All your "ideas" amount to there being more than 2 protected modes. Rest assurred that the idea of more levels or rings or splits in rings has been around for 30 years. This is nothing new, and people have already taken advantage of it.
Oh I know (hence the reference to multics, for example), I'm not claiming credit for these things (Well, maybe the protected OO language thing, I don't think I've seen that done anywhere.)
I believe that we don't need more than the kernel/user levels and the fact that all the user programs are protected from each other by virtual memory mapping and by all communication going through the kernel.
Well, that is certainly a valid opinion, but I do think more levels would be useful. Again, see the multics example.
When they added memory protection to the 386, you could write software that ran in the unprotected mode. Yes, you could write a system that would lock things up so that a branch of software was unable to switch to protected mode and unable to write outside it's own memory. But you could write that system!
Yeah, I'm guessing it's going to work much in the same way here.
The difference with Palladium is that it is explicitly designed so that nobody other than MicroSoft can write the unprotected mode part.
Palladium, yeah, I'm sure that's bad. But this story isn't about palladium. It's about cool new hardware that can run palladium. Or other things.
Unless you think that only MS is going to be allowed to write software for this new hardware (which is ludicrous), I don't see the problem.
This isn't about MS building Palladium, this is about Intel making better hardware, that have more functionality. Sure, on top of that you can build software that does bad things. Or, good things. Like, the ones I listed in the post you replied to.
Talking about Divx and DRM... This stuff seems completely orthogonal to that.
Am I new to the internet? No, I've been around for a while, and I happened to notice we need better security. Hence, this is a good thing. (I think it's a really weird tactic to accuse me of being naive and having bad security when I'm arguing that this new, hopefully more secure stuff is a good thing... )
"Trusted Computing" is intended to protect the vendors, not the users.
FYI "Trusted Computing" is certainly nothing new, or something Microsoft came up with. Google on terms such as "Trusted Solaris", "Common Criteria", "Mandatory Access Control". Oh, and it's not about giving up control to anyone else, more like the other way 'round.
We are the ones that are expected to pay for these boxes. I can't think of any actual benefits which DRM-enabling will give me in actual practice.
I can see that (Not wanting DRM). But DRM-capable hardware will give you benefits, since it's capable of other things as well. See my post.
/August, was a sysadmin on a "Trusted" (TCSEC b2 rated) DG/UX box back in '95.
This is not about palladium. It's enabling technology for that, but for a lot of other stuff as well. I'm not discussing palladium here, it's a separate thing, good or not. (Sounds bad, but I really don't know enough about it yet to tell)
Caveat: The article had almost as little info as the slashdot story. ("demo begins and ends"? Huh?). So I don't really know what it is really about. But if Microsoft can use it to implement palladium, we can do some real cool stuff with it. too.
This seems to be about getting better hardware suppoort for separation of different kinds. This is good stuff. That might mean stuff like:
Multics-style divisions within the kernel. (Think of it as a second division like between kernel- and userspace, but inside the kernel. For example maybe drivers can have their own address spaces. Right now, an error in an ethernet driver kan scribble memory inside the scsi driver. Or the mm system. That isn't so good.
In multics they had a small piece of the kernel in the "center", called the hardcore, and everything else in the kernel interfaced with that much in the same way that userland interfaces with the kernel now.
Kind of part of the ealier point, but it was getting long... Maybe we can get a Reference Monitor now. This is a separate part of the kernel, (that the rest of the kernel can't see or write to) that takes all the security desicions, instead of having that stuff spread all over the code. That makes it small and verifiable. (In theory. But it should hopefully be alot easier to find bugs that way.)
maybe you can have subdivision between different parts of user code. (libraries vs. app code, private things in OO languages actually being private to that class, all kind of stuff.)
Possibly this might make doing different kinds of mandatory access control easier (sonds like it ; that's what palladium sounds like, except the Security Officer is someone who works at Microsoft) If they can do that, we can do traditional MAC.
I have never seen such a freaking luddite reactoin to new tech here at slashdot. Geez... Were you guys this upset when they added memory protection to the 386 too? This is more of the same.
It can certainly be beaten. I have, once, as a wizard. Out of maybe 500 games. It's very hard, but a lot of fun because of the great variety in it. As the saying goes, TDTTOE (The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything), someone anticipated the really weird, cornercase situation you're in, and added code (or a message) to handle it. It's amazing.
