He is an expert. He is expected to say this sort of things, in fact, it is what he is paid for. And in some ways, it make a lot of sence; if the hole / gash hadn't opened up further, the ingress of hot gas may not have caused enought damage to the structure to cause a failure.
To take another example I know more intimatly; We (the RNoAF) lost a F-16AM during Operation Enduring Freedom this winter, when both main landing gear tensionstuts collaped on landing. Now, at the surface, we lost it because the struts broke. Dvelving deeper into it however, showed us that the struts broke because the jetjockey slammed a fully loaded, newly refuled (from a tanker aircraft) into the runway with a sinkspeed three times the limit.
Sometimes what you think causes the failuer is but the start in the chain of events, sometimes it is the last bit of it.
"he seals are made of reinforced carbon composite and fit between pairs of panels made of the same material that are designed to withstand temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees during re-entry. These seals and panels wrap around the leading edge of each wing." sure sounds like a badly thought out design to my ears.
At mach 2+, the airpreasure is high enought to rip an aircrafts structure apart - thus we make sure that no edges stick out of the airframe, and that no holes excist or can appear in such things as the leading edges of the wings, stabs or tail. At the speeds the shuttle has on reentry, this is even more important - even if you don't factor in the heatpulse. A design which, if it breaks, opens a gash into the interior structure is thus a flawed design - even if the designer didn't think it would ever fail! And remember fellow/.ers, NASA did more or less the same error when it came to the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters; the design was flawed from the start, but they choose to belive it wouldn't fail.
As far as I recall, the shuttle does not have leading egde flaps. Thus it shouldn't be a reason for a 'split' design like the article describes, a solid leading edge panel made of reinforced carbon should be both possible and perhapes even less expencive. It is certainly among the things NASA should consider to lessen the possibility of another disaster. Oh, and make sure the foam sticks to the tank as well, or at least find a better way to test it for flaws.
I think Weird Al and his hillarious music is a different kettle of fish alltogether; after all, he almost always uses the original music (even if he seems fond of adding some accordion) and changes the lyrics - thus retainign a significant portion of the original work. Had he instead written a new melody to go along with his altered lyrics, I think he might not have needed to ask permission.
Besides, which recordlabel would have dared publish his records if he hand't had permission in the first place?
...a network of 350 radio antenna dishes. Called the Allen Telescope Array (or ATA), the network ties together 6.1 meter (~20 foot) diameter dishes for a total surface area as large as eight football fields.
I thought that the baseline of a telescope array was more important than the collecting area - or is that just when you work in the visible wavelenghts? Can anyone set me straight on that?
It has been ages since I bought an indy-comic. Partly because there nearest decent comic-store is an hour or so from here - and that seems to cater mainly to the young, inmature section of the market (more tits than in a porno-rag), partly because much of the mainstream norwegian comics are very good (karine haaland, Nemi, Pondus and EON
& Wildlife to mention a few), and partly because the web provides me with more under- and overground comics than a sane man can read (Comander Kitty, Fur Will Fly, House of LSD and Kevin & Kell to take the first four on my list of bookmarks).
I don't think that indy-comics printed on dead trees has the importance they had for say, oh, ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that are good will find their way into mainstream magasines (at least this holds true for Norway), the ones that ain't good will die out. That, and the World Wide Wait is the underground printingpress of today; both for comics as well as for writing, art and music.
But as the subject says, that just my 2 cents (by the exchange rate anyway).
I'm about to open my mouth wide enought to stick my foot in here, but yes. The United States of America would take a great political leap towards what democracy means (peoples rule) if they ditched the electoral college and just appointed the one who most citizens voted for as president.
Or you could look into parlamentism; where the head of state has to answer not only to God and the voters, but to the national assembly. Works a treat in a lot of nations y'know... And how about trying more than two parites? Or putting a cap on how much cash various cooperations can 'help' the politicans with? Just suggestions off course, the people of the US must make up their own minds on what sort of goverment they want.
