Don't get shocked. My cousin peed on an electric fence once. I'd imagine peeing into "the already polluted river of corporate communication" would have similar effects.
Toss a few of these things into a building or room to get some intelligence before making an assualt. Say in a hostage situation, or bank robbery in progress.
Or on the battle field if you wanted a bird's eye view, but didn't want an RC plane spotted. Toss some of these up or shoot a compacted version out of a grenade launcher (40mm rounds) and you get a prett good height. Just like flares at night... you only need a couple of minutes to do a quick body count, or get an idea of which direction the enemy is approaching your position.
I could imagine things like these working near or inside buildings that are on fire as well. Just a quick recon. They'd have to be modified to withstand the heat and have a control system suitable to that kind of turbulent fluid mechanics environment.
I don't know about you, but most people don't seem to realize that you don't need a pen, or paperclips, or tweezers to kill someone. Screening for weapons does jack shit when that person is strong or knowledgable enough to kill without weapons. Hell, I know of five ways that I personally could kill someone with nothing other than my bare hands. I know of five more that can disable that person so they are either not getting up or they can't do anything if they did.
The other thing is, and I'm not 100% sure about this, in the event of a plane crash the government has an obligation by law to find the next of kin. It's assumed that they'll be able to do this if the people on board have names associated with them. It's also a law in most states that a body can't be buried without being identified. A plane crash generates a lot of bodies. All those anonymous people would severely clog up a morgue...
So what you're saying is that you take a pair of entangled photons, have one get sent to the moon and hooked up to a detector and transmitter, and take the other and stick it in a cold room until the one on the moon is ready.
Then, at a prearranged time, read both photons. The one on the moon sends it's results to earth as soon as the detector reads it. The one on earth stores the info with a timestamp.
The incoming data from the moon should lag a bit, easily measurable with today's equipment. Put a time stamp on said data as soon as it comes to your lab, account for transmission delays (should only add a couple of seconds at most).
When you compare the times, your moon detector should say that the photon had such and such state on the moon, and since you read both photons at the same time, the one on earth should give you information a couple of seconds before the info arrives from the moon about the photon on the moon.
Oh yeah, that's just what we need, engineering students whose mindset is that of a business owner. How about busting your butt to achieve something? researching more elegant solutions (and no, that's not yours, elegance is in the design and performance software with tough constraints)?
You are forgetting that a good engineer is, by nature, lazy. The only reason we have cars, planes, trains, boats, and so on, is because an engineer was too lazy to walk, try and fly (by flapping his arms), too lazy to run, and too lazy to swim. Engineers typically say to themselves, "How can I do this with less effort/money/time/etc.?"
but my previous one owned any ideas that I came up with that were related to what the company did.
There was also a clause in my contract that said that after I stopped working there, I could not work for a company that offered competing products for a period of two years.
It was a reasonable and logical contract. My former employer did not want me competing with them, nor did they want me to go and take my projects and trade secrets with me to another company.
I think the guy in the article was an idiot for either: not double-checking his contract for an ownership clause, or not figuring out a way to get around the contract by publishing under an assumed name or holding off on publishing his idea.
1) I see. =) Though I'd question the analogy of slavery to immigration. I can see how they are similar in the US, but I can also see how they are different. I think that the thing that drives the US is the fact that after disasters, wars, famines, just hard times in general, the US always bounces back. I wonder if the drivers are more external events and the populace reacting to those events. Pearl Harbor, USSR and the space race, Vietnam, collapse of the USSR, 9/11, etc. It seems that Americans react to situations rather than anticipate and sidestep them.
2) No doubts there. Without slaves after Rome became big enough to require them, the Roman empire would have fallen apart. Though I think it should also be noted that slaves could obtain Roman citizenship. It was at the beginning of Rome that the consolidation and expansion didn't require slaves.
Not exactly. The fact that Rome was a conquering civilization is somewhat false. Rome always conquered when it [i]felt[/i] threatened. There were many civilizations that existed alongside the Romans until the Romans felt threatened (Etruscan, Greek, Gauls, turks, and so on). It was that feeling of being threatened (militarily, culturally, or economically) that caused Rome to strike out. It started off being a little valley with mud huts.
