If that's the case then Uncle Fester is completely around the bend. They have one division that is a leading player in a rapidly developing market, and that is Xbox in a market where entertainment is starting to be delivered by IP network and the cable companies are starting to cave or become irrelevant. Just at this moment Fester decides to sell. Holy Jebus Gates, fire that idiot.
Hellova ride NASA. I watched Young and Crippen climb into the first one on TV, not know if they'd live to tell about it. There was no unmanned test flight, they were it. Huge conjones those two. The landing looking like a DC-9 coming in from Cleveland. A proud moment for everyone.
I was a young machinist in LA, just about to transition into the Quality job, and the last thing I did was these weird chunks of stainless steel. I didn't know what they were for, but I found out they were supposed to fly. On the first satellite rescue mission, the first time something from orbit was salvaged and brought back to earth, there were my chunks, the attach points for the cradle for the satellite. I was never prouder.
I watched Challenger's fireball driving down Semoran Blvd. in Orlando. I went home to 4 little girls who asked why the teacher died. Daddy didn't have any answers that day.
I spent 6 months afterwords working on Strut Parts as an inspector. I was assigned a part that had it flown, they would have lost another shuttle. They guy from the Cape had to be helped back to his car after we showed him. They got a lot more serious about safety after that.
I was gaming on line with a bunch of guys in Teamspeak when the guy from Dallas shouted 'WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!!'. He described a sonic boom. We put 2+2 together and figured out another shuttle was in trouble, it should have been 40 miles up over Dallas that day, it was less than 10. 10 minutes later, NBC announced.
Still a magnificent achievement NASA.
I use Sirius all the time, and I can always find something worth listening to. I listen to FIND new things/people/groups to listen to, I don't have enough storage to tote all the MP3's I might want around, and I carry 10 DVD's worth of stuff now.
That, and finding DJ Tiesto at 3am in the middle of Alabama lets me make to the hotel in one piece.
It's just better radio. For people who spend too much time in the car, it's a bargain.
Elevate them to the status of Aldoph Hitler, that makes them seem powerful. Send armies after them, that makes them seem important. Don't use the people who are equiped to find bad guys hiding in a civilian population - mainly law enforcement - because that would make them look like mere criminals.
Then tell the public you are a "war president", so you seem important.
Nope, GM and the rest of the carmakers have been designing for 10 years exclusively in metric. They still have a few older designs(read Chevy V-8 and some V-6's derived from them)that are based in imperial units that are reaching their end of life. Everything new for the last 10 years has been metric.
I'm doing this very late so I doubt that it will be modded at all - but here's what I found in my personal investigation of something that has interested me since 1962.
In 1962, during the Cuban missle crisis my father who had faught in the Phillipines and Okinawa told me his eyewitness story of the results of the Hiroshima bombing. That was a lot for a 12 year old to swallow. Even though he had been a combat veteran, and had killed Japanese soldiers and had friends killed by them, after seeing Hiroshima he was profoundly sympathetic to the Japanese people who had suffered so much during the war. He was not sympathetic to the Japanese military leadership and felt they were criminals, and that too few were prosecuted after the war, Hundreds or thousands should have been, but only a handful were.
This leadership was convinced that if they caused enough US casualties, the US would give them better terms for surrender. Their goal was to surrender conditionally, and the condition was there was to be no change in the polity of Japan, the Emperor was to remain head of state, and there would be no occupation of Japan by foriegn troops. But changing that polity was exactly what we had in mind, and occupation was a necessary step to do it.
The bomb gave the lie to this strategy. The Emperor started to question the strategy, but for many years he had sat silent and not spoken in the the Privvy Council and had signified assent by his silence - an interesting tradition. In any event after the first bomb, the Emperor had not found his voice. With the second bomb, he did. With a most courageous act he announced his decision to end the war. He had no idea whether he would be obeyed, and indeed there were those who would have killed him for it, but the recording was made, and carefully hidden to protect it from those who took over the palace that night to find it and destroy it. When the morning came, it was played to the Japanese public.
From the view of the Americans, the Japanese Army was still full of fight, and despite Tojo's resignation, the Americans didn't believe there was any fundimental change in the Japanese governement. There more contacts to start negotiations, but at this point the only negotiations the US was willing to entertain were for unconditional surrender since it had been decided the the Imperial polity had to change. Please note - there was a Japanese Army of 5.5 million men still in the field - most of whom had not been defeated, and who's offensive spirit was undimmed. Even with the carpet bombing of the cities, the government's was leading the civilian population to believe that victory was possible, and anti-invasion training was widespread. The American's looked at this and decided the fight was to the finish, and acted accordingly.
