If your sole means of navigation and collision avoidance fails, you are unable to guarantee that that won't happen.
Which is why they currently have 80 zillion procedures and techniques to avoid that destruction in the event that the current day navigation systems fail. Backups to the Backups to the Backups. Almost all of which will continue to work perfectly well with the new system, and the ones that won't already have multiple alternatives.
you are unable to guarantee that that won't happen.
No one is able to "guarantee" anything. Guaranteeing is an inherently religious outlook on life based on the concept of a perfect god combined with the belief that mere humans can be equally god-like perfect. Claiming that its an insight or worthy discussion point that the real world doesn't work that way, is popular, yet irrelevant.
I read the report, and the problem wasn't that they were distracted by their laptops, its that they were talking to each other about their laptop software instead of listening to the radio or flying the plane.
In another scenario with no laptops on board, they could have leaned back and debated soccer teams with identical outcome.
Blaming the laptops is a way of attacking an inanimate object instead of blaming the pilots whom screwed up by not doing their jobs. Since both pilots got fired (as far as I know) there seems little point in covering up for them. So, why is someone in the govt doing that?
GPS, since the plane's antenna is semi-omnidirectional, is easily jammed.
The problem is, the semi-direction, as you call it, is pointed up. Most GPS satellites are up there rather than down here. And most/all jammers will be down here, where it isn't pointing. You're going to need about 20 dB more power just for that alone.
A weak signal can't interfere far away. So, just fly on for a mile, and its all good again.
A strong signal can be easily detected/pinpointed/eliminated by military ECM/ECCM aircraft.
Its unlikely a ground based jammer could be effective for more than a couple hours.
Well, the point of ADS-B is to replace the skin painting radar, so ATC will not be using the now non-existent to vector them in.
In VFR conditions you simply fly the plane VFR and the pilot reports his position visually. You'll need quite a bit more separation than usual, just in case, which is annoying to ATC but no big deal.. A wise ATC and/or a wise ATC regulation would force every other plane in their area out of their flight level. Alternately some peculiar formation flying will occur. Flight 7732 look 12 oclock high and Flight 123 look 9 oclock low and please acknowledge each other by rocking wings, over. Flight 123 please maintain 5 mile sep with flight 7732 following them to the airport, over.
In IFR you'd shoo everyone out of their flight level, and divert to the closest VFR airport, where the TSA jackboots would waterboard whomever owns that luggage, whom might even be the ones responsible for the jammer. Or if there's light enough traffic and a ILS transmitter and ILS/VOR onboard gear still exists, simply fly IFR with an "old fashioned" ILS approach with the caveat that ATC has no idea where the plane is located (other than reported altitude and dead reckoning)
No public reports of anyone intentionally messing with the 50 year old transponder system, which basically did "about the same thing" but without GPS. Probably because the military spent enormous amounts of money on gear and training to stop the Russians from doing it effectively, by being able to pinpoint the source, launch HARM missiles at the source, etc. If you can do a better job than a world superpower, then the USAF might be concerned... maybe.
There is an economic limitation in that the cost of the gear to "mess with the system" would be staggeringly far in excess of the cost of a simple cheap surface to air missile or an explosive in a suitcase (or shoe). And when all is said and done, you've knocked out air surveillance, something that happens on occasion right now due to equipment failure and its "no big deal".
Also, what happens when a solar storm takes out the satellites?
GPS sats are pretty tough, vaguely EMP proof. They were built and launched by the military for the military, you know.
Note that plenty of small planes fly with no transponders or IFR gear, today... You won't get 3 landings per minute at ohare and IFR would seem to be borderline impossible, but by no means do you have to "shut down ALL traffic" or all airplanes will magically fall out of the sky.
The cheapest/simplest solution might be to scramble the AWACS planes temporarily, until you can hotwire some patriot missile radars into the civilian facilities.
