A side note to all this is the ease of moving phones and computers around your building.
As a net admin in the UK, I serviced a building with about 150 computers, 80 phones, and 300 jacks. Instead of having hard-wired telco jumper blocks, the telco lines ran to a patch board in the bottom of the same rack with the patch board to the network switches. If someone needed their phone/computer moved, you simply moved the jumper from the old jack to the new one, phone or computer as needed. This worked great with the PBX phones, too. If you can do this, it can save you a lot of telco phone movement headaches and fees.
Better yet, the RJ-45 wiring for 568-A/B have the pairs as pass through, so the same jumper cables worked for phone and computer! At the user end, the RJ-11/14 jacks fit the RJ-45 plugs, no problem.
More often than not, I'd have the jumpers re-routed before the customer had finished moving their stuff down the hall. The only problem I ever had was an unmarked crossover cable I grabbed from the pile for a new installation.
As a child, I still recall the "WTF Is This?" nature of the show with the dealings and double dealings in the plot and settings. "You're not Number 6, your THE Number 6!" And of course, nightmares of being chased by those damn white bubbles...
But as an adult, I get the dissapointment of seeing two idiots on a rotating teeter-totter in the control room while some other lackys wave their arms at some edge-lit plexiglas as if it were somehow important. Atmosphere yes, but now very stale.
This is where Battlestar Glactica shines. It updates the cardboard and blinky lights to something more credible which in turn supports and embellishes the plot and the writing. I've heard it said that ST:TOS and (older) Doctor Who were crap, but they were Glorious Crap! The writing and (sort-of) acting overcame the environmental and special-effects cheese factor. The Prisoner was head and shoulders above this. Bring the enviroment up to date, and the original writing will shine through again! With competent acting, of course... One hopes.
The sig is the solution to an alphabet problem in the computer game 7th Guest . You are in a haunted house solving a murder, and must puzzle you way out of various situations. They even have a robot of sorts (the microscope game), but it wasn't that dangerous!
Having worked at the 26th NORAD blockhouse at Luke AFB, Arizona, I can certainly agree -- Them suckers are Big!
The computer itself was many dozens of floor-to-ceiling racks about 50 feet long. The racks were pressurized with cool air. The tubes were mounted 4 to 6 in a tray similar to server rack trays. The base of each tube mount had a rubber baffle clearing the tube by about 1/4 inch to let the cool air in the rack flow past the tube. The warmed air served as building heat. The tube trays could be hot-swapped or individual tubes replaced as needed.
For anybody who remembers an old TV series called "The Time Tunnel", the big blinky control panel (with rows and rows of toggle and paddle switchs) with the 15 inch ocilliscope in the middle was basically a SAGE computer control station. I think they got it surplus from IBM or somebody.
Also of note is a tool built so the SAGE could finish the Detect-Identify-Respond loop: the F-106 Delta Dart supersonic interceptor. It carried various missles, including atomic warheads, to destroy hostile interlopers, commie or otherwise. In full-up SAGE operations, the SAGE operators in their blockhouses could directly steer the F-106 aircraft and fire missles at the bad guys, all by computer control. The pilot got the plane off the ground and back on the runway afterwards. Not exactly Missle Command or Defender, but you get the idea.
<nitpick>Oh - NORth American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was it's own entity, a designated military command on par with Stratagic Air Command (SAC).</nitpick>
Sucessful designs tend to hang around a while because they are sucessful. Autos still have four wheels mounted near the corners, just like the past 100 years. But the technology isn't old, just the proven design.
A fundamental design problem with the shuttle is the lightest part (the H2/LOx tank) carries the entire load of the system. It boils down to this:
1. The tank provides fuel to the shuttle
2. The shuttle main engines (SME) lift the shuttle only
3. The solid rocket boosters (SRB) lift the tank only
4. Any mismatch in "only" in 2 and 3 above is absorbed by the tank, and adjusted by the shuttle computers by gimbaling the SMEs
5. On the pad, the entire dead weight of the shuttle is hung on the tank, connected to the SRBs, thus torquing the whole setup. This torque is unloaded at launch, and the SMEs get to balance the SRB thrust and and stresses through the tank.
A do-able problem, but an engineering nightmare.
