Who said anything about a 50% chance? If your detector can have a semicircle resolution of, say, 100 degrees, then you only have a 1% chance of guessing the right polarization. 1% * 50% = 0.5%, and as other posters stated, if you don't know the sequence, that means that you have a 0.5% chance of getting EACH bit right, so your entire chances of getting a complete message are almost nil.
And as time marches on, the resolution can only increase...
Why do you need to guess the exact polarization of the bit you just received? Why can't you just detect it?
And if resolution of your detector won't give you the EXACT polarizarion, how come you can't just make one that's as least as good as the detector, then they won't be able to tell the difference either...
Well actually, almost everyone who lives in an urban area has at least 1000 watts of radio energy going through them almost 24/7...
Heck, HAM radio operators who have their advanced qualification can operate stations up to 2000-and-something watts!
Re:Great, Now not only on the ground, but in the s
on
Flying Snakes
·
· Score: 1
Actually, if you read the FAQ at the guy's site, he takes a lot of time to point out that the only known snakes that can fly do not have potent venom. He states that the worst medically recorded effect from a snakebite was a "swollen finger".
In fact, he goes on to say that the bite, if not to a small prey animal, is more dangerous to the snake because it risks ripping its own teeth our and getting infected.
Fortunatly however, Continental drift is rarely more than a few millimeters/year. A geologist friend of mine was recently ecstatic because a colleague of his had shown that Australia was drifting at a rate of 4 whole mm/year towards North America! at that rate, it'll only be a few hundred millenia before those damn Aussi's are knocking on our front door!
Not only that, the first family evacuated the white house in the middle of a dinner. So once the Brits marched in, a few officers finished it off before they set fire to the White House.
Not mentioned in the above brief, there is a CNN article here.
CNN seems to be under the impression that SMART-1 mission's priority is to determine the future site for a lunar base. While I wish that this were the case, I cannot help but think how neccesarily a long way off we are from this commendable goal.
Really, if one thinks about it, we are not really much closer to this goal than the last apollo mission, and NASA has made it clear that it has no plans for a lunar base, let alone further lunar missions. As well, there interest in manned mars missions falls far behind other items *cough* ISS, pluto probe *cough*.
Is it time to have a new space agency that will pursue more "commercial" goals in space? Can the ESA or China fulfill this role? I am encouraged by what we have already seen from Russia, but am not sure wheather the can move beyond simple space tourism to the ISS...
You missed the best and most masterful act of diplomacy of that era:
game starts in '37 with the spanish civil war. Hitler and the allies both swear that they will not intervene. In the end hitler orders german troops into spain to support Franco, then claims they were acting of there own free will.
Hitler also remilitarizes the rheinland on a "militarize first, ask questions later." He states that it was germany's right, and sweet talks chamberlin into going along.
Then Hitler has a conference with the other "big fish" and, agrees to be more pacifist in his policies if Czechloslovakia hands over the sudetnland to germany. Everyone agrees - Except for the czech's, but that doesn't matter because Hitler didn't invite them to the conference, and now the three big powers of western europe are telling them to do it.
Then, to top it all off, he turns around and backstabs them all in '39.
Really, when compared to a game of diplomacy, it was the prewar years and '39-'42, after that it was mostly fate playing itself out.
A friend of mine also had something similar for a time.
You see, he was running a warez server and he figured that if he got busted, the cops would probably be able to figure out anything that was on his drive before, no matter how many times he formatted it. The solution?
He had a deadman's switch that when run, send a signal out through a spare serial port. This was connected to some homebrew electronics, which was connected to an electric ignitor, which was connected to a fuse, which was connected to a little pile of thermite sitting on top of the hard drive. This meant that if the switch didn't get reset, his harddrive would very quickly become a little puddle of molten metal on the bottom of his case (it would probably set his house on fire too, but if you're dead, who cares?)
They other neat feature he built into it is he connected a wire up to a switch near his front door that would act as a manual activator if/when the cops came to execute a warrant. After a couple close calls though, he figured his system was even more of a liability than his pirate server and then went back to just formatting multiple times.