There's a great feeling of accomplishment after you ascend. The only similar thing would be if you ever reached Elite in Elite, I guess. (Never did - Deadly)
There's a bit of randomness in it, and you can get killed on chance, but almost only right in the beginning of the game, when it doesn't matter so much. After that, I found that every time I died, I could tell afterwards what I did wrong. After a while you learn not to panic so easily - it's easy to get all caught up in tyhe action, but it's a turn based game! The trick is, go make some coffe, think, look through your inventory, think about praying, will they respect the E-word? Go slow.
I never played it in the original character mode. I always used the semi-graphical font that came with it. In the beginning because it was easier to remeber what monster was which from the picture than from the character, and later because there's enough of them. If you play with characters, you always need to (/) look up what this actually is. (ie, is this "a" a measly giant ant, or a deadly soldier ant? And "h" is even worse...) You need to know about it anyway, later (when you use the genocide spell for example) but it's rare enough that you can look it up then.
All that is true, but one good thing with 64-bit architextures is that you get to 64-bit data registers as well. If your app actually uses 64-bit math, having those long registers help a great deal. (The alternative is doing it with several smaller registers, tracking cthe flags and branching and stuff. Really ugly and slow, and on an architecture like IA32, where you really only have 3 registers, this gets even worse.)
I would agree, but when I saw this story, I had a look at Redhat's Bugzilla (didn't know they had one), and what do you know - there are reported bugs there that I hadn't heard of. In my software.
So nowadays, I think you should probably mail the upstream author (if you can find him, that's not always easy), and the vendor.
I think it would be reasonable for RH (and others) to make sure whatever bug reports come in through their bug-reporting systems actually gets passed on to the upstream author. At least when they're about real bugs that exist in the upstream software, if it's about their packages being built with the wrong flags or something, then obviously I don't need to know about it.
And also, I'd appreciate hearing about when distributions include my software, for all kinds of reasons. Debian did this, but they're the only ones, so far.
Don't forget 15-pin D-subs are (OK, were) also used for Ethernet AUI connectors; also hardly ever seen these days. I would expect some cases built to support
on-board networking to have these.
Yeah, but those always* came with the (weirdo) sliding thingy instead of screws, so you can tell those apart pretty easily. Also, those were only for reasonably high-end 10 Mb ethernet, for 100 they used (the even less common) MII interface.
Those RT connectors carried over into the early RS/6000s, which meant every machine came with a "book" containing 1' long cables with the weird connector on one
side and the standard connector on the other. (Plus the wrap plugs for self-diagnosis.)
They were a bit longer than 1" for the RT, more like a foot, but yeah. I still have the RT manuals though - they are by far the best manuals for any computer I have ever had. I swear my mom could get an RT up and running using those, and that's saying something.
* Well, I have seen one really old ungermann-bass card (I think it was a UB card at least) that had screws, but pretty much always
The PC keyboard interface has seen three revs, the original one was for the IBM PC RT and it had a lot of cool features that they removed for the XT. (Along with a lot of other stuff. Both the PC and the POWER-based RS/6000 architecture stems from it. It used a short-lived (but pretty cool) RISC CPU of a family called ROMP, and it ran AIX 2.XX)
It had a different physical connector too, most connectors on the RT was in the same style, kind of like a ribbon cable connector, but with a housing that prevented you from connecting stuff upside down.
The physical interface for RS-232 has changed quite a lot, too. Back in the olden days (terminal nets), 15-pin D-subs were very common, and you NEVER see those today. People would think it was a game port I guess. But you can sometimes see that there's one of those push-out D-sub blanks on the back side of a PC box that is too big for a 9-pin and to small for a 23-pin connector. That's what that's for.
Of course, the RT had the flat, small (8-pin IIRC) connectors for that too. It was pretty handy, you could get a 4-port serial card that didn't need octopus cables or external connector boxes or anything.
/August, got rid of my last 6150 a little over a year ago, but still has a few IBM 9332/400 disks.
That clause seems orthogonal to what the kernel guys are doing, but I wonder where the line in the sand really is...
what if the kernel guys decide to implement a VMS-style filesystem (Which remembers older versions of files, and you get those back if you delete the current file.) Is that enough to trigger the clause?
Then maybe you can call it lots of bugs in lots of apps. It used to be worse I think... it seems like they are fixing it slowly.
Hope so. The left-right select trick isn't exactly an often used feature (Most people don't even know it exists), but I do think it should work. You speak of a lot of such bugs... Any examples? (Apart from Sylpheed. It's pretty weird that a MUA would have c&p problems...)