I've helped with a FIRST team since 1999. It's damned hard work. It's gruelling and stressful and hard on your family life. Frequently it sucks so bad, you just have to get away for a while.
But the payoff is worth all the pain. Our kids end up as wielders of technology, not as passive consumers of it. The kids who are willing to work at it get fantastic rewards. The lazy get very little.
Coincidently, Tom Hank's Christmas movie (why not, he's done everything else) - the Polar Express opened Wed. Lionel got the in on the act, and they have the official toy for the movie and are expecting to double their best year in the last 20. They are probably right.
Electric trains are still fun, I still remember the one I had at age 5.
It really does depend on who your sponsor is. I wish the team I help mentor on HAD a sponsor. The kids work to provide the money to power the team. And as someone noted - FIRST is expensive.
There have been a lot of efforts to knock off a FIRST program at lower cost. Canada had one for quite a while, but BEST is the most organized and largest knock off.
And the comment about watching a video from Woodie Flowers MIT class as the inspiration for BEST is really cheeky. Woodie is the National Advisor for FIRST and has served in the FIRST organization from the beginning. FIRST was founded by Dean "Segway" Kamen.
This probably means the blue-green laser system is up and in orbit, and all you line of sites belong to us.
Same thing happened when they "retired" the SR-71. They did it because the new plane/spacecraft was ready. The one they don't talk about, yet.
"Up in arms" is irrelevant. The ever growing percentage of kids who use MP3's will defeat any system that prevents them from using MP3's. It's hard to convince a kid with an iPod he has to return to the past.
The music (formerly) buying public has decided, and they'd rather have portability, playability, and pirateability and since they can't buy that at Walmart, they'll get it any way they can.
If the music industry ever quits living in the past, they'll wake up and give the public an option that the public already taken, and make a little money. As it is, they're heading for no money at all.
Lol! Believe me, juries will do what makes sense to them. If a law is clearly wrong in their sense of things, they'll find the person not guilty, regardless of what the judge says. That unpredictability of juries is why we end up with $50m lawsuits over hot coffee and OJ walking free.
It's also the reason that if I was a Muslim male accused of a crime, I'd be scared to death of the American legal system. That kid in Idaho was in the right place, with the right judge and the right defense lawyer.
I thought the one juror's amazement that the First Amendment allows people to say a lot more that he thought was laugh. I'm not sure America deserves the Constitution she has. I was clearly designed for a people a lot more enlightened that the US population.
For those of the redneck persuasion an old amusement around the gas station is a coffee can full of gas. Throw lit cigarettes into it to put them out. Which it does. Without an explosion.
Potenitally of more immediate interest is the airbags now in every car, and also the seat belt pre-tensioners that fire a few milliseconds before the airbag mostly in more expensive models so far. The pre-tensioners pull your lap belt in about 2 inches to sit you in the seat more firmly.
All these things are known as pyrotechnic devices. Actually, you could look at an airbag as a piece of ordnance pointed at your face, with a really smart trigger.
Airbag factories all have patches over the the holes in the roof. Although the airbags are far better now than the early models in resisting inadvertent firing, still it does happen occasionally. There are two results.
One result is the module was sitting the right way with the airbag opening facing up or at least facing away from anything. In that case it deploys with great force, but doesn't move much.
The other condition is that the airbag opening is facing something, like sitting on a table with the airbag opening down (pretty typical), and in that case the airbag opens with great force and launches itself with great force away from any surface the airbag hits. In the case of the table, probably through the roof.
So undeployed airbags are potentially really dangerous, and make getting someone out of a wreck much more complicated.
Usually, they go off as designed. Thank goodness.
Re:Editorial bias anyone?
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
There was a SF story, and I think it was in the 60's or 70's - just a short story of a living mass on Europa done in by a bag of poo left by an astronaut (or cosmonaut or whateverthechinsecallitnaut). The mass was delighted to find such a great source of food, but the bacteria load that came with it did it in. Can't remember any else about it - where I read or who wrote it.
