Baby steps. That's how the massive government space program started, and how the commercial space program is starting (but the current efforts have the experience and gained knowledge of more than a half century of spaceflight to draw on, and are advancing much more quickly.)
I think we'll be pleasantly surprised...and remember that back when we were taking our first steps, few had dreamed of the potential profitability of communications and spy satellites.
Now the fruits of half a century+ of development of the technology is accessible to small startup companies. Think about it, Rei. I know you are a pessimist when it comes to the development of manned space access - hell, I have been since watching the clusterfuck that happened after Challenger - but this is private corporations who are dedicated to making it happen! Come on now! Not even twenty years ago this was considered just a pipe dream!
I simply don't understand your pessimism about this. Sure, it's not likely to be a ten year suborbit to lunar landing style excursion, but who's to tell at this point? What a lot of us have dreamed of for two decades+ is at least being attempted. Give 'em some credit!
What, and you think that those "controlling interests" wouldn't love to be the ground-breakers in a massive changeover to alternative fuels and have a (temporary) monopoly? Why are they spending billions of dollars researching alt fuels, then?
The main problem is the cost of changing our infrastructure over (to hydrogen, alcohol, or whatever). Half a trillion dollars over ten years (given a real effort) is the conservative estimate.
The other problem, right now, is that the demand for that changeover is simply not there in the automotive industry. Sure, there are a lot of alt-fuel vehicles being demo'd, and sold, but still just a drop in the bucket compared to the traditional vehicles out there.
The really promising long-term switchover (to electric once the storage and solar cell efficiency problem is solved) tech is hydrogen; but as a lot of people are fond of saying, there aren't any hydrogen wells; we need massive amounts of electrical power to produce hydrogen, and the only really efficient way to do so is with fission plants (which are cost-prohibitive to build right now due to various licensing issues which I won't go into here)
So basically, in the US we need a huge "paradigm change" in how the public perceives energy use. Military intervention in the Middle East isn't really helping.
I know this is really short and lacks detail, and some will argue with it, but essentially that's where we stand right now. But the "Petroleum corps are interested in maintaining the status quo" argument has been dead for years now, considering the amount of money all of them are investing in alternatives. Seriously, do some research - I used to think the same way as you do, and found out that I was simply wrong.
This tech is somewhat old hat to some of us in the industry, but having seen a demo at a show some time ago, it does work and was pretty impressive. Don't remember who did the demo, some industry group or another. They had quite a crowd.
I do remember a couple people asking about high humidity environments, IIRC they were told that those were being tested. I can't remember exactly what the responses were to the one person who asked about undried(green) wood, but I do remember someone saying something to the effect of some forms of treated wood (particularly creosote?) possibly being a problem. Something about different conductivity characteristics.
Wish I remembered where I put the notes I made during the show.
All in all I have to say that this is very promising - not necessarily for the professional side, but certainly for schools and DIYers. Amazing technology, whoever thought it up is a friggen' genius. Find a way to extend it to handheld power tools, bring the price down, and it'll sell like crazy.
I just hope it doesn't become legally mandated, because that would mean that tool prices for us pros would climb again (some of don't really need this to keep our fingers, it's called practicing job safety and having a healthy respect for our tools). But having the option to buy tools with this feature would be fantastic.
WRT to hand tools, I think that's impractical (being a carpenter:) - but most hand tools are nowhere near as dangerous as power tools are.
But I'll absolutely agree with you about routers. All too few people realize how dangerous a cutting blade spinning at 20k+ rpm is. Be a harder technical problem than a table saw, tho. But at least it's rather difficult to get your fingers in the way of a router head.
Bet you have developed better safety habits now:) I've never personally injured myself with a power saw/router/etc; but they command a lot more respect from me than even electricity does. Hand tools, on the other hand (pun not intended) - well, I have my scars...
A tip when working with oddly shaped pieces; build an appropriately shaped jig to push it thru the saw; really only practical if you are doing a lot of repititions of the piece, but can be worth doing especially for the cut accuracy that can result. A jig made out of a piece of dense styrofoam, which one can cut with a sharp utility blade or a hot knife, using your template; works nicely, and pays off in accuracy.
Altogether the power tool I consider to be the most dangerous is the lathe. Saw kickback has nothing on having cutting heads richocheting around the room or shattering.
So...let's eliminate the floppy drive as well - because it could be done that way. Heck, if you network boot a machine, you can still feed it whatever you want to. Allowing a vendor lockin wrt to one operating system in the hardware would be suicide for Intel, AMD, etc, and they know it.
Tell me - how does one do bios upgrades on the motherboard without a floppy or some other bootable access to the hardware? Do people seriously think that one can design and market general purpose PC hardware that only allows installation of Windows? That's just nuts. The server market would say "Fuck you".
But more ontopic, if one has to boot the machine to one form of storage or another, one can find a way to read/write/alter the info on any storage medium on the computer.
Sure, the hardware manufacturers can change that. Will they?
SB
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Ugh. Bite your tongue! That first sentence is just plain ugly, ugly, ugly. Fortunately I think that given how long Baen has been Baen, and the spirit of the company (and holders) that that particular scenario has the odds of happening of a quart of Ben&Jerry's surviving in the photosphere of the sun long enough to be eaten. Certainly not while Jim is alive. *shudder*
Actually the Bar *can* be painfully slow, even to lucky individuals like me with 2Mb/s cable access; there was a discussion there a couple years ago in which it was revealed that the Bar runs as a single-threaded perl script; I don't know if they've updated it (been lax in reading there lately:) but it's still pretty slow. Several people suggested back then that they go to slashcode, but concerns over the interface Look&Feel ruled it out, IIRC. Personally I think slashcode would work better, but I'm biased:)
I'll grant that the Bar has been around for a long time, and sometimes it's better to leave a good thing that semi-works alone. Anyway, you might be interested in the fact that there is a Bujold thread and Lois posts there on a regular basis;-) (also a Bujold nut here; well, a Miles Vorkosigan nut, anyway. Damn but that lady can write!)
