It seems prudent to me to engage internal facilities guys to re-wire up the facility for 3 types of power:
Always On - For stuff like servers, routers, security equipment and walkway lighting; UPS backed.
User Decides - Normal power; subject to city power interruptions but user decides if devices are on or off. This is good for certain lights and most computers.
Timed Power - All things which should be off at night and on holidays. This is perfect for monitors, area lights, etc. Each floor/area can be put on different timers for different shifts and work habits.
... with corresponding outlet colors to avoid confusion. Of course, this means at least 2 different power runs to each cubicle in the common corporate work area. With infrastructure duplication and labor costs, this is still a tough call, and especially so with the insane cost-cutting mentality that currently infects the corporate mind.
NN may have been merely off a bit(pass?). The thing about "micropayments" (and I hate that word, I prefer "decipayment") is that there is a large population that can benefit from it ("micro" producers on the web). From all that demand a service provider can arise, as has happened many times in Capitalist history.
I've complained about this as such to Scott McCloud of webcomic fame. He has since been involved in BitPass. He hardly needed to hear my complaint; my opinion was formed in part by his own books making the formative points.
It seems to me that the Aldridge Commission report is just taking the next logical step in carving up NASA, considering how much NASA had ignored the strategic survival plans from the two prior commissions.
After all, if in 1986 they tell you that you had a car accident due to your drinking, then in 1990 they tell you your driving is still terrible, then we can only conclude that when you have another inept DUI accident in 2002 that it's time to restrict your driving to "work only".
NASA has proven itself to be a poor repository of space vision. And we can see with increasing clarity that it is also a poor place to put your technological hopes for SSTO, solar power stations, lunar and asteroid mining, and overall Human habitation in space.
I can't blame NASA for all of this, however; we must also point at the money-fickle Congress. NASA has earned good marks with the thing they were allowed to pursue in good faith and budgeting, that being the interplanetary probes. We may as well relegate them to that so they can (to borrow that hated modern phrase) "concentrate on their core competency". I'd leap for actual joy if NASA was reduced to a "National Space Exploration Administration", which would design equipment, build probes, contract to have them launched, and then manage and track them with the DSN.
Rational-izing an equipment investment for savings on consumables tends to be a real problem.
This Slashdot article may as well propose that everyone pick up ONE piece of ground trash per day, which will result in markedly cleaner areas around workplaces and homes. This will save on cleaning costs from city services (provided they layoff or reallocate to compensate; bear with me here). However, the devil's in the detail of getting everyone to do it periodically and consistently.
I'm sure that much more efficient p/s are possible, but like the daily lean-and-grab for that piece of trash, you'd have to endure the cost (high-priced p/s) in order to enjoy the benefit (lower energy use). Most people would consider a cleaner city to be not worth the effort; similarly, the market for p/s has demanded cheapness and availability over energy efficiency. Instant gratification. Heck, that defines many of the problems with Microsoft Windows right there.
I have been involved in some facilities conversations regarding reducing the energy consumption of even such a simple population as all the employee monitors that are left on day and night. The answer is complex due to the lack of systemic design for such things. We must therefore press our consumer voices into service and then vote accordingly with our dollars, if we're to see actual gains in energy efficiency. The market just isn't speaking in the quality and quantity required.
Nothing much, really. Let's say you have an idea for an improved, ceramic superconducting antenna for all sorts of communications with weapon systems that by their very nature are hard to reach, like missiles and mines (your first idea; you were concerned about mines being turned off at will by the mine-layer after the battle is over).
Your improved antenna can be "weapons grade" in a garage, with the right equipment. In other words, you are just making a ceramic antenna coil with specialized equipment, perhaps after a $10K investment in the proper furnace and materials, etc. Once the government puts your antenna through its paces, there's no rational reason why it couldn't receive a MIL spec and then installed into the weapons.
The thing about weapon systems is that there are a good many components that don't require that they be built inside some NORAD-like compound for this or that security reasons. A weapon system itself should always be assembled under physical security, for obvious reasons: no sabotage; no espionage; and no theft of restricted materials like explosives, nuclear material, and encryption equipment. But all the parts that are not restricted can be built under the normal protections that exist with development and manufacturing (which exist in any inventor's garage).