Another issue is two button mice... A new user may not enable 3 button emulation, and even if they do, clicking both buttons at the same time isn't exactly an easy feat...
Well, get the correct hardware then! Tha analog to that argument is "I have no CTRL key on my keyboard so the windows c&p scheme doesn't work!"
That said, I haven't seen a two-button mouse in years... And mice are consumable goods, they are replaced fairly often. Is this a problem anymore?
I don't have all the answers. The problem does seem to be getting better, but I don't think we can write it off as a non-problem either.
Well IMHO the problem (as usual) is education. Learn how the system works, and don't complain just because it doesn't work like something else.
One of the problems in this industry is having too much backwards compatibility in
these circumstances.
You select with the left MB (click-drag, double-click-drag, triple-click-drag as required), as well as the left-click, right-click combo
You paste with the middle MB.
And that's it. Where's the problem?
Though now that I mentioned it, I noticed that the "left-click, right-click combo" actually doesn't work in mozilla! Damn, there goes my point... Still, that's a bug, and I'm reporting it ASAP.
Cut and paste in X has been standardized since before I started using it, and that was X11R3, circa 1991. See one of my older postings for more info on that if you feel like it.
Actually, one of the things that bug me the most when I use windows is the screwed-up way they do cut and paste.
Your example is a good example of that. In X, you select the new url, and right-click in the browser, and that's it. (Or you open a new window/tab first)
In windows, You have to know that ctrl-c means copy (which is inconsistent - it used to mean "kill app" in that OS earlier. Actually, I think it still does for console apps, but I'm not sure.) and then you can't just paste it into the window, you need to select the little text field in the top, and then know that ctrl-v will paste. There's just way more you need to know, that aren't obvious or intuitive here.
And why does it highlight the url when I click it once? I can't tell you how many times I have clicked, hit backspace to remove the last component of the url, removed the whole thing, and had to navigate back to where I was.
Yeah, and you can probably pop popcorn off of the thing as well, if you just remove theheatsink/fan assembly and the thermal paste, and add some mazola instead!
Brings a whole new meaning ot the term "home entertainment system", doesn't it?
/August.
Re:SPECint / SPECfp vs. POWER4 / US III / P4
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
Weird that they don't include the 1250MHz ev68 Alpha in the table. They make that CPU as well, and there's current data on spec.org.
It beats the itanium2 on int_base (845 vs 807)
and gets 1016 vs 1356 on fp_base. That would place it in third place on fp, and second on int, in the graphs they have.
So it's kind of strange that it's missing. Inter-department rivalry?
I think it's great that they actually use the spec benchmarks too, and not some kind of homebrewed BS crafted to give themselves an edge, like some other manufacturers do. Signs of a quality corporation.
"burning metal tube of death" is actually not a bad name for a rocket! Or maybe "fiberglass tube".
"burning metal tube of death, screaming through the atmosphere at the speed of sound looking for some poor schmuck to land on" isn't bad either, but a bit long winded.
I'll keep it in mind...
There's been a few of names in the same vein lately. "Flying pyramid of death" was a well known one, and at the last LDRS there was one called something like "purple rocket of extremely painful indigestion".
From what I've seen these guys (Armadillo Aerospace (Carmack et al.) and ERPS) are nowhere near the kind of adversaries you kind of make it sound like. A lot of info is routinely shared and they seem to be getting along really well.
True in principle, but this was not an orbital attempt, it was just going to go up into space (About 62 miles IIRC), and then come down again. And land in the same desert.
But in general, I know(*) the hardships Ky had to go thru to get all the numerous permits he needed to get to launch, and it's a crying shame that this kind of thing is so hard to do. And in America of all places. It's just weird that an amateur rocketeer, doing cool, new things, need to demonstrate having taken so many safety measures, when any shmoe can drive a car or fly an aircraft which is way more (potentially) destructive with impunity.
Now, I can certainly see that the FAA (or whomever) may want to limit "any yahoo" do to this, but that's just not the case here. Ky and many other serious amateurs have been doing this for a long time, and they've done a pretty good job. The bar is just at the wrong level.
Damn shame it failed, good luck next time, Ky!
(*) Not really, but I've heard him talk about it over a couple of beers, and it sounded pretty bad.
The N1 was the soviet moon rocket, the equavilent of the american Saturn V. They built four of them, all blew up shortly after liftoff, one of them taking out the whole launch complex and killing loads of their best rocket scientists.
Most of the failures happened because KORD, the computer that ran the rocket and had all kinds of automatic management for motor flame-outs and what not screwed up.