Just slightly off topic here, but interesting nonetheless.
The reason that explosive crews use "Turn off Transmitter next X miles" is not because they use radio detonation (its dangerous, expensive, and unneccesary unless you are trying to be covert), but because squibs and blasting caps can actually set off by the small amount of current generated through the inductance caused by nearby radio transmissions.
It sounds implausible, and like it would never happen, but there were a couple guys who did some tests a few years ago and found that while unlikely, it was indeed possible. While it seems their site is currently down, there is a google cache of it here.
All of that said and done though, your points are still valid.:-)
Actually, the Aerial relouding scheme could be the best thing in fire-fighting since water. The problem with conventional, fixed-wing firefighting aircraft is the have to get really low do to the fire because of accuracy problems. The only catch is, often the fires are on mountinous/hilly terrain. When flying in to make a drop, a water bomber pilot is counting heavily on (a) The extra lift caused by the updraft of hot air from the fire and (b) The lift caused by releasing its tonnes of water. If the pilot miscalculates either of these factors or if the water doors jam or open slowly, the plane will likely crash into the hillside. This makes water-bomber flying extremely dangerous and there are many crashes every year because of this.
Helicopters are not susceptible to the above problem for obvious reasons, however, they are slower (important when the water source is further away from a fire), they can't carry very much, and they are extremely expensive to operate. That is why you still see water-bombers in use despite the high risks involven in their operation.
A blimp like this would be incredibly useful because the water bombers could then be operated from a safe altitude and their runs could be made very quickly. As for the accuracy altitude, this would not be a problem for the blimp because, as mentioned on the site, rather than just providing general spray coverage to the area, it can have high-pressure water cannons mounted on it. These are only effective from relatively motionless platform which is why they can't be used on planes. As you mentioned, they are used for targeting hotspots identified by ground-based firefighters.
IMHO, if they can overcome the wind problem you mentioned, a single one of the airships could could greatly improve the effectiveness of any aerial firefighting operation.
FWIW, I happen to think that their reforestation plans for post-fire use are complete bullshit. Those have so far had a very low success rate in forestry industry tests. Mostly it seems like a gimmick to entice investors.
It could be possible to have an external microphone and then connect it via bluetooth to the implant in your tooth. I assume that a cellular phone would do something similar, otherwise dialing would be a real pain:-)
You are correct. Though the diameter of the tube doesn't affect much, the length of the hairs affect which frequencies they "hear". Thus, if you desensitize all of your really long hairs by listening to really loud rap or some other bass-heavy music your bass hearing will be impaired whereas the shorter hairs that pick up higher frequency sounds should remain relatively intact.
I liked the comment about the sniper rifles and laser sights, mostly because they're wrong. They were correct in stating that the army doesn't use LASER sights for sniper rifles, however, as an army friend was recently telling me, they now use a form of IASER for sights.
The IASER basically paints an infrared dot as opposed to a visible light dot, thus it can't be seen with human eyes. But, If one is looking through the infrared sight of a sniper rifle, it is clear as day. Thus, one gets all the advantages of a laser sight without letting the victim know of his impending death ahead of time.
One thing to note though, is that these sights are only really practical on sniper rifles, as one would have to be wearing infrared goggles for them to work on normal guns.
Actually, what froze up your computer was the massive amounts of EM radiation noise coming from the arcs in you busted vacuum tube.
Actually, if you have spare CRTs or vacuum tubes lying around one of my favorite things to do is bust them and then plug them in to watch the arcing. I first discovered this when I busted a CRT in an old monitor that I was fiddling around with. The only thing to watch out for is that you don't run them for too long and that you run them in a very non-flammable/contuctable environment where you can stand a safe distance away. If you run them for too long, they fsck up your power supply, and, well the consequences of the other precautions should be fairly obvious.:-)
Do you know if that solar sail would make a viable sail for a sailboat or beach-sailer? If so, that would be awesome!