And Rome also conquered and took land well into the 4th and 5th centuries AD. There was nothing wrong with taking over a territory because often the Romans didn't want to be bothered with government of a province; they'd rather be protected by treaties and agreements, backed up by the threat of military pressure, than sit in a province and police it. One of Rome's strong points was that they did not grind a province into the ground unless they felt threatened by it.
Rome lost many battles in its decline. The western empire fell almost immediately after Justinian split the emporer's seat in two. The western empire fell because it was attacked swiftly and the soldiers defending it weren't trained to defend properly.
The eastern empire stayed as long as it did because it was across the pond from europe, and because the soldiers there were still constantly trained by marauding persian and far eastern tribes. They also didn't try to expand their empire beyond what they knew they could control. Until they were defeated several hundred years after the western empire fell.
Conquering civilizations can survive if they do it correctly.
You never heard much of non-conquering civilizations because they didn't last long. (Etruscans were almost never heard of until the last hundred years when their artifacts were discovered and properly recognized.)
I'm not saying that the US is going to survive if it turns into a conquering civilization. I am saying that the US has to be a bit of a conquering civilization to maintain its prosperity. If the US really were in the business of conquering, we'd drop a few nukes on a place (to clear it out), then we'd send in hazmat teams and robots to clean up the place and rebuild, or just let the place lose its radioactivity over time. Give it 50 or 100 years and things are back to levels that are as safe as being in a brick building underground. We wouldn't screw around with infantry on the ground. Trust me. If our goal in Iraq really was oil, we'd probably fabricate a lie as incentive to launch some nukes at Iraq. Flatten the country and rebuild with automated factories and reap the rewards. That's if we really were a conquering culture that was really interested in oil.
When I first started using Win2kPro, I was running an Athlon Tbird at 1.4GHz on an ASUS A7M266 MB, with 512 MB PC2100 ram from crucial. And I saw a BSOD almost daily.
Some things I realized:
My hardware was not uncommon.
The temps in the case were 55 C as measured by the little PC monitor thingy in ASUS' MB products (forgot the name)
I ended up getting frustrated with the system and getting a Koolance case since I figured things were too hot.
Most of the BSODs were solved with the water cooling. Temps were at most 33 C.
I still got a few and realized that the temp of the CPU was 33 C, while the temps of the memory and chipset on the MB were still up in the 50's.
I got a new MB, CPU, and new RAM, and sold the old stuff on ebay.
No more BSODs until I accidentally dropped my case on my parent's hardwood floors after moving back in after I finished my masters. The two harddisks both died a drowning death. I got a free replacement of the broken koolance stuff, and a replacement of my hardisks. I dropped one of the harddisks as I left the store and decided to just go with one.
Since I cooled things properly and replaced the harddrive, and rebuilt the system, Win2kPro has [i]NEVER[/i] died on me since. Not once. And I moved to the high desert in Southern California where it is currently 35 C outside.
I would guess that most of the problems people experience are from not keeping their hardware cool, having poor power supplies, or misconfigurations (say OC'ing to a freq that's not as stable as it seems). In fact, everyone that I know of that has had BSODs on Win2k and XP have all had zero BSODs since they started making sure their systems were cool.
BTW, that system that I had so many problems with ended up going to a friend. He implemented water cooling and put some new RAM in. He has had zero problems as well.
Nope. It was because the legions lost their training because they never fought much after moving to a policy of preclusive defense once their walls were established. All the legions got moved to garrison duty on the walls, and the excess legions were retired. When civil unrest broke out, it took a long time for the legions to be called back from the frontier, or for a new legion to be trained and formed.
After a few generations, the Romans forgot how to fight effectively. The Roman soldier in the last part of the empire's reign would have got his ass beat down by a soldier from the first part of the empire's reign. The soldiers just became soft.
Soldier: "Oh crap! Captain, our checkered phalanx is falling apart against their calvary!"
Captain: "Well... there goes another legion!"
Because the shuttles can carry MUCH more cargo than the Soyuz can. Not only in terms of tons of cargo, but also in terms of size. Things can be only so big on a soyuz; on the shuttle, things can be any size you want that will fit in the cargo bay and be secured in place.
The reason that there are only two people on the ISS right now is that there are not enough supplies to support more than that. Water is a big problem. So are spare parts. The shuttle was able to lift all the water needed for 3 people on the ISS and still had extra. You have to launch several Soyuz capsules to get the same amount of materials up there.
