USB sticks sure beat rewriting tool CDs every time one updates!:)
I have a 4GB Kingston stick with all the sorts of things you have on it in addition to other stuff and lots of freeware portable apps including clamav which has come in very very handy; plus another 4GB with portable Bart PE loaded with antimalware kit on the first partition, and Ubuntu on a second partition; and a bunch of other ones including a 128MB with DSL that I carry everywhere.
Once the 16GB sticks come down in price a little more I'll build one with several bootable images on it.
Sweet kit, fits in the wallet. I love those things. Not too many years ago being able to put that kind of software power on a set of CDs was sweet kit...;)
Haven't had a single one break yet, either; a couple of them have been thru the laundry. The 128MB DSL stick case is actually slightly melted, as I left it on a dashboard of a car one 100F day. It still works...:)
We will pay off all warranties and contracts effective of the date of this message, as we are leaving the galaxy. Please forward any correspondence to Messus@earth.gov.
Thank you for you business, and we look forward to doing business with you again in the future.
Firstly, every cord *SHOULD* be labeled with maximium voltage... most likely 600V for most equipment. This is based on the voltage the insulation on the wires can withstand in a normal environment.
The ones I sold in the hardware store I worked in up until a couple years ago are.
The problem isn't the labeling or lack of it, not anymore. The problem is that the people buying them don't understand the labeling.
No amount of labeling is going to solve the basic problem of people not being educated in what the labeling means.
I'm a maintenance person nowadays, and I deal with a lot of college students living in the apartments I keep up.
Maybe one in five of those students understands that an electric baseboard heater can start things on fire, DESPITE the warnings printed on the heaters (in two languages, here).
Perhaps - just perhaps - our educational systems should include basic things like this? Might save some lives, methinks. But practical vocational education in our primary schools is almost nonexistent nowadays.
(don't get me wrong, we need math, writing, and some history. But isn't the idea of primary education to teach kids how to deal with the real world? Shouldn't we include relevant technological knowledge as well?)
Or we just tell all those poor damned whiners that the $5 tax goes towards the economy as a whole, which should help citizens buy their works instead of pirate them. Yes?
I have little sympathy for anyone who wants more laws made to protect their own mode of business profit. And yes, I'm a part time photographer who's made money off my works and dealt with local infringement.
We already have copyright laws, we don't need special compensations for certain works or business models.
Hmm. "Gentlemanly warfare" is something that only applies to the losers in any (especially modern) naval combat. Or did you think we built all those boomers, carriers, cruisers and attack subs because they were neat? At this point in history, ANY country which takes the US navy on is going to experience "assymetrical warfare". People who cause ecological damage with nukes are going to be known as terrorists, not combatants.
If the US is at war with someone, and we sink their ships without suffering much damage ourselves, yeah, some (stupid) politicos might put up an outcry. But the smart ones will think "we do NOT want to go to war with them" - and that's the whole point of military deterrence. Any country which would vaporize it's own fleet to make a political statement would mostly get laughed at, then defeated.
So, just as in my past arguments about the near-uselessness of trying to SINK a USN CVN when nuking the water she'll need for seawater cooling and desalination/etc, or nuking the flight area or flight deck and warping the arrestor wires and catapult pistons is possible (tho maybe not a likely SUCCESSFUL scenario, at LEAST an enemy/enema can TRY, if conditions are favorable...--fake Commair, assault in Panama, Suez assault, etc... ) to make a token gesture.
Uh, what? There's lots of seawater out there, I don't think anyone could hurt the navy by nuking patches of seawater, or even land-based desalination facilities (most carriers do their own desalination).
If you hit a carrier with a nuke, even a tactical nuke, that carrier is going to be mostly vaporized steel and there almost certainly won't be anyone left alive onboard, nor enough left of it to conn.
I suspect the last part of that sentence is talking about sabotage or terrorist activities, but that's hardly relevant to what we were talking about, which was the effectiveness of railgun launched weapons in naval warfare.
Now I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to say here, but I don't think so.
That's why modern anti-tanks rounds are so devastating - they are designed to turn armor into molten shrapnel. If you kill the crew and the electronics, a tank is useless.
Of course the more velocity, the more shrapnel, and if you have enough velocity, you don't even need an explosive warhead.
I can see using proximity-detonated flechette-style warheads on these, however. Think how devastating a few hundred ~250gram steel balls (or uranium penetrators) traveling at mach 8 would be to most surface craft, especially carriers.