The Stack type rocket is, by comparison, much easier to build and operate. The load is on the top end, the fuel tanks carry a vertical load, and any crap that falls off (ice ice baby...) is in the throwaway zone immediately. Side boosters are easily added (Titan, Ariane, etc) and do not torque the vertical load.
The classic design of the Titan rocket family is a good example of the flexibility of this system, in terms of the types and weights of payloads launchable.
Throwaway? Yes. The complexity incurred by insisting on completely or largely reusable space flight systems is the rub. An objective solution falls back to basic cost/benefit analysis. To put 100 tons in space, do you go with the $1Bn shuttle x 5 launchs, + refit/refurbish ($$$), or 5 Titan IVb launchs for rather less? What is the time value of your launch windows -- Refit/refurbish delay vs launch next the Titan off the assembly line?
And so on. You pays your money, and you makes your choice.
This array would likely be able to do it's share in submarine tracking, but only as piece of a larger system.
Part of the adventure of sonar detection is that low frequencies, especially the 30-100Hz range, travel thousands of miles with very little loss. This trick to long range submarine detection is listening for sounds from pumps, fans, etc, in those low ranges. Next, you need a wide baseline to triangulate a position. The SOSUS arrays covering the Greenland-Iceland-Britan gap covered hundreds of miles.
Now comes the problem of sound ducting. The temperature and salinity gradients of seawater can steer sound in much the same way as a mirage is from bent light due to temperature gradients in the air.
The Fata Morgana mirage, also called Looming, is a prime example of a sonar problem. By eye, you see a mirror image of a distant, even over-the-horizon object reflected as if by a mirror -- the temperature inversion layer. By ear, you care only for the direction of the sound, but now the problem is "which mirror?" As the sound curves up to the sea surface, it reflects back down, then curves up once again, and reflects again, at about 33 mile intervals. This is called a Convergence Zone.
These complexities go on and on, and require a wide range of sensors by depth and distance to detect and resolve the location of a sound source. The computers come in handy to do the filtering ID work, so you don't mistake a squid or a beluga for a Typhoon or Krasnodar...
True enough about printed outbut being a best cantidate for survival, but the central problem in recovering the data is interpreting the data stream. Basic ASCII and EBCDIC are well documented, as are the other common font conversions. But what will you do when you come across something oddball, such as Cherokee, Chinese, Thai, or Tibetan Fonts? How many variations are there, and where is the common library?
Allright, so now you can read an unformatted TXT file... What about spreadsheets, databases, sound, and imagery? How about reading them from 9-inch floppies, Osborne disks, or those huge 1 megabyte multi-plate hard-drive platter stacks? There you need not only an original/compatible machnie, but more importantly, you need to know the DATA STREAM FORMAT.
How many sectors/tracks and where? What are the headers/trailers and sector structure? When you've extracted a binary stream from the original source, how was the, say, database/spreadsheet laid out? Which/where are the rows, columns, tuples, relvars, relations, and operators? Color, font, and column size declarations? OLE crosslinks to other files on the same source?
Oooo... somone clever used an early image/sound compression format -- how do you unpack it? ARC/LZH/ARJ/ZIP/Other? Remember ZORK text file compression? Orca-M compiler? UCSD Pascal? FORTH? 1-2-3? Lisp? Foxpro?
The point is that saving old data using antique equipment (or compatible emulators) will require knowing the structure of the data streams being read. Documenting that structure is at least as important as getting the emulator working properly.
One of the space products has been Microspheres several magnitudes more precise than those made on earth. Other of the NASA Microgravity projects can lead directly to ultrapure chip development for use in, for example, pinhead size medical and scientific gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers.
Because the microgravity should allow for high chip yield and high quality, the remaining issue is cost of production.
Allowing for $10,000 per Kg (source) for a mature launch/return system like the Saturn 5, Delta, or Titan series, a 100 Kg furnace containing 10 Kg of product would cost $1,000,000 to orbit. If the output is 0.01 gram chips at 95% yield, that gives you 950,000 chips. If you can sell them for a bit over $1.05 per chip, you're in the money. At only $5000/Kg, you are way ahead!
