JP's been around for much longer than that - I've watched their baby steps building balloon launched rockets out at BlackRock for many years now.
Like Armadillo, Carmack's company the best thing about them is that they don't have one great idea that they are basing their company on (or bust), instead they are taking small steps to a large goal, sometimes failing but learning from that failure and moving on a little at a time. Of course it helps to have mob of volunteers around just itching to help:-)
White Island's not that far from shore - certainly within reach of any of the local sea-going pleasure boats - from memory people actually used to mine sulphur there in years gone by - but it's also somewhere that's particularly expected to let loose one day soon so it's not reccomended
err CNN is mainly a cable news show, while they may not have mentioned it on their web site they certainly did on the air (you should have simply switch channels from fox and checked for yourself...)
well yes and no - it's a patent on the use of a PLL in clock generation for a CPU on a 'daughter card' - proving that an integrated CPU/bus unit is a cpu on a daughter card is going to be quite a stretch - they are up against Intel's lawyers after all....
It's actually one of the more clearly written patents I've read in a long time (that may be their undoing:-) not a lot of claims and easy to read - but certainly there's prior art up the wazoo for PLLs and CPUs - besides using a PLL to do this doesn't pass the obvious test (how else would you do it?).
It was filed in 1993 - I'm sure there's prior art in the PC and Mac space (people were building Mac accelerators like this in the '80s)
all 'union' means is that when the time comes to talk to your boss about next year's pay increase you do it as a group, and maybe hire someone who does that for a living to help you... why does that make you a "lazy bum"? how is it different from hiring someone to represent you in court?.... having people get together so they can negotiate from a position of power is a good thing (from the point of view of the people concerned) - it evens the power relationship a bit... it's what got you Saturdays off and a 40 hour work week.
Sadly the US has a (recent) history of people abusing that power
err more like: Arkansas, Missouri, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan (from drilling down further in the same web site)
Well think of the breakup of AT&T into the baby-bells as that scene where they freeze the liquid-metal terminator and shatter him into pieces...... after a while they melt and all start flowing back together to recreate the whole.... that's what SBC (and to some extent Verizon) are....
yes but not a lot - drag is, well, a real drag - proportional to something evil like the cube of your velocity (I forget exactly) - best trick is to go straight up a slowly as possible 'till you're past the worst of the air then once it starts to get thin kick the accelerator and start the arc over into orbit (yes no one pulls exact snappy 90 degree turns, I was just trying to draw a mental image of the problem you have to solve)
so that it comes in slowish (not balistic) you don't want to be close to mach when you pop the chute - it'll shred. Also you want something to stabilize the descent so it's not spinning too much when the main chute comes out (to avoid tangling)
more importantly it also means you probably have some sort of guidance system (other than fins). It's pretty easy to go straight up - but to get into orbit you basicly have to go straight up (to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible) and then turn 90 degrees sideways and go fast enough that you fall back at the same rate the earth is falling away from you. That's hard - without air fins don't work - you need some sort of reaction control or thrust vectoring as well as some inertial system so you know where you are and where you are going
I fly at Blackrock a lot (where this flew). One of the reasons we choose this spot is that it's easy to get an FAA waiver (ie permission to use the airspace) - it's south of the air traffic from Portland and north of the traffic from SF.
We do it 3-4 times a year have been for 15 years or so. We arrange ahead of time and then we call into ATC before we light up the waiver and again when we're done. We regularly get waivers to 100k ft ASL (20 miles up) well above the 30k ft commercial planes fly at. Though we seldom fly that high.
Getting a waiver above 100k ft is much much harder - the normal FAA ATC doesn't have juristiction above there - you have to apply to a different part of the govt. who worry about things like stuff landing on other countries etc etc
Want to come to a launch? - you're welcome - check out www.aeropac.org
not true - the music industry has a different sort of monopoly sanctioned by the copyright laws. In the canned air biz anyone can can air, and sure anyone can make CDs.... but because of copyright not just anyone can make say "Rolling Stones" CDs - I can't go anywhere and choose between different vendors of a particular Rolling Sones CD - there's no competition on price, quality, etc etc because there is a monopoly at the label/distribution level.
I'm not arguing against copyright here - just pointing out that there is an anti-competitive form of monopoly that exists.
