Wow, I have almost the exact same browsing habits and experience as you do. I've found actually that wikipedia has actually started to rival/. in terms of the time I spend there.
Yeah, you could plant sensors on public land, but unlike the US gov't, you would have no right to complain and no legal recourse should they be removed. So if anyone ever found out about your sensors, they would be free to remove and keep them...
There's nothing stopping you (if you leave out the legal), but it wouldn't be all that useful. While an amplifier would boost your output, it will do nearly nothing to increase the signal that you recieve i.e. you will be speaking louder but the person talking to you will still be speaking at the same volume. You may well ask then how an antenna's gain works out overall then, as you are still basically just boosting the wattage of your signal, not the other guy's. The answer there comes from the directionality of the antenna - while the other guy isn't speaking any louder the directional antenna allows you to filter out the noise coming from everywhere else, making it easier to hear what he's saying. Thus with a directional antenna, you're getting two good effects, while with the amp you're really only getting one. Now, OTOH, if you stuck an amp on your rig AND the other guy's rig, then you'd be talking:-)
Actually where I'm from we have a local jammer on the amateur frequencies who has proven to be quite a pain in the ass. When calls to the cops didn't produce anything a few amateurs tried to track this guy down when he started jamming again with some directional radio equipment. They caught up to him to find that he was in a car, only to have him try and run one of the HAMs down. When they reported this to the police, it turned out that the car was stolen. The police's advice? "stay out of his way and let us handle it." They've been "handling" it for over a year now without any change in what he's doing.
Actually, America can never be free of foreign oil unless it uses alternative energy. I read a very interesting article in The Economist a while back title The Oil We Eat. I highly reccomend looking it up and reading it.
In short it discussed how modern agricultural practices (i.e. fertilization, crop-spraying, tractors and whatnot) have come to the point where we actually expend ~5 calories of energy to produce every calorie of energy in our food. If you compare this with 20 years ago when the ratio was about 1:1, or 50 years ago when it was closer to 0.5:1 it's a very scary trend. The article is a bit of a statistics and numbers game, but it is very insightful and does a much more in-depth analysis of the issue than I've presented here.
The reason this is relevant is simple closed-system mathematics. If it takes you 5 times the energy to produce a given unit of energy in food form, you can never create all your energy from food. I agree that these plants can help with recycling and are probably overall a good thing, but one must keep in mind that these industrial processes can only rise to provide a certain portion of our energy, and anything above that percentage will be extremely inefficient. In the long run, America will have to look towards wind or solar or nuclear (my personal favourite) or some other alternative power source if they want to have any hope of relieving their dependance on foreign oil.
The FCC has publically stated that it is the overloading of land-based cell networks that causes problems, and this is why the FCC prohibits the use of cell phones while airborne. Note that this is not an issue that the FAA has any hand in! The FAA has never actually regulated the use of cell phones in aircraft, though they have conducted studies into possible instrumentation interference, etc.
To consider the magnitude of the problem, consider using a cell phone in any major metropolis. Yes you might reach 20 or even 50 cells, but airborne over that city you may recieve a signal from hundreds of cells!
Cell phones have been used from passenger flights numerous times, Sept. 11 is a good example that many othe posters mentioned. Doppler is not the issue.
Re:Ugh...
on
A Worm's Worm
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a very serious suggestion, namely that Agobot, once it infects a host, should patch the host, remove spyware, and remove other virii, and then propogate itself a maximum of 10 times (to conserve bandwidth). Though you are still doing unauthorized stuff to other peoples' computers, if you're gonna make a virus, you may as well make it beneficial. Maybe that way fewe people would get arrested...
Given that it's a GPL project, I can't imagine that it would be too hard to find a few dedicated coders who would be willing to work on such a fork.
Nope, the cooling process generally increases the Entropy of the universe, or the whole closed system, but it DOES decrease the entropy of whatever is being cooled. For example, when you put an elephant in your fridge, the entropy of the elephant is decreasing, but the overall entropy of the elephant, the fridge, and the room it's in is increasing.
I dunno, I think that what you cited, educational value, is the PRINCIPAL reason why we should try to get more people involved in HAM radio. I'm in the engineering program at UBC (Vancouver, Canada) and belong to the UBC Amateur Radio Society (they're gonna kill me for linking that:-). I always find that the guys there are pursuing interesting projects, that I get a great opportunity to learn useful stuff outside the classroom in a fun and practically applicable setting, and that the whole community is full of incredibly interesting people. I find it's a lot easier to find someone interesting to talk to on an interesting subject in the HAM community, mostly because you don't have to wade through all the crap and idiots on the 'net.