It would be an expensive and annoying PITA, but far less severe than the first couple days post-9/11
The few times I had computers from unknown origin at which I actually looked at the content of the disk, it was usually pirated movies, personal documents like letters and recipes
pirated software, homework essays/term papers, music, and possibly homemade pr0n
The "elite" types like to think only other "elite" types have access to pirated s/w, but trust me, from researching the contents of "goodwill harddrives" the unwashed masses somehow have access to virtually every warez we have. Also the same people that claim they can't be bothered to figure out how to change their background picture and could we do it for them, seem to easily have the motivation and technical ability to install warez. I think feigned ignorance is more a matter of pride, at least for the average loser, so I don't feel so bad about carefully structuring so I can't / won't help. It never fails that the village idiot, despite proudly stating he knows nothing about computers, somehow has the worlds most complicated cracked warez installed and working. WTF?
Homework is uniformly bad. Not only is grade inflation increasing over the decades, but writing ability seems to be plummeting at the same time. So, what was a good "C" is now an "A" from the bell curve declining pushing it to a "B" and then some inflation pushing it to the "A". It is true that there are very few misspelled words, and the gross grammatical errors that word can find are fixed, but the essays are usually filled with homonym substitution and terrible paragraph construction. Most people are, for all intents and purposes, illiterate, and can't write because they have no experience of reading good writing. I read it for the LOLs.
The music I find is usually pretty interesting. I'll listen at least once. Rarely is it stuff I actually want to keep, but its interesting to hear one time. I've noticed that on average the great unwashed seem to be moving away from discographies and albums. You'll just find that "one good song" from a musician. Much more like a "stream ripper listening to commercial FM radio" than the traditional computer dude attitude of mirroring a complete directory because its no harder than copying a single file.
As for the Pr0n its surprisingly hard to tell if they just downloaded a collection of one person or if it was genuinely homemade. Unlike home decorating, most people have good taste in Pr0n selection so you can't strictly go on subject matter. If they're chubby its homemade as "most americans are now fat". Also homemade stuff has ridiculous hoarded junk in the background or terrible lighting, that no pro photographer would put up with. Also the homemade stuff has bad hair/makeup. Other than that, its difficult to tell... needs more research, much more.
Anyway, thats what I find on hard drives, rarely this "movies, letters and recipe" stuff you refer to.
I don't have the patience to wait for a borked OS to load (if it ever loads).
External USB hard drive enclosure. Plugged into a machine not running that O/S to prevent any contagion. Stereotypical windoze drive, in a $25 USB external enclosure, plugged into a Linux box. No problemo.
Forgiving the debt counts as income, so it doesn't help at all.
Well, legally formally forgiving the debt in writing, yes that makes sense.
I mean formally posting it as bad debt, but in your mind and actions forgiving it, as in not working too hard to collect it, giving up on collecting it via the can't squeeze blood from a judgment proof stone theory, etc.
Every bad debt incurred isn't automatically counted as income, is it? If it were, our banks would be rich...
The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity
Too broad of a brush. At Ubuntu, the dude who pays the paychecks and owns the servers has said, make it so. And it is done. Hope you like it! If not, tough cookies!
In Debian, its a bit different. Any developer can take that source package, fix it, and upload an new package named "whatever-better-ui" or something. Eventually one side will get tired of the game and there will be some renaming.
Then there's the Debian model, where project policy and other project wide decisions are pure democracy, yet individual package maintainers have a dictatorship over their individual package within the wide limitations of policy.
Actually its even more complicated in that the individual whom ran an individual package as a dictator is completely free to decide to operate as a triumvirate or whatever they please, and many do operate as anarchic teams, but the initial state is a dictatorship.
If a dictator is a miserable failure, thats OK too, since its all open source it just works.
It seems to be a much more reasonable balance of power than the Ubuntu community.
4) The way billing works in hospitals is more or less fraudulent. It works by inflating prices by 4x, offering a 75% discount to insurance companies (who essentially pay the original price), thus screwing over people that don't have insurance in order to cover losses from people that don't pay.
Accurate, but what's really going on is tax fraud, not regular plain ole fraud. Someone with no insurance, assuming they are not wealthy, will have most of the bill forgiven or sent to collections or otherwise disposed of at considerable "loss" to the hospital. The relevant tax fraud, is the hospital will book a phantom "loss" of 75% or more of the hyper-inflated cost of care, therefore not having to pay income tax on that fraction of revenue, or if a non-profit they just cooked the books allowing more "real" income to come in to balance that "phantom" expense.
