What you say is true - but has utterly nothing to do with what I said. The software for the MK98 FCS and the firmware inside the missile is under US control. I.E. precisely what Mr. Blair is complaing about for the JSF. The difference is, that it doesn't matter for Trident. We have no industrial base in ballistic missile development, and the system is effectively an off the shelf product. The reason that it is important with JSF is that we do have an existing aerospace industry who are involved in the development of the product, and who also develop munitions that the US do not use. Should we decide to procure a new weapon and need to make modifications to the JSF in order to utilise it, it makes sense not to have to defer to another nation's contractors who could charge what they want, without our being able to properly verify their work.
It's fascinating that you, and Mr. Blair, make a big deal of this - without mentioning that the UK's strategic deterrent is already in the hands of another country. The U.K. is utterly dependent on the U.S. for software and spares for the Trident-II submarines. The UK deterrent is carried in UK designed and built and operated submarines with UK built warheads. These are based on a US design, but modified to out requirements. The Trident missiles are leased from the US, and as such are swapped for replacements when they are due for maintenance.
The UK retains control over the use and deployment of its nuclear weapons, though these are generally going to be inline with the NATO doctrine.
Something like this would be very useful for small sailing boats. My dad's boat has a small wind generator rated at about 5W and a 15W solar panel to keep the battery topped off. That's fine for the odd day sail, as the usage (instruments, lights, etc) will be made up when no one is there, but not enough to sustain everything for more than a few days.
100W is more than enough to power the contiuous load on a small boat, whereas it would otherwise need the engine running every now and again to charge, which is noisy and defeats the object on a sailing boat. Once you get above a certain size, there is room for a small generator, but that isn't really practical on a small craft.
I used to work for a manufacturer of high end hi-fi speakers. While I wasn't directly involved with the development of the products I often used to get involved with blind listening tests and at first found it quite suprising what made a difference to the sound.
My observations were that with speaker cables, as long as the cables are big enough to handle the current requirements you could almost never tell the difference.
I never heard a difference when changing between digital patch cables.
It is hard to say whether one cable is better than another. What was noticable was that some cables coloured the sound more than others - not easy to test for with out plugging them in and listening. Some cables sounded different with some sources than others, but I don't know that it was something that you could pin down scientifically as 'better'. You certainly couldn't tell by looking, or by price.
Interestingly, changing things like the manufacturer of discrete components in the active crossovers did change the sound quite noticably.
Quite. By that logic, you could readily justify the position of the Nazi party in Germany. After all, a great many people also died fighting for that cause as well.
"Why even bother with the "loyalty" programs? You can collect data on every single sale that is processed and analyze it till your balls fall off. Nothing is stopping a business from holding anonymous data and using it to their benefit."
The reason is because they can then track your purchasing habits over a period of time. Instead of having lots of discrete individual transactions, they have a history of everything that you buy over a period of time.
This is far more useful - do you buy the same things every time you go shopping? Probably not, but do you buy the same things a lot over the course of a few months? Far more likely.
Here in the UK, if a police officer stops you in the street you are entitled to ask for the reason why, and they must tell you. They can't stop you solely on your appearance. You are also entitled to know the officers name and the police station where they are based. If they don't have a good reason then they are leaving themselves open for a whole load of shite should you complain.
You are not obliged to answer questions, though you might end up getting nicked if you refuse to give your name and address and they think you are hiding something. You are only obliged to give your name and address if you are arrested on suspicion of having commited an arrestable offence.
If you gave false information, then you might end up getting charged with wasting police time.
No, but a legitimate suspicion that is worthy of investigation has been raised. If as a result of that investigation it is found that it was groundless, then there is no harm done, but if they did not respond to calls such as that then the police would not be doing their jobs properly.
I don't know about the situation in the US but here in the UK, anyone who abuses the system by making malicious reports like that would end up getting prosecuted themselves.
"Who told you that the UK coast guard is a safety critical system? Who actually told you that they do anything besides wasting public money?"
