"Move somewhere where the wind don't blow quite that much" =)
However, it amazing how soon after a 'total disaster' a system can be up and running again. I distinctly recalls seeing a lot about just that in the paper (the one made from dead wood) after 9/11. Kudos, I say!.
...just remember: when people stop buying photoshop and ms office, americans lose jobs.
And why would people in the nordic countries even bother careing about that? It is not the responsibility of the nordic goverments to make sure you has a job - it is the responsibility of your goverment. Despite how much you may wish for it, it the world isn't here to provide the softwaregiants of the US with a ready marked for their badly translated programs.
Open-source programmes for small language areas have the advantage over license-based programmes that the users are allowed to adapt the source code. This means that the programmes can be translated and play an important role in the struggle by small countries to maintain their linguistic and national identities.
And boy do we need that up here in Ultima Thule. Lets count shall we? On the surface, we have swedish, danish, norwegian, icelandic and finnish to take into account - thats five major launguages (allthought norwegians, danes and swedes can understand eachother - we just choose not to).
However....
In sweden, sami is an offical second language. In Norway, we have bokmal (mainstream 'wegian), nynorsk ('new norwegian', based on the dialects) and sami as official launguages. In Finland, you have both finnish and 'finlandssvenska' (finlandswedish) to cope with. The danes and icelanders are easily the best off, with just one launguge each. So that gives us a total of nine launguage-variants that the writer of software ought to cater for... in a region with just over 25 million inhabitants. Can we seriously expect the big corps to cater to this marked? Not really, and that makes OSS the best alternative in order to make sure we get software in our own language.
It's not about 'lost jobs', it's about attitude.
on
Wendy Seltzer Interviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
How about focusing on "equal oppertunities" instead, and hire the best person for the job, with no regard to gender, skincolour, cultural background or religion? I'm sure that will work out better, while at the same time makeing sure the rest of us don't have to hear people whine about how the new co-worker was hired just because she sits down when she pees (instead of standing up, like most guys do).
Off course the descission to send men into space is a political decission, as long as the only ones capabel of doing it is various goverments around the globe. The day the technologys has filtered down to where corps can do it, it'll be an echonomical decission, and I guess you'll oppose that as well.
We need to send a man to mars - No, we don't need to send a man anywhere. For that matter, we don't need to send robots either, or look in telescopes or even look up. No one is forcing our hands. But if we (or rather, the guys who sit on the moneybags) decide that mars should be explored, I do belive that we ought to send men there. A robot is limited by it's design and programming, and will be at a loss if it comes into a situation that its designers hadn't thought off. A man on the other hand is flexible and adaptable. Off course, that isn't to say we shoudl stop sending robots - we ought to do both.
We need man in space to mine exotic minerals from asteroids - Again, we don't need to do this, but if you're going to use those exotic materials in space anyway, it can make a lot of sence to mine them up there in huge quantities (some of the more serious suggestions I've read about is about mining the moon btw, not going hunting for an astroid) rather than to mine them down here - at the bottom of the gravitywell - and burn up lots and lots of fuel sending them up there.
We need man in space to establish the new frontier where people can go to live - Yet again, there is no need - today. But with the rate we are stripmining this planet for recourcess, it may be a good idea to start looking for a new neighbourhood. The day we really, really need to find a new place to expand, it is to late. Besides, by the logic you display here, the americas should never heve been needed to be colonised from Europe. After all, by the standards of the day, north america was as far away as the moon is today, and the enviroment was much less friendly. Couldn't they have have found places to live in Europe?
We don't need to go to space - but we don't need to have dreams either.
So, my cowardly friend, capsules do need to optimise their re-entry angle, even thought they are more or less selfstabelising once they have entered the atmosphere (ie, keeping the right side down).
Disclaimer: I don't have kids of my own (yet), but I'm the proud uncle of two.
There are a few things I've learned the last few years (and looking back on my own childhood, they become very clear):
- The simple, non-complex toys are played with more often than the high-tech gadgetry. My oldest niece plays a hundred times as much with her ragdolls and with her Barbie (*shudder*), than she do with the 'true to life' babydoll she got two years back. The fancy toys holds the kids interest for a short while, but they are very likely to return to the toys that allow them to play in freeform.
- Boys and girls do play difrently. From what I've seen, girls will go for the 'readymade toys' like dolls and pretend-stoves, while boys will seek out toys that allow they to create and modify, like Lego or Mechano (or even better; a hammer, some bits of wood and a handfull of nails).
- Kids today have, as a general rule and in the parts of the western world I've seen, more toys than they had when I grew up - and I'm not that old. My guess is that a lot of parents would rather buy toys for their kids than to play with their kids - and the rest are giving into peer-preasure.
