Essentially this whole case is about outsourcing the risk of corruption to the legal system/judge.
If they didn't get the judge involved, then at any time in the past, WF could have lied to the CDO holders by saying "uh, you know that interest payment you been gettin? we say you aint getting that no more" and no one would have been the wiser, although WF would have been richer.
WF has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the CDO holders at the same time as it has a fiduciary responsibility to protect themselves, thus buying into a deal where one bank owns both sides of a 80/20 is pretty dumb, although the legal system is involved to at least try to protect the CDO holders from gross corruption.
This way, the judge verifies its an honest deal, a real genuine foreclosure, on the judges word the CDO holders are screwed and the CDO holders can at least probably trust the judge is telling the truth, or at least truer than WF whom is working both sides since they own both sides....
A party can't have a dispute with itself, period, because by definition it has the same interests as itself.
Except in this case it bought into both sides of an 80/20 mortgage, in which case it intentionally set itself in conflict with itself, during the inevitable foreclosure, one of the investments will lose the lawsuit to the other investment.
It's not Wells Fargo we ought to be upset at, it's the legal system that's so borked it requires a company to sue itself. Can we burn the law books yet and just govern ourselves by common sense?
Not a system problem at all.
How can all these "computer people" not know the phrase "garbage in, garbage out".
One bank on both sides of a 80/20 is garbage.
Garbage in, garbage out, therefore the cleanup is inherently going to be crazy.
Regardless of facts being left out, the company is still suing itself, which is demonstrably stupid.
No no no. The demonstrably stupid part is not suing itself, but the same org taking both sides of the 80/20.
The whole point of an 80/20 is the bank paying for the 80 thinks the victim is too much of a credit risk for a 95/5 or a 100/0 or whatever, but maybe they can get a 20 somewhere else, from some loan shark or something.
Basically some fool paid all the fees for two mortgages at the same place, an 80 and a 20, when they should have just paid one fee for a 100/0. Its really more of a fraud case than anything else.
The application of the law seems weird because its a being applied to a bizarre situation.
Admittedly my last home purchase was before the housing bubble, with at least 20% down, a long time ago. Maybe in the bubble madness this is just how things were done.
I'm not sure why it's the first time you've seen it: it's always been a requirement for vehicles that I financed.
No, that's probably not the reason at all. I had a similar situation with countrywide mortgage (since bankrupt and bought out, could not have happened to a better bunch of crooks).
The deal is, if they throw out paperwork, they make more money charging fees for arranging their own insurance.
As long as they make legal action too expensive (binding arbitration by the King Of Timbuktu, etc), its cheaper for the screwed customer to remain screwed.
Somehow I dodged the bullet after mailing and faxing the info multiple times, but I guess I was just lucky. Registered mail was next. Also property insured by multiple insurers is a classic insurance fraud setup.... having my ins company yell at them might have helped.
So, if they do something incompetent, they make a little more money. Therefore, they strategically pick victims, throw out paperwork, then send multiple HELOC and refinance offers per week, with the legally mandated notification in the middle so it will hopefully be overlooked, then throw out incoming mail and faxes, then make extra money.
X. Profit for the sub-contractor friends of the congressmen in the 80s whom originally approved the thing.
But that was friends of the senatorial class of '80. Even Strom Thurmond is gone now. So, who needs to kick-back his friends anymore? Deorbit the thing and work on a new make-work/make-vote/make-contributions program.
without the ISS as a destination, what does the CEV do between the deorbit of the ISS and any planned moon or mars mission in the early 2020s?
Nothing?
I can just hear the next bureaucratic speech "Due to forseen circumstances, that no one could have predicted, the CEV program unfortunately no longer has a mission, and is therefore rightsized."
Then a month after the CEV program is unalterably terminated, we can continue the ISS mission as planned.
Basically an elaborate way to cancel the CEV program, to shift the business to space-X or maybe just plain ole get out of the manned launches business.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.
But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated.
You write that like its bad or something. Decentralized is always more reliable overall.
The correct way is to work it thru in reverse. Automated tools should find things they can monitor, and then humans think about what to do.
NMAP periodically dumps its results in a DB. Watch your CDP too. Maybe sample your ARP cache on your switches. And keep an eye on your RANCID router configs.
One simple script analyzes the nagios config and emails a complaint to either one individual, a mailing list, or a gateway that autogenerates a ticket. The script sends one alert for each issue it finds, something like "WTF nmap found a device at 10.11.12.13 that is not configured or commented as ignore in Nagios". I haven't met a plain text config file yet, that doesn't allow comments, so if you desire not to monitor something you have a syntax in the config file "# ignore 10.11.12.14" and your script understands that.