The medical market alone for $5-10 one-shot broad spectrum biochemical testers would easily absorb the 10 million-plus that could be produced with monthly launches.
1. Insert sample into tester
2. Plug tester into USB/Firewire port
3. Read results from software support package
4. (Profit!)
Having the law on the books is one thing, applying it is another. Allowing that SpamHaus Ltd is convicted (in abstentia or other), and is outside the nation (that pesky extradition thing), one possible next step would be a national (international?) blacklist of SpamHaus's ISP. If local ISPs continue to allow access to SpamHaus, the law would then treat the next case as treating the Local ISP of aiding and abetting SpamHaus.
Yes, this would be shooting the messenger, but it would also put the screws to the ISP serving SpamHaus as other ISPs cut them off on a national level. The Common Carrier status of ISPs may not provide full protection when they've been told about known criminal acts using their service. This could be an end run to force ISPs to keep their house clean (enforcing all those user agreements) or be isolated. And if the ISP host nation doesn't care about SpamHaus operating there, then it could find itself in the dark as a consequence.
Yes, the Great Firewall of China is a good example of bad intent, but the theme is appropriate to fight back at spammers on their own ground. The application of an anti-spam/spyware law has to apply pressure on the source, either from inside (with national support), or from the outside (isolation due to host nation indifference).
One of the first programs I learned and understood was an Apple ][ basic program called Horses. The horses were shape tables with assigned colors to various parts (body, head, legs), and the shapes were set to move about the screen using a simple edge reflection algorithm -- the bouncing ball sort of thing.
Try setting up a simple Visual Basic (insert preferred demo language flames here) program for this, using small animal icons for actors.
First, one critter moving x-axis. Then add a line for y-axis. (You can change things!)
Discussion - bounce speed/distance; change demo code (Need for learning Math)
Discussion - random angle; introduce x/y modifieres (Computer can do what you tell it)
Discussion - icon displays; change critter (Behold the Power of Coding! Muwhahaha...)
Discussion - multiple actors; add critters (Shows code modularity and reuse)
Question - What would you like to see the animals do? Discuss and code.
So, compared to Earth by altitude (approximately):
5,000 feet - 850 mb, 1 mile high
10,000 ft - 700 mb, 2 miles
Oxygen required for unpressurized aircraft
18,000 ft - 500 mb (half the atmosphere is above/below this level), 3 miles
30,000 ft - 300 mb (70% of atmosphere is below), 6 miles high, entering the Stratosphere
Dead Zone: Fatal without 100% oxygen source
53,000 ft - 100 mb (90% below, 10 miles, Stratosphere
Fatal without Pressure suit: Blood pressure exceedes environment pressure, so oxygen is not absorbed
Blood starts to outgas (boil) causing the Bends
68,000 ft - 50 mb (95%) 13 miles
102,000 ft - 10 mb (99%) 20 miles
104,000 ft - 9 mb High pressure on Mars
110,000 ft - 7 mb Average Mars pressure, 24 miles aloft on Earth
120,000 ft - 5 mb (99.5%) Higher terrain Mars pressure
157,000 ft - 1 mb (99.9%) Mars mountain tops,
30 miles on Earth
Oh, yes - Earth has 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and all that. Water vapor can be up to 4% or so on hot, humid days.
In other words, Mars Tourists will need to pack much more than a towel and sunscreen.
Somebody, please please PLEEZ figure out a simple (one click?) install and update process for *Nix instead of having to slog through multiple tarballs and such? At least the Knoppix Hacks disk has a clear set of instructions in the associated book, and for dual boot too.
As much as I want to use *Nix, I'm still tied to my swarm of M$/Wintel packages and hardware -- Thank You Wine! At this rate, I'll be jumping ship to a Mac Mini any day now just to get spun up. Already have a KVM switch for three boxen -- just as easy to mount a fourth...
Ahhh... back in the Apple ][ days of yore... a fellow named Donald Brown created the world of Eamon, an RPG game with a fun twist -- it was also a game shell. You could get game modules from your BBS (at 300 baud on your Hayes Micromodem) or write your own modules. Your (mainly) text based game could have whatever number of rooms, treasures, monsters and allies (charisma roll please...) with whatever properties you wanted.
