'scuse me? in the normal gas from burning powder pushed situation, yes. The peak chamber pressure at the point of the bullets being pushed into the rifleing is going to be 15,000psi+ or you have a stuck bullet. And this with soft, copper clad, lead core bullets in sporting arms.
There is no way in hell that thing can get up enough energy to engrave the barrels rifleing into an iron bullet. First, the barrel has to be magneticly transparent & very thin so the coils can be as close as possible. There are some stainless alloys that are transparent for low frequencies, but for the frequencies that uses, 2/3rds of the energy would be wasted generating eddy currents in the barrel if it were conductive. throw in the fact that those types of stainless are softer than the iron in the bullet, the bullet would more than likely just make the barrel bulge to fit the size of the bullet.
In other words, the bullet is as tough as any potential barrel materiel, and barrel wear and tear would be very high, much like our military cannon in multi-inch sizes are. Some of those have to have the powder charge raised a few pounds with each and every fireing because the wear rate is so high. Ask any retired navy gunners mate, or dig up Col. Townsend Whalen, who wrote the definitive book on the subject.
No, IMO the iron bullet precludes a conductive barrel materiel, and rifleing of any kind unless there is a thin sabot involved, and I saw no references to that in the rather thin web page. Adding the sabot also increases the distance to the coils, fubaring the efficiency at the same time.
Ahh, yes, silence, nice concept. Nice but flawed. Once the power is ramped up to achieve more than paint gun power, the noise will come along with the bullet speed, getting several magnitudes louder if the bullet can actually be made to move at or above mach 1. That part of physics cannot be made to go away unless one could build a soundproof pipe for the bullet to travel inside of on its way to the target.
And that is going to be a hell of a lot harder to hide than the gun itself.
Interesting concept. Just one Q though, as it doesn't seem to be discussed on the site in the link, and that is how does it achieve the effect of a normal rifled barrel in causeing the iron bullet to spin and therefore be stabilized in flight?
And thereby hangs the tale of why copyrights are a bad idea.
Don't get me wrong, I think the person who does a unique work in any field should have the full benefit of copyright protection that the law can give he/she.
But in my opinion, that work is his or hers, and the copyright cannot be transfered, and should terminate in a reasonable time frame that might even be adjustable according to the type of the work. Music, and similar more or less timeless stuff, would seem to need a much longer copyright lifetime than things technical, such as computer software which can be rendered obsolete in a heartbeat.
That doesn't mean the author cannot sell the right to make copies to a publisher, but that should be a seperate contract, possibly exclusive (in which case the holder of the exclusivity should be the one to defend it, based on the fact that most publishers who would like to profit from the exclusive publication have much deeper pockets that the owner of the copyright would generally have) and be treated totally independant of the actual copyright itself.
To me, selling the actual copyright is like selling one of your children, it shouldn't be done, ever.
If people would just realize that they're gonna have to give up a little more of their paycheck if they want (more) decent teachers, then we'd already be on our waying to fixing this problem.
Yeah, well lets look at a bit of history that I'm fam with, having lived through it.
60 some years ago when I was in grammer school, the state where I was born used the proceeds of the state liquor stores to finance the school systems, with an occasional small levy for a major construction project. In those years the literacy rate in Iowa was 99.98%. Then in about the 1960 time frame, the legislators got the goody 2 shoes attitude that the state really shouldn't be in the business of selling anything with as bad a history as alcohol has, why the state prisons were overflowing with drunk drivers! At that point, the BAC for a DWI citation was.05%, so anybody with more than 2 or 3 of their 3.2% beer's in them was an automatic gime.
So they raised the BAC to.1%, and privatized the liquor business. It did give them a free cot in the prison system occasionally, and probably doubled the number of DWI related traffic fatalities. It also meant they had to pay for the schools out of the general fund.
To me that was a false economy on both fronts. Because the educational funding then was a visible item in the taxes, there was much more reticence in passing adequate funding levels for the educational system. Obviously Iowa isn't claiming that 99.98% literacy rate today, although I do have one grandchild who had to move in with her grandmother in Iowa since the Nebraska schools were failing miserably with a 2 star or better student. Now 10 years old, and about to graduate from high school with all A's. College bound to study medicine. You will I think, hear her name in connection with a major discovery in another 15 or so years.
I don't know what the current BAC for a DWI cite is today, but I do know they lowered it back to.08% at one point many years ago.
I can say that because I had the advantage of a well funded educational system back then, that it really hasn't bothered me in my ability to earn a decent living. People are often surprised to learn that I have only an 8th grade education, particularly when they also know that I have lassoed electrons for a living for the last 54 years, the last 39 in broadcast engineering.
"If nothing else, I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of ruling against header spoofing and taking over others' server bandwidth. Spammers have been going to great lengths to keep themselves anonymous and to steal bandwidth."
I agree violently with this. I use my real name in my email address, and won't likely ever change that. "I" have no reason to lie to anybody about who I am./. wanted a "handle", so thats what they got.
Now, if it were legislated that the return address of a piece of spam must be to the person responsible for sending the spam, a person who is readily looked up in the phone book in case you wanted to call he/she/it up and tell them off, then we have 2 things.
1st of course is a valid from address we can black hole while its still on the server with any good pop filter.
2nd, if the goods or services offered aren't as advertised, there is a trail leading back to the jerk that tried to take you. And there are huge advantages to that which need no explanation.
3rd of course is that it will never work unless there is an easily applied fine of 10 million dollars or so for violating the return address rule. One that splits that collected fine between the victim bringing the evidence and the enforcement agency doing the foreclosing and all it should take is a good paper trail linkage establishing that the message in the printout was indeed sent by the perp you are trying to collect from. If the perp doesn't have it to pay, then you collect all available property includeing the all the vehicles, bank accounts, houses and other real estate and boats, hold it while the courts are ruling on the validity of the evidence, and when thats been done in the afirmative call the judgement paid and split the proceeds of the courthouse steps sale. And if the court doesn't affirm, then the charge bringer is held liable for the perps loses and the property is returned in as good a condition as when it was seized. That would make the charge bringer be very very sure he has the right perp.
The last thing you want to do is to send a message to the perp first because by the time the courts get around to entering the judgement, the perp will have had planty of time to move it all out of the country if its portable, or peddled and the cash deposited in a Swiss Bank if its not.
I'd call that a law with teeth, teeth sharp enough it would be obeyed...
But its too simple, and the attorneys can't make a killing on it, so the chances of its passing are somewhere between point double-ought nothing and zero.
'scuse me, but how are you going to blow the tanks when the exterior pressure is sufficient to keep your liquid CO2 liquid by a factor of 20+. CO2 can be kept liquid at a pressure of a few hundred psi at room temps, somewhat less at the somewhat lower water temp. In the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the external pressure is in the range of 15,500 psi. Your liquid CO2 may even be a solid.
What you do is drop (release) the ballast weight that made it heavier than water and become lighter, in the case of the Trieste, something like 9 tons of ballast was released when it was time to come back up.
-- Cheers, Gene, who knows a wee bit about the Trieste since it was wearing tv cameras I helped build when it made that dive. I was working as an ET at Oceanographic Engineering in San Diego at the time.
I think you are probably at least 150% correct. As a broadcast engineer, I know full well the battle for the eyeball is made or broken in 30 seconds any time of the day or night, and has been that way since they invented the first remote control that actually worked.
