The principles are simple. The design itself is quite tricky. But it's nothing a couple determined knowledgeable nuclear engineers can't design and simulate on a computer. If the machine can run Doom 3, it can run a blast simulation.
See the nth Country Experiment. In 1967 it took only 3 man-years. Today much more info is in public, and there are much more powerful computers available in civilian sector.
Getting the materials in sufficient quantity and purity is seriously difficult, though.
That's the problem with nukes and lawyers. Both are expensive, harmful when used, and flexing them is bad for PR, but if one has them, everybody else is forced to get them too.
"Improvements in toy-making technology and the changing requirements of Today's Santa made the ELF system no longer necessary,"
Considering most toys are labeled "Made in China", the "improvements in technology" are just a PR for outsourcing.
In other news, the leader of Elven Labor Unions is reported to be assassinated in a drive-by shooting, according to unconfirmed reports ordered by Santa, Inc. top management.
There is only so much oil you can store to run the backup generators....... Also remember that the data rate is very very slow.
Both limits are good enough when the only command to send is "Code 666", meaning "Open the sealed envelopes, cry Havoc, and let launch the ICBMs of war".
Is the collar computer obvious? If so, why has nobody thought of making one before?
Displays. Wearable displays with small weight, small size, and useful resolution are still AWFULLY expensive. The computer cores themselves were too (or too weak, or too battery hungry, or all of that), until quite recently.
Just think, all of you guys who came up with this idea years ago could have made a million dollars producing one of these.
Not everybody who comes up with a good idea has the resources to actually produce it. The crucial parts are still overly expensive. Given the limited availability of resources like money and time, it's pretty difficult to at the same time make enough money, acquire the necessary technological skills, and have skills to monetarize the results. (There is a lot of various devices out there anyway, without mainstream publicity, built for research or curiosity purposes as prototypes.)
Besides, all the good ideas (and a plethora of bad ones) are already described in SF novels.
When the protestors and the army are on the same side, things will change.
The first thing necessary for the soldiers to disobey their orders is to have doubts about them, and/or about those who issued them. This is something an access to unfiltered information (or at least clearly showing again and again that something is being filtered) can help with. This is something we the technicians, with the assistance of TCP/IP, can help with.
We can't supply tangible weapons. But we can supply the doubts.
When the flag goes into effect, they will likely have to stop shipping source code for drivers and obey the flag
There is also a chance it will be possible to download the drivers from an offshore location. (Which would be a good advantage against competing brands without such option.) If we are stuck with capitalism and have to cope with globalization, we can use their better aspects too instead of only bitching.
Sooner or later somebody writes the whole thing as a FPGA core and makes fat money on shipping "general purpose high-bandwidth data input cards with integrated signal processor". When open technology fights against corrupt laws, technology - at least if distributed enough and spread thin enough to not make a counterstrike too effective - tends to win.
His DV camera won't record (or output, I can't remember which) video from his VCR.
In Europe, the cheaper class of DV cams has disabled DV-in, because the Wise Public Servants decided that higher tax applies to VCRs than to cameras, and if it can record from external input, it is a VCR. (Bunch of filthy bastards. If somebody turns Brussels into a vat of molten glass, and drowns all the bureaucrats in it, I won't cry for them. Radioactive fallout from such flash-bang would be easier to cope with than the endless stream of "important" paperwork which that portal of Hell keeps spewing. But I digress.) Some models can be modified and unlocked, though, but the manufacturers do what they can to avoid it, as the tax applies even to the models that are possible to be DV-in enabled by software only (and they are way too happy to sell you standalone DV recorders, naturally properly overpriced).
Getting a friendly tourist to smuggle it through the customs for you is likely an option, though, but beware of PAL/NTSC issues. Australia and Far East is PAL region, USA and Japan are NTSC. It's possible to transcode between them by a computer, but it always brings in some artefacts.
It's bad when the weight of multiple engines and/or airbreathing parts exceeds the weight, cost, performance, or maintenence penalties of just using a rocket with oxidizer.
I wouldn't underestimate the weight of the oxidizer. Let's use a simple hydrogen-oxygen system, and count with hydrogen fuel for all three stages.
Oxygen is relatively heavy atom, its molar weight is 16 g/mol. Hydrogen atom is only 1 g/mol. To form one mol of water, we need two mols of hydrogen atoms, which is 2 grams, and 1 mol of oxygen, which is 16 grams. If we use oxygen from atmosphere, we have to carry only 11% of the mass of H2/O2 mixture.
