What has Schwarzenegger done to solve this problem? Anything? Why not? Seems like a wonderful opportunity to actually do something useful. Nope, instead he chasing down nurses and calling them names.
You are so ignorant it's funny. How people on the left can think they're "reality-based" without actually knowing anything has always amazed me. The governor in California is a virtual figurehead - except during emergencies (like the LA riots) his actual power is almost nil. There's a reason Ahnuld can't do anything unless he can convince the voters to enact his policies via the initiative process. I'm a Republican, and I realise (the aptly named) Gray Davis couldn't do anthing about the power problem until it was an emergency.
Sure, Pete Wilson (a RINO like Ahnuld, but that's another story) was governor when the power regulations were changed. So what? What input did he have to the whole thing? His only input was the veto. The reality is Democrats have controlled the California legislature since God was a kid, so it's completely reasonable to lay this kind of crap at their doorstep. For example, there's no reason for our state to be broke, but because the Democrats spend like drunken sailors when times are good, and raise taxes when times are bad we have both high taxes and no money. Thanks, guys!
Grow the fuck up and stop whining. We're sick of it already.
Who do you mean by "we"? Moonbats on slashdot? Believe me, you get all the consideration you're due. You must be a student or a failure. Anybody who's happy about how this state's been driven into the ground by the most corrupt legislature in memory just isn't paying taxes. You people have fucked up a state that used to be a really nice place to live. Thanks again.
You sound like a Republican... can't tell the difference between his head and his ass.
You sound pretty ignorant. You sound like a "progressive", too. But I repeat myself.
The reality is California handed out-of-state power companies the keys to our pocketbooks (I am a resident of the Peoples Republic of Califonia). Power "deregulation" was in no way, shape, or form actual deregulation. It was a scheme where regulations that had been working were replaced by a new set of regulations guarenteed to be a train wreck in a few years.
The stupidity of the scheme was two-fold. On the one hand, we've got the toughest environmental regulations on the planet. It takes more than a decade to site a power plant, even a relatively clean natural gas plant. The law is written such that anybody in the general area can tie you up in court until the project has no hope of ever making money. But we still need power, so the upshot was a dependence on power companies in other states to actually supply the power.
The dumbest thing they did was forbid power retailers from buying anything on a long-term contract. That means any interruption in the supply - a war in the gulf, a refinery fire, power plant maintennence, anything - gets bourne by the end-user. The spot market has always been volatile, and people who understand how these things work knew this would be a problem.
And yes, the power producers took advantage of the situation. But it wasn't just Enron. One of the biggest gougers was the fucking City of fucking Los Angeles, which sold its excess municipal power to the rest of us at a huge premium. But I don't really blame them, because the state did the equivalent of park a brand new Mercedes in a bad neighborhood with the keys in the ignition.
You really would have to be a Democrat to come up with California's phoney "deregulation" scam, and they were. I sometimes wonder if it was all a ploy to make sure people would never support actual deregulation, something that would work. In fact, it has worked quite well in other parts of the world (Great Britain, for instance). But it's probably just ignorance and corruption, both of which the Democrats in California have honed to a fine art.
OK, the blurb on the Kelo decision is just wrong. First of all, an executive order isn't a law; it can be changed by the next president on a whim. Executive orders are simply the president's directions to his employees in the executive branch regarding some aspect of how business is conducted. It doesn't have the force of law, it's just something a civil servant could (in theory) get fired for disobeying.
Secondly, Bush's order only applies to federal use of emminent domain, which doesn't occur nearly as often as city and county use of said power. In fact, almost never.
In the specific case of Kelo, the "taking" was done by the city of New London, so the executive order doesn't apply.
Really, the order is just political posturing, nothing more. What the court held in Kelo was this is a matter the constitution leaves to the states, and there's no reason for the federal judiciary to get involved. If the federal government actually did transfer ownership of land from one private party to another, the federal courts would have jurisdiction and might very well rule it unconstitutional.