(The N1 had 30 motors in the first stage, so they pretty much knew one of two of them wouldn't work each flight. The Saturn V had five motros in the first stage.)
Great naming there, Sun... Something to live up to.
Not if they used proper glue. (Well, maybe you can dissolve it, but not without melting the player around it.)
Seriously (no really!) though, isn't this a textbook example of a DMCA violation? Isn't this just what that law was written for? How come this menace of a reviewer is still walking the streets?
It is a shame that civilians died in the terrorist attacks, but what about the civilians the US has killed in Afghanistan, like that wedding - they excuse it by saying some collateral damage is to be expeced.
Why do they say that the 'terrorist' attacks were "cowardly"? It'd take a fairly brave and strong willed person to willingly fly
themselves into a building. If they were cowardly they'd just talk about how they were going to attack America but do nothing about it.
Now, in a war (police action, whatever - when there's military force involved), some collateral damage is to be expected. If you're not, you're fooling yourself or someone else.
One interesting thing though - The wrong people always gets blamed for these things. If you park your anti-aircraft gun next to a wedding party and start shooting at enemy aircraft, if the party-goers are killed when that aircraft bombs you, that's not the pilot's fault - it's yours.
That's not how it gets reported though, the media tells it as if the aircraft attacked the party, and implies that it was done on puropse.
The media (as a whole) should probably read up on this stuff a bit.
Actually the sparks under the engines are just there to burn off excess hydrogen that exits the cone before ignition (the engines have a fuel lead, to prevent hard starts). The engines have their own ignition systems built in, and those are effectivley spark plugs.
Now, it's super important that the SRBs (solid boosters) are lit up at the same time. They're far away from the center, and and being solid, they can't be throttled. If just one of them were to light, that would be another shuttle lost, right there.
The SRBs are ignited by a smaller (though still pretty big) solid motor in the top of the SRB that sends a flame down the grains to ignite the whole burning surface at once. That smaller motor gets lit by what's essentially an e-match with BKNO on it.
Agreed, Bob Zubrin is a pretty cool guy. Actually, he'd make a great slashdot interviewee! I'd love to get an update on what's been happening since "The Case for Mars".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I know (hence the reference to multics, for example), I'm not claiming credit for these things (Well, maybe the protected OO language thing, I don't think I've seen that done anywhere.)
I believe that we don't need more than the kernel/user levels and the fact that all the user programs are protected from each other by virtual memory mapping and by all communication going through the kernel.
Well, that is certainly a valid opinion, but I do think more levels would be useful. Again, see the multics example.
When they added memory protection to the 386, you could write software that ran in the unprotected mode. Yes, you could write a system that would lock things up so that a branch of software was unable to switch to protected mode and unable to write outside it's own memory. But you could write that system!
Yeah, I'm guessing it's going to work much in the same way here.
The difference with Palladium is that it is explicitly designed so that nobody other than MicroSoft can write the unprotected mode part.
Palladium, yeah, I'm sure that's bad. But this story isn't about palladium. It's about cool new hardware that can run palladium. Or other things.
Unless you think that only MS is going to be allowed to write software for this new hardware (which is ludicrous), I don't see the problem.
This isn't about MS building Palladium, this is about Intel making better hardware, that have more functionality. Sure, on top of that you can build software that does bad things. Or, good things. Like, the ones I listed in the post you replied to.
Talking about Divx and DRM... This stuff seems completely orthogonal to that.
Am I new to the internet? No, I've been around for a while, and I happened to notice we need better security. Hence, this is a good thing. (I think it's a really weird tactic to accuse me of being naive and having bad security when I'm arguing that this new, hopefully more secure stuff is a good thing... )
"Trusted Computing" is intended to protect the vendors, not the users.
FYI "Trusted Computing" is certainly nothing new, or something Microsoft came up with. Google on terms such as "Trusted Solaris", "Common Criteria", "Mandatory Access Control". Oh, and it's not about giving up control to anyone else, more like the other way 'round.
We are the ones that are expected to pay for these boxes. I can't think of any actual benefits which DRM-enabling will give me in actual practice.
I can see that (Not wanting DRM). But DRM-capable hardware will give you benefits, since it's capable of other things as well. See my post.
Caveat: The article had almost as little info as the slashdot story. ("demo begins and ends"? Huh?). So I don't really know what it is really about. But if Microsoft can use it to implement palladium, we can do some real cool stuff with it. too.