If you consider only the progress resupply vehicles as your source of cargo vessel, you still end up needing many more missions than if you had a shuttle in the mix. Progress is basically a soyuz design with autopilot and all the people stuff thrown out. It's built for cargo carrying only (and they REALLY pack stuff tight in those things!)
Ideally, to have one vehicle that can get people and cargo up to orbit, or purely cargo, you need one of two approaches:
1) A high-altitude lifter to get a cargo module up high enough for the cargo module to boost itself to the proper orbit (similar to the White-Knight/SpaceShip One approach).
2) A soyuz-like approach where you have a capsule lifted to orbit by multi-stage rockets. With a capsule that is large enough to support people and a significant amount of cargo.
Both approaches would require a fast turn around time. Basically, you have smaller vehicles in terms of cargo lifting capability, but send up a nearly continuous stream of them to get a similar amount of material up there.
The government chooses those formats because most companies have and use them. And also probably because the contracting officer that writes the BAA (or SPO or whoever), has a format in their head that they think is the proper one.
I've seen both sides of this; before as a person at a small private company dealing directly with the DoD, and now as a spectator on the other side of the field. (I don't do contract stuff at my current job.)
Though I will admit that if you can convince the government that something is worth their time and money, they'll change. I see it happen every day. Usually it's the contractors that are the stubborn ones (a certain aerospace company guy strictly requests that all of the people under him use Excel and Word in writing documents). On my side... heck, if I had say in the format, I'd go with something that's easy and cheap to use, and is widespread enough or easily attainable so that folks bidding on contracts or submitting proposals or whitepapers don't have to worry.
I've also seen with certain offices that they accept rich text, html, word, and pdf files all for the same RFP.
I'd really like to be able to use something other than MS stuff at work though. Certain of our programs are things that I am wary of using, and I don't use them at home. I've been mulling over whether I should talk to the IT folks here, but I'm not sure what their reaction will be. It won't hurt to try, but I don't want to bruise egos or anything either.;)
I think that using the approach of having something with blades causes cavitation, or even pre-cavitation pressure drops. Both pressure drops would easily destroy red blood cells (heck, I've watched propellers in turbines be destroyed from cavitation).
I'm familiar with the principles behind the operation of a laser, thank you.
I hope this isn't meant to sound pissy on your part. I did not intend to come across as lecturing or condescending. I thought I was coming across as helpful and friendly.
You could use a thermal cycle as you stated. Though I don't think it would be very efficient. The likely candidate would be a brayton cycle because it would be more easily engineered on a spacecraft than the ideal carnot cycle.
However, I think it would be more feasible to use some kind of conductive mesh that has individual molecules or atoms trapped in the lattice of the mesh. I was thinking a mesh solely for the surface area you would have.
Another option may be a thin resonating chamber filled with a gas that just happens to resonate at the same energy level as your gas. The gas cools your heat shields and uses the peltier effect to flow in low gravity. Your gas would be a coolant and a lasing medium. I think the only serious issue here is cooling of the gas too much. I don't know that you'd necessarily need an optical shutter either; just have the gas constantly lasing.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight?
You'd not have to worry at all about the ionization temperature.
When designing a laser, the only thing you need to worry about is what energy levels are stable for the medium you are working with. For example, in a solid state laser, you have a material that has an energy level which can quite easily be populated by adding electrons. The level is somewhat unstable (you gotta always have the capability of spontaneous emission), and so you have to continuously pump the lasing material.
In a CO2 laser, you continuously pump the CO2 to vibrate. The molecule will only vibrate at certain frequencies. Your CO2 molecule will relax after it emits a photon, if the vibrational mode is at the correct energy level. You get enough CO2 molecules pumped and you'll get lasing.
In a chemical laser, you have the same principle. Some chemical reaction produces an excited state of some molecule or atom and that excited state gives off a photon. The pumping mechanism is based on a chemical reaction.
In all three cases, the lasing medium may be the actual pumped material, or it may be something that is close in energy levels to the excited levels in the pumped material.
Also, the goal is purely to get many atoms/molecules to be in an excited state (more than in the ground state). It's this condition that is called a population inversion. A population inversion is needed so that you can get to a point where you have a lot of atoms/molecules giving off photons at nearly the same time. Those photons then either hit other atoms/molecules, or they are released with other photons to make the laser beam.
As an example, why spend time, effort, and money developing an algorithm that does the exact same things that the linux kernel does?