This is simply false. For the most part, military satellites are polar orbit birds. The shuttle hasn't flown a military mission in a decade, but even then they were probably just adding to the DOD's communications bandwidth. To my knownledge the shuttle has never made a polar orbit.
To launch a spysat, you need a rocket attached to your payload so it gets to the proper orbit. This turns the shuttle into a 52 billion dollar (well, 1980 dollars) first stage. Marvelous.
The black stuff has gone up on Delta and Titan, for the most part, from Vandenburg.
The real reason the shuttle is still going, as others have pointed out, is it employs 20,000 people in key congressional districts.
Having worked for the government, I can assure you with virtually 100% certainty it's too early for prop 71 money to have done anything but buy office furniture. Check back in about five years.
Yeah, that's kind of my reaction. Do you remember the show Space 1999 from the '70s? Seven years ago we were supposed to have a permanent base on the moon, little laser gun thingies, and spacecraft that could make a round trip from the moon to a planet without refueling.
I don't think someone from the '70s would be impressed at all - I think he'd be pretty damn dissappointed.
Lol, Daniel. I agree with you 100%. Of course we could all live longer if lived like strict Mormons, but there's more to life than prolonging it. I say live as fully as you can, and there's nothing wrong with turning to medical science when you have a problem.
...after I had a friend fired in New York for mentioning the existence of evolution in a class.
I don't believe you. Do you have some kind of link or documentation to support that assertion? You can barely fire a teacher for committing a felony - there's no way the mere mention of evolution could get you fired in one of the bluest states in America. Bullshit. Your friend certainly left part of the story out, like how he slept with one of his students, or something like that.
In any event, cirriculum selection is a state and local matter - it really has nothing to do with the feds. The Department of Education mostly gives out grants to teachers colleges, to the extent it does anything at all. Thank you Jimmy Carter.
I read lots of this kind of garbage on slashdot, but before you scream "theocracy", remember the school system has been in a forty year slide, and it actually was illegal to teach evolution in most states when the US had unchallenged scientific preeminence.
By the way, if you're interested in learning critical thinking, you couldn't do better than a traditionl Jesuit university.
I have no interest in living in a "true welfare state". I'm not impressed with the European version, and I don't see why an American version would be any better. Just give me a portion of my taxes back, thank you, when the Iraq occupation ends.
Two reasons. First, because it's easy to blow up an unprotected target. The IRA did it, ETA did it, the Palestinians do it regularly in the world's most security-conscious country. If Al Qeda had any desire to do it in the US you would have read about it in the paper.
Secondly, it has been stated explicitly by Bin Laden and others, and we intercept message traffic from time to time indicating it's true. Setting off bombs in shopping malls would be an admission of weakness, an admission our efforts have degraded their capability, since it's going from a big attack to a small one. What they want is something that will top 9/11. Even better would be delivering a crippling blow. They're pretty up front about it, if you read what they say.
I don't see why you think the idea a state would supply a terrorist with a nuke is so farfetched. Exactly what would be a reasonable response to a nuclear attack nobody will take credit for? And what forensic evidence would you use to determine where it came from?
When it happens, we'll most likely be powerless to respond because we won't know who did it. We can't nuke the entire rest of the world because somebody blew up Washinton, and they know it. In my mind that makes it more likely. There are plenty of states that see American power as an impediment to their ambitions.
It's not ridiculous just because it hasn't happened yet. It will happen eventually, it's just a matter of time. I just hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime.
I've got a better chance of being hit by lightning that being killed by the (boogeyman) Terrorists.
You don't know that. You can't know that. The minute AQ gets ahold of a nuke the odds will shift quite dramatically against you. And when a couple cities dissappear beneath a mushroom cloud you'll be the first one to say the government didn't do enough.
It really irritates me when idiots like you call terrorists "boogeyman". These people are not like you and me. They're dangerous, and they do their best to become more dangerous. The fact that we haven't been hit since 9/11 doesn't mean they don't exist, it means they're not interested in setting off bombs in shopping malls and sports stadiums, killing mere hundreds.
Terrorists are a lame red herring. There's always been terrorists, there always will be unhappy people in this world.