Tearing apart the Applesoft Basic and hacking my own weapons were a joy indeed!
From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C
and 29.92 inches).
So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3,
or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same
yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium
displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble
isn't really relevant here, OK?)
Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS
Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4
tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.
Now the problems start.
Blimps use balonets
to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes.
For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the
blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude)
if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this
through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.
The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10
miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb.
This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all
available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208
tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.
Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb,
so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible
lift.
Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for
less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to
compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the
pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the
flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.
This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around
10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think
this plan is crap.
"Detroit - The directors, employees, and stockholders of the Ford Motor Company were arrested today by the FBI for RICO criminal conspiracy to commit felony. Their products have been used in thousands of bank robberies, kidnappings, and other heinous crimes for over 70 years. This history of felonious intent is clear from the long record of criminal praise and adulation for Ford products. No less than the murderous Bonnie and Clyde publicly praised Ford products in the 1930s for their power, speed, and reliability in fleeing the police, and the use of Ford products in criminal activities continue to this day."
"The directors, employees, and stockholders of the Ford Motor Company were arrested for RICO criminal conspiracy to commit felony. Their products have been used in thousands of bank robberies, kidnappings, and other heinous crimes for over 70 years. This history of felonious intent is clear from the long record of criminal praise and adulation for Ford products. No less than the murderous Bonnie and Clyde publicly praised Ford products in the 1930s for their power, speed, and reliability in fleeing the police, and the use of Ford products in criminal activities continue to this day."
Slashdot Mirror
A side note to all this is the ease of moving phones and computers around your building.
As a net admin in the UK, I serviced a building with about 150 computers, 80 phones, and 300 jacks. Instead of having hard-wired telco jumper blocks, the telco lines ran to a patch board in the bottom of the same rack with the patch board to the network switches. If someone needed their phone/computer moved, you simply moved the jumper from the old jack to the new one, phone or computer as needed. This worked great with the PBX phones, too. If you can do this, it can save you a lot of telco phone movement headaches and fees.
Better yet, the RJ-45 wiring for 568-A/B have the pairs as pass through, so the same jumper cables worked for phone and computer! At the user end, the RJ-11/14 jacks fit the RJ-45 plugs, no problem.
More often than not, I'd have the jumpers re-routed before the customer had finished moving their stuff down the hall. The only problem I ever had was an unmarked crossover cable I grabbed from the pile for a new installation.
I forget... did he invent the Buss Bar, or the System Buss? Google no help here.
Not just to remember, but to remember better.
As a child, I still recall the "WTF Is This?" nature of the show with the dealings and double dealings in the plot and settings. "You're not Number 6, your THE Number 6!" And of course, nightmares of being chased by those damn white bubbles...
But as an adult, I get the dissapointment of seeing two idiots on a rotating teeter-totter in the control room while some other lackys wave their arms at some edge-lit plexiglas as if it were somehow important. Atmosphere yes, but now very stale.
This is where Battlestar Glactica shines. It updates the cardboard and blinky lights to something more credible which in turn supports and embellishes the plot and the writing. I've heard it said that ST:TOS and (older) Doctor Who were crap, but they were Glorious Crap! The writing and (sort-of) acting overcame the environmental and special-effects cheese factor. The Prisoner was head and shoulders above this. Bring the enviroment up to date, and the original writing will shine through again! With competent acting, of course... One hopes.
The sig is the solution to an alphabet problem in the computer game 7th Guest . You are in a haunted house solving a murder, and must puzzle you way out of various situations. They even have a robot of sorts (the microscope game), but it wasn't that dangerous!
Don't worry -- Pretty soon they'll evolve to discover Asimov's Zeroth Law.
Umm, they ARE evolving, aren't they?
So, what does this mean when I try to listen to the live stream from the next Zimbabwean Music Festival?
Are the TCP/IP speakers on my 5-channel stereo surround system all going to have different pings? Bleah!
...I wonder how long it will take to defrag...
Having worked at the 26th NORAD blockhouse at Luke AFB, Arizona, I can certainly agree -- Them suckers are Big!