But there is a difference, is there not, between making new maps and such and this; GTA for multiplayer is in many ways a 'new' game, not a 'new look' on an old game. Besides, it is reasonable safe to assume that if the company in question hasn't released a SDK for the game in question, then you are not really allowed (by them) to tinker with it?
Or am I completly off the wall here?
I'm not saying that modding and tinkering with games are a bad idea, I'm just wondering about the legality of such a major tinkering as this.
The day you speak and write norwegian as good as I speak and write english, I'll take lessons from you...
In the mean time however; skaff deg et brukernavn og slutt å gjemme deg bak 'anonym feiging'.
Is this strickly legal?
on
GTA3 Multiplayer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Great idea and all that (even if they could have more info on their website), but is this strickly speaking legal? While tinkering with old games like Doom is all fine and dandy (didn't Id release the code for that?), we're talkign about a game thats still is selling, ain't we? What if the original developers left the multiplayer hooks in the codebase (as the site says they did), in order to be able to sell multiplayer GTA as an add-on later - earning even more of our hard earned cash?
ps; no, it's not trolling - I probaly could have phrased the wquestion better, but I'm genuinly curious and a bit stumped.
Re:Other Smart Ideas...
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That sounds like an awefully small yeild. I recall reading somewhere that it was the lowest possible yield they could acchive, but I've not been able to find that page again. I did however find this (curtesy of this
page);
Back in the 1960s, American designers put together probably the coolest - yet also most suicidal - battlefield weapon ever built. It was a nuclear bazooka, capable of being operated by a pair of soldiers, and intended to be unleashed against Soviet battalions as they headed for Worthing-on-Sea.
The bazooka was given the patriotic codename 'Davy Crockett', presumably to encourage its operators to risk using it. Basically a scaled-up rifle grenade launcher which could either be hand-carried or mounted on a jeep, the initial Davy Crockett model had a maximum range of only two kilometres, later doubled to four. The minimum range was a suicidal 400 metres.
The tripod-mounted launcher fired a W-54 plutonium implosion bomb, the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by US forces. The egg-shaped atomic bomb weighed a portable 25 kilograms and had a selectable yield of either 10 or 20 tonnes. In blast terms that makes it only four times as powerful as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing device, but its wider radiation effects would inflict considerable fatalities. The Davy Crockett warhead had a timer fuse to be primed by its operators, who would have had to work out the time taken to reach its target.
One early firing of the Davy Crockett at the Nevada Test Site was witnessed by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From 1961 onwards 400 bazooka warheads were manufactured and deployed. However non-nuclear test firings of the Davy Crockett revealed the design had a targeting flaw and it was retired in 1971.
The W-54 bomb had another application, as an Atomic Demolition Munition (ADM). Planted in hidden chambers beneath Germany - to destroy or block access to Warsaw Pact forces - it could be carried on handles by an individual or a team using mounted poles. ADMs were only finally retired from service in 1989.
Re:It probably wasn't that bad of an idea
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Get people so concentrated on doing a specific complicated series of maneuvers to unleash their payload that they don't even have time to worry about the fact that they're probably not going to make it back alive.
That, and it allowed you to have a standoff-distance of about 7 miles - or about 11 km for us who prefer metrics - from your target. Back in the days before advanced SAMs, you know, when they used guns to plink aircraft out of the sky, that could be the difference between getting your bomb on target and beeing shot down before you got that far. So it all makes sence to me, in so far any use of nukes makes sence at all.
The worse news is that the slump has hit Canada first and hardest, because of our higher-than-average use of the Internet, compared to other countries, and the tendency of Internet downloading to cripple traditional record sales. FUD! Has there ever been any proof that people downloading music makes for less sales? If so, can anyone give me some links?
As music downloading continues to soar -- KaZaA's online file-sharing service leapt by a staggering 1,500 per cent between the summers of '01 and '02 -- layoffs are widespread across the recording industry. Entire divisions -- such as Sony's classical division in Canada -- are being pared back. Because as we all know, those nasty youngsters just love to download hours upon hours of Bach's organmusic...