Defense folks aren't stupid. They're not going to reinvent the wheel when they don't have to. You'll never see any of the proprietary source code that a firm (or DoD personnel) will write to do something. They don't have to publish said modules. They can just say that they're using such and such linux kernel and this library. They're not violating any license by doing things that way.
You would never see the source code for a fire control algorithm on a missile system. Nor would you see the source for flight control software on an aircraft. But the task manager may very well be stated as being the linux kernel, verson X.X.X.
"They" are going to not reinvent the wheel. And "they" are not required to divulge any of the source code that they write themselves. Just because "they" use open source code doesn't mean "they" have to give the source to "their" proprietary stuff.;)
Personally, I think it's a good thing that the government uses open source stuff. I also think it's good to use commercial off the shelf stuff whenever possible. Again, why come up with something that accomplishes the same exact thing that an already existing system does? It makes absolutely NO sense.
The statements against FOSS in the article are BS. The US has a doctrine to incorporate open source whenever and wherever possible. It's cheaper, easier to maintain, and there are not hidden backdoors.;)
The part of the government I work for insists on using Open Source ideology whenever and wherever they can. I could never talk about what systems, but you (slashdot crowd) may be suprised at how widespread open source software is. And in what systems such software is used.
I can tell you from previous experience at a private company, that open source software is used quite frequently in systems that the government purchases. The linux kernel would be a prime example.
This talk about open source being un-american, un-patriotic, or a threat to national security is PURE BS. The people crying about these things now are way too late. It's funny as hell too. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get shocked. My cousin peed on an electric fence once. I'd imagine peeing into "the already polluted river of corporate communication" would have similar effects.
Photons don't have a rest mass. That means that when they are not moving, they are massless and not affected by gravity.
However, it's pretty hard to slow an actual physical photon. You can slow the photon down by smearing it out.
But as long as the photon is moving, it has a mass associated with that kinetic energy. That mass is what is affected by gravity.
That's ironic.
Toss a few of these things into a building or room to get some intelligence before making an assualt. Say in a hostage situation, or bank robbery in progress.
Or on the battle field if you wanted a bird's eye view, but didn't want an RC plane spotted. Toss some of these up or shoot a compacted version out of a grenade launcher (40mm rounds) and you get a prett good height. Just like flares at night... you only need a couple of minutes to do a quick body count, or get an idea of which direction the enemy is approaching your position.
I could imagine things like these working near or inside buildings that are on fire as well. Just a quick recon. They'd have to be modified to withstand the heat and have a control system suitable to that kind of turbulent fluid mechanics environment.
Just a few examples I suppose...
I don't know about you, but most people don't seem to realize that you don't need a pen, or paperclips, or tweezers to kill someone. Screening for weapons does jack shit when that person is strong or knowledgable enough to kill without weapons. Hell, I know of five ways that I personally could kill someone with nothing other than my bare hands. I know of five more that can disable that person so they are either not getting up or they can't do anything if they did.
The other thing is, and I'm not 100% sure about this, in the event of a plane crash the government has an obligation by law to find the next of kin. It's assumed that they'll be able to do this if the people on board have names associated with them. It's also a law in most states that a body can't be buried without being identified. A plane crash generates a lot of bodies. All those anonymous people would severely clog up a morgue...
I've seen Billy boy without his shirt on (at wild waves... a water park a bit south of Seattle).
He has boobs.
To copyright something all you really have to do is put your stamp on it.
This post copyright 2004, by Sexylicious.
Now this post is copyrighted.
So what you're saying is that you take a pair of entangled photons, have one get sent to the moon and hooked up to a detector and transmitter, and take the other and stick it in a cold room until the one on the moon is ready.
Then, at a prearranged time, read both photons. The one on the moon sends it's results to earth as soon as the detector reads it. The one on earth stores the info with a timestamp.
The incoming data from the moon should lag a bit, easily measurable with today's equipment. Put a time stamp on said data as soon as it comes to your lab, account for transmission delays (should only add a couple of seconds at most).
When you compare the times, your moon detector should say that the photon had such and such state on the moon, and since you read both photons at the same time, the one on earth should give you information a couple of seconds before the info arrives from the moon about the photon on the moon.
Would be a good experiment.