The less weight we have, the less we have to lift and accelerate, the less fuel in turn we need, and the less fuel, the less weight to lift. So by saving on the weight of oxygen we are also saving also on the weight of hydrogen. The lower we are, the more dense the atmosphere is. The drag caused by atmosphere depends on the aerodynamic profile of the body (which in turn depends on the amount of fuel we need, as big tanks are bulky, so lower fuel consumption saves here too), the atmospheric density (which depends on altitude), and the speed of the body. By splitting the problem to stages, and using a slow subsonic airplane for the lowest part in the most dense atmosphere, we save on the energy otherwise wasted on drag. (By using a commercial airplane we also save on a lot of R&D and maintenance.) The second stage, a lightweight airframe without much fuel, is then optimized for high speeds in thin air, which brings further savings as we have to do less compromises here. The third stage, well, it's a classical rocket - nothing to gain here. Both first and second stages are easy to be made reusable, which brings further savings (we don't have to do many engineering miracles here, as we don't have to deal with reentry from the orbit and the resulting massive deceleration and overheating - the potentially problematic part, engineering-wise, is the scramjet on second stage).
Another advantage could be safety. In most situations, the abort is easier than shutting down a huge monstrosity full of liquid oxygen, with a solid booster on each side.
Disclaimer: I can be wrong. I am not a rocket scientist. And even they sometimes are wrong.
First, as somebody said already, the power of Rome lasted for some 600 years, of which you already spent about 200. Second, thanks to certain improvements in communication and transportation technologies, things - including rise and fall times of empires - tend to happen much faster.
Enjoy your hilltop. The fall of the New Rome can happen well within your lifetime.
The question is if you will be able to notice it. Americans by definition have freedom - it's just the definition of "freedom" that changes. Expect the return of McCarthy era blacklists in the form of no-fly (and derived) lists, the reincarnation of HUAC under different name, more taxpayer-paid military adventures around the world, castration of domestic IT industry by combined efforts of outsourcing and Microsoft-led patent wars (bound to happen as their empire is crumbling and they are going to have nothing to lose) and the resulting exodus of innovating companies to more friendly parts of the world, something similar for biotech industry. And further tightening of intellectual property laws leading to War on Infringement, which will take place of War on Drugs, perhaps including asset forfeiture and random searches, taking its toll on the nation's brightest people whose curiosity led them to clash with the DMCA and its successors (remember Wozniak used to make money on blue-boxes). And depletion of the "brain pool", as the visa policies make it unreasonably difficult for the students to attend US universities (which already leads to decrease in applications) and for the scientists to attend conferences - which will lead to moving of the conferences offshore and to growth of non-US universities.
But it will still be good, because US policies aren't bad by definition.
If somebody can defeat the USA, it's the USA. They are working hard on it.
The salestwit gave me his best cold glare and said "I can see that. Your name and address, please."
The hapless cashregisterman was most likely instructed by management to ask for the name/address, and reprimanded if he didn't have x% success rate (which, coupled with fatigue and a dead-end job, was the likely cause of the cold stare).
Just do the same people do online. Give him a nonexistent name, with a nonexistent street address.
This approach has several benefits. The cashier isn't harmed (no, if he could find another job, wouldn't he be there already?). You don't have to stress over the transaction. The corporation has a bogus entry in their database (also known as database poisoning), and is punished a little bit by having to waste money on an undeliverable leaflet. (As a further benefit, you can use the address of your advertiser-friendly politician.)
Re:Own a computer, own a car
on
Security Alert
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· Score: 1
Were it so, we would have already had one computer crashing every other computer on every other net in the world. We have not, not can it happen.
W32/LovSan, also known as Blaster.
(To be accurate, it didn't crash "every other computer", but "only" a significant percentage of them. But it's nothing a zero-day remote exploit in the IP stack, once it appears, couldn't do.)
In short, saying that scramjets are the way to cheaper access to space is a big fat lie and just an excuse for robbing the taxpayers.
Not necessarily. (Even if it leads "only" to hypersonic transport aircrafts, it's good.)
A big enemy of the space flight is the atmosphere. But it can also be a friend, when used properly. Why avoid multiple-stage system?
Every day, thousands heavy airplanes take off all over the world and climb to 30,000 feet of cruising altitude. This part of the flight is well-understood and commercialized. Atmospherical oxygen means the airplanes don't have to carry oxidizer, the atmosphere itself supplies not only drag (which is bad) but also lift (which is good), so we don't need to lift everything by jets, which is not really effective.