"They're their own victims," says one senior executive, known for years as an unabashed booster of the recording business. "And the problem has been the CD -- the CD and its plastic jewel case. It looks like crap." Uhm.. that actually makes sence you know... if you're going to fork over a fistfull of hard earned money, you would like to get a quality product back.
We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters. Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD. And their apparant taste for classical music (se above) must be the downfall of the one hit wonderbands the musicindustry is pushing these days.
Elvis, are you with the Jukebox Jihad? Firstly, Elvis is assumed dead, so he can't be with anything. Secondly, as far as I'm told by my mother, Elvis actually cared for his fans. If downloading a 'taster' of your favorite musicians newest release nukes your harddisk, chances are you're going to be pretty pissed off with the recordindustry... thus not giving them your money (besides, you need that cash to buy a new harddisk).
Many of them are musicians, but just as many are managers, booking agents, producers, publishers, promoters, publicists, A&R reps, distributors, indie-label entrepreneurs and the like And you wondered why a CD costs so much? Here is your answer; the organised music industy of today are full of leechers. The best CD I bought last year was from a band I've never heard of before, on a concert I went to only because a friend recomended it. While the quality of the coversleeve was less than the ones in the shop, the music and recording was way better, and the price was about ¾ of what I would have paid in a shop. BTW, the band was Fuzzfish, and I think they are worth listening to.
Independent labels, meanwhile, survive on a fraction of the bureaucracy and lavish expense-account living enjoyed by the majors, and generally treat their artists more generously. Cant argue there - actually, if the 'big brands' learned this lesson we might see an actuall decrese of P2P-sharing of music.
Why is radio so appallingly tedious, homogeneous, unadventurous and predictable? Lowest common denominator. They play partly whats least naseauting to the most listeners, partly what they recive money to give airtime.
And they do this in the most predictable ways. You like Norah Jones? Let's get more where she came from. Of course, if Norah Jones is for real, then there aren't any more where she came from. But we'll witness a parade of lesser facsimiles before another instant trend comes along. Ah, send in the clones - the me-too's and the other one hit wonderbands. Then sit back and wonder why they arn't as popular as the original. Looking back a few years, we had a reasonable successfull group called Aqua that came from Scandinavia. The next thing we knew, we had at least a dozen wannabees (Toy Box and Daze were the most successfull ones, and thats not saying much) who copied the musical style from Aqua, the visuals o
Well, as the parent (grandparent) is clearly clueless on several issues, why not add geografy to the mix?
Anywho...
A national ID cardf isn't 'evil' per see, allthought it could be used to track people with. But even today most counties around the globe expects you to be able to identify yourself when there is a need - so all this do is to a) standarice the card used (instead of relying on drivers licence, studentcard, military ID, bank card and so on), and b) provide a easy way to carry about information that could be accessed as appropriate. I havn't RTFA, but I imagine you could put your medical record on there (which would mean that if you're allergic to certain drugs the hospital will know if you come in in a coma), you could put (encrypted) information about your biometrics in there (so the police can see if the card is genuine) just to mention a couple of ideas.
I don't think it would be a problem to roll these babies out in europe... but then we arn't as paranoind as the avrage american slashdotter seems to be (no offence, just a casual observation).
I'm striken by the things that usually strikes me as I look at gizmos that has a 'keyboard-look-a-like-input-thingy' - why do so many people designing such gizoms where text entry is important insist of laying out the 'keyboard' like "A B C D E etc"? I mean, come on people, Psion has shown us that is is easy to put in a QWERTY-layout keyboard (or DOVRAK, if you prefer) on a handheld device. For me, and I have tried a handfull of small formfactor keyboards, you can't get better in a small package than the Series5mx. Even the old Series3 looks to have a better keyboard than this new gizmo the UPS will start using.
