"It's just that a bullet (even a qualified one) through the cabin itself would amount to instant cabin depressurisation and a sincere risk of structural damage."
As much as I think the idea that guns on planes would make them safer is incredibly stupid and counter to experience, the idea that a cabin depressurizes instantly or produces a risk of structural failure simply isn't true.
Cabin pressure is constantly monitored and adjusted, generally around 8-9 psi. (The pressization comes from a bleed from the engines.) They already have a couple of outflow valves, one in front and one in back, which are basically just holes. The systems are generally designed to maintain cabin pressure even with a whole window knocked out. It might be a little windy near the window, but there's not much worry of depressurizing.
Even without the automatic monitoring and correction for pressure, it would take a fairly long time to depressurize the cabin to atmospheric, certainly much longer than the 5 minutes or so it takes to get to a safe altitude.
As for structural damage, the airframe itself is capable of flying without pressure and certainly the windows and shell provide no structural support. I'm not sure where this belief comes from.
In case people are worried about depressurization and structure, consider that a flight from Hawaii lost an entire section of skin. While it did depressurize fairly quickly (huuuuggge hole), that only caused diziness and headaches with perhaps a little vomiting. It did not cause structural failure and the only serious injury was the flight attendant who died when she was sucked out because she was standing next to it when it failed.
"This falls on the "acceptable security" side for me."
That may be true in your case for whatever reason, but I have to ask the question of why is this necessary. How many hi-jackings using hidden guns or weapons take place in the U.S. each year? How many incidents would it have stopped? (If you say 9/11, that'd be wrong. The box cutters didn't slip through security, they were allowed on.)
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. It plays off of the fear and paranoia spread by the current administration and media. You are far more likely to get your car hi-jacked than be on an airplane that is hi-jacked.
Thanks for the references, they're very informative. Longer life expectancy, lower mortality rates, and much less spent per capita and per GDP on health. I was unaware of that before.
"Wait till sealevels rise a few tens of metres..."
Hey, I think we can solve a bunch of problems at once here. Since we're pumping cold water from the ocean, the ocean levels will actually drop, counteracting the rise of sealevels. Unless of course we put the pumped water back in the ocean. So, instead, we'll "deposit" the cold water inland which will increase the number of people living near water which means more people that can benefit from this technology.
Warning: Reasoning in your rearview mirror may appear less logical than in reality. It is merely an illusion.
"The sweating of the pipes below ground is a great idea. It seems much more efficient than spraying water everywhere, and having a lot of it evaporate."
Actually, they're complementary here. The "sweat" is just condensed water vapour from the air. It won't work well in areas with low humidity. The evaporation of sprayed water only happens in areas of low humidity. So, if you are in an area of low humidity you're screwed for both, unless you can use the humidity from the evaporated sprayed water as the "sweat" from the cold water.
"In fact the accident rate WENT DOWN.""That's why the death rate went down when the speed limits were raised."
Not that I disagree at all, but there is a common assumption or mis-conception that you seem to be repeating here, unless you have a separate source. A lower accident rate does not mean a lower death rate or vice versa. It might be true in this case, I'm not sure.
The argument about relative speeds being the problem probably has a lot of truth in it; I've read research in this area and it certainly seems to be a factor. However, reducing the disparity by raising the speed of the slower drivers means that there is much more kinetic energy on the roads, especially with kinetic energy increasing with the square of velocity. (20% faster speed means 44% more kinetic energy.) This is further exacerbated by a trend towards larger vehicles, such as SUVs, since kinetic energy is also proportional to mass. In an accident this energy must be dissipated and the amount of damage will generally be related to this energy.
So, while accidents may happen less often, the average and total damage caused in an accident may increase, including death rates. Accident rate is only part of the equation. Again, the death rate may have indeed dropped, but it isn't a given just because the accident rate dropped.
"Of course then you have the issue of how to deal with morally objectionable material. I for one wouldn't care to allow porn to be paid for like that."
It already is, essentially. Although hard-core porn cable/satellite channels are paid for directly, other channels show porn (usually softer, but not always) that are paid for though advertising revenues and/or general cable fees. Personally, I don't find porn objectionable. I do, however, find fear-mongering crap like Fox News and other similar "news" shows objectionable. If I had to pick things I'd rather not be paying for it's something like that.
However, ultimately for the general solution to work we all have to partially pay for some things we object to. That's the way society works in general. Everyone needs to contribute, but you don't get to pick and chose what your contribution pays for except in the aggregated sense.
"The moderation is undone, and you don't get the mod point back."