But don't blame it all on the media, and bandwidth starvation. There is as much of a bandwidth limit on the receiving end (the human receiver that is) as there is on the sending end.
The humans ability to absorb info varies some from individual to individual of course, but being on the upper side of the curve, I've found that my bull shit detector seems to work quite well at least 95% of the time. Even so, I do business with some of those types simply because I can let them run down, and then rebutt their blather in such positive terms they haven't any defense. At that point, their bluff has been called, and we can deal. And strange as it may seem, some of those have turned out to be pretty darned good friends over the years.
Maybe they aren't used to having somebody say yes, stick out a hand to shake on it, and once its shook on it WILL be done. But thats how I work 90% of the time. The other 10% I get it in writing. Safer that way when they cannot deny it:-)
Well, in their shoes, when they see the sales backlash from not having the label dislayed, they are going to put it back on & let Phillips sue. Thats of course if they have any customer reports to point them in that direction, otherwise they'll continue to blame the plummeting sales on piracy and press for even more draconian laws.
They are totally failing to understand 2 things. First being that the public is damned tired of hearing a song on the radio, liking it well enough to go buy the album with its other 17 tracks of pure trash filler on it, and then finding the cut they bought it for and finding that cut is a totally different mix of what is probably a different recording session and it too sucks.
Second, while I appreciate that we need new blood behind the mikes to keep things going, the overall emphasis is so lopsided against the more seasoned, and therefore probably more expen$ive artists that the old standards who still can draw a sellout crowd anytime they step up to the mike, cannot buy airtime or an album contract for any kind of money.
Those two effects have caused a serious reduction in the overall quality, both sonicly and artisticly, of whats in the bin at dear old wallyworld, so noticeable that the last few cd's I've bought, were ordered on the network, from artists who wouldn't touch the RIAA with a rifle bullet. And they're making a bit of money doing it. Go check out Janis Ian's site. Its a good example, and right decent music even to this old farts CW trained ears.
Of course if they get sued, the only defense they could possibly offer is insanity. There seems to be more than enough of that to go around these days.
I'm repeating myself of course, but whatever happened to good old honesty? It seems to be about as extinct as the dodo bird today.
The fix for that is real simple. When the customer starts objecting, hand him/her over to the supervisor/store owner/whomever is in charge.
As a min wage peon, I don't think your having to put up with me when I'm unhappy (and thats not at all pretty) is in your job description, and I'm all too happy to have the 'discussion' elevated to someone who should give a shit. Its the only way to send a message, and be heard far enough up the chain from the poor minwager at the counter that it won't be forgotten at quitting time. Hopefully...
Pass it off to the boss, its his decision, not yours anyway. When he gets enough of it, he'll fix it.
In the meantime, he is paying you the same amount per hour to restock the rejected items as he is when you are at the register, so I'm not sure I see the problem there. Treat it as a break from jerky customers like me.
As far as the initial outburst that got managements attention, and its effect on you, be aware that I will often go back and apologize to you because I'm fully aware, and you should be too, that its often fake anger, designed to get the managements attention in the first place.
Its unfortunate that one often has to resort to such actions to make a point, the point being that if he wants my money, he will give working product. He is an ass who passes that job off to you. Find another job if you can and let him know that you know what sort of people he seems to be.
I do for one, because I live here. And I can tell you right damned fast that if the congresscritters actually listened to something besides their wallet, that law would have been laughed out of existance before it ever got out of committee.
When that thing was up for discussion I sent my critter my views on it, and its damaging effects on technology in general. He voted for it anyway, and he has not had my vote since.
And you are right to see that law as the technology smothering law that it is.
ISTR that Phillips put the industry on notice over 2 years ago, that the CD could not carry the 'logo' we've all come to ignore if it was copy protected.
In case you haven't noticed, the CD or Conpact Disk Digital Audio logo has all but dissappeared from the display bins, even at CitGo/7-11.
If it doesn't carry the logo, it gets dropped back in the bin like the trash it is.
Re your sig, I started programming on a 1.79 mhz RCA 1802 cpu, where it took 8 of those 1.79 mhz cycles for one machine cycle. You had it good, or you had it bad, depending on ones point of view. That cpu was a most unusual one, having features that were well before its time that made programming rather productive if used. I generated a new academy countdown for tv commercials with some simple TTL circuitry and 6 bytes of dma per vertical scan. Your 8088 couldn't do that with 10k of code.
Well, for one thing, you haven't read the article well enough. At least one of the elements under test is gold, which is quite a ways on up the heavy end of the periodic table from iron. Iron is the point where the balance of matter in vs energy out reverses.
I mention iron because when a star runs out of fuel, the star collapses until it has enough pressure and temperature to start the next fusion process, each one from the hydrogen->helium stage requireing more heat and pressure to maintain. Quite a few steps up the ladder it will finally get to making iron. I forget what out of unforch, I'm not a nuclear physicist.
But theres a minor detail to making iron, and ALL the heavier elements by the fusion method, it takes more energy that it releases to make iron. At that point, the core cools, and can no longer support the rest of the star. More materiel falls into the core heating it back up again until the next reaction gets started, and the scenario repeats, this on a time scale considerably under a minute, and in fact limited by the local speed of sound which in ultradense material is a good fraction of C.
Basicly the star collapses into itself, with 2 possible outcomes. Heavy stars can collapse into a neutron star and may well bounce a considerable portion of the fusion byproducts back out into space in the form of a super nova. The really heavy ones may even collapse to a black hole.
The one that bounce are where ALL the iron and heavier elements come from, and a goodly share of the carbon we're made out of was once in the heart of an ageing star that went boom at the end of its life.
What they are doing in the accelerator is creating a very unstable and short lived version of the core of a collapsing star at about the point of its bounce if it doesn't hit black hole density.
This takes energy, huge amounts of it, most of which is absorbed. I would in fact be interested in finding out if the end product was still a gold ion when two of them meet at relativistic speeds.
My guess is something heavier if it could be caught in sufficient quantities to analyze.
OTOH, once the plasma cools a few femtoseconds, probably enough identifiable particles will be ejected, which is what they are actually looking at, and the end result might well be identifiably gold, but fewer of them than went in.
Thats the problem with these little public announcements, they dumb the data down trying to make Joe Sixpack understand it, removing 95% of the usefull data that we might be able to add up and come to a conclusion.
When I first got a dsl connection I figured I'd better lock a few more doors, so I did the sensible thing (I thought) at the time and bought a 'home' router, a Seimans 2604. It had built in PPPoE and made the hookup pretty transparent.
I'd had it about a week and was still playing with its settings, when one evening it refused to let me access it from its web server.
After an hours worth of unsuccessfully messing with that, I got to thinking maybe I had been attacked, but I have some guard dogs standing by that will log that, and at least attempt to lock the purps out.
Apparently the locks held, but there was a new line in hosts.deny placed there by the guard dog that recorded the address of the incoming attack that set off the guard dog.
There was also a new rule in the iptables ruleset, also placed by the guard dog, portsentry-1.1.
That was my clue that all was not well, and that possibly that the router was now a man in the middle. Or something.
The router went back to C.C. the next day, and a linksys was brought home, which has not allowed any repeats of that, in fact its blocked everything as no further logs have been written since.
The address of the attack source? One of the verizon.com dns servers I was supposed to be useing. The attack was reported to verizon at the time of discovery, but the veracity has been neither denied, nor confirmed in the past 2+ months since it happened by verizon.