...at least not when you consider what ought to be the primary focus of any schoolsystem: to give the children knowledge and prepare them for a life in the real world. A school is not a place you keep your kids until they are old enought to move out, it's supposed to be a place your kids are prepared to become a contributing member of society.
One may or may not like it, but for most kinds of work out there, the Wintel-platform is what it is all about. Working with office-apps? Chances are that you're not using a Mac. Accessing a database? I'll guess ten to one that the clientend is a windowsapp.
As long as the subject matter isn't one where the Mac dominate in the real world, schools shouldn't "miseducate" (sorry, I couldn't think of a word that fitted better) the pupils by using machines from Apple - weither or not they are better / cheaper to maintain / has more fancy colours than a wintel machine. If they do, they are not doing our children any favours.
Towards the end of school, say the last couple of years before people graduate, I think it would be wise to have a "general OS" class, teaching the pupils the basic of not just the wintel or the MacOS, but also divers flavours of Linux, BDS, Contiki and whatnot. Show the pupils that there are many more operatingsystems out there, each with a distinct set of pros and cons, and make them make up their own mind what they will use at home; because when they start working they will have to use whatever the company has decided on.
PS: the line 'Here and there you'll still find an original Mac -- not to mention a few Apple IIs -- hard at work in classrooms' isn't really saying anything about the longvity of the mac - but it does say a whole lot about the lack of proper funding of the schools.
The day before the grid went down, this was probaly dismissed by the CEO of the powercompanies, politicans and other top brass as 'too expencive' to install.
Today the very same people are likely to ask people lower down in the system why such a device wasn't installed in the first place.
Human nature I guess...
Anyway, there are other systems out there that can prevent a cascading failure like we say in the US now. Trouble is, every system - including the one described in the article - comes with a pricetag and a set of drawbacks. In this cause, I would suspect that keeping the supercondutors superconduting isn't free, neither in money or in energy.
Ah, so basicly we agree, but use some words differently. Thats cool with me. And I'm truely am sorry to hear you had an accident which stopped your carreer - as far as I'm conserned, I can't think of a better place to work, even thought the people in charge are a bunch of idiots.
Oh well... I take it you was what we refer to as an 'indian'? In other word, a common soldier? Things looks different in differnt armed forces son, and they sure looks different when you got some stuff on your shoulders like I do. So no, I don't really give the top brass - most of which are civilian politicans anyway - much credit.
As for your second paragraph.. beeing told something is not the same as it beeing true. True, the avrage US soldier carry more and newer equipment than most other soldiers... they train more (but not necesarely better), but equipment and training isn't everything. I've seen the 'wegian homeguards sweep the floor with the US marines, just because they knew the terrain and dared do stuff that the US brass thought impossible... I've seen big, beefy, sexy F-15 get shot down in simulated combat by F-5A's...
Working in the norwegian armed forces myself - who has been trying to tell our politicans that a) running a defence costs money, b) doing a lot of operations overseas costs more, and c) we could really need more and newer fighters, preferable by 1997, and some new tanks, rifles, chemical protection suits and naval ships wouldn't be out of the way - I would say this has a simple reason.
Buying 'more of the same' just ain't sexy enought.
Nor does it look impressive. Telling your mistress that you signed a deal for a score of flying gasstation is not as cool as telling her you just signed a goverment contract to develop an airportable selfdeploying P2P network with cellular jamming capability.
That, and we most not forget that the arnament industry in the western world is technologydriven. The defenceindustry comes up with something new and sexy, and off course the top brass goes along with it (see above for why). In the old eastern block, things worked (well, barly worked, but thats another matter) differently. The military went to the industry and said 'this is what we need, you have two years to come up with a solution'. Worked much better, at least as far as maintaining capabilities goes. A bit less so if your focus is on developing new capabilities thought...
...that seems to be mainly aimed at countering themselfs.
Wait, don't mod me down just yet; let me elaborate on that. Basicly, you have two situations when in a military conflict: Either you are invading, in which cause you depend on mobile, wireless communication. Or you're defending, and that means most of the time relying on fixed lines of communication (fiberoptic cables buried deep in the ground is a favorite). Now, if you're using fixed lines of communications, you don't have to worry to much about these. Sure, some forms of landlines are radiates energy that can be detected by the 'wolfpack', but I've yet to hear about any armed forces worth it's salt that don't use encryption these days. If you're attacking however, you need to carry your own coms. Most armed forces don't roll in money the way the US forces do, so most forces has to rely on older equipment, like the good old AN/PRC-77. And those can't be affected by a jammer designed to knock out cellular transmittions.
NASA did that with the Ranger-probes from 1961 onwards. They meet with success on the 31 July 1964 at 13:25:49 UT with Ranger 7. Off course, the ruskies was first out, crashing their Luna E-1A, which hardlanded on the moon on 14 September 1959.