Once up in 30,000 ft, we can use a second stage - a smaller airplane, with smaller fuel tanks, sitting on the back of eg. an Airbus (I don't like Boeing, but you can use one too, if you have it). This plane can use scramjet engines, and maybe small JATO-style solid-fuel rocket boosters to give it a kick to take off the back of the carrier airplane and reach the scramjet-friendly speed (the Airbus then goes back to its airport and lands, as common for airplanes). This is the stage where X-43 comes to play. The scramjet is used to get the second-stage airplane as high and fast as possible. We still use atmospheric oxygen here, saving on the mass of the oxidizer, and we still exploit the atmosphere to supply the lift to our wings.
Once we get too high for a scramjet, the atmosphere is too thin for both the wings and the scramjet (which is now a disadvantage for stage 2, but advantage for stage 3, which has much less drag to cope with). We jettison the second-stage (which then returns on parachute or by computer-controlled glide), and continue on a conventional rocket engine. (We face the change of density of the atmosphere with rising altitude, which is a challenge for the scramjet design - but maybe the designs where a shock wave acts as part of the engine could provide the necessary geometry changes.)
We then return back in one of the ways available. I suppose the cheapest is the Soyuz-style approach, a reentry capsule with ablative shield and parachutes. That way we sacrifice part of the third-stage craft, but it can still be cheap enough to satisfy our purposes.
What's bad on using different engines for different flight stages?
but when you can effectively completely fuck a businesses telephony over anonymously and with little trouble, you'll end up seeing legislation.
Legislation botched, prone to abuse by lawyers, and gutted by amendments sponsored by Association of Direct Marketers. At least that's my bet.
I'd love to see a bayesian filter for voice data.
It's more effective than relying on legislation. My personal bet is on blocklists of known-spamming IDs or IPs, and letters-in-a-picture checks (or hashcash-based limiters) for new ID registrations.
Give me a SPITassassin over a law any day. Even the worst programmers are more competent than the best politicians.
I started with a 14k4 modem card and Windows 3.11, or DOS and NCSA Telnet. It was FAR better than nothing.
Even the 2400 bps modem I used to use in the Age of BBS was better than nothing. I am too young to remember those cute acoustically coupled 300 bps terminals, but I suppose they were better than no access too.
Not any more than I can imagine the work of a single teenage miscreant causing half the cars in the country to stall on the highway.
Wouldn't that be called a buggy-ride?
Seriously, the quality of engineering in car industry is much higher than in software industry, so chance of something like that is quite low. At least until the cars get wirelessly networked onboard control computers...
Considering the fact that until recently the majority of packets on the internet either originated or terminated in California, I sincerly invite you to try routing around CA.
Encrypt the data. Doesn't help in all settings, but often greatly alleviates the situation. Even a simple unauthenticated SSL can protect against passive prying eyes of the Echelon class.
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It's the saltpeter component. Charcoal and sulphur are only the fuels; saltpeter supplies oxygen for them.
See the nth Country Experiment. In 1967 it took only 3 man-years. Today much more info is in public, and there are much more powerful computers available in civilian sector.
Getting the materials in sufficient quantity and purity is seriously difficult, though.
The other road is to make sure to not limit one's caffeine intake enough to notice any withdrawal syndroms.
Return home on full steam, and kick the posterior of the one who tripped the breakers?
That's the problem with nukes and lawyers. Both are expensive, harmful when used, and flexing them is bad for PR, but if one has them, everybody else is forced to get them too.
They aren't much better than that. The pointers' coherency sucks.
Considering most toys are labeled "Made in China", the "improvements in technology" are just a PR for outsourcing.
In other news, the leader of Elven Labor Unions is reported to be assassinated in a drive-by shooting, according to unconfirmed reports ordered by Santa, Inc. top management.
Both limits are good enough when the only command to send is "Code 666", meaning "Open the sealed envelopes, cry Havoc, and let launch the ICBMs of war".
Displays. Wearable displays with small weight, small size, and useful resolution are still AWFULLY expensive. The computer cores themselves were too (or too weak, or too battery hungry, or all of that), until quite recently.
Just think, all of you guys who came up with this idea years ago could have made a million dollars producing one of these.
Not everybody who comes up with a good idea has the resources to actually produce it. The crucial parts are still overly expensive. Given the limited availability of resources like money and time, it's pretty difficult to at the same time make enough money, acquire the necessary technological skills, and have skills to monetarize the results. (There is a lot of various devices out there anyway, without mainstream publicity, built for research or curiosity purposes as prototypes.)
Besides, all the good ideas (and a plethora of bad ones) are already described in SF novels.