Make of it what you will. Linux saved the day AFAIAC.
Apparently so, and its having a tendency to give me the willies since I'm a kde fan.
Question: How much of Troll-Tech does Canopy own? Controlling interest, or just a pain-in-the-butt seat at the board meeting table?
Gnome may be just as capable as kde, but 'user-friendly' when trying to configure it, it ain't, and in the relatively small number of times I've played with it, it wasn't very stable. The task bar dissappeared, and the best recommendation the gnome guys could come up with was to reinstall. 'scuse me?
So what does happen if the guys & girls at Troll-Tech decide that the makefile is only going to format the hard drive if it finds itself running on UW box?
Thats an extreme case of course, and would be prosecutable in most jurisdictions, but there is nothing to stop kde from becoming very dumb and basic if built on a UW box. Stub functions that only return a 0?
I'd expect the canopy folks to send in a new CEO with orders to fix it, possibly messing with the licenseing in the process just because he took lessons from Darl.
Now that scares the hell out of me. And it should scare the rest of the open source proponents too.
But I hope the potential newbie Troll-Tech CEO is watching the debacle Darl M. is manufacturing since he took over SCO. In the end, which we haven't seen anyplace but in our highly biased crystal balls, if it comes out according to the huge quantities of our own wishfull thinking, that would send a pretty loud message that Darls methods aren't (and I'm being very charitable) optimum.
I think this is a case where letting that dog sleep for a bit longer might be in order. If, and when, IBM is vindicated in court, then it would appear to be time to take UW off the supported list until such time as they are willing to pay for the port in programmers salaries. Or go tits up. That seems only fair to me for all the headaches they've gleefully given us in the last 60 some days.
"There is nothing stupider than someone who tailgates someone on a bike..."
Except the biker who lets him tailgate. The average bike is fully capable in such a situation, of pulling into the gap between 2 vehicles in the right lane and matching speeds with those vehicles long before there is any danger of colliding with the vehicle in front. I've done it many times.
Let me repeat what the teachers will tell you, learn what that bike can do when pushed, then make such responses automatic, it will save you ass. That means you must keep in 'practice'. I realised about 4 years ago, coming up on my 65th that my reflexes weren't up to that anymore, so I did the wise thing and sold it to someone younger.
I have also, sitting at traffic lights, realized the vehicle approaching in my mirrors wasn't going to stop, kicked it over on the right peg and jumped the curb with the front tire fully airborne, then set it back down and stopped and watched both vehicles get completely totalled in my mirrors. This was about 20 years ago when the reflexes were still sharp.
The curb I was jumping was the one in front of the old Hecks/Big Bear shopping area in Ashland Ky. I did that bit of 'getting the hell out of crunch' twice in 2 weeks at the same light! Unforch, Darwin wasn't awarding either driver, they survived. But I'd be willing to bet some sucker insurance company wrote checks for over $100k in each of those two wrecks.
" Actually, I seem to recall that in some states with metered lights motorcyclists did not trip the sensor in order to change the lights. I've heard several stories of bikers having to get off their bikes, run to the corner, press the pedestrian walk button, and run back to their bikes to avoid breaking the law by running a red light at an intersection with no traffic for miles in any direction."
Yeah, this reminds me of a light located at the intersection of US50 and I-79, at the end of the I-79 southbound exit ramp.
The coil in the concrete went to hell or something, and traffic that wanted to turn left was reduced to ripping out across 4 lanes of oncoming traffic during gaps in the traffic, which was doing an average of 55-60 mph at that point.
On my GS-550, I sat behind a honey wagon that must have massed 30k pounds, while he walked his back axles back and forth in the loop trying to trigger it. Maybe 10 minutes to get thru the intersection which was known locally as suicide gulch due the number and severity of the wrecks that took place there when the damned light was working.
I'd even called the hiway dept squawking about it a couple of times. But apparently the lights were on but nobody was home.
Somewhere along the line somebody managed to bash the pole the control box was on. Didn't hurt the box but it was hanging off-kilter by 10 degrees or so, and that finally got the maintainance crews attention. I pulled up and stopped, noticed they were there, and proceeded to turn left and drive up to where he was working.
I said I hoped he was here to fix the light since it hadn't responded to traffic sitting in the coils for about 2 months. He said, no he wasn't here to fix the light, just bolt the box back up straight. I don't suffer fools gladly and saw red instantly. My next statement was that I knew where there was a cache of very old dynamite, (17 years later its still there!) and if that light wasn't fixed sensitive enough to see my bike by the next morning when I came through, the box would be subjected to about 4 old, real greasy sticks, a fresh cap and a 5 minute fuse.
He started to sputter and I said it again, this time very quietly.
He wrote down the plate number on my bike, but as I pulled away to get back in line, I noticed he was finally paying attention to the piled up traffic. It took me about 15 minutes to get back to the light and another 5 to get through it. All of which he watched from his truck with a microphone in his hand. I half expected the sheriff to come calling on me at work, but nothing ever came of it.
But, the light was fixed the next morning, even sensitive enough to see my 430 lb bike when I pulled over the loop. I was a Happy Camper(TM).
The threat was idle of course, that stuff is so old I walk very quietly, using my deer hunting stride, around it. OTOH, I have a history of walking in where angels fear to go and coming back out upright. So who knows...
I have no opinion on the red light cams as long as they don't shorten the yellow to bring in the cash. Links given elsewhere in this thread are now bookmarked in case I need them however.
But its been a while since I last had a ticket, and in 54+ years behind the wheel, I have yet to turn anything with more than 2 wheels greasy side up. I do drive the missus bonkers over my driving at times, she had drivers ed, and I treat a moving vehicle as a ballistic missile in that to change direction/speed you have to figure closing speeds, traction problems and all that well before you get to the immovable object. My margin of safety is a couple of feet, hers is 50 yards. Guess who's bent more fenders by a factor of infinity since we got hitched. The body shop bills have totalled nearly 3 grand in 14 years. All on her van...
She always figures that guy is gonna stop at the stop sign, and I never do until he is both completely stopped AND looking at me. And I already have an escape route planned in case he comes through it and I don't have traction enough to do a stoppie. Old bike riders either develop that sense when they are still young, or the bike will kill them, its that simple.
"The probe will then dump its nuclear waste onto these moons, thereby killing that life."
Give me a break dimwit. If those plans do not include a final disposal by a jupiter intercept, something we've been pretty carefull about and did because we didn't want to affect any other moon, and Europa was always first in the lists of 'do not disturb' items, then its very likely the plan will not be approved even to the point of drawing up flight profiles.
Sheesh, another enviro-terrorist.
Now, to change the subject slightly, I find it a stretch to make the connection between the use of thermal power supplies and their ability to support far more capable electronics, both of which will increase the mass of the vehicle, with the ability to carry the additional fuel that will allow the manuvering. Thats a fur piece out there to one of them moons, and to carry the fuel, even after retrograde skims of jupiter itself to scrub off the velocity and allow an orbital insertion around the farthest moon, seems either to be very fuel intensive, or extremely computer intensive in that they would need to do the same slingshot moves to get down to each of the other 3 moons.
All of which will take time of course, but the craft can be considered as being considerably more robust if it doesn't have to worry about being beat to death by its own solar panels if it fired a thruster big enough to do its move in a reasonable time.
Maybe someone more expert at orbital mechanics can comment on how this can be done?