Oh yeah, that's just what we need, engineering students whose mindset is that of a business owner. How about busting your butt to achieve something? researching more elegant solutions (and no, that's not yours, elegance is in the design and performance software with tough constraints)?
You are forgetting that a good engineer is, by nature, lazy. The only reason we have cars, planes, trains, boats, and so on, is because an engineer was too lazy to walk, try and fly (by flapping his arms), too lazy to run, and too lazy to swim. Engineers typically say to themselves, "How can I do this with less effort/money/time/etc.?"
but my previous one owned any ideas that I came up with that were related to what the company did.
There was also a clause in my contract that said that after I stopped working there, I could not work for a company that offered competing products for a period of two years.
It was a reasonable and logical contract. My former employer did not want me competing with them, nor did they want me to go and take my projects and trade secrets with me to another company.
I think the guy in the article was an idiot for either: not double-checking his contract for an ownership clause, or not figuring out a way to get around the contract by publishing under an assumed name or holding off on publishing his idea.
1) I see. =) Though I'd question the analogy of slavery to immigration. I can see how they are similar in the US, but I can also see how they are different. I think that the thing that drives the US is the fact that after disasters, wars, famines, just hard times in general, the US always bounces back. I wonder if the drivers are more external events and the populace reacting to those events. Pearl Harbor, USSR and the space race, Vietnam, collapse of the USSR, 9/11, etc. It seems that Americans react to situations rather than anticipate and sidestep them.
2) No doubts there. Without slaves after Rome became big enough to require them, the Roman empire would have fallen apart. Though I think it should also be noted that slaves could obtain Roman citizenship. It was at the beginning of Rome that the consolidation and expansion didn't require slaves.
Not exactly. The fact that Rome was a conquering civilization is somewhat false. Rome always conquered when it [i]felt[/i] threatened. There were many civilizations that existed alongside the Romans until the Romans felt threatened (Etruscan, Greek, Gauls, turks, and so on). It was that feeling of being threatened (militarily, culturally, or economically) that caused Rome to strike out. It started off being a little valley with mud huts.
And Rome also conquered and took land well into the 4th and 5th centuries AD. There was nothing wrong with taking over a territory because often the Romans didn't want to be bothered with government of a province; they'd rather be protected by treaties and agreements, backed up by the threat of military pressure, than sit in a province and police it. One of Rome's strong points was that they did not grind a province into the ground unless they felt threatened by it.
Rome lost many battles in its decline. The western empire fell almost immediately after Justinian split the emporer's seat in two. The western empire fell because it was attacked swiftly and the soldiers defending it weren't trained to defend properly.
The eastern empire stayed as long as it did because it was across the pond from europe, and because the soldiers there were still constantly trained by marauding persian and far eastern tribes. They also didn't try to expand their empire beyond what they knew they could control. Until they were defeated several hundred years after the western empire fell.
Conquering civilizations can survive if they do it correctly.
You never heard much of non-conquering civilizations because they didn't last long. (Etruscans were almost never heard of until the last hundred years when their artifacts were discovered and properly recognized.)
I'm not saying that the US is going to survive if it turns into a conquering civilization. I am saying that the US has to be a bit of a conquering civilization to maintain its prosperity. If the US really were in the business of conquering, we'd drop a few nukes on a place (to clear it out), then we'd send in hazmat teams and robots to clean up the place and rebuild, or just let the place lose its radioactivity over time. Give it 50 or 100 years and things are back to levels that are as safe as being in a brick building underground. We wouldn't screw around with infantry on the ground. Trust me. If our goal in Iraq really was oil, we'd probably fabricate a lie as incentive to launch some nukes at Iraq. Flatten the country and rebuild with automated factories and reap the rewards. That's if we really were a conquering culture that was really interested in oil.
When I first started using Win2kPro, I was running an Athlon Tbird at 1.4GHz on an ASUS A7M266 MB, with 512 MB PC2100 ram from crucial. And I saw a BSOD almost daily.
Some things I realized:
My hardware was not uncommon.
The temps in the case were 55 C as measured by the little PC monitor thingy in ASUS' MB products (forgot the name)
I ended up getting frustrated with the system and getting a Koolance case since I figured things were too hot.
Most of the BSODs were solved with the water cooling. Temps were at most 33 C.
I still got a few and realized that the temp of the CPU was 33 C, while the temps of the memory and chipset on the MB were still up in the 50's.
