So when do the alchemists who invented this pocedure for creating diamonds out of cow farts plan to IPO? I want in. Why bother going to Jupiter when all you need is a red laser and a pressure cell?
And how many people, serving in the United States Armed forces, would turn their cruise missiles, bombers, artillery, etc. on American citizens? Point their weapons at their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters? We aren't talking about a video game here; it isn't a matter of "I have more troops so I win". American soldiers are drawn from American people in American towns, and join the American military for reasons that usually have a lot to do with protecting these people, their rights, and the principles upon which the country was formed. Our oaths are to the constitution, not to the president, for precisely that reason. Read some history; civil wars are fought between citizens, not regulated armies. Modern industrialized armies are always rendered impotent very early on because the means to support them vanish.
And people intelligent enough to create a despotic government in a once-free country know this; ask yourself how many dictatorships in the world have the full right to bear arms? None? An armed populace can force corrupt regimes to yield. An unarmed populace stumbles to the gas chambers.
Always remember: it only really takes ONE man with a gun, willing to sacrifice his life, to end a dictatorship. If Germany didn't have effective gun control, do you think Hitler could have killed 6 million men, women, and children? As long as our highly visible leaders know this(and they do, now), we are safe from the most egregious attacks on our liberty. In a society based on the inalienable rights of man, scheming to restrict these rights is treason. They don't dare because they know the penalty of treason is death.
Finally: The constitution does not GIVE us any rights. The constitution gives rights to the government. The government takes away rights based upon what the constitution says it can do. The second amendment does not mean "People can have guns", it means "Even if the country establishes a militia (or Standing Army, something the founders were opposed to, but that it necessary given the advances in modern warfare), the government can't take away guns". Simply an explicit statement of what every person who has bothered to study the history of our country knows.
It is interesting how closely this action mirrors one of the fundamental libertarian models of social adjustment; if you want someone to stop doing something, you make it harder for them to do it through peaceful manipulation of civil property. For instance, most (L)ibertarians believe that national forests are exceedingly wasteful; if you want to prevent lumber companies from chopping down yellowstone forest, the best way to do it is to form a large civil organization like the Sierra Club and buy it, placing a restriction on use of that land for lumber.
I am actually quite surprised to see this approach in action, applied liberally to the internet. Especially coming from an organization like the NAACP, for although I admire their resolve to support individual freedom and equality, it seems that most of the time their approach to this lies in spending huge amounts of money lobbying congress and organizing protests in the attempt to pass new laws restricting freedoms.
For those of you who think this is censorship, think again. Censorship requires an act of force. The only force being wielded here is the power vested in the DNS supplier to assign and store domain names. If you oppose this action on the part of the NAACP, your recourse is to fight this escheatment, not to challenge the right of the NAACP to own property. In a free market, which for the most part the internet still is, if you want to own www.kkk.org you have to pay for it. If you can't afford the price your opponent is asking, $100 buys you www.k-k-k.com or something similar, and you can still say whatever you want.
Still, I think this is a futile gesture on the part of the NAACP. People looking for lists of "Approved songs for white folks" will probably use google and find just what they are looking for. Sigh. Well, at worst it is a moral coup, forcing Young Urban Racists to look a little harder for their hate fix; at best it is a victory for all rational people who hate hatred. I'll go ahead and give the NAACP a gold star for effort...
"We don't need so damned much government", said the e-mail of the man who never had a serious disease because of vaccines and medicines developed by brilliant scientists who weren't afraid to challenge conventional ideas. He was sitting at a tiny laptop computer, a technological marvel, with a processor developed by engineers at Intel inc. and an OS developed by ruthless egoists with names like Linus and Alan Cox; people who could easily have developed the internet on their own. He chose to buy a Pentium because the Celeron chip was faster and cheaper than any competitor and he chose Linux because it was the best there was. His next computer would be an Athlon, however, because he didn't like the way Intel did business; they finally had viable competition.