To tell you the truth, that's the story I thought the comments refered to - Clarke's 2010 came years and years afterword.
As for editorial bias - well some sites lean left and some right. The hardware heads over at Tech Report think GWB saved western civilization by beating WJC. I don't hold it against them as long as the technical stuff comes out correct../ is the same, and if you strongly object, then the only honest thing to do is roll your own.
The RAF learned the "Dresden" technique studying what the Luftwaffe did to Coventry on November 14th, 1940. After Coventry was raised, the Brits gave it back to the Germans. Harris never expressed any remorse, believing he was right until his death.
By design and by capability, Japan's war production was distributed into a huge number of small shops, the Japanese military leaders feeling this method would blunt any attempt at effective strategic bombing by the US. Up until January 1945, they were right.
Curtis Lemay had been working the 8th Air Force in England during 1942-43, and then sent to the Pacific theater in July 1944, rising to head the 21st Bomber Command in January 1945. Using what he had learned from the Brits in England, he proceded to fire bomb Japanese cities into ashes. On March 9-10, 1945 the firebombing of Tokyo killed 110,000 people, far more than either atomic weapon did.
He went on to lead the Berlin Airlift, and to head the Strategic Air Command from 1949 to 1957, becoming Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961. He also was George Wallace's running mate in 1968.
Sadest part about his is the $1B isn't even close to the level of spending needed if we truly intended to do this on the proposed schedule. I heard one expert today say it should be funded at a level around $20B if we meant it.
Bush jr's financial ineptness has a history. Poppy gave him a $500m company and he bankrupted it.
The current budget fiasco is going to hurt many things unless it is rapidly reversed. No space program is going to be funded at anything near the right levels in the future if we don't get our own house in order. You can't have the government swallowing up huge amounts of the available credit like a drunk in a liquor store and expect the economy to run correctly and efficiently. Greenspan dosen't have the courage to say anything, the coward.
So don't worry about the Mars program. It will fade away next year just like Poppy's program did.
We had supersonic cruise missles in the 50's and decided to build ballistic missles instead. Navaho missle
Cruise missles today fly nap of the earth. Doing that at Mach 3 just leaves a big crater somewhere. Two technologies make cruise missles effective. One is GPS guidance with or without laser guidance on the final approach. The second was cheap turbojet engines. The costs per missle is ~$600k. Cheap at Pentagon prices. The alternative is sending in a $3m pilot in a $40m Strike Eagle.
Beamer.:o) Bimmer if you are the brie crowd...
Ah true the M3 owns. For $50k...
Go read the reviews, torque steer well under control, thing is a rocketship. A little Mercedes help, probably..
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the case then Uncle Fester is completely around the bend. They have one division that is a leading player in a rapidly developing market, and that is Xbox in a market where entertainment is starting to be delivered by IP network and the cable companies are starting to cave or become irrelevant. Just at this moment Fester decides to sell. Holy Jebus Gates, fire that idiot.
Hellova ride NASA. I watched Young and Crippen climb into the first one on TV, not know if they'd live to tell about it. There was no unmanned test flight, they were it. Huge conjones those two. The landing looking like a DC-9 coming in from Cleveland. A proud moment for everyone. I was a young machinist in LA, just about to transition into the Quality job, and the last thing I did was these weird chunks of stainless steel. I didn't know what they were for, but I found out they were supposed to fly. On the first satellite rescue mission, the first time something from orbit was salvaged and brought back to earth, there were my chunks, the attach points for the cradle for the satellite. I was never prouder. I watched Challenger's fireball driving down Semoran Blvd. in Orlando. I went home to 4 little girls who asked why the teacher died. Daddy didn't have any answers that day. I spent 6 months afterwords working on Strut Parts as an inspector. I was assigned a part that had it flown, they would have lost another shuttle. They guy from the Cape had to be helped back to his car after we showed him. They got a lot more serious about safety after that. I was gaming on line with a bunch of guys in Teamspeak when the guy from Dallas shouted 'WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!!'. He described a sonic boom. We put 2+2 together and figured out another shuttle was in trouble, it should have been 40 miles up over Dallas that day, it was less than 10. 10 minutes later, NBC announced. Still a magnificent achievement NASA.
I use Sirius all the time, and I can always find something worth listening to. I listen to FIND new things/people/groups to listen to, I don't have enough storage to tote all the MP3's I might want around, and I carry 10 DVD's worth of stuff now.