Nothing wrong with your script generating alerts that contain sample "cut-n-paste" info to add to your configs.
Repeat for reverse DNS, munin monitoring system, MRTG polling of anything with an open SNMP port, etc.
Also you need well backed up and replicated wiki with a page for every device your network monitoring tool detects.
Finally don't forget that if something has been "red" in nagios for perhaps a week and/or its gone from the ARP table for a week, maybe it's time to formally delete it, also necessitating alert emails.
Conveniently this scheme also "forces" people to explain what they think they are doing, to at least one other sentient being, which can be very educational for all concerned if the end users are doing something crazy.
As staggering as this is, I am fairly sure that only overwhelming cost is preventing many governments (including UK, AU and US in that order), from implementing such measures, since it's becoming clear that the citizens are willing to give up any privacy and liberty they have left, in order to feel safer, and (at best) reduce their absolute risks by minute amounts.
No, the govt spends like a drunken sailor and this technology is pretty cheap. The real reason is PR related.
1) Since the only govt goal is providing security theater, as opposed to real security, hiring some uneducated ineffective bullies to stand around the airport and intimidate innocent civilians is cheaper, more theatrical, and has plenty of opportunity to buy votes and/or do corrupt deals, thus it meets the goals much more effectively... Security theater has to be in your face and over the top and a little airplane is not.
2) The other aspect is vaguely similar to some theories about nuclear non-proliferation. Frankly the cost of a flying drone is pretty low for anyone, not just the government. Spending lots of govt money merely gives the whole technology a higher profile and lowers the costs for non-government operated drones. Consider a little airplane in Tijuana being filled with "something" and landing in El Paso times about a zillion. A street gang could have its own small scale airforce... Even without any R and D right now, consider what could be done w/ RC cars for street level transactions. Out of sight out of mind is the crucial feature here, with the govt hoping the bad guys don't get any ideas... Which brings up the famous saying about hope in one hand and #### in the other and see which fills first.
The mistake is trying to monitor thousands of devices on a 2-D map. I'll look pretty to the suits, but be useless for the users. Nothing but endless slow clicky clicky clicky.
Give them a text screen of whats currently down... that'll work.
Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator
A very common misconception. Actually they were far, far more powerful than any modern computer. One mainframe could run multinational corporations, put a man on the moon, etc. In comparison, on a good day, a modern computer might be able to balance my checkbook, with alot of help, play a game, or maybe replay some music.
That is what motivates people like myself toward retrocomputing... Its not that its a low clock speed, who cares about that, but that on my desk I can now use technology that ran entire research labs, major corporations, etc.
You can either learn how to solve scalable, ultra high reliability, enterprise grade computing problems by studying how the ancients solved those problems, or flail around blindly while re-learning the ancient's wisdom... Your choice.
Power is applied by changing the world, not toggling a flipflop at GHz speeds but not really doing anything out in the world.
Because in this specific application, absolutely everything else in the equation is a fixed constant....
There's always going to be about a coulomb of H generated per amp-second of current. H only has one ionization state of +1 in this situation.
The number of atoms of hydrogen in a mole is mighty constant around 6E23.
The mass of hydrogen in a mole's count is mighty constant (and around 1 gram per mole)
So, in summary, the amp-hours required to generate a gram of hydrogen is pretty much more or less mostly a constant.
Multiply the amp-hours to react your tank of H by the voltage required, gives you watt-hours, and some metric magic and that becomes the world famous ever popular KwH that the energy companies use to charge you.
Electrical transmission technology is well-understood. There shouldn't be any technical surprises.
Seeing as it's Texas, somebody didn't make a large enough campaign contribution to the right people, next thing you know, right where the towers were supposed to be installed, it turns out to be the breeding ground for a rare species of mosquito, or perhaps prairie dog or armadillo.
There will be some more posturing on both sides, money will change hands, the show stopping problem will be papered over, it'll be all good.
Ahh yes, the first snowfall of Winter, when all the people driving sensible winter vehicles get to laugh at all the people in fancy sports cars off in the ditch.
I see the exact opposite. Here in Wisconsin, when it snows, the ditches absolutely fill with tipped over SUVs, and the occasional pickup truck. I have seen ditches full of SUVs only a couple hundred feet apart in the worst freezing rain conditions.