The computer itself was many dozens of floor-to-ceiling racks about 50 feet long. The racks were pressurized with cool air. The tubes were mounted 4 to 6 in a tray similar to server rack trays. The base of each tube mount had a rubber baffle clearing the tube by about 1/4 inch to let the cool air in the rack flow past the tube. The warmed air served as building heat. The tube trays could be hot-swapped or individual tubes replaced as needed.
For anybody who remembers an old TV series called "The Time Tunnel", the big blinky control panel (with rows and rows of toggle and paddle switchs) with the 15 inch ocilliscope in the middle was basically a SAGE computer control station. I think they got it surplus from IBM or somebody.
Also of note is a tool built so the SAGE could finish the Detect-Identify-Respond loop: the F-106 Delta Dart supersonic interceptor. It carried various missles, including atomic warheads, to destroy hostile interlopers, commie or otherwise. In full-up SAGE operations, the SAGE operators in their blockhouses could directly steer the F-106 aircraft and fire missles at the bad guys, all by computer control. The pilot got the plane off the ground and back on the runway afterwards. Not exactly Missle Command or Defender, but you get the idea.
<nitpick>Oh - NORth American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was it's own entity, a designated military command on par with Stratagic Air Command (SAC).</nitpick>
Fifteen Years? How about needing them the following year to prep for your Thesis Defense?
Ok, I see (RTFA) where the book can be "unlocked" for several semesters, but really...
How hard is it to strip the headers off a PDF and keep the body text?
Sucessful designs tend to hang around a while because they are sucessful. Autos still have four wheels mounted near the corners, just like the past 100 years. But the technology isn't old, just the proven design.
A fundamental design problem with the shuttle is the lightest part (the H2/LOx tank) carries the entire load of the system. It boils down to this:
1. The tank provides fuel to the shuttle
2. The shuttle main engines (SME) lift the shuttle only
3. The solid rocket boosters (SRB) lift the tank only
4. Any mismatch in "only" in 2 and 3 above is absorbed by the tank, and adjusted by the shuttle computers by gimbaling the SMEs
5. On the pad, the entire dead weight of the shuttle is hung on the tank, connected to the SRBs, thus torquing the whole setup. This torque is unloaded at launch, and the SMEs get to balance the SRB thrust and and stresses through the tank.
A do-able problem, but an engineering nightmare.
The Stack type rocket is, by comparison, much easier to build and operate. The load is on the top end, the fuel tanks carry a vertical load, and any crap that falls off (ice ice baby...) is in the throwaway zone immediately. Side boosters are easily added (Titan, Ariane, etc) and do not torque the vertical load.
The classic design of the Titan rocket family is a good example of the flexibility of this system, in terms of the types and weights of payloads launchable.
Throwaway? Yes. The complexity incurred by insisting on completely or largely reusable space flight systems is the rub. An objective solution falls back to basic cost/benefit analysis. To put 100 tons in space, do you go with the $1Bn shuttle x 5 launchs, + refit/refurbish ($$$), or 5 Titan IVb launchs for rather less? What is the time value of your launch windows -- Refit/refurbish delay vs launch next the Titan off the assembly line?
And so on. You pays your money, and you makes your choice.
This array would likely be able to do it's share in submarine tracking, but only as piece of a larger system.
Part of the adventure of sonar detection is that low frequencies, especially the 30-100Hz range, travel thousands of miles with very little loss. This trick to long range submarine detection is listening for sounds from pumps, fans, etc, in those low ranges. Next, you need a wide baseline to triangulate a position. The SOSUS arrays covering the Greenland-Iceland-Britan gap covered hundreds of miles.
Now comes the problem of sound ducting. The temperature and salinity gradients of seawater can steer sound in much the same way as a mirage is from bent light due to temperature gradients in the air.
The Fata Morgana mirage, also called Looming, is a prime example of a sonar problem. By eye, you see a mirror image of a distant, even over-the-horizon object reflected as if by a mirror -- the temperature inversion layer. By ear, you care only for the direction of the sound, but now the problem is "which mirror?" As the sound curves up to the sea surface, it reflects back down, then curves up once again, and reflects again, at about 33 mile intervals. This is called a Convergence Zone.
These complexities go on and on, and require a wide range of sensors by depth and distance to detect and resolve the location of a sound source. The computers come in handy to do the filtering ID work, so you don't mistake a squid or a beluga for a Typhoon or Krasnodar...