I know, I'm ranting a bit, but it is something I feel is important; but then, I prefer using the keyboard over the mouse most days to move about on the computer.
Very well put - and 101% correct. There has been too much effort put into the gathering of information in the recent history, and far to little effort put into interprenting what the gathered information signify.
While I havn't heard the story about the egypt airbases before - and thus can't validate it - it highlights another problem; namely how to prevent your enemy (both military and business) to find outs what's real and whats not. By making every second plane a fake, the egyptians made it easy to predict which targets were real and which were not. In much the same way, the germans streaches camo-nets over their uboats as they were built during WWII, but as the germans were too neat, they only camoflaged what was there - so the british could measure the lenght of the camo-nets and attack just before the sub was about to be launched, maximising the damage.
There is a morale to that story; disinformation - both in military and business applications - must not be of such a kind as to reveal what it is supposed to hide. Oh, and while computer 'enchanted' pictures and whatnot are pretty to watch, you can sometimes learn more by going over a real photografy with a magnifyinglass.
To qoute the article; Within five years, terms such as business intelligence... will have all but disappeared. Which may be a good thing, as all to many businesses these days seems to have their inteligence challenged by thinking up a business plan of the kind that ends in "3. PROFIT!!", and all to often has a bulletpoint just above there they'll get back to...
Military intelligence has everything to with gatherering information and passing it on to those who are supposed to figure out how to use it. After all, we can't be stuck with that sort of intelligence the civilians use, can we =) ?
As long as you provide enought energy, sure. The one reason why all conventional rockets take off vertically is to minimise the time they travel to the most dense area of the atmosphere. Energy is the key here, provide enought and you can take off in any direction you want.
The 'immense forces' you're refering to is probaly the G-forces of acceleration.. so if you cut back on trust and instead prolonged the burn, you would end up with the same amouth of enegry delivered to the craft with lot less stress involed. You don't need to be a rocket-scientist to know that, but it helps.
It's neat to see that they've already done some rocket testing and all, but why announce now after two years when they don't even have a full scale version done? What did they get by waiting to announce?
They probaly wanted to make sure the concept wasn't flawed before they announced it - running a few subscale tests and so on - and then announce it before they went and build the real deal. Because if they didn't announce it before they build and launch it, because if they didn't a lot of people would call then cheaters.
In other words, it may prove cheaper both in the short and long run not to build a new shuttle of the old design, but rather to design and build a new, updated shuttle.
If you really want to keep the price down (or maybe up), make it interchangable with todays shuttle as far as groundsystems etc goes. Heck, if NASA are willing to accept the inherant problems with solid boosters (moostly that they can't be throttled / shut down), allow a new shuttle-design to use the old kind of solid boosters. And apart from the apperant problem with the insulation (which I'm sure can be solved), there is nothing wrong with utilizing the excisting design for the outer tank either.
In short - build a 'slot in' replacement for the winged orbiter.
Re:Espionage and the Eisenhower Era
on
Secret Empire
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the war in Korea was a UN action, and while the US took the lead (simply because they provided the most men and firepower, units from a whole range of other nations participated - in fact, it had many parallells the the action taken after Irak inwaded Kuwait.
...and the Corona satellite. What I find interesting is that what most people in the US and the rest of the world thought to be a series of peacefull research sateliets named Discovery, actually was the coronaspysatelitesystem. It's even more amazing when you realise what they actually achived with such a 'primitive' system, starting virtually from scratch.
I also found some links to the Thor booster and Agena spacecraft, variants A, B and D on Encyclopedia Astronautica
- my favorite webpage for such things.
While I'm as gadgetfixated as anyone, I need my phone for one thing; to make calls. And maybe the occosinal SMS. I don't need a PDA (thats what my Palm is about), and I don't need to spend a shitload of cash for WAPing (I'm not that rich, and I can survive without checking my e-mail a few hours). So, since this phone don't offer me any significant increce on the things I deam inportant (batterylife mostly), I'll stick to me 5110 a few more years.