Don't read too much into someone who throws around the term "weapons grade". It probably just keeps away the locals. All information is dangerous, but it's irrational to treat it as such (as is so prevalent in the current US Administration).
As a person who co-wrote 2 SBIRs applications in the early 1990s, I have to take corrective action on one of your comments.
SBIRs had some pretty good PR that mimicked your "[support] people in garages with Ideas" remark, but the reality was that at least for some fields, the RFPs were ghost-written by the companies that were going to win them anyway (when they later "applied").
Just because the Cold War was "over", didn't mean that the aerospace industry welfare system augered in. The incestuous system simply put on a cloak of another layer of deception. The same people still met on the same golf course, at the same bar, and at the same industrial conference, and hammered out the same plans; but now, after being wined and dined, the government officials had to perform one more step of getting the RFP put into some periodic SBIR solicitation. In short, it's the usual corruption.
Also, as far as I know today, SBIRs are still suspiciously prone to approvals under the system of sponsorship... when means that no matter how good your idea is, you need an established business to rubber-stamp your app... and such things aren't done for free, as the sponsor takes some measure of control of "your" idea.
Spending SBIR money on marketing efforts should be a no-no, as you implied, but I wouldn't be surprised at all at how much that occurs.
these products are just interesting exercises in chemical engineering
Perhaps this was the (partial) intention. IT could be handy for the copyright owners to hand out DVDs for certain purposes like review, with the guarantee that the DVD will die (eventually) after it's out of their hands. Corporations have a lot of plans and obscure requirements going on behind the scenes, that we consumers seldom see.
The tv+camera system is not a feature for the cubicle dwellers... it is a monitoring system, and there's no such thing as a "hidden" camera system that's installed so pervasively ((a) since people will come in the next day and notice all the cubicles have been altered, (b) someone will notice what the PHB is really using the tv for, etc.). Emitter/detector array walls are a feature that can be subverted into a monitoring system.
Of course, I'm not too concerned, since such arrays can be hacked and allow you to spy on your boss, too. It would be pretty funny (and a good notice to the management) to have the boss's office transmitted to everyone's wall.
If you anticipate the Mars flight to a one-off effort, then sure, going from Earth to Mars directly is the thing to do.
If your Mars flight is one of many, then the Moon is the oply sensible place to setup such a thing. (There must be corresponding stations in Earth and Lunar orbits, too. Gotta do these things right, by damn.)
The availability of vast Lunar regolith components can reduce Earth shipments to Luna to things like hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and other trace elements, as well as specific equipment and personnel (who, you will note, are mostly made up of hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon). Very acceptable, even luxurious ships made from aluminum, steel and titanium can be built upon the Moon, stocked with oxygen and powdered aluminum as fuel components, and (more to the point) they can be launched from the Lunar surface via extremely long mass drivers, saving most of the fuel load for maneuvering and deceleration (although I'd like to see designs that use anti-slingshot and aerobraking). And the ships can be enormous to boot, avoiding a resource crunch that can kill a crew that is 110 million miles from the nearest assistance.
I haven't run the numbers, but a line of accelerator/restraining EM rails can probably be built around the Moon's entire circumference, and the acceleration of the cradle holding a Mars ship can be very gentle before slinging the ship off on a Mars trajectory at many klicks per second. If we choose 30km/s (which could result in a 1-2 month trip to Mars) and 1g launch acceleration:
V = AT X = (1/2)AT^2 1g = 9.81 m/s^2 lunar circum. = 10920 km = X 30 km/s = V T = V/A = (30000 m/s) / (9.81 m/s^2) T = 3060 sec (almost an hour) X = (.5) (9.81 m/s) (3060 x 3060) s^2 X = 45900 km (over 4 lunar circum. trips)
... well, this is too long. 1g is rather light, expecially since the launch phase is so short (about 50 minutes). Most Humans lose consciousness at 10g, so let's choose a 4g launch:
V = AT X = (1/2)AT^2 A = 4g = 39.2 m/s^2 T = V/A = (30000 m/s) / (39.2 m/s^2) T = 765 sec (about 12 min.) X = (.5) (39.2 m/s) (765 x 765) s^2 X = 11500 km
... which is about right. In fact, since the launch is only about 12 minutes at a little over (to compensate for the lesser X) 4g, we can try 6g for the same length (Lunar circum.) to get a higher launch velocity:
V = AT X = (1/2)AT^2 T = (2X/A)^.5 = [(2) (10920000 m) / (6) (9.81 m/s^2)]^.5 T = 609 sec (about 10 min.) V = AT = (6) (9.81 m/s^2) (609 s) = 35800 m/s V = ~36km/s
... which is 20% faster.