As long as the actual expense is less than the income tax on the "phantom" loss, the hospital comes out ahead.
You claim to be a small business owner. What would the IRS think, if you marked the price of a used worn out blank USB stick as $10M, sold it to me, and I never paid you, or we settled for 25 cents total? Then on your income tax you enter a "$10M" business loss, thus you don't have to pay income taxes this year because that "loss" cancels out all your revenue?
But subsonics are cheaper, smaller, more reliable, better in every way except they are slower.
The speed is of no account for surprise attacks because you just do ToT Time on Target calculations to stagger the launches. Besides alternate delivery is much cheaper (UPS, fedex, the local trucking company)
So, a SS CM is only useful for very fast delivery, very low latency missions... more the response to the surprise attack than the surprise attack itself.
Nawww, the real "first strike weapon from Hell." is a 20 foot standard shipping container, either in the harbor or hauled around the country on a flatbed semi trailer. Heck, a really big RV, or a cargo jet, would work too. The fact that no one has done this to the USA yet, is basically proof that at least either the motive or the capability doesn't exist.
Now a SS cruise missile, that would be an interesting tactical weapon if you're losing a hot conventional war aka surprise invasion, or a great "return fire" response to the shipping container scenario.
A mass produced 350 KT V-1 from the mid 1940s would have been a quite effective strategic weapon. A modern version would probably work pretty well too.
The definition game is probably best played by flight profile as opposed to navigation systems, in which case an ancient german V-1 would qualify.
Personally, as a guy from a military background, and enjoying military strategy games, etc, I agree with him completely, I don't see much advantage of SS cruise missiles over a ballistic missile, at least for most countries and most situations.
The advantage a subsonic cruise missile has over a ballistic, is primarily payload fraction. Consider a tomahawk that weighs 3000 pounds of which 1000 pounds is warhead. Put another way, if you want 1000 pounds of boom on target, and want to use a subsonic cruise missile, you get to haul an additional 2000 extra pounds of missile around, instead of an additional 2000 pounds of aircraft fuel or food on a submarine or whatever.
In comparison, lets consider an ancient ballistic missile, a Polaris carrying a W47. A W47 only weighs 700 pounds or so, in comparison to 1000 pounds of "boom" on a tomahawk. Yet, a Polaris weighed freaking 28000 pounds. So, you can VERY QUICKLY deliver a mere 700 pounds of boom on target, if you're willing to haul around an extra 27300 pounds of missile.
Supersonic missiles combine the fuel efficiency of a ballistic missile, with the simplicity, reliability, and low cost of a cruise missile. Note the slight sarcasm. Pretty much a total failure EXCEPT that they can deliver extremely quickly.
If you dominate the air land and sea, you get quick delivery by stationing a boring old fashioned B-52 directly over the target and dropping a simple iron bomb straight down. Or, if you're not planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike, you simply don't need that capability to reach your goals. India, on the other hand....
Back in the 80s, I remember someone saying that a paperless office would be about as useful as the paperless toilet.
I'm not sure why I feel that this is true. But I'm hoping this discussion will provide insight.
Urinal = only works for about half the employees, even then only most of the time.
Also, there is the probably false assumption that office work is inherently useful work. Insert the "office space" movie quote "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
"Relatively short drive"? If you live in Berne, Multimap is giving me over 100 miles each way to get to a likely town outside Swizerland. Man, you've got to really want that game!
The tired old saying rears its ugly head again, in Europe they think 100 miles is far away, and in America they think 100 years is a long time ago.
Why? There is nothing inherently evil about spoofing caller ID.
Should be, from the point of view of wasting time. All we'll end up with is about 40 states banning it, and given that LD is so cheap as to be borderline free, all the crooks will base themselves in the remaining 10 states. No actual effect other than a bunch of wasted time.
Like the state usury laws forcing all the crooked CCs to DE or CT where-ever it was.
If they tried it at the federal level, then being a stupid idea, it could be promptly shot down, making the world simpler for everyone.
