An important thing to remember is that if you are in a bad car accident, you need to be able to get out of your car. The overwhelming majority of the land area in America is rural, and with our infrastructure, people are driving across the counry all the time. I know that if I'm in a wreck in one of my Volvos (I have several) the door frame and passenger compartment will not deform and I'll be able to open the door and get out. If the car is on fire, or the car that hit me is on fire, this could be the difference between life and death. Similarly, if I am in an accident and bleeding, I want the door to open when emergency workers get there so they can get me out and treat me ASAP. The time lost by them needing to cut me out of the car means I could bleed to death. Sorry, but the Swedes know what they are doing, and after having been in accidents in a Volvo and walking away without a scratch (when the other person in the accident was taken away in an ambulance), I'll swear by them for life.
You know, I never had a problem with the 80hp diesel engine in my old Mercedes. Also, modern European economy cars use engines much smaller than 1.5L my VW Polo while I was in England had a 1L...the old Mercedes and the VW were cheaper to operate and maintain than I'm sure any hybrid is.
The main mechanism for aging a whisky is time in the cask. Once you bottle it, its done. Whisky spends the vast majority of its time in the cask. Aging has little to do with alcohol content. All the alcohol is obtained in the wash and boiler. Once the alcohol is added to the cask, it is left to sit for years and years. I had the marvelous opportunity to explore the Speyside region of Scotland and actually go through the distilleries at the Glenlivet, Glenfiddich Lodge, and Dalwhinnie. With whisky (not whiskey, there is a difference) the same cask can be used several times. You can actually see how used up the cask is by looking at how much has leached out of the wood and into the alcohol. Its really quite incredible to go inside a distillery's cask warehouse; the air is thick with the smell of whisky permeating through the casks, and most casks are left to age from 12 to 18 years. At the Glenlivet, I actually got to see one cask covered in cobwebs that had been aging for 46 years and was going to be bottled at 50.
I do agree that this machine advertised sounds like magic.
Accelerometers, targeting lasers, and deformable mirrors take care of the issues you mentioned. The optics adapt to motion, not the laser. It is really not nearly as difficult as you seem to think it is to develop a control system to prevent "raking of the beam." The weapon control system can obtain aircraft data it needs to assure that the optics will not attempt to exceed hard max deflections; should the aircraft enter a situation where that would have to happen, the control system disables the weapon. Just like you can't release a bomb when inverted.
Research the SSHCL. You will learn many neat things.
For bonus points, since you have a reasonable understanding of aeronautics, think about the bigger problem of boundary layer refraction and the associated risks of using a directed energy weapon in the transonic region.
These lasers ARE allowed under the Geneva Convention. Lasers designed specifically to blind people are not allowed. A laser designed to destroy a target but may cause unintended blindness is perfectly acceptable under the Geneva Convention.
1) The size and weight of laser weapon systems on the drawing boards right now are meant for C-130s and F-35s. Not helicopters. The size and weight are prohibitive. 2) Beam precision is are defined by the optics. In the case of the laser weapons being produced, that is accomplished by deformable mirrors. 3) A laser weapon is not "on" for very long. They are pulsed lasers with target dwell times on the order of a couple seconds. There will be no "raking" of unintended targets. 4) "until the chopper moves outside the range of the pointing device" You have no idea what real aerospace engineering involves. 5) Light scattering? Perhaps you should look at the videos of prototype tests of these lasers. Oddly enough, the cameras, which were right next to the targets, were not destroyed.
The astute reader will use their education, knowledge, facts, and reasoning to understand the actual science and engineering behind this, instead of listening to someone who demonstrates that they have no real knowledge base in physics or engineering. Yes, I am an aerospace engineer, and I have published papers on directed energy weapon systems.