His wife called him from her new digital phone, and asked him to lunch. He accepted of course; being the lead engineer at an aerospace company was hard work, and she only had lunch free once a month. While he was waiting for at the restaurant her he emailed his mother, a teacher at a Lutheran school just south of St. Louis, to tell her that he was flying home that weekend in his old Cessna 152. The Cessna was fine when he bought it in 1982, but he was going to buy a Dassault in January; since their aircraft were subject to fewer FAA regulation-induced design flaws, they handily outperformed anything designed in America. It was cheaper, too, even though he had to pay a grotesque import tax. His mother would be happy to see him, since his father was in Mexico building a new processor plant for Motorola. The old one, in Tyler, Texas, was being shut down; they couldn't afford to pay the inflated union wages.
The FDA was dragging its feet approving a new medicine his company developed, one that promised to cure the common cold; a rival company who made cough drops had produced a study showing that rats died when fed nothing but his medicine for a month. Because of this, he had a red card meeting with two of his most promising employees that afternoon. He would advise them to go back to school; he even considered sponsoring them himself, since he knew they would never come back if he fired them now. However, taxes were due in April, and he was in the highest bracket; he couldn't afford to spare 50K when his taxes were taking three times that. They would have to fend for themselves. Of course, there was always unemployment. They would probably end up in an under-funded government or university cancer lab; maybe an HMO would pick them up.
While waiting for his wife, he saw an interesting article on your Rights Online. Since its initiation in September of 1999, it had become a focal point for Internet Freedom groups; he was often terrified by what he read, but he maintained a morbid fascination. According to the article, President Bush was contemplating signing the Internet Prohibition Treaty, which would make the International War On Pornography official, and sign over control of all US networks found to be serving pornographic of otherwise dangerous or offensive materiel to the United Nations Internet Extension(UNIX). "Only 30 percent of the sites online will even be affected." A spokesman for the White House claimed. "If people would just self-regulate themselves, we wouldn't have this problem."
"Too much damned government." He wrote. "Too much damned government."
Every advocate of increased government control or regulation believes that his plan is the one that government will implement. This is true regardless of whether we are talking about health care, gun control or internet filtering. What advocates of moral and economic fascism like Lester don't understand is that the internet isn't really chaos; it is potentially 5 billion plans, each one carefully regulated by its owner, according to his own ideas. Thus self regulation always works, by definition; it simply doesn't always work exactly the way the people used to wielding power want it to work. Of course this angers them, and they respond in typical fashion; strangling the greatest boon mankind has ever known, murdering it in its infancy. Before it is strong enough to fight back.
The problem isn't self regulation; we cannot concede to them the moral high ground. We must make these people call it what it is. If they want to change what we choose to say, we can't let them call it a free choice, and we can't let them still call the net free. We have to make them admit that they are trying to stifle us, processing our thoughts like so many parrots, weeding out that which they don't approve of. And we must make them say it loudly, in so many words. Write it one hundred times. No American lawmaker will dare touch us if we make them tell the truth about what they are doing. If we let them deceive themselves and their constituents, I am afraid the Internet as we know it will soon be dead.
Scudder
"The Soviet Union could have worked, if only they could have had microchips implanted in their brains." Arthur C. Clarke, 3001
Ancient Aztec legend held that the end of the world would come when jaguars fell from the sky and ate everyone. They had specific holidays and sacrifices specifically designed to postpone this...
The irony here is that the conservationists and park ranger bureaucrats who failed to save the poor mutts the first time around are the ones who are fighting to prevent the scientists from giving them a second chance at failure.
More irony: The tasmanian tiger might not even be extinct! T'would be hi-larious if they spent $30M to bring back something that is alive and well in indonesia... (http://unmuseum.mus.pa.us/ttiger.htm)
And here is a nifty movie of the last tasmanian tiger. It's 1.5 megs and in quicktime. He is one ugly critter; watch him tear a rat to pieces.
My parents scraped up several thousand dollars a year to send me to a bottom-echelon private school from kindergarten through eighth grade. They weren't overtly religious, but since they both worked and didn't have time to home school, the only options available in my small southern Missouri town were St. Paul's Lutheran School and the public school system.
I found it very interesting that the public high school I attended used the same freshman physical science textbook that I had used at St. Paul's in seventh grade -- and many of the manufactured fools who went to public school had trouble reading it. None of the parochial graduates had that problem, because a privately funded school was more than able to provide a quality education without resorting to armed robbery.