It's not really that Patriot interceptor missiles are too expensive - it's that they don't work! yes they get a few of them, but the patriot systems' current hit rate is miserably low. Also witness the other problems with the patriot system: it accidentally shot down an RAF Tornado in iraq killing both men aboard.
cool analogy. And I really like the concept. call me cynical, but I still don't think we'll see it in our lifetimes.
The biggest problem I can think of is that this engine would have to be developed entirely on paper, and then it would have to work right the first time it launched. There's no way to test it standing still unless you can figure out a way to contain this continous hiroshima...
slightly OT: I would love to see an non-profit organization set up that could collect monies from anyone and allocate them to a specific prize. For example, the organization would set up a list of space-based objectives like orbiting a man for 1 week without government funding, landing a man on the moon without government funding, or putting a man in orbit around mars. People, governments, buisinesses, and organizations could then donate money to whichever goals they thought their money would be best put towards. The organization would collect these monies and hold them in trust, applying whatever interest they earned back towards whatever goal they were put towards. As well, the organization could recieve requests and set up other prizes for space-related achievements. Upon the completion of any given achievement, the organization would pay out the prize money to whichever corporation or government (if that is permitted by the prize's rules) achieved that goal. Hopefully, there would be appropriate media hype of the event complete with recognition of the major donors to the prize.
This would be a long term project, and there would presumably be hundreds of prizes that people could donate to. As time goes on, each prize would grow larger with interest and donations - becoming more attractive until it is finally achieved. Prizes for second place could even be set up and if people think that they would encourage competition, they would donate to them too. As well, I see these prizes as something that governments could hopefully be persuaded to contribute to, as I predict many people would have nationality based prizes (i.e. prizes that are only open to american or japanese companies/citizens/teams).
Finally, it is worth noting that while you might end up with an enourmous amount of really low-value prizes, one could presumably collect multiple prizes with one mission. For example, it's not hard to imagine one mission qualifying for an orbit of mars, a human landing on mars, a sample return from mars, an surface exploration of mars' poles, and some space-habitation-endurance prizes.
I dunno how well this would work, I just think it sounds like the best way to get private companies involved in space while still ensuring that some actual science gets done. I also think it would be totally cool if I could donate $50 of my next paycheck to the quest for a semi-permanent lunar base.
Actually, this doesn't make much sense - as you pointed out, NASA already has high specific impulse engines with isp's of >10,000. These engines actually can run in the atmosphere, it's just that they're useless for boosting crafts out of earth's gravity well - because they have incredibly small amounts of thrust (typically 1 kN). What NASA needs are engines that have higher ISPs, yet still produce similar amounts of thrust to those in use today, or better yet, those that were used on the Saturn V (33,400 kN).
Orion has snowball's chance in hell. I am pro-nuclear power, I even support NERVA engines for planes and such, but I would never support orion because, as another poster pointed out - you're talking about the atmospheric detonation of many nuclear bombs with a single launch. IIRC, before it got killed, the orion project entailed a study of the environmental/health effects of a launch that predicted dozens of terminal cancer patients per launch of orion, merely from the radiatioactive materials released into the atmosphere.
I think what he's proposing is much different actually - rather than having a mass of uranium heat a fuel to propel it out the back, he's talking about actually having a steady stream of super-critical gaseous uranium/plutonium into a rocket chamber. It's actually more similar to current rockets than a NERVA engine. I don't know that it'll be practical within our lifetimes though, the more i think about it the more ENOURMOUS engineering challenges present themselves.
Nope, this is bullshit propagated by the RIAA and to some extent the MPAA - nowhere in American law does it refer to persons buying a license to a copyrighted work when they buy a cd at a music store, or for that matter a song on iTunes. This analogy is often used because it makes many aspects of copyright law much easier to understand, but in legal terms, you are buying that song. Certain limitations are placed on what you can do with it, but you unequivocally own that song, and asides from limitations provided for in the copyright act and, more recently, the DMCA, there are no restrictions that the published can legally place on you. Now, the DMCA has made it so that the publisher can implement ANY technical (i.e. copy protection, etc) restrictions it sees fit, and it's illegal for you to bypass them, so it has changed the face of copyright law considerably.