This seems to be about getting better hardware suppoort for separation of different kinds. This is good stuff. That might mean stuff like:
In multics they had a small piece of the kernel in the "center", called the hardcore, and everything else in the kernel interfaced with that much in the same way that userland interfaces with the kernel now.
I have never seen such a freaking luddite reactoin to new tech here at slashdot. Geez... Were you guys this upset when they added memory protection to the 386 too? This is more of the same.
There's a great feeling of accomplishment after you ascend. The only similar thing would be if you ever reached Elite in Elite, I guess. (Never did - Deadly)
There's a bit of randomness in it, and you can get killed on chance, but almost only right in the beginning of the game, when it doesn't matter so much. After that, I found that every time I died, I could tell afterwards what I did wrong. After a while you learn not to panic so easily - it's easy to get all caught up in tyhe action, but it's a turn based game! The trick is, go make some coffe, think, look through your inventory, think about praying, will they respect the E-word? Go slow.
I never played it in the original character mode. I always used the semi-graphical font that came with it. In the beginning because it was easier to remeber what monster was which from the picture than from the character, and later because there's enough of them. If you play with characters, you always need to (/) look up what this actually is. (ie, is this "a" a measly giant ant, or a deadly soldier ant? And "h" is even worse...) You need to know about it anyway, later (when you use the genocide spell for example) but it's rare enough that you can look it up then.
So nowadays, I think you should probably mail the upstream author (if you can find him, that's not always easy), and the vendor.
I think it would be reasonable for RH (and others) to make sure whatever bug reports come in through their bug-reporting systems actually gets passed on to the upstream author. At least when they're about real bugs that exist in the upstream software, if it's about their packages being built with the wrong flags or something, then obviously I don't need to know about it.
And also, I'd appreciate hearing about when distributions include my software, for all kinds of reasons. Debian did this, but they're the only ones, so far.
Ah, yes, thinko...
Don't forget 15-pin D-subs are (OK, were) also used for Ethernet AUI connectors; also hardly ever seen these days. I would expect some cases built to support on-board networking to have these.
Yeah, but those always* came with the (weirdo) sliding thingy instead of screws, so you can tell those apart pretty easily. Also, those were only for reasonably high-end 10 Mb ethernet, for 100 they used (the even less common) MII interface.
Those RT connectors carried over into the early RS/6000s, which meant every machine came with a "book" containing 1' long cables with the weird connector on one side and the standard connector on the other. (Plus the wrap plugs for self-diagnosis.)
They were a bit longer than 1" for the RT, more like a foot, but yeah. I still have the RT manuals though - they are by far the best manuals for any computer I have ever had. I swear my mom could get an RT up and running using those, and that's saying something.
* Well, I have seen one really old ungermann-bass card (I think it was a UB card at least) that had screws, but pretty much always
It had a different physical connector too, most connectors on the RT was in the same style, kind of like a ribbon cable connector, but with a housing that prevented you from connecting stuff upside down.
The physical interface for RS-232 has changed quite a lot, too. Back in the olden days (terminal nets), 15-pin D-subs were very common, and you NEVER see those today. People would think it was a game port I guess. But you can sometimes see that there's one of those push-out D-sub blanks on the back side of a PC box that is too big for a 9-pin and to small for a 23-pin connector. That's what that's for.
Of course, the RT had the flat, small (8-pin IIRC) connectors for that too. It was pretty handy, you could get a 4-port serial card that didn't need octopus cables or external connector boxes or anything.
what if the kernel guys decide to implement a VMS-style filesystem (Which remembers older versions of files, and you get those back if you delete the current file.) Is that enough to trigger the clause?
Hope so. The left-right select trick isn't exactly an often used feature (Most people don't even know it exists), but I do think it should work. You speak of a lot of such bugs... Any examples? (Apart from Sylpheed. It's pretty weird that a MUA would have c&p problems...)
Another issue is two button mice... A new user may not enable 3 button emulation, and even if they do, clicking both buttons at the same time isn't exactly an easy feat...
Well, get the correct hardware then! Tha analog to that argument is "I have no CTRL key on my keyboard so the windows c&p scheme doesn't work!"
That said, I haven't seen a two-button mouse in years... And mice are consumable goods, they are replaced fairly often. Is this a problem anymore?
I don't have all the answers. The problem does seem to be getting better, but I don't think we can write it off as a non-problem either.
Well IMHO the problem (as usual) is education. Learn how the system works, and don't complain just because it doesn't work like something else. One of the problems in this industry is having too much backwards compatibility in these circumstances.
How does it not work in the same way in all apps?