30km/s or more can get the craft to Mars in 1 to 2 months depending upon relative positions of Mars and the Moon, less braking time. Since the launch was 6g for about 18 minutes, I imagine that the deceleration could be done at 10g for about 11 minutes. Since it really didn't matter how much fuel load was launched (since the Lunar launch ring should be built to launch many thousands of tons at once), burning fuel to produce 10g for 11 minutes shouldn't be much of a problem, fuel-quantity wise.
One thing that could be done is the construction of a launch system upon Phobos, which is about 20km long. It may be worthwhile using Phobos for this purpose. Since it's so tiny compared to the Lunar launcher, it would have to use higher force to be useful. Let's say we can use a 20km length (through it?) with various steering mechanisms to make sure of proper aim. Since it's so short, let's choose a relatively high force for launching: 8g. (Mercury program launches involved 6g, and 12g upon reentry.)
X = 20000 m A = 8g = (8) (9.81) m/s^2 = 78.5 m/s^2 T = [(2) (20000 m) / (78.5 m/s^2)]^.5 T = 22.6 s V = AT = (78.5 m/s^2) (22.6 s) = 1770 m/s =~ 1.8 Km/s
... which is a little low, but the launch time is of very short duration. Let's try for a rough launcher at
To be fair to the HR people themselves, they are particularly stressed from compression between these forces:
1. People seeking work and willing to lie, cheat and steal to get it.
2. Internal policies that are frankly illegal, if not outrightly immoral.
We ask (or demand) that HR vet the population which has members representing force#1. That alone is quite stressful, and with all the law governing the selection process, we arrive at force#2. Let's face facts; managers don't willingly do things like hire 1 women into a group of loudmouthed guys, and vice versa. (If you don't think it works in the reverse, guys, just try to get a job in a library, bookstore, etc. Odds are you'll encounter resistance to the undercurrent of "women only".) Managers of all types have all manner of biases and states of ignorance, and gender, race, marital status, etc. all come into play without prompting.
When it comes to workplace biases, about the only ways the government catches all this prejudice is (1) the company is small enough that they screw up and let a bias become readily apparent, or (2) the company is large enough that statistical methods can show a likely pattern of bias. Between these two conditions of exposure, we have a vast range of law breaking.
I've done it myself. I worked for a plating company that made it quite clear that, in general, women and blacks were not welcome. The women were seen as potential lawsuits in general ("you hire 'em and they start filing suits, so forget it"), and specifically for their reaction to the usual array of porn that tends to lay around such a facility. The blacks were not welcome since the good 'ol boys working the lines were profoundly racist; hence, who really wants to invoke strife in the production lines?
(I never want to get involved in such a small, inbred business again. I want to avoid feelign dirty in that particular way that washing cannot alleviate.)
I am very skeptical about the (you'll note, primarily female) HR population. But I have to hand them the (small) olive branch of peace and understanding with the pressures they endure.
A sensible attitude, but how do you propose to do that? Let's say www.enticing10yearolds.com is hosted out of Malaysia. What can you really do about that?
What you can do is urge your government to bring the KP issue into play with whatever relationship exists between you country and Malaysia. It can be as subtle as imposing a tariff on, say, Malaysian hardwood imports, with a special notation of "tariff 34t-5y for enforcement of information trade", and when a Malaysian official asks about it, have your trade rep say something like "it's costing us a lot of money to block your child-pornography sites, which you refuse to shut down".
That's how you pass on the pain. And if it's a situation where the age of consent and legal nudity is simply different, like in the Netherlands, then there could just be an exchange between the affected countries and the Netherlands where the costs of banning selected IPs are borne in a civilized fashion.
No one forfeits their rights regardless of their crimes. You must be American, considering your fuckheaded attitude is all over the place here. In fact, those accused of crimes are the ones most in peril of having their rights trampled under enthusiatic law enforcement officers, hence we should be more cautious with them than usual.