Airplanes are some of the most complicated machines that we (as people) can make. Looking at an airplane as a singular entity is silly. It is a system of systems, and each subsystem has dozens of people working on it. Those people don't have to know how to build an airplane, just their widget. So, Boeing employs thousands of people who don't have a clue how to build an airplane in fact. Also, they have entire departments of programmers that sit around staring at code all day. Their R&D group, Phantom Works, plays with crazy stuff, like fuel cells and lasers.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I had a manager who has no clue as to what it was exactly that I did. I was the Director of IT/System Administrator for a small engineering company. I was the entire IT staff. I had to improve their IT capabilities, provide better user experiences for the engineers at their workstations, and provide internal support for very complicated engineering software, in addition to providing hardware and software support in a lab. I gave them more than they ever dreamed of in the span of two and a half years, and did it with no budget, only petty cash. In the end, for my hard work, I was replaced by a foreign grad student who did the work on his OPT time for 60% of what I was getting paid. All web services were outsourced to Rackspace for $13,500 per year. Given their cost savings, they decided to buy all new computers (around $6,000 each) and open a new workshop. Turned out their replacement for me couldn't do everything, so they hired a summer intern to pick up some of the work. The summer intern was also paid 60% of what I was paid. Unfortunately, the intern couldn't put a lot of hours in when the semester started, so they had to hire a THIRD person to do the work I used to do, at a rate I don't even know. The supplier of one of the expensive engineering programs heard that I had been fired, and promptly increased the support/maintenance cost of their software by 90% (because they knew the only person there who was trained in their software was gone). So, the manager hires three people to replace me, spending more on them than he did on me, and bought all this new hardware that the staff of three is now struggling to support, and dealing with software that they haven't a clue how to use. The funny part to all this? I was laid off as a cost-cutting measure.
Moral of the story is that a manager should understand and appreciate what his employee's contributions to the company are.
Re:I think that that is the problem we had.
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Except the CEO of Ford sure as hell knows what a carburetor is, how it works, and how to take it apart and put it back together. He's an aerospace engineer. We both had the same professor for Senior Aircraft Design in school (years apart, of course). I know he knows his engines.:)
There is an important fact that you highlighted: the sysadmins want to keep their jobs. Management needs to be understanding of the situation a sysadmin is in. A hacker only has to beat the sysadmin once to win. But a sysadmin has to beat the hacker EVERY TIME to win.
If they bust into one of Rackspace's datacenters for example, shit will hit the fan. They have some very powerful customers.
I completely agree that one of the copyright cops will get shot one of these days. More importantly though, why hasn't anyone shot up or bombed a record industry office? Shooting and blowing shit up is how we get things done in America; its what created us.
When I traveled to the UK I signed up for a talkmobile prepay plan. I could dial a special code on my handset and it would give me the exact amount of money I had left in my account, and when I ran below 2 GBP, whenever I placed a call, it would first direct me to a voice messages stating that my credit was running low and that I should top-up before connecting me. I was very pleased. Not gonna see anything like that in the US.
The helicopters can NOT fly by themselves "out of the lab." They are remote control helicopters with a few extra gadgets. In particular, they would include potentiometers to measure control surface deflection, digital servos, an AHRS unit, a data acquisition system, and a small autopilot computer based on a PowerPC, XScale, ARM9, or similar low-power CPU. The autopilot computer contains the definition of the control system, which is a set of nonlinear equations defining the dynamics and flight control of the helicopter. To perform a maneuver, the pilot moves the his controls which feed inputs to the control system. The servo outputs are based upon the equations defined by the control system. By recording the control inputs, accelerations, servo locations, and control surface deflections for a given maneuver, an autopilot program can be defined to fly the helicopter autonomously. Here's where AI comes into play. As the helicopter flies autonomously, there will inevitably be oscillations in the motion of the helicopter, since the human pilot that trained it cannot be perfect. However, by analyzing the feedback from the AHRS, servo locations, and control surface deflections, the control input gains to the autopilot program can be modified to give the helicopter a smoother flight by damping the unwanted oscillation induced by the autopilot attempting to reproduce the maneuver. It doesn't figure out the goal of the commands, it damps oscillation induced by the flight control system by figuring out what causes it. Its just math.