And I wouldn't exactly call a DEC manual priceless, one-off or irreplaceable.
Not in the 70s, no. But now, they are more or less "irreplaceable" in one sense, just like any other out of print book. As far as priceless, assuming its not so rare it never, ever hits ebay, I guess it had a recent "price", sort of.
Since DEC enjoyed using acid based paper which is literally rotting away, a 60s/70s era DEC manual will very soon be literally priceless, one-off, and irreplaceable.
Damage as in think of how the bottom of a piece of plywood looks after you cut it, chips yanked off the edge. Tensile strength of paper is pretty high... with fine tooth blade and a cardboard backer board the pages are not torn, wrinkled, ripped thru the saw, etc. One sneaky way to prevent damage to the cover/last pages of a book you want, is to use a magazine/catalog/cardboard box or whatever as a backer board underneath the book you want to cut.
The bandsaw edge is, however, much more frizzy than the sheared edges, and could theoretically jam much better, although it works for me, well enough.
Really, you should try a bandsaw. Its super cheap and works well enough. It is also extremely fast, at least compared to the scanning time. You don't have to sacrifice a one of a kind first edition to try it, just saw last months catalog in half. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, despite sounding super pessimistic about it. There is some learned technique to it, and it takes maybe a dozen catalogs to get the blade set up right, and make a perfectly straight cut.
Fair enough dude, I'll try a shear some time, since you claim it works so well. If its anything like my old high school sheet metal shear, I'd worry about losing fingers in it, but I'll be careful so I think it will be OK...
in a real-life environment, there is an effective difference between reflected and transmitted photons.
Show me the physics... other than light polarization weakly depending on reflection. But human eyes have an extremely weak response to polarization.
The brightness of the screen can be drastically different than the surrounding environment with a backlit screen
Then it looks terrible until you adjust brightness/contrast. Which my ipod touch tries to do automatically, albeit very poorly. I think TVs have been available with auto-brightness adjustment since I owned one with that feature in the late 70s.
Don't optometrists recommend not using a bright monitor in a dark room?
Bright room equals tiny pupil diameter equals wide depth of field. And vice versa. If you're borderline near or far sighted, high light levels more or less cure it by shrinking the pupil.
E-ink allows that, and LCDs don't.
I've only seen two LCD screens without contrast and brightness settings on wristwatches and the worlds junkiest clock radio.
First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages.
My bandsaw does no damage to the pages either. Clearly you haven't tried this. It worked for me, but I'm a small timer compared to the guys at bitsavers.org. They claim it works on an EXTREMELY large scale. I "saw" an ad for a paper shear (usually used for binding, and sorry for the pun). The shear was about 10 times the cost of my little tabletop bandsaw. If the market has changed and you can now buy a shear for the cost of a good steak dinner, well, I guess I'm out of date then. But even then, I needed a bandsaw for other purposes, and if its dual use, all the better, and I'd not be amused at buying, storing, maintaining, and evnetually disposing of two tools to do a job that one does perfectly well.
Second, nearly all the high-speed sheet-fed document scanners out there are duplex scanners.
New, maybe. Not in the olden times aka longer ago than yesterday. Maybe the new ones even duplex properly with paper other than standard 8.5x11 laser paper, and don't just jam on the cut edge. Maybe the new ones don't duplex at a speed about 4 times slower than non-duplex. You're the expert, I'm merely a guy who's actually done it.
I'm only saying what worked with what I had, and what I know other people have successfully done in the past, I'm not just some dude quoting specs out of a tiger direct catalog with an infinite budget for brand new gadgets.
The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.
Someone with real balls would have asked for a cash refund. "Clearly my copy of the book is faulty, can I get cash refund, or just instore credit?"
Slashdot Mirror
if they're even marginally good at Star Trek Online ... lone Escort, lemme tell
Hmm... Paid for Gamer Girls ... Star Trek Online... Escort ...
I got it! A Star Trek Online Escort Service! Brilliant!
If your sole means of navigation and collision avoidance fails, you are unable to guarantee that that won't happen.