Slashdot Mirror
He is an expert. He is expected to say this sort of things, in fact, it is what he is paid for. And in some ways, it make a lot of sence; if the hole / gash hadn't opened up further, the ingress of hot gas may not have caused enought damage to the structure to cause a failure.
To take another example I know more intimatly; We (the RNoAF) lost a F-16AM during Operation Enduring Freedom this winter, when both main landing gear tensionstuts collaped on landing. Now, at the surface, we lost it because the struts broke. Dvelving deeper into it however, showed us that the struts broke because the jetjockey slammed a fully loaded, newly refuled (from a tanker aircraft) into the runway with a sinkspeed three times the limit.
Sometimes what you think causes the failuer is but the start in the chain of events, sometimes it is the last bit of it.
And could you train them to sort small screws? And what about that carbon rod?
...from a fighter aircraft, but;
"he seals are made of reinforced carbon composite and fit between pairs of panels made of the same material that are designed to withstand temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees during re-entry. These seals and panels wrap around the leading edge of each wing." sure sounds like a badly thought out design to my ears.
At mach 2+, the airpreasure is high enought to rip an aircrafts structure apart - thus we make sure that no edges stick out of the airframe, and that no holes excist or can appear in such things as the leading edges of the wings, stabs or tail. At the speeds the shuttle has on reentry, this is even more important - even if you don't factor in the heatpulse. A design which, if it breaks, opens a gash into the interior structure is thus a flawed design - even if the designer didn't think it would ever fail! And remember fellow /.ers, NASA did more or less the same error when it came to the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters; the design was flawed from the start, but they choose to belive it wouldn't fail.
As far as I recall, the shuttle does not have leading egde flaps. Thus it shouldn't be a reason for a 'split' design like the article describes, a solid leading edge panel made of reinforced carbon should be both possible and perhapes even less expencive. It is certainly among the things NASA should consider to lessen the possibility of another disaster. Oh, and make sure the foam sticks to the tank as well, or at least find a better way to test it for flaws.
I think Weird Al and his hillarious music is a different kettle of fish alltogether; after all, he almost always uses the original music (even if he seems fond of adding some accordion) and changes the lyrics - thus retainign a significant portion of the original work. Had he instead written a new melody to go along with his altered lyrics, I think he might not have needed to ask permission.
Besides, which recordlabel would have dared publish his records if he hand't had permission in the first place?
I thought that the baseline of a telescope array was more important than the collecting area - or is that just when you work in the visible wavelenghts? Can anyone set me straight on that?
It has been ages since I bought an indy-comic. Partly because there nearest decent comic-store is an hour or so from here - and that seems to cater mainly to the young, inmature section of the market (more tits than in a porno-rag), partly because much of the mainstream norwegian comics are very good (karine haaland, Nemi, Pondus and EON & Wildlife to mention a few), and partly because the web provides me with more under- and overground comics than a sane man can read (Comander Kitty, Fur Will Fly, House of LSD and Kevin & Kell to take the first four on my list of bookmarks).
I don't think that indy-comics printed on dead trees has the importance they had for say, oh, ten to fifteen years ago. The ones that are good will find their way into mainstream magasines (at least this holds true for Norway), the ones that ain't good will die out. That, and the World Wide Wait is the underground printingpress of today; both for comics as well as for writing, art and music.
But as the subject says, that just my 2 cents (by the exchange rate anyway).
I'm about to open my mouth wide enought to stick my foot in here, but yes. The United States of America would take a great political leap towards what democracy means (peoples rule) if they ditched the electoral college and just appointed the one who most citizens voted for as president.
Or you could look into parlamentism; where the head of state has to answer not only to God and the voters, but to the national assembly. Works a treat in a lot of nations y'know... And how about trying more than two parites? Or putting a cap on how much cash various cooperations can 'help' the politicans with? Just suggestions off course, the people of the US must make up their own minds on what sort of goverment they want.