WRT to mods; I suspect most of the mods are off fwapping to newer articles. At least it seems safe to be this deep and old. (Speak and ye shall receive, nave!;-D ) In any case, I do also know of a private newsgroup with a cat/critter discussion thread - it's not very active right now, but I trust and respect the people there (it's invitation only) but I think I could wrangle an invitation for you, if you are interested. Good talks like these are always fun with more interested and intelligent participants, I think.
I'm going to have to think on your last paragraph a bit. I think it's a bit more complicated than that, but I can't quite put my thinking into a logical form right now. However, let me ask you this question(s): Do you think it's possible that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals (or any other ancient - X*100k years - species) could interbreed? Why isn't it possible that different species (domesticated cats, circa ~10k BC(?) and their wild cousins X removed - could interbreed under certain circumstances? I think the interbreeding issue over the many offshoots of the feline families is a lot more complicated; mainly because I think that the genetic factors regarding interbreeding are much more complicated than just species seperation. IANAGeneticist, however:)
Suppose that, rather than being a cardinal rule across the various species, interbreeding can only happen between some linked subsets of the species in question, and the offshoots are mostly sterile, but not always. Wouldn't that forestall the homogenization?
I don't know if I'm expressing this right, can you see what I'm suggesting?
I'll admit right now that I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable on these things as you are, so I'll be interested in your comments if you have time. (Email, aye; echoed this to what seemed the most likely email link:) - I, um, took liberties with the subject)
Cheers! SB
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Wow...that's the word I've been looking for (extrapolator)! Ditto here; but I could never describe it well.
I wonder what it means that most of the somewhat good scifi I composed I did so during Senior optics classes circa '88 *snerk*:) Maybe that's why my interview with Meade didn't go off so well back in '89...
No, no, it's a *good* thing when the main character (or any other one) is out of control! That's when the story writes itself! Just leaves you to clean up the inconsistencies, but hey, what's a writer good for, anyway? Why do you writers honestly think that you really come up with these ideas?
(Note: Above paragraph written by Basrack Sheir, Sr. Timeline Troubleshooter - pay no attention to this poor shrick pounding the keyboard!)
Ditto here wrt to editing - or so I'm told - have been helping as much as I can with some friends (Jon being one) in their stories. However it's always *much* easier to critique constructively than it is to construct in the first place - particularly when it's hard to find something that hasn't already been done. Sigh(!)
Sending Darl back in time...How about the original asteroid bombardment, 400m years worth, but give him unlimited regeneration and place him on the surface. Hmmm...yes.
--
Vacation? I don't know, can one buy one on Ebay? I'm getting mine courtesy of a partially torn tendon in my foot that refuses to start healing - which means I'll be spending it mostly lying around with an icepack rather than doing something interesting like climbing Devils Tower (one of my summer plans that has been deep-sixed after much planning, dammit!!!! *&$#%&^%$#!!!!) Four whole days until the call of the customer brings me back...yay.
Whether or not I catch up on the housework and other TD list crap around here is becoming increasingly irrelevant at this point. I 'plan to' spend my lying around time drinking beer with the laptop, two cats, and catching up on the multitude of movies I've not yet seen. But I'm sure that Murphy will intervene there - he always does. That Rat Bastard.;) But....he can't have my Bud Lite!:)
Way, way back, when I used to isolate myself in my apartment, with nothing more than Turbo Pascal, me, and a job that I could ignore on my off time... well shit. Shit.
At least the cats will be happy. I rarely spend a lot of playtime with them anymore. *guilt*
I'm looking forward much more to my SO finishing her job and coming back here in August. The last 10 months have been damned lonely.
She'll say "Whiner! Quitcher bitching and go do something!"
More and more, I find myself missing my pre-internet days (not pre-computer, hacking Apples, Ataris, and the IBM PC was fun). But the internet can truly swallow one, especially monkey-curious types:( Those who think that geeks nowadays are *anti-social* do not understand the true magnitude of learning computers where the only form of communication between geeks was 300baud@~50cents/minute growing up in a little dinky farmtown where nobody knew WTF a computer WAS save a couple people. Generational...pass it on.:)
Anti-social, my ass. It's altogether too EASY nowadays.../rant
Bah&Humbug, even.:) Rambling again...I hate it when that happens.;)
Cheers! SB (not burnt out but close... too damned close)
Re:Cutting through the confusion
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Re: filks; I mostly parody current top 40 crap; generally when I'm in good company and feeling mellow (meaning good dark beer:).
SF: I published a couple of short stories back in my college days in a obscure and long-defunct local college fanrag; one of them came to the attention of the editors at Asimov's FSF magazine but was never published (and they never returned the manuscript either, darnit!) I also published (if one can call it that) a short on a Star Wars fanfic site that got some good email comments, several years ago. I cringe when I reread it now, however;)
I have several projects that are on the slow burner; but they've been stalled for a while. Two of them are time-travel detective style stories that got a long ways before becoming so complicated I couldn't sort them out. Damn, *finishing* a story and re-reading/editing it is a lot harder than writing the bulk of it in the first place!