35 out of 236 people in my high school graduating class (1994) have graduated with four year degrees. 10 of the 12 kids that graduated from St. Paul's have (and one died in high school!). 91% vs. 3.9%? I sense a strong statistical trend. Please don't say that money was a factor; the head of the richest family at St. Paul's picked her son up each day in a used Ford Taurus station wagon. And I worked my ass off to get through college on my own.
Americans today seem to want to be given things. We are all too stupid to see that nothing on Earth is ever really given; my parents paid more in property taxes to support the local school district than they paid to St. Paul's. So did 15,000 other people in my town, not to mention state and federal funding (none of which St. Paul's recieved). Only about 600 of those 18,000 actually used the schools at any one time. Do the math, if you're able; public schools don't work. It's not about burning more money, however it is extorted. It is about government doing the things that government knows how to do (like bombing Europe) and teachers doing what they know how to do (like teaching science). Mixing government and education results in Europeans learning science and Americans bombing schools.
This article is trying to read too much into vague results; at best, all they can say is that portals are portals. It looks to me like someone got ripped off by funding a useless study. Easy money for the researchers though, eh?
One thing that I have definitely noticed recently is that it has become effectively impossible to find anything useful on the net. Back in my undergrad days if I tried to find information on anything all I had to do to find it was to type some creative synonyms in a search engine. Now everything I am referred to is either a useless 3 line blurb from zdnet (complete with 12 ads and a popup window) or an 'error 404'. I have given up on trying to find useful things on the net, unless I have in hand an url to a site that can send me to links.
I know there has to be much, much more information out there now than there was three years ago. Unfortunately most of the net is uncatalogued by the existing search engines. I think this is much more of a reason for the lack of diversity; people now surf the net looking for news and diversion rather than to learn or do research. Search engines reflect this in their queries. These queries become the basis for this news story. Bah.
Anyone in the middle tennessee area want to get a design going for next year? I have mechanical engineering ability and some metalworking skills, but lack any r/c expertise, ee, or robotics outside of r/c aircraft. I'm in Tullahoma, halfway between nashville and chattanooga... email if...
If you can figure out a way to make an AV-8 go supersonic (without strapping on 30 JATO rockets) i will buy you one*:)
see http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/aircr aft/air-av8.html
keep in mind that even at the harriers max ceiling at FL50 the speed of sound is still 660 mph, and the harrier is a low-level aircraft. therefore its engines are designed to have their max performance around sea level. Above that the engine is no longer performing on-design.
btw some newer business jets can go supersonic; I don't know what kind of licenses are required, but I have seen some advertisements about them. Here is a link to a story about one of Dassault's planned a/c:
this is more aircraft than I was talking about, however-- i remember seeing an article about a cessna citation-class business aircraft capable of reaching Mach 1. Anyone else see this? I think it was in a trade mag of some sort.
* any reasonable person knows this is a joke. laugh.
You are probably thinking about (http://www.dm.af.mil/dmhist.htm) Davis-Monthan AFB, Az. Old Air Force planes go there when they are no longer usable, to be processed and destroyed. Valuable metals and components containing potentially environmentally hazardous chemicals are removed from the aircraft, which are then left to rust in the desert. For an aero type, this is the single most depressing place on earth; hundreds of huge, decaying hulks of once beautiful aircraft now abused by the wind and the sun...
The movies "Marlboro man"??? and "terminal velocity"??? (I am not sure about these names) both climax in the airplane graveyard.
Anyway, a harrier would not be sent there unless it was unflyable. In a stripped-down condition, it would barely be worth $700,000--though it would make a very nice lawn ornament... 'specially here in tennessee...
While it is true that this bill does not contain any regulation of domestic encryption, it does contain certain ominous particulars. The most obvious of these is the clause which places the whim of the president above any law or court.
Don't assume that it will be found unconstitutional. When the issue of 'national defense' is raised, we have done far worse. Remember the atrocities committed during world war II, towards the general asian populace? Once this has been established, the framework will have been laid for much more extensive legislation. This is exactly analogous to the anti-gun movement, the pro-welfare movement, etc.
The first step in erasing freedom lies in restricting a basic right in such a way that no one will complain. No one needs field artillery or heavy machine guns. Later, this becomes 'cop killer' bullets and assault rifles; note that neither of these terms existed before they became illegal. In crypto, it will become 'strong' domestic crypto, or possibly 'military-grade' crypto. Why would anyone need that if they weren't using it for something illegal?