Yes, there have always been terrorists. But the technology that allows regular people to make biological weapons, or small states to make nukes is new within the last couple decades.
The idea these are "unhappy people" is laughably ignorant. They're not "unhappy people", they're religious fanatics. They think the act of slaughtering American civilians will get them into heaven. And they're supported, with money and training, by states in the Middle East.
Your logic applies if the record company pays every artist the same amount of money per song. I would think you'd have to pay more for an esablished, successful star than some band you're taking a chance on. This is surely reflected in the price of the CD.
I've always thought the price-fixing argument has some merit, though, since the artist is always in a contract that excludes other lables. I can imagine a market where the artist makes a track and labels bid for the right to sell copies in lots of 100,000, say. Distribution would be substantailly less profitable, and the people who create and add value to the music would be paid more in line with profitability.
One disadvantage of using diffraction gratings is that the amount of bending is wavelength dependent.
One man's disadvantage is another man's cooling system. Since the solar cells are also wavelength dependent, the goal is to collect all the usefull light and let the rest (mostly) pass harmlessly through the glass plate. Very clever.
I wonder about this. You know how lots of people have those fan controllers, you know, the ones that slow your system fans when the full CFM rate isn't needed? If you could hack into one of those controllers you could cause the CPU to overheat by turning off the fans.
Come to think of it, I had an old HP that integrated a fan controller on the motherboard. It might have been hardware-only, though.
Seems like a lot of hacking for a small payoff, but I think the path is there for some systems.
Almost 20 years ago I did some asynchronous stuff as a discrete-logic board designer. It was pretty seductive - we could save lots of power and use slower, cheaper parts without sacrificing the overall board speed.
It didn't really work out. While we could easily get prototypes to work well over rated temperature ranges, getting the production version to work reliably was an order of magnitude more effort than the clocked version. As the complexity of the logic increases, the number of potential race conditions increases exponentially. So every nth board had to be scrapped in the early production runs.
It turns out, for TTL and its successors the same manufacturer can produce two copies of the same part that are an order of magnitude different in speed. We would get situations where a signal would propagate through five gates faster than a single gate on another path, so if you missed a path during the design phase you were sure to see a failure eventually. Also, there were no commercial async design tools available at the time, so simulation was definitely "roll-your-own".
Another problem we didn't even consider early on was the inability of the repair technicians to understand the curcuit, so getting a board repaired required the assistance of an engineer.
We would have been fine for onesey-twosey production, but for large commercial runs? The benefits just didn't outweigh the extra hassle.
I'm curious to see if they have any more trouble than normal (for a CPU) when they ramp up to production volumes.
No, that certainly wasn't a joke, but you're reading a lot more into what I wrote than you should. I certainly don't think people are "required" to love their country. And it seems reasonable if you feel you must oppose your country to do so within the bounds of the law.
My point was the first ammendment isn't a blanket protection for all speech. There is such a thing as illegal speech in the US. Incitement to overthrow the government by non-democratic means is illegal, for instance. It's also illegal to incite people to take up arms against the US military if you're a citizen or resident.
Beyond that, there are lawful activities that demand a little extra scrutiny from the government. If you're a citizen of the US, for instance, and you run an anti-US website, as opposed to a website critical of this or that policy, the US government has a duty to take a closer look at your activities. That's not a violation of your civil rights, it's just the FBI doing its job.
I don't care if liberals hate OReilly or Limbaugh. For one thing OReilly isn't a conservative at all, he's a populist, and I can't stand him either. Limbaugh is an entertainer who provides the same service for conservatives the NY Times editorial page provides for leftists, i.e. he tells them what they want to hear.
You make the assumption the grandparent poorly worded. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. We'll have to wait for the original poster to clarify. Sometimes people actually mean what they say.
You may have missed the second half of snippet you quoted from my post. I didn't say those people should be (necessarily)arrested. What I was saying was the government needs to look into what they're doing.
Also, the first ammendment isn't absolute. It doesn't protect shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater and it doesn't protect advocating the overthrow of the US government. The fact that the sedition act of 1918 was repealed doesn't make sedition legal, it just voids the provisions of that act.