I have heard before that many courts of law will overturn a contract if it can be shown that the user was coerced into signing it or was not in full possesion of his mental faculties when he signed it. Thus, if you are drunk and sign a contract, it may be possible to get that contract nullified by a court of law. The solution would therefore seem to be the practice of keeping a bottle of vodka near your computer and taking a couple shots before accepting each EULA. Since you were drunk, you can probably successfully argue that it isn't legally binding...
I find myself in the same position as you - until last year I refused to carry a GPS with me for pride's sake. Why should I bring a GPS when I am perfectly capable of navigating by hand with a compass and map? However, I was on the mamquam glacier (in BC, Canada) last february during a complete white-out, and we had to move. We definitely used the old fashioned way of finding our bearings with a compass and then ensuring our path with trailed ropes and such, but it was VERY reassuring to have a GPS to confirm that our predicted position was accurate. That was the first time when I actually felt that a GPS was truely serving a useful, nonredundant purpose. Mind you, it was one occaision in my 10+ years of mountaineering experience, but all the same it only takes one fuck-up out there to kill you.
Since then I've bought a GPS and carry it with me regularly, even on day trips. I actually kind of appreciate the waypoints features which have come in extremely useful on one occaision where my Dad lost his wallet at campsite and didn't realize it 'till he got home. Luckily, the people he was with had taken a waypoint there and I was able to transfer that waypoint into my GPS and go up a few days later with some of my friends and we found it with only ~15 mins searching. Probably could have been done w/o GPS, but it was much faster with it and a fun excerciser to boot. The contents of the wallet also covered the cost of my GPS:-)
Lat/Long is obsolete - I find it much easier to use a more modern system like Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM). I consider it to be the metric equivalent of lat and long. Where in lat/long you have subdivisions of 60, UTM is all divisible by 10, has grid lines drawn on all maps (at least on those produced by the USGS and the Canadian equivalent), and is very easy to work with at widely different scales. For more of an explanation see http://www.nps.gov/prwi/readutm.htm
You're leaving out the best part of the story! before we burned it down, our generals sat down and finished the esteemed President's (James Madison) and his family's dinner. It was still warm, and we wouldn't want to let it go to waste, eh?
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Wow, I have almost the exact same browsing habits and experience as you do. I've found actually that wikipedia has actually started to rival /. in terms of the time I spend there.
Well, I'd kind of like to see some of this evidence - think you could post a couple links for the rest of us?
Yeah, you could plant sensors on public land, but unlike the US gov't, you would have no right to complain and no legal recourse should they be removed. So if anyone ever found out about your sensors, they would be free to remove and keep them...
There's nothing stopping you (if you leave out the legal), but it wouldn't be all that useful. While an amplifier would boost your output, it will do nearly nothing to increase the signal that you recieve i.e. you will be speaking louder but the person talking to you will still be speaking at the same volume. You may well ask then how an antenna's gain works out overall then, as you are still basically just boosting the wattage of your signal, not the other guy's. The answer there comes from the directionality of the antenna - while the other guy isn't speaking any louder the directional antenna allows you to filter out the noise coming from everywhere else, making it easier to hear what he's saying. Thus with a directional antenna, you're getting two good effects, while with the amp you're really only getting one. Now, OTOH, if you stuck an amp on your rig AND the other guy's rig, then you'd be talking :-)
Actually where I'm from we have a local jammer on the amateur frequencies who has proven to be quite a pain in the ass. When calls to the cops didn't produce anything a few amateurs tried to track this guy down when he started jamming again with some directional radio equipment. They caught up to him to find that he was in a car, only to have him try and run one of the HAMs down. When they reported this to the police, it turned out that the car was stolen. The police's advice? "stay out of his way and let us handle it." They've been "handling" it for over a year now without any change in what he's doing.
Ah yes, thanks.
Actually, America can never be free of foreign oil unless it uses alternative energy. I read a very interesting article in The Economist a while back title The Oil We Eat. I highly reccomend looking it up and reading it.
In short it discussed how modern agricultural practices (i.e. fertilization, crop-spraying, tractors and whatnot) have come to the point where we actually expend ~5 calories of energy to produce every calorie of energy in our food. If you compare this with 20 years ago when the ratio was about 1:1, or 50 years ago when it was closer to 0.5:1 it's a very scary trend. The article is a bit of a statistics and numbers game, but it is very insightful and does a much more in-depth analysis of the issue than I've presented here.