As for some amateurs to do the same, I think that is a few years away at the best. For one thing, no amateurbuilt rocket has yet reached orbit, allthought several groups, like the norwegian NEAR has it as a stated project.
Re:Another "thing" they are working on
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Building a Better Bomb
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· Score: 2, Informative
The odd one - if we develop new load racks, you should be able to carry approximately 10 times more 50 lb bombs than you could 500 lb bombs
Not quite - there is way more to a bombrack than an eyebolt screwed into the wing of an airplane. For each bomb you'll need a pair of swaybraces to stabelice it while it's mounted on the plane, you'll need two plungers to ensure a clean seperation, you'll need two cartridges to produce the gas needed to operate the plungers (you want two to make sure the weapon lets go when it shall) and various sundry bits of wire - and if your weapons are guided, that adds even more wire. Thus, a bombrack designed for carreing ten small bombs will weight more than one designed for carreing one large one.
Also, one must consider what is refered to as parasite drag. Anything you stick on an aircraft casues drag - and two 500lbs bombs have more drag than one 1000lbs bomb, just as 4 250lbs bombs causes more drag than two 500lbs ones. A larger (longer / wider) bombrack will cause more drag than the slick design used for a single bomb.
When we (yes, I do work in the armed forces) talk about the weight of a bomb, we talk about the weight of the filled bombshell. Things like a guidancepackage is not really figured in until you strap it on and place the now guided weapon on the wing of your plane. And I can't honestly see that a modern guidancepackage can be made much lighter - maybe half as heavy, but not by a factor of ten.
To sum up; developing a bom that weight 1/10th of todays bomb while not allow you to carry ten times the number of bombs. I would guess six, maybe eight, times the number.
First, the X-price is about creating a sub-orbital craft, not an orbital one. Still, it's a valid question you ask.
Rockets to slow the capsule / spaceship down for rentry purposes has been used on every single manned spaceship I know of. They are called retro-rockets and are employed to initiate re-entry at the proper time and place to put the capsule / spaceship down where it's supposed to come down. The alternative is to stay in orbit until it dacays naturaly, and then who knows how long you will stay up there or where you will come down.
That said, I assume you knew that already and are wondering about rocketengines / other engines that can be used continualy for a logner period of time to brake the craft faster than purely aerodynamic braking can achive?
In theory it is nothing stopping you from trying that - apart from the weight of both engines and fuel. Not only does the rule of thumb tells us that for every kilogram you want to take into orbit, you'll burn ten kilograms of fuel to get it there, but as the engiens and fuel will have to be protected against the heat of re-entry, you nead a larger (thus heavier) heatshield as well as a larger (heavier) craft overall. And that in turns means - you guessed it - that you'll have to burn even more fuel getting it up there.
On the other hand, if you're simply suggesting dropping the relative groundvelocity of the craft to zero before it re-enetered the atmosphere, so it would drop straight down, I see two problems. Firstly, you would have to do it fast (since loss in speed means loss in altitude - thus meeting the atmosphere), which means an allmighty kick in the pants for the poor astronauts (very hight G). Secondly, the heatpulse would be about the same anyway - the craft will have a whooping huge potential energy from simply beeing that high, and that will be converted to kinetic energy (read; speed) on the way down. Remember Epot = mgh while Ekin = 1/2mv, and if we assume that all the potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy (which it ain't, a whole lot will turn into heat), we find that Epot = Ekin, thus mgh=1/2mv. Simplify, and you see that the speed (v) equals the square root of two times the height multiplied with the gravitatinal pull (v=sq(2gh) ). Thus, if we set the height to 100 km (100000 meter) and we assume that g is constant at 9.82ms, we find that the speed of the craft as it reaches the surface is no less than 1401.42 meter a second, equal to 5045kmh, equal to 3136mph, or about 4.25 Mach. So to summarise, you won't save anything by 'stopping' in your orbital tracks.
It is simple: One imperial mile is 1609 meter. One nautical mile is 1852 meter. One kilometer - which is the preferable way to measure distances if you have seen the light of the metric system - is 1000 meter. One norwegian mil is (at least in this day and age) 10000 meter (10 kilometer).
So they dropped it 18520 meters east of Mojave, or about what I would say was roughtly one-point-eight mil away from touchdown.
The competitors for the X-price are one after the other dropping their capsules / spaceships out of the sky to test at least part of their re-entry profile, and Burt Rutans entry at least flies like a dream (big surprice - he designs flyingmachiens for a living, don't he?). The X-price is running until January 1, 2005 (qoute; The X PRIZE is fully funded through January 1, 2005, through private donations and backed by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the day that the prize is won), giving the teams a little more than one year to launch, overhaul their machines and launch again.