The question then is how does one establish the linkage in such a manner that it would be traceable in a court of law.
Besides that, the sponsor(s) of that bill are very well known indeed for their warped sense of what the public wants. Schumers anti-gun bias is legendary for instance. He fails to understand that because we have the 2nd amendment here in the states, he still has the first. Without the 2nd, the first would long ago have become a footnote, and probably edited out by now by the history revisionists, in this country's history.
I'm a very firm believer in history, pretty or ugly, and some of it is ugly indeed, being factual, recorded once as it happens by the eyewitnesses and carved forever in the granite of time. These jerks that would like to edit out that we used atomic weapons on Japan, or that claim we never had men walking on the moon, are attempting to modify the history being taught to the children for their own personal agenda. This does the children who are the next generation of governing adults a mind-boggling diss-service, one that should be handled with a length of rope and a nearby tree.
Put simply, any bill this man (and group) brings to the table is highly suspect for its unspoken motives. Be wary, be very wary, of this bill.
Can you supply the lines to put into ones iptables.sh file to facilitate this? Or better yet, a small script that opens up the ports when you want them open, and slams the door a few hours later when the traffic has trickled off?
Thats for those of us who aren't confident in messing with our iptables setups.
>TV broadcasters are using the spectrum that belongs to the US taxpayers, and arent paying a cent to do so
What the heck are you smoking? I'd like to sample it sometime when I've got a week to recover my sanity.
While we are undoubtedly getting a very large discount on a 6 mhz wide hunk of spectrum, let me assure you that by the time the legal beagles add on their fees in addition to the fcc re-newall fees, our 'license to broadcast' is far from free, and will probably pay your salary rather comfortably for multiple months.
Then your broadcaster and your cable system have agreed to disagree, and its time to start lobbying both to rectify that.
First, let me state that I'm a semi-retired C.E. of a small market tv station, with 40 years in broadcastings technical back rooms, so at least you'll know my credentials to speak to the issue at hand.
Back when even the big time cable ops had to pickup an off-air signal from someplace, and often microwave it to their headend for final mixing, the 'local' off-air signal was often left at second rate, a situation that has grown worse since the fcc started allowing the cable folks to sell their own commercials. If the broadcaster really leans on the cable folks for a bad signal, they can sometimes fix it for a few months, but there isn't any payoff for them in maintaining it as the best signal on their system when its a 100% cost item to them.
This of course leads to a natural bias skew in the ratings because the cable signals, usually obtained from a satellite and therefore pretty clean, were often of higher quality than the local off air signals they also carried.
This satellite-ization of the cables signal distribution medium has lead to a generalized desertion of the hilltop antenna farms the cable folks used to maintain, and to chase them back down into the valley's where they won't get 5 grand worth of equipment blown to hell everytime somebody calls that stuff butter and mother nature objects.
So what have we as broadcasters done to facilitate competing against that? In our case, its relatively easy as the glass fibre used to interconnect the various cable systems goes right by our studios. So we now feed the cable systems in 2 major population areas with a signal straight out of the studio switcher, instantly making our signal quality at least the equal of any of their satellite feeds.
They (the local cable folks here) were damned glad to get a quality signal, actually 2 of them, for almost free. We also program another non-broadcast channel for their use. This non-broadcast channel is dragging in enough markers in the ratings books that we are actually making a small profit on it.
This alone, has been worth 3 to 5 points in the ratings books for the main over the air channel, and has long ago paid off the approximately 8 thousand we had to spend to get the 4 channel fibre transmitter/receiver installed at both ends of a 39km fibre. Cable ran the fibre into our studio and we had to furnish the interfaceing on both ends.
The downside is that the studio is often monitoring the cable instead of the off-air, and transmitter problems that used to be cause for burning rubber are treated with considerably more restraint now.
I'd like also to make note that the 90% penetration figures being bandied around in this thread are not true, by quite a few percentage points locally, where the cable penetration is not more than 65%, the dish folks having a good share too.
But lets be reminded that the dish folks also charge out the yang, often approaching 90 bucks a month according to one daughter who has it. All those promo's that get you to buy it in the first place have a nasty tendency to expire, and the normal bill soon gets the dish tossed in the bin for those who really cannot afford that kind of a monthly bill.
But we are still free for the taking if you want to put up an antenna. Many retired folks find themselves reduced to that as there simply isn't room in the SS check for a monthly cable or dish bill.
Anyone who wants to take away that free option and replace it with yet another toy band is thinking in terms of the elitist, not the general population. Thats the equivalent of Ms. Antoinette's famous statement "Well, let them eat cake" when told that the commoners had no bread.
That attitude has no place in the 'Land of the Free'. It would become valid only if enough 'dish' bandwidth were to be launched so that every over the air broadcaster could ha
I don't know if this has been pointed out before, but the readers here should understand that within the states, Barbara is probably the single most famous person of the Jewish faith, and as such is a target for all the terrorists who are out to wage war on the Jews, wherever they live.
She went private, didn't perform in public at all for 10 years because she had received a death threat from one of them, long before Ollie North started worrying about Osama.
I don't blame her a bit. Her bodyguards have occasionally been accused of doing their job too well. In her shoes, I'd complement them when they do make the papers cause it tells the rest of the world to bring a lunch if they want to do harm.
The lady has 'class', and a hell of a voice to go with it, but those are dangerous shoes to walk around in.
I sincerely hope not. But, from the way I read the announcement, there is not a heck of a lot that can be done to prevent it. It needed, but didn't get, some kind of a codicil that warned anyone who had that in mind that if they did, their technologies presence in the standard was automaticly, and instantly, removed from the standard, with no further action required on the part of the W3C group.
OTOH, the rambus thing has pretty well played itself out because it forced the R & D that brought other, pretty competitive methods to the everyday production of cheap, low power, fast memories. They may have a signed agreement with 3 or 4 memory makers now, but my guess is that when we're another 3 years down the log rambus will be moot, starved to death by having their technology leap frogged as they rightly should be. Had I been a memory maker, caught in that little catch 22, I would have sued the jedec committee as a whole for 50% of the damages, with that member of the committee whose complicity allowed that to occur being named as the other 50%, plus any punitive and legal fees to be funded by that person and his company. All members of that committee were, from what I've read, aware of the conflict of interest and chose to ignore it, hoping it would just go away. There has been the usual expected denials all around of course, but the testimony I've read seems to indicate otherwise. They failed to take a clue from the gif debacle, which should make the committee as a whole responsible for that lack of oversight. That certainly seems like a winable case in civil court to me, FWTW. But then, I'm a CET, not a lawyer.
As a CET, oriented toward RF and video technology, where proper signal terminations are king, I've looked over the rambus technology enough to see its warts, and that those warts are not easily removeable when production tolerances enter into the picture.
I totally fail to see why anyone in their right mind would ever attempt to bring a motherboard design to production that used rambus. Under lab conditions its fast (and hot, don't forget that its terminations are power hungry), under production tolerance conditions, it looks like a 75% warranty return rate nightmare to me.
Slashdot Mirror
'scuse me? in the normal gas from burning powder pushed situation, yes. The peak chamber pressure at the point of the bullets being pushed into the rifleing is going to be 15,000psi+ or you have a stuck bullet. And this with soft, copper clad, lead core bullets in sporting arms.