Just think: in tropical locales, people could sail all day when it's sunny and charge batteries. Then if/when the wind died down or they needed to motor, they could run the boat on an electric motor. As well, all of the appliances on the boat could be run off of the sails. This could mean the end of the diesel engines on todays sailboats (save for maybe a small back-up) and would make long-distance sailing trips much more feasable as one would no longer have to worry about fuel/energy supplies.
Not only can they do computer simulations, they apparently already have a "mars-chamber" for testing rotary winged aircraft:
"NASA researchers, too, are exploring Martian helicopter design. This spring, Larry A. Young of the Army/NASA Rotorcraft Division at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and his colleagues have begun testing the aerodynamic performance of other prototype Martian rotor blades. The tests take place in a vacuum chamber more than 6 meters across. The researchers have also begun building pared-down models of whole rotorcraft, which they plan to test for lift and other performance features."
Since these proposed entomopters are only the size of a bird, they should fit nicely inside this 6x6 metre chamber. Now, all they would need to do is simulate the gravity change, which may be possible by vectoring gases upwards within the chamber...
Then again, maybe that wouldn't work at all.:-)
Well, I heard this suggestion a while ago on slashdot but (for fairly obvious reasons) I have yet to see/hear of it again:
Why not make a case mod in which all of the components sat in deionized water? The theory behind this is that deionized H2O doesn't conduct; therefore, it wouldn't conduct and thus submersing all of the components in your case would work. Has anyone done any investigating into whether this is practical? Has anyone already done it?
If it works, this is is definitely the holy grail of case-modding.
Slashdot Mirror
"50% chance of picking the wrong polarization"
Who said anything about a 50% chance? If your detector can have a semicircle resolution of, say, 100 degrees, then you only have a 1% chance of guessing the right polarization. 1% * 50% = 0.5%, and as other posters stated, if you don't know the sequence, that means that you have a 0.5% chance of getting EACH bit right, so your entire chances of getting a complete message are almost nil.
And as time marches on, the resolution can only increase...
Why do you need to guess the exact polarization of the bit you just received? Why can't you just detect it?
And if resolution of your detector won't give you the EXACT polarizarion, how come you can't just make one that's as least as good as the detector, then they won't be able to tell the difference either...
Well actually, almost everyone who lives in an urban area has at least 1000 watts of radio energy going through them almost 24/7...
Heck, HAM radio operators who have their advanced qualification can operate stations up to 2000-and-something watts!
Actually, if you read the FAQ at the guy's site, he takes a lot of time to point out that the only known snakes that can fly do not have potent venom. He states that the worst medically recorded effect from a snakebite was a "swollen finger".
In fact, he goes on to say that the bite, if not to a small prey animal, is more dangerous to the snake because it risks ripping its own teeth our and getting infected.
better yet, make your own milk with flour and water...
just mix it till it looks appropriate and then fill a carton or jug with it and wait...
(i used to do this when i was three years old... my dad was the usual victim)
Um, the explosion ends sometime, right? Therefore it is NOT self-sustaining!
Think, if it was self-sustaining, it would be one continual explosion going on forever and ever.....
not 12% of ALL kids, 12% of the CRIMINALS
big difference there...
Yes, 1"/year would add up over a few centuries.
Fortunatly however, Continental drift is rarely more than a few millimeters/year. A geologist friend of mine was recently ecstatic because a colleague of his had shown that Australia was drifting at a rate of 4 whole mm/year towards North America! at that rate, it'll only be a few hundred millenia before those damn Aussi's are knocking on our front door!
They got the Capitol Building alright...
:-)
Not only that, the first family evacuated the white house in the middle of a dinner. So once the Brits marched in, a few officers finished it off before they set fire to the White House.
BTW, I live in B.C.
Not mentioned in the above brief, there is a CNN article here.
CNN seems to be under the impression that SMART-1 mission's priority is to determine the future site for a lunar base. While I wish that this were the case, I cannot help but think how neccesarily a long way off we are from this commendable goal.