The first thing necessary for the soldiers to disobey their orders is to have doubts about them, and/or about those who issued them. This is something an access to unfiltered information (or at least clearly showing again and again that something is being filtered) can help with. This is something we the technicians, with the assistance of TCP/IP, can help with.
We can't supply tangible weapons. But we can supply the doubts.
There is also a chance it will be possible to download the drivers from an offshore location. (Which would be a good advantage against competing brands without such option.) If we are stuck with capitalism and have to cope with globalization, we can use their better aspects too instead of only bitching.
Sooner or later somebody writes the whole thing as a FPGA core and makes fat money on shipping "general purpose high-bandwidth data input cards with integrated signal processor". When open technology fights against corrupt laws, technology - at least if distributed enough and spread thin enough to not make a counterstrike too effective - tends to win.
In Europe, the cheaper class of DV cams has disabled DV-in, because the Wise Public Servants decided that higher tax applies to VCRs than to cameras, and if it can record from external input, it is a VCR. (Bunch of filthy bastards. If somebody turns Brussels into a vat of molten glass, and drowns all the bureaucrats in it, I won't cry for them. Radioactive fallout from such flash-bang would be easier to cope with than the endless stream of "important" paperwork which that portal of Hell keeps spewing. But I digress.) Some models can be modified and unlocked, though, but the manufacturers do what they can to avoid it, as the tax applies even to the models that are possible to be DV-in enabled by software only (and they are way too happy to sell you standalone DV recorders, naturally properly overpriced).
Getting a friendly tourist to smuggle it through the customs for you is likely an option, though, but beware of PAL/NTSC issues. Australia and Far East is PAL region, USA and Japan are NTSC. It's possible to transcode between them by a computer, but it always brings in some artefacts.
I wouldn't underestimate the weight of the oxidizer. Let's use a simple hydrogen-oxygen system, and count with hydrogen fuel for all three stages.
Oxygen is relatively heavy atom, its molar weight is 16 g/mol. Hydrogen atom is only 1 g/mol. To form one mol of water, we need two mols of hydrogen atoms, which is 2 grams, and 1 mol of oxygen, which is 16 grams. If we use oxygen from atmosphere, we have to carry only 11% of the mass of H2/O2 mixture.
The less weight we have, the less we have to lift and accelerate, the less fuel in turn we need, and the less fuel, the less weight to lift. So by saving on the weight of oxygen we are also saving also on the weight of hydrogen. The lower we are, the more dense the atmosphere is. The drag caused by atmosphere depends on the aerodynamic profile of the body (which in turn depends on the amount of fuel we need, as big tanks are bulky, so lower fuel consumption saves here too), the atmospheric density (which depends on altitude), and the speed of the body. By splitting the problem to stages, and using a slow subsonic airplane for the lowest part in the most dense atmosphere, we save on the energy otherwise wasted on drag. (By using a commercial airplane we also save on a lot of R&D and maintenance.) The second stage, a lightweight airframe without much fuel, is then optimized for high speeds in thin air, which brings further savings as we have to do less compromises here. The third stage, well, it's a classical rocket - nothing to gain here. Both first and second stages are easy to be made reusable, which brings further savings (we don't have to do many engineering miracles here, as we don't have to deal with reentry from the orbit and the resulting massive deceleration and overheating - the potentially problematic part, engineering-wise, is the scramjet on second stage).
Another advantage could be safety. In most situations, the abort is easier than shutting down a huge monstrosity full of liquid oxygen, with a solid booster on each side.
Disclaimer: I can be wrong. I am not a rocket scientist. And even they sometimes are wrong.
First, as somebody said already, the power of Rome lasted for some 600 years, of which you already spent about 200. Second, thanks to certain improvements in communication and transportation technologies, things - including rise and fall times of empires - tend to happen much faster.
Enjoy your hilltop. The fall of the New Rome can happen well within your lifetime.
The question is if you will be able to notice it. Americans by definition have freedom - it's just the definition of "freedom" that changes. Expect the return of McCarthy era blacklists in the form of no-fly (and derived) lists, the reincarnation of HUAC under different name, more taxpayer-paid military adventures around the world, castration of domestic IT industry by combined efforts of outsourcing and Microsoft-led patent wars (bound to happen as their empire is crumbling and they are going to have nothing to lose) and the resulting exodus of innovating companies to more friendly parts of the world, something similar for biotech industry. And further tightening of intellectual property laws leading to War on Infringement, which will take place of War on Drugs, perhaps including asset forfeiture and random searches, taking its toll on the nation's brightest people whose curiosity led them to clash with the DMCA and its successors (remember Wozniak used to make money on blue-boxes). And depletion of the "brain pool", as the visa policies make it unreasonably difficult for the students to attend US universities (which already leads to decrease in applications) and for the scientists to attend conferences - which will lead to moving of the conferences offshore and to growth of non-US universities.