Well, whatever the range, speed, or lethality of those "rail guns", they'll only give further justification for asymmetrical warfare and tactics. If I were a government faced with my ships being targeted by such guns, I'd resort to deploying ships with 50 or 100 MT nukes designed to detonate when impacted by high-energy rounds. The USN had then better hit my ships SPOT ON to assure they nukes wouldn't go off.
Your point about assymetrical warfare is good, but not fleshed out well.
If this ship targets you, it's probably going to be at least a hundred miles outside the blast radius of your large fusion weapons. So the best you'll accomplish is to incinerate your own ships and fleet and disrupt local communications for a while.
The best counter to stealth craft like these would likely be nuclear-powered attack submarines and satellite recc.
Possibly. Of course, it takes less deltaV to enter Mars orbit than it does to match velocity with something with no gravity field.
But not if you include surface landings and returns, especially return flights hauling mass off the surface. Even aerobraking isn't that much of an advantage as it's limited to lower-mass vehicles due to how thin Mars' atmosphere is. And we're only talking about the most efficient Mars interception orbits; a few days delay in a launch can blow your transfer window. There's only one Mars, and there's a LOT of NEA.
On the other hand, a rock can come from the Oort Cloud and impact the Earth. The possibility of an Earth impact does not in any way imply that deltaV requirement is low.
For that matter, a Near Earth Asteroid such as you're mentioning can impact Earth even if its orbit is significantly inclined to Earth's orbital plane. And deltaV requirements for large plane changes are, well, large.
In other words, a possible impactor does not imply low deltaV requirements to rendezvous.
And there probably won't be anything we can do about rocks like that for a long, long time, but if we don't start learning how to do so, eventually we'll get smacked. And it's much more likely it'll be a nearby rock (there's a reason why NEAs are considered the greatest risks) - and yes, I understand about inclined orbits, see below.
It'll be a lot easier to learn how to do so if we can practice on relatively nearby easy to reach rocks, wouldn't it?
One might also remember that something with an orbit not especially different than Earth's has launch windows that come infrequently, and return windows that come infrequently. An asteroid mission with low deltaV requirements will tend to require long mission times. Longer than a Mars mission, frequently.
True for many of the rocks out there, but not true for others. There are rocks that have or temporarily enter resonance orbits with earth that bring them to insanely low deltaV requirements, and some of them are upwards of a half km in diameter. If we're going to to have a prayer of intercepting *any rock* someday, we have to learn how to travel to them, survey them, and perhaps build bases on them (for larger ones that'll take more than a triple handful of nukes). The best way to bootstrap that sort of know-how is to start with rocks we can reach easily. It's easier, cheaper, and we learn more.
If we're going to spend huge sums of money learning how to keep astronauts alive on long space journeys - and if you think about it, any surface stay on Mars is going to likely have *more* overall travel time than surface time - what better way to do it by practicing on asteroids? There are other attractions, too, if we could learn to mine and maneuver smaller ones, that'd make it easier to set up regular cargo flights to any eventual mars base. Plus we could put rotating structures (artificial gravity) around an asteroid which have MUCH easier surface access than an orbiting Mars station would. Spend a few days on the surface working, then rotate back to gravity, repeat, for a few tens of cm/s deltaV each time rather than the km/s that Mars would entail (think cabled-together living modules). Solar power installations could be built for microgravity rather than 1/3 gee (lots cheaper to transport and set up)
I could go on. But essentially I believe that if we're going to bootstrap ourselves into solar system resource exploration and colonization, starting with small projects involving what rocks we can reach easiest makes a lot more sense. It's not exactly a new idea, but apparently at least one person at NASA might think so as well. Good, it's about time!:) Of course it's unfortunate that any such decision will likely not be made by anyone at NASA, but that's another topic.
Anyway, welcome a response. Thanks for being polite in your answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably a grad student :)
SB
"they might remember when this was said about calculators and spell checkers and Elvis and moving pictures and electricity."
;)
Oh, come on, now. Elvis was not a technological change in society.
Cultural, sure. But not in the same vein as the others.
Sheese.
SB
Elvis?
There's an item in your list that doesn't belong
SB
Corollary: Most people never had the ability to think rationally in the first place.
SB
USB sticks sure beat rewriting tool CDs every time one updates! :)
;)
:)
I have a 4GB Kingston stick with all the sorts of things you have on it in addition to other stuff and lots of freeware portable apps including clamav which has come in very very handy; plus another 4GB with portable Bart PE loaded with antimalware kit on the first partition, and Ubuntu on a second partition; and a bunch of other ones including a 128MB with DSL that I carry everywhere.
Once the 16GB sticks come down in price a little more I'll build one with several bootable images on it.