Later, someone will be caught dealing drugs or *gasp* helping illegal immigrants into the country, and it will be discovered that they used encryption to hide their nefarious activities. The brady bill of domestic encrytion will be passed, and everyone who stands against it will be a child molester just like everyone who opposes handgun control is a psychopath today.
After all, my mom doesn't understand either subject and votes the way the minister tells her to on sunday. Millions of other people do the same. The number one concern Curt Weldon and JC Watts have is getting re-elected, and the masses will be happy to do it as long as it makes them feel safe, regardless of how accurate that feeling is. In a democracy it is very dangerous to be a minority.
BTW back to the president's newest empowerment: if it passes, and he chooses to make all cryptography illegal to keep saddam from blowing us up or something, we won't be able to revoke it. Ever. Unless he decides to change his mind.
I can do the calculations that show social security can't work on my TI-86... just graph an exponential function to represent population growth, and a linear function to represent growth of capital. If they cross then the bank goes bust.
(on topic) The scary thing is that the computer predicted in this article would run at 100 mhz and could still crack RC6 in 7.19 minutes. Think of how fast 1 ghz chips will this time next year... or 5 ghz chips by 2002.
When I first saw this, my immediate thought was exactly similar to what I've seen on the list so far. Like any good capitalist, I was horrified at what was obviously an attempt to steal the intellectual property that others have spent $B developing. Then I read the patent.
My personal interpretation of the patent is that this company has developed a "unique" system which records music broadcast on the net and plays it back. They have effectively created a proprietery 'rio' type device that can use.wav, mp3,.au, etc (instead of just one format). I don't think they are trying to screw anyone out of their intellectual property; they just hired engineers to do their tech writing.
If I have gone insane I am sure you will tell me...
Nehemiah S.
"This is the best tea party that I've ever been to." -Faith No More
Slashdot Mirror
So when do the alchemists who invented this pocedure for creating diamonds out of cow farts plan to IPO? I want in. Why bother going to Jupiter when all you need is a red laser and a pressure cell?
And how many people, serving in the United States Armed forces, would turn their cruise missiles, bombers, artillery, etc. on American citizens? Point their weapons at their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters? We aren't talking about a video game here; it isn't a matter of "I have more troops so I win". American soldiers are drawn from American people in American towns, and join the American military for reasons that usually have a lot to do with protecting these people, their rights, and the principles upon which the country was formed. Our oaths are to the constitution, not to the president, for precisely that reason. Read some history; civil wars are fought between citizens, not regulated armies. Modern industrialized armies are always rendered impotent very early on because the means to support them vanish.
And people intelligent enough to create a despotic government in a once-free country know this; ask yourself how many dictatorships in the world have the full right to bear arms? None? An armed populace can force corrupt regimes to yield. An unarmed populace stumbles to the gas chambers.
Always remember: it only really takes ONE man with a gun, willing to sacrifice his life, to end a dictatorship. If Germany didn't have effective gun control, do you think Hitler could have killed 6 million men, women, and children? As long as our highly visible leaders know this(and they do, now), we are safe from the most egregious attacks on our liberty. In a society based on the inalienable rights of man, scheming to restrict these rights is treason. They don't dare because they know the penalty of treason is death.
Finally: The constitution does not GIVE us any rights. The constitution gives rights to the government. The government takes away rights based upon what the constitution says it can do. The second amendment does not mean "People can have guns", it means "Even if the country establishes a militia (or Standing Army, something the founders were opposed to, but that it necessary given the advances in modern warfare), the government can't take away guns". Simply an explicit statement of what every person who has bothered to study the history of our country knows.
Scudder
It is interesting how closely this action mirrors one of the fundamental libertarian models of social adjustment; if you want someone to stop doing something, you make it harder for them to do it through peaceful manipulation of civil property. For instance, most (L)ibertarians believe that national forests are exceedingly wasteful; if you want to prevent lumber companies from chopping down yellowstone forest, the best way to do it is to form a large civil organization like the Sierra Club and buy it, placing a restriction on use of that land for lumber.