I got a new MB, CPU, and new RAM, and sold the old stuff on ebay.
No more BSODs until I accidentally dropped my case on my parent's hardwood floors after moving back in after I finished my masters. The two harddisks both died a drowning death. I got a free replacement of the broken koolance stuff, and a replacement of my hardisks. I dropped one of the harddisks as I left the store and decided to just go with one.
Since I cooled things properly and replaced the harddrive, and rebuilt the system, Win2kPro has [i]NEVER[/i] died on me since. Not once. And I moved to the high desert in Southern California where it is currently 35 C outside.
I would guess that most of the problems people experience are from not keeping their hardware cool, having poor power supplies, or misconfigurations (say OC'ing to a freq that's not as stable as it seems). In fact, everyone that I know of that has had BSODs on Win2k and XP have all had zero BSODs since they started making sure their systems were cool.
BTW, that system that I had so many problems with ended up going to a friend. He implemented water cooling and put some new RAM in. He has had zero problems as well.
Nope. It was because the legions lost their training because they never fought much after moving to a policy of preclusive defense once their walls were established. All the legions got moved to garrison duty on the walls, and the excess legions were retired. When civil unrest broke out, it took a long time for the legions to be called back from the frontier, or for a new legion to be trained and formed.
After a few generations, the Romans forgot how to fight effectively. The Roman soldier in the last part of the empire's reign would have got his ass beat down by a soldier from the first part of the empire's reign. The soldiers just became soft.
Soldier: "Oh crap! Captain, our checkered phalanx is falling apart against their calvary!"
Captain: "Well... there goes another legion!"
Because the shuttles can carry MUCH more cargo than the Soyuz can. Not only in terms of tons of cargo, but also in terms of size. Things can be only so big on a soyuz; on the shuttle, things can be any size you want that will fit in the cargo bay and be secured in place.
The reason that there are only two people on the ISS right now is that there are not enough supplies to support more than that. Water is a big problem. So are spare parts. The shuttle was able to lift all the water needed for 3 people on the ISS and still had extra. You have to launch several Soyuz capsules to get the same amount of materials up there.
If you consider only the progress resupply vehicles as your source of cargo vessel, you still end up needing many more missions than if you had a shuttle in the mix. Progress is basically a soyuz design with autopilot and all the people stuff thrown out. It's built for cargo carrying only (and they REALLY pack stuff tight in those things!)
Ideally, to have one vehicle that can get people and cargo up to orbit, or purely cargo, you need one of two approaches:
1) A high-altitude lifter to get a cargo module up high enough for the cargo module to boost itself to the proper orbit (similar to the White-Knight/SpaceShip One approach).
2) A soyuz-like approach where you have a capsule lifted to orbit by multi-stage rockets. With a capsule that is large enough to support people and a significant amount of cargo.
Both approaches would require a fast turn around time. Basically, you have smaller vehicles in terms of cargo lifting capability, but send up a nearly continuous stream of them to get a similar amount of material up there.
The government chooses those formats because most companies have and use them. And also probably because the contracting officer that writes the BAA (or SPO or whoever), has a format in their head that they think is the proper one.
;)
I've seen both sides of this; before as a person at a small private company dealing directly with the DoD, and now as a spectator on the other side of the field. (I don't do contract stuff at my current job.)
Though I will admit that if you can convince the government that something is worth their time and money, they'll change. I see it happen every day. Usually it's the contractors that are the stubborn ones (a certain aerospace company guy strictly requests that all of the people under him use Excel and Word in writing documents). On my side... heck, if I had say in the format, I'd go with something that's easy and cheap to use, and is widespread enough or easily attainable so that folks bidding on contracts or submitting proposals or whitepapers don't have to worry.
I've also seen with certain offices that they accept rich text, html, word, and pdf files all for the same RFP.
I'd really like to be able to use something other than MS stuff at work though. Certain of our programs are things that I am wary of using, and I don't use them at home. I've been mulling over whether I should talk to the IT folks here, but I'm not sure what their reaction will be. It won't hurt to try, but I don't want to bruise egos or anything either.
I think that using the approach of having something with blades causes cavitation, or even pre-cavitation pressure drops. Both pressure drops would easily destroy red blood cells (heck, I've watched propellers in turbines be destroyed from cavitation).
while(1)
{ get(info);
if (info=true)
goto(war_with_iraq(info));
elseif (info=false)
goto(war_with_iraq(info));
else
do_monkey_subroutine(bush_iq); }
Wonder if this would work?