The fact nobody has been charged with sedition in a few years is more a function of politics than anything else. But it's still a crime.
I'm curious about the source of the Brennan quote. What case did that pertain to?
383 Million dollars over three years is pocket change for a mandate that large. I'd be surprised if it was enough to get every government computer up to the latest security patch level, let alone enough to engage in any "operations".
Incidentally, having this kind of capability isn't a bad idea, even if you never use it. You have to have some level of expertise to know what's possible.
That's an interesting choice of words. Not "a website critical of US policy" or an "anti-Bush website". An "anti-us" website.
This is why conservatives don't trust American liberals (leftists). We have always suspected the "I love my country but hate its policies" line was really just a public face for "My country isn't perfect so I'm willing to work against the interests of my fellow citizens".
If someone creates an "anti-us" site, not just a site critical of US policies, or Bush administration policies, they should get scrutiny from the US government. Sedition is not a civil liberty. I'm not saying the site owner should be necessarily arrested or the site shut down, but the same people who are crying over lost civil liberties now will be whining "why weren't you tracking these people?" when the next attack occurs.
AIP is still in its infancy as a deployed technology, but according to Wikipedia there are a couple of classes that employ it. In addition to the countries mentioned in the article, China is rumored to be building AIP subs, although the Chinese have been, until very recently, unable to produce subs that work reliably. We'll see what the next generation looks like.
I question the article's 15 day figure. Other sources I've read say no more than 5 days underwater at a stretch, with a couple weeks total range. Current designs have LOX tanks for both breathable air and also as an oxydizer for the power plant.
Russians, for one, have missiles that fly just above water and only go up when they're close and it's time to attack. They're impossible to intercept because radars can't see them due to reflections from water. Launch a few of these and this $4B toy will sink like a fucking rock. US, no doubt, has similar tech
Couple points:
Every country which wants these kinds of missiles either buys them or builds them. France and China will sell anti-ship missiles to anyone, as they don't have enough orders domestically to maintain the technology.
Airborn doppler radar picks anti-ship missiles out from the surface with ease, since the water is effectively stationary next to a very fast moving missile.
Anti-ship missiles can be targetted with said radar or by the enormous heat signature of anything ploughing through thick, sea-level air at 2000 ft/sec.
Anti-ship missiles can be detected and targeted when they switch on target aquisition radars.
As others have noted, anti-ship missiles don't appear out of the ether. It's not at all easy to get into firing range of a properly escorted carrier.
Russians also have supercavitation torpedoes which no one can intercept because of their speed.
Super-cav torpedoes are also mostly useless without nuclear warheads, since the noise they generate blinds the torpedo's own sensors. The original Russian model, the skval, had a nuclear-only role - it was designed to be fired into the center of an American battle group and detonated. They had no capability of actually hitting a ship.
The most advanced versions of the skval can be programmed to drop out of super-cav mode and go into target acuisition mode at more typical torpedo speeds when it reaches the general vicinity of the target. But slowing down and turning on active sonar makes it a target for other torpedos and hedgehog-like systems.
This is not even taking submarines into account. A sub can stay close to the sea floor with motors turned off. Once this thing goes above it, it will just launch half a dozen torpedoes and move on.
If it survives long enough. A sub can be detected by a myriad of systems contained in a carrier battle group. Helicopter dropped sono-bouys, MAD systems, active "sled" systems. The list is endless, but I shouldn't leave out the attack sub captain's worst nightmare: the sub (or two) that's escorting the carrier.
Also, in order to set up an ambush like that you have to know exactly where the carrier is going. You might be able to guess in general where the carrier is going, but exact times and routes are a closely guarded secret. Torpedos are relatively short range weapons - if you just pick a spot and wait you're unlikely to last until a target presents itself. A nuclear sub can stay submerged for months, but can be detected by reactor pump noise. A diesel can only spend a couple days submerged before it runs out of air.