Which is why they currently have 80 zillion procedures and techniques to avoid that destruction in the event that the current day navigation systems fail. Backups to the Backups to the Backups. Almost all of which will continue to work perfectly well with the new system, and the ones that won't already have multiple alternatives.
you are unable to guarantee that that won't happen.
No one is able to "guarantee" anything. Guaranteeing is an inherently religious outlook on life based on the concept of a perfect god combined with the belief that mere humans can be equally god-like perfect. Claiming that its an insight or worthy discussion point that the real world doesn't work that way, is popular, yet irrelevant.
I read the report, and the problem wasn't that they were distracted by their laptops, its that they were talking to each other about their laptop software instead of listening to the radio or flying the plane.
In another scenario with no laptops on board, they could have leaned back and debated soccer teams with identical outcome.
Blaming the laptops is a way of attacking an inanimate object instead of blaming the pilots whom screwed up by not doing their jobs. Since both pilots got fired (as far as I know) there seems little point in covering up for them. So, why is someone in the govt doing that?
GPS, since the plane's antenna is semi-omnidirectional, is easily jammed.
The problem is, the semi-direction, as you call it, is pointed up. Most GPS satellites are up there rather than down here. And most/all jammers will be down here, where it isn't pointing. You're going to need about 20 dB more power just for that alone.
A weak signal can't interfere far away. So, just fly on for a mile, and its all good again.
A strong signal can be easily detected/pinpointed/eliminated by military ECM/ECCM aircraft.
Its unlikely a ground based jammer could be effective for more than a couple hours.
Well, the point of ADS-B is to replace the skin painting radar, so ATC will not be using the now non-existent to vector them in.
In VFR conditions you simply fly the plane VFR and the pilot reports his position visually. You'll need quite a bit more separation than usual, just in case, which is annoying to ATC but no big deal.. A wise ATC and/or a wise ATC regulation would force every other plane in their area out of their flight level. Alternately some peculiar formation flying will occur. Flight 7732 look 12 oclock high and Flight 123 look 9 oclock low and please acknowledge each other by rocking wings, over. Flight 123 please maintain 5 mile sep with flight 7732 following them to the airport, over.
In IFR you'd shoo everyone out of their flight level, and divert to the closest VFR airport, where the TSA jackboots would waterboard whomever owns that luggage, whom might even be the ones responsible for the jammer. Or if there's light enough traffic and a ILS transmitter and ILS/VOR onboard gear still exists, simply fly IFR with an "old fashioned" ILS approach with the caveat that ATC has no idea where the plane is located (other than reported altitude and dead reckoning)
So each plane sends its location back to air traffic control?
ADS-B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast
How is this system secured? This will be breached repeatedly.
No technical means what so ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillance-broadcast#Public_Access_to_ADS-B
No public reports of anyone intentionally messing with the 50 year old transponder system, which basically did "about the same thing" but without GPS. Probably because the military spent enormous amounts of money on gear and training to stop the Russians from doing it effectively, by being able to pinpoint the source, launch HARM missiles at the source, etc. If you can do a better job than a world superpower, then the USAF might be concerned... maybe.
There is an economic limitation in that the cost of the gear to "mess with the system" would be staggeringly far in excess of the cost of a simple cheap surface to air missile or an explosive in a suitcase (or shoe). And when all is said and done, you've knocked out air surveillance, something that happens on occasion right now due to equipment failure and its "no big deal".
Also, what happens when a solar storm takes out the satellites?
GPS sats are pretty tough, vaguely EMP proof. They were built and launched by the military for the military, you know.
Note that plenty of small planes fly with no transponders or IFR gear, today... You won't get 3 landings per minute at ohare and IFR would seem to be borderline impossible, but by no means do you have to "shut down ALL traffic" or all airplanes will magically fall out of the sky.
The cheapest/simplest solution might be to scramble the AWACS planes temporarily, until you can hotwire some patriot missile radars into the civilian facilities.