Child porn is a law enforcement issue. Ever heard of police? Warrants? Courts? Due process? No, it appears not.
I expect BT to comply with law enforcement. IPs hitting child porn sites SHOULD ALREADY be logged and investigated. But I do not expect them to CENSOR, since it applies a direct enforcement action. When the cops come to your house to arrest you and take your porn, they are censoring you, but rightfully so.
Still, this social wrong of censorship will be fixed eventually when BT finds itself overcensoring from verve, even in the narrow sense of "only child porn sites". I now expect them to start censoring gun sites, etc. It's now only a matter of time before they lose enough customers that they'll feel the pinch.
When lawyers have no evidence to work with, they attack or defend on the basis of reputation, to support or remove suspicion and doubt.
Brown's tactics show this clearly. He is trying to raise the doubt about Linux's development to (he hopes) "reasonable" levels.
This is not a bad tactic, considering how things like juries are swayed by the doubt factor. Fortunately for us Linuxheads, this tactic is easy to deal with, but you have to be patient. At some point, when the spinmaster has spent his wad trying to settle the appropriate level of doubt, you step in and point out that there simply is no evidence to justify turning doubt into action.
Although the spinmaster Brown considers it unlikely that Mr Torvalds created the Linux kernal at such a young age, it is still what happened since there's no other evidence to the contrary. (Note to SCO: Look up the word "evidence" in the dictionary. Thanks.)
I agree. A proper keyboard is at least 4"x16" in size, and even innovating with keys produces a QWERTY that is a lot larger than a frickin' cellphone. And when it comes to the screen... well, a 15" diagonal is my minimum.
Every since PDAs started coming out in force, they could kiss my ass. Final Point: They never can provide the necessary keyboard and screen space.
The best you can hope for is a funny scrolled sheet like the ones used in the movie Mission to Mars (Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss). The entire surface appeared programmable, so could be screen, keyboard, etc.... and you could roll up the area that was in your way.
Granted, but you'll find that many people don't want to interact with a device that will constantly market more crap to them. Even if the marketing is just "a little nagging" like you exampled. I used to use local the time+weather phone number for wherever I lived, but since those have gone into wild sales modes, I stopped using them and just wait until I can click onto a website that hands me the info.
Don't misunderstand me; a website will still adify you, but a visual field allows faster access to the data you wanted, rather than a stream of sound that you have to wait for. Think RAM over punched paper tape.
Yes, I think that the software structure of a critical realtime system like ATC is much more important than which OS or language it's written in. It should be built like a strange composite stranded cable, with different strands of simple structure that can survive sporadic (even systemic) failure of its parts. In such a system, there should be no such thing as a system-wide reboot, since the only thing that is truly system-wide is the data.
Without this structure, Linux would probably fail at an unacceptable rate too.
I see this as less of a loss leader than being a hook.
I say this because things that we traditionally see as loss leaders are still items that are sellable on their own. In contrast, hardware is just getting "too cheap to meter" -- the margin is too low for many companies to bother with. So, with computer margins for your business becoming razor thin, why not switch to a model that bypasses those margins and instead capitalizes on software ones? I'm sure there are enormous tax "benefits" to having a semi-leased hardware base, and the "free" hardware ploy will make your marketing department drool obscenely.
Granted, with people like Sun and Microsoft, the traditional use of a loss leader to tempt people into their clutches is still a strong term in this equation.
[...] the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.
... but any day now some geek will announce that he's porting Linux to it.
Correct. From what I've read on this subject, the average Orangutan could deadlift 1600LB over its head should it be so inclined to do so. That beats any Human lifter.
Even Chimps (excluding our President) are a lot stronger than Humans, on average. Any Human who wrestles a Chimp soon finds himself at a marked disadvantage.
I haven't yet dug deep enough to find out why this is true. It doesn't seem to just be a function of exercise or diet; rather, it seems that primate muscle tissue is different from the Human version. It would be nice if we could find a way to convert Human muscle tissue over time to the content or structure of the primate version. It may even be fruitful to discover the mechanism that allows primates like Chimps to keep their muscle tone in a relative lack of exercise.
I don't agree. Following my policy of having the punishment fit the crime, the ends were financial. The heaviness of the punishment imposed on Carmack should have been the fines, not years of his life.