Really, if one thinks about it, we are not really much closer to this goal than the last apollo mission, and NASA has made it clear that it has no plans for a lunar base, let alone further lunar missions. As well, there interest in manned mars missions falls far behind other items *cough* ISS, pluto probe *cough*.
Is it time to have a new space agency that will pursue more "commercial" goals in space? Can the ESA or China fulfill this role? I am encouraged by what we have already seen from Russia, but am not sure wheather the can move beyond simple space tourism to the ISS...
maybe it's blatantly obvious and I'm just being stupid, but what exactly is wrong with cplusplus.com's Hello World?
fp?
You missed the best and most masterful act of diplomacy of that era:
game starts in '37 with the spanish civil war. Hitler and the allies both swear that they will not intervene. In the end hitler orders german troops into spain to support Franco, then claims they were acting of there own free will.
Hitler also remilitarizes the rheinland on a "militarize first, ask questions later." He states that it was germany's right, and sweet talks chamberlin into going along.
Then Hitler has a conference with the other "big fish" and, agrees to be more pacifist in his policies if Czechloslovakia hands over the sudetnland to germany. Everyone agrees - Except for the czech's, but that doesn't matter because Hitler didn't invite them to the conference, and now the three big powers of western europe are telling them to do it.
Then, to top it all off, he turns around and backstabs them all in '39.
Really, when compared to a game of diplomacy, it was the prewar years and '39-'42, after that it was mostly fate playing itself out.
A friend of mine also had something similar for a time.
You see, he was running a warez server and he figured that if he got busted, the cops would probably be able to figure out anything that was on his drive before, no matter how many times he formatted it. The solution?
He had a deadman's switch that when run, send a signal out through a spare serial port. This was connected to some homebrew electronics, which was connected to an electric ignitor, which was connected to a fuse, which was connected to a little pile of thermite sitting on top of the hard drive. This meant that if the switch didn't get reset, his harddrive would very quickly become a little puddle of molten metal on the bottom of his case (it would probably set his house on fire too, but if you're dead, who cares?)
They other neat feature he built into it is he connected a wire up to a switch near his front door that would act as a manual activator if/when the cops came to execute a warrant. After a couple close calls though, he figured his system was even more of a liability than his pirate server and then went back to just formatting multiple times.
Just slightly off topic here, but interesting nonetheless.
:-)
The reason that explosive crews use "Turn off Transmitter next X miles" is not because they use radio detonation (its dangerous, expensive, and unneccesary unless you are trying to be covert), but because squibs and blasting caps can actually set off by the small amount of current generated through the inductance caused by nearby radio transmissions.
It sounds implausible, and like it would never happen, but there were a couple guys who did some tests a few years ago and found that while unlikely, it was indeed possible. While it seems their site is currently down, there is a google cache of it here.
All of that said and done though, your points are still valid.
Actually, the Aerial relouding scheme could be the best thing in fire-fighting since water. The problem with conventional, fixed-wing firefighting aircraft is the have to get really low do to the fire because of accuracy problems. The only catch is, often the fires are on mountinous/hilly terrain. When flying in to make a drop, a water bomber pilot is counting heavily on (a) The extra lift caused by the updraft of hot air from the fire and (b) The lift caused by releasing its tonnes of water. If the pilot miscalculates either of these factors or if the water doors jam or open slowly, the plane will likely crash into the hillside. This makes water-bomber flying extremely dangerous and there are many crashes every year because of this.
Helicopters are not susceptible to the above problem for obvious reasons, however, they are slower (important when the water source is further away from a fire), they can't carry very much, and they are extremely expensive to operate. That is why you still see water-bombers in use despite the high risks involven in their operation.
A blimp like this would be incredibly useful because the water bombers could then be operated from a safe altitude and their runs could be made very quickly. As for the accuracy altitude, this would not be a problem for the blimp because, as mentioned on the site, rather than just providing general spray coverage to the area, it can have high-pressure water cannons mounted on it. These are only effective from relatively motionless platform which is why they can't be used on planes. As you mentioned, they are used for targeting hotspots identified by ground-based firefighters.