If you actually believe that then you either are poorly informed, or are trolling.
Take a look at their website to see what they do.
As someone who spends significant amounts of time off the coast of the UK on a boat, I am quite glad they are only a VHF call away.
I love sailing. It can be as geeky or basic as you want.
I go sailing on a yacht that has onboard computer tied in to the GPS and realtime chart plotting, along with loads of other insrumentation. It can be fun playing with all that, but it's also nice to switch it all off and just use your basic skills.
It's a great way to get away from a hectic lifestyle. You can't get much more out of it than being offshore with nothing in view apart from your own boat.
I'm neither a left-wing activist or naive about how the economy works, but perhaps am guilty of being a little idealistic. I'm well aware that the arms industry and various armed forces employ huge numbers of people; and that it would be impractical to just stop spending on that and allocate the money elsewhere, but that isn't what I meant. I also wasn't advocating spending that money on the third world, at least not in the fashion that you suggest, but that is a different argument entirely.
I was commenting more on how willing we are to spend money on preparing to blow each other up, rather than on somthing that could have far reaching positive effects on everybody on the planet.
Given how dependant the economy is on electrical power, and that the source that provides it is finite and could potentially run out within our lifetimes, it surprises me that more of an effort to find an alternative is not being made. I understand your argument that throwing unlimited resources at a problem is not necessarily the way to go, but from other threads on this subject it appears that some projects are having trouble getting sufficient funding for what they want to do now, let alone expanding their scope.
I just feel that we need to readjust our priorities a little.
Taken from: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-4.html
4.4.5.3.1 Pure Deuterium
Deuterium is an inexpensive fusion fuel, consisting on the order of $100/kg to manufacture, with an effectively unlimited supply. Its major disadvantage is that it is a gas at normal conditions, requiring extreme cold to liquefy it (to below 23.57 K). It has the additional disadvantage that it is a low density liquid - 0.169 (or 0.0845 moles/cm^3). This low density, combined with the necessity of extremely efficient insulation implies a large volume for any weapon using pure deuterium as a fuel (to say nothing of the cost, weight, and complexity of the cryogenic equipment needed for handling it, and keeping it cold).
Deuterium has a high energy content however, 82.2 kt/kg with complete thermonuclear combustion. It also produces a large excess of neutrons per unit of energy released, one neutron for each 21.62 MeV of reaction energy. The net reaction is: 6 D -> 2 He-4 + 2 p + 2 n + 43.24 MeV
Pure deuterium has been used in at least one thermonuclear test - Ivy Mike, the first radiation implosion design ever tested. The fact of this test conveniently demonstrates that thermonuclear energy release in weapons does not require tritium breeding neutronic reactions, but can be driven by the D+D reactions alone.
4.4.5.3.2 "Dry" Fuels (Lithium Hydrides)
It would be more convenient if deuterium could be incorporated into weapons in the form of a stable chemical compound with more convenient physical properties than the low boiling point elemental form. A suitable compound would be the hydride of a light element, which would give a fairly high deuterium content by weight.
While there are several compounds that fit this description, it was realized quite early in both the US and Soviet Union that one compound in particular was uniquely suited for this role - lithium deuteride. Even more important than its high deuterium content (22.4-25% by weight), and high atom density (0.103 moles D/cm^3, higher than in liquid deuterium!), is the fact that lithium isotopes can also provide additional fusion fuel. By capturing neutrons generated as fusion byproducts, reactions 5 and 6 produce highly combustible and energetic tritium. Reaction 5 also produces significant amounts of energy directly from neutron capture. Probably all fusion devices since Mike have used lithium hydrides of varying isotopic composition as fusion fuel.
4.4.5.3.2.1 Enriched Lithium Deuteride
The most desirable fuel is pure lithium-6 deuteride since it has the highest energy content per kilogram: 64.0 kt/kg. The net reaction is a combination of reactions 1 and 5: Li-6 + D -> 2 He-4 + 22.371 MeV There are a few considerations that must be addressed before this reaction will work. First, the neutrons produced by reaction 1 are too energetic to direct drive reaction 5 efficiently - they must undergo a few collisions to moderate their energy. Also, there must be an initial source of neutrons or tritium to drive reaction 5 before reaction 1 can occur. The overall cycle does not breed neutrons.