I'm getting all excited over the prosects ahead of us. Never mind if the X-price succeds in jumpstarting the space-tourism or not - we're getting a taste of what the spacerace was like when the USA and the USSR were competing about getting the first man up into space, allthought this time all the teams are playing with open cards.
I'm willing to bet all my karma that we'll have the first launch before next summer; anyone willing to bet against it?
Bob the builder? As a IT mascot? I'm dumbfuzzled... we are talking of the animated doll who are routinly seen talking to his concrete-mixer, arn't we? Not an obvious choise for a IT-department I feel (even thought his motto of "Can we fix it? Yes, we can" seems appropriate).
Well, the PHB made the executive decision; I guess the blame for Evil Bob resides with him. Still, I feel that maybe Will E. Coyote would be a better pick - can anyone come up with more suggestions?
There is a full list of the teams at the x-price website. From the PDF file found there it appers that most of the "serious" contenders are based in either North America or Europe, but then the majority of the teams are from there anywhere (could be many reasons for that). A notable exception which I - with my reasonsable limited knowhow of building and launching manned rockets - believe might create a viable launchvehicle, is the Gauchito (The Little Cowboy) from Argentina.
Mind you, there are a few of the contestants who are rather barmy, and since most of the entries are from the western world, most of the oddballs are from there as well. Check out Micro Space, a somewhat redneck, risky way to get suborbital (more info at their own site, including info on how they plan on using scuba-gear to survive in the rarified atmosphere up there).
I share files (mostly porn thought, but the principle is the same as for music) and I care about the copytight laws.
With that, I mean that I believe - and will say in a loud and clear voice - that todays copyrightlaws are downright down and should be reworked. Five to ten years sounds like a reasonable time for a work to be copyrighted to me - or maybe a system simular to the patent-laws could be introduced, where it would cost the copyrightowner cold, hard cash to prolong the copyright of a particular work.
So you see, I care about the laws. Still don't stop me sharing files.
Ever noticed how time seems to fly past when you're having fun? Or how something boring can drag out for ever? Or even better, how a workday can seemingly be endless, but a week full of them is gone boefore you knew what happened?
While it is a good while since I studied physics, it tells me that while we can make clocks that appers to measure how fast times goes, we move 'along' in time in a more haphazard fashion, slowing and accelerating as we blunder on. Time might be the diminsion thats 90 on the other three (width, depth and lenght), but we have a lot more problems determining both an objects movement in that dimension and the position in it.
In short, while some of the article went over my head (I've just gotten out of bed y'know), I think he might be on to something.
ps: It's sorta scary to see that people whos very job it is to broaden our understanding can be horrible quick to judge ("I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection."), as that will only slow down the speed we as a society learns about the world around us. Someone might be off the mark, but it's hard to decide from the first two paragrahps they write.
pps: In Terry Pratches well know discworld-series, the classical paradox is about a tortoise outrunning an arrow instead. And off course, the real question is what to do with all the tortoises on a stick the testing of that axiom gives you...;P
Don't blame the rest of us for your education - high schools in Norway actualy covers the orbital mechanics as a special subset of the mechanics of movement if you pick natural sciences as one of your classes...
Anyway, the X-price is a competition to build and launch a 'spaceship' carreing 3 people to a minimum height of 100 kilometer (abb. km or just k) twice in the course of two weeks. Deploying a chute while 62.5 miles up in the air isn't all that smart - either you'll rip the chute or use a long time and a lot of crossrange to get down - so some for of thermal protection system ought to be included in the design. Since we're not talking orbital speeds here, this needs to be much less beefy than for a spacecraft designed for fully orbital capacity. Initiall breaking of the capsule is likely to be aerodynamic - as the capsule plunges into the denser atmosphere the drag will increase and eitehr slow it down or at least limit the terminal velocity.
For a more extrem take at the X-price, look at Micro Space, three guys in scubagear with parachutes...
Not because I'm in a war-torn area with a flaky tele-com strukture, but simply because I live in Norway and has my girlfriend (fiancee really) in the US. While the quality of the connection cannot rival - or even get close - to that of a conventilan landline, it is offset by the fact that I don't have to pay thru the nose to spend an hour or so hearing her voice.
None of the links I bothered to click on even touched - as far as my skimming of the articles revealed - anything about why the chinese has opted for a variation on Linux, instead of one of the commercial unixes, Wondows (yeah, right) or something along those lines. Does it adapt better to this scale? Is it because it's essentially free (as in 'no licenses')? If it the reds fear of a backdoor in the system if they buy a commercial product?
Don't get me wrong, a supercomputer running on Linux is cool and all that, but I would like to know more about the logic that dictates the choice of OS in such an application. Suggestions?
Slashdot Mirror
"Move somewhere where the wind don't blow quite that much" =)
However, it amazing how soon after a 'total disaster' a system can be up and running again. I distinctly recalls seeing a lot about just that in the paper (the one made from dead wood) after 9/11. Kudos, I say!.