That depends on how you do it. If someone logs out and re-opens/. as a true AC, it has no way to know it's the same person as who did the modding. If they just hit the "Post as AC" option, then you're probably right.
"Guantanomo Bay is a US military base, therefore it is subject to US laws."
No, in fact it is rented from Cuba (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.
"They were captured in disguise and according to the laws of warfare could be summarily executed as spies."
While it's nice to refer to what the actual laws and interpretations allow, you miss the most important point: they have no due process rights. As you state, they have no Geneva Convention protection, even though they were captured as "the enemy" in a war. They are also not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see above link) because they are considered on foreign soil, even though they were captured by Americans, are being held by Americans, and are on an American base. In short, they have no protected rights for due process that civilized nations provide to everyone including war criminals, enemy soldiers, and civilian criminals.
Some people may not care. After all, these are terrorists, right? Well, how do we know? Is the military infallable? Is every accused person guilty? That's what due process is for. Is this not the "absolute power" behaviour that pissed off American's enough to create the U.S. in the first place, and provide such basic protections to all people?
"In point of fact, it's very American to have a municipality provide cheap broadband - cities and townships were created expressly to provide common services like water, electricity, libraries - and now broadband."
Absolutely. On top of that, anything considered "infrastructure" is generally provided through the government. I think access to the internet falls more in the category of infrastructure than, say, libraries. You don't see road-building companies complaining that the government provides "free" or cheap access to roads.
"why the hell should I use what precious little upstream I have distributing content for major content providers . there are plenty of protocols designed to distribute over the web. use them. "
It's clear you don't understand the swarming nature of BT. BT allows you to download more robustly, and usually faster overall, because there isn't a single bottleneck from one download source. It gets part of the data from different people. Ideally, this means you could always be downloading at your maximum bandwidth rather than being limited by someone else's transfer rates and/or losing your single connection. But you can only get the file "bits" from other people (pun intended) if they are also uploading them. So, if everybody ceased to allow uploading then you can't download as fast or robustly, which is why BT enforces uploading, it's a requirement to make the whole system work as well as it does. In the system you describe, you'll end up with longer and flakier downloading even with the small loss of uploading bandwidth.
That is why people are on the BT bandwagon. Now, it only works if there are other people downloading or making available the same file you are getting, so if you are downloading something obscure or old, you might be better off with a direct download. On the other hand, if it is obscure then nobody else would be looking for it and you'd have no requests for uploading it either.
"I believe it can only accommodate one shuttle at a time."
There are actually 3 Pressurized Mating Adaptors (PMAs) on the ISS but one is the interface between the Unity (Node 1) module and the Russian FGB module. The remaining two can be docked to but if a shuttle is docked to one and a Soyuz is docked to the other (there is generally an "escape" vehicle always attached), then you are probably correct that that one of these vehicles would have to be jetisoned to accomodate the second shuttle.
However, as to the "cramped" ISS versus using the shuttle too, I don't think anybody realizes the size difference. The shuttle has very small crew space. Both the mid-deck and flight-deck are about the size of walk-in closet. The ISS is HUGE in comparison. In the Unity module it's even possible to get to a point in the middle where you can't touch anything even fully outstretched. (For fun astronauts have put someone there to see if they could actually manage to get themselves out -- since they can't push off anything the only way to move is to throw something hard in the opposite direction you want to move. When all you have is your clothes, there's slim pickings -- and yes, it was a woman they did this to.)
A "cramped" ISS would be a lot less cramped than using the shuttle.
"Well, the last time I read about an electric sports car being compared to Ferrari and other high horse power cars, it beat them hands down in acceleration."
Yes, perhaps you were reading about the Tzero. Indeed it out-accelerates most sports cars. I'd buy one if (a) production models were available yet, (b) the line-up wasn't so long, (c) I had somewhere to part it, and (d) I could afford one.
"I thought, looking at a lot of these, that they would be things someone might legitimately buy, if for a conversation piece if nothing else."
What I find even funnier is that you can actually buy magnetic tetrahedrons (tetranom) at about the size they show (though smaller balls) and even up to 2 m per bar length. They're used as 3D measurement standards and are even thermally compensated. Of course they cost $10K+ a piece. We have one in-house.
"I am going to miss the SuSE 3D graphics card driver though"
Yeah, I installed SuSE as well and it is very nice, except the out-of-date Yast2 packages. But what kills it for me was the bloat that made it painfully slow. Unfortunately you're also right about Yoper. Although I like it's speed a lot, it's not exactly the most robust system yet. Give it a few revs yet though. I'd like to try Gentoo as well, which has both speed and robustness, but unfortunately I don't have the time to tweak it.
