Although in my gut I don't particularly like the fact that our military satellite orbits are known to all who care to look on the Internet, the article gets the moral of the story right.
Well...most satellites have limited propellant onboard to do anything more except adjust their orbit to maintain its intended design, whether it is a geostationary orbit or a "normal" orbiting orbit. They do not carry sufficient propellant to move from a polar orbit to a less inclined orbit, a high apogee orbit to low apogee orbit, etc. Orbital mechanics are pretty straight forward, and it only takes a few observations of some object to figure out its orbit. If they do, they have a very finite amount, and any large scale manouvering is not undertaken lightly, as it directly affects the lifetime of the satellite.
the obscurity required in this case isn't information about the orbit, nor should anyone really care, but on the use and purpose of the satellite. Is that "black" satellite a RORSAT? LIDAR? SIGINT? Keyhole? VESTA? THAT part about the satellite and its mission is the real secret. Orbital information has been published in astronomy magazines for some time anyways.
If you've read any tom clancy novels, you would understand that most of the baddies already know when the intelligence satellites are going to be overhead, and adjust their activities accordingly if they don't want to be directly observed.
If they are observed, either they don't know (hardly likely these days) or they DO want us to know.
Even the civilian LANDSAT and other geo-observational satellites could be determined to be "spy" satellites. Want to see how Iran's economy is doing? Use LANDSAT to monitor over time their agricultural lands. If the measured land isn't "right", then their crops have failed, which means more instabilit.
No, it's not competing with local newspapers. National/world news is commodity information. Winston-Salem NC is not likely to write a story wholely unrelated to NC about McMinnville, OR. So, if I look up anything about "Evergreen Aviation", chances are any news items that show up in GoogleNews are going to be in the Yamhill Observer, Salem Statesman-Journal or Oregonian. Not really competing with them, especially if the best sources for looking at ancillary information to whatever GoogleNews pulled up is from the papers' websites...
It is odd, though, finding interesting Superbowl articles in the Xinhua Times...
...or do what the NYT does with its stories that end up on GoogleNoose. I freakin' hate NYT articles in GoogleNoose, becasue they make you go thru the login form to read them.
On the other hand, Yahoo News slurps the entire article and presents it in Yahoo's portal style, not redirect you to the original article on the source's website.
You want dry snow to do this with as well. The wet stuff that falls typically in the Cascade Mts isn't too good at this. At 40-50 degs, it'll be melting rather quickly, you'll get wet and get hypothermia anyways. It wouldn't do you well in a good ol' Dakota/Wyoming/Montana Blizzard, though, if you were out in the open, because any stacked up snow would blow away rather quickly, and unless there already was snow pack, there wouldn't be too much snowpack to dig into.
Plus, you're assuming you have blankets with you...
As far as the horse guts go, I imagine the bacterial action in their intestines working to break down any ingested hay still keeps working for some time, putting out enough heat to keep you warm enough.
Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?
Well, if they're motivated enough. Look at how well it's working in Iraq...
linking external data to Excel is done through MS-Query anyways. It's read-only. But it's easy enough to replicate in VBA with ADO as well, just more painful to do and no GUI query builder.
No, it'll probably be some sort of disclaimer that certain authors will have to sign, releasing the publisher of responsibility for the contents of the publication should parts of the truthful book be wrong and actually cause damages. Which will then cause at some point a push for a law that limits the liabilities of authors who make a "good faith effort" to ensure the "factuality" of any statements made to be factual. Somehow, there will be a way in there for the Michael Moores, et al (this sword will cut both ways) from creating alternate (libelous/slanderous) realities from otherwise truthful statements as well... you know, along the lines of "when was the last time you molested your children?" kind of things.
But it's OK for the US Government to base policy based on what comes out of Hillary Clinton's or Bill Frist's mouths, not the least GWB, DichCheney, et al?
Well, if the EU keeps having its way with Microsoft, I bet a lot of MS Windows source code will be making it onto Usenet soon... So what then? Can you be criminally punished in the US for releasing or downloading source code directly from Microsoft when said source code is also trivially available in Europe?
The thing is, Sarnoff knew what Farnsworth was doing, and both were Americans.