And why would people in the nordic countries even bother careing about that? It is not the responsibility of the nordic goverments to make sure you has a job - it is the responsibility of your goverment. Despite how much you may wish for it, it the world isn't here to provide the softwaregiants of the US with a ready marked for their badly translated programs.
Open-source programmes for small language areas have the advantage over license-based programmes that the users are allowed to adapt the source code. This means that the programmes can be translated and play an important role in the struggle by small countries to maintain their linguistic and national identities.
And boy do we need that up here in Ultima Thule. Lets count shall we? On the surface, we have swedish, danish, norwegian, icelandic and finnish to take into account - thats five major launguages (allthought norwegians, danes and swedes can understand eachother - we just choose not to).However....
In sweden, sami is an offical second language. In Norway, we have bokmal (mainstream 'wegian), nynorsk ('new norwegian', based on the dialects) and sami as official launguages. In Finland, you have both finnish and 'finlandssvenska' (finlandswedish) to cope with. The danes and icelanders are easily the best off, with just one launguge each. So that gives us a total of nine launguage-variants that the writer of software ought to cater for... in a region with just over 25 million inhabitants. Can we seriously expect the big corps to cater to this marked? Not really, and that makes OSS the best alternative in order to make sure we get software in our own language.
How about focusing on "equal oppertunities" instead, and hire the best person for the job, with no regard to gender, skincolour, cultural background or religion? I'm sure that will work out better, while at the same time makeing sure the rest of us don't have to hear people whine about how the new co-worker was hired just because she sits down when she pees (instead of standing up, like most guys do).
Just my 2 cents.
Off course the descission to send men into space is a political decission, as long as the only ones capabel of doing it is various goverments around the globe. The day the technologys has filtered down to where corps can do it, it'll be an echonomical decission, and I guess you'll oppose that as well.
We need to send a man to mars - No, we don't need to send a man anywhere. For that matter, we don't need to send robots either, or look in telescopes or even look up. No one is forcing our hands. But if we (or rather, the guys who sit on the moneybags) decide that mars should be explored, I do belive that we ought to send men there. A robot is limited by it's design and programming, and will be at a loss if it comes into a situation that its designers hadn't thought off. A man on the other hand is flexible and adaptable. Off course, that isn't to say we shoudl stop sending robots - we ought to do both.
We need man in space to mine exotic minerals from asteroids - Again, we don't need to do this, but if you're going to use those exotic materials in space anyway, it can make a lot of sence to mine them up there in huge quantities (some of the more serious suggestions I've read about is about mining the moon btw, not going hunting for an astroid) rather than to mine them down here - at the bottom of the gravitywell - and burn up lots and lots of fuel sending them up there.
We need man in space to establish the new frontier where people can go to live - Yet again, there is no need - today. But with the rate we are stripmining this planet for recourcess, it may be a good idea to start looking for a new neighbourhood. The day we really, really need to find a new place to expand, it is to late. Besides, by the logic you display here, the americas should never heve been needed to be colonised from Europe. After all, by the standards of the day, north america was as far away as the moon is today, and the enviroment was much less friendly. Couldn't they have have found places to live in Europe?
We don't need to go to space - but we don't need to have dreams either.
Point is that with capsules you don't need to optimize the reentry angle, capsules stabilize themselves. The KISS principle at work.
That's a load of manure. If you head over to Encyclopedia Astronautica and read up, you'll find that every single caspule that has flown, from Vostok and Mercury to Shenzhou (the spanking new chinese capsule) had / has to hit the atmosphere at exact atmosphere for a number of reasons, among others the need to minimize the heatpulse and limit the amount of Gs (come in to shallow, and you burn to death, come in to steep and you're crushed).
So, my cowardly friend, capsules do need to optimise their re-entry angle, even thought they are more or less selfstabelising once they have entered the atmosphere (ie, keeping the right side down).
Disclaimer: I don't have kids of my own (yet), but I'm the proud uncle of two.
There are a few things I've learned the last few years (and looking back on my own childhood, they become very clear):
- The simple, non-complex toys are played with more often than the high-tech gadgetry. My oldest niece plays a hundred times as much with her ragdolls and with her Barbie (*shudder*), than she do with the 'true to life' babydoll she got two years back. The fancy toys holds the kids interest for a short while, but they are very likely to return to the toys that allow them to play in freeform.
- Boys and girls do play difrently. From what I've seen, girls will go for the 'readymade toys' like dolls and pretend-stoves, while boys will seek out toys that allow they to create and modify, like Lego or Mechano (or even better; a hammer, some bits of wood and a handfull of nails).
- Kids today have, as a general rule and in the parts of the western world I've seen, more toys than they had when I grew up - and I'm not that old. My guess is that a lot of parents would rather buy toys for their kids than to play with their kids - and the rest are giving into peer-preasure.