Doesn't help, either, that work and work-related study (and slashdot, alas) consume entirely too much of my time nowadays; I *should* be concentrating on my work studies - mostly electrical and plumbing codes and HowDoUDoIt; after work I'm mostly so fried I need to get away, and slashdot is where I go, and, well, nevermind, doh:)
Re:Cutting through the confusion
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WRT to the hybrid site; I agree. It's on my ToDo list to see if I can't find some independent correlation on the South Dakota stories; I live here, and there should be some info in the libraries around here. Could be a big project, but my curious is piqued.
Agreed on Darl and Co. Fortunately his kind aren't in the majority, but it's amazing how much damage a minority can do, ain't it?:)
Bandit will be the fourth cat I've raised from a kitten; and he's by *far* the most lunatic, er, hyperactive, of the lot. As I said before, tho, I suspect he's going to be quite the cat once grown. He shows every sign of being highly intelligent and aware of human nuances such as humor, i.e. deliberately goofing off for the camera, etc. He does seem to be finally learning what "No!" means, fortunately *grin*
re HH volume (War of Honor) the CD has a lot of great stuff on it in addition to the Honor stories - it's free to distribute, too, so if you'd like a copy, they are available (ya just gotta love Jim Baen and the direction he's taking Baen books - and Baen and the Baen's Bar Forums are attracting some really great people. If you get into that sort of thing hang around in the bar a bit - the interface sucks but the conversations are superb). I think it has a bittorrent link. There are many good books on the CD in addition to quite a bit of good art; and there's another free CD out there too - it's name escapes me.
Yeah, Jon is quite a talented filker. Myself, I'm not really very good at it, but it sure is fun! Too bad most of my filks are X-rated:)
That's a good point. With the potential overlap of private/semi-private Wifi nodes, how would the RIAA be able to determine the who, what and where of illegal filesharing? The monitoring costs are going to be boosted by another order of magnitude, at least, and right now they can't even accurately identify who's doing what on the public networks, even with what they're paying outside companies to do.
I may be talking out of my ass, but it makes sense to me that massively cheap and widespread Wifi is going to introduce even more major difficulties in fighting copyright violation. Other than successfully lobbying the FCC (which this decision essentially IIUC correctly has torpedoed) what can they do about it?
Want to share files? Jump in the van and go wardriving. Oh, wait...
We'll be looking forward to your "Post Humously" post, then;-D
SB
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I wondered what had happened - wasn't keeping track of the days. Ah well:)
This *was* a truly marvelous filk, and I've sent it to some friends who have some infamy at filking on their own. I don't know if you are an Honor Harrington fan, but if you like Gilbert&Sullivan, you might enjoy reading these filks.:)
I first heard the root phrase, "Once you've paid the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane" cited as a British proverb ca. 800 A.D. (and have often thus quoted it here), but one suspects it goes back far beyond that. Funny how little things change over the centuries... companies like SCO are now the roving marauders who take whatever they want from anyone not sufficiently well-defended.
I'm sure that the concept probably goes back to the beginnings of religion, at least;) I really know little about the history of the phrase however.
I'd say, rather, that *men* like Darl are the roving marauders...
Oh, if you dig back in our last conversation a bit, you'll find an email address embedded in there (it's also in my, um, last journal comment *cough*;-D ) so in case we get cutoff again, there's another way to continue...
Speaking of our last conversation, do you know of any way to deal with a cat who is affectionate and hyper beyond the point of tolerance - "pest behavior"? Bandit is a great cat, but he is also driving every member - human and feline - of this household batty! I'm not quite sure how to deal with him at this point and am hoping he'll grow out of it.
On that note we should also consider what videotapes have done to the theater industry. Probably one of the few places where we are actually moving *away* from a service economy towards a goods-based one (DRM 'licensing' being a artificially created exception and one that has yet to prove itself as viable).
But eventually the internet - if it's not totally locked down by a few major media companies - will do the same thing to physical media. In some senses it already is. That's why open video standards are so important for consumers, and anathema to profit-based corps.
SB
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Shadowbearer raises a beer to you for that wonderful and insightful filk, and goes back into treatment... er... lurk-mode. Damn slashdot anyway:)
Salut!
SB (Knowing some filkers of note that I do, do you mind if I pass that on - with attribution, of course, mind you!;)
A rail-gun is a formidable weapon, but its only really of use for attacking a rival navy, or a military establishment on a coastal shore.
Satellites. Think land-based railguns with proximity fused 'shotgun' warheads. Bye-bye, satellite recon - and our birds are just as vulnerable as anyone else's)
Tho I'll agree with you about terrorists - but they aren't really a military problem, they are an internal security problem, and we have different assets to deal with them. (not going to discuss the effectiveness of those, but I'm more worried about getting killed by an idiot driver or homicidal thief than by a terrorist)
In all seriousness, thinking ahead in ways just like this - even if a lot of them don't pan out - can mean the difference in a future war against an enemy with a strong military - and just because there isn't one now, doesn't mean there won't be (and I'm not just talking about the US here, mind you. Many countries will be trying to develop this kind of tech, and while it's pretty advanced, it's not exactly bleeding edge. )
The rapid advance of technology is changing all the rules as regards warfare, and rapidly. Only fifty years ago we were essentially at war with China, remember?:)
The Thor concept has actually been pretty well thought out - it's quite old (dating from the late 60s, IIRC).