Don't get me wrong; the man's a scumsac and a general nutcocker. But even so, he's a person with irreplaceable years of life, who can reform as we should hope anyone can. Financial judgments against him could have chased him for decades, which seems sufficient punishment.
Italy is seeking to jail MP3 traders, and we are jailing a con artist. Both crimes are relatively innocuous compared to years of jailing. I can only urge others to keep a sense of perspective about such things.
Fascists? Why yes, yes they are. They're called Corporations. Of course, they need to assume the mantle of government to get the full effect of socioeconomic fascism.
Somewhere in Italy, the concept of "the punishment should fit the crime" just took a dump.
Can you be a bit more expository about that? Once metric which will strongly concern the individual fuel-maker is liters/day/sqft. We can use such qualified metrics to find out if we can invest in the square-footage to come up with the throughput we desire in a time we can stand.
Slashdot Mirror
NN may have been merely off a bit(pass?). The thing about "micropayments" (and I hate that word, I prefer "decipayment") is that there is a large population that can benefit from it ("micro" producers on the web). From all that demand a service provider can arise, as has happened many times in Capitalist history.
I've complained about this as such to Scott McCloud of webcomic fame. He has since been involved in BitPass. He hardly needed to hear my complaint; my opinion was formed in part by his own books making the formative points.
Considering corporate handling of the web, user-TV was a pretty apt predictive metaphor.
It seems to me that the Aldridge Commission report is just taking the next logical step in carving up NASA, considering how much NASA had ignored the strategic survival plans from the two prior commissions.
After all, if in 1986 they tell you that you had a car accident due to your drinking, then in 1990 they tell you your driving is still terrible, then we can only conclude that when you have another inept DUI accident in 2002 that it's time to restrict your driving to "work only".
NASA has proven itself to be a poor repository of space vision. And we can see with increasing clarity that it is also a poor place to put your technological hopes for SSTO, solar power stations, lunar and asteroid mining, and overall Human habitation in space.
I can't blame NASA for all of this, however; we must also point at the money-fickle Congress. NASA has earned good marks with the thing they were allowed to pursue in good faith and budgeting, that being the interplanetary probes. We may as well relegate them to that so they can (to borrow that hated modern phrase) "concentrate on their core competency". I'd leap for actual joy if NASA was reduced to a "National Space Exploration Administration", which would design equipment, build probes, contract to have them launched, and then manage and track them with the DSN.
Rational-izing an equipment investment for savings on consumables tends to be a real problem.
This Slashdot article may as well propose that everyone pick up ONE piece of ground trash per day, which will result in markedly cleaner areas around workplaces and homes. This will save on cleaning costs from city services (provided they layoff or reallocate to compensate; bear with me here). However, the devil's in the detail of getting everyone to do it periodically and consistently.
I'm sure that much more efficient p/s are possible, but like the daily lean-and-grab for that piece of trash, you'd have to endure the cost (high-priced p/s) in order to enjoy the benefit (lower energy use). Most people would consider a cleaner city to be not worth the effort; similarly, the market for p/s has demanded cheapness and availability over energy efficiency. Instant gratification. Heck, that defines many of the problems with Microsoft Windows right there.
I have been involved in some facilities conversations regarding reducing the energy consumption of even such a simple population as all the employee monitors that are left on day and night. The answer is complex due to the lack of systemic design for such things. We must therefore press our consumer voices into service and then vote accordingly with our dollars, if we're to see actual gains in energy efficiency. The market just isn't speaking in the quality and quantity required.
weapons grade research [...] What does that mean?
Nothing much, really. Let's say you have an idea for an improved, ceramic superconducting antenna for all sorts of communications with weapon systems that by their very nature are hard to reach, like missiles and mines (your first idea; you were concerned about mines being turned off at will by the mine-layer after the battle is over).
Your improved antenna can be "weapons grade" in a garage, with the right equipment. In other words, you are just making a ceramic antenna coil with specialized equipment, perhaps after a $10K investment in the proper furnace and materials, etc. Once the government puts your antenna through its paces, there's no rational reason why it couldn't receive a MIL spec and then installed into the weapons.
The thing about weapon systems is that there are a good many components that don't require that they be built inside some NORAD-like compound for this or that security reasons. A weapon system itself should always be assembled under physical security, for obvious reasons: no sabotage; no espionage; and no theft of restricted materials like explosives, nuclear material, and encryption equipment. But all the parts that are not restricted can be built under the normal protections that exist with development and manufacturing (which exist in any inventor's garage).