...at least not when you consider what ought to be the primary focus of any schoolsystem: to give the children knowledge and prepare them for a life in the real world. A school is not a place you keep your kids until they are old enought to move out, it's supposed to be a place your kids are prepared to become a contributing member of society.
One may or may not like it, but for most kinds of work out there, the Wintel-platform is what it is all about. Working with office-apps? Chances are that you're not using a Mac. Accessing a database? I'll guess ten to one that the clientend is a windowsapp.
As long as the subject matter isn't one where the Mac dominate in the real world, schools shouldn't "miseducate" (sorry, I couldn't think of a word that fitted better) the pupils by using machines from Apple - weither or not they are better / cheaper to maintain / has more fancy colours than a wintel machine. If they do, they are not doing our children any favours.
Towards the end of school, say the last couple of years before people graduate, I think it would be wise to have a "general OS" class, teaching the pupils the basic of not just the wintel or the MacOS, but also divers flavours of Linux, BDS, Contiki and whatnot. Show the pupils that there are many more operatingsystems out there, each with a distinct set of pros and cons, and make them make up their own mind what they will use at home; because when they start working they will have to use whatever the company has decided on.
PS: the line 'Here and there you'll still find an original Mac -- not to mention a few Apple IIs -- hard at work in classrooms' isn't really saying anything about the longvity of the mac - but it does say a whole lot about the lack of proper funding of the schools.
The day before the grid went down, this was probaly dismissed by the CEO of the powercompanies, politicans and other top brass as 'too expencive' to install.
Today the very same people are likely to ask people lower down in the system why such a device wasn't installed in the first place.
Human nature I guess...
Anyway, there are other systems out there that can prevent a cascading failure like we say in the US now. Trouble is, every system - including the one described in the article - comes with a pricetag and a set of drawbacks. In this cause, I would suspect that keeping the supercondutors superconduting isn't free, neither in money or in energy.
Ah, so basicly we agree, but use some words differently. Thats cool with me. And I'm truely am sorry to hear you had an accident which stopped your carreer - as far as I'm conserned, I can't think of a better place to work, even thought the people in charge are a bunch of idiots.
Oh well... I take it you was what we refer to as an 'indian'? In other word, a common soldier? Things looks different in differnt armed forces son, and they sure looks different when you got some stuff on your shoulders like I do. So no, I don't really give the top brass - most of which are civilian politicans anyway - much credit.
As for your second paragraph.. beeing told something is not the same as it beeing true. True, the avrage US soldier carry more and newer equipment than most other soldiers... they train more (but not necesarely better), but equipment and training isn't everything. I've seen the 'wegian homeguards sweep the floor with the US marines, just because they knew the terrain and dared do stuff that the US brass thought impossible... I've seen big, beefy, sexy F-15 get shot down in simulated combat by F-5A's...
Working in the norwegian armed forces myself - who has been trying to tell our politicans that a) running a defence costs money, b) doing a lot of operations overseas costs more, and c) we could really need more and newer fighters, preferable by 1997, and some new tanks, rifles, chemical protection suits and naval ships wouldn't be out of the way - I would say this has a simple reason.
Buying 'more of the same' just ain't sexy enought.
Nor does it look impressive. Telling your mistress that you signed a deal for a score of flying gasstation is not as cool as telling her you just signed a goverment contract to develop an airportable selfdeploying P2P network with cellular jamming capability.
That, and we most not forget that the arnament industry in the western world is technologydriven. The defenceindustry comes up with something new and sexy, and off course the top brass goes along with it (see above for why). In the old eastern block, things worked (well, barly worked, but thats another matter) differently. The military went to the industry and said 'this is what we need, you have two years to come up with a solution'. Worked much better, at least as far as maintaining capabilities goes. A bit less so if your focus is on developing new capabilities thought...
...that seems to be mainly aimed at countering themselfs.
Wait, don't mod me down just yet; let me elaborate on that. Basicly, you have two situations when in a military conflict: Either you are invading, in which cause you depend on mobile, wireless communication. Or you're defending, and that means most of the time relying on fixed lines of communication (fiberoptic cables buried deep in the ground is a favorite). Now, if you're using fixed lines of communications, you don't have to worry to much about these. Sure, some forms of landlines are radiates energy that can be detected by the 'wolfpack', but I've yet to hear about any armed forces worth it's salt that don't use encryption these days. If you're attacking however, you need to carry your own coms. Most armed forces don't roll in money the way the US forces do, so most forces has to rely on older equipment, like the good old AN/PRC-77. And those can't be affected by a jammer designed to knock out cellular transmittions.
On the lighter side, how long until the troops use this P2P-network to share violent videos and hard porn?