It would be an expensive and annoying PITA, but far less severe than the first couple days post-9/11
The few times I had computers from unknown origin at which I actually looked at the content of the disk, it was usually pirated movies, personal documents like letters and recipes
pirated software, homework essays/term papers, music, and possibly homemade pr0n
The "elite" types like to think only other "elite" types have access to pirated s/w, but trust me, from researching the contents of "goodwill harddrives" the unwashed masses somehow have access to virtually every warez we have. Also the same people that claim they can't be bothered to figure out how to change their background picture and could we do it for them, seem to easily have the motivation and technical ability to install warez. I think feigned ignorance is more a matter of pride, at least for the average loser, so I don't feel so bad about carefully structuring so I can't / won't help. It never fails that the village idiot, despite proudly stating he knows nothing about computers, somehow has the worlds most complicated cracked warez installed and working. WTF?
Homework is uniformly bad. Not only is grade inflation increasing over the decades, but writing ability seems to be plummeting at the same time. So, what was a good "C" is now an "A" from the bell curve declining pushing it to a "B" and then some inflation pushing it to the "A". It is true that there are very few misspelled words, and the gross grammatical errors that word can find are fixed, but the essays are usually filled with homonym substitution and terrible paragraph construction. Most people are, for all intents and purposes, illiterate, and can't write because they have no experience of reading good writing. I read it for the LOLs.
The music I find is usually pretty interesting. I'll listen at least once. Rarely is it stuff I actually want to keep, but its interesting to hear one time. I've noticed that on average the great unwashed seem to be moving away from discographies and albums. You'll just find that "one good song" from a musician. Much more like a "stream ripper listening to commercial FM radio" than the traditional computer dude attitude of mirroring a complete directory because its no harder than copying a single file.
As for the Pr0n its surprisingly hard to tell if they just downloaded a collection of one person or if it was genuinely homemade. Unlike home decorating, most people have good taste in Pr0n selection so you can't strictly go on subject matter. If they're chubby its homemade as "most americans are now fat". Also homemade stuff has ridiculous hoarded junk in the background or terrible lighting, that no pro photographer would put up with. Also the homemade stuff has bad hair/makeup. Other than that, its difficult to tell... needs more research, much more.
Anyway, thats what I find on hard drives, rarely this "movies, letters and recipe" stuff you refer to.
I don't have the patience to wait for a borked OS to load (if it ever loads).
External USB hard drive enclosure. Plugged into a machine not running that O/S to prevent any contagion. Stereotypical windoze drive, in a $25 USB external enclosure, plugged into a Linux box. No problemo.
Forgiving the debt counts as income, so it doesn't help at all.
Well, legally formally forgiving the debt in writing, yes that makes sense.
I mean formally posting it as bad debt, but in your mind and actions forgiving it, as in not working too hard to collect it, giving up on collecting it via the can't squeeze blood from a judgment proof stone theory, etc.
Every bad debt incurred isn't automatically counted as income, is it? If it were, our banks would be rich...
The cult of personality and hubris, especially within Ubuntu/Debian where it seems to erupt with regularity
Too broad of a brush. At Ubuntu, the dude who pays the paychecks and owns the servers has said, make it so. And it is done. Hope you like it! If not, tough cookies!
In Debian, its a bit different. Any developer can take that source package, fix it, and upload an new package named "whatever-better-ui" or something. Eventually one side will get tired of the game and there will be some renaming.
Then there's the Debian model, where project policy and other project wide decisions are pure democracy, yet individual package maintainers have a dictatorship over their individual package within the wide limitations of policy.
Actually its even more complicated in that the individual whom ran an individual package as a dictator is completely free to decide to operate as a triumvirate or whatever they please, and many do operate as anarchic teams, but the initial state is a dictatorship.
If a dictator is a miserable failure, thats OK too, since its all open source it just works.
It seems to be a much more reasonable balance of power than the Ubuntu community.
4) The way billing works in hospitals is more or less fraudulent. It works by inflating prices by 4x, offering a 75% discount to insurance companies (who essentially pay the original price), thus screwing over people that don't have insurance in order to cover losses from people that don't pay.
Accurate, but what's really going on is tax fraud, not regular plain ole fraud. Someone with no insurance, assuming they are not wealthy, will have most of the bill forgiven or sent to collections or otherwise disposed of at considerable "loss" to the hospital. The relevant tax fraud, is the hospital will book a phantom "loss" of 75% or more of the hyper-inflated cost of care, therefore not having to pay income tax on that fraction of revenue, or if a non-profit they just cooked the books allowing more "real" income to come in to balance that "phantom" expense.