Don't read too much into someone who throws around the term "weapons grade". It probably just keeps away the locals. All information is dangerous, but it's irrational to treat it as such (as is so prevalent in the current US Administration).
As a person who co-wrote 2 SBIRs applications in the early 1990s, I have to take corrective action on one of your comments.
... when means that no matter how good your idea is, you need an established business to rubber-stamp your app ... and such things aren't done for free, as the sponsor takes some measure of control of "your" idea.
SBIRs had some pretty good PR that mimicked your "[support] people in garages with Ideas" remark, but the reality was that at least for some fields, the RFPs were ghost-written by the companies that were going to win them anyway (when they later "applied").
Just because the Cold War was "over", didn't mean that the aerospace industry welfare system augered in. The incestuous system simply put on a cloak of another layer of deception. The same people still met on the same golf course, at the same bar, and at the same industrial conference, and hammered out the same plans; but now, after being wined and dined, the government officials had to perform one more step of getting the RFP put into some periodic SBIR solicitation. In short, it's the usual corruption.
Also, as far as I know today, SBIRs are still suspiciously prone to approvals under the system of sponsorship
Spending SBIR money on marketing efforts should be a no-no, as you implied, but I wouldn't be surprised at all at how much that occurs.
these products are just interesting exercises in chemical engineering
Perhaps this was the (partial) intention. IT could be handy for the copyright owners to hand out DVDs for certain purposes like review, with the guarantee that the DVD will die (eventually) after it's out of their hands. Corporations have a lot of plans and obscure requirements going on behind the scenes, that we consumers seldom see.
The tv+camera system is not a feature for the cubicle dwellers ... it is a monitoring system, and there's no such thing as a "hidden" camera system that's installed so pervasively ((a) since people will come in the next day and notice all the cubicles have been altered, (b) someone will notice what the PHB is really using the tv for, etc.). Emitter/detector array walls are a feature that can be subverted into a monitoring system.
Of course, I'm not too concerned, since such arrays can be hacked and allow you to spy on your boss, too. It would be pretty funny (and a good notice to the management) to have the boss's office transmitted to everyone's wall.
Correct. Compatibility means a hit on performance. If you want the ultimate performance, you invariably end up with a highly customized system.
In an important way, performance==customization.
Look at overclockers. For the increase in performance, significant incompatible customizations have to be done.
If your Mars flight is one of many, then the Moon is the oply sensible place to setup such a thing. (There must be corresponding stations in Earth and Lunar orbits, too. Gotta do these things right, by damn.)
The availability of vast Lunar regolith components can reduce Earth shipments to Luna to things like hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and other trace elements, as well as specific equipment and personnel (who, you will note, are mostly made up of hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon). Very acceptable, even luxurious ships made from aluminum, steel and titanium can be built upon the Moon, stocked with oxygen and powdered aluminum as fuel components, and (more to the point) they can be launched from the Lunar surface via extremely long mass drivers, saving most of the fuel load for maneuvering and deceleration (although I'd like to see designs that use anti-slingshot and aerobraking). And the ships can be enormous to boot, avoiding a resource crunch that can kill a crew that is 110 million miles from the nearest assistance.
I haven't run the numbers, but a line of accelerator/restraining EM rails can probably be built around the Moon's entire circumference, and the acceleration of the cradle holding a Mars ship can be very gentle before slinging the ship off on a Mars trajectory at many klicks per second. If we choose 30km/s (which could result in a 1-2 month trip to Mars) and 1g launch acceleration:
... well, this is too long. 1g is rather light, expecially since the launch phase is so short (about 50 minutes). Most Humans lose consciousness at 10g, so let's choose a 4g launch:
... which is about right. In fact, since the launch is only about 12 minutes at a little over (to compensate for the lesser X) 4g, we can try 6g for the same length (Lunar circum.) to get a higher launch velocity:
... which is 20% faster.
30km/s or more can get the craft to Mars in 1 to 2 months depending upon relative positions of Mars and the Moon, less braking time. Since the launch was 6g for about 18 minutes, I imagine that the deceleration could be done at 10g for about 11 minutes. Since it really didn't matter how much fuel load was launched (since the Lunar launch ring should be built to launch many thousands of tons at once), burning fuel to produce 10g for 11 minutes shouldn't be much of a problem, fuel-quantity wise.