RIM is Canadian, and NTP is American. Perhaps it's a bad move on RIM's part for doing well in the US, but in theory the two countries' patents kind of knock each other out, right?
Besides, I had more than a couple of friends who had done the nascent version of it before 1991: hooking modems up to a couple of computers that monitored servers and paged them text msgs when things happened. So RIM (and NTP) centralized the modem part?
Whom did Motorola work with with its RIM-like boxes in the late 90's, SkyTel? How come NTP isn't going after SkyTel as well?
Isn't the judge sort of presuming that RIM's founder was looking through USPTO's listings, found NTP's patents, and decided to implement them? Aren't NTP's patents aged out already anyways?
As long as we have a space agency that works in the "Lowest Bidder" enviroment we will have these problems....and it will always be that way because it is too easy for some redneck legislator to start banging his shoe on the lecturn and say how much money NASA is wasting, again, with no other perspective to how NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking, that still turns out way too much useful stuff, even if it's not geewhiz visible today.
Gotta defend the budget while trying to appease a Congressman or Senator that you're not doing enough to contain costs (which means you don't have enough money left in your budget to get slurped into the Space Shuttle program to pay Lockmart/Boeing).
It all depends. If it's a car full of a family man and his family (wife and *5* kids...), who was having car problems but got plowed into some H2-driving soccer mom who was jammering on her cell phone while also trying to put the binky back into her kid's mouth, thus killing the family in the car in the ensuing fireball, while later we find out that the soccer mom is married to a local cop, and their PD asks politely for the county DA to not pursue the case...well...
At least in Illinois, a similar accident led to an investigation into the Sec. of State's methods for giving out commercial drivers' licenses (instead of soccer mom it was some incompetent truck driver who had bought his Illinois CDL) for...umm...financial considerations while the acting governer had been Sec of State ("License for Bribes"). Said governor is now in federal court defending his ass for the stuff uncovered in that investigation and while he was governor.
At least as far as the health care issue, hundereds of Americans die every day inspite of their healthcare they have paid for. So what's your point?
If the innocence of the people who die in an incident is pure enough, if enough people die (i.e., plane crash), or there is something else that grabs people's attention (like miners trapped underground), then we're sucked in. Joe Blow driving to work? Well, we all do it every day, so it's not a big deal.
How many people in the US are going to care that *another* building roof collapsed in Europe yesterday, killing a bunch of people? Probably not too many.
How many people around the world are going to care whether the Pittsburg Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks in the Superbowl? Probably about 10. But it'll be the Biggest F'ing Deal in the US for the next week or so.
It's not nationalistic pride or anything else. It's just human nature.
Don't forget that you probably didn't know of the issues with the ORings before the Challenger launch, and you were probably assuming like everyone else that things would be OK, that Christa McAuliffe's Classes From Space would have been cool, etc.
So stow your cynical conspiracy theories. Sometimes, despite our best intentions and regardless of our worst ones, bad shit still happens.
Palestinian news reports on an American death as either a reminder that Allah is punishing the Great Infidels for their promiscuous societal ways or just...not reported at all, either.
It's the tribal aspect of human nature. That which is inside the tribe is part of the news. That which is outside of the tribe is insignificant, as long as it does not involve the tribe.
Where is the circumspective journalism in all islamic press entities when another young Islamic person throws their life away for some stupid elder's whims, saying, is blowing up the best minds of our future generations the best way to get along in the world that is proceeding without our involvement?
This mighty sword cuts in all directions, not just on American journalism.
Read up on how the Canadian ag industry feels about the US ban on Canadian ruminant imports... or the Canadian view towards the US' tariff actions on softwood exports to the US.
The root causes of most of the "terrorism" is a result of the propaganda machines in the countries in question in order to create dissention and distrust towards an external entity as the source of their problems, rather than the fucked up countries they live in.
If anything, the press in the US is becoming more like the press in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., where any dissenting views against the Administration are attacked in every other way except for arguing about the facts. Divide-and-Conquer (or KeepDivided-and-StayInPower)., and those who wish to maintain discontent based on externalities in order to further their agendas (left and right) are doing quite well. The Press is just a corporate entity now, and large corporations do well to suck up to the Government as best as they can. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Plus, cranky, divisive news sells better than saner, less subjective news.