As long as the actual expense is less than the income tax on the "phantom" loss, the hospital comes out ahead.
You claim to be a small business owner. What would the IRS think, if you marked the price of a used worn out blank USB stick as $10M, sold it to me, and I never paid you, or we settled for 25 cents total? Then on your income tax you enter a "$10M" business loss, thus you don't have to pay income taxes this year because that "loss" cancels out all your revenue?
But subsonics are cheaper, smaller, more reliable, better in every way except they are slower.
The speed is of no account for surprise attacks because you just do ToT Time on Target calculations to stagger the launches. Besides alternate delivery is much cheaper (UPS, fedex, the local trucking company)
So, a SS CM is only useful for very fast delivery, very low latency missions... more the response to the surprise attack than the surprise attack itself.
Nawww, the real "first strike weapon from Hell." is a 20 foot standard shipping container, either in the harbor or hauled around the country on a flatbed semi trailer. Heck, a really big RV, or a cargo jet, would work too. The fact that no one has done this to the USA yet, is basically proof that at least either the motive or the capability doesn't exist.
Now a SS cruise missile, that would be an interesting tactical weapon if you're losing a hot conventional war aka surprise invasion, or a great "return fire" response to the shipping container scenario.
A mass produced 350 KT V-1 from the mid 1940s would have been a quite effective strategic weapon. A modern version would probably work pretty well too.
The definition game is probably best played by flight profile as opposed to navigation systems, in which case an ancient german V-1 would qualify.
Oh, don't give him a hard time.
Personally, as a guy from a military background, and enjoying military strategy games, etc, I agree with him completely, I don't see much advantage of SS cruise missiles over a ballistic missile, at least for most countries and most situations.
The advantage a subsonic cruise missile has over a ballistic, is primarily payload fraction. Consider a tomahawk that weighs 3000 pounds of which 1000 pounds is warhead. Put another way, if you want 1000 pounds of boom on target, and want to use a subsonic cruise missile, you get to haul an additional 2000 extra pounds of missile around, instead of an additional 2000 pounds of aircraft fuel or food on a submarine or whatever.
In comparison, lets consider an ancient ballistic missile, a Polaris carrying a W47. A W47 only weighs 700 pounds or so, in comparison to 1000 pounds of "boom" on a tomahawk. Yet, a Polaris weighed freaking 28000 pounds. So, you can VERY QUICKLY deliver a mere 700 pounds of boom on target, if you're willing to haul around an extra 27300 pounds of missile.
Supersonic missiles combine the fuel efficiency of a ballistic missile, with the simplicity, reliability, and low cost of a cruise missile. Note the slight sarcasm. Pretty much a total failure EXCEPT that they can deliver extremely quickly.
If you dominate the air land and sea, you get quick delivery by stationing a boring old fashioned B-52 directly over the target and dropping a simple iron bomb straight down. Or, if you're not planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike, you simply don't need that capability to reach your goals. India, on the other hand....
Hows that "grep" working for ya, and can you instantly make copies and then share, distribute, and backup using this newfangled "paper" gadget?
Back in the 80s, I remember someone saying that a paperless office would be about as useful as the paperless toilet.
I'm not sure why I feel that this is true. But I'm hoping this discussion will provide insight.
Urinal = only works for about half the employees, even then only most of the time.
Also, there is the probably false assumption that office work is inherently useful work. Insert the "office space" movie quote "I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."
99% of the employees have 10-30 yellow stickys stuck all over their desk for the password change of the week.
Corrected that for you.
"Relatively short drive"? If you live in Berne, Multimap is giving me over 100 miles each way to get to a likely town outside Swizerland. Man, you've got to really want that game!
The tired old saying rears its ugly head again, in Europe they think 100 miles is far away, and in America they think 100 years is a long time ago.
Why? There is nothing inherently evil about spoofing caller ID.