One thing that could be done is the construction of a launch system upon Phobos, which is about 20km long. It may be worthwhile using Phobos for this purpose. Since it's so tiny compared to the Lunar launcher, it would have to use higher force to be useful. Let's say we can use a 20km length (through it?) with various steering mechanisms to make sure of proper aim. Since it's so short, let's choose a relatively high force for launching: 8g. (Mercury program launches involved 6g, and 12g upon reentry.)
... which is a little low, but the launch time is of very short duration. Let's try for a rough launcher at
To be fair to the HR people themselves, they are particularly stressed from compression between these forces:
1. People seeking work and willing to lie, cheat and steal to get it.
2. Internal policies that are frankly illegal, if not outrightly immoral.
We ask (or demand) that HR vet the population which has members representing force#1. That alone is quite stressful, and with all the law governing the selection process, we arrive at force#2. Let's face facts; managers don't willingly do things like hire 1 women into a group of loudmouthed guys, and vice versa. (If you don't think it works in the reverse, guys, just try to get a job in a library, bookstore, etc. Odds are you'll encounter resistance to the undercurrent of "women only".) Managers of all types have all manner of biases and states of ignorance, and gender, race, marital status, etc. all come into play without prompting.
When it comes to workplace biases, about the only ways the government catches all this prejudice is (1) the company is small enough that they screw up and let a bias become readily apparent, or (2) the company is large enough that statistical methods can show a likely pattern of bias. Between these two conditions of exposure, we have a vast range of law breaking.
I've done it myself. I worked for a plating company that made it quite clear that, in general, women and blacks were not welcome. The women were seen as potential lawsuits in general ("you hire 'em and they start filing suits, so forget it"), and specifically for their reaction to the usual array of porn that tends to lay around such a facility. The blacks were not welcome since the good 'ol boys working the lines were profoundly racist; hence, who really wants to invoke strife in the production lines?
(I never want to get involved in such a small, inbred business again. I want to avoid feelign dirty in that particular way that washing cannot alleviate.)
I am very skeptical about the (you'll note, primarily female) HR population. But I have to hand them the (small) olive branch of peace and understanding with the pressures they endure.
A sensible attitude, but how do you propose to do that? Let's say www.enticing10yearolds.com is hosted out of Malaysia. What can you really do about that?
What you can do is urge your government to bring the KP issue into play with whatever relationship exists between you country and Malaysia. It can be as subtle as imposing a tariff on, say, Malaysian hardwood imports, with a special notation of "tariff 34t-5y for enforcement of information trade", and when a Malaysian official asks about it, have your trade rep say something like "it's costing us a lot of money to block your child-pornography sites, which you refuse to shut down".
That's how you pass on the pain. And if it's a situation where the age of consent and legal nudity is simply different, like in the Netherlands, then there could just be an exchange between the affected countries and the Netherlands where the costs of banning selected IPs are borne in a civilized fashion.
No one forfeits their rights regardless of their crimes. You must be American, considering your fuckheaded attitude is all over the place here. In fact, those accused of crimes are the ones most in peril of having their rights trampled under enthusiatic law enforcement officers, hence we should be more cautious with them than usual.
Child porn is a law enforcement issue. Ever heard of police? Warrants? Courts? Due process? No, it appears not.
I expect BT to comply with law enforcement. IPs hitting child porn sites SHOULD ALREADY be logged and investigated. But I do not expect them to CENSOR, since it applies a direct enforcement action. When the cops come to your house to arrest you and take your porn, they are censoring you, but rightfully so.
Still, this social wrong of censorship will be fixed eventually when BT finds itself overcensoring from verve, even in the narrow sense of "only child porn sites". I now expect them to start censoring gun sites, etc. It's now only a matter of time before they lose enough customers that they'll feel the pinch.
When lawyers have no evidence to work with, they attack or defend on the basis of reputation, to support or remove suspicion and doubt.
Brown's tactics show this clearly. He is trying to raise the doubt about Linux's development to (he hopes) "reasonable" levels.