Don't lump all US agribusiness into the people who feed ADM. ADM is the entity that lobbies against removing the EtOH tarriff, on behalf of the farmers (sort of like the RIAA does for its artists).
The US Government now is not into free market economics anymore. It is into business model protection. Vertically integrated dairies (dairy produces milk, bottles it and sells it to retailers) that provide milk cheaper than the typical dairy coop or Dean's Foods? Hmm... no, that's not fair, so the FDA must stick them with the same rules that "protect" the coops from Dean's Foods!
I heard it "live" on the radio, while driving down to Seattle for a ROTC scholarship interview at the Univ. of Washington. When I got there, of course, everyone was watching it on CNN. It was a long drive home.
I woke up and turned on the TV to watch the Columbia return, just to see the initial video feeds of it zooming over Texas in chunks, live. Oh shit, not again.
I didn't see the first tower fall, but was listening to it on the radio while driving my daughter to the doctor's office. I was pissed off about the whole deal walking out to the car because I thought it was just a cessna or lear jet that crashed into it, not a big deal. Yeah, right. Watched the 2nd tower fall on the TV at the Dr's office.
I still hope to go see a Shuttle launch (or whatever replaces it) with my kids one of these years.
More technically, it was a "conflagration", or, the sudden and spontaneous complete combustion of fuel and oxidizer. Much like those videos of the rocket fuel plant in Nevada that was on fire and suddenly blew up, all on live TV, except that was more akin to an explosion, because you can see the shockwave radiating away from the site before it got to the helicopter...
ammonium nitrate and fuel oil isn't particularly dangerous (not like TNT, octol, etc), unless you have a lot of it and you set it off with a percussive trigger. If you had a couple of pounds of it and just set it on fire, it's just going to burn. C4 is the same way.
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Although in my gut I don't particularly like the fact that our military satellite orbits are known to all who care to look on the Internet, the article gets the moral of the story right.
Well...most satellites have limited propellant onboard to do anything more except adjust their orbit to maintain its intended design, whether it is a geostationary orbit or a "normal" orbiting orbit. They do not carry sufficient propellant to move from a polar orbit to a less inclined orbit, a high apogee orbit to low apogee orbit, etc. Orbital mechanics are pretty straight forward, and it only takes a few observations of some object to figure out its orbit. If they do, they have a very finite amount, and any large scale manouvering is not undertaken lightly, as it directly affects the lifetime of the satellite.
the obscurity required in this case isn't information about the orbit, nor should anyone really care, but on the use and purpose of the satellite. Is that "black" satellite a RORSAT? LIDAR? SIGINT? Keyhole? VESTA? THAT part about the satellite and its mission is the real secret. Orbital information has been published in astronomy magazines for some time anyways.
If you've read any tom clancy novels, you would understand that most of the baddies already know when the intelligence satellites are going to be overhead, and adjust their activities accordingly if they don't want to be directly observed.
If they are observed, either they don't know (hardly likely these days) or they DO want us to know.
Even the civilian LANDSAT and other geo-observational satellites could be determined to be "spy" satellites. Want to see how Iran's economy is doing? Use LANDSAT to monitor over time their agricultural lands. If the measured land isn't "right", then their crops have failed, which means more instabilit.
No, it's not competing with local newspapers. National/world news is commodity information. Winston-Salem NC is not likely to write a story wholely unrelated to NC about McMinnville, OR. So, if I look up anything about "Evergreen Aviation", chances are any news items that show up in GoogleNews are going to be in the Yamhill Observer, Salem Statesman-Journal or Oregonian. Not really competing with them, especially if the best sources for looking at ancillary information to whatever GoogleNews pulled up is from the papers' websites...
It is odd, though, finding interesting Superbowl articles in the Xinhua Times...
Hmm...they pay AP, Reuters, etc. for access to their news feeds...
...or do what the NYT does with its stories that end up on GoogleNoose. I freakin' hate NYT articles in GoogleNoose, becasue they make you go thru the login form to read them.
On the other hand, Yahoo News slurps the entire article and presents it in Yahoo's portal style, not redirect you to the original article on the source's website.
Actually, ruminant entrails smell like...ruminant entrails. Definitely not like chicken or fish (or rotting chicken or fish).
