I do remember the Titanic's construction, or at least remember what I have read about it. It had high bulkheads athwartship, I think 11 of them spaced down the length of the ship, but they were not closed at the top. As the bow flooded, the water spilled over the top of the first high bulkhead, flooding the next section, which tilted it enough to flood the 3rd, and so on.
Besides, no one is claiming this is unbreakable. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient force. But it won't be a matter of a single bullet popping it or setting it ablaze.
Only a few comments so far, most of them about how easy it would be to shoot it down.
But it won't be that easy. First of all, compartmentation. No doubt the bag will be at least dozens, if not hundreds, of individual compartments. Weight prevents anything equivalent to a ship with thousands of watertight compartments, but there will certainly be enough that bullets won't be much of a danger. The lifting gas won't be under pressure, so it won't start rips that widen the holes. And certainly the gas bag material will have anti-rip threading.
It won't use hydrogen either, no one is that stupid. Helium is the lifting gas of choice.
Shoulder fired missles are not a threat. This thing will fly above them. Their range is only a couple of miles. Full sized missles and full size AAA are a different matter, but again, compartmentation will help, and gas bags probably don't provide much of a radar signature to trigger fuzes, nor does the gas bag itself offer enough resistance to trigger most fuzes; they will probably fly right through and leave behind a few holes, trivial to patch.
Which brings up damage control. I am sure the crew will be able to climb around inside and apply temporary patches.
I think these heavy lift combat balloons are a silly idea. But they aren't nearly as silly as so many quick posts make out.
So the judge says: "okay, big boys, bring on the lava. Don't try to lure the virgin into the forest
Better yet, what she said was, Don't expect me to lure the virgin into the forest. Once you've brought her to me, she's under my protection, I decide, not you and your gang hidden away in the forest.
They corrected the spelling in the post to "Australian" from "Australiam" but couldn't be bothered to fix the word itself, since it wasn't Australian (or even Australiam) scientists but U.S. ones.
Helicopter pilots gets wings. Yet only an aerodynamicist would quibble about rotor blades being wings. Certainly the general public thinks of rotor blades as rotors, not wings. "Look ma, no wings!"
Submarines have diving planes which are actually wings. But they don't get wing pins, they get dolphins.
Cars have wings. Everyone calls them wings. But they don't fly.
Does no one remember The Perl Journal cover from so many years ago, where Perl install was trying to configure itself on a typewriter? I tried googling, didn't find it, but I didn't try too hard either.
Now some patent lawsuit company has $40M to go after other companies, and Amazon has even more incentive to enforce its own stupid patents. More swords will be put into play. This is not good.
Consumer Reports publishes rankings of reported defects by brand for a zillion product categories, including PCs and, I think, printers, scanners, whatnot. It comes out once a year or so. I have a subscription, so I don't know how non-members can get access, but the magazine and web access are relatively cheap. They only cover the top brands, and they only report what their surveys have collected, so it may not be as double-blind and objective as one could wish. It is probably also not directly comparable to your data.
Every last person has different genes and is below average in some category or other. Allowing employers to screen for these conditions is akin to making every action you take illegal. It would simply be a handy dandy basket of excuses ready to to get a company off the hook for the slightest deviation from safe working conditions.
Slipped on loose carpeting and hurt your ankle and out for a couple of days? Ha! Your genes show you only have 99% of the average person's balance control due to a genetic defect in yoru inner ear. You lose.
Don't say this won't happen. It will. You know it will. Corporations aren't evil so much as susceptible to faceless bureaucrats looking for a pat on the back for saving money.
So... regular handling changes the surface, eh? Or fold, drop it by mistake, write a note on another piece of paper on top of the document, put it in a file cabinet and press it between other documents or bend the edges cramming it in, pass it around so iother people can read it, mail it and handling mucks with it, it gets crammed into a mailbox with other documents... heck, you scan it before putting it into an envelope, but you have to fold it to put it in the envelope...