The SUV drivers get strange ideas about how magically better SUVs stick to the road... after all, its more expensive, so it must perform better? And the commercials show them climbing the side of Mt Everest, and commercials never lie?
It's very rare to see a car in the ditch in Wisconsin... after all, "everyone knows" they don't handle well in the snow, so they get driven pretty carefully.
Assuming more robustly built structures in a modern city, I would still suspect that a 10 megaton bomb, releasing 50 times more energy would be much more destructive than 200-300 meters.
No, not really. Even at the most optimistic level, you need to take a cube root to go go between radius and volume... cube root of 50 is about 3.7. So, at the most optimistic, 50 times more volume of destruction equals about 3 something larger radius. Round down for improved building codes and improved technology. Round down for realistic blast effects (shading from bigger buildings, lots of the extra "power" just makes the fireball go upwards even faster).
Secondly, radiative damage would be devastating, as that becomes an increasing factor with bomb strength.
Nope, nada, zactly precisely totally the opposite effect. Check out the old book "effects of nuclear weapons" or the wikipedia entry. There used to be a palm pilot calculator that used the equations more than a decade ago on a little slide rule...
In summary, for the little bombs, its a mighty close tossup as to killed by blast, burns, or radiation, although radiation has a slight lead, so most folks will probably die of radiation exposure if a small bomb hits. But for big bombs, most folks die from the burns which are real bad if you were outside in visual range (slashdotters need not worry about that) or for that matter in a burnable building (Moms basement counts, unless all masonry and steel roof shingles and metal window blinds), if you're close enough to be seriously fried in the fire then the blast will probably get you anyway, finally radiation is so short ranged it won't kill you unless you were so close you were in the utterly "ground to dust" range (like, bank guard chilling in an empty, closed bank vault or similar during the blast).
Or rephrased, for a small bomb its three virtual identical circles of destruction like earth vs its oceans and atmosphere kind of diagram, but for big bombs its a (relatively) tiny little radiation circle, surrounded by a big ole blast circle several times larger, surrounded by a modestly larger thermal circle, like saturn and some of its rings scale of diagram.
Really? They're aiming for 500 launch vehicles. Are there even that many targets to nuke or does Bolton just want us to do it a few times over for the refried beans effect?
Start w/ 500 theoretical vehicles. 25% are non operational due to regular scheduled maintenance, waiting on spare parts, reconstruction/rebuilding, waiting on trained personnel to do a simple repair, paperwork screwed up, whatever.
Of the remaining 375, we could attack with, we'd like to split into four distinct missions. Immediate counterattack/attack. Delayed counterattack, as in stop this foolishness or we pound you just as hard in a half hour. Deterrence against other "enemies" (so, we're fighting the Chinese today, but we'd like to deter the N.K. from starting a fight tomorrow). Finally a quarter or so for reserve, for who knows what, spare parts or alien invasion or blasting a new panama canal or literally who knows, that's the whole point of a reserve.
Of the remaining 90 for an actual attack, figure maybe 1/2 won't even work. Built by the lowest bidder. Maintenance dude was hung over that day. The Chinese spies that seem to effortlessly steal all our secret designs, were equally successful at inserting a failure mode into the designs. Enemy fighter shot down the bomber. Sub sunk by enemy sub while in the long tedious process of launching. Probably 1 in 10 unmanned rockets blow up shortly after launching when no one is in a particular hurry, so the odds will be worse in wartime.
Of the remaining 40 or so "kabooms", figure we really are hot for destroying certain targets not just make big random bangs that may or may not do stuff. So, figure on targeting 2 "kabooms" per target to make sure the target is most certainly going to get smooshed.
So, figure that starting with 500 treaty permitted vehicles, we might actually destroy 20 targets.
Now, 20 destroyed targets in Cuba is quite impressive, doesn't leave much left standing, definitely a demonstration of your "refried beans effect". 20 vaporized targets in China, not so impressive, not much of your "refried beans effect", in fact most of the country will be untouched and frankly unaffected as long as they don't listen to radio/TV/propoganda.
Therefore with only 500 treaty vehicles, the USA will no longer be able to deter large countries like China from attacking us. I hope they are nice enough not to, but hope in one hand and ____ in another and see which hand fills up first... We don't need to deter the little countries since the conventional military can smoosh them all on their own.
So, in a weird way it makes nuclear deterrence obsolete. Therefore we will go back to world wars every generation or two. Hope we all enjoy WWIII while we can!
A photo ID is a much better method of identification - it doesn't need to be stored and it is (yet) difficult to steal a face.