I'm familiar with the principles behind the operation of a laser, thank you.
I hope this isn't meant to sound pissy on your part. I did not intend to come across as lecturing or condescending. I thought I was coming across as helpful and friendly.
You could use a thermal cycle as you stated. Though I don't think it would be very efficient. The likely candidate would be a brayton cycle because it would be more easily engineered on a spacecraft than the ideal carnot cycle.
However, I think it would be more feasible to use some kind of conductive mesh that has individual molecules or atoms trapped in the lattice of the mesh. I was thinking a mesh solely for the surface area you would have.
Another option may be a thin resonating chamber filled with a gas that just happens to resonate at the same energy level as your gas. The gas cools your heat shields and uses the peltier effect to flow in low gravity. Your gas would be a coolant and a lasing medium. I think the only serious issue here is cooling of the gas too much. I don't know that you'd necessarily need an optical shutter either; just have the gas constantly lasing.
But what about a laser powered by heat? Can it happen without having to reach the ionization temperature of the lasing medium? Anyone have any insight? You'd not have to worry at all about the ionization temperature.
When designing a laser, the only thing you need to worry about is what energy levels are stable for the medium you are working with. For example, in a solid state laser, you have a material that has an energy level which can quite easily be populated by adding electrons. The level is somewhat unstable (you gotta always have the capability of spontaneous emission), and so you have to continuously pump the lasing material.
In a CO2 laser, you continuously pump the CO2 to vibrate. The molecule will only vibrate at certain frequencies. Your CO2 molecule will relax after it emits a photon, if the vibrational mode is at the correct energy level. You get enough CO2 molecules pumped and you'll get lasing.
In a chemical laser, you have the same principle. Some chemical reaction produces an excited state of some molecule or atom and that excited state gives off a photon. The pumping mechanism is based on a chemical reaction.
In all three cases, the lasing medium may be the actual pumped material, or it may be something that is close in energy levels to the excited levels in the pumped material.
Also, the goal is purely to get many atoms/molecules to be in an excited state (more than in the ground state). It's this condition that is called a population inversion. A population inversion is needed so that you can get to a point where you have a lot of atoms/molecules giving off photons at nearly the same time. Those photons then either hit other atoms/molecules, or they are released with other photons to make the laser beam.
As an example, why spend time, effort, and money developing an algorithm that does the exact same things that the linux kernel does?
;)
Defense folks aren't stupid. They're not going to reinvent the wheel when they don't have to. You'll never see any of the proprietary source code that a firm (or DoD personnel) will write to do something. They don't have to publish said modules. They can just say that they're using such and such linux kernel and this library. They're not violating any license by doing things that way.
You would never see the source code for a fire control algorithm on a missile system. Nor would you see the source for flight control software on an aircraft. But the task manager may very well be stated as being the linux kernel, verson X.X.X.
"They" are going to not reinvent the wheel. And "they" are not required to divulge any of the source code that they write themselves. Just because "they" use open source code doesn't mean "they" have to give the source to "their" proprietary stuff.
Personally, I think it's a good thing that the government uses open source stuff. I also think it's good to use commercial off the shelf stuff whenever possible. Again, why come up with something that accomplishes the same exact thing that an already existing system does? It makes absolutely NO sense.
They have already made up their minds. ;)
;)
The statements against FOSS in the article are BS. The US has a doctrine to incorporate open source whenever and wherever possible. It's cheaper, easier to maintain, and there are not hidden backdoors.
That would make sense if those shows are worth more than 500,000. ;)
It also makes sense since the guy put the stuff up on foreign servers. That's international, and that little fact likely brought the FBI into things.
The part of the government I work for insists on using Open Source ideology whenever and wherever they can. I could never talk about what systems, but you (slashdot crowd) may be suprised at how widespread open source software is. And in what systems such software is used.
I can tell you from previous experience at a private company, that open source software is used quite frequently in systems that the government purchases. The linux kernel would be a prime example.
This talk about open source being un-american, un-patriotic, or a threat to national security is PURE BS. The people crying about these things now are way too late. It's funny as hell too. =)
Very true. However, I think my premise still holds true. If you make a product, and the market likes it, it doesn't matter how small you are.