There was never suppose to be a fleet of shuttles. They were supposed to have such a fast turnaround that the capital cost of each shuttle would be amortized over zillions of launches. It was originally sold to Congress as having a turnaround of a week. It was never sold as being cheap to mass produce a fleet of them. You wouldn't need a fleet if they had a one week turnaround.
Write a Perl app to access the web server programmatically. This is pretty simple. The first time I used LWP, it was 15 minutes from the time I started searching CPAN, found, downloaded, and installed LWP, and had an app running which read a web form and POSTed the values we needed. It took another couple of days to polish it up, add in some error checking and consistency checking (did they change that web page on me?), etc, but LWP is very easy to use.
I believe what he is suggesting is that Microsoft spend a billion bucks and a year to embrace and extend Linux, starting from some existing distribution. Then when they release their flood of changes in a year, under the GPL, no one will be able to catch up because of that billion buck one year lead.
But that one year lag works the other way too. Microsoft would then be a year behind the open source baseline with which they started.
If they kept merging mainline changes into their internal codeset during that year of secret development, it would no longer have a year's worth of changes in it, it would only have enhancements, which would be a lot easier to pick and choose from for the rest of the world to merge back into the mainline.
If Microsoft kept their baseline "pure", they would be behind the world as much as the world would be behind them. If they kept their internal codeset up to date, they would not be a year ahead.
The foam in question insulates the disposable fuel tank so ice doesn't form on it. It does not reach orbit and is not part of the shuttle. The problem with the previous shuttle was that the foam hit the shuttle tiles as it fell off. Since this foam did not hit the shuttle, there is no problem with it.
Slashdot Mirror
... company's mission of ...
I do remember the Titanic's construction, or at least remember what I have read about it. It had high bulkheads athwartship, I think 11 of them spaced down the length of the ship, but they were not closed at the top. As the bow flooded, the water spilled over the top of the first high bulkhead, flooding the next section, which tilted it enough to flood the 3rd, and so on.
Besides, no one is claiming this is unbreakable. Anything can be destroyed with sufficient force. But it won't be a matter of a single bullet popping it or setting it ablaze.
Only a few comments so far, most of them about how easy it would be to shoot it down.
But it won't be that easy. First of all, compartmentation. No doubt the bag will be at least dozens, if not hundreds, of individual compartments. Weight prevents anything equivalent to a ship with thousands of watertight compartments, but there will certainly be enough that bullets won't be much of a danger. The lifting gas won't be under pressure, so it won't start rips that widen the holes. And certainly the gas bag material will have anti-rip threading.
It won't use hydrogen either, no one is that stupid. Helium is the lifting gas of choice.
Shoulder fired missles are not a threat. This thing will fly above them. Their range is only a couple of miles. Full sized missles and full size AAA are a different matter, but again, compartmentation will help, and gas bags probably don't provide much of a radar signature to trigger fuzes, nor does the gas bag itself offer enough resistance to trigger most fuzes; they will probably fly right through and leave behind a few holes, trivial to patch.
Which brings up damage control. I am sure the crew will be able to climb around inside and apply temporary patches.
I think these heavy lift combat balloons are a silly idea. But they aren't nearly as silly as so many quick posts make out.
flat-out unintelligable gibberish
Spelling is the least of thier problems
I would go so far (as) to say that
They can't do either, how could they do both?
Either too much, too little, or wrong kind. That's what would scare me.
So the judge says: "okay, big boys, bring on the lava. Don't try to lure the virgin into the forest
Better yet, what she said was, Don't expect me to lure the virgin into the forest. Once you've brought her to me, she's under my protection, I decide, not you and your gang hidden away in the forest.
Silly moderators. They can't see the original mispelling of "Australiam" so they think my post is off-topic.
Burn, karma, burn!
They corrected the spelling in the post to "Australian" from "Australiam" but couldn't be bothered to fix the word itself, since it wasn't Australian (or even Australiam) scientists but U.S. ones.
... from big storms, just like this one
No denying that the North Atlantic can dish out some major storms, but they are not even close to hurricane status.
== Pluto Phishing. I wonder what I have signed up for ...