Yer not trying very hard then... "Uh sir, I lost my I.D., could you issue me another". Works especially well if you look kind of like the person. Flickr and the other web 2.0 sites are quite helpful in finding people whom "look kind of like you" along with enough personal info to get past any questions, unless you look like a total space alien or something.
Does New York City have a unique political status of which I am unaware?
Probably not unique, but they certainly have an extremely rare status for the USA... NYC has a CITY income tax. Yes you heard right, you live in NYC you pay federal, state, and CITY income tax. No, I didn't miswrite property tax or sales tax or misinterpret something, they have a genuine CITY income tax, as in the CITY siphons out a fraction of your income. Ick. Ick. Ick.
I have thankfully never lived in NYC, but I'd guess, like every other income tax I'm aware of, you get a tiny joke of a credit or deduction on your taxes for each child with a SS number that you list on the form, and NYC probably does the "trust but verify" thing with those SS #s, along with the 50 states, D.C., P.R., etc.
1) Have the fiber from one provider come into the building from, say, the north side of the building.
2) Have a competitor, unrelated business wise, that doesn't use the same upstream providers bring his fibers in from the South side of the building.
3) Discover that both fiber runs connect to the same L.E.C. vault 100 feet away and then run parallel the whole way back to the same central office, and/or they both are carried on the same SONET ring just connected to different ADMs (which would at least give you ADM redundancy).
Seriously though, step 3) is get a copy of the DLR / CLR of the local loop, and have someone analyze them. Of course how the circuit is designed is not necessarily how it is actually routed, which is even funnier.
Everyone in the telco business has heard the story about the general/admiral/CEO being told by the sales weasel how everything is redundant and it'll never fail, so the totally disbelieving general/admiral/CEO walks up to the fiber frame with scissors/bolt cutter/wire cutter and then... Now that is probably the only real way to know if it'll work.
If everything referenced by the DNS records (web and email services or whatever) is hosted on the same machine as the name server, then it isn't particularly stupid. It's just a small operation that has a single point of failure; redundant DNS isn't going to change that.
WITH the single exception I know of, that incoming email will bounce with something like "domain not found" if there is no DNS response at all, vs if there is DNS but the MX record servers can't be reached it'll silently retry. Some totally brain-dead MTAs will bounce, but anything remotely usable will transparently retry later and no one will know it happened.
And it's not so much a "small operation", as a non-relevant risk. People have a certain expectation of how (un-)reliable email is, due to filtering, and/or just plain ole magic. As long as my colo'd server is dramatically more reliable than their expectation of email reliability, then increasing the server reliability by a microscopic amount at the expense of more complicated design, would be misprioritized wasted effort. Put that effort into improving spam filtering instead, etc.
Naive or not, it's an EASY solution, it's not like disposing nuclear waste.
Yes, exactly. Nuclear waste decays away over time, eventually becoming harmless. So, just dump it in the ocean and wait, it'll be OK, eventually.
On the other hand, mercury is toxic forever. It never, ever, becomes safe, no matter how long you wait. When the glass breaks it'll poison you just as well in a million years as it does today.
I agree, the solution is simple, treat it as more dangerous than nuclear waste.
You're mixing about a zillion different orbits into one recollection.
If you've got enough fuel, just turn and burn man... simple. Of course that takes a heck of a lot of fuel, like your idea of 98% mass fraction of fuel.
A Hohmann TO is the simplest imaginable transfer to design and is pretty quick too. Draw an ellipse that touches both orbits...
A Bi-elliptic is way slow, but if you're making a major/huge change to your orbital parameters it takes less fuel. Enter a giant orbit way the heck out there, then on the return pass enter your new orbit. Handy for inclination changes too.
And if you literally have decades of spare time there is the famous "ITN" which takes practically no fuel and takes practically forever, which works by wandering around the various eddies of the Lagrange points or something very vaguely like that.
"showing we need add just 2.966 km/s, a shade short of 3 km/s or 10% of the orbital velocity."
and then when you get there you need another 2.5 km/s to match mars orbit, although you can play various gravitational slingshot games to help that out...
Slashdot Mirror
without the appearance of impropriety.
Essentially this whole case is about outsourcing the risk of corruption to the legal system/judge.
If they didn't get the judge involved, then at any time in the past, WF could have lied to the CDO holders by saying "uh, you know that interest payment you been gettin? we say you aint getting that no more" and no one would have been the wiser, although WF would have been richer.