NASA did that with the Ranger-probes from 1961 onwards. They meet with success on the 31 July 1964 at 13:25:49 UT with Ranger 7. Off course, the ruskies was first out, crashing their Luna E-1A, which hardlanded on the moon on 14 September 1959.
As for some amateurs to do the same, I think that is a few years away at the best. For one thing, no amateurbuilt rocket has yet reached orbit, allthought several groups, like the norwegian NEAR has it as a stated project.
The odd one - if we develop new load racks, you should be able to carry approximately 10 times more 50 lb bombs than you could 500 lb bombs
Not quite - there is way more to a bombrack than an eyebolt screwed into the wing of an airplane. For each bomb you'll need a pair of swaybraces to stabelice it while it's mounted on the plane, you'll need two plungers to ensure a clean seperation, you'll need two cartridges to produce the gas needed to operate the plungers (you want two to make sure the weapon lets go when it shall) and various sundry bits of wire - and if your weapons are guided, that adds even more wire. Thus, a bombrack designed for carreing ten small bombs will weight more than one designed for carreing one large one.
Also, one must consider what is refered to as parasite drag. Anything you stick on an aircraft casues drag - and two 500lbs bombs have more drag than one 1000lbs bomb, just as 4 250lbs bombs causes more drag than two 500lbs ones. A larger (longer / wider) bombrack will cause more drag than the slick design used for a single bomb.
When we (yes, I do work in the armed forces) talk about the weight of a bomb, we talk about the weight of the filled bombshell. Things like a guidancepackage is not really figured in until you strap it on and place the now guided weapon on the wing of your plane. And I can't honestly see that a modern guidancepackage can be made much lighter - maybe half as heavy, but not by a factor of ten.
To sum up; developing a bom that weight 1/10th of todays bomb while not allow you to carry ten times the number of bombs. I would guess six, maybe eight, times the number.
First, the X-price is about creating a sub-orbital craft, not an orbital one. Still, it's a valid question you ask.
Rockets to slow the capsule / spaceship down for rentry purposes has been used on every single manned spaceship I know of. They are called retro-rockets and are employed to initiate re-entry at the proper time and place to put the capsule / spaceship down where it's supposed to come down. The alternative is to stay in orbit until it dacays naturaly, and then who knows how long you will stay up there or where you will come down.
That said, I assume you knew that already and are wondering about rocketengines / other engines that can be used continualy for a logner period of time to brake the craft faster than purely aerodynamic braking can achive?
In theory it is nothing stopping you from trying that - apart from the weight of both engines and fuel. Not only does the rule of thumb tells us that for every kilogram you want to take into orbit, you'll burn ten kilograms of fuel to get it there, but as the engiens and fuel will have to be protected against the heat of re-entry, you nead a larger (thus heavier) heatshield as well as a larger (heavier) craft overall. And that in turns means - you guessed it - that you'll have to burn even more fuel getting it up there.
On the other hand, if you're simply suggesting dropping the relative groundvelocity of the craft to zero before it re-enetered the atmosphere, so it would drop straight down, I see two problems. Firstly, you would have to do it fast (since loss in speed means loss in altitude - thus meeting the atmosphere), which means an allmighty kick in the pants for the poor astronauts (very hight G). Secondly, the heatpulse would be about the same anyway - the craft will have a whooping huge potential energy from simply beeing that high, and that will be converted to kinetic energy (read; speed) on the way down. Remember Epot = mgh while Ekin = 1/2mv, and if we assume that all the potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy (which it ain't, a whole lot will turn into heat), we find that Epot = Ekin, thus mgh=1/2mv. Simplify, and you see that the speed (v) equals the square root of two times the height multiplied with the gravitatinal pull (v=sq(2gh) ). Thus, if we set the height to 100 km (100000 meter) and we assume that g is constant at 9.82ms, we find that the speed of the craft as it reaches the surface is no less than 1401.42 meter a second, equal to 5045kmh, equal to 3136mph, or about 4.25 Mach. So to summarise, you won't save anything by 'stopping' in your orbital tracks.
It is simple: One imperial mile is 1609 meter. One nautical mile is 1852 meter. One kilometer - which is the preferable way to measure distances if you have seen the light of the metric system - is 1000 meter. One norwegian mil is (at least in this day and age) 10000 meter (10 kilometer).
So they dropped it 18520 meters east of Mojave, or about what I would say was roughtly one-point-eight mil away from touchdown.
The competitors for the X-price are one after the other dropping their capsules / spaceships out of the sky to test at least part of their re-entry profile, and Burt Rutans entry at least flies like a dream (big surprice - he designs flyingmachiens for a living, don't he?). The X-price is running until January 1, 2005 (qoute; The X PRIZE is fully funded through January 1, 2005, through private donations and backed by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the day that the prize is won), giving the teams a little more than one year to launch, overhaul their machines and launch again.
