft? If one breaks down the second one will get you to the scene of the crash.
In other words, those things need two engines to get off the ground, there's no redundancy or failsafe component to them.
If you were starving you'd eat the seed. And then starve the rest of the way to death. Or did you think you could just hibernate?
Substitute radical fundamentalist Christian, the ten commandments, certain cult leaders like Jim Jones and the Waco gang and values such as tolerance (of other races, sexualities or philosophies such as socialism or communism), free speech and freedom of and from religion (mandating Christian prayer in state legislatures like Delaware just did) and the above describes a significant percentage of the current American populace too.
I can see the next development, to assist in landings and to support the assembly for a true takeoff from land, put a tricycle landing gear on it, than make it a bit more comfortable for the flier by giving him a seat of better support. With a seat we can fasten the controls down and dress up the wiring and cabling some. Add a windshield because you really don't like being hit by other flying creatures at 100+ mph.
Oh wait, that's called an airplane.
Good thought. The way I see it, it's management that is supposed to be the solution to the problem. They (we) use tools to manage. As you say, we get lazy and try to get the tool to be the solution. That's abdicating responsibility. In literature they call it deus ex machine, Arther Clarke called it "any sufficiently advanced technology." I call it F.M. - the cargo-cultish belief that someone (John Frum?) else will take care of the issues.
...hence my sig: To hear the gods laugh, tell them your plans...
Hmm, I read that article in Queue more than a month ago. I think we are pretty far afield from the original.
My company did a pilot for a year and then bought the right for all employees to use Books 24X7, unlimited. This is a large (65,000 employees) computing services & outsourcing firm. I use eBooks routinely. I just wish that I could more easily load larger chunks of the books onto local storage, but I'm certain that threatens the revenue stream or digital rights management for B24X7.
I don't read hardcopy newspapers any more but I read the Washington Post and most of the NY Times daily. I also load and read from the Gutenberg library and read Corey Doctorow's electronic novel.
Am I abnormal? I'm definitely old-school, being 53. I suspect that the Gen-X & Gen-Y cohorts don't read much of anything, compared to my and previous cohorts. It takes too much undivided attention. But then I don't track a whole lot of things at once, like you learn to do in most games now. So you win some and you lose some.
how the ability to intercept communications equates to 1)real time monitoring, and 2) the capability to participate in the communication.
Certainly if you can do 1 and 2, you have achieved the intercept capability, but you don't need to go through that kind of expense and effort if you only need to know what was said.
This sounds a lot more like a really unusual form of cross-talk.
I've done just what you are talking about. Took a Ford Aerostar 3.0 v6 through Yellowstone, and across the Beartooth pass. Lots of wheezing. Why? At that altitude it's generating maybe half the power it would at sea level. But do the same with a turbo and it will generate the same power it did at sea level, because the turbo precompresses the intake air so that it's being fed the same amount of air at 10,000 ft that it was getting at sea level.
Turbos rock!
an opinion anyway.
Go figure.
I didn't see anything in the article that referred to power output - maybe I just missed it. But I think that there may be lots of applications where the kind of power you are thinking about isn.t needed, Military units need maximum range, and range is often hundreds of miles. But to spot another car in the fog all you need is a hundred yards or so.
And the beam-focusing aspect means that 100 mW can go a long way.
I was thinking that the communications aspect may be the big payoff, think what this would do for a cell-phone. No external antenna, and the comm beam always aimed in a direction other than the user's head. Cuts the radiation exposure by orders of magnitude. Of course you might not want to step in from of one...
or raptor silhoettes, both are available at reasonable cost from bird enthusiast suppliers. Theory is that these are things that birds notice. Raptors because they are dangerous, cobwebs because birds don't like having to clean them off their feathers. Of course, I don't know how many birds will be looking out for cobwebs at 250 ft altitude.
It'll take at least 10 years to bring this to a production anything. Bush will be long gone, as will his successor.
I understand that supersonic combustion is a neat trick, basically the flamefront has to keep up with the aircraft as it moves through the air. Since normally a flamefront is limited in its speed by the speed with which the molecules can contact each other and thus react chemically, getting that flamefront to keep up with the aircraft involves getting the local pressure high enough that molecules can bump together at "supersonic" speed (I doubt it is actually supersonic in the region and under the temperature/pressure conditions of the combustion).
But how does one exert pressure against something that is not there? Imagine the classic balloon we blow up and then release. The pressure differential between the front of the ballon and the area where the air is escaping causes the balloon to move. Pop the balloon with a pin and it goes nowhere, because the pressure is released everywhere at once. A ramjet compresses purely from the ramming of air into the combustion pipe. Without a compressor against which to enclose the combusting mixture, how is thrust generated?
Something I'm missing. We know it works, we've seen it. It just doesn't make sense yet.
Whoever modded this as interesting knows even less about physics and aerospace technology than did the writer. The heat generated by friction at high speed is an issue that must be addressed, but while there will be drag it's not going to rip anything apart unless it's not designed properly in the first place. That's one of the things wind tunnels and computer modeling help deal with long before a model is test-flown.
The SR-71's fusalage expanded from heat, true. The material is going to have to deal with heat, true. The NASA shuttle deals with the heat of mach 25 on re-entry, and it is not torn apart by drag unless something goes wrong, but the same happens when a commecial airliner gets seriously out of shape in-flight. Like the one that lost its rudder over Long Island Sound a couple years ago.
The stealth bomber (B-2) is subsonic. Carbon fiber is used due to its strength-to-weight and radio-frequency transparency, not heat resistance. I would be looking at exotic metal alloys, metal composites, ceramics (which is what the space shuttle tiles are) and use of circulating fuel for cooling of critical areas. The flight profile for a long duration hypersonic craft would probably involve extended flight at altitudes where drag is less of an issue, further reducing friction heating.
And it would cost so much just to vet the comments and try to separate the spam from the good stuff that they'd have to sell advertising on the site.
but you have to be willing to fork it over.
The rover's cheap fallback is what, 10 bps? You're doing better than that.
Though I also wish this AC had provided some insight into where current thought in this field has gone since.
It also occurs to me that the original critique describes a group of people and an intellectual discourse that bears at least some resemblance to the state of institutions of higher learning in the Islamic world. It has been alleged that more than half of all student in universities in the Islamic world are studying Islam, with a low - or relatively low - component of business, engineering, medicine and other worldly pursuits. The worldly pursuits, of course, are those which tend to run hard aground when they lose touch with reality, whereas religious or philosophical studies can remain afloat in illusion for far longer, if not indefinitely.
Having seen multiple reviews of the book but not having time or opportunity to read it...
Whether or not the globe is warming is less the issue than whether humans are affecting the rate, and if so can we do anything about it. Personally, I don't think we have sufficient evidence and understanding to say that humans are affecting temperatures on a global scale. And even if they are, anyone planning on persuading people to stop having children, reduce their standard of living and in general make dramatic sacrifices for the possible benefit of others they will never see, is living in a different world than the one I see around me. The kind of money proposed to be spent to reduce "greenhouse-gas" emissions will not be made available until people see an immediate need for it. Better to take what can be squeezed out of government and university research budgets to plan how to deal with increasing sea level and the changes in agriculture that will result from changes in climate in the food-growing regions.
I would guess that it's more likely that we will see significant changes in climate than that we will be hit by a large space rock. In both cases we need to have a plan, not just pie-in-the-sky fantasies.