But it will still be good, because US policies aren't bad by definition.
If somebody can defeat the USA, it's the USA. They are working hard on it.
See here.
According to this source, the maintenance-free life of the bearing is about 1300 years. Impressive!
Do they actually enforce it anymore?
The hapless cashregisterman was most likely instructed by management to ask for the name/address, and reprimanded if he didn't have x% success rate (which, coupled with fatigue and a dead-end job, was the likely cause of the cold stare).
Just do the same people do online. Give him a nonexistent name, with a nonexistent street address.
This approach has several benefits. The cashier isn't harmed (no, if he could find another job, wouldn't he be there already?). You don't have to stress over the transaction. The corporation has a bogus entry in their database (also known as database poisoning), and is punished a little bit by having to waste money on an undeliverable leaflet. (As a further benefit, you can use the address of your advertiser-friendly politician.)
W32/LovSan, also known as Blaster.
(To be accurate, it didn't crash "every other computer", but "only" a significant percentage of them. But it's nothing a zero-day remote exploit in the IP stack, once it appears, couldn't do.)
Not necessarily. (Even if it leads "only" to hypersonic transport aircrafts, it's good.)
A big enemy of the space flight is the atmosphere. But it can also be a friend, when used properly. Why avoid multiple-stage system?
Every day, thousands heavy airplanes take off all over the world and climb to 30,000 feet of cruising altitude. This part of the flight is well-understood and commercialized. Atmospherical oxygen means the airplanes don't have to carry oxidizer, the atmosphere itself supplies not only drag (which is bad) but also lift (which is good), so we don't need to lift everything by jets, which is not really effective.
Once up in 30,000 ft, we can use a second stage - a smaller airplane, with smaller fuel tanks, sitting on the back of eg. an Airbus (I don't like Boeing, but you can use one too, if you have it). This plane can use scramjet engines, and maybe small JATO-style solid-fuel rocket boosters to give it a kick to take off the back of the carrier airplane and reach the scramjet-friendly speed (the Airbus then goes back to its airport and lands, as common for airplanes). This is the stage where X-43 comes to play. The scramjet is used to get the second-stage airplane as high and fast as possible. We still use atmospheric oxygen here, saving on the mass of the oxidizer, and we still exploit the atmosphere to supply the lift to our wings.
Once we get too high for a scramjet, the atmosphere is too thin for both the wings and the scramjet (which is now a disadvantage for stage 2, but advantage for stage 3, which has much less drag to cope with). We jettison the second-stage (which then returns on parachute or by computer-controlled glide), and continue on a conventional rocket engine. (We face the change of density of the atmosphere with rising altitude, which is a challenge for the scramjet design - but maybe the designs where a shock wave acts as part of the engine could provide the necessary geometry changes.)
We then return back in one of the ways available. I suppose the cheapest is the Soyuz-style approach, a reentry capsule with ablative shield and parachutes. That way we sacrifice part of the third-stage craft, but it can still be cheap enough to satisfy our purposes.
What's bad on using different engines for different flight stages?
1) Win the X-Prize.
2) Find investors.
3) Add braking rockets to the system.
4) Profit?
Legislation botched, prone to abuse by lawyers, and gutted by amendments sponsored by Association of Direct Marketers. At least that's my bet.
I'd love to see a bayesian filter for voice data.
It's more effective than relying on legislation. My personal bet is on blocklists of known-spamming IDs or IPs, and letters-in-a-picture checks (or hashcash-based limiters) for new ID registrations.
Give me a SPITassassin over a law any day. Even the worst programmers are more competent than the best politicians.
I started with a 14k4 modem card and Windows 3.11, or DOS and NCSA Telnet. It was FAR better than nothing.
Even the 2400 bps modem I used to use in the Age of BBS was better than nothing. I am too young to remember those cute acoustically coupled 300 bps terminals, but I suppose they were better than no access too.
Even today I'd pick 300 bps over nothing.
When you're good enough, it doesn't matter how you started.
Wouldn't that be called a buggy-ride?
Seriously, the quality of engineering in car industry is much higher than in software industry, so chance of something like that is quite low. At least until the cars get wirelessly networked onboard control computers...
Encrypt the data. Doesn't help in all settings, but often greatly alleviates the situation. Even a simple unauthenticated SSL can protect against passive prying eyes of the Echelon class.