I can't believe this. I have worked on several wind energy projects over the years. The large scale utility turbines are huge; some have blades so large that they require an oversized load semi trailer to transport them. They are also not terribly light, even though many are made from composite materials. Spikes? Give me a break. First of all, you do *not* want to extract power from every gust of wind, and turbines and their associated management systems are tailored to that. The speed of the turbines is well regulated by the inertia of the blades and blade pitch adjustments. The objective being to provide the most stable power output possible. When there are spikes (such as when one turbine is more directly pointed into the wind with regard to others in a farm, for example) the spike can be bled off in several ways, the simplest of which being heat. Grid-tie systems do their job very well. I'm pretty sure if this was as big of a problem as it is made out to be, England (with dozens of wind farms and several nuclear reactors) would surely have had an infrastructure nightmare on its hands.
Functionally, the grid *is* a battery, except there is no need for an extra AC-DC-AC conversion step. The grid-tie conditioners take care of phase alignment and voltage.
"The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution."
I openly carry my ex-military 9mm CZ handgun (I live in a US city where open carry is legal) and whenever a cop sees me walking down the street and notices, he just nods to acknowledge my presence, and that's it.
...and if by "crummy CDMA" you mean the network that gives me over 1Mbps down to my two year old cell phone when I'm standing next to a cow in a field in the middle of nowhere Kansas...
Slashdot Mirror
An important thing to remember is that if you are in a bad car accident, you need to be able to get out of your car. The overwhelming majority of the land area in America is rural, and with our infrastructure, people are driving across the counry all the time. I know that if I'm in a wreck in one of my Volvos (I have several) the door frame and passenger compartment will not deform and I'll be able to open the door and get out. If the car is on fire, or the car that hit me is on fire, this could be the difference between life and death. Similarly, if I am in an accident and bleeding, I want the door to open when emergency workers get there so they can get me out and treat me ASAP. The time lost by them needing to cut me out of the car means I could bleed to death. Sorry, but the Swedes know what they are doing, and after having been in accidents in a Volvo and walking away without a scratch (when the other person in the accident was taken away in an ambulance), I'll swear by them for life.
I stand corrected, I forgot. :)
You know, I never had a problem with the 80hp diesel engine in my old Mercedes. Also, modern European economy cars use engines much smaller than 1.5L my VW Polo while I was in England had a 1L...the old Mercedes and the VW were cheaper to operate and maintain than I'm sure any hybrid is.
"hard to maintain combustion engines are expensive for the consumer and good for our bottom line. "
Hard to maintain? The car manufacturers selling hybrids also make some of the worst internal combustion engines.
The main mechanism for aging a whisky is time in the cask. Once you bottle it, its done. Whisky spends the vast majority of its time in the cask. Aging has little to do with alcohol content. All the alcohol is obtained in the wash and boiler. Once the alcohol is added to the cask, it is left to sit for years and years. I had the marvelous opportunity to explore the Speyside region of Scotland and actually go through the distilleries at the Glenlivet, Glenfiddich Lodge, and Dalwhinnie. With whisky (not whiskey, there is a difference) the same cask can be used several times. You can actually see how used up the cask is by looking at how much has leached out of the wood and into the alcohol. Its really quite incredible to go inside a distillery's cask warehouse; the air is thick with the smell of whisky permeating through the casks, and most casks are left to age from 12 to 18 years. At the Glenlivet, I actually got to see one cask covered in cobwebs that had been aging for 46 years and was going to be bottled at 50.
I do agree that this machine advertised sounds like magic.
Actually, in the US gun ownership is *explicitly* defined as a right. Gambling on the other hand, is not.
Now excuse me while my CETME and I blow away some tin cans.