That, and finding DJ Tiesto at 3am in the middle of Alabama lets me make to the hotel in one piece.
It's just better radio. For people who spend too much time in the car, it's a bargain.
Elevate them to the status of Aldoph Hitler, that makes them seem powerful. Send armies after them, that makes them seem important. Don't use the people who are equiped to find bad guys hiding in a civilian population - mainly law enforcement - because that would make them look like mere criminals.
Then tell the public you are a "war president", so you seem important.
Nope, GM and the rest of the carmakers have been designing for 10 years exclusively in metric. They still have a few older designs(read Chevy V-8 and some V-6's derived from them)that are based in imperial units that are reaching their end of life. Everything new for the last 10 years has been metric.
In 1962, during the Cuban missle crisis my father who had faught in the Phillipines and Okinawa told me his eyewitness story of the results of the Hiroshima bombing. That was a lot for a 12 year old to swallow. Even though he had been a combat veteran, and had killed Japanese soldiers and had friends killed by them, after seeing Hiroshima he was profoundly sympathetic to the Japanese people who had suffered so much during the war. He was not sympathetic to the Japanese military leadership and felt they were criminals, and that too few were prosecuted after the war, Hundreds or thousands should have been, but only a handful were.
This leadership was convinced that if they caused enough US casualties, the US would give them better terms for surrender. Their goal was to surrender conditionally, and the condition was there was to be no change in the polity of Japan, the Emperor was to remain head of state, and there would be no occupation of Japan by foriegn troops. But changing that polity was exactly what we had in mind, and occupation was a necessary step to do it.
The bomb gave the lie to this strategy. The Emperor started to question the strategy, but for many years he had sat silent and not spoken in the the Privvy Council and had signified assent by his silence - an interesting tradition. In any event after the first bomb, the Emperor had not found his voice. With the second bomb, he did. With a most courageous act he announced his decision to end the war. He had no idea whether he would be obeyed, and indeed there were those who would have killed him for it, but the recording was made, and carefully hidden to protect it from those who took over the palace that night to find it and destroy it. When the morning came, it was played to the Japanese public.
From the view of the Americans, the Japanese Army was still full of fight, and despite Tojo's resignation, the Americans didn't believe there was any fundimental change in the Japanese governement. There more contacts to start negotiations, but at this point the only negotiations the US was willing to entertain were for unconditional surrender since it had been decided the the Imperial polity had to change. Please note - there was a Japanese Army of 5.5 million men still in the field - most of whom had not been defeated, and who's offensive spirit was undimmed. Even with the carpet bombing of the cities, the government's was leading the civilian population to believe that victory was possible, and anti-invasion training was widespread. The American's looked at this and decided the fight was to the finish, and acted accordingly.
I've helped with a FIRST team since 1999. It's damned hard work. It's gruelling and stressful and hard on your family life. Frequently it sucks so bad, you just have to get away for a while. But the payoff is worth all the pain. Our kids end up as wielders of technology, not as passive consumers of it. The kids who are willing to work at it get fantastic rewards. The lazy get very little.
Coincidently, Tom Hank's Christmas movie (why not, he's done everything else) - the Polar Express opened Wed. Lionel got the in on the act, and they have the official toy for the movie and are expecting to double their best year in the last 20. They are probably right.
Electric trains are still fun, I still remember the one I had at age 5.
There have been a lot of efforts to knock off a FIRST program at lower cost. Canada had one for quite a while, but BEST is the most organized and largest knock off.
And the comment about watching a video from Woodie Flowers MIT class as the inspiration for BEST is really cheeky. Woodie is the National Advisor for FIRST and has served in the FIRST organization from the beginning. FIRST was founded by Dean "Segway" Kamen.
This probably means the blue-green laser system is up and in orbit, and all you line of sites belong to us. Same thing happened when they "retired" the SR-71. They did it because the new plane/spacecraft was ready. The one they don't talk about, yet.
Too easy, give me another..
The Bord are already with us, and in fact spend most of their workday reading the forums and posting on /.
The music (formerly) buying public has decided, and they'd rather have portability, playability, and pirateability and since they can't buy that at Walmart, they'll get it any way they can.
If the music industry ever quits living in the past, they'll wake up and give the public an option that the public already taken, and make a little money. As it is, they're heading for no money at all.