This is not a bad tactic, considering how things like juries are swayed by the doubt factor. Fortunately for us Linuxheads, this tactic is easy to deal with, but you have to be patient. At some point, when the spinmaster has spent his wad trying to settle the appropriate level of doubt, you step in and point out that there simply is no evidence to justify turning doubt into action.
Although the spinmaster Brown considers it unlikely that Mr Torvalds created the Linux kernal at such a young age, it is still what happened since there's no other evidence to the contrary. (Note to SCO: Look up the word "evidence" in the dictionary. Thanks.)
I agree. A proper keyboard is at least 4"x16" in size, and even innovating with keys produces a QWERTY that is a lot larger than a frickin' cellphone. And when it comes to the screen ... well, a 15" diagonal is my minimum.
... and you could roll up the area that was in your way.
Every since PDAs started coming out in force, they could kiss my ass. Final Point: They never can provide the necessary keyboard and screen space.
The best you can hope for is a funny scrolled sheet like the ones used in the movie Mission to Mars (Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss). The entire surface appeared programmable, so could be screen, keyboard, etc.
Granted, but you'll find that many people don't want to interact with a device that will constantly market more crap to them. Even if the marketing is just "a little nagging" like you exampled. I used to use local the time+weather phone number for wherever I lived, but since those have gone into wild sales modes, I stopped using them and just wait until I can click onto a website that hands me the info.
Don't misunderstand me; a website will still adify you, but a visual field allows faster access to the data you wanted, rather than a stream of sound that you have to wait for. Think RAM over punched paper tape.
Yes, I think that the software structure of a critical realtime system like ATC is much more important than which OS or language it's written in. It should be built like a strange composite stranded cable, with different strands of simple structure that can survive sporadic (even systemic) failure of its parts. In such a system, there should be no such thing as a system-wide reboot, since the only thing that is truly system-wide is the data.
Without this structure, Linux would probably fail at an unacceptable rate too.
"Special key", huh? That's what I call my Dremel. {whiiiiirrrr}
I see this as less of a loss leader than being a hook.
I say this because things that we traditionally see as loss leaders are still items that are sellable on their own. In contrast, hardware is just getting "too cheap to meter" -- the margin is too low for many companies to bother with. So, with computer margins for your business becoming razor thin, why not switch to a model that bypasses those margins and instead capitalizes on software ones? I'm sure there are enormous tax "benefits" to having a semi-leased hardware base, and the "free" hardware ploy will make your marketing department drool obscenely.
Granted, with people like Sun and Microsoft, the traditional use of a loss leader to tempt people into their clutches is still a strong term in this equation.
Not only that:
... but any day now some geek will announce that he's porting Linux to it.
[...] the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2 microseconds) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC.
Correct. From what I've read on this subject, the average Orangutan could deadlift 1600LB over its head should it be so inclined to do so. That beats any Human lifter.
Even Chimps (excluding our President) are a lot stronger than Humans, on average. Any Human who wrestles a Chimp soon finds himself at a marked disadvantage.
I haven't yet dug deep enough to find out why this is true. It doesn't seem to just be a function of exercise or diet; rather, it seems that primate muscle tissue is different from the Human version. It would be nice if we could find a way to convert Human muscle tissue over time to the content or structure of the primate version. It may even be fruitful to discover the mechanism that allows primates like Chimps to keep their muscle tone in a relative lack of exercise.
I don't agree. Following my policy of having the punishment fit the crime, the ends were financial. The heaviness of the punishment imposed on Carmack should have been the fines, not years of his life.
Don't get me wrong; the man's a scumsac and a general nutcocker. But even so, he's a person with irreplaceable years of life, who can reform as we should hope anyone can. Financial judgments against him could have chased him for decades, which seems sufficient punishment.
Italy is seeking to jail MP3 traders, and we are jailing a con artist. Both crimes are relatively innocuous compared to years of jailing. I can only urge others to keep a sense of perspective about such things.
Fascists? Why yes, yes they are. They're called Corporations. Of course, they need to assume the mantle of government to get the full effect of socioeconomic fascism.
Somewhere in Italy, the concept of "the punishment should fit the crime" just took a dump.
Can you be a bit more expository about that? Once metric which will strongly concern the individual fuel-maker is liters/day/sqft. We can use such qualified metrics to find out if we can invest in the square-footage to come up with the throughput we desire in a time we can stand.