Perhaps one solution would be to free the music in a different sort of way - change the copyright laws so that copyright cannot be transfered from the original author - and then outlaw licensing schemes that are exclusionary - that would help the artists and protect the consumers and make the labels actually compete with each other day to day for customers.
If you ever get a chance listen to John Perry Barlow talk about bthe history of music copyright.... there was none for the longest time - wandering musicians played music, learned songs from each other and played them live. No one ever paid royalties... it was only when the rise of the victorian middle class put pianos in people's houses that sheet music became under copyright, and after that recordings did the current way of looking at music as being owned come about.... untill just over 100 years ago music was free
I fly at Blackrock all the time - you have miles of downrange in all directions - but it's more common to deplot a drogue at apogee and something bigger at a few 1000 ft
he already has lots and lots of fans - the project you describe is already in progress.... in fact if the fans go away we might suffer a meltdown... probably an LN2 bath would be going a bit over the top, perhaps the occasional case of beer sent his way would help though
Analog CATV is standardized, cable channel 27 in one town is on the same frequencies as cable channel 27 in another.
While that's true for broadcast it's not uniformly true for CATV - though HRC and IRC are now mostly losing the battle - check out http://www.jneuhaus.com/fccindex/cablech.html for a list of freqs
we actually did the fill-the-office-with-baloons to the VP of engineering for a company I worked for (almost 20 years ago now...) - came in on Sunday, worked all day 'till when we pushed on in through the ceiling tiles another would burst - it was a great team building exercise we had a great time.
Monday morning he came in a foul mood (usually he was a really great guy) - which kind of ruined it for us. Walking into his office with a pin was a lot of fun though:-)
I think the big problem with Quicksilver is that it's the first bookm in a big trilogy, not a standalone book in it's own right - reading it I assumed it was setting me up with all the information I'll need to read the next two.... problem is that won't be for a while and by then I'll have forgotten a lot.
I think that for a work that large you really do need to work on making the story more satisfying at the points along the way too
Everyone knows how to do DES. The math is quite well understood. However, this doesn't make DES any less secure.
exactly - in fact suppose I want to hack into an ATM - if I'm bright I'll certainly look at the open source ATM code... and if it is indeed well designed and protected by lots of lovelly large primes that I don't know I'll probably look elsewhere. On the other hand Diebold's recent voting machine snafu's would probably have me looking long and hard at any ATM they make (or in my case be looking for a different bank to put my money in should my bank start using them)
yeah but they can't/don't evolve. instead their creater sees what mistakes they've made, makes a new verion and releases it. Being created to be adaptable to different circumstances is not the same as evolving.
Just wait untill someone genuinely codes some genetic algorithms into viruses - then we may really be in trouble....
Come on - the virus and worm analogy is a great one to make lots of points... but they aren't evolving under Darwinian survival of then fittest.... if anything it's more of a creationist sort of thing with rival gods throwing their latest creations into the world to battle it out with nature (ie the rest of us who provide the medium for them to live in) and each other
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Like Armadillo, Carmack's company the best thing about them is that they don't have one great idea that they are basing their company on (or bust), instead they are taking small steps to a large goal, sometimes failing but learning from that failure and moving on a little at a time. Of course it helps to have mob of volunteers around just itching to help :-)
White Island's not that far from shore - certainly within reach of any of the local sea-going pleasure boats - from memory people actually used to mine sulphur there in years gone by - but it's also somewhere that's particularly expected to let loose one day soon so it's not reccomended
err CNN is mainly a cable news show, while they may not have mentioned it on their web site they certainly did on the air (you should have simply switch channels from fox and checked for yourself ...)
well stripping paint from titanium might work (got and old Blackbird that needs painting?) ... but a wood surface? maybe you need more insurance .....
It's actually one of the more clearly written patents I've read in a long time (that may be their undoing :-) not a lot of claims and easy to read - but certainly there's prior art up the wazoo for PLLs and CPUs - besides using a PLL to do this doesn't pass the obvious test (how else would you do it?).