It would be tremendously expensive - even as an automated system. It's not technologically unfeasible, however, just politically and economically so.
Modern ablative coatings and guidance systems solve the reentry problems - and note that a Thor projectile would actually reenter with *more* velocity than an ICBM would, as the Thor starts with orbital velocity, while ICBMs are suborbital (not a huge difference, but there is one, and if the Thor "rod" has sufficient deorbit boost, it can far surpass ICBM reentry parameters. Firing your Thor rods thru a orbital railgun would suffice, I think:)
You're right about the plasma sensor problems, but given the cross sections of the rods, winds and varying density (which can both be calculated before launch, btw) aren't as much a problem as one would think.
Terminal guidance would be done in the last few tens of seconds, *after* the rod is out of it's plasma sheath. For terminal guidance only GPS and internal gyro tracking is important - and maybe laser guidance.
Of course putting all this into orbit is economically impractical right now, when we have systems that already do the job a lot cheaper. But I'd bet good money that someday the Thor concepts *will* be put into use, if for no other reason that they can supply a good area denial bombardment system (think 'anti-tank') for a battlefield with no other resources than what you put into orbit and a small C&C control room somewhere with good operators and intelligence updates - and no enemy without the capability to destroy orbital facilities will be able to respond.
Pournelle's book wasn't technologically farfetched - we *can* do it, right now - it's just that the cost is awfully high for something that we don't need that badly - not yet - and cost to orbit is still too high. But both those factors can and will change in the future.
What you've stated above *are* problems, but they are engineering problems, not technological ones.
I think the major question that will have to be answered there, in the long run, will be effectiveness vs. cost. That's a very different equation now than it was during the cold war - will these weapons be necessary to our ships in future conflicts? Which ones?
I can see smaller versions of these weapons - like ship-mounted AA and CIWS systems being *very* worth the cost of development; but the larger (and currently envisioned) systems most likely only in land bombardment rather than surface actions, against likely naval deployments any potential enemy might make currently.
Here's another idea, tho: DD(X) that can shoot down satellites:) They could certainly be scaled up to have the range, and with sufficient tracking ability, warheads (think warheads timed to explode for the 'shotgun' effect at a preset orbital altitude) and worldwide deployment, no enemy satellite would survive the first hour or so after a war warning.
Land-based anti-sat-EMK systems, would, of course, be even more effective. I'm kind of surprised that I've seen little on this particular application - it seems obvious (or maybe I'm missing something?)
I can think of one possible disadvantage tho; impact damage.
At these velocities, with a lot of surface targets (ships) the projectile might well pass right thru the ship. There'd be some damage from armor spalling and possible projectile disintegration, but nothing compared to what a thousand kg or so of missile delivered HE fireballing into your internal spaces - like, say, the hanger deck on a carrier - can produce.
Carriers would be the obvious example - they have large internal spaces that would offer little resistance to the warhead.
One would have to have the capability of precision impact points on the target to do massive damage - say, like the munition storage spaces or fuel storage, to do critical damage to a surface ship - and that wouldn't be easy with moving targets on the ocean.
Stationary targets (land targets), such as bunkers and backtracked artillery, on the other hand...:) Ouch!
But combine these with proximity/delay fused explosive warheads or focused jet penetrators like sabot warheads, however, and that's one hell of a weapon. I'd imagine there will be different warheads for different combat targets, like there is now. Difference is these will be a lot harder to evade:)
(Another application that comes to mind is multi-barrel radar guided anti-aircraft EMK - wouldn't need explosive warheads there, and there's no way any aircraft is going to evade a mach 7+ stream of metal)
Conventional wisdom has nothing to do with it, for me. After Raiders, TOD was a real letdown for me. I thought the plot was boring and the acting wooden. It might be because I have a dislike for "voodoo" movies in general, however. I haven't seen any of the DVDs; I saw all three in the theater and have them on VHS, so I don't know if the DVDs differ (special editions or whatnot)
*shrug*
In any case, Raiders is still in my top five all time great adventure flix.
Have the government schools taught you that life is fair?
Probably. Well, to a large extent, yes. But it isn't just the schools.
At the risk of flamebait, I'd say that there is a good reason that the term "sheep" is often applied. Nice little obedient numbers, er, servants, er, citizens. Yeah, citizens, that's it. Can't let 'em feel underprivileged, now, can we. Be a good little citizen and take your lumps. After all, we know what's best for you.
The way to imprison a free man is to write laws that make his very existence a crime. He can't be converted nor subverted, therefore the only choice is to end his existence.
Historically, this is the path taken by those who would wish to have absolute power over others, to bend them to their will. Historically, they have succeeded more often than they have failed. Thus we continue to fight. There is no forgetting.
- me, in another forum (almost another universe, it seems at times.)
I'll agree that the article as posted was definitely a flamebait invite; but I'll disagree that it's not news worthy of slashdot, considering that anonymity on the web (and it's lack thereof, and the mechanisms for finding it) has been a frequent discussion here.
The third movie sure made up for the lame bullshit of the second one:) The first is still my favorite, but the third came close; it was actually *funny*, which is what the whole idea was in the first place. I wonder if Ford cringes while viewing the second movie (whose name I shall not utter here)? Talk about horrible lines!
The interaction between Indiana and his father (whoever scripted Connery for that role was a genius) was very, very well done. I enjoyed TLC immensely and still do.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Goddard?
Baby steps. That's how the massive government space program started, and how the commercial space program is starting (but the current efforts have the experience and gained knowledge of more than a half century of spaceflight to draw on, and are advancing much more quickly.)