True enough about printed outbut being a best cantidate for survival, but the central problem in recovering the data is interpreting the data stream. Basic ASCII and EBCDIC are well documented, as are the other common font conversions. But what will you do when you come across something oddball, such as Cherokee, Chinese, Thai, or Tibetan Fonts? How many variations are there, and where is the common library?
Allright, so now you can read an unformatted TXT file... What about spreadsheets, databases, sound, and imagery? How about reading them from 9-inch floppies, Osborne disks, or those huge 1 megabyte multi-plate hard-drive platter stacks? There you need not only an original/compatible machnie, but more importantly, you need to know the DATA STREAM FORMAT.
How many sectors/tracks and where? What are the headers/trailers and sector structure? When you've extracted a binary stream from the original source, how was the, say, database/spreadsheet laid out? Which/where are the rows, columns, tuples, relvars, relations, and operators? Color, font, and column size declarations? OLE crosslinks to other files on the same source?
Oooo... somone clever used an early image/sound compression format -- how do you unpack it? ARC/LZH/ARJ/ZIP/Other? Remember ZORK text file compression? Orca-M compiler? UCSD Pascal? FORTH? 1-2-3? Lisp? Foxpro?
The point is that saving old data using antique equipment (or compatible emulators) will require knowing the structure of the data streams being read. Documenting that structure is at least as important as getting the emulator working properly.
One of the space products has been Microspheres several magnitudes more precise than those made on earth. Other of the NASA Microgravity projects can lead directly to ultrapure chip development for use in, for example, pinhead size medical and scientific gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers.
Because the microgravity should allow for high chip yield and high quality, the remaining issue is cost of production.
Allowing for $10,000 per Kg (source) for a mature launch/return system like the Saturn 5, Delta, or Titan series, a 100 Kg furnace containing 10 Kg of product would cost $1,000,000 to orbit. If the output is 0.01 gram chips at 95% yield, that gives you 950,000 chips. If you can sell them for a bit over $1.05 per chip, you're in the money. At only $5000/Kg, you are way ahead!
The medical market alone for $5-10 one-shot broad spectrum biochemical testers would easily absorb the 10 million-plus that could be produced with monthly launches.
1. Insert sample into tester
2. Plug tester into USB/Firewire port
3. Read results from software support package
4. (Profit!)
Having the law on the books is one thing, applying it is another. Allowing that SpamHaus Ltd is convicted (in abstentia or other), and is outside the nation (that pesky extradition thing), one possible next step would be a national (international?) blacklist of SpamHaus's ISP. If local ISPs continue to allow access to SpamHaus, the law would then treat the next case as treating the Local ISP of aiding and abetting SpamHaus.
Yes, this would be shooting the messenger, but it would also put the screws to the ISP serving SpamHaus as other ISPs cut them off on a national level. The Common Carrier status of ISPs may not provide full protection when they've been told about known criminal acts using their service. This could be an end run to force ISPs to keep their house clean (enforcing all those user agreements) or be isolated. And if the ISP host nation doesn't care about SpamHaus operating there, then it could find itself in the dark as a consequence.
Yes, the Great Firewall of China is a good example of bad intent, but the theme is appropriate to fight back at spammers on their own ground. The application of an anti-spam/spyware law has to apply pressure on the source, either from inside (with national support), or from the outside (isolation due to host nation indifference).
We don't need no steenking First Amendment! We're the School Board! So there! Nyah!
One of the first programs I learned and understood was an Apple ][ basic program called Horses. The horses were shape tables with assigned colors to various parts (body, head, legs), and the shapes were set to move about the screen using a simple edge reflection algorithm -- the bouncing ball sort of thing.
Try setting up a simple Visual Basic (insert preferred demo language flames here) program for this, using small animal icons for actors.
First, one critter moving x-axis. Then add a line for y-axis. (You can change things!)
Discussion - bounce speed/distance; change demo code (Need for learning Math)
Discussion - random angle; introduce x/y modifieres (Computer can do what you tell it)
Discussion - icon displays; change critter (Behold the Power of Coding! Muwhahaha...)