But there is a difference, is there not, between making new maps and such and this; GTA for multiplayer is in many ways a 'new' game, not a 'new look' on an old game. Besides, it is reasonable safe to assume that if the company in question hasn't released a SDK for the game in question, then you are not really allowed (by them) to tinker with it?
Or am I completly off the wall here?
I'm not saying that modding and tinkering with games are a bad idea, I'm just wondering about the legality of such a major tinkering as this.
The day you speak and write norwegian as good as I speak and write english, I'll take lessons from you...
In the mean time however; skaff deg et brukernavn og slutt å gjemme deg bak 'anonym feiging'.
Great idea and all that (even if they could have more info on their website), but is this strickly speaking legal? While tinkering with old games like Doom is all fine and dandy (didn't Id release the code for that?), we're talkign about a game thats still is selling, ain't we? What if the original developers left the multiplayer hooks in the codebase (as the site says they did), in order to be able to sell multiplayer GTA as an add-on later - earning even more of our hard earned cash?
ps; no, it's not trolling - I probaly could have phrased the wquestion better, but I'm genuinly curious and a bit stumped.
That sounds like an awefully small yeild. I recall reading somewhere that it was the lowest possible yield they could acchive, but I've not been able to find that page again. I did however find this (curtesy of this page);
Back in the 1960s, American designers put together probably the coolest - yet also most suicidal - battlefield weapon ever built. It was a nuclear bazooka, capable of being operated by a pair of soldiers, and intended to be unleashed against Soviet battalions as they headed for Worthing-on-Sea.
The bazooka was given the patriotic codename 'Davy Crockett', presumably to encourage its operators to risk using it. Basically a scaled-up rifle grenade launcher which could either be hand-carried or mounted on a jeep, the initial Davy Crockett model had a maximum range of only two kilometres, later doubled to four. The minimum range was a suicidal 400 metres.
The tripod-mounted launcher fired a W-54 plutonium implosion bomb, the smallest nuclear weapon ever fielded by US forces. The egg-shaped atomic bomb weighed a portable 25 kilograms and had a selectable yield of either 10 or 20 tonnes. In blast terms that makes it only four times as powerful as the 1995 Oklahoma bombing device, but its wider radiation effects would inflict considerable fatalities. The Davy Crockett warhead had a timer fuse to be primed by its operators, who would have had to work out the time taken to reach its target.
One early firing of the Davy Crockett at the Nevada Test Site was witnessed by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. From 1961 onwards 400 bazooka warheads were manufactured and deployed. However non-nuclear test firings of the Davy Crockett revealed the design had a targeting flaw and it was retired in 1971.
The W-54 bomb had another application, as an Atomic Demolition Munition (ADM). Planted in hidden chambers beneath Germany - to destroy or block access to Warsaw Pact forces - it could be carried on handles by an individual or a team using mounted poles. ADMs were only finally retired from service in 1989.
Get people so concentrated on doing a specific complicated series of maneuvers to unleash their payload that they don't even have time to worry about the fact that they're probably not going to make it back alive.
That, and it allowed you to have a standoff-distance of about 7 miles - or about 11 km for us who prefer metrics - from your target. Back in the days before advanced SAMs, you know, when they used guns to plink aircraft out of the sky, that could be the difference between getting your bomb on target and beeing shot down before you got that far. So it all makes sence to me, in so far any use of nukes makes sence at all.
The worse news is that the slump has hit Canada first and hardest, because of our higher-than-average use of the Internet, compared to other countries, and the tendency of Internet downloading to cripple traditional record sales. FUD! Has there ever been any proof that people downloading music makes for less sales? If so, can anyone give me some links?
As music downloading continues to soar -- KaZaA's online file-sharing service leapt by a staggering 1,500 per cent between the summers of '01 and '02 -- layoffs are widespread across the recording industry. Entire divisions -- such as Sony's classical division in Canada -- are being pared back. Because as we all know, those nasty youngsters just love to download hours upon hours of Bach's organmusic...