I am actually quite surprised to see this approach in action, applied liberally to the internet. Especially coming from an organization like the NAACP, for although I admire their resolve to support individual freedom and equality, it seems that most of the time their approach to this lies in spending huge amounts of money lobbying congress and organizing protests in the attempt to pass new laws restricting freedoms.
For those of you who think this is censorship, think again. Censorship requires an act of force. The only force being wielded here is the power vested in the DNS supplier to assign and store domain names. If you oppose this action on the part of the NAACP, your recourse is to fight this escheatment, not to challenge the right of the NAACP to own property. In a free market, which for the most part the internet still is, if you want to own www.kkk.org you have to pay for it. If you can't afford the price your opponent is asking, $100 buys you www.k-k-k.com or something similar, and you can still say whatever you want.
Still, I think this is a futile gesture on the part of the NAACP. People looking for lists of "Approved songs for white folks" will probably use google and find just what they are looking for. Sigh. Well, at worst it is a moral coup, forcing Young Urban Racists to look a little harder for their hate fix; at best it is a victory for all rational people who hate hatred. I'll go ahead and give the NAACP a gold star for effort...
Scudder
"We don't need so damned much government", said the e-mail of the man who never had a serious disease because of vaccines and medicines developed by brilliant scientists who weren't afraid to challenge conventional ideas. He was sitting at a tiny laptop computer, a technological marvel, with a processor developed by engineers at Intel inc. and an OS developed by ruthless egoists with names like Linus and Alan Cox; people who could easily have developed the internet on their own. He chose to buy a Pentium because the Celeron chip was faster and cheaper than any competitor and he chose Linux because it was the best there was. His next computer would be an Athlon, however, because he didn't like the way Intel did business; they finally had viable competition.
His wife called him from her new digital phone, and asked him to lunch. He accepted of course; being the lead engineer at an aerospace company was hard work, and she only had lunch free once a month. While he was waiting for at the restaurant her he emailed his mother, a teacher at a Lutheran school just south of St. Louis, to tell her that he was flying home that weekend in his old Cessna 152. The Cessna was fine when he bought it in 1982, but he was going to buy a Dassault in January; since their aircraft were subject to fewer FAA regulation-induced design flaws, they handily outperformed anything designed in America. It was cheaper, too, even though he had to pay a grotesque import tax. His mother would be happy to see him, since his father was in Mexico building a new processor plant for Motorola. The old one, in Tyler, Texas, was being shut down; they couldn't afford to pay the inflated union wages.
The FDA was dragging its feet approving a new medicine his company developed, one that promised to cure the common cold; a rival company who made cough drops had produced a study showing that rats died when fed nothing but his medicine for a month. Because of this, he had a red card meeting with two of his most promising employees that afternoon. He would advise them to go back to school; he even considered sponsoring them himself, since he knew they would never come back if he fired them now. However, taxes were due in April, and he was in the highest bracket; he couldn't afford to spare 50K when his taxes were taking three times that. They would have to fend for themselves. Of course, there was always unemployment. They would probably end up in an under-funded government or university cancer lab; maybe an HMO would pick them up.
While waiting for his wife, he saw an interesting article on your Rights Online. Since its initiation in September of 1999, it had become a focal point for Internet Freedom groups; he was often terrified by what he read, but he maintained a morbid fascination. According to the article, President Bush was contemplating signing the Internet Prohibition Treaty, which would make the International War On Pornography official, and sign over control of all US networks found to be serving pornographic of otherwise dangerous or offensive materiel to the United Nations Internet Extension(UNIX). "Only 30 percent of the sites online will even be affected." A spokesman for the White House claimed. "If people would just self-regulate themselves, we wouldn't have this problem."
"Too much damned government." He wrote. "Too much damned government."
Every advocate of increased government control or regulation believes that his plan is the one that government will implement. This is true regardless of whether we are talking about health care, gun control or internet filtering. What advocates of moral and economic fascism like Lester don't understand is that the internet isn't really chaos; it is potentially 5 billion plans, each one carefully regulated by its owner, according to his own ideas. Thus self regulation always works, by definition; it simply doesn't always work exactly the way the people used to wielding power want it to work. Of course this angers them, and they respond in typical fashion; strangling the greatest boon mankind has ever known, murdering it in its infancy. Before it is strong enough to fight back.