I think we'll be pleasantly surprised...and remember that back when we were taking our first steps, few had dreamed of the potential profitability of communications and spy satellites.
Now the fruits of half a century+ of development of the technology is accessible to small startup companies. Think about it, Rei. I know you are a pessimist when it comes to the development of manned space access - hell, I have been since watching the clusterfuck that happened after Challenger - but this is private corporations who are dedicated to making it happen! Come on now! Not even twenty years ago this was considered just a pipe dream!
I simply don't understand your pessimism about this. Sure, it's not likely to be a ten year suborbit to lunar landing style excursion, but who's to tell at this point? What a lot of us have dreamed of for two decades+ is at least being attempted. Give 'em some credit!
SB
What, and you think that those "controlling interests" wouldn't love to be the ground-breakers in a massive changeover to alternative fuels and have a (temporary) monopoly? Why are they spending billions of dollars researching alt fuels, then?
The main problem is the cost of changing our infrastructure over (to hydrogen, alcohol, or whatever). Half a trillion dollars over ten years (given a real effort) is the conservative estimate.
The other problem, right now, is that the demand for that changeover is simply not there in the automotive industry. Sure, there are a lot of alt-fuel vehicles being demo'd, and sold, but still just a drop in the bucket compared to the traditional vehicles out there.
The really promising long-term switchover (to electric once the storage and solar cell efficiency problem is solved) tech is hydrogen; but as a lot of people are fond of saying, there aren't any hydrogen wells; we need massive amounts of electrical power to produce hydrogen, and the only really efficient way to do so is with fission plants (which are cost-prohibitive to build right now due to various licensing issues which I won't go into here)
So basically, in the US we need a huge "paradigm change" in how the public perceives energy use. Military intervention in the Middle East isn't really helping.
I know this is really short and lacks detail, and some will argue with it, but essentially that's where we stand right now. But the "Petroleum corps are interested in maintaining the status quo" argument has been dead for years now, considering the amount of money all of them are investing in alternatives. Seriously, do some research - I used to think the same way as you do, and found out that I was simply wrong.
SB
This tech is somewhat old hat to some of us in the industry, but having seen a demo at a show some time ago, it does work and was pretty impressive. Don't remember who did the demo, some industry group or another. They had quite a crowd.
I do remember a couple people asking about high humidity environments, IIRC they were told that those were being tested. I can't remember exactly what the responses were to the one person who asked about undried(green) wood, but I do remember someone saying something to the effect of some forms of treated wood (particularly creosote?) possibly being a problem. Something about different conductivity characteristics.
Wish I remembered where I put the notes I made during the show.
All in all I have to say that this is very promising - not necessarily for the professional side, but certainly for schools and DIYers. Amazing technology, whoever thought it up is a friggen' genius. Find a way to extend it to handheld power tools, bring the price down, and it'll sell like crazy.
I just hope it doesn't become legally mandated, because that would mean that tool prices for us pros would climb again (some of don't really need this to keep our fingers, it's called practicing job safety and having a healthy respect for our tools). But having the option to buy tools with this feature would be fantastic.
SB
WRT to hand tools, I think that's impractical (being a carpenter
But I'll absolutely agree with you about routers. All too few people realize how dangerous a cutting blade spinning at 20k+ rpm is. Be a harder technical problem than a table saw, tho. But at least it's rather difficult to get your fingers in the way of a router head.
Bet you have developed better safety habits now
A tip when working with oddly shaped pieces; build an appropriately shaped jig to push it thru the saw; really only practical if you are doing a lot of repititions of the piece, but can be worth doing especially for the cut accuracy that can result. A jig made out of a piece of dense styrofoam, which one can cut with a sharp utility blade or a hot knife, using your template; works nicely, and pays off in accuracy.
Altogether the power tool I consider to be the most dangerous is the lathe. Saw kickback has nothing on having cutting heads richocheting around the room or shattering.
SB
So...let's eliminate the floppy drive as well - because it could be done that way. Heck, if you network boot a machine, you can still feed it whatever you want to. Allowing a vendor lockin wrt to one operating system in the hardware would be suicide for Intel, AMD, etc, and they know it.
Tell me - how does one do bios upgrades on the motherboard without a floppy or some other bootable access to the hardware? Do people seriously think that one can design and market general purpose PC hardware that only allows installation of Windows? That's just nuts. The server market would say "Fuck you".
But more ontopic, if one has to boot the machine to one form of storage or another, one can find a way to read/write/alter the info on any storage medium on the computer.
Sure, the hardware manufacturers can change that. Will they?
SB
Ugh. Bite your tongue! That first sentence is just plain ugly, ugly, ugly. Fortunately I think that given how long Baen has been Baen, and the spirit of the company (and holders) that that particular scenario has the odds of happening of a quart of Ben&Jerry's surviving in the photosphere of the sun long enough to be eaten. Certainly not while Jim is alive. *shudder*
:) but it's still pretty slow. Several people suggested back then that they go to slashcode, but concerns over the interface Look&Feel ruled it out, IIRC. Personally I think slashcode would work better, but I'm biased :) ;-) (also a Bujold nut here; well, a Miles Vorkosigan nut, anyway. Damn but that lady can write!)
;-D ) In any case, I do also know of a private newsgroup with a cat/critter discussion thread - it's not very active right now, but I trust and respect the people there (it's invitation only) but I think I could wrangle an invitation for you, if you are interested. Good talks like these are always fun with more interested and intelligent participants, I think.