I knew they had registered VIIV before and everyone was speculating on what it meant. Glad you found it for me!
This is slashdot. Convert We're into Were. It's a question by someone unfamiliar with the English language and its odd spelling.
Helicopter pilots gets wings. Yet only an aerodynamicist would quibble about rotor blades being wings. Certainly the general public thinks of rotor blades as rotors, not wings. "Look ma, no wings!"
Submarines have diving planes which are actually wings. But they don't get wing pins, they get dolphins.
Cars have wings. Everyone calls them wings. But they don't fly.
Have a great time with it, I'm busy with other things.
:-)
Yeh, like posting to slashdot
Does no one remember The Perl Journal cover from so many years ago, where Perl install was trying to configure itself on a typewriter? I tried googling, didn't find it, but I didn't try too hard either.
Now some patent lawsuit company has $40M to go after other companies, and Amazon has even more incentive to enforce its own stupid patents. More swords will be put into play. This is not good.
Consumer Reports publishes rankings of reported defects by brand for a zillion product categories, including PCs and, I think, printers, scanners, whatnot. It comes out once a year or so. I have a subscription, so I don't know how non-members can get access, but the magazine and web access are relatively cheap. They only cover the top brands, and they only report what their surveys have collected, so it may not be as double-blind and objective as one could wish. It is probably also not directly comparable to your data.
Every last person has different genes and is below average in some category or other. Allowing employers to screen for these conditions is akin to making every action you take illegal. It would simply be a handy dandy basket of excuses ready to to get a company off the hook for the slightest deviation from safe working conditions.
Slipped on loose carpeting and hurt your ankle and out for a couple of days? Ha! Your genes show you only have 99% of the average person's balance control due to a genetic defect in yoru inner ear. You lose.
Don't say this won't happen. It will. You know it will. Corporations aren't evil so much as susceptible to faceless bureaucrats looking for a pat on the back for saving money.
So ... regular handling changes the surface, eh? Or fold, drop it by mistake, write a note on another piece of paper on top of the document, put it in a file cabinet and press it between other documents or bend the edges cramming it in, pass it around so iother people can read it, mail it and handling mucks with it, it gets crammed into a mailbox with other documents ... heck, you scan it before putting it into an envelope, but you have to fold it to put it in the envelope ...
Both "both" are not both needed. :-) for you idiot moderators on crack.
There was never suppose to be a fleet of shuttles. They were supposed to have such a fast turnaround that the capital cost of each shuttle would be amortized over zillions of launches. It was originally sold to Congress as having a turnaround of a week. It was never sold as being cheap to mass produce a fleet of them. You wouldn't need a fleet if they had a one week turnaround.
Write a Perl app to access the web server programmatically. This is pretty simple. The first time I used LWP, it was 15 minutes from the time I started searching CPAN, found, downloaded, and installed LWP, and had an app running which read a web form and POSTed the values we needed. It took another couple of days to polish it up, add in some error checking and consistency checking (did they change that web page on me?), etc, but LWP is very easy to use.
I believe what he is suggesting is that Microsoft spend a billion bucks and a year to embrace and extend Linux, starting from some existing distribution. Then when they release their flood of changes in a year, under the GPL, no one will be able to catch up because of that billion buck one year lead.
But that one year lag works the other way too. Microsoft would then be a year behind the open source baseline with which they started.
If they kept merging mainline changes into their internal codeset during that year of secret development, it would no longer have a year's worth of changes in it, it would only have enhancements, which would be a lot easier to pick and choose from for the rest of the world to merge back into the mainline.
If Microsoft kept their baseline "pure", they would be behind the world as much as the world would be behind them. If they kept their internal codeset up to date, they would not be a year ahead.
Wham! Paradox City Arizona, baby.
The foam in question insulates the disposable fuel tank so ice doesn't form on it. It does not reach orbit and is not part of the shuttle. The problem with the previous shuttle was that the foam hit the shuttle tiles as it fell off. Since this foam did not hit the shuttle, there is no problem with it.