The problem isn't self regulation; we cannot concede to them the moral high ground. We must make these people call it what it is. If they want to change what we choose to say, we can't let them call it a free choice, and we can't let them still call the net free. We have to make them admit that they are trying to stifle us, processing our thoughts like so many parrots, weeding out that which they don't approve of. And we must make them say it loudly, in so many words. Write it one hundred times. No American lawmaker will dare touch us if we make them tell the truth about what they are doing. If we let them deceive themselves and their constituents, I am afraid the Internet as we know it will soon be dead.
Scudder
"The Soviet Union could have worked, if only they could have had microchips implanted in their brains."
Arthur C. Clarke, 3001
Ancient Aztec legend held that the end of the world would come when jaguars fell from the sky and ate everyone. They had specific holidays and sacrifices specifically designed to postpone this...
Scudder
The irony here is that the conservationists and park ranger bureaucrats who failed to save the poor mutts the first time around are the ones who are fighting to prevent the scientists from giving them a second chance at failure.
t ext.html
More irony: The tasmanian tiger might not even be extinct! T'would be hi-larious if they spent $30M to bring back something that is alive and well in indonesia... (http://unmuseum.mus.pa.us/ttiger.htm)
And here is a nifty movie of the last tasmanian tiger. It's 1.5 megs and in quicktime. He is one ugly critter; watch him tear a rat to pieces.
http://vcserv.seas.smu.edu/tastour/fauna/tiger-
I don't know how to make direct links work and I'm too lazy to look very hard. Sorry. Just cut and paste and then enjoy.
Scudder
Dowp! That should be 15,000 both places...
My parents scraped up several thousand dollars a year to send me to a bottom-echelon private school from kindergarten through eighth grade. They weren't overtly religious, but since they both worked and didn't have time to home school, the only options available in my small southern Missouri town were St. Paul's Lutheran School and the public school system.
I found it very interesting that the public high school I attended used the same freshman physical science textbook that I had used at St. Paul's in seventh grade -- and many of the manufactured fools who went to public school had trouble reading it. None of the parochial graduates had that problem, because a privately funded school was more than able to provide a quality education without resorting to armed robbery.
35 out of 236 people in my high school graduating class (1994) have graduated with four year degrees. 10 of the 12 kids that graduated from St. Paul's have (and one died in high school!). 91% vs. 3.9%? I sense a strong statistical trend. Please don't say that money was a factor; the head of the richest family at St. Paul's picked her son up each day in a used Ford Taurus station wagon. And I worked my ass off to get through college on my own.
Americans today seem to want to be given things. We are all too stupid to see that nothing on Earth is ever really given; my parents paid more in property taxes to support the local school district than they paid to St. Paul's. So did 15,000 other people in my town, not to mention state and federal funding (none of which St. Paul's recieved). Only about 600 of those 18,000 actually used the schools at any one time. Do the math, if you're able; public schools don't work. It's not about burning more money, however it is extorted. It is about government doing the things that government knows how to do (like bombing Europe) and teachers doing what they know how to do (like teaching science). Mixing government and education results in Europeans learning science and Americans bombing schools.
This article is trying to read too much into vague results; at best, all they can say is that portals are portals. It looks to me like someone got ripped off by funding a useless study. Easy money for the researchers though, eh?
One thing that I have definitely noticed recently is that it has become effectively impossible to find anything useful on the net. Back in my undergrad days if I tried to find information on anything all I had to do to find it was to type some creative synonyms in a search engine. Now everything I am referred to is either a useless 3 line blurb from zdnet (complete with 12 ads and a popup window) or an 'error 404'. I have given up on trying to find useful things on the net, unless I have in hand an url to a site that can send me to links.
I know there has to be much, much more information out there now than there was three years ago. Unfortunately most of the net is uncatalogued by the existing search engines. I think this is much more of a reason for the lack of diversity; people now surf the net looking for news and diversion rather than to learn or do research. Search engines reflect this in their queries. These queries become the basis for this news story. Bah.
Scudder
...is, I WANT TO PLAY!
Anyone in the middle tennessee area want to get a design going for next year? I have mechanical engineering ability and some metalworking skills, but lack any r/c expertise, ee, or robotics outside of r/c aircraft. I'm in Tullahoma, halfway between nashville and chattanooga... email if...