Discussion - multiple actors; add critters (Shows code modularity and reuse)
Question - What would you like to see the animals do? Discuss and code.
Fish, meet hook.
The standard atmosphere surface pressure on earth is 1013.23 millibars (mb), or 29.92 inches of mercury.
A record High Pressure in Siberia made it up to 1083.8 mb/32.01 inches, and a Pacific Typhoon had a record low pressure of 879 mb/25.69 inches of mercury.
So, compared to Earth by altitude (approximately):
5,000 feet - 850 mb, 1 mile high 10,000 ft - 700 mb, 2 miles Oxygen required for unpressurized aircraft 18,000 ft - 500 mb (half the atmosphere is above/below this level), 3 miles 30,000 ft - 300 mb (70% of atmosphere is below), 6 miles high, entering the Stratosphere Dead Zone: Fatal without 100% oxygen source 53,000 ft - 100 mb (90% below, 10 miles, Stratosphere Fatal without Pressure suit: Blood pressure exceedes environment pressure, so oxygen is not absorbed Blood starts to outgas (boil) causing the Bends 68,000 ft - 50 mb (95%) 13 miles 102,000 ft - 10 mb (99%) 20 miles 104,000 ft - 9 mb High pressure on Mars 110,000 ft - 7 mb Average Mars pressure, 24 miles aloft on Earth 120,000 ft - 5 mb (99.5%) Higher terrain Mars pressure 157,000 ft - 1 mb (99.9%) Mars mountain tops, 30 miles on Earth Oh, yes - Earth has 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, 1% Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and all that. Water vapor can be up to 4% or so on hot, humid days.
In other words, Mars Tourists will need to pack much more than a towel and sunscreen.
I'm going to upgrade XP now.... ummm....
Somebody, please please PLEEZ figure out a simple (one click?) install and update process for *Nix instead of having to slog through multiple tarballs and such? At least the Knoppix Hacks disk has a clear set of instructions in the associated book, and for dual boot too.
As much as I want to use *Nix, I'm still tied to my swarm of M$/Wintel packages and hardware -- Thank You Wine! At this rate, I'll be jumping ship to a Mac Mini any day now just to get spun up. Already have a KVM switch for three boxen -- just as easy to mount a fourth...
So... Will this replace my SCO Linux license, or do I need both? I'd really like to get my $699 back...
You can avoid Knoppix-STD's through abstinence. If you must, wear a Kondom.
Ahhh... back in the Apple ][ days of yore... a fellow named Donald Brown created the world of Eamon, an RPG game with a fun twist -- it was also a game shell. You could get game modules from your BBS (at 300 baud on your Hayes Micromodem) or write your own modules. Your (mainly) text based game could have whatever number of rooms, treasures, monsters and allies (charisma roll please...) with whatever properties you wanted.
Tearing apart the Applesoft Basic and hacking my own weapons were a joy indeed!
And best of all, they're still out there!
Nice idea, but crap physics. Here's why:
From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C and 29.92 inches). So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3, or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble isn't really relevant here, OK?)
Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4 tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.
Now the problems start.
Blimps use balonets to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes. For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude) if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.
The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10 miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb. This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208 tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.
Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb, so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible lift.
Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.
This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around 10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think this plan is crap.
"Detroit - The directors, employees, and stockholders of the Ford Motor Company were arrested today by the FBI for RICO criminal conspiracy to commit felony. Their products have been used in thousands of bank robberies, kidnappings, and other heinous crimes for over 70 years. This history of felonious intent is clear from the long record of criminal praise and adulation for Ford products. No less than the murderous Bonnie and Clyde publicly praised Ford products in the 1930s for their power, speed, and reliability in fleeing the police, and the use of Ford products in criminal activities continue to this day."
"The directors, employees, and stockholders of the Ford Motor Company were arrested for RICO criminal conspiracy to commit felony. Their products have been used in thousands of bank robberies, kidnappings, and other heinous crimes for over 70 years. This history of felonious intent is clear from the long record of criminal praise and adulation for Ford products. No less than the murderous Bonnie and Clyde publicly praised Ford products in the 1930s for their power, speed, and reliability in fleeing the police, and the use of Ford products in criminal activities continue to this day."