Sweet kit, fits in the wallet. I love those things. Not too many years ago being able to put that kind of software power on a set of CDs was sweet kit...
Haven't had a single one break yet, either; a couple of them have been thru the laundry. The 128MB DSL stick case is actually slightly melted, as I left it on a dashboard of a car one 100F day. It still works...
Cheers,
SB
We will pay off all warranties and contracts effective of the date of this message, as we are leaving the galaxy. Please forward any correspondence to Messus@earth.gov.
Thank you for you business, and we look forward to doing business with you again in the future.
Sincerely
Messus
That is NOT the way to train future skynet bots.
SB
Not yet. ;-\
SB
Firstly, every cord *SHOULD* be labeled with maximium voltage... most likely 600V for most equipment. This is based on the voltage the insulation on the wires can withstand in a normal environment.
The ones I sold in the hardware store I worked in up until a couple years ago are.
The problem isn't the labeling or lack of it, not anymore. The problem is that the people buying them don't understand the labeling.
No amount of labeling is going to solve the basic problem of people not being educated in what the labeling means.
SB
I'm a maintenance person nowadays, and I deal with a lot of college students living in the apartments I keep up.
Maybe one in five of those students understands that an electric baseboard heater can start things on fire, DESPITE the warnings printed on the heaters (in two languages, here).
Perhaps - just perhaps - our educational systems should include basic things like this? Might save some lives, methinks. But practical vocational education in our primary schools is almost nonexistent nowadays.
(don't get me wrong, we need math, writing, and some history. But isn't the idea of primary education to teach kids how to deal with the real world? Shouldn't we include relevant technological knowledge as well?)
SB
E. Can't read the warning sticker, because your school didn't teach you how to read.
SB
Or we just tell all those poor damned whiners that the $5 tax goes towards the economy as a whole, which should help citizens buy their works instead of pirate them. Yes?
I have little sympathy for anyone who wants more laws made to protect their own mode of business profit. And yes, I'm a part time photographer who's made money off my works and dealt with local infringement.
We already have copyright laws, we don't need special compensations for certain works or business models.
SB
He's hoping to save himself that $10k by publicly posting a bounty on this poor chap's head, scaring the blogger into quitting.
IANAL, but isn't that sort of practice illegal?
SB
Hmm. "Gentlemanly warfare" is something that only applies to the losers in any (especially modern) naval combat. Or did you think we built all those boomers, carriers, cruisers and attack subs because they were neat? At this point in history, ANY country which takes the US navy on is going to experience "assymetrical warfare". People who cause ecological damage with nukes are going to be known as terrorists, not combatants.
If the US is at war with someone, and we sink their ships without suffering much damage ourselves, yeah, some (stupid) politicos might put up an outcry. But the smart ones will think "we do NOT want to go to war with them" - and that's the whole point of military deterrence. Any country which would vaporize it's own fleet to make a political statement would mostly get laughed at, then defeated.
So, just as in my past arguments about the near-uselessness of trying to SINK a USN CVN when nuking the water she'll need for seawater cooling and desalination/etc, or nuking the flight area or flight deck and warping the arrestor wires and catapult pistons is possible (tho maybe not a likely SUCCESSFUL scenario, at LEAST an enemy/enema can TRY, if conditions are favorable...--fake Commair, assault in Panama, Suez assault, etc... ) to make a token gesture.
Uh, what? There's lots of seawater out there, I don't think anyone could hurt the navy by nuking patches of seawater, or even land-based desalination facilities (most carriers do their own desalination).
If you hit a carrier with a nuke, even a tactical nuke, that carrier is going to be mostly vaporized steel and there almost certainly won't be anyone left alive onboard, nor enough left of it to conn.
I suspect the last part of that sentence is talking about sabotage or terrorist activities, but that's hardly relevant to what we were talking about, which was the effectiveness of railgun launched weapons in naval warfare.
Now I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to say here, but I don't think so.
SB
That's why modern anti-tanks rounds are so devastating - they are designed to turn armor into molten shrapnel. If you kill the crew and the electronics, a tank is useless.
Of course the more velocity, the more shrapnel, and if you have enough velocity, you don't even need an explosive warhead.
SB
I can see using proximity-detonated flechette-style warheads on these, however. Think how devastating a few hundred ~250gram steel balls (or uranium penetrators) traveling at mach 8 would be to most surface craft, especially carriers.
SB
You nuke 'em all from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
SB
Well, whatever the range, speed, or lethality of those "rail guns", they'll only give further justification for asymmetrical warfare and tactics. If I were a government faced with my ships being targeted by such guns, I'd resort to deploying ships with 50 or 100 MT nukes designed to detonate when impacted by high-energy rounds. The USN had then better hit my ships SPOT ON to assure they nukes wouldn't go off.