It was filed in 1993 - I'm sure there's prior art in the PC and Mac space (people were building Mac accelerators like this in the '80s)
think of it as the union 'maximizing shareholder value' .... it's just that its shareholders are its members
Sadly the US has a (recent) history of people abusing that power
err more like: Arkansas, Missouri, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan (from drilling down further in the same web site)
and California/Nevada too (the subsumed Pactell a while back)
Well think of the breakup of AT&T into the baby-bells as that scene where they freeze the liquid-metal terminator and shatter him into pieces ...... after a while they melt and all start flowing back together to recreate the whole .... that's what SBC (and to some extent Verizon) are ....
yes but not a lot - drag is, well, a real drag - proportional to something evil like the cube of your velocity (I forget exactly) - best trick is to go straight up a slowly as possible 'till you're past the worst of the air then once it starts to get thin kick the accelerator and start the arc over into orbit (yes no one pulls exact snappy 90 degree turns, I was just trying to draw a mental image of the problem you have to solve)
There a bunch of other amateur satellite projects - for a start check out:
http://cubesat.calpoly.edu/
http://ssdl.stanford.edu/
http://www.arliss.org/
so that it comes in slowish (not balistic) you don't want to be close to mach when you pop the chute - it'll shred. Also you want something to stabilize the descent so it's not spinning too much when the main chute comes out (to avoid tangling)
more importantly it also means you probably have some sort of guidance system (other than fins). It's pretty easy to go straight up - but to get into orbit you basicly have to go straight up (to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible) and then turn 90 degrees sideways and go fast enough that you fall back at the same rate the earth is falling away from you. That's hard - without air fins don't work - you need some sort of reaction control or thrust vectoring as well as some inertial system so you know where you are and where you are going
We do it 3-4 times a year have been for 15 years or so. We arrange ahead of time and then we call into ATC before we light up the waiver and again when we're done. We regularly get waivers to 100k ft ASL (20 miles up) well above the 30k ft commercial planes fly at. Though we seldom fly that high.
Getting a waiver above 100k ft is much much harder - the normal FAA ATC doesn't have juristiction above there - you have to apply to a different part of the govt. who worry about things like stuff landing on other countries etc etc
Want to come to a launch? - you're welcome - check out www.aeropac.org
I'm not arguing against copyright here - just pointing out that there is an anti-competitive form of monopoly that exists.
Perhaps one solution would be to free the music in a different sort of way - change the copyright laws so that copyright cannot be transfered from the original author - and then outlaw licensing schemes that are exclusionary - that would help the artists and protect the consumers and make the labels actually compete with each other day to day for customers.
If you ever get a chance listen to John Perry Barlow talk about bthe history of music copyright .... there was none for the longest time - wandering musicians played music, learned songs from each other and played them live. No one ever paid royalties ... it was only when the rise of the victorian middle class put pianos in people's houses that sheet music became under copyright, and after that recordings did the current way of looking at music as being owned come about .... untill just over 100 years ago music was free
I fly at Blackrock all the time - you have miles of downrange in all directions - but it's more common to deplot a drogue at apogee and something bigger at a few 1000 ft
he already has lots and lots of fans - the project you describe is already in progress .... in fact if the fans go away we might suffer a meltdown ... probably an LN2 bath would be going a bit over the top, perhaps the occasional case of beer sent his way would help though
While that's true for broadcast it's not uniformly true for CATV - though HRC and IRC are now mostly losing the battle - check out http://www.jneuhaus.com/fccindex/cablech.html for a list of freqs
Monday morning he came in a foul mood (usually he was a really great guy) - which kind of ruined it for us. Walking into his office with a pin was a lot of fun though :-)
I think that for a work that large you really do need to work on making the story more satisfying at the points along the way too
It just takes someone finding one of those guy's photos in a stock photo album somewhere ....
exactly - in fact suppose I want to hack into an ATM - if I'm bright I'll certainly look at the open source ATM code ... and if it is indeed well designed and protected by lots of lovelly large primes that I don't know I'll probably look elsewhere. On the other hand Diebold's recent voting machine snafu's would probably have me looking long and hard at any ATM they make (or in my case be looking for a different bank to put my money in should my bank start using them)
Just wait untill someone genuinely codes some genetic algorithms into viruses - then we may really be in trouble ....
Come on - the virus and worm analogy is a great one to make lots of points ... but they aren't evolving under Darwinian survival of then fittest .... if anything it's more of a creationist sort of thing with rival gods throwing their latest creations into the world to battle it out with nature (ie the rest of us who provide the medium for them to live in) and each other