There is no way in hell that thing can get up enough energy to engrave the barrels rifleing into an iron bullet. First, the barrel has to be magneticly transparent & very thin so the coils can be as close as possible. There are some stainless alloys that are transparent for low frequencies, but for the frequencies that uses, 2/3rds of the energy would be wasted generating eddy currents in the barrel if it were conductive. throw in the fact that those types of stainless are softer than the iron in the bullet, the bullet would more than likely just make the barrel bulge to fit the size of the bullet.
In other words, the bullet is as tough as any potential barrel materiel, and barrel wear and tear would be very high, much like our military cannon in multi-inch sizes are. Some of those have to have the powder charge raised a few pounds with each and every fireing because the wear rate is so high. Ask any retired navy gunners mate, or dig up Col. Townsend Whalen, who wrote the definitive book on the subject.
No, IMO the iron bullet precludes a conductive barrel materiel, and rifleing of any kind unless there is a thin sabot involved, and I saw no references to that in the rather thin web page. Adding the sabot also increases the distance to the coils, fubaring the efficiency at the same time.
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Cheers, Gene
Ahh, yes, silence, nice concept. Nice but flawed. Once the power is ramped up to achieve more than paint gun power, the noise will come along with the bullet speed, getting several magnitudes louder if the bullet can actually be made to move at or above mach 1. That part of physics cannot be made to go away unless one could build a soundproof pipe for the bullet to travel inside of on its way to the target.
And that is going to be a hell of a lot harder to hide than the gun itself.
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Cheers, Gene
Interesting concept. Just one Q though, as it doesn't seem to be discussed on the site in the link, and that is how does it achieve the effect of a normal rifled barrel in causeing the iron bullet to spin and therefore be stabilized in flight?
You can buy and sell copyrights
And thereby hangs the tale of why copyrights are a bad idea.
Don't get me wrong, I think the person who does a unique work in any field should have the full benefit of copyright protection that the law can give he/she.
But in my opinion, that work is his or hers, and the copyright cannot be transfered, and should terminate in a reasonable time frame that might even be adjustable according to the type of the work. Music, and similar more or less timeless stuff, would seem to need a much longer copyright lifetime than things technical, such as computer software which can be rendered obsolete in a heartbeat.
That doesn't mean the author cannot sell the right to make copies to a publisher, but that should be a seperate contract, possibly exclusive (in which case the holder of the exclusivity should be the one to defend it, based on the fact that most publishers who would like to profit from the exclusive publication have much deeper pockets that the owner of the copyright would generally have) and be treated totally independant of the actual copyright itself.
To me, selling the actual copyright is like selling one of your children, it shouldn't be done, ever.
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Cheers, Gene
If people would just realize that they're gonna have to give up a little more of their paycheck if they want (more) decent teachers, then we'd already be on our waying to fixing this problem.
.05%, so anybody with more than 2 or 3 of their 3.2% beer's in them was an automatic gime.
.1%, and privatized the liquor business. It did give them a free cot in the prison system occasionally, and probably doubled the number of DWI related traffic fatalities. It also meant they had to pay for the schools out of the general fund.
.08% at one point many years ago.
Yeah, well lets look at a bit of history that I'm fam with, having lived through it.
60 some years ago when I was in grammer school, the state where I was born used the proceeds of the state liquor stores to finance the school systems, with an occasional small levy for a major construction project. In those years the literacy rate in Iowa was 99.98%. Then in about the 1960 time frame, the legislators got the goody 2 shoes attitude that the state really shouldn't be in the business of selling anything with as bad a history as alcohol has, why the state prisons were overflowing with drunk drivers! At that point, the BAC for a DWI citation was
So they raised the BAC to
To me that was a false economy on both fronts. Because the educational funding then was a visible item in the taxes, there was much more reticence in passing adequate funding levels for the educational system. Obviously Iowa isn't claiming that 99.98% literacy rate today, although I do have one grandchild who had to move in with her grandmother in Iowa since the Nebraska schools were failing miserably with a 2 star or better student. Now 10 years old, and about to graduate from high school with all A's. College bound to study medicine. You will I think, hear her name in connection with a major discovery in another 15 or so years.
I don't know what the current BAC for a DWI cite is today, but I do know they lowered it back to
I can say that because I had the advantage of a well funded educational system back then, that it really hasn't bothered me in my ability to earn a decent living. People are often surprised to learn that I have only an 8th grade education, particularly when they also know that I have lassoed electrons for a living for the last 54 years, the last 39 in broadcast engineering.
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Cheers, Gene
"If nothing else, I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of ruling against header spoofing and taking over others' server bandwidth. Spammers have been going to great lengths to keep themselves anonymous and to steal bandwidth."
/. wanted a "handle", so thats what they got.
I agree violently with this. I use my real name in my email address, and won't likely ever change that. "I" have no reason to lie to anybody about who I am.
Now, if it were legislated that the return address of a piece of spam must be to the person responsible for sending the spam, a person who is readily looked up in the phone book in case you wanted to call he/she/it up and tell them off, then we have 2 things.
1st of course is a valid from address we can black hole while its still on the server with any good pop filter.
2nd, if the goods or services offered aren't as advertised, there is a trail leading back to the jerk that tried to take you. And there are huge advantages to that which need no explanation.
3rd of course is that it will never work unless there is an easily applied fine of 10 million dollars or so for violating the return address rule. One that splits that collected fine between the victim bringing the evidence and the enforcement agency doing the foreclosing and all it should take is a good paper trail linkage establishing that the message in the printout was indeed sent by the perp you are trying to collect from. If the perp doesn't have it to pay, then you collect all available property includeing the all the vehicles, bank accounts, houses and other real estate and boats, hold it while the courts are ruling on the validity of the evidence, and when thats been done in the afirmative call the judgement paid and split the proceeds of the courthouse steps sale. And if the court doesn't affirm, then the charge bringer is held liable for the perps loses and the property is returned in as good a condition as when it was seized. That would make the charge bringer be very very sure he has the right perp.
The last thing you want to do is to send a message to the perp first because by the time the courts get around to entering the judgement, the perp will have had planty of time to move it all out of the country if its portable, or peddled and the cash deposited in a Swiss Bank if its not.
I'd call that a law with teeth, teeth sharp enough it would be obeyed...
But its too simple, and the attorneys can't make a killing on it, so the chances of its passing are somewhere between point double-ought nothing and zero.
Cheers, Gene
'scuse me, but how are you going to blow the tanks when the exterior pressure is sufficient to keep your liquid CO2 liquid by a factor of 20+. CO2 can be kept liquid at a pressure of a few hundred psi at room temps, somewhat less at the somewhat lower water temp. In the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the external pressure is in the range of 15,500 psi. Your liquid CO2 may even be a solid.
What you do is drop (release) the ballast weight that made it heavier than water and become lighter, in the case of the Trieste, something like 9 tons of ballast was released when it was time to come back up.
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Cheers, Gene, who knows a wee bit about the Trieste since it was wearing tv cameras I helped build when it made that dive. I was working as an ET at Oceanographic Engineering in San Diego at the time.
Touche'
:-)
I think you are probably at least 150% correct. As a broadcast engineer, I know full well the battle for the eyeball is made or broken in 30 seconds any time of the day or night, and has been that way since they invented the first remote control that actually worked.
But don't blame it all on the media, and bandwidth starvation. There is as much of a bandwidth limit on the receiving end (the human receiver that is) as there is on the sending end.