Some open literature sources assert that reaction 5 is driven by neutrons produced by fission reactions in the trigger, the spark plug, or the tamper.
The first of these suggested sources can be easily disposed of as a possibility. If neutrons from the primary were to breed a significant amount of tritium, severe neutron preheating problems would result.
A number of arguments can be offered against the other possibilities. The most obvious is that the net Li-6 + D reaction does not produce spare neutrons (although a small excess of 10-15% might be produced though n->2n reactions with the fast neutrons). Since only a relatively small proportion of the neutron excess can actually cause fast fission in U-238 (due to moderation, inelastic scattering, and absorption), for a lithium deuteride fueled bomb to produce substantial energy through fast fission some other type of fu
The world spends about $800 billion on arms annually.
If we spent half that much per year on developing fusion power it would be worth it, considering the returns that we would get (and I don't just mean monetary).
"Why don't the record labels go after the radio monopolies instead?"
Because they are one of the primary sales tools of the record industry. At least, that's the way it seems here in the UK.
If you listen to any of the major "independant" (actually, a lot of the big local stations are owned by GWR) stations then you hear the same few songs hyped to the point of tedium weeks before the record is actually released.
People in general act like sheep. The super-cool DJ says it's a great song, so it must be a great song. After all, he is a DJ and knows what he's talking about, right?
If you hash a document, and then change it by a few bytes, then the hash is likely to be very different. The point is, that while it may be possible to come up with large numbers of plaintext documents for any given hash, how likely is it that the file will be remotely related to the original? Not very I'd say.
If you are using the hash function for authentication then this is clearly not an issue, as anything that produces the same hash will allow you access.
I guess that it costs quite a lot of money to set up and run the system, and that funding would be a lot easier to get if there was some benefit to taxpayers other than indirectly through improved military capability.
It is good that the US has made the system available effectively without restriction, however now that other nations have realised the value of such a system, it is understandable that they want to be able to operate something similar without whatever political considerations are affecting the US to affect it.
I can relate to this having recently spent 2 weeks in hospital with what turned out to be Glandular Fever (I think called mono in the states). I ended up with a secondary infection in my throat and larynx which caused my throat to swell to the point that I couldn't swallow anything. I wasn't able to eat or drink for 5 days.
When they first suspected that there was a secondary bacterial infection they started giving me penicillin, however this had little effect. It turns out that there were actually 3 different bacteria causing the infection, including Staphylococcus and Strep A. The other one I can't remember. Once these were identified, switching to two other much more powerful antibiotics cleared it up.
I could possibly argue that I would not have caught the secondary infection if I were not in the hospital, but my immune system had taken quite a battering so chances are I would have picked up something else instead anyway.
The last thing I feel like doing is sueing the hospital or the staff, as they did a pretty good job of making sure I didn't choke or suffocate myself to death!
What is it that makes people unable to accept that sometimes bad things happen? Did they guy with the Staph infection recover from it? If so he should put it down to experience and get on with his life.
Someone coined the phrase refering to the allegation that the government had embellished a dossier of evidence relating to the weapons of mass destruction supposedly held by Iraq, in order to make a better case for going to war. Since then, it has been used by the media everytime the subject comes up.
Slashdot Mirror
What you say is true - but has utterly nothing to do with what I said. The software for the MK98 FCS and the firmware inside the missile is under US control. I.E. precisely what Mr. Blair is complaing about for the JSF. The difference is, that it doesn't matter for Trident. We have no industrial base in ballistic missile development, and the system is effectively an off the shelf product. The reason that it is important with JSF is that we do have an existing aerospace industry who are involved in the development of the product, and who also develop munitions that the US do not use. Should we decide to procure a new weapon and need to make modifications to the JSF in order to utilise it, it makes sense not to have to defer to another nation's contractors who could charge what they want, without our being able to properly verify their work.