WF has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the CDO holders at the same time as it has a fiduciary responsibility to protect themselves, thus buying into a deal where one bank owns both sides of a 80/20 is pretty dumb, although the legal system is involved to at least try to protect the CDO holders from gross corruption.
This way, the judge verifies its an honest deal, a real genuine foreclosure, on the judges word the CDO holders are screwed and the CDO holders can at least probably trust the judge is telling the truth, or at least truer than WF whom is working both sides since they own both sides....
A party can't have a dispute with itself, period, because by definition it has the same interests as itself.
Except in this case it bought into both sides of an 80/20 mortgage, in which case it intentionally set itself in conflict with itself, during the inevitable foreclosure, one of the investments will lose the lawsuit to the other investment.
It's not Wells Fargo we ought to be upset at, it's the legal system that's so borked it requires a company to sue itself. Can we burn the law books yet and just govern ourselves by common sense?
Not a system problem at all.
How can all these "computer people" not know the phrase "garbage in, garbage out".
One bank on both sides of a 80/20 is garbage.
Garbage in, garbage out, therefore the cleanup is inherently going to be crazy.
Regardless of facts being left out, the company is still suing itself, which is demonstrably stupid.
No no no. The demonstrably stupid part is not suing itself, but the same org taking both sides of the 80/20.
The whole point of an 80/20 is the bank paying for the 80 thinks the victim is too much of a credit risk for a 95/5 or a 100/0 or whatever, but maybe they can get a 20 somewhere else, from some loan shark or something.
Basically some fool paid all the fees for two mortgages at the same place, an 80 and a 20, when they should have just paid one fee for a 100/0. Its really more of a fraud case than anything else.
The application of the law seems weird because its a being applied to a bizarre situation.
Admittedly my last home purchase was before the housing bubble, with at least 20% down, a long time ago. Maybe in the bubble madness this is just how things were done.
I'm not sure why it's the first time you've seen it: it's always been a requirement for vehicles that I financed.
No, that's probably not the reason at all. I had a similar situation with countrywide mortgage (since bankrupt and bought out, could not have happened to a better bunch of crooks).
The deal is, if they throw out paperwork, they make more money charging fees for arranging their own insurance.
As long as they make legal action too expensive (binding arbitration by the King Of Timbuktu, etc), its cheaper for the screwed customer to remain screwed.
Somehow I dodged the bullet after mailing and faxing the info multiple times, but I guess I was just lucky. Registered mail was next. Also property insured by multiple insurers is a classic insurance fraud setup.... having my ins company yell at them might have helped.
So, if they do something incompetent, they make a little more money. Therefore, they strategically pick victims, throw out paperwork, then send multiple HELOC and refinance offers per week, with the legally mandated notification in the middle so it will hopefully be overlooked, then throw out incoming mail and faxes, then make extra money.
I don't get it...
Here, let me help you
1. Build ISS .
2. Deorbit...
.
.
I think we are OK so far?
X. Profit?!?!
You mean:
X. Profit for the sub-contractor friends of the congressmen in the 80s whom originally approved the thing.
But that was friends of the senatorial class of '80. Even Strom Thurmond is gone now. So, who needs to kick-back his friends anymore? Deorbit the thing and work on a new make-work/make-vote/make-contributions program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond
without the ISS as a destination, what does the CEV do between the deorbit of the ISS and any planned moon or mars mission in the early 2020s?
Nothing?
I can just hear the next bureaucratic speech "Due to forseen circumstances, that no one could have predicted, the CEV program unfortunately no longer has a mission, and is therefore rightsized."
Then a month after the CEV program is unalterably terminated, we can continue the ISS mission as planned.
Basically an elaborate way to cancel the CEV program, to shift the business to space-X or maybe just plain ole get out of the manned launches business.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.
Translated ... Orion will also get the boot.
Why not make that date something to the tune of, "Upon becoming too cumbersome to maintain." Or, "Becomes scientifically unecessary."
So, go back in time to 2006 when the hab module was cancelled?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitation_Module
Or back in time to 2007 when they canceled the research module?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Research_Module
But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated.
You write that like its bad or something. Decentralized is always more reliable overall.
The correct way is to work it thru in reverse. Automated tools should find things they can monitor, and then humans think about what to do.
NMAP periodically dumps its results in a DB. Watch your CDP too. Maybe sample your ARP cache on your switches. And keep an eye on your RANCID router configs.