The humans ability to absorb info varies some from individual to individual of course, but being on the upper side of the curve, I've found that my bull shit detector seems to work quite well at least 95% of the time. Even so, I do business with some of those types simply because I can let them run down, and then rebutt their blather in such positive terms they haven't any defense. At that point, their bluff has been called, and we can deal. And strange as it may seem, some of those have turned out to be pretty darned good friends over the years.
Maybe they aren't used to having somebody say yes, stick out a hand to shake on it, and once its shook on it WILL be done. But thats how I work 90% of the time. The other 10% I get it in writing. Safer that way when they cannot deny it
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Cheers, Gene
Well, in their shoes, when they see the sales backlash from not having the label dislayed, they are going to put it back on & let Phillips sue. Thats of course if they have any customer reports to point them in that direction, otherwise they'll continue to blame the plummeting sales on piracy and press for even more draconian laws.
They are totally failing to understand 2 things. First being that the public is damned tired of hearing a song on the radio, liking it well enough to go buy the album with its other 17 tracks of pure trash filler on it, and then finding the cut they bought it for and finding that cut is a totally different mix of what is probably a different recording session and it too sucks.
Second, while I appreciate that we need new blood behind the mikes to keep things going, the overall emphasis is so lopsided against the more seasoned, and therefore probably more expen$ive artists that the old standards who still can draw a sellout crowd anytime they step up to the mike, cannot buy airtime or an album contract for any kind of money.
Those two effects have caused a serious reduction in the overall quality, both sonicly and artisticly, of whats in the bin at dear old wallyworld, so noticeable that the last few cd's I've bought, were ordered on the network, from artists who wouldn't touch the RIAA with a rifle bullet. And they're making a bit of money doing it. Go check out Janis Ian's site. Its a good example, and right decent music even to this old farts CW trained ears.
Of course if they get sued, the only defense they could possibly offer is insanity. There seems to be more than enough of that to go around these days.
I'm repeating myself of course, but whatever happened to good old honesty? It seems to be about as extinct as the dodo bird today.
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Cheers, Gene
The fix for that is real simple. When the customer starts objecting, hand him/her over to the supervisor/store owner/whomever is in charge.
As a min wage peon, I don't think your having to put up with me when I'm unhappy (and thats not at all pretty) is in your job description, and I'm all too happy to have the 'discussion' elevated to someone who should give a shit. Its the only way to send a message, and be heard far enough up the chain from the poor minwager at the counter that it won't be forgotten at quitting time. Hopefully...
Pass it off to the boss, its his decision, not yours anyway. When he gets enough of it, he'll fix it.
In the meantime, he is paying you the same amount per hour to restock the rejected items as he is when you are at the register, so I'm not sure I see the problem there. Treat it as a break from jerky customers like me.
As far as the initial outburst that got managements attention, and its effect on you, be aware that I will often go back and apologize to you because I'm fully aware, and you should be too, that its often fake anger, designed to get the managements attention in the first place.
Its unfortunate that one often has to resort to such actions to make a point, the point being that if he wants my money, he will give working product. He is an ass who passes that job off to you. Find another job if you can and let him know that you know what sort of people he seems to be.
I do for one, because I live here. And I can tell you right damned fast that if the congresscritters actually listened to something besides their wallet, that law would have been laughed out of existance before it ever got out of committee.
When that thing was up for discussion I sent my critter my views on it, and its damaging effects on technology in general. He voted for it anyway, and he has not had my vote since.
And you are right to see that law as the technology smothering law that it is.
ISTR that Phillips put the industry on notice over 2 years ago, that the CD could not carry the 'logo' we've all come to ignore if it was copy protected.
In case you haven't noticed, the CD or Conpact Disk Digital Audio logo has all but dissappeared from the display bins, even at CitGo/7-11.
If it doesn't carry the logo, it gets dropped back in the bin like the trash it is.
Re your sig, I started programming on a 1.79 mhz RCA 1802 cpu, where it took 8 of those 1.79 mhz cycles for one machine cycle. You had it good, or you had it bad, depending on ones point of view. That cpu was a most unusual one, having features that were well before its time that made programming rather productive if used. I generated a new academy countdown for tv commercials with some simple TTL circuitry and 6 bytes of dma per vertical scan. Your 8088 couldn't do that with 10k of code.
Well, for one thing, you haven't read the article well enough. At least one of the elements under test is gold, which is quite a ways on up the heavy end of the periodic table from iron. Iron is the point where the balance of matter in vs energy out reverses.
I mention iron because when a star runs out of fuel, the star collapses until it has enough pressure and temperature to start the next fusion process, each one from the hydrogen->helium stage requireing more heat and pressure to maintain. Quite a few steps up the ladder it will finally get to making iron. I forget what out of unforch, I'm not a nuclear physicist.
But theres a minor detail to making iron, and ALL the heavier elements by the fusion method, it takes more energy that it releases to make iron. At that point, the core cools, and can no longer support the rest of the star. More materiel falls into the core heating it back up again until the next reaction gets started, and the scenario repeats, this on a time scale considerably under a minute, and in fact limited by the local speed of sound which in ultradense material is a good fraction of C.
Basicly the star collapses into itself, with 2 possible outcomes. Heavy stars can collapse into a neutron star and may well bounce a considerable portion of the fusion byproducts back out into space in the form of a super nova. The really heavy ones may even collapse to a black hole.
The one that bounce are where ALL the iron and heavier elements come from, and a goodly share of the carbon we're made out of was once in the heart of an ageing star that went boom at the end of its life.
What they are doing in the accelerator is creating a very unstable and short lived version of the core of a collapsing star at about the point of its bounce if it doesn't hit black hole density.
This takes energy, huge amounts of it, most of which is absorbed. I would in fact be interested in finding out if the end product was still a gold ion when two of them meet at relativistic speeds.
My guess is something heavier if it could be caught in sufficient quantities to analyze.
OTOH, once the plasma cools a few femtoseconds, probably enough identifiable particles will be ejected, which is what they are actually looking at, and the end result might well be identifiably gold, but fewer of them than went in.
Thats the problem with these little public announcements, they dumb the data down trying to make Joe Sixpack understand it, removing 95% of the usefull data that we might be able to add up and come to a conclusion.
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Cheers, Gene
When I first got a dsl connection I figured I'd better lock a few more doors, so I did the sensible thing (I thought) at the time and bought a 'home' router, a Seimans 2604. It had built in PPPoE and made the hookup pretty transparent.
I'd had it about a week and was still playing with its settings, when one evening it refused to let me access it from its web server.
After an hours worth of unsuccessfully messing with that, I got to thinking maybe I had been attacked, but I have some guard dogs standing by that will log that, and at least attempt to lock the purps out.
Apparently the locks held, but there was a new line in hosts.deny placed there by the guard dog that recorded the address of the incoming attack that set off the guard dog.
There was also a new rule in the iptables ruleset, also placed by the guard dog, portsentry-1.1.
That was my clue that all was not well, and that possibly that the router was now a man in the middle. Or something.
The router went back to C.C. the next day, and a linksys was brought home, which has not allowed any repeats of that, in fact its blocked everything as no further logs have been written since.
The address of the attack source? One of the verizon.com dns servers I was supposed to be useing. The attack was reported to verizon at the time of discovery, but the veracity has been neither denied, nor confirmed in the past 2+ months since it happened by verizon.
Make of it what you will. Linux saved the day AFAIAC.
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Cheers, Gene
A mostly retired old coot
Apparently so, and its having a tendency to give me the willies since I'm a kde fan.