I'm getting all excited over the prosects ahead of us. Never mind if the X-price succeds in jumpstarting the space-tourism or not - we're getting a taste of what the spacerace was like when the USA and the USSR were competing about getting the first man up into space, allthought this time all the teams are playing with open cards.
I'm willing to bet all my karma that we'll have the first launch before next summer; anyone willing to bet against it?
Bob the builder? As a IT mascot? I'm dumbfuzzled... we are talking of the animated doll who are routinly seen talking to his concrete-mixer, arn't we? Not an obvious choise for a IT-department I feel (even thought his motto of "Can we fix it? Yes, we can" seems appropriate).
Well, the PHB made the executive decision; I guess the blame for Evil Bob resides with him. Still, I feel that maybe Will E. Coyote would be a better pick - can anyone come up with more suggestions?
There is a full list of the teams at the x-price website. From the PDF file found there it appers that most of the "serious" contenders are based in either North America or Europe, but then the majority of the teams are from there anywhere (could be many reasons for that). A notable exception which I - with my reasonsable limited knowhow of building and launching manned rockets - believe might create a viable launchvehicle, is the Gauchito (The Little Cowboy) from Argentina.
Mind you, there are a few of the contestants who are rather barmy, and since most of the entries are from the western world, most of the oddballs are from there as well. Check out Micro Space, a somewhat redneck, risky way to get suborbital (more info at their own site, including info on how they plan on using scuba-gear to survive in the rarified atmosphere up there).
I share files (mostly porn thought, but the principle is the same as for music) and I care about the copytight laws.
With that, I mean that I believe - and will say in a loud and clear voice - that todays copyrightlaws are downright down and should be reworked. Five to ten years sounds like a reasonable time for a work to be copyrighted to me - or maybe a system simular to the patent-laws could be introduced, where it would cost the copyrightowner cold, hard cash to prolong the copyright of a particular work.
So you see, I care about the laws. Still don't stop me sharing files.
Ever noticed how time seems to fly past when you're having fun? Or how something boring can drag out for ever? Or even better, how a workday can seemingly be endless, but a week full of them is gone boefore you knew what happened?
While it is a good while since I studied physics, it tells me that while we can make clocks that appers to measure how fast times goes, we move 'along' in time in a more haphazard fashion, slowing and accelerating as we blunder on. Time might be the diminsion thats 90 on the other three (width, depth and lenght), but we have a lot more problems determining both an objects movement in that dimension and the position in it.
In short, while some of the article went over my head (I've just gotten out of bed y'know), I think he might be on to something.
ps: It's sorta scary to see that people whos very job it is to broaden our understanding can be horrible quick to judge ("I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection."), as that will only slow down the speed we as a society learns about the world around us. Someone might be off the mark, but it's hard to decide from the first two paragrahps they write.
pps: In Terry Pratches well know discworld-series, the classical paradox is about a tortoise outrunning an arrow instead. And off course, the real question is what to do with all the tortoises on a stick the testing of that axiom gives you... ;P
Don't blame the rest of us for your education - high schools in Norway actualy covers the orbital mechanics as a special subset of the mechanics of movement if you pick natural sciences as one of your classes...
Anyway, the X-price is a competition to build and launch a 'spaceship' carreing 3 people to a minimum height of 100 kilometer (abb. km or just k) twice in the course of two weeks. Deploying a chute while 62.5 miles up in the air isn't all that smart - either you'll rip the chute or use a long time and a lot of crossrange to get down - so some for of thermal protection system ought to be included in the design. Since we're not talking orbital speeds here, this needs to be much less beefy than for a spacecraft designed for fully orbital capacity. Initiall breaking of the capsule is likely to be aerodynamic - as the capsule plunges into the denser atmosphere the drag will increase and eitehr slow it down or at least limit the terminal velocity.
For a more extrem take at the X-price, look at Micro Space, three guys in scubagear with parachutes...
Not because I'm in a war-torn area with a flaky tele-com strukture, but simply because I live in Norway and has my girlfriend (fiancee really) in the US. While the quality of the connection cannot rival - or even get close - to that of a conventilan landline, it is offset by the fact that I don't have to pay thru the nose to spend an hour or so hearing her voice.
Voice over IP - it's a blessing in my life!
None of the links I bothered to click on even touched - as far as my skimming of the articles revealed - anything about why the chinese has opted for a variation on Linux, instead of one of the commercial unixes, Wondows (yeah, right) or something along those lines. Does it adapt better to this scale? Is it because it's essentially free (as in 'no licenses')? If it the reds fear of a backdoor in the system if they buy a commercial product?
Don't get me wrong, a supercomputer running on Linux is cool and all that, but I would like to know more about the logic that dictates the choice of OS in such an application. Suggestions?