Your point about assymetrical warfare is good, but not fleshed out well.
If this ship targets you, it's probably going to be at least a hundred miles outside the blast radius of your large fusion weapons. So the best you'll accomplish is to incinerate your own ships and fleet and disrupt local communications for a while.
The best counter to stealth craft like these would likely be nuclear-powered attack submarines and satellite recc.
Just IMO
SB
Uhh, wouldn't that require a line of sight to the intended target?
That's what unmanned reconnaissance drones are for.
SB
4) DSL-N on a fairly indestructible 256MB usbstick, you insensitive livecd clod. I pack a Free OS on my keychain. ;)
SB
Laser Guided Drones
SB
Bad form to reply to myself, I know, but anyone who is owned by cats knows about the chore of scooping out the cat boxes.
... sorry
One morning you're scooping them out, and you see a gleam of metal in a feces. Your first thought is "What *is* that?"
Your second thought after dissecting the feces is "Hey, didn't I read about these on Slashdot a few years ago? Shit!"
SB
I hope I don't get billed for all the lost government property that is swallowed by my cats!
:)
You can bet that your vet will bill you for extracting indigestible electronics from their intestinal tracts, tho.
Then the FBI shows up at your door...
SB
Possibly. Of course, it takes less deltaV to enter Mars orbit than it does to match velocity with something with no gravity field.
:) Of course it's unfortunate that any such decision will likely not be made by anyone at NASA, but that's another topic.
But not if you include surface landings and returns, especially return flights hauling mass off the surface. Even aerobraking isn't that much of an advantage as it's limited to lower-mass vehicles due to how thin Mars' atmosphere is. And we're only talking about the most efficient Mars interception orbits; a few days delay in a launch can blow your transfer window. There's only one Mars, and there's a LOT of NEA.
On the other hand, a rock can come from the Oort Cloud and impact the Earth. The possibility of an Earth impact does not in any way imply that deltaV requirement is low.
For that matter, a Near Earth Asteroid such as you're mentioning can impact Earth even if its orbit is significantly inclined to Earth's orbital plane. And deltaV requirements for large plane changes are, well, large.
In other words, a possible impactor does not imply low deltaV requirements to rendezvous.
And there probably won't be anything we can do about rocks like that for a long, long time, but if we don't start learning how to do so, eventually we'll get smacked. And it's much more likely it'll be a nearby rock (there's a reason why NEAs are considered the greatest risks) - and yes, I understand about inclined orbits, see below.
It'll be a lot easier to learn how to do so if we can practice on relatively nearby easy to reach rocks, wouldn't it?
One might also remember that something with an orbit not especially different than Earth's has launch windows that come infrequently, and return windows that come infrequently. An asteroid mission with low deltaV requirements will tend to require long mission times. Longer than a Mars mission, frequently.
True for many of the rocks out there, but not true for others. There are rocks that have or temporarily enter resonance orbits with earth that bring them to insanely low deltaV requirements, and some of them are upwards of a half km in diameter. If we're going to to have a prayer of intercepting *any rock* someday, we have to learn how to travel to them, survey them, and perhaps build bases on them (for larger ones that'll take more than a triple handful of nukes). The best way to bootstrap that sort of know-how is to start with rocks we can reach easily. It's easier, cheaper, and we learn more.
If we're going to spend huge sums of money learning how to keep astronauts alive on long space journeys - and if you think about it, any surface stay on Mars is going to likely have *more* overall travel time than surface time - what better way to do it by practicing on asteroids? There are other attractions, too, if we could learn to mine and maneuver smaller ones, that'd make it easier to set up regular cargo flights to any eventual mars base. Plus we could put rotating structures (artificial gravity) around an asteroid which have MUCH easier surface access than an orbiting Mars station would. Spend a few days on the surface working, then rotate back to gravity, repeat, for a few tens of cm/s deltaV each time rather than the km/s that Mars would entail (think cabled-together living modules). Solar power installations could be built for microgravity rather than 1/3 gee (lots cheaper to transport and set up)
I could go on. But essentially I believe that if we're going to bootstrap ourselves into solar system resource exploration and colonization, starting with small projects involving what rocks we can reach easiest makes a lot more sense. It's not exactly a new idea, but apparently at least one person at NASA might think so as well. Good, it's about time!
Anyway, welcome a response. Thanks for being polite in your answer.
SB
A dragonfly?
(-1:HarHarHar)
SB