Question: How much of Troll-Tech does Canopy own? Controlling interest, or just a pain-in-the-butt seat at the board meeting table?
Gnome may be just as capable as kde, but 'user-friendly' when trying to configure it, it ain't, and in the relatively small number of times I've played with it, it wasn't very stable. The task bar dissappeared, and the best recommendation the gnome guys could come up with was to reinstall. 'scuse me?
So what does happen if the guys & girls at Troll-Tech decide that the makefile is only going to format the hard drive if it finds itself running on UW box?
Thats an extreme case of course, and would be prosecutable in most jurisdictions, but there is nothing to stop kde from becoming very dumb and basic if built on a UW box. Stub functions that only return a 0?
I'd expect the canopy folks to send in a new CEO with orders to fix it, possibly messing with the licenseing in the process just because he took lessons from Darl.
Now that scares the hell out of me. And it should scare the rest of the open source proponents too.
But I hope the potential newbie Troll-Tech CEO is watching the debacle Darl M. is manufacturing since he took over SCO. In the end, which we haven't seen anyplace but in our highly biased crystal balls, if it comes out according to the huge quantities of our own wishfull thinking, that would send a pretty loud message that Darls methods aren't (and I'm being very charitable) optimum.
I think this is a case where letting that dog sleep for a bit longer might be in order. If, and when, IBM is vindicated in court, then it would appear to be time to take UW off the supported list until such time as they are willing to pay for the port in programmers salaries. Or go tits up. That seems only fair to me for all the headaches they've gleefully given us in the last 60 some days.
Just an old mans $0.02
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Cheers, Gene
"There is nothing stupider than someone who tailgates someone on a bike..."
Except the biker who lets him tailgate. The average bike is fully capable in such a situation, of pulling into the gap between 2 vehicles in the right lane and matching speeds with those vehicles long before there is any danger of colliding with the vehicle in front. I've done it many times.
Let me repeat what the teachers will tell you, learn what that bike can do when pushed, then make such responses automatic, it will save you ass. That means you must keep in 'practice'. I realised about 4 years ago, coming up on my 65th that my reflexes weren't up to that anymore, so I did the wise thing and sold it to someone younger.
I have also, sitting at traffic lights, realized the vehicle approaching in my mirrors wasn't going to stop, kicked it over on the right peg and jumped the curb with the front tire fully airborne, then set it back down and stopped and watched both vehicles get completely totalled in my mirrors. This was about 20 years ago when the reflexes were still sharp.
The curb I was jumping was the one in front of the old Hecks/Big Bear shopping area in Ashland Ky. I did that bit of 'getting the hell out of crunch' twice in 2 weeks at the same light! Unforch, Darwin wasn't awarding either driver, they survived. But I'd be willing to bet some sucker insurance company wrote checks for over $100k in each of those two wrecks.
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Cheers, Gene
" Actually, I seem to recall that in some states with metered lights motorcyclists did not trip the sensor in order to change the lights. I've heard several stories of bikers having to get off their bikes, run to the corner, press the pedestrian walk button, and run back to their bikes to avoid breaking the law by running a red light at an intersection with no traffic for miles in any direction."
Yeah, this reminds me of a light located at the intersection of US50 and I-79, at the end of the I-79 southbound exit ramp.
The coil in the concrete went to hell or something, and traffic that wanted to turn left was reduced to ripping out across 4 lanes of oncoming traffic during gaps in the traffic, which was doing an average of 55-60 mph at that point.
On my GS-550, I sat behind a honey wagon that must have massed 30k pounds, while he walked his back axles back and forth in the loop trying to trigger it. Maybe 10 minutes to get thru the intersection which was known locally as suicide gulch due the number and severity of the wrecks that took place there when the damned light was working.
I'd even called the hiway dept squawking about it a couple of times. But apparently the lights were on but nobody was home.
Somewhere along the line somebody managed to bash the pole the control box was on. Didn't hurt the box but it was hanging off-kilter by 10 degrees or so, and that finally got the maintainance crews attention. I pulled up and stopped, noticed they were there, and proceeded to turn left and drive up to where he was working.
I said I hoped he was here to fix the light since it hadn't responded to traffic sitting in the coils for about 2 months. He said, no he wasn't here to fix the light, just bolt the box back up straight. I don't suffer fools gladly and saw red instantly. My next statement was that I knew where there was a cache of very old dynamite, (17 years later its still there!) and if that light wasn't fixed sensitive enough to see my bike by the next morning when I came through, the box would be subjected to about 4 old, real greasy sticks, a fresh cap and a 5 minute fuse.
He started to sputter and I said it again, this time very quietly.
He wrote down the plate number on my bike, but as I pulled away to get back in line, I noticed he was finally paying attention to the piled up traffic. It took me about 15 minutes to get back to the light and another 5 to get through it. All of which he watched from his truck with a microphone in his hand. I half expected the sheriff to come calling on me at work, but nothing ever came of it.
But, the light was fixed the next morning, even sensitive enough to see my 430 lb bike when I pulled over the loop. I was a Happy Camper(TM).
The threat was idle of course, that stuff is so old I walk very quietly, using my deer hunting stride, around it. OTOH, I have a history of walking in where angels fear to go and coming back out upright. So who knows...
I have no opinion on the red light cams as long as they don't shorten the yellow to bring in the cash. Links given elsewhere in this thread are now bookmarked in case I need them however.
But its been a while since I last had a ticket, and in 54+ years behind the wheel, I have yet to turn anything with more than 2 wheels greasy side up. I do drive the missus bonkers over my driving at times, she had drivers ed, and I treat a moving vehicle as a ballistic missile in that to change direction/speed you have to figure closing speeds, traction problems and all that well before you get to the immovable object. My margin of safety is a couple of feet, hers is 50 yards. Guess who's bent more fenders by a factor of infinity since we got hitched. The body shop bills have totalled nearly 3 grand in 14 years. All on her van...
She always figures that guy is gonna stop at the stop sign, and I never do until he is both completely stopped AND looking at me. And I already have an escape route planned in case he comes through it and I don't have traction enough to do a stoppie. Old bike riders either develop that sense when they are still young, or the bike will kill them, its that simple.
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Cheers, Gene
"The probe will then dump its nuclear waste onto these moons, thereby killing that life."
Give me a break dimwit. If those plans do not include a final disposal by a jupiter intercept, something we've been pretty carefull about and did because we didn't want to affect any other moon, and Europa was always first in the lists of 'do not disturb' items, then its very likely the plan will not be approved even to the point of drawing up flight profiles.
Sheesh, another enviro-terrorist.
Now, to change the subject slightly, I find it a stretch to make the connection between the use of thermal power supplies and their ability to support far more capable electronics, both of which will increase the mass of the vehicle, with the ability to carry the additional fuel that will allow the manuvering. Thats a fur piece out there to one of them moons, and to carry the fuel, even after retrograde skims of jupiter itself to scrub off the velocity and allow an orbital insertion around the farthest moon, seems either to be very fuel intensive, or extremely computer intensive in that they would need to do the same slingshot moves to get down to each of the other 3 moons.
All of which will take time of course, but the craft can be considered as being considerably more robust if it doesn't have to worry about being beat to death by its own solar panels if it fired a thruster big enough to do its move in a reasonable time.
Maybe someone more expert at orbital mechanics can comment on how this can be done?