Well, yes, cute. But still faked. Look at the upper left of the screen where the blue and green stripes off the blanket miss by a lot. They're all faked, that's the point. Using Photoshop, though feasible, takes all the fun out of it.
That's nice, but the guy said "When a product such as this exists, it's very hard for most people to justify spending $400 on an ipod." He gave the price range and said "iPod", obviously referring to the iPod, not the Mini and not the Shuffle.
Looks like you haven't learned that there are different Linux distros yet. I have Yoper Linux on a 233 MHz that boots faster than my XP on a 3 GHz, not to mention how fast the apps start. Gentoo is pretty fast too.
See, with Linux you can find lots of options and tradeoffs depending on what you want. With Windows you get XP or your option is something older, less functional, slower, etc.
"Seriously, haven't you ever looked at a PCMall or TigerDirect catalog..."
Yes, I've seen them. I meant there must be a joke about dolphins selling laptops. Some sort of "Where are they now" entertainment story with Flipper in a suit selling laptops at Best Buy or something.
"The real question is why people think that multiple layers of firewalls make them more secure. It is confusing."
But see, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. How is anybody supposed to know if they are secure? I'm a pretty smart guy and I'd say intermediate knowledge on networking and security, but I haven't got a clue how to check if my PC has been breached. Obviously ZoneAlarm reports unexpected incoming and outgoing traffic, but a number of programs need to pass through, like web browsers and P2P.
So I'll ask the question again. Is there any software out there to check if a PC has been breached? Obviously the honeynet project has some of their own, but what about the rest of us? Do I have to become an expert and write my own code? (If the answer is yes, we're doomed.)
Oh, as a side note, the 2 firewalls has nothing to do with being more secure. Both the server and router come with firewalls. The server is necessary because it serves our webpages and email and the router is necessary to attach more than one PC.
There's gotta be a great joke in there somewhere, but I'm at a loss for one right now. That being said, I've seen one of these laptops in action and thought it was crap. The "3D" looks like one of those rigged images that shows a different picture when you look at a different angle. Basically it looked like it was just flipping between two slightly different views depending on where my head was. It also sucked a ton of juice.
Absolutely. I find it odd that anyone would ever disagree with this. Well, as long as "open source" means "open methodology". The software doesn't have to be open source, but any algorithms should be. Otherwise it isn't really science, it's just somebody saying "I did some calculations and came up with these results. Trust me, they're true." Science requires that the results are repeatable by independent evaluation, otherwise errors can find their way into the results, as appears to be the case here.
That being said, Mann did publish his methodogy (though not the software code directly) and when McKitrick & McIntyre did re-create the calculations they found errors in the approach and the claims. I'm not sure that the source code to calculations is really the issue here, M&M are generally claiming the methodology and data organization is flawed, not specifically a coding error.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
As much as I think the idea that guns on planes would make them safer is incredibly stupid and counter to experience, the idea that a cabin depressurizes instantly or produces a risk of structural failure simply isn't true.
Cabin pressure is constantly monitored and adjusted, generally around 8-9 psi. (The pressization comes from a bleed from the engines.) They already have a couple of outflow valves, one in front and one in back, which are basically just holes. The systems are generally designed to maintain cabin pressure even with a whole window knocked out. It might be a little windy near the window, but there's not much worry of depressurizing.
Even without the automatic monitoring and correction for pressure, it would take a fairly long time to depressurize the cabin to atmospheric, certainly much longer than the 5 minutes or so it takes to get to a safe altitude.
As for structural damage, the airframe itself is capable of flying without pressure and certainly the windows and shell provide no structural support. I'm not sure where this belief comes from.
In case people are worried about depressurization and structure, consider that a flight from Hawaii lost an entire section of skin. While it did depressurize fairly quickly (huuuuggge hole), that only caused diziness and headaches with perhaps a little vomiting. It did not cause structural failure and the only serious injury was the flight attendant who died when she was sucked out because she was standing next to it when it failed.
That may be true in your case for whatever reason, but I have to ask the question of why is this necessary. How many hi-jackings using hidden guns or weapons take place in the U.S. each year? How many incidents would it have stopped? (If you say 9/11, that'd be wrong. The box cutters didn't slip through security, they were allowed on.)
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. It plays off of the fear and paranoia spread by the current administration and media. You are far more likely to get your car hi-jacked than be on an airplane that is hi-jacked.