One simple script analyzes the nagios config and emails a complaint to either one individual, a mailing list, or a gateway that autogenerates a ticket. The script sends one alert for each issue it finds, something like "WTF nmap found a device at 10.11.12.13 that is not configured or commented as ignore in Nagios". I haven't met a plain text config file yet, that doesn't allow comments, so if you desire not to monitor something you have a syntax in the config file "# ignore 10.11.12.14" and your script understands that.
Nothing wrong with your script generating alerts that contain sample "cut-n-paste" info to add to your configs.
Repeat for reverse DNS, munin monitoring system, MRTG polling of anything with an open SNMP port, etc.
Also you need well backed up and replicated wiki with a page for every device your network monitoring tool detects.
Finally don't forget that if something has been "red" in nagios for perhaps a week and/or its gone from the ARP table for a week, maybe it's time to formally delete it, also necessitating alert emails.
Conveniently this scheme also "forces" people to explain what they think they are doing, to at least one other sentient being, which can be very educational for all concerned if the end users are doing something crazy.
As staggering as this is, I am fairly sure that only overwhelming cost is preventing many governments (including UK, AU and US in that order), from implementing such measures, since it's becoming clear that the citizens are willing to give up any privacy and liberty they have left, in order to feel safer, and (at best) reduce their absolute risks by minute amounts.
No, the govt spends like a drunken sailor and this technology is pretty cheap. The real reason is PR related.
1) Since the only govt goal is providing security theater, as opposed to real security, hiring some uneducated ineffective bullies to stand around the airport and intimidate innocent civilians is cheaper, more theatrical, and has plenty of opportunity to buy votes and/or do corrupt deals, thus it meets the goals much more effectively... Security theater has to be in your face and over the top and a little airplane is not.
2) The other aspect is vaguely similar to some theories about nuclear non-proliferation. Frankly the cost of a flying drone is pretty low for anyone, not just the government. Spending lots of govt money merely gives the whole technology a higher profile and lowers the costs for non-government operated drones. Consider a little airplane in Tijuana being filled with "something" and landing in El Paso times about a zillion. A street gang could have its own small scale airforce... Even without any R and D right now, consider what could be done w/ RC cars for street level transactions. Out of sight out of mind is the crucial feature here, with the govt hoping the bad guys don't get any ideas... Which brings up the famous saying about hope in one hand and #### in the other and see which fills first.
The mistake is trying to monitor thousands of devices on a 2-D map. I'll look pretty to the suits, but be useless for the users. Nothing but endless slow clicky clicky clicky.
Give them a text screen of whats currently down ... that'll work.
Computers took entire buildings to house but were less powerful than a pocket calculator
A very common misconception. Actually they were far, far more powerful than any modern computer. One mainframe could run multinational corporations, put a man on the moon, etc. In comparison, on a good day, a modern computer might be able to balance my checkbook, with alot of help, play a game, or maybe replay some music.
That is what motivates people like myself toward retrocomputing... Its not that its a low clock speed, who cares about that, but that on my desk I can now use technology that ran entire research labs, major corporations, etc.
You can either learn how to solve scalable, ultra high reliability, enterprise grade computing problems by studying how the ancients solved those problems, or flail around blindly while re-learning the ancient's wisdom... Your choice.
Power is applied by changing the world, not toggling a flipflop at GHz speeds but not really doing anything out in the world.
When did they make volts a unit of energy?
Because in this specific application, absolutely everything else in the equation is a fixed constant....
There's always going to be about a coulomb of H generated per amp-second of current. H only has one ionization state of +1 in this situation.
The number of atoms of hydrogen in a mole is mighty constant around 6E23.
The mass of hydrogen in a mole's count is mighty constant (and around 1 gram per mole)
So, in summary, the amp-hours required to generate a gram of hydrogen is pretty much more or less mostly a constant.
Multiply the amp-hours to react your tank of H by the voltage required, gives you watt-hours, and some metric magic and that becomes the world famous ever popular KwH that the energy companies use to charge you.
.... said the six digit UID to the seven digit UID.
Electrical transmission technology is well-understood. There shouldn't be any technical surprises.
Seeing as it's Texas, somebody didn't make a large enough campaign contribution to the right people, next thing you know, right where the towers were supposed to be installed, it turns out to be the breeding ground for a rare species of mosquito, or perhaps prairie dog or armadillo.
There will be some more posturing on both sides, money will change hands, the show stopping problem will be papered over, it'll be all good.
Ahh yes, the first snowfall of Winter, when all the people driving sensible winter vehicles get to laugh at all the people in fancy sports cars off in the ditch.
