It *is not* trivial to make a bomb, particularly a plutonium bomb. It's in the bounds of established third-world technology with some work, but you aren't going to be cobbling together a functional explosive lens compression system in your garage. Some of the parts needed are very special, and non-proliferation efforts are at least partially directed to preventing these parts from circulating. U235 is probably less daunting, but it's also a lot harder to refine.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I know enough about it to know it's not as easy as you make it out to be.
Now how can we argue with that. I think we are all indebted to Gabby Johnson here for clearly stating what had to be said. And I'm glad the children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish...but it expressed a courage that is little seen in this day and age.
Hyper-over-reaction in the original article, and the summary.
This sort of thing is not particularly unusual. The shuttle gets hit with perceptible impact dozens to hundreds of times per mission. They have polish out a few to dozens of divots from the windows alone after each flight. The rocks/paint chip/aluminum particles that make up most of the impactors don't have window-seeking guidance systems, so there are proportionally more hits on the rest of the vehicle too. It's just a matter of statistics to determine that it will hit something relatively interesting/important every once in a while. The odds have been known since the mid-60s. And while the odds are increasing due to man-made debris, it's nothing that exceeds the overall reliability from other reasons. This sort of thing is just a cost of doing business, and it's not going to put an end to anything in the space program.
And no, in this case the hole in the radiator certainly wasn't caused by dropped bolts, or co-orbital debris. By defintion, these have relatively low velocities relative to the shuttle. After the shuttle separated from the ISS and for the few days afterwards, it was, as most, a few hundred feet per second. The impact was clearly a hyper-velocity impact on the order of miles/second.
Those are some good examples of how the generate new features incorrectly. But, the biggest problem with MS products are the goddam bugs, and they are doing absolutely nothing to fix those, near as I can tell. I just want to be able to edit a minimally-formatted Word document for more than half an hour and through a few saves without the fucking thing getting corrupted. But no, we got tons of unusable features (like the idiotic "collapsed menus" thing, as you mentioned), and the same "Disk is full" errors and randomly-exploding table formats that they had in Word 97. With no end in sight.
from TFS: >What makes this particularly interesting >is that Erlich is a Republican -- the >party often maligned for exploiting >flaws in electronic systems -- and his >attempts to clean up Maryland's voting >problems are being opposed by Democrats, >the party that is usually complaining >about electronic voting!"
I suppose that you have forgotten that those claims of manipulating electronic votes were not valid, and typical hyper-partisan drivel. Maybe it has been repeated as a mantra often enough to make it seem real to some, but that has no bearing on its accuracy or prove that it's based on something valid.
This sort of idiotic conspiracy theory crap doesn't pass the basic tenets of common decency, much less public discourse.
MOST people holding public office are genuinely trying to do the right thing. And, most believe that their own personal positions are the right positions and therefore would prefer honest votes. It doesn't matter which party they happen to belong to.
I had an Ionic breeze, and it definitely works. It moves a fair bit of air, and it definitely takes dust out. Those plates get dirty pretty quickly, and you do just have to wipe it off.
However, I found that it while it's silent to start with, it doesn't stay "silent. As it gets dirty, it start to buzz a little bit. Wiping the plates doesn't entirely fix it, because stuff also sticks to the other pole of the circuit. There are 4 long wires suspended in the case from top to that ionize the dust, and then the plates attract it. Eventually, the wires get dirty too, and to clean them you need to wipe them somehow. I used a bit of paper towel taped to the end of a piece of arrowshaft tubing. It's a pain to do, and while I never did it, it would be easy to break the wire.
My ionic breeze blew the internal fuse one day, when one of the capacitors in the high-voltage power supply spewed it's guts out, and I never bothered to fix it.
There's probably a lot better ways to cool off computer chips, I would think. A heat sink with a thermionic cooler would seem a lot more practical.
Why do you think it's contaminated? It's different. I fail to see why anyone is happy having rice with unintentional, random genetic changes (i.e. natural rice) and concerned over intentional changes.
> Why is congress getting involved? Isn't this area sufficiently covered > by state and federal law that they can leave it up to an Attorney General somewhere? > I suspect grandstanding.
A chance to grill one of the those terrible corporate executive fat cats, possibly on TV? Two months before a mid-term election? I just can't see the connection...
Window shielding is a well-established technology. Note http://www.lessemf.com/plastic.html. This has been done for decades for secure facilities. There's nothing new about RF shielded/Faraday cage buildings.
Given that it's slashdot, no. If that had happened, the board would be filled with posts about how Chimpy McBushitler failed to protect America and got those otherwise thoughtful and kind guys in al Queda and Hezbollah mad at us by invading the peaceful and happy shangri-la of Iraq. Where little kids flew kites in carefree safety and freedom.
Instead we get a board with posts about how terrible it is for people to have to take their shoes off and put toothpaste in their checked baggage, because Chimpy McBushitler... (fill in the rest with typical DU and KosKids tinfoil hat conspiracy theories).
What will get this stopped is if the noise level is above the legal limit at the edge of his property.
Get a DB meter (Radio Shack's is as good as any). Go to nearest point before entering his property. Record DB level. If it's above the legal limit for your community, call police with noise complaint. Show them DB meter reading. They will probably attempt to confirm you results. If they confirm the reading, they will make him shut it off.
If the noise level it below the legal limit at the edge of the property you have no recourse, the law/statute is not being broken. You could try to sue him but that's a crap-shoot. Probably start with trying to get a temporary injunction.