Accelerometers, targeting lasers, and deformable mirrors take care of the issues you mentioned. The optics adapt to motion, not the laser. It is really not nearly as difficult as you seem to think it is to develop a control system to prevent "raking of the beam." The weapon control system can obtain aircraft data it needs to assure that the optics will not attempt to exceed hard max deflections; should the aircraft enter a situation where that would have to happen, the control system disables the weapon. Just like you can't release a bomb when inverted.
Research the SSHCL. You will learn many neat things.
For bonus points, since you have a reasonable understanding of aeronautics, think about the bigger problem of boundary layer refraction and the associated risks of using a directed energy weapon in the transonic region.
These lasers ARE allowed under the Geneva Convention. Lasers designed specifically to blind people are not allowed. A laser designed to destroy a target but may cause unintended blindness is perfectly acceptable under the Geneva Convention.
"The "precision" argument is Pentagon bullshit. "
No, the bullshit is what you are spewing.
1) The size and weight of laser weapon systems on the drawing boards right now are meant for C-130s and F-35s. Not helicopters. The size and weight are prohibitive.
2) Beam precision is are defined by the optics. In the case of the laser weapons being produced, that is accomplished by deformable mirrors.
3) A laser weapon is not "on" for very long. They are pulsed lasers with target dwell times on the order of a couple seconds. There will be no "raking" of unintended targets.
4) "until the chopper moves outside the range of the pointing device" You have no idea what real aerospace engineering involves.
5) Light scattering? Perhaps you should look at the videos of prototype tests of these lasers. Oddly enough, the cameras, which were right next to the targets, were not destroyed.
The astute reader will use their education, knowledge, facts, and reasoning to understand the actual science and engineering behind this, instead of listening to someone who demonstrates that they have no real knowledge base in physics or engineering. Yes, I am an aerospace engineer, and I have published papers on directed energy weapon systems.
Airplanes are some of the most complicated machines that we (as people) can make. Looking at an airplane as a singular entity is silly. It is a system of systems, and each subsystem has dozens of people working on it. Those people don't have to know how to build an airplane, just their widget. So, Boeing employs thousands of people who don't have a clue how to build an airplane in fact. Also, they have entire departments of programmers that sit around staring at code all day. Their R&D group, Phantom Works, plays with crazy stuff, like fuel cells and lasers.
So what you're saying is that the engineer shouldn't understand WHY the principles of engineering work. Suck it up, learn your diff eq.
In Soviet Russia, Dog Poop Sniffs YOU!
I had a manager who has no clue as to what it was exactly that I did. I was the Director of IT/System Administrator for a small engineering company. I was the entire IT staff. I had to improve their IT capabilities, provide better user experiences for the engineers at their workstations, and provide internal support for very complicated engineering software, in addition to providing hardware and software support in a lab. I gave them more than they ever dreamed of in the span of two and a half years, and did it with no budget, only petty cash. In the end, for my hard work, I was replaced by a foreign grad student who did the work on his OPT time for 60% of what I was getting paid. All web services were outsourced to Rackspace for $13,500 per year. Given their cost savings, they decided to buy all new computers (around $6,000 each) and open a new workshop. Turned out their replacement for me couldn't do everything, so they hired a summer intern to pick up some of the work. The summer intern was also paid 60% of what I was paid. Unfortunately, the intern couldn't put a lot of hours in when the semester started, so they had to hire a THIRD person to do the work I used to do, at a rate I don't even know. The supplier of one of the expensive engineering programs heard that I had been fired, and promptly increased the support/maintenance cost of their software by 90% (because they knew the only person there who was trained in their software was gone). So, the manager hires three people to replace me, spending more on them than he did on me, and bought all this new hardware that the staff of three is now struggling to support, and dealing with software that they haven't a clue how to use. The funny part to all this? I was laid off as a cost-cutting measure.
Moral of the story is that a manager should understand and appreciate what his employee's contributions to the company are.