Seems to have slowed down the pirates by .06 seconds.
It's also the reason that if I was a Muslim male accused of a crime, I'd be scared to death of the American legal system. That kid in Idaho was in the right place, with the right judge and the right defense lawyer.
I thought the one juror's amazement that the First Amendment allows people to say a lot more that he thought was laugh. I'm not sure America deserves the Constitution she has. I was clearly designed for a people a lot more enlightened that the US population.
For those of the redneck persuasion an old amusement around the gas station is a coffee can full of gas. Throw lit cigarettes into it to put them out. Which it does. Without an explosion. Potenitally of more immediate interest is the airbags now in every car, and also the seat belt pre-tensioners that fire a few milliseconds before the airbag mostly in more expensive models so far. The pre-tensioners pull your lap belt in about 2 inches to sit you in the seat more firmly. All these things are known as pyrotechnic devices. Actually, you could look at an airbag as a piece of ordnance pointed at your face, with a really smart trigger. Airbag factories all have patches over the the holes in the roof. Although the airbags are far better now than the early models in resisting inadvertent firing, still it does happen occasionally. There are two results. One result is the module was sitting the right way with the airbag opening facing up or at least facing away from anything. In that case it deploys with great force, but doesn't move much. The other condition is that the airbag opening is facing something, like sitting on a table with the airbag opening down (pretty typical), and in that case the airbag opens with great force and launches itself with great force away from any surface the airbag hits. In the case of the table, probably through the roof. So undeployed airbags are potentially really dangerous, and make getting someone out of a wreck much more complicated. Usually, they go off as designed. Thank goodness.
It's not your Grandpa's Dellmobile...
There was a SF story, and I think it was in the 60's or 70's - just a short story of a living mass on Europa done in by a bag of poo left by an astronaut (or cosmonaut or whateverthechinsecallitnaut). The mass was delighted to find such a great source of food, but the bacteria load that came with it did it in. Can't remember any else about it - where I read or who wrote it.
./ is the same, and if you strongly object, then the only honest thing to do is roll your own.
To tell you the truth, that's the story I thought the comments refered to - Clarke's 2010 came years and years afterword.
As for editorial bias - well some sites lean left and some right. The hardware heads over at Tech Report think GWB saved western civilization by beating WJC. I don't hold it against them as long as the technical stuff comes out correct.
By design and by capability, Japan's war production was distributed into a huge number of small shops, the Japanese military leaders feeling this method would blunt any attempt at effective strategic bombing by the US. Up until January 1945, they were right.
Curtis Lemay had been working the 8th Air Force in England during 1942-43, and then sent to the Pacific theater in July 1944, rising to head the 21st Bomber Command in January 1945. Using what he had learned from the Brits in England, he proceded to fire bomb Japanese cities into ashes. On March 9-10, 1945 the firebombing of Tokyo killed 110,000 people, far more than either atomic weapon did.
He went on to lead the Berlin Airlift, and to head the Strategic Air Command from 1949 to 1957, becoming Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961. He also was George Wallace's running mate in 1968.
Sadest part about his is the $1B isn't even close to the level of spending needed if we truly intended to do this on the proposed schedule. I heard one expert today say it should be funded at a level around $20B if we meant it. Bush jr's financial ineptness has a history. Poppy gave him a $500m company and he bankrupted it. The current budget fiasco is going to hurt many things unless it is rapidly reversed. No space program is going to be funded at anything near the right levels in the future if we don't get our own house in order. You can't have the government swallowing up huge amounts of the available credit like a drunk in a liquor store and expect the economy to run correctly and efficiently. Greenspan dosen't have the courage to say anything, the coward. So don't worry about the Mars program. It will fade away next year just like Poppy's program did.
We had supersonic cruise missles in the 50's and decided to build ballistic missles instead. Navaho missle Cruise missles today fly nap of the earth. Doing that at Mach 3 just leaves a big crater somewhere. Two technologies make cruise missles effective. One is GPS guidance with or without laser guidance on the final approach. The second was cheap turbojet engines. The costs per missle is ~$600k. Cheap at Pentagon prices. The alternative is sending in a $3m pilot in a $40m Strike Eagle.
Beamer. :o) Bimmer if you are the brie crowd...
Ah true the M3 owns. For $50k...
Go read the reviews, torque steer well under control, thing is a rocketship. A little Mercedes help, probably..