In any event, the moment the sub attacks (successfully or not) it will be destroyed by helicopters, and an attack sub is a pretty expensive toy in its own right. You can't afford to lose half a dozen attack subs at $2Bn a pop sinking a $4Bn carrier.
If your point is an un-escorted carrier can be sunk pretty easily, I will certainly concede it. The un-escorted Argentinian 25th of May (oddly enough, originally commissioned as the British carrier Venerable) came within seconds of being sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands war. The carrier crew was completely unaware.
But first-world carriers are never deployed without escorts. The carrier is the innermost layer of a very large, juicy onion, and there isn't any non-nuclear system that can just waltz in and destroy it. I will eat my hat if Britain or France is even considering deploying that kind of asset without at least a half-dozen destroyers or cruisers. Britain, in particular, has extremely deadly destroyers.
Re:Seeing is believing. NASA == cancelled projects
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'll believe this when I see it. More and more I think that under this administration NASA is a PR flack that cancels anything practical, but spins dazzling visions of the future (as long as there isn't any budget requirement).
You must be young. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. NASA has done the groundwork for at least seven or eight systems since it became clear the shuttle would never live up to its billing in the early 1980s. They never happen because the shuttle employs 20,000 people, and while the next program, whatever it is, may employ the same number of people, they won't be the same people in the same congressional districts.
Look at CEV. Instead of using cheaper, lower performance (but certainly adequate) boosters, the current plan is to use SSME. Why? So all the current shuttle workers can work on the next project, and the same contractors can stay on the gravy train working under the same NASA project managers. Without that CEV would never happen either.
NASA has become an agency all about self-preservation. It doesn't matter who's in Congress or the White House, the first priority of any established bureaucracy is to grow. Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle calls it "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: Those whose interests are in furthering the organization rather than its goals always get in charge of any bureaucracy."
NASA has done some good work in the past, and until very recently NASA made progress with robotics and even scramjets. But the manned space program is the one that's easiest to sell to the public, so it's become "the monster that ate the budget". Over the next few years manned spaceflight will become the only thing NASA does.
Unfortunately, real progress will have to happen under the USAF as black projects the bureaucrats at NASA don't know about, and thus can't kill.
Slashdot Mirror
You are so ignorant it's funny. How people on the left can think they're "reality-based" without actually knowing anything has always amazed me. The governor in California is a virtual figurehead - except during emergencies (like the LA riots) his actual power is almost nil. There's a reason Ahnuld can't do anything unless he can convince the voters to enact his policies via the initiative process. I'm a Republican, and I realise (the aptly named) Gray Davis couldn't do anthing about the power problem until it was an emergency.
Sure, Pete Wilson (a RINO like Ahnuld, but that's another story) was governor when the power regulations were changed. So what? What input did he have to the whole thing? His only input was the veto. The reality is Democrats have controlled the California legislature since God was a kid, so it's completely reasonable to lay this kind of crap at their doorstep. For example, there's no reason for our state to be broke, but because the Democrats spend like drunken sailors when times are good, and raise taxes when times are bad we have both high taxes and no money. Thanks, guys!
Grow the fuck up and stop whining. We're sick of it already.
Who do you mean by "we"? Moonbats on slashdot? Believe me, you get all the consideration you're due. You must be a student or a failure. Anybody who's happy about how this state's been driven into the ground by the most corrupt legislature in memory just isn't paying taxes. You people have fucked up a state that used to be a really nice place to live. Thanks again.
You sound pretty ignorant. You sound like a "progressive", too. But I repeat myself.
The reality is California handed out-of-state power companies the keys to our pocketbooks (I am a resident of the Peoples Republic of Califonia). Power "deregulation" was in no way, shape, or form actual deregulation. It was a scheme where regulations that had been working were replaced by a new set of regulations guarenteed to be a train wreck in a few years.
The stupidity of the scheme was two-fold. On the one hand, we've got the toughest environmental regulations on the planet. It takes more than a decade to site a power plant, even a relatively clean natural gas plant. The law is written such that anybody in the general area can tie you up in court until the project has no hope of ever making money. But we still need power, so the upshot was a dependence on power companies in other states to actually supply the power.