It's fascinating that you, and Mr. Blair, make a big deal of this - without mentioning that the UK's strategic deterrent is already in the hands of another country. The U.K. is utterly dependent on the U.S. for software and spares for the Trident-II submarines.
The UK deterrent is carried in UK designed and built and operated submarines with UK built warheads. These are based on a US design, but modified to out requirements. The Trident missiles are leased from the US, and as such are swapped for replacements when they are due for maintenance. The UK retains control over the use and deployment of its nuclear weapons, though these are generally going to be inline with the NATO doctrine.
Visa IS a non-profit company.
Something like this would be very useful for small sailing boats. My dad's boat has a small wind generator rated at about 5W and a 15W solar panel to keep the battery topped off. That's fine for the odd day sail, as the usage (instruments, lights, etc) will be made up when no one is there, but not enough to sustain everything for more than a few days. 100W is more than enough to power the contiuous load on a small boat, whereas it would otherwise need the engine running every now and again to charge, which is noisy and defeats the object on a sailing boat. Once you get above a certain size, there is room for a small generator, but that isn't really practical on a small craft.
I used to work for a manufacturer of high end hi-fi speakers. While I wasn't directly involved with the development of the products I often used to get involved with blind listening tests and at first found it quite suprising what made a difference to the sound.
My observations were that with speaker cables, as long as the cables are big enough to handle the current requirements you could almost never tell the difference.
I never heard a difference when changing between digital patch cables.
It is hard to say whether one cable is better than another. What was noticable was that some cables coloured the sound more than others - not easy to test for with out plugging them in and listening. Some cables sounded different with some sources than others, but I don't know that it was something that you could pin down scientifically as 'better'. You certainly couldn't tell by looking, or by price.
Interestingly, changing things like the manufacturer of discrete components in the active crossovers did change the sound quite noticably.
Quite. By that logic, you could readily justify the position of the Nazi party in Germany. After all, a great many people also died fighting for that cause as well.
"Why even bother with the "loyalty" programs? You can collect data on every single sale that is processed and analyze it till your balls fall off. Nothing is stopping a business from holding anonymous data and using it to their benefit."
The reason is because they can then track your purchasing habits over a period of time. Instead of having lots of discrete individual transactions, they have a history of everything that you buy over a period of time.
This is far more useful - do you buy the same things every time you go shopping? Probably not, but do you buy the same things a lot over the course of a few months? Far more likely.
I can certainly see your point.
Here in the UK, if a police officer stops you in the street you are entitled to ask for the reason why, and they must tell you. They can't stop you solely on your appearance. You are also entitled to know the officers name and the police station where they are based. If they don't have a good reason then they are leaving themselves open for a whole load of shite should you complain.
You are not obliged to answer questions, though you might end up getting nicked if you refuse to give your name and address and they think you are hiding something. You are only obliged to give your name and address if you are arrested on suspicion of having commited an arrestable offence.
If you gave false information, then you might end up getting charged with wasting police time.
I don't know how that compares to the US.
No, but a legitimate suspicion that is worthy of investigation has been raised. If as a result of that investigation it is found that it was groundless, then there is no harm done, but if they did not respond to calls such as that then the police would not be doing their jobs properly.
I don't know about the situation in the US but here in the UK, anyone who abuses the system by making malicious reports like that would end up getting prosecuted themselves.
"Who told you that the UK coast guard is a safety critical system? Who actually told you that they do anything besides wasting public money?"
If you actually believe that then you either are poorly informed, or are trolling.
Take a look at their website to see what they do. As someone who spends significant amounts of time off the coast of the UK on a boat, I am quite glad they are only a VHF call away.
I love sailing. It can be as geeky or basic as you want.