The reason this is relevant is simple closed-system mathematics. If it takes you 5 times the energy to produce a given unit of energy in food form, you can never create all your energy from food. I agree that these plants can help with recycling and are probably overall a good thing, but one must keep in mind that these industrial processes can only rise to provide a certain portion of our energy, and anything above that percentage will be extremely inefficient. In the long run, America will have to look towards wind or solar or nuclear (my personal favourite) or some other alternative power source if they want to have any hope of relieving their dependance on foreign oil.
The FCC has publically stated that it is the overloading of land-based cell networks that causes problems, and this is why the FCC prohibits the use of cell phones while airborne. Note that this is not an issue that the FAA has any hand in! The FAA has never actually regulated the use of cell phones in aircraft, though they have conducted studies into possible instrumentation interference, etc.
To consider the magnitude of the problem, consider using a cell phone in any major metropolis. Yes you might reach 20 or even 50 cells, but airborne over that city you may recieve a signal from hundreds of cells!
Cell phones have been used from passenger flights numerous times, Sept. 11 is a good example that many othe posters mentioned. Doppler is not the issue.
I have a very serious suggestion, namely that Agobot, once it infects a host, should patch the host, remove spyware, and remove other virii, and then propogate itself a maximum of 10 times (to conserve bandwidth). Though you are still doing unauthorized stuff to other peoples' computers, if you're gonna make a virus, you may as well make it beneficial. Maybe that way fewe people would get arrested...
Given that it's a GPL project, I can't imagine that it would be too hard to find a few dedicated coders who would be willing to work on such a fork.
Nope, the cooling process generally increases the Entropy of the universe, or the whole closed system, but it DOES decrease the entropy of whatever is being cooled. For example, when you put an elephant in your fridge, the entropy of the elephant is decreasing, but the overall entropy of the elephant, the fridge, and the room it's in is increasing.
I dunno, I think that what you cited, educational value, is the PRINCIPAL reason why we should try to get more people involved in HAM radio. I'm in the engineering program at UBC (Vancouver, Canada) and belong to the UBC Amateur Radio Society (they're gonna kill me for linking that :-). I always find that the guys there are pursuing interesting projects, that I get a great opportunity to learn useful stuff outside the classroom in a fun and practically applicable setting, and that the whole community is full of incredibly interesting people. I find it's a lot easier to find someone interesting to talk to on an interesting subject in the HAM community, mostly because you don't have to wade through all the crap and idiots on the 'net.
It's not really that Patriot interceptor missiles are too expensive - it's that they don't work! yes they get a few of them, but the patriot systems' current hit rate is miserably low. Also witness the other problems with the patriot system: it accidentally shot down an RAF Tornado in iraq killing both men aboard.
cool analogy. And I really like the concept. call me cynical, but I still don't think we'll see it in our lifetimes.
The biggest problem I can think of is that this engine would have to be developed entirely on paper, and then it would have to work right the first time it launched. There's no way to test it standing still unless you can figure out a way to contain this continous hiroshima...
slightly OT: I would love to see an non-profit organization set up that could collect monies from anyone and allocate them to a specific prize. For example, the organization would set up a list of space-based objectives like orbiting a man for 1 week without government funding, landing a man on the moon without government funding, or putting a man in orbit around mars. People, governments, buisinesses, and organizations could then donate money to whichever goals they thought their money would be best put towards. The organization would collect these monies and hold them in trust, applying whatever interest they earned back towards whatever goal they were put towards. As well, the organization could recieve requests and set up other prizes for space-related achievements. Upon the completion of any given achievement, the organization would pay out the prize money to whichever corporation or government (if that is permitted by the prize's rules) achieved that goal. Hopefully, there would be appropriate media hype of the event complete with recognition of the major donors to the prize.
This would be a long term project, and there would presumably be hundreds of prizes that people could donate to. As time goes on, each prize would grow larger with interest and donations - becoming more attractive until it is finally achieved. Prizes for second place could even be set up and if people think that they would encourage competition, they would donate to them too. As well, I see these prizes as something that governments could hopefully be persuaded to contribute to, as I predict many people would have nationality based prizes (i.e. prizes that are only open to american or japanese companies/citizens/teams).
Finally, it is worth noting that while you might end up with an enourmous amount of really low-value prizes, one could presumably collect multiple prizes with one mission. For example, it's not hard to imagine one mission qualifying for an orbit of mars, a human landing on mars, a sample return from mars, an surface exploration of mars' poles, and some space-habitation-endurance prizes.