The dumbest thing they did was forbid power retailers from buying anything on a long-term contract. That means any interruption in the supply - a war in the gulf, a refinery fire, power plant maintennence, anything - gets bourne by the end-user. The spot market has always been volatile, and people who understand how these things work knew this would be a problem.
And yes, the power producers took advantage of the situation. But it wasn't just Enron. One of the biggest gougers was the fucking City of fucking Los Angeles, which sold its excess municipal power to the rest of us at a huge premium. But I don't really blame them, because the state did the equivalent of park a brand new Mercedes in a bad neighborhood with the keys in the ignition.
You really would have to be a Democrat to come up with California's phoney "deregulation" scam, and they were. I sometimes wonder if it was all a ploy to make sure people would never support actual deregulation, something that would work. In fact, it has worked quite well in other parts of the world (Great Britain, for instance). But it's probably just ignorance and corruption, both of which the Democrats in California have honed to a fine art.
Secondly, Bush's order only applies to federal use of emminent domain, which doesn't occur nearly as often as city and county use of said power. In fact, almost never. In the specific case of Kelo, the "taking" was done by the city of New London, so the executive order doesn't apply.
Really, the order is just political posturing, nothing more. What the court held in Kelo was this is a matter the constitution leaves to the states, and there's no reason for the federal judiciary to get involved. If the federal government actually did transfer ownership of land from one private party to another, the federal courts would have jurisdiction and might very well rule it unconstitutional.
To launch a spysat, you need a rocket attached to your payload so it gets to the proper orbit. This turns the shuttle into a 52 billion dollar (well, 1980 dollars) first stage. Marvelous.
The black stuff has gone up on Delta and Titan, for the most part, from Vandenburg.
The real reason the shuttle is still going, as others have pointed out, is it employs 20,000 people in key congressional districts.
Having worked for the government, I can assure you with virtually 100% certainty it's too early for prop 71 money to have done anything but buy office furniture. Check back in about five years.
I don't think someone from the '70s would be impressed at all - I think he'd be pretty damn dissappointed.
Lol, Daniel. I agree with you 100%. Of course we could all live longer if lived like strict Mormons, but there's more to life than prolonging it. I say live as fully as you can, and there's nothing wrong with turning to medical science when you have a problem.
I don't believe you. Do you have some kind of link or documentation to support that assertion? You can barely fire a teacher for committing a felony - there's no way the mere mention of evolution could get you fired in one of the bluest states in America. Bullshit. Your friend certainly left part of the story out, like how he slept with one of his students, or something like that.
In any event, cirriculum selection is a state and local matter - it really has nothing to do with the feds. The Department of Education mostly gives out grants to teachers colleges, to the extent it does anything at all. Thank you Jimmy Carter.
I read lots of this kind of garbage on slashdot, but before you scream "theocracy", remember the school system has been in a forty year slide, and it actually was illegal to teach evolution in most states when the US had unchallenged scientific preeminence.
By the way, if you're interested in learning critical thinking, you couldn't do better than a traditionl Jesuit university.
I have no interest in living in a "true welfare state". I'm not impressed with the European version, and I don't see why an American version would be any better. Just give me a portion of my taxes back, thank you, when the Iraq occupation ends.
Secondly, it has been stated explicitly by Bin Laden and others, and we intercept message traffic from time to time indicating it's true. Setting off bombs in shopping malls would be an admission of weakness, an admission our efforts have degraded their capability, since it's going from a big attack to a small one. What they want is something that will top 9/11. Even better would be delivering a crippling blow. They're pretty up front about it, if you read what they say.
When it happens, we'll most likely be powerless to respond because we won't know who did it. We can't nuke the entire rest of the world because somebody blew up Washinton, and they know it. In my mind that makes it more likely. There are plenty of states that see American power as an impediment to their ambitions.
It's not ridiculous just because it hasn't happened yet. It will happen eventually, it's just a matter of time. I just hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime.