:)
:) - I, um, took liberties with the subject)
Actually the Bar *can* be painfully slow, even to lucky individuals like me with 2Mb/s cable access; there was a discussion there a couple years ago in which it was revealed that the Bar runs as a single-threaded perl script; I don't know if they've updated it (been lax in reading there lately
I'll grant that the Bar has been around for a long time, and sometimes it's better to leave a good thing that semi-works alone. Anyway, you might be interested in the fact that there is a Bujold thread and Lois posts there on a regular basis
WRT to mods; I suspect most of the mods are off fwapping to newer articles. At least it seems safe to be this deep and old. (Speak and ye shall receive, nave!
I'm going to have to think on your last paragraph a bit. I think it's a bit more complicated than that, but I can't quite put my thinking into a logical form right now. However, let me ask you this question(s): Do you think it's possible that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals (or any other ancient - X*100k years - species) could interbreed? Why isn't it possible that different species (domesticated cats, circa ~10k BC(?) and their wild cousins X removed - could interbreed under certain circumstances? I think the interbreeding issue over the many offshoots of the feline families is a lot more complicated; mainly because I think that the genetic factors regarding interbreeding are much more complicated than just species seperation. IANAGeneticist, however
Suppose that, rather than being a cardinal rule across the various species, interbreeding can only happen between some linked subsets of the species in question, and the offshoots are mostly sterile, but not always. Wouldn't that forestall the homogenization?
I don't know if I'm expressing this right, can you see what I'm suggesting?
I'll admit right now that I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable on these things as you are, so I'll be interested in your comments if you have time. (Email, aye; echoed this to what seemed the most likely email link
Cheers!
SB
Wow...that's the word I've been looking for (extrapolator)! Ditto here; but I could never describe it well.
:) Maybe that's why my interview with Meade didn't go off so well back in '89...
;) But....he can't have my Bud Lite! :)
:( Those who think that geeks nowadays are *anti-social* do not understand the true magnitude of learning computers where the only form of communication between geeks was 300baud@~50cents/minute growing up in a little dinky farmtown where nobody knew WTF a computer WAS save a couple people. Generational...pass it on. :)
/rant
:) Rambling again...I hate it when that happens. ;)
I wonder what it means that most of the somewhat good scifi I composed I did so during Senior optics classes circa '88 *snerk*
No, no, it's a *good* thing when the main character (or any other one) is out of control! That's when the story writes itself! Just leaves you to clean up the inconsistencies, but hey, what's a writer good for, anyway? Why do you writers honestly think that you really come up with these ideas?
(Note: Above paragraph written by Basrack Sheir, Sr. Timeline Troubleshooter - pay no attention to this poor shrick pounding the keyboard!)
Ditto here wrt to editing - or so I'm told - have been helping as much as I can with some friends (Jon being one) in their stories. However it's always *much* easier to critique constructively than it is to construct in the first place - particularly when it's hard to find something that hasn't already been done. Sigh(!)
Sending Darl back in time...How about the original asteroid bombardment, 400m years worth, but give him unlimited regeneration and place him on the surface. Hmmm...yes.
--
Vacation? I don't know, can one buy one on Ebay? I'm getting mine courtesy of a partially torn tendon in my foot that refuses to start healing - which means I'll be spending it mostly lying around with an icepack rather than doing something interesting like climbing Devils Tower (one of my summer plans that has been deep-sixed after much planning, dammit!!!! *&$#%&^%$#!!!!) Four whole days until the call of the customer brings me back...yay.
Whether or not I catch up on the housework and other TD list crap around here is becoming increasingly irrelevant at this point. I 'plan to' spend my lying around time drinking beer with the laptop, two cats, and catching up on the multitude of movies I've not yet seen. But I'm sure that Murphy will intervene there - he always does. That Rat Bastard.
Way, way back, when I used to isolate myself in my apartment, with nothing more than Turbo Pascal, me, and a job that I could ignore on my off time... well shit. Shit.
At least the cats will be happy. I rarely spend a lot of playtime with them anymore. *guilt*
I'm looking forward much more to my SO finishing her job and coming back here in August. The last 10 months have been damned lonely.
She'll say "Whiner! Quitcher bitching and go do something!"
More and more, I find myself missing my pre-internet days (not pre-computer, hacking Apples, Ataris, and the IBM PC was fun). But the internet can truly swallow one, especially monkey-curious types
Anti-social, my ass. It's altogether too EASY nowadays...
Bah&Humbug, even.
Cheers!
SB
(not burnt out but close... too damned close)
Re: filks; I mostly parody current top 40 crap; generally when I'm in good company and feeling mellow (meaning good dark beer :).
;)
:)
SF: I published a couple of short stories back in my college days in a obscure and long-defunct local college fanrag; one of them came to the attention of the editors at Asimov's FSF magazine but was never published (and they never returned the manuscript either, darnit!) I also published (if one can call it that) a short on a Star Wars fanfic site that got some good email comments, several years ago. I cringe when I reread it now, however
I have several projects that are on the slow burner; but they've been stalled for a while. Two of them are time-travel detective style stories that got a long ways before becoming so complicated I couldn't sort them out. Damn, *finishing* a story and re-reading/editing it is a lot harder than writing the bulk of it in the first place!
Doesn't help, either, that work and work-related study (and slashdot, alas) consume entirely too much of my time nowadays; I *should* be concentrating on my work studies - mostly electrical and plumbing codes and HowDoUDoIt; after work I'm mostly so fried I need to get away, and slashdot is where I go, and, well, nevermind, doh
Anyway, later, I'm already behind tonite...vacation cometh soon, thank Bog!