I see the exact opposite. Here in Wisconsin, when it snows, the ditches absolutely fill with tipped over SUVs, and the occasional pickup truck. I have seen ditches full of SUVs only a couple hundred feet apart in the worst freezing rain conditions.
The SUV drivers get strange ideas about how magically better SUVs stick to the road... after all, its more expensive, so it must perform better? And the commercials show them climbing the side of Mt Everest, and commercials never lie?
It's very rare to see a car in the ditch in Wisconsin... after all, "everyone knows" they don't handle well in the snow, so they get driven pretty carefully.
Assuming more robustly built structures in a modern city, I would still suspect that a 10 megaton bomb, releasing 50 times more energy would be much more destructive than 200-300 meters.
No, not really. Even at the most optimistic level, you need to take a cube root to go go between radius and volume... cube root of 50 is about 3.7. So, at the most optimistic, 50 times more volume of destruction equals about 3 something larger radius. Round down for improved building codes and improved technology. Round down for realistic blast effects (shading from bigger buildings, lots of the extra "power" just makes the fireball go upwards even faster).
Secondly, radiative damage would be devastating, as that becomes an increasing factor with bomb strength.
Nope, nada, zactly precisely totally the opposite effect. Check out the old book "effects of nuclear weapons" or the wikipedia entry. There used to be a palm pilot calculator that used the equations more than a decade ago on a little slide rule...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
In summary, for the little bombs, its a mighty close tossup as to killed by blast, burns, or radiation, although radiation has a slight lead, so most folks will probably die of radiation exposure if a small bomb hits. But for big bombs, most folks die from the burns which are real bad if you were outside in visual range (slashdotters need not worry about that) or for that matter in a burnable building (Moms basement counts, unless all masonry and steel roof shingles and metal window blinds), if you're close enough to be seriously fried in the fire then the blast will probably get you anyway, finally radiation is so short ranged it won't kill you unless you were so close you were in the utterly "ground to dust" range (like, bank guard chilling in an empty, closed bank vault or similar during the blast).
Or rephrased, for a small bomb its three virtual identical circles of destruction like earth vs its oceans and atmosphere kind of diagram, but for big bombs its a (relatively) tiny little radiation circle, surrounded by a big ole blast circle several times larger, surrounded by a modestly larger thermal circle, like saturn and some of its rings scale of diagram.
Really? They're aiming for 500 launch vehicles. Are there even that many targets to nuke or does Bolton just want us to do it a few times over for the refried beans effect?
Start w/ 500 theoretical vehicles. 25% are non operational due to regular scheduled maintenance, waiting on spare parts, reconstruction/rebuilding, waiting on trained personnel to do a simple repair, paperwork screwed up, whatever.
Of the remaining 375, we could attack with, we'd like to split into four distinct missions. Immediate counterattack/attack. Delayed counterattack, as in stop this foolishness or we pound you just as hard in a half hour. Deterrence against other "enemies" (so, we're fighting the Chinese today, but we'd like to deter the N.K. from starting a fight tomorrow). Finally a quarter or so for reserve, for who knows what, spare parts or alien invasion or blasting a new panama canal or literally who knows, that's the whole point of a reserve.
Of the remaining 90 for an actual attack, figure maybe 1/2 won't even work. Built by the lowest bidder. Maintenance dude was hung over that day. The Chinese spies that seem to effortlessly steal all our secret designs, were equally successful at inserting a failure mode into the designs. Enemy fighter shot down the bomber. Sub sunk by enemy sub while in the long tedious process of launching. Probably 1 in 10 unmanned rockets blow up shortly after launching when no one is in a particular hurry, so the odds will be worse in wartime.
Of the remaining 40 or so "kabooms", figure we really are hot for destroying certain targets not just make big random bangs that may or may not do stuff. So, figure on targeting 2 "kabooms" per target to make sure the target is most certainly going to get smooshed.
So, figure that starting with 500 treaty permitted vehicles, we might actually destroy 20 targets.
Now, 20 destroyed targets in Cuba is quite impressive, doesn't leave much left standing, definitely a demonstration of your "refried beans effect". 20 vaporized targets in China, not so impressive, not much of your "refried beans effect", in fact most of the country will be untouched and frankly unaffected as long as they don't listen to radio/TV/propoganda.
Therefore with only 500 treaty vehicles, the USA will no longer be able to deter large countries like China from attacking us. I hope they are nice enough not to, but hope in one hand and ____ in another and see which hand fills up first... We don't need to deter the little countries since the conventional military can smoosh them all on their own.