You don't know that. You can't know that. The minute AQ gets ahold of a nuke the odds will shift quite dramatically against you. And when a couple cities dissappear beneath a mushroom cloud you'll be the first one to say the government didn't do enough.
It really irritates me when idiots like you call terrorists "boogeyman". These people are not like you and me. They're dangerous, and they do their best to become more dangerous. The fact that we haven't been hit since 9/11 doesn't mean they don't exist, it means they're not interested in setting off bombs in shopping malls and sports stadiums, killing mere hundreds.
Terrorists are a lame red herring. There's always been terrorists, there always will be unhappy people in this world.
Yes, there have always been terrorists. But the technology that allows regular people to make biological weapons, or small states to make nukes is new within the last couple decades.
The idea these are "unhappy people" is laughably ignorant. They're not "unhappy people", they're religious fanatics. They think the act of slaughtering American civilians will get them into heaven. And they're supported, with money and training, by states in the Middle East.
I've always thought the price-fixing argument has some merit, though, since the artist is always in a contract that excludes other lables. I can imagine a market where the artist makes a track and labels bid for the right to sell copies in lots of 100,000, say. Distribution would be substantailly less profitable, and the people who create and add value to the music would be paid more in line with profitability.
One man's disadvantage is another man's cooling system. Since the solar cells are also wavelength dependent, the goal is to collect all the usefull light and let the rest (mostly) pass harmlessly through the glass plate. Very clever.
Come to think of it, I had an old HP that integrated a fan controller on the motherboard. It might have been hardware-only, though.
Seems like a lot of hacking for a small payoff, but I think the path is there for some systems.
It didn't really work out. While we could easily get prototypes to work well over rated temperature ranges, getting the production version to work reliably was an order of magnitude more effort than the clocked version. As the complexity of the logic increases, the number of potential race conditions increases exponentially. So every nth board had to be scrapped in the early production runs.
It turns out, for TTL and its successors the same manufacturer can produce two copies of the same part that are an order of magnitude different in speed. We would get situations where a signal would propagate through five gates faster than a single gate on another path, so if you missed a path during the design phase you were sure to see a failure eventually. Also, there were no commercial async design tools available at the time, so simulation was definitely "roll-your-own".
Another problem we didn't even consider early on was the inability of the repair technicians to understand the curcuit, so getting a board repaired required the assistance of an engineer.
We would have been fine for onesey-twosey production, but for large commercial runs? The benefits just didn't outweigh the extra hassle.
I'm curious to see if they have any more trouble than normal (for a CPU) when they ramp up to production volumes.
My point was the first ammendment isn't a blanket protection for all speech. There is such a thing as illegal speech in the US. Incitement to overthrow the government by non-democratic means is illegal, for instance. It's also illegal to incite people to take up arms against the US military if you're a citizen or resident.
Beyond that, there are lawful activities that demand a little extra scrutiny from the government. If you're a citizen of the US, for instance, and you run an anti-US website, as opposed to a website critical of this or that policy, the US government has a duty to take a closer look at your activities. That's not a violation of your civil rights, it's just the FBI doing its job.
You make the assumption the grandparent poorly worded. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. We'll have to wait for the original poster to clarify. Sometimes people actually mean what they say.
Also, the first ammendment isn't absolute. It doesn't protect shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater and it doesn't protect advocating the overthrow of the US government. The fact that the sedition act of 1918 was repealed doesn't make sedition legal, it just voids the provisions of that act.
The fact nobody has been charged with sedition in a few years is more a function of politics than anything else. But it's still a crime.
I'm curious about the source of the Brennan quote. What case did that pertain to?
Incidentally, having this kind of capability isn't a bad idea, even if you never use it. You have to have some level of expertise to know what's possible.
That's an interesting choice of words. Not "a website critical of US policy" or an "anti-Bush website". An "anti-us" website.
This is why conservatives don't trust American liberals (leftists). We have always suspected the "I love my country but hate its policies" line was really just a public face for "My country isn't perfect so I'm willing to work against the interests of my fellow citizens".