I go sailing on a yacht that has onboard computer tied in to the GPS and realtime chart plotting, along with loads of other insrumentation. It can be fun playing with all that, but it's also nice to switch it all off and just use your basic skills.
It's a great way to get away from a hectic lifestyle. You can't get much more out of it than being offshore with nothing in view apart from your own boat.
I'm neither a left-wing activist or naive about how the economy works, but perhaps am guilty of being a little idealistic. I'm well aware that the arms industry and various armed forces employ huge numbers of people; and that it would be impractical to just stop spending on that and allocate the money elsewhere, but that isn't what I meant. I also wasn't advocating spending that money on the third world, at least not in the fashion that you suggest, but that is a different argument entirely.
I was commenting more on how willing we are to spend money on preparing to blow each other up, rather than on somthing that could have far reaching positive effects on everybody on the planet.
Given how dependant the economy is on electrical power, and that the source that provides it is finite and could potentially run out within our lifetimes, it surprises me that more of an effort to find an alternative is not being made. I understand your argument that throwing unlimited resources at a problem is not necessarily the way to go, but from other threads on this subject it appears that some projects are having trouble getting sufficient funding for what they want to do now, let alone expanding their scope.
I just feel that we need to readjust our priorities a little.
Taken from: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-4.html
4.4.5.3.1 Pure Deuterium
Deuterium is an inexpensive fusion fuel, consisting on the order of $100/kg to manufacture, with an effectively unlimited supply. Its major disadvantage is that it is a gas at normal conditions, requiring extreme cold to liquefy it (to below 23.57 K). It has the additional disadvantage that it is a low density liquid - 0.169 (or 0.0845 moles/cm^3). This low density, combined with the necessity of extremely efficient insulation implies a large volume for any weapon using pure deuterium as a fuel (to say nothing of the cost, weight, and complexity of the cryogenic equipment needed for handling it, and keeping it cold).
Deuterium has a high energy content however, 82.2 kt/kg with complete thermonuclear combustion. It also produces a large excess of neutrons per unit of energy released, one neutron for each 21.62 MeV of reaction energy. The net reaction is:
6 D -> 2 He-4 + 2 p + 2 n + 43.24 MeV
Pure deuterium has been used in at least one thermonuclear test - Ivy Mike, the first radiation implosion design ever tested. The fact of this test conveniently demonstrates that thermonuclear energy release in weapons does not require tritium breeding neutronic reactions, but can be driven by the D+D reactions alone.
4.4.5.3.2 "Dry" Fuels (Lithium Hydrides)
It would be more convenient if deuterium could be incorporated into weapons in the form of a stable chemical compound with more convenient physical properties than the low boiling point elemental form. A suitable compound would be the hydride of a light element, which would give a fairly high deuterium content by weight.
While there are several compounds that fit this description, it was realized quite early in both the US and Soviet Union that one compound in particular was uniquely suited for this role - lithium deuteride. Even more important than its high deuterium content (22.4-25% by weight), and high atom density (0.103 moles D/cm^3, higher than in liquid deuterium!), is the fact that lithium isotopes can also provide additional fusion fuel. By capturing neutrons generated as fusion byproducts, reactions 5 and 6 produce highly combustible and energetic tritium. Reaction 5 also produces significant amounts of energy directly from neutron capture. Probably all fusion devices since Mike have used lithium hydrides of varying isotopic composition as fusion fuel.
4.4.5.3.2.1 Enriched Lithium Deuteride
The most desirable fuel is pure lithium-6 deuteride since it has the highest energy content per kilogram: 64.0 kt/kg. The net reaction is a combination of reactions 1 and 5:
Li-6 + D -> 2 He-4 + 22.371 MeV
There are a few considerations that must be addressed before this reaction will work. First, the neutrons produced by reaction 1 are too energetic to direct drive reaction 5 efficiently - they must undergo a few collisions to moderate their energy. Also, there must be an initial source of neutrons or tritium to drive reaction 5 before reaction 1 can occur. The overall cycle does not breed neutrons.