Thanks for the references, they're very informative. Longer life expectancy, lower mortality rates, and much less spent per capita and per GDP on health. I was unaware of that before.
Hey, I think we can solve a bunch of problems at once here. Since we're pumping cold water from the ocean, the ocean levels will actually drop, counteracting the rise of sealevels. Unless of course we put the pumped water back in the ocean. So, instead, we'll "deposit" the cold water inland which will increase the number of people living near water which means more people that can benefit from this technology.
Warning: Reasoning in your rearview mirror may appear less logical than in reality. It is merely an illusion.
Actually, they're complementary here. The "sweat" is just condensed water vapour from the air. It won't work well in areas with low humidity. The evaporation of sprayed water only happens in areas of low humidity. So, if you are in an area of low humidity you're screwed for both, unless you can use the humidity from the evaporated sprayed water as the "sweat" from the cold water.
Not that I disagree at all, but there is a common assumption or mis-conception that you seem to be repeating here, unless you have a separate source. A lower accident rate does not mean a lower death rate or vice versa. It might be true in this case, I'm not sure.
The argument about relative speeds being the problem probably has a lot of truth in it; I've read research in this area and it certainly seems to be a factor. However, reducing the disparity by raising the speed of the slower drivers means that there is much more kinetic energy on the roads, especially with kinetic energy increasing with the square of velocity. (20% faster speed means 44% more kinetic energy.) This is further exacerbated by a trend towards larger vehicles, such as SUVs, since kinetic energy is also proportional to mass. In an accident this energy must be dissipated and the amount of damage will generally be related to this energy.
So, while accidents may happen less often, the average and total damage caused in an accident may increase, including death rates. Accident rate is only part of the equation. Again, the death rate may have indeed dropped, but it isn't a given just because the accident rate dropped.
It already is, essentially. Although hard-core porn cable/satellite channels are paid for directly, other channels show porn (usually softer, but not always) that are paid for though advertising revenues and/or general cable fees. Personally, I don't find porn objectionable. I do, however, find fear-mongering crap like Fox News and other similar "news" shows objectionable. If I had to pick things I'd rather not be paying for it's something like that.
However, ultimately for the general solution to work we all have to partially pay for some things we object to. That's the way society works in general. Everyone needs to contribute, but you don't get to pick and chose what your contribution pays for except in the aggregated sense.
That depends on how you do it. If someone logs out and re-opens /. as a true AC, it has no way to know it's the same person as who did the modding. If they just hit the "Post as AC" option, then you're probably right.
No, in fact it is rented from Cuba (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.
"They were captured in disguise and according to the laws of warfare could be summarily executed as spies."
While it's nice to refer to what the actual laws and interpretations allow, you miss the most important point: they have no due process rights. As you state, they have no Geneva Convention protection, even though they were captured as "the enemy" in a war. They are also not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see above link) because they are considered on foreign soil, even though they were captured by Americans, are being held by Americans, and are on an American base. In short, they have no protected rights for due process that civilized nations provide to everyone including war criminals, enemy soldiers, and civilian criminals.
Some people may not care. After all, these are terrorists, right? Well, how do we know? Is the military infallable? Is every accused person guilty? That's what due process is for. Is this not the "absolute power" behaviour that pissed off American's enough to create the U.S. in the first place, and provide such basic protections to all people?
Absolutely. That's why on hot summer days I sit behind a nice cool fan facing away from me.
Absolutely. On top of that, anything considered "infrastructure" is generally provided through the government. I think access to the internet falls more in the category of infrastructure than, say, libraries. You don't see road-building companies complaining that the government provides "free" or cheap access to roads.
It's clear you don't understand the swarming nature of BT. BT allows you to download more robustly, and usually faster overall, because there isn't a single bottleneck from one download source. It gets part of the data from different people. Ideally, this means you could always be downloading at your maximum bandwidth rather than being limited by someone else's transfer rates and/or losing your single connection. But you can only get the file "bits" from other people (pun intended) if they are also uploading them. So, if everybody ceased to allow uploading then you can't download as fast or robustly, which is why BT enforces uploading, it's a requirement to make the whole system work as well as it does. In the system you describe, you'll end up with longer and flakier downloading even with the small loss of uploading bandwidth.
That is why people are on the BT bandwagon. Now, it only works if there are other people downloading or making available the same file you are getting, so if you are downloading something obscure or old, you might be better off with a direct download. On the other hand, if it is obscure then nobody else would be looking for it and you'd have no requests for uploading it either.