Cheers!
SB
WRT to the hybrid site; I agree. It's on my ToDo list to see if I can't find some independent correlation on the South Dakota stories; I live here, and there should be some info in the libraries around here. Could be a big project, but my curious is piqued.
Agreed on Darl and Co. Fortunately his kind aren't in the majority, but it's amazing how much damage a minority can do, ain't it?
Bandit will be the fourth cat I've raised from a kitten; and he's by *far* the most lunatic, er, hyperactive, of the lot. As I said before, tho, I suspect he's going to be quite the cat once grown. He shows every sign of being highly intelligent and aware of human nuances such as humor, i.e. deliberately goofing off for the camera, etc. He does seem to be finally learning what "No!" means, fortunately *grin*
re HH volume (War of Honor) the CD has a lot of great stuff on it in addition to the Honor stories - it's free to distribute, too, so if you'd like a copy, they are available (ya just gotta love Jim Baen and the direction he's taking Baen books - and Baen and the Baen's Bar Forums are attracting some really great people. If you get into that sort of thing hang around in the bar a bit - the interface sucks but the conversations are superb). I think it has a bittorrent link. There are many good books on the CD in addition to quite a bit of good art; and there's another free CD out there too - it's name escapes me.
Yeah, Jon is quite a talented filker. Myself, I'm not really very good at it, but it sure is fun! Too bad most of my filks are X-rated
Cheers!
SB
That's a good point. With the potential overlap of private/semi-private Wifi nodes, how would the RIAA be able to determine the who, what and where of illegal filesharing? The monitoring costs are going to be boosted by another order of magnitude, at least, and right now they can't even accurately identify who's doing what on the public networks, even with what they're paying outside companies to do.
I may be talking out of my ass, but it makes sense to me that massively cheap and widespread Wifi is going to introduce even more major difficulties in fighting copyright violation. Other than successfully lobbying the FCC (which this decision essentially IIUC correctly has torpedoed) what can they do about it?
Want to share files? Jump in the van and go wardriving. Oh, wait...
SB
We'll be looking forward to your "Post Humously" post, then ;-D
SB
I wondered what had happened - wasn't keeping track of the days. Ah well :)
:)
;) I really know little about the history of the phrase however.
;-D ) so in case we get cutoff again, there's another way to continue...
This *was* a truly marvelous filk, and I've sent it to some friends who have some infamy at filking on their own. I don't know if you are an Honor Harrington fan, but if you like Gilbert&Sullivan, you might enjoy reading these filks.
I first heard the root phrase, "Once you've paid the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane" cited as a British proverb ca. 800 A.D. (and have often thus quoted it here), but one suspects it goes back far beyond that. Funny how little things change over the centuries... companies like SCO are now the roving marauders who take whatever they want from anyone not sufficiently well-defended.
I'm sure that the concept probably goes back to the beginnings of religion, at least
I'd say, rather, that *men* like Darl are the roving marauders...
Oh, if you dig back in our last conversation a bit, you'll find an email address embedded in there (it's also in my, um, last journal comment *cough*
Speaking of our last conversation, do you know of any way to deal with a cat who is affectionate and hyper beyond the point of tolerance - "pest behavior"? Bandit is a great cat, but he is also driving every member - human and feline - of this household batty! I'm not quite sure how to deal with him at this point and am hoping he'll grow out of it.
Cheers!
SB
On that note we should also consider what videotapes have done to the theater industry. Probably one of the few places where we are actually moving *away* from a service economy towards a goods-based one (DRM 'licensing' being a artificially created exception and one that has yet to prove itself as viable).
But eventually the internet - if it's not totally locked down by a few major media companies - will do the same thing to physical media. In some senses it already is. That's why open video standards are so important for consumers, and anathema to profit-based corps.
SB
Shadowbearer raises a beer to you for that wonderful and insightful filk, and goes back into treatment... er... lurk-mode. Damn slashdot anyway
Salut!
SB
(Knowing some filkers of note that I do, do you mind if I pass that on - with attribution, of course, mind you!
Holy Fucking Shit, where's the windex, there's beer all over my monitor!
rice_burners, you ROCK! That is the funniest damned thing I've ever read here.
Been working on it a while?
SB
(Yeah, I said I quit, but this article got linked to in my google news email updates, and I just had to read it. Glad I did
A rail-gun is a formidable weapon, but its only really of use for attacking a rival navy, or a military establishment on a coastal shore.
:)
Satellites. Think land-based railguns with proximity fused 'shotgun' warheads. Bye-bye, satellite recon - and our birds are just as vulnerable as anyone else's)
Tho I'll agree with you about terrorists - but they aren't really a military problem, they are an internal security problem, and we have different assets to deal with them. (not going to discuss the effectiveness of those, but I'm more worried about getting killed by an idiot driver or homicidal thief than by a terrorist)
In all seriousness, thinking ahead in ways just like this - even if a lot of them don't pan out - can mean the difference in a future war against an enemy with a strong military - and just because there isn't one now, doesn't mean there won't be (and I'm not just talking about the US here, mind you. Many countries will be trying to develop this kind of tech, and while it's pretty advanced, it's not exactly bleeding edge. )
The rapid advance of technology is changing all the rules as regards warfare, and rapidly. Only fifty years ago we were essentially at war with China, remember?