Some open literature sources assert that reaction 5 is driven by neutrons produced by fission reactions in the trigger, the spark plug, or the tamper.
The first of these suggested sources can be easily disposed of as a possibility. If neutrons from the primary were to breed a significant amount of tritium, severe neutron preheating problems would result.
A number of arguments can be offered against the other possibilities. The most obvious is that the net Li-6 + D reaction does not produce spare neutrons (although a small excess of 10-15% might be produced though n->2n reactions with the fast neutrons). Since only a relatively small proportion of the neutron excess can actually cause fast fission in U-238 (due to moderation, inelastic scattering, and absorption), for a lithium deuteride fueled bomb to produce substantial energy through fast fission some other type of fu
The Wright bothers didn't start off by trying to fly accross the atlantic.
Now we do it all the time.
You can't go from nothing to all in one step.
The world spends about $800 billion on arms annually.
If we spent half that much per year on developing fusion power it would be worth it, considering the returns that we would get (and I don't just mean monetary).
"Why don't the record labels go after the radio monopolies instead?"
Because they are one of the primary sales tools of the record industry. At least, that's the way it seems here in the UK.
If you listen to any of the major "independant" (actually, a lot of the big local stations are owned by GWR) stations then you hear the same few songs hyped to the point of tedium weeks before the record is actually released.
People in general act like sheep. The super-cool DJ says it's a great song, so it must be a great song. After all, he is a DJ and knows what he's talking about, right?
If you hash a document, and then change it by a few bytes, then the hash is likely to be very different. The point is, that while it may be possible to come up with large numbers of plaintext documents for any given hash, how likely is it that the file will be remotely related to the original? Not very I'd say.
If you are using the hash function for authentication then this is clearly not an issue, as anything that produces the same hash will allow you access.
I guess that it costs quite a lot of money to set up and run the system, and that funding would be a lot easier to get if there was some benefit to taxpayers other than indirectly through improved military capability.
It is good that the US has made the system available effectively without restriction, however now that other nations have realised the value of such a system, it is understandable that they want to be able to operate something similar without whatever political considerations are affecting the US to affect it.
Seems that it is limited by the data rate of the PCI bus. It would be cool if they do a 64-bit version, and make it bootable.
In the UK it is legal for a vet to prescribe to a human, however it is illegal for a doctor to precribe to a an animal.
I can relate to this having recently spent 2 weeks in hospital with what turned out to be Glandular Fever (I think called mono in the states). I ended up with a secondary infection in my throat and larynx which caused my throat to swell to the point that I couldn't swallow anything. I wasn't able to eat or drink for 5 days.
When they first suspected that there was a secondary bacterial infection they started giving me penicillin, however this had little effect. It turns out that there were actually 3 different bacteria causing the infection, including Staphylococcus and Strep A. The other one I can't remember. Once these were identified, switching to two other much more powerful antibiotics cleared it up.
I could possibly argue that I would not have caught the secondary infection if I were not in the hospital, but my immune system had taken quite a battering so chances are I would have picked up something else instead anyway.
The last thing I feel like doing is sueing the hospital or the staff, as they did a pretty good job of making sure I didn't choke or suffocate myself to death!
What is it that makes people unable to accept that sometimes bad things happen? Did they guy with the Staph infection recover from it? If so he should put it down to experience and get on with his life.
Not everything is someone elses fault.
Not sure if you are asking seriously or not.
If you are:
Someone coined the phrase refering to the allegation that the government had embellished a dossier of evidence relating to the weapons of mass destruction supposedly held by Iraq, in order to make a better case for going to war. Since then, it has been used by the media everytime the subject comes up.
Is it just me who gets pissed off with the way this kind of thing gets worded in the media?
"Sexed up"? Whats wrong with "lied"?
I don't think the average slashdot reader is going to get near enough to a girl to find out!
It was actually originally intended to be one 10 millionth the distance between the north pole and the equator.
In 1983 it was redefined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
If you are going to bitch at someone for getting it wrong, you could at least get it right yourself.