"They're their own victims," says one senior executive, known for years as an unabashed booster of the recording business. "And the problem has been the CD -- the CD and its plastic jewel case. It looks like crap." Uhm.. that actually makes sence you know... if you're going to fork over a fistfull of hard earned money, you would like to get a quality product back.
We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters. Some 17-year-olds I know have vast music collections but have yet to purchase their first CD. And their apparant taste for classical music (se above) must be the downfall of the one hit wonderbands the musicindustry is pushing these days.
Elvis, are you with the Jukebox Jihad? Firstly, Elvis is assumed dead, so he can't be with anything. Secondly, as far as I'm told by my mother, Elvis actually cared for his fans. If downloading a 'taster' of your favorite musicians newest release nukes your harddisk, chances are you're going to be pretty pissed off with the recordindustry... thus not giving them your money (besides, you need that cash to buy a new harddisk).
Many of them are musicians, but just as many are managers, booking agents, producers, publishers, promoters, publicists, A&R reps, distributors, indie-label entrepreneurs and the like And you wondered why a CD costs so much? Here is your answer; the organised music industy of today are full of leechers. The best CD I bought last year was from a band I've never heard of before, on a concert I went to only because a friend recomended it. While the quality of the coversleeve was less than the ones in the shop, the music and recording was way better, and the price was about ¾ of what I would have paid in a shop. BTW, the band was Fuzzfish, and I think they are worth listening to.
Independent labels, meanwhile, survive on a fraction of the bureaucracy and lavish expense-account living enjoyed by the majors, and generally treat their artists more generously. Cant argue there - actually, if the 'big brands' learned this lesson we might see an actuall decrese of P2P-sharing of music.
Why is radio so appallingly tedious, homogeneous, unadventurous and predictable? Lowest common denominator. They play partly whats least naseauting to the most listeners, partly what they recive money to give airtime.
And they do this in the most predictable ways. You like Norah Jones? Let's get more where she came from. Of course, if Norah Jones is for real, then there aren't any more where she came from. But we'll witness a parade of lesser facsimiles before another instant trend comes along. Ah, send in the clones - the me-too's and the other one hit wonderbands. Then sit back and wonder why they arn't as popular as the original. Looking back a few years, we had a reasonable successfull group called Aqua that came from Scandinavia. The next thing we knew, we had at least a dozen wannabees (Toy Box and Daze were the most successfull ones, and thats not saying much) who copied the musical style from Aqua, the visuals o
Well, as the parent (grandparent) is clearly clueless on several issues, why not add geografy to the mix?
Anywho...
A national ID cardf isn't 'evil' per see, allthought it could be used to track people with. But even today most counties around the globe expects you to be able to identify yourself when there is a need - so all this do is to a) standarice the card used (instead of relying on drivers licence, studentcard, military ID, bank card and so on), and b) provide a easy way to carry about information that could be accessed as appropriate. I havn't RTFA, but I imagine you could put your medical record on there (which would mean that if you're allergic to certain drugs the hospital will know if you come in in a coma), you could put (encrypted) information about your biometrics in there (so the police can see if the card is genuine) just to mention a couple of ideas.
I don't think it would be a problem to roll these babies out in europe... but then we arn't as paranoind as the avrage american slashdotter seems to be (no offence, just a casual observation).
I'm striken by the things that usually strikes me as I look at gizmos that has a 'keyboard-look-a-like-input-thingy' - why do so many people designing such gizoms where text entry is important insist of laying out the 'keyboard' like "A B C D E etc"? I mean, come on people, Psion has shown us that is is easy to put in a QWERTY-layout keyboard (or DOVRAK, if you prefer) on a handheld device. For me, and I have tried a handfull of small formfactor keyboards, you can't get better in a small package than the Series5mx. Even the old Series3 looks to have a better keyboard than this new gizmo the UPS will start using.