You want dry snow to do this with as well. The wet stuff that falls typically in the Cascade Mts isn't too good at this. At 40-50 degs, it'll be melting rather quickly, you'll get wet and get hypothermia anyways. It wouldn't do you well in a good ol' Dakota/Wyoming/Montana Blizzard, though, if you were out in the open, because any stacked up snow would blow away rather quickly, and unless there already was snow pack, there wouldn't be too much snowpack to dig into.
Plus, you're assuming you have blankets with you...
As far as the horse guts go, I imagine the bacterial action in their intestines working to break down any ingested hay still keeps working for some time, putting out enough heat to keep you warm enough.
Can mobs of various primitive, semi-sentient beings repeatedly defeat large imperial armies (presumably with state of the art training and equipment), by throwing random objects at them?
Well, if they're motivated enough. Look at how well it's working in Iraq...
linking external data to Excel is done through MS-Query anyways. It's read-only. But it's easy enough to replicate in VBA with ADO as well, just more painful to do and no GUI query builder.
No, it'll probably be some sort of disclaimer that certain authors will have to sign, releasing the publisher of responsibility for the contents of the publication should parts of the truthful book be wrong and actually cause damages. Which will then cause at some point a push for a law that limits the liabilities of authors who make a "good faith effort" to ensure the "factuality" of any statements made to be factual. Somehow, there will be a way in there for the Michael Moores, et al (this sword will cut both ways) from creating alternate (libelous/slanderous) realities from otherwise truthful statements as well... you know, along the lines of "when was the last time you molested your children?" kind of things.
But it's OK for the US Government to base policy based on what comes out of Hillary Clinton's or Bill Frist's mouths, not the least GWB, DichCheney, et al?
Well, if the EU keeps having its way with Microsoft, I bet a lot of MS Windows source code will be making it onto Usenet soon... So what then? Can you be criminally punished in the US for releasing or downloading source code directly from Microsoft when said source code is also trivially available in Europe?
OLAP would be better served by "lighter" databases, not OLTP.
IBM is still releasing updates to Informix (just worked at a now-Oracle shop that had just upgraded Informix versions).
Sybase & Oracle couldn't be more different, once you get past that they use SQL.
The thing is, Sarnoff knew what Farnsworth was doing, and both were Americans.
RIM is Canadian, and NTP is American. Perhaps it's a bad move on RIM's part for doing well in the US, but in theory the two countries' patents kind of knock each other out, right?
Besides, I had more than a couple of friends who had done the nascent version of it before 1991: hooking modems up to a couple of computers that monitored servers and paged them text msgs when things happened. So RIM (and NTP) centralized the modem part?
Whom did Motorola work with with its RIM-like boxes in the late 90's, SkyTel? How come NTP isn't going after SkyTel as well?
Isn't the judge sort of presuming that RIM's founder was looking through USPTO's listings, found NTP's patents, and decided to implement them? Aren't NTP's patents aged out already anyways?
As long as we have a space agency that works in the "Lowest Bidder" enviroment we will have these problems. ...and it will always be that way because it is too easy for some redneck legislator to start banging his shoe on the lecturn and say how much money NASA is wasting, again, with no other perspective to how NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking, that still turns out way too much useful stuff, even if it's not geewhiz visible today.
Gotta defend the budget while trying to appease a Congressman or Senator that you're not doing enough to contain costs (which means you don't have enough money left in your budget to get slurped into the Space Shuttle program to pay Lockmart/Boeing).
It all depends. If it's a car full of a family man and his family (wife and *5* kids...), who was having car problems but got plowed into some H2-driving soccer mom who was jammering on her cell phone while also trying to put the binky back into her kid's mouth, thus killing the family in the car in the ensuing fireball, while later we find out that the soccer mom is married to a local cop, and their PD asks politely for the county DA to not pursue the case...well...
At least in Illinois, a similar accident led to an investigation into the Sec. of State's methods for giving out commercial drivers' licenses (instead of soccer mom it was some incompetent truck driver who had bought his Illinois CDL) for...umm...financial considerations while the acting governer had been Sec of State ("License for Bribes"). Said governor is now in federal court defending his ass for the stuff uncovered in that investigation and while he was governor.
At least as far as the health care issue, hundereds of Americans die every day inspite of their healthcare they have paid for. So what's your point?