There are actually 3 Pressurized Mating Adaptors (PMAs) on the ISS but one is the interface between the Unity (Node 1) module and the Russian FGB module. The remaining two can be docked to but if a shuttle is docked to one and a Soyuz is docked to the other (there is generally an "escape" vehicle always attached), then you are probably correct that that one of these vehicles would have to be jetisoned to accomodate the second shuttle.
However, as to the "cramped" ISS versus using the shuttle too, I don't think anybody realizes the size difference. The shuttle has very small crew space. Both the mid-deck and flight-deck are about the size of walk-in closet. The ISS is HUGE in comparison. In the Unity module it's even possible to get to a point in the middle where you can't touch anything even fully outstretched. (For fun astronauts have put someone there to see if they could actually manage to get themselves out -- since they can't push off anything the only way to move is to throw something hard in the opposite direction you want to move. When all you have is your clothes, there's slim pickings -- and yes, it was a woman they did this to.)
A "cramped" ISS would be a lot less cramped than using the shuttle.
Yes, perhaps you were reading about the Tzero. Indeed it out-accelerates most sports cars. I'd buy one if (a) production models were available yet, (b) the line-up wasn't so long, (c) I had somewhere to part it, and (d) I could afford one.
My favorite is "ThinkGeek, Ass Pooh Loft".
What I find even funnier is that you can actually buy magnetic tetrahedrons (tetranom) at about the size they show (though smaller balls) and even up to 2 m per bar length. They're used as 3D measurement standards and are even thermally compensated. Of course they cost $10K+ a piece. We have one in-house.
Yeah, I installed SuSE as well and it is very nice, except the out-of-date Yast2 packages. But what kills it for me was the bloat that made it painfully slow. Unfortunately you're also right about Yoper. Although I like it's speed a lot, it's not exactly the most robust system yet. Give it a few revs yet though. I'd like to try Gentoo as well, which has both speed and robustness, but unfortunately I don't have the time to tweak it.
Well, yes, cute. But still faked. Look at the upper left of the screen where the blue and green stripes off the blanket miss by a lot. They're all faked, that's the point. Using Photoshop, though feasible, takes all the fun out of it.
That's nice, but the guy said "When a product such as this exists, it's very hard for most people to justify spending $400 on an ipod." He gave the price range and said "iPod", obviously referring to the iPod, not the Mini and not the Shuffle.
Looks like you haven't learned that there are different Linux distros yet. I have Yoper Linux on a 233 MHz that boots faster than my XP on a 3 GHz, not to mention how fast the apps start. Gentoo is pretty fast too.
See, with Linux you can find lots of options and tradeoffs depending on what you want. With Windows you get XP or your option is something older, less functional, slower, etc.
Yes, I've seen them. I meant there must be a joke about dolphins selling laptops. Some sort of "Where are they now" entertainment story with Flipper in a suit selling laptops at Best Buy or something.
But see, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. How is anybody supposed to know if they are secure? I'm a pretty smart guy and I'd say intermediate knowledge on networking and security, but I haven't got a clue how to check if my PC has been breached. Obviously ZoneAlarm reports unexpected incoming and outgoing traffic, but a number of programs need to pass through, like web browsers and P2P.
So I'll ask the question again. Is there any software out there to check if a PC has been breached? Obviously the honeynet project has some of their own, but what about the rest of us? Do I have to become an expert and write my own code? (If the answer is yes, we're doomed.)
Oh, as a side note, the 2 firewalls has nothing to do with being more secure. Both the server and router come with firewalls. The server is necessary because it serves our webpages and email and the router is necessary to attach more than one PC.
There's gotta be a great joke in there somewhere, but I'm at a loss for one right now. That being said, I've seen one of these laptops in action and thought it was crap. The "3D" looks like one of those rigged images that shows a different picture when you look at a different angle. Basically it looked like it was just flipping between two slightly different views depending on where my head was. It also sucked a ton of juice.
Absolutely. I find it odd that anyone would ever disagree with this. Well, as long as "open source" means "open methodology". The software doesn't have to be open source, but any algorithms should be. Otherwise it isn't really science, it's just somebody saying "I did some calculations and came up with these results. Trust me, they're true." Science requires that the results are repeatable by independent evaluation, otherwise errors can find their way into the results, as appears to be the case here.
That being said, Mann did publish his methodogy (though not the software code directly) and when McKitrick & McIntyre did re-create the calculations they found errors in the approach and the claims. I'm not sure that the source code to calculations is really the issue here, M&M are generally claiming the methodology and data organization is flawed, not specifically a coding error.