SB
The Thor concept has actually been pretty well thought out - it's quite old (dating from the late 60s, IIRC).
:)
It would be tremendously expensive - even as an automated system. It's not technologically unfeasible, however, just politically and economically so.
Modern ablative coatings and guidance systems solve the reentry problems - and note that a Thor projectile would actually reenter with *more* velocity than an ICBM would, as the Thor starts with orbital velocity, while ICBMs are suborbital (not a huge difference, but there is one, and if the Thor "rod" has sufficient deorbit boost, it can far surpass ICBM reentry parameters. Firing your Thor rods thru a orbital railgun would suffice, I think
You're right about the plasma sensor problems, but given the cross sections of the rods, winds and varying density (which can both be calculated before launch, btw) aren't as much a problem as one would think.
Terminal guidance would be done in the last few tens of seconds, *after* the rod is out of it's plasma sheath. For terminal guidance only GPS and internal gyro tracking is important - and maybe laser guidance.
Of course putting all this into orbit is economically impractical right now, when we have systems that already do the job a lot cheaper. But I'd bet good money that someday the Thor concepts *will* be put into use, if for no other reason that they can supply a good area denial bombardment system (think 'anti-tank') for a battlefield with no other resources than what you put into orbit and a small C&C control room somewhere with good operators and intelligence updates - and no enemy without the capability to destroy orbital facilities will be able to respond.
Pournelle's book wasn't technologically farfetched - we *can* do it, right now - it's just that the cost is awfully high for something that we don't need that badly - not yet - and cost to orbit is still too high. But both those factors can and will change in the future.
What you've stated above *are* problems, but they are engineering problems, not technological ones.
SB
I think the major question that will have to be answered there, in the long run, will be effectiveness vs. cost. That's a very different equation now than it was during the cold war - will these weapons be necessary to our ships in future conflicts? Which ones?
I can see smaller versions of these weapons - like ship-mounted AA and CIWS systems being *very* worth the cost of development; but the larger (and currently envisioned) systems most likely only in land bombardment rather than surface actions, against likely naval deployments any potential enemy might make currently.
Here's another idea, tho: DD(X) that can shoot down satellites
Land-based anti-sat-EMK systems, would, of course, be even more effective. I'm kind of surprised that I've seen little on this particular application - it seems obvious (or maybe I'm missing something?)
SB
I can think of one possible disadvantage tho; impact damage.
:) Ouch!
:)
At these velocities, with a lot of surface targets (ships) the projectile might well pass right thru the ship. There'd be some damage from armor spalling and possible projectile disintegration, but nothing compared to what a thousand kg or so of missile delivered HE fireballing into your internal spaces - like, say, the hanger deck on a carrier - can produce.
Carriers would be the obvious example - they have large internal spaces that would offer little resistance to the warhead.
One would have to have the capability of precision impact points on the target to do massive damage - say, like the munition storage spaces or fuel storage, to do critical damage to a surface ship - and that wouldn't be easy with moving targets on the ocean.
Stationary targets (land targets), such as bunkers and backtracked artillery, on the other hand...
But combine these with proximity/delay fused explosive warheads or focused jet penetrators like sabot warheads, however, and that's one hell of a weapon. I'd imagine there will be different warheads for different combat targets, like there is now. Difference is these will be a lot harder to evade
(Another application that comes to mind is multi-barrel radar guided anti-aircraft EMK - wouldn't need explosive warheads there, and there's no way any aircraft is going to evade a mach 7+ stream of metal)
SB
Guess we'll have to disagree, then
Conventional wisdom has nothing to do with it, for me. After Raiders, TOD was a real letdown for me. I thought the plot was boring and the acting wooden. It might be because I have a dislike for "voodoo" movies in general, however. I haven't seen any of the DVDs; I saw all three in the theater and have them on VHS, so I don't know if the DVDs differ (special editions or whatnot)
*shrug*
In any case, Raiders is still in my top five all time great adventure flix.
SB
Have the government schools taught you that life is fair?
Probably. Well, to a large extent, yes. But it isn't just the schools.
At the risk of flamebait, I'd say that there is a good reason that the term "sheep" is often applied. Nice little obedient numbers, er, servants, er, citizens. Yeah, citizens, that's it. Can't let 'em feel underprivileged, now, can we. Be a good little citizen and take your lumps. After all, we know what's best for you.
Assholes.
SB
The way to imprison a free man is to write laws that make his very existence a crime. He can't be converted nor subverted, therefore the only choice is to end his existence.
Historically, this is the path taken by those who would wish to have absolute power over others, to bend them to their will. Historically, they have succeeded more often than they have failed. Thus we continue to fight. There is no forgetting.
- me, in another forum (almost another universe, it seems at times.)
SB
Unless, of course, you're on the shit list of some local government agency,
Like the TSA? Shared databases...a two edged sword.
SB
I'll agree that the article as posted was definitely a flamebait invite; but I'll disagree that it's not news worthy of slashdot, considering that anonymity on the web (and it's lack thereof, and the mechanisms for finding it) has been a frequent discussion here.
So it *is* relevant to News for Nerds, IMO.
SB
The third movie sure made up for the lame bullshit of the second one :) The first is still my favorite, but the third came close; it was actually *funny*, which is what the whole idea was in the first place. I wonder if Ford cringes while viewing the second movie (whose name I shall not utter here)? Talk about horrible lines!
The interaction between Indiana and his father (whoever scripted Connery for that role was a genius) was very, very well done. I enjoyed TLC immensely and still do.
Dad! DAD!!!!
SB