- You select with the left MB (click-drag, double-click-drag, triple-click-drag as required), as well as the left-click, right-click combo
- You paste with the middle MB.
And that's it. Where's the problem?Though now that I mentioned it, I noticed that the "left-click, right-click combo" actually doesn't work in mozilla! Damn, there goes my point... Still, that's a bug, and I'm reporting it ASAP.
Actually, one of the things that bug me the most when I use windows is the screwed-up way they do cut and paste. Your example is a good example of that. In X, you select the new url, and right-click in the browser, and that's it. (Or you open a new window/tab first)
In windows, You have to know that ctrl-c means copy (which is inconsistent - it used to mean "kill app" in that OS earlier. Actually, I think it still does for console apps, but I'm not sure.) and then you can't just paste it into the window, you need to select the little text field in the top, and then know that ctrl-v will paste. There's just way more you need to know, that aren't obvious or intuitive here.
And why does it highlight the url when I click it once? I can't tell you how many times I have clicked, hit backspace to remove the last component of the url, removed the whole thing, and had to navigate back to where I was.
Brings a whole new meaning ot the term "home entertainment system", doesn't it?
It beats the itanium2 on int_base (845 vs 807) and gets 1016 vs 1356 on fp_base. That would place it in third place on fp, and second on int, in the graphs they have.
So it's kind of strange that it's missing. Inter-department rivalry?
I think it's great that they actually use the spec benchmarks too, and not some kind of homebrewed BS crafted to give themselves an edge, like some other manufacturers do. Signs of a quality corporation.
"burning metal tube of death, screaming through the atmosphere at the speed of sound looking for some poor schmuck to land on" isn't bad either, but a bit long winded.
I'll keep it in mind...
There's been a few of names in the same vein lately. "Flying pyramid of death" was a well known one, and at the last LDRS there was one called something like "purple rocket of extremely painful indigestion".
But in general, I know(*) the hardships Ky had to go thru to get all the numerous permits he needed to get to launch, and it's a crying shame that this kind of thing is so hard to do. And in America of all places. It's just weird that an amateur rocketeer, doing cool, new things, need to demonstrate having taken so many safety measures, when any shmoe can drive a car or fly an aircraft which is way more (potentially) destructive with impunity.
Now, I can certainly see that the FAA (or whomever) may want to limit "any yahoo" do to this, but that's just not the case here. Ky and many other serious amateurs have been doing this for a long time, and they've done a pretty good job. The bar is just at the wrong level.
Damn shame it failed, good luck next time, Ky!
(*) Not really, but I've heard him talk about it over a couple of beers, and it sounded pretty bad.
Most of the failures happened because KORD, the computer that ran the rocket and had all kinds of automatic management for motor flame-outs and what not screwed up.
(The N1 had 30 motors in the first stage, so they pretty much knew one of two of them wouldn't work each flight. The Saturn V had five motros in the first stage.)
Great naming there, Sun... Something to live up to.
Seriously (no really!) though, isn't this a textbook example of a DMCA violation? Isn't this just what that law was written for? How come this menace of a reviewer is still walking the streets?
The Gates brothers flies some of the coolest rockets in HPR today, and they have hands-down the best video.
Now, in a war (police action, whatever - when there's military force involved), some collateral damage is to be expected. If you're not, you're fooling yourself or someone else.
One interesting thing though - The wrong people always gets blamed for these things. If you park your anti-aircraft gun next to a wedding party and start shooting at enemy aircraft, if the party-goers are killed when that aircraft bombs you, that's not the pilot's fault - it's yours.
That's not how it gets reported though, the media tells it as if the aircraft attacked the party, and implies that it was done on puropse.
The media (as a whole) should probably read up on this stuff a bit.
The Stark Draper Open Source Rocketry Award (3 oz of gold for reaching 200km.)
and
John Carmack's High Performance Propulsion Award, $1000 for designing a rocket motor better than a certain performance level
(Seems to be down, at the moment, try the Wayback Machine)
Now, it's super important that the SRBs (solid boosters) are lit up at the same time. They're far away from the center, and and being solid, they can't be throttled. If just one of them were to light, that would be another shuttle lost, right there.
The SRBs are ignited by a smaller (though still pretty big) solid motor in the top of the SRB that sends a flame down the grains to ignite the whole burning surface at once. That smaller motor gets lit by what's essentially an e-match with BKNO on it.
At least, if they had taken it from Rogue Trooper: War machine there would have been a bit of irony in it.
How do I nominate him? And where?