Except the CEO of Ford sure as hell knows what a carburetor is, how it works, and how to take it apart and put it back together. He's an aerospace engineer. We both had the same professor for Senior Aircraft Design in school (years apart, of course). I know he knows his engines. :)
There is an important fact that you highlighted: the sysadmins want to keep their jobs. Management needs to be understanding of the situation a sysadmin is in. A hacker only has to beat the sysadmin once to win. But a sysadmin has to beat the hacker EVERY TIME to win.
If they bust into one of Rackspace's datacenters for example, shit will hit the fan. They have some very powerful customers.
I completely agree that one of the copyright cops will get shot one of these days. More importantly though, why hasn't anyone shot up or bombed a record industry office? Shooting and blowing shit up is how we get things done in America; its what created us.
When I traveled to the UK I signed up for a talkmobile prepay plan. I could dial a special code on my handset and it would give me the exact amount of money I had left in my account, and when I ran below 2 GBP, whenever I placed a call, it would first direct me to a voice messages stating that my credit was running low and that I should top-up before connecting me. I was very pleased. Not gonna see anything like that in the US.
The helicopters can NOT fly by themselves "out of the lab." They are remote control helicopters with a few extra gadgets. In particular, they would include potentiometers to measure control surface deflection, digital servos, an AHRS unit, a data acquisition system, and a small autopilot computer based on a PowerPC, XScale, ARM9, or similar low-power CPU. The autopilot computer contains the definition of the control system, which is a set of nonlinear equations defining the dynamics and flight control of the helicopter. To perform a maneuver, the pilot moves the his controls which feed inputs to the control system. The servo outputs are based upon the equations defined by the control system. By recording the control inputs, accelerations, servo locations, and control surface deflections for a given maneuver, an autopilot program can be defined to fly the helicopter autonomously. Here's where AI comes into play. As the helicopter flies autonomously, there will inevitably be oscillations in the motion of the helicopter, since the human pilot that trained it cannot be perfect. However, by analyzing the feedback from the AHRS, servo locations, and control surface deflections, the control input gains to the autopilot program can be modified to give the helicopter a smoother flight by damping the unwanted oscillation induced by the autopilot attempting to reproduce the maneuver. It doesn't figure out the goal of the commands, it damps oscillation induced by the flight control system by figuring out what causes it. Its just math.
I can't believe this. I have worked on several wind energy projects over the years. The large scale utility turbines are huge; some have blades so large that they require an oversized load semi trailer to transport them. They are also not terribly light, even though many are made from composite materials. Spikes? Give me a break. First of all, you do *not* want to extract power from every gust of wind, and turbines and their associated management systems are tailored to that. The speed of the turbines is well regulated by the inertia of the blades and blade pitch adjustments. The objective being to provide the most stable power output possible. When there are spikes (such as when one turbine is more directly pointed into the wind with regard to others in a farm, for example) the spike can be bled off in several ways, the simplest of which being heat. Grid-tie systems do their job very well. I'm pretty sure if this was as big of a problem as it is made out to be, England (with dozens of wind farms and several nuclear reactors) would surely have had an infrastructure nightmare on its hands.
Functionally, the grid *is* a battery, except there is no need for an extra AC-DC-AC conversion step. The grid-tie conditioners take care of phase alignment and voltage.
I had eight Quadro Plex units where I used to work for CAD/CAM/FEA/CFD...a year ago.
"The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution."
I openly carry my ex-military 9mm CZ handgun (I live in a US city where open carry is legal) and whenever a cop sees me walking down the street and notices, he just nods to acknowledge my presence, and that's it.
...and if by "crummy CDMA" you mean the network that gives me over 1Mbps down to my two year old cell phone when I'm standing next to a cow in a field in the middle of nowhere Kansas...
Actually, I just found out that my going away present is a Model M keyboard from 1985 in mint condition. Awesome.
At work I use a Model M, and at home I use a Klingon Gray SGI keyboard.
Since today is my last day at work, perhaps I will steal my keyboard.