I know, I'm ranting a bit, but it is something I feel is important; but then, I prefer using the keyboard over the mouse most days to move about on the computer.
Very well put - and 101% correct. There has been too much effort put into the gathering of information in the recent history, and far to little effort put into interprenting what the gathered information signify.
While I havn't heard the story about the egypt airbases before - and thus can't validate it - it highlights another problem; namely how to prevent your enemy (both military and business) to find outs what's real and whats not. By making every second plane a fake, the egyptians made it easy to predict which targets were real and which were not. In much the same way, the germans streaches camo-nets over their uboats as they were built during WWII, but as the germans were too neat, they only camoflaged what was there - so the british could measure the lenght of the camo-nets and attack just before the sub was about to be launched, maximising the damage.
There is a morale to that story; disinformation - both in military and business applications - must not be of such a kind as to reveal what it is supposed to hide. Oh, and while computer 'enchanted' pictures and whatnot are pretty to watch, you can sometimes learn more by going over a real photografy with a magnifyinglass.
..is bunk.
To qoute the article; Within five years, terms such as business intelligence ... will have all but disappeared. Which may be a good thing, as all to many businesses these days seems to have their inteligence challenged by thinking up a business plan of the kind that ends in "3. PROFIT!!", and all to often has a bulletpoint just above there they'll get back to...
Military intelligence has everything to with gatherering information and passing it on to those who are supposed to figure out how to use it. After all, we can't be stuck with that sort of intelligence the civilians use, can we =) ?
As long as you provide enought energy, sure. The one reason why all conventional rockets take off vertically is to minimise the time they travel to the most dense area of the atmosphere. Energy is the key here, provide enought and you can take off in any direction you want.
The 'immense forces' you're refering to is probaly the G-forces of acceleration.. so if you cut back on trust and instead prolonged the burn, you would end up with the same amouth of enegry delivered to the craft with lot less stress involed. You don't need to be a rocket-scientist to know that, but it helps.
For most things spacerelated, visit Encyclopedia Astronautica.
It's neat to see that they've already done some rocket testing and all, but why announce now after two years when they don't even have a full scale version done? What did they get by waiting to announce?
They probaly wanted to make sure the concept wasn't flawed before they announced it - running a few subscale tests and so on - and then announce it before they went and build the real deal. Because if they didn't announce it before they build and launch it, because if they didn't a lot of people would call then cheaters.
In other words, it may prove cheaper both in the short and long run not to build a new shuttle of the old design, but rather to design and build a new, updated shuttle.
If you really want to keep the price down (or maybe up), make it interchangable with todays shuttle as far as groundsystems etc goes. Heck, if NASA are willing to accept the inherant problems with solid boosters (moostly that they can't be throttled / shut down), allow a new shuttle-design to use the old kind of solid boosters. And apart from the apperant problem with the insulation (which I'm sure can be solved), there is nothing wrong with utilizing the excisting design for the outer tank either.
In short - build a 'slot in' replacement for the winged orbiter.
Actually, the war in Korea was a UN action, and while the US took the lead (simply because they provided the most men and firepower, units from a whole range of other nations participated - in fact, it had many parallells the the action taken after Irak inwaded Kuwait.
What I find interesting is that what most people in the US and the rest of the world thought to be a series of peacefull research sateliets named Discovery, actually was the corona spy satelite system. It's even more amazing when you realise what they actually achived with such a 'primitive' system, starting virtually from scratch.
I also found some links to the Thor booster and Agena spacecraft, variants A, B and D on Encyclopedia Astronautica - my favorite webpage for such things.
While I'm as gadgetfixated as anyone, I need my phone for one thing; to make calls. And maybe the occosinal SMS. I don't need a PDA (thats what my Palm is about), and I don't need to spend a shitload of cash for WAPing (I'm not that rich, and I can survive without checking my e-mail a few hours). So, since this phone don't offer me any significant increce on the things I deam inportant (batterylife mostly), I'll stick to me 5110 a few more years.