If you can figure out a way to make an AV-8 go supersonic (without strapping on 30 JATO rockets) i will buy you one* :)
r aft/air-av8.html
o psto3.htm
see http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/airc
keep in mind that even at the harriers max ceiling at FL50 the speed of sound is still 660 mph, and the harrier is a low-level aircraft. therefore its engines are designed to have their max performance around sea level. Above that the engine is no longer performing on-design.
btw some newer business jets can go supersonic; I don't know what kind of licenses are required, but I have seen some advertisements about them. Here is a link to a story about one of Dassault's planned a/c:
http://www.aviationweek.com/shownews/nbaaday1/t
this is more aircraft than I was talking about, however-- i remember seeing an article about a cessna citation-class business aircraft capable of reaching Mach 1. Anyone else see this? I think it was in a trade mag of some sort.
* any reasonable person knows this is a joke. laugh.
You are probably thinking about (http://www.dm.af.mil/dmhist.htm) Davis-Monthan AFB, Az. Old Air Force planes go there when they are no longer usable, to be processed and destroyed. Valuable metals and components containing potentially environmentally hazardous chemicals are removed from the aircraft, which are then left to rust in the desert. For an aero type, this is the single most depressing place on earth; hundreds of huge, decaying hulks of once beautiful aircraft now abused by the wind and the sun...
The movies "Marlboro man"??? and "terminal velocity"??? (I am not sure about these names) both climax in the airplane graveyard.
Anyway, a harrier would not be sent there unless it was unflyable. In a stripped-down condition, it would barely be worth $700,000--though it would make a very nice lawn ornament... 'specially here in tennessee...
Disclaimer: I did read the article.
While it is true that this bill does not contain any regulation of domestic encryption, it does contain certain ominous particulars. The most obvious of these is the clause which places the whim of the president above any law or court.
Don't assume that it will be found unconstitutional. When the issue of 'national defense' is raised, we have done far worse. Remember the atrocities committed during world war II, towards the general asian populace? Once this has been established, the framework will have been laid for much more extensive legislation. This is exactly analogous to the anti-gun movement, the pro-welfare movement, etc.
The first step in erasing freedom lies in restricting a basic right in such a way that no one will complain. No one needs field artillery or heavy machine guns. Later, this becomes 'cop killer' bullets and assault rifles; note that neither of these terms existed before they became illegal. In crypto, it will become 'strong' domestic crypto, or possibly 'military-grade' crypto. Why would anyone need that if they weren't using it for something illegal?
Later, someone will be caught dealing drugs or *gasp* helping illegal immigrants into the country, and it will be discovered that they used encryption to hide their nefarious activities. The brady bill of domestic encrytion will be passed, and everyone who stands against it will be a child molester just like everyone who opposes handgun control is a psychopath today.
After all, my mom doesn't understand either subject and votes the way the minister tells her to on sunday. Millions of other people do the same. The number one concern Curt Weldon and JC Watts have is getting re-elected, and the masses will be happy to do it as long as it makes them feel safe, regardless of how accurate that feeling is. In a democracy it is very dangerous to be a minority.
BTW back to the president's newest empowerment: if it passes, and he chooses to make all cryptography illegal to keep saddam from blowing us up or something, we won't be able to revoke it. Ever. Unless he decides to change his mind.
I can do the calculations that show social security can't work on my TI-86... just graph an exponential function to represent population growth, and a linear function to represent growth of capital. If they cross then the bank goes bust.
(on topic) The scary thing is that the computer predicted in this article would run at 100 mhz and could still crack RC6 in 7.19 minutes. Think of how fast 1 ghz chips will this time next year... or 5 ghz chips by 2002.
When I first saw this, my immediate thought was exactly similar to what I've seen on the list so far. Like any good capitalist, I was horrified at what was obviously an attempt to steal the intellectual property that others have spent $B developing. Then I read the patent.
.wav, mp3, .au, etc (instead of just one format). I don't think they are trying to screw anyone out of their intellectual property; they just hired engineers to do their tech writing.
My personal interpretation of the patent is that this company has developed a "unique" system which records music broadcast on the net and plays it back. They have effectively created a proprietery 'rio' type device that can use
If I have gone insane I am sure you will tell me...
Nehemiah S.
"This is the best tea party that I've ever been to."
-Faith No More