IMHO, if they can overcome the wind problem you mentioned, a single one of the airships could could greatly improve the effectiveness of any aerial firefighting operation.
FWIW, I happen to think that their reforestation plans for post-fire use are complete bullshit. Those have so far had a very low success rate in forestry industry tests. Mostly it seems like a gimmick to entice investors.
Well, at least they haven't included klingon in their translator. That'll be the day...
It could be possible to have an external microphone and then connect it via bluetooth to the implant in your tooth. I assume that a cellular phone would do something similar, otherwise dialing would be a real pain :-)
You are correct. Though the diameter of the tube doesn't affect much, the length of the hairs affect which frequencies they "hear". Thus, if you desensitize all of your really long hairs by listening to really loud rap or some other bass-heavy music your bass hearing will be impaired whereas the shorter hairs that pick up higher frequency sounds should remain relatively intact.
I liked the comment about the sniper rifles and laser sights, mostly because they're wrong. They were correct in stating that the army doesn't use LASER sights for sniper rifles, however, as an army friend was recently telling me, they now use a form of IASER for sights.
The IASER basically paints an infrared dot as opposed to a visible light dot, thus it can't be seen with human eyes. But, If one is looking through the infrared sight of a sniper rifle, it is clear as day. Thus, one gets all the advantages of a laser sight without letting the victim know of his impending death ahead of time.
One thing to note though, is that these sights are only really practical on sniper rifles, as one would have to be wearing infrared goggles for them to work on normal guns.
Actually, what froze up your computer was the massive amounts of EM radiation noise coming from the arcs in you busted vacuum tube.
:-)
Actually, if you have spare CRTs or vacuum tubes lying around one of my favorite things to do is bust them and then plug them in to watch the arcing. I first discovered this when I busted a CRT in an old monitor that I was fiddling around with. The only thing to watch out for is that you don't run them for too long and that you run them in a very non-flammable/contuctable environment where you can stand a safe distance away. If you run them for too long, they fsck up your power supply, and, well the consequences of the other precautions should be fairly obvious.
Do you know if that solar sail would make a viable sail for a sailboat or beach-sailer? If so, that would be awesome!
Just think: in tropical locales, people could sail all day when it's sunny and charge batteries. Then if/when the wind died down or they needed to motor, they could run the boat on an electric motor. As well, all of the appliances on the boat could be run off of the sails. This could mean the end of the diesel engines on todays sailboats (save for maybe a small back-up) and would make long-distance sailing trips much more feasable as one would no longer have to worry about fuel/energy supplies.
Not only can they do computer simulations, they apparently already have a "mars-chamber" for testing rotary winged aircraft:
:-)
"NASA researchers, too, are exploring Martian helicopter design. This spring, Larry A. Young of the Army/NASA Rotorcraft Division at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and his colleagues have begun testing the aerodynamic performance of other prototype Martian rotor blades. The tests take place in a vacuum chamber more than 6 meters across. The researchers have also begun building pared-down models of whole rotorcraft, which they plan to test for lift and other performance features."
Since these proposed entomopters are only the size of a bird, they should fit nicely inside this 6x6 metre chamber. Now, all they would need to do is simulate the gravity change, which may be possible by vectoring gases upwards within the chamber...
Then again, maybe that wouldn't work at all.
Well, I heard this suggestion a while ago on slashdot but (for fairly obvious reasons) I have yet to see/hear of it again:
Why not make a case mod in which all of the components sat in deionized water? The theory behind this is that deionized H2O doesn't conduct; therefore, it wouldn't conduct and thus submersing all of the components in your case would work. Has anyone done any investigating into whether this is practical? Has anyone already done it?
If it works, this is is definitely the holy grail of case-modding.
The way to solve this is to put a diode across the "hot" lead, thus, your UPS will no longer back-supply the grid as was mentioned in another post.