If the innocence of the people who die in an incident is pure enough, if enough people die (i.e., plane crash), or there is something else that grabs people's attention (like miners trapped underground), then we're sucked in. Joe Blow driving to work? Well, we all do it every day, so it's not a big deal.
How many people in the US are going to care that *another* building roof collapsed in Europe yesterday, killing a bunch of people? Probably not too many.
How many people around the world are going to care whether the Pittsburg Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks in the Superbowl? Probably about 10. But it'll be the Biggest F'ing Deal in the US for the next week or so.
It's not nationalistic pride or anything else. It's just human nature.
Don't forget that you probably didn't know of the issues with the ORings before the Challenger launch, and you were probably assuming like everyone else that things would be OK, that Christa McAuliffe's Classes From Space would have been cool, etc.
So stow your cynical conspiracy theories. Sometimes, despite our best intentions and regardless of our worst ones, bad shit still happens.
Meanwhile,
Palestinian news reports on an American death as either a reminder that Allah is punishing the Great Infidels for their promiscuous societal ways or just...not reported at all, either.
It's the tribal aspect of human nature. That which is inside the tribe is part of the news. That which is outside of the tribe is insignificant, as long as it does not involve the tribe.
Where is the circumspective journalism in all islamic press entities when another young Islamic person throws their life away for some stupid elder's whims, saying, is blowing up the best minds of our future generations the best way to get along in the world that is proceeding without our involvement?
This mighty sword cuts in all directions, not just on American journalism.
Read up on how the Canadian ag industry feels about the US ban on Canadian ruminant imports... or the Canadian view towards the US' tariff actions on softwood exports to the US.
The root causes of most of the "terrorism" is a result of the propaganda machines in the countries in question in order to create dissention and distrust towards an external entity as the source of their problems, rather than the fucked up countries they live in.
If anything, the press in the US is becoming more like the press in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc., where any dissenting views against the Administration are attacked in every other way except for arguing about the facts. Divide-and-Conquer (or KeepDivided-and-StayInPower)., and those who wish to maintain discontent based on externalities in order to further their agendas (left and right) are doing quite well. The Press is just a corporate entity now, and large corporations do well to suck up to the Government as best as they can. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. Plus, cranky, divisive news sells better than saner, less subjective news.
Don't lump all US agribusiness into the people who feed ADM. ADM is the entity that lobbies against removing the EtOH tarriff, on behalf of the farmers (sort of like the RIAA does for its artists).
The US Government now is not into free market economics anymore. It is into business model protection. Vertically integrated dairies (dairy produces milk, bottles it and sells it to retailers) that provide milk cheaper than the typical dairy coop or Dean's Foods? Hmm... no, that's not fair, so the FDA must stick them with the same rules that "protect" the coops from Dean's Foods!
great.
Humboldt's Squid are that agressive, though.
Turn off System Restore, too. And leave it off, unless you know you're going to be making a change that you might want to undo.
I heard it "live" on the radio, while driving down to Seattle for a ROTC scholarship interview at the Univ. of Washington. When I got there, of course, everyone was watching it on CNN. It was a long drive home.
I woke up and turned on the TV to watch the Columbia return, just to see the initial video feeds of it zooming over Texas in chunks, live. Oh shit, not again.
I didn't see the first tower fall, but was listening to it on the radio while driving my daughter to the doctor's office. I was pissed off about the whole deal walking out to the car because I thought it was just a cessna or lear jet that crashed into it, not a big deal. Yeah, right. Watched the 2nd tower fall on the TV at the Dr's office.
I still hope to go see a Shuttle launch (or whatever replaces it) with my kids one of these years.
paraffin in GB == Kerosene in US
More technically, it was a "conflagration", or, the sudden and spontaneous complete combustion of fuel and oxidizer. Much like those videos of the rocket fuel plant in Nevada that was on fire and suddenly blew up, all on live TV, except that was more akin to an explosion, because you can see the shockwave radiating away from the site before it got to the helicopter...
ammonium nitrate and fuel oil isn't particularly dangerous (not like TNT, octol, etc), unless you have a lot of it and you set it off with a percussive trigger. If you had a couple of pounds of it and just set it on fire, it's just going to burn. C4 is the same way.