I dunno how well this would work, I just think it sounds like the best way to get private companies involved in space while still ensuring that some actual science gets done. I also think it would be totally cool if I could donate $50 of my next paycheck to the quest for a semi-permanent lunar base.
Actually, this doesn't make much sense - as you pointed out, NASA already has high specific impulse engines with isp's of >10,000. These engines actually can run in the atmosphere, it's just that they're useless for boosting crafts out of earth's gravity well - because they have incredibly small amounts of thrust (typically 1 kN). What NASA needs are engines that have higher ISPs, yet still produce similar amounts of thrust to those in use today, or better yet, those that were used on the Saturn V (33,400 kN).
Orion has snowball's chance in hell. I am pro-nuclear power, I even support NERVA engines for planes and such, but I would never support orion because, as another poster pointed out - you're talking about the atmospheric detonation of many nuclear bombs with a single launch. IIRC, before it got killed, the orion project entailed a study of the environmental/health effects of a launch that predicted dozens of terminal cancer patients per launch of orion, merely from the radiatioactive materials released into the atmosphere.
I think what he's proposing is much different actually - rather than having a mass of uranium heat a fuel to propel it out the back, he's talking about actually having a steady stream of super-critical gaseous uranium/plutonium into a rocket chamber. It's actually more similar to current rockets than a NERVA engine. I don't know that it'll be practical within our lifetimes though, the more i think about it the more ENOURMOUS engineering challenges present themselves.
Nope, this is bullshit propagated by the RIAA and to some extent the MPAA - nowhere in American law does it refer to persons buying a license to a copyrighted work when they buy a cd at a music store, or for that matter a song on iTunes. This analogy is often used because it makes many aspects of copyright law much easier to understand, but in legal terms, you are buying that song. Certain limitations are placed on what you can do with it, but you unequivocally own that song, and asides from limitations provided for in the copyright act and, more recently, the DMCA, there are no restrictions that the published can legally place on you. Now, the DMCA has made it so that the publisher can implement ANY technical (i.e. copy protection, etc) restrictions it sees fit, and it's illegal for you to bypass them, so it has changed the face of copyright law considerably.
Heh, an even better idea, post somebody else's phone number... :-)
I have heard before that many courts of law will overturn a contract if it can be shown that the user was coerced into signing it or was not in full possesion of his mental faculties when he signed it. Thus, if you are drunk and sign a contract, it may be possible to get that contract nullified by a court of law. The solution would therefore seem to be the practice of keeping a bottle of vodka near your computer and taking a couple shots before accepting each EULA. Since you were drunk, you can probably successfully argue that it isn't legally binding...
I find myself in the same position as you - until last year I refused to carry a GPS with me for pride's sake. Why should I bring a GPS when I am perfectly capable of navigating by hand with a compass and map? However, I was on the mamquam glacier (in BC, Canada) last february during a complete white-out, and we had to move. We definitely used the old fashioned way of finding our bearings with a compass and then ensuring our path with trailed ropes and such, but it was VERY reassuring to have a GPS to confirm that our predicted position was accurate. That was the first time when I actually felt that a GPS was truely serving a useful, nonredundant purpose. Mind you, it was one occaision in my 10+ years of mountaineering experience, but all the same it only takes one fuck-up out there to kill you.
:-)
Since then I've bought a GPS and carry it with me regularly, even on day trips. I actually kind of appreciate the waypoints features which have come in extremely useful on one occaision where my Dad lost his wallet at campsite and didn't realize it 'till he got home. Luckily, the people he was with had taken a waypoint there and I was able to transfer that waypoint into my GPS and go up a few days later with some of my friends and we found it with only ~15 mins searching. Probably could have been done w/o GPS, but it was much faster with it and a fun excerciser to boot. The contents of the wallet also covered the cost of my GPS
Lat/Long is obsolete - I find it much easier to use a more modern system like Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM). I consider it to be the metric equivalent of lat and long. Where in lat/long you have subdivisions of 60, UTM is all divisible by 10, has grid lines drawn on all maps (at least on those produced by the USGS and the Canadian equivalent), and is very easy to work with at widely different scales. For more of an explanation see http://www.nps.gov/prwi/readutm.htm
With large, expensive, and heavy apparatus. That's why you see this system being developed for a 747 rather than an F-15.
You're leaving out the best part of the story! before we burned it down, our generals sat down and finished the esteemed President's (James Madison) and his family's dinner. It was still warm, and we wouldn't want to let it go to waste, eh?
it *DID* say everquest i think - it may have said that and been changed...