Should be, from the point of view of wasting time. All we'll end up with is about 40 states banning it, and given that LD is so cheap as to be borderline free, all the crooks will base themselves in the remaining 10 states. No actual effect other than a bunch of wasted time.
Like the state usury laws forcing all the crooked CCs to DE or CT where-ever it was.
If they tried it at the federal level, then being a stupid idea, it could be promptly shot down, making the world simpler for everyone.
And I wouldn't exactly call a DEC manual priceless, one-off or irreplaceable.
Not in the 70s, no. But now, they are more or less "irreplaceable" in one sense, just like any other out of print book. As far as priceless, assuming its not so rare it never, ever hits ebay, I guess it had a recent "price", sort of.
Since DEC enjoyed using acid based paper which is literally rotting away, a 60s/70s era DEC manual will very soon be literally priceless, one-off, and irreplaceable.
Hopefully someone scanned it...
Damage as in think of how the bottom of a piece of plywood looks after you cut it, chips yanked off the edge. Tensile strength of paper is pretty high... with fine tooth blade and a cardboard backer board the pages are not torn, wrinkled, ripped thru the saw, etc. One sneaky way to prevent damage to the cover/last pages of a book you want, is to use a magazine/catalog/cardboard box or whatever as a backer board underneath the book you want to cut.
The bandsaw edge is, however, much more frizzy than the sheared edges, and could theoretically jam much better, although it works for me, well enough.
Really, you should try a bandsaw. Its super cheap and works well enough. It is also extremely fast, at least compared to the scanning time. You don't have to sacrifice a one of a kind first edition to try it, just saw last months catalog in half. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, despite sounding super pessimistic about it. There is some learned technique to it, and it takes maybe a dozen catalogs to get the blade set up right, and make a perfectly straight cut.
Fair enough dude, I'll try a shear some time, since you claim it works so well. If its anything like my old high school sheet metal shear, I'd worry about losing fingers in it, but I'll be careful so I think it will be OK...
in a real-life environment, there is an effective difference between reflected and transmitted photons.
Show me the physics... other than light polarization weakly depending on reflection. But human eyes have an extremely weak response to polarization.
The brightness of the screen can be drastically different than the surrounding environment with a backlit screen
Then it looks terrible until you adjust brightness/contrast. Which my ipod touch tries to do automatically, albeit very poorly. I think TVs have been available with auto-brightness adjustment since I owned one with that feature in the late 70s.
Don't optometrists recommend not using a bright monitor in a dark room?
Bright room equals tiny pupil diameter equals wide depth of field. And vice versa. If you're borderline near or far sighted, high light levels more or less cure it by shrinking the pupil.
E-ink allows that, and LCDs don't.
I've only seen two LCD screens without contrast and brightness settings on wristwatches and the worlds junkiest clock radio.
First, there are guillotine-style shears for cutting bindings off books that do no damage at all to the pages.
My bandsaw does no damage to the pages either. Clearly you haven't tried this. It worked for me, but I'm a small timer compared to the guys at bitsavers.org. They claim it works on an EXTREMELY large scale. I "saw" an ad for a paper shear (usually used for binding, and sorry for the pun). The shear was about 10 times the cost of my little tabletop bandsaw. If the market has changed and you can now buy a shear for the cost of a good steak dinner, well, I guess I'm out of date then. But even then, I needed a bandsaw for other purposes, and if its dual use, all the better, and I'd not be amused at buying, storing, maintaining, and evnetually disposing of two tools to do a job that one does perfectly well.
Second, nearly all the high-speed sheet-fed document scanners out there are duplex scanners.
New, maybe. Not in the olden times aka longer ago than yesterday. Maybe the new ones even duplex properly with paper other than standard 8.5x11 laser paper, and don't just jam on the cut edge. Maybe the new ones don't duplex at a speed about 4 times slower than non-duplex. You're the expert, I'm merely a guy who's actually done it.
I'm only saying what worked with what I had, and what I know other people have successfully done in the past, I'm not just some dude quoting specs out of a tiger direct catalog with an infinite budget for brand new gadgets.
The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.
Someone with real balls would have asked for a cash refund. "Clearly my copy of the book is faulty, can I get cash refund, or just instore credit?"
(just kidding)