If someone creates an "anti-us" site, not just a site critical of US policies, or Bush administration policies, they should get scrutiny from the US government. Sedition is not a civil liberty. I'm not saying the site owner should be necessarily arrested or the site shut down, but the same people who are crying over lost civil liberties now will be whining "why weren't you tracking these people?" when the next attack occurs.
What do you expect? It's another Roland P. article. If you want to read the original article he ripped off and reworded, look here.
I question the article's 15 day figure. Other sources I've read say no more than 5 days underwater at a stretch, with a couple weeks total range. Current designs have LOX tanks for both breathable air and also as an oxydizer for the power plant.
Couple points:
Russians also have supercavitation torpedoes which no one can intercept because of their speed.
Super-cav torpedoes are also mostly useless without nuclear warheads, since the noise they generate blinds the torpedo's own sensors. The original Russian model, the skval, had a nuclear-only role - it was designed to be fired into the center of an American battle group and detonated. They had no capability of actually hitting a ship.
The most advanced versions of the skval can be programmed to drop out of super-cav mode and go into target acuisition mode at more typical torpedo speeds when it reaches the general vicinity of the target. But slowing down and turning on active sonar makes it a target for other torpedos and hedgehog-like systems.
This is not even taking submarines into account. A sub can stay close to the sea floor with motors turned off. Once this thing goes above it, it will just launch half a dozen torpedoes and move on.
If it survives long enough. A sub can be detected by a myriad of systems contained in a carrier battle group. Helicopter dropped sono-bouys, MAD systems, active "sled" systems. The list is endless, but I shouldn't leave out the attack sub captain's worst nightmare: the sub (or two) that's escorting the carrier.
Also, in order to set up an ambush like that you have to know exactly where the carrier is going. You might be able to guess in general where the carrier is going, but exact times and routes are a closely guarded secret. Torpedos are relatively short range weapons - if you just pick a spot and wait you're unlikely to last until a target presents itself. A nuclear sub can stay submerged for months, but can be detected by reactor pump noise. A diesel can only spend a couple days submerged before it runs out of air.
In any event, the moment the sub attacks (successfully or not) it will be destroyed by helicopters, and an attack sub is a pretty expensive toy in its own right. You can't afford to lose half a dozen attack subs at $2Bn a pop sinking a $4Bn carrier.
If your point is an un-escorted carrier can be sunk pretty easily, I will certainly concede it. The un-escorted Argentinian 25th of May (oddly enough, originally commissioned as the British carrier Venerable) came within seconds of being sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands war. The carrier crew was completely unaware.
But first-world carriers are never deployed without escorts. The carrier is the innermost layer of a very large, juicy onion, and there isn't any non-nuclear system that can just waltz in and destroy it. I will eat my hat if Britain or France is even considering deploying that kind of asset without at least a half-dozen destroyers or cruisers. Britain, in particular, has extremely deadly destroyers.
You must be young. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. NASA has done the groundwork for at least seven or eight systems since it became clear the shuttle would never live up to its billing in the early 1980s. They never happen because the shuttle employs 20,000 people, and while the next program, whatever it is, may employ the same number of people, they won't be the same people in the same congressional districts.
Look at CEV. Instead of using cheaper, lower performance (but certainly adequate) boosters, the current plan is to use SSME. Why? So all the current shuttle workers can work on the next project, and the same contractors can stay on the gravy train working under the same NASA project managers. Without that CEV would never happen either.
NASA has become an agency all about self-preservation. It doesn't matter who's in Congress or the White House, the first priority of any established bureaucracy is to grow. Sci-fi writer Jerry Pournelle calls it "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: Those whose interests are in furthering the organization rather than its goals always get in charge of any bureaucracy."
NASA has done some good work in the past, and until very recently NASA made progress with robotics and even scramjets. But the manned space program is the one that's easiest to sell to the public, so it's become "the monster that ate the budget". Over the next few years manned spaceflight will become the only thing NASA does.
Unfortunately, real progress will have to happen under the USAF as black projects the bureaucrats at NASA don't know about, and thus can't kill.