So, in a weird way it makes nuclear deterrence obsolete. Therefore we will go back to world wars every generation or two. Hope we all enjoy WWIII while we can!
A photo ID is a much better method of identification - it doesn't need to be stored and it is (yet) difficult to steal a face.
Yer not trying very hard then... "Uh sir, I lost my I.D., could you issue me another". Works especially well if you look kind of like the person. Flickr and the other web 2.0 sites are quite helpful in finding people whom "look kind of like you" along with enough personal info to get past any questions, unless you look like a total space alien or something.
Does New York City have a unique political status of which I am unaware?
Probably not unique, but they certainly have an extremely rare status for the USA ... NYC has a CITY income tax. Yes you heard right, you live in NYC you pay federal, state, and CITY income tax. No, I didn't miswrite property tax or sales tax or misinterpret something, they have a genuine CITY income tax, as in the CITY siphons out a fraction of your income. Ick. Ick. Ick.
I have thankfully never lived in NYC, but I'd guess, like every other income tax I'm aware of, you get a tiny joke of a credit or deduction on your taxes for each child with a SS number that you list on the form, and NYC probably does the "trust but verify" thing with those SS #s, along with the 50 states, D.C., P.R., etc.
1) Have the fiber from one provider come into the building from, say, the north side of the building.
2) Have a competitor, unrelated business wise, that doesn't use the same upstream providers bring his fibers in from the South side of the building.
3) Discover that both fiber runs connect to the same L.E.C. vault 100 feet away and then run parallel the whole way back to the same central office, and/or they both are carried on the same SONET ring just connected to different ADMs (which would at least give you ADM redundancy).
Seriously though, step 3) is get a copy of the DLR / CLR of the local loop, and have someone analyze them. Of course how the circuit is designed is not necessarily how it is actually routed, which is even funnier.
Everyone in the telco business has heard the story about the general/admiral/CEO being told by the sales weasel how everything is redundant and it'll never fail, so the totally disbelieving general/admiral/CEO walks up to the fiber frame with scissors/bolt cutter/wire cutter and then ... Now that is probably the only real way to know if it'll work.
If everything referenced by the DNS records (web and email services or whatever) is hosted on the same machine as the name server, then it isn't particularly stupid. It's just a small operation that has a single point of failure; redundant DNS isn't going to change that.
WITH the single exception I know of, that incoming email will bounce with something like "domain not found" if there is no DNS response at all, vs if there is DNS but the MX record servers can't be reached it'll silently retry. Some totally brain-dead MTAs will bounce, but anything remotely usable will transparently retry later and no one will know it happened.
And it's not so much a "small operation", as a non-relevant risk. People have a certain expectation of how (un-)reliable email is, due to filtering, and/or just plain ole magic. As long as my colo'd server is dramatically more reliable than their expectation of email reliability, then increasing the server reliability by a microscopic amount at the expense of more complicated design, would be misprioritized wasted effort. Put that effort into improving spam filtering instead, etc.
Naive or not, it's an EASY solution, it's not like disposing nuclear waste.
Yes, exactly. Nuclear waste decays away over time, eventually becoming harmless. So, just dump it in the ocean and wait, it'll be OK, eventually.
On the other hand, mercury is toxic forever. It never, ever, becomes safe, no matter how long you wait. When the glass breaks it'll poison you just as well in a million years as it does today.
I agree, the solution is simple, treat it as more dangerous than nuclear waste.
You're mixing about a zillion different orbits into one recollection.
If you've got enough fuel, just turn and burn man... simple. Of course that takes a heck of a lot of fuel, like your idea of 98% mass fraction of fuel.
A Hohmann TO is the simplest imaginable transfer to design and is pretty quick too. Draw an ellipse that touches both orbits...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohmann_transfer_orbit
A Bi-elliptic is way slow, but if you're making a major/huge change to your orbital parameters it takes less fuel. Enter a giant orbit way the heck out there, then on the return pass enter your new orbit. Handy for inclination changes too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-elliptic_transfer
And if you literally have decades of spare time there is the famous "ITN" which takes practically no fuel and takes practically forever, which works by wandering around the various eddies of the Lagrange points or something very vaguely like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network
As for your claim of 98% mass fraction, check out the math on
http://www.iki.rssi.ru/mirrors/stern/stargaze/Smars2.htm
"showing we need add just 2.966 km/s, a shade short of 3 km/s or 10% of the orbital velocity."
and then when you get there you need another 2.5 km/s to match mars orbit, although you can play various gravitational slingshot games to help that out...