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Cheers, Gene
The question then is how does one establish the linkage in such a manner that it would be traceable in a court of law.
Besides that, the sponsor(s) of that bill are very well known indeed for their warped sense of what the public wants. Schumers anti-gun bias is legendary for instance. He fails to understand that because we have the 2nd amendment here in the states, he still has the first. Without the 2nd, the first would long ago have become a footnote, and probably edited out by now by the history revisionists, in this country's history.
I'm a very firm believer in history, pretty or ugly, and some of it is ugly indeed, being factual, recorded once as it happens by the eyewitnesses and carved forever in the granite of time. These jerks that would like to edit out that we used atomic weapons on Japan, or that claim we never had men walking on the moon, are attempting to modify the history being taught to the children for their own personal agenda. This does the children who are the next generation of governing adults a mind-boggling diss-service, one that should be handled with a length of rope and a nearby tree.
Put simply, any bill this man (and group) brings to the table is highly suspect for its unspoken motives. Be wary, be very wary, of this bill.
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Cheers, Gene
Can you supply the lines to put into ones iptables.sh file to facilitate this? Or better yet, a small script that opens up the ports when you want them open, and slams the door a few hours later when the traffic has trickled off?
Thats for those of us who aren't confident in messing with our iptables setups.
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Cheers, Gene
>TV broadcasters are using the spectrum that belongs to the US taxpayers, and arent paying a cent to do so
What the heck are you smoking? I'd like to sample it sometime when I've got a week to recover my sanity.
While we are undoubtedly getting a very large discount on a 6 mhz wide hunk of spectrum, let me assure you that by the time the legal beagles add on their fees in addition to the fcc re-newall fees, our 'license to broadcast' is far from free, and will probably pay your salary rather comfortably for multiple months.
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Cheers, Gene
>Cable just looks like CRAP.
Then your broadcaster and your cable system have agreed to disagree, and its time to start lobbying both to rectify that.
First, let me state that I'm a semi-retired C.E. of a small market tv station, with 40 years in broadcastings technical back rooms, so at least you'll know my credentials to speak to the issue at hand.
Back when even the big time cable ops had to pickup an off-air signal from someplace, and often microwave it to their headend for final mixing, the 'local' off-air signal was often left at second rate, a situation that has grown worse since the fcc started allowing the cable folks to sell their own commercials. If the broadcaster really leans on the cable folks for a bad signal, they can sometimes fix it for a few months, but there isn't any payoff for them in maintaining it as the best signal on their system when its a 100% cost item to them.
This of course leads to a natural bias skew in the ratings because the cable signals, usually obtained from a satellite and therefore pretty clean, were often of higher quality than the local off air signals they also carried.
This satellite-ization of the cables signal distribution medium has lead to a generalized desertion of the hilltop antenna farms the cable folks used to maintain, and to chase them back down into the valley's where they won't get 5 grand worth of equipment blown to hell everytime somebody calls that stuff butter and mother nature objects.
So what have we as broadcasters done to facilitate competing against that? In our case, its relatively easy as the glass fibre used to interconnect the various cable systems goes right by our studios. So we now feed the cable systems in 2 major population areas with a signal straight out of the studio switcher, instantly making our signal quality at least the equal of any of their satellite feeds.
They (the local cable folks here) were damned glad to get a quality signal, actually 2 of them, for almost free. We also program another non-broadcast channel for their use. This non-broadcast channel is dragging in enough markers in the ratings books that we are actually making a small profit on it.
This alone, has been worth 3 to 5 points in the ratings books for the main over the air channel, and has long ago paid off the approximately 8 thousand we had to spend to get the 4 channel fibre transmitter/receiver installed at both ends of a 39km fibre. Cable ran the fibre into our studio and we had to furnish the interfaceing on both ends.
The downside is that the studio is often monitoring the cable instead of the off-air, and transmitter problems that used to be cause for burning rubber are treated with considerably more restraint now.
I'd like also to make note that the 90% penetration figures being bandied around in this thread are not true, by quite a few percentage points locally, where the cable penetration is not more than 65%, the dish folks having a good share too.
But lets be reminded that the dish folks also charge out the yang, often approaching 90 bucks a month according to one daughter who has it. All those promo's that get you to buy it in the first place have a nasty tendency to expire, and the normal bill soon gets the dish tossed in the bin for those who really cannot afford that kind of a monthly bill.
But we are still free for the taking if you want to put up an antenna. Many retired folks find themselves reduced to that as there simply isn't room in the SS check for a monthly cable or dish bill.
Anyone who wants to take away that free option and replace it with yet another toy band is thinking in terms of the elitist, not the general population. Thats the equivalent of Ms. Antoinette's famous statement "Well, let them eat cake" when told that the commoners had no bread.
That attitude has no place in the 'Land of the Free'. It would become valid only if enough 'dish' bandwidth were to be launched so that every over the air broadcaster could ha
I don't know if this has been pointed out before, but the readers here should understand that within the states, Barbara is probably the single most famous person of the Jewish faith, and as such is a target for all the terrorists who are out to wage war on the Jews, wherever they live.
She went private, didn't perform in public at all for 10 years because she had received a death threat from one of them, long before Ollie North started worrying about Osama.
I don't blame her a bit. Her bodyguards have occasionally been accused of doing their job too well. In her shoes, I'd complement them when they do make the papers cause it tells the rest of the world to bring a lunch if they want to do harm.
The lady has 'class', and a hell of a voice to go with it, but those are dangerous shoes to walk around in.
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Cheers, Gene
I sincerely hope not. But, from the way I read the announcement, there is not a heck of a lot that can be done to prevent it. It needed, but didn't get, some kind of a codicil that warned anyone who had that in mind that if they did, their technologies presence in the standard was automaticly, and instantly, removed from the standard, with no further action required on the part of the W3C group.
OTOH, the rambus thing has pretty well played itself out because it forced the R & D that brought other, pretty competitive methods to the everyday production of cheap, low power, fast memories. They may have a signed agreement with 3 or 4 memory makers now, but my guess is that when we're another 3 years down the log rambus will be moot, starved to death by having their technology leap frogged as they rightly should be. Had I been a memory maker, caught in that little catch 22, I would have sued the jedec committee as a whole for 50% of the damages, with that member of the committee whose complicity allowed that to occur being named as the other 50%, plus any punitive and legal fees to be funded by that person and his company. All members of that committee were, from what I've read, aware of the conflict of interest and chose to ignore it, hoping it would just go away. There has been the usual expected denials all around of course, but the testimony I've read seems to indicate otherwise. They failed to take a clue from the gif debacle, which should make the committee as a whole responsible for that lack of oversight. That certainly seems like a winable case in civil court to me, FWTW. But then, I'm a CET, not a lawyer.
As a CET, oriented toward RF and video technology, where proper signal terminations are king, I've looked over the rambus technology enough to see its warts, and that those warts are not easily removeable when production tolerances enter into the picture.
I totally fail to see why anyone in their right mind would ever attempt to bring a motherboard design to production that used rambus. Under lab conditions its fast (and hot, don't forget that its terminations are power hungry), under production tolerance conditions, it looks like a 75% warranty return rate nightmare to me.
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Cheers, Gene
Damn, I wish you hadn't mentioned that.
Mr. Murphy you see, is alive and well, and now Senator Dizzy will bring up an emergency bill to get that patent extended for another 75 years.
Sometimes its better to just STFU.