Trying to "fix" the problem yourself by breaking or stealing the device, counter-harrasment of some sort, is just as likely to get you in trouble. Noise cancellation - microphone, amplifier with a high-pass filter, and a cheap stero speaker (or just the tweeter) may work locally.
>I would find that a true delta configuration would be >unlikely as there would be little evolutionary advantage >to developing an inherently less stable "wing" configuration >for the low speed flying that this creature would be doing.
Probably, but not necessarily. Such wing configurations also allow much wider ranges of angle of attack/higher stall angles. I can see that being useful if you are trying to fly around in a forest.
What do you mean, the "good old days"? The Saturn S-II and S-IV/IVB LH2 tanks were insulated. The S-II, I beleive, had essentially the same system for insulation as the shuttle main tank, except that it was painted white. LH2 tanks *need* insulation; they are much much colder than liquid oxygen as used in the Atlas example above. Of course, the insulation could be in the inside.
>Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years,
>particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them.
>Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are
> degraded beyond use?
What in the world are you talking about? I have hundreds of audio CDs dating back to the beginning of the CD (86?), and not a single one of them fails to play. Some have been played perhaps a hundred times over the last 20 years or so. I take no particular precautions, they sit out in the dust sometimes, get tossed into the passenger seat of the car and then fall on the floor and flop around for a while. I may have had one that would skip, and when that happens, usually, just cleaning it off with Windex on my t-shirt fixes it.
Note that I am referring are professionally-produced CDs for the most part. Cheapie CD-R media burned at home definitely is not likely to be as durable. If nothing else you can delaminate the plastic from the media if you try. But short of intentionally damaging it, all of mine dating back about 6 years also still work.
Brett
>The future will be full of cars that only exaust water....and fueling stations >brimming with switch-grass, corn-mash, stale beer, human feces, and the > occasional Rhodoferax ferrireducens bateria
The future? Obviously, you have never been in a typical Tennessee gas station...
How can there be a "next generation" of fusion reactors that are going to be "more efficient", when the aren't any viable, net-energy-producing fusion reactors AT ALL? To have a next generation, you first have to have a *first generation*. It's still an entirely open question whether functional fusion reactors (with postive energy balance) can even be built.
It was "SCE" to Aux - Signal Conditioning Electronics to Auxiliary. The SCE was what provided the intrumentation that went to telemetry, so when the primary SCE got zapped, the telemetry itself was invalid, so you couldn't see the actual state of the spacecraft on the ground. Once that was fixed, they could then begin assessing the state and providing corrective reconfiguration commanding.
A lot of people equate "knowledge about computers" with "intelligence". There are some people in the IT world that consider their completion of a Java programming class as proof that they are the next Einstein. That's where the amazing arrogance comes from -"I know what the word "instantiate" means, therefore, I am far smarter than the average human being, perhaps the next step in human evolution". Where, in fact, they would still fail out of the Airco Institute.
No offense, but I said nothing about monetary cost. A fast electric car runs for a shorter time/distance than a slow one, because you can't store enough energy.
It won't be fast for long! There's no particular magic to making an electric car accelerate faster of have a higher top speed than some gasoline-powered cars. Just put in a bigger motor that produces more horsepower.
Problem is obviously that to get more power out, you have to put more amp-hours in, and if you run at a high power level it's not going to last very long. You can still only store so much energy per unit mass in a battery, and it's still FAR less than the energy per unit mass you can store in gasoline.
THAT's the reason all attempts at *practical* all-electric cars result in wimpy performance - they are trying to extend the range by limiting the performance. It's not anything about the inherent weakness of the motor, it's about the limited power you can store.
TRW DIDN'T build the Hubble. It was Lockheed, in Sunnyvale. Lockheed was the prime contractor and built the spacecraft systems, and Perkin-Elmer was contracted for the telescope assembly. I saw the damn thing being put together, and it wasn't in Redondo Beach...
Slashdot Mirror
It *is not* trivial to make a bomb, particularly a plutonium bomb. It's in the bounds of established third-world technology with some work, but you aren't going to be cobbling together a functional explosive lens compression system in your garage. Some of the parts needed are very special, and non-proliferation efforts are at least partially directed to preventing these parts from circulating. U235 is probably less daunting, but it's also a lot harder to refine.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I know enough about it to know it's not as easy as you make it out to be.
Brett
Now how can we argue with that. I think we are all indebted to Gabby Johnson here for clearly stating what had to be said. And I'm glad the children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish...but it expressed a courage that is little seen in this day and age.
Hyper-over-reaction in the original article, and the summary.
This sort of thing is not particularly unusual. The shuttle gets hit with perceptible impact dozens to hundreds of times per mission. They have polish out a few to dozens of divots from the windows alone after each flight. The rocks/paint chip/aluminum particles that make up most of the impactors don't have window-seeking guidance systems, so there are proportionally more hits on the rest of the vehicle too. It's just a matter of statistics to determine that it will hit something relatively interesting/important every once in a while. The odds have been known since the mid-60s. And while the odds are increasing due to man-made debris, it's nothing that exceeds the overall reliability from other reasons. This sort of thing is just a cost of doing business, and it's not going to put an end to anything in the space program.
And no, in this case the hole in the radiator certainly wasn't caused by dropped bolts, or co-orbital debris. By defintion, these have relatively low velocities relative to the shuttle. After the shuttle separated from the ISS and for the few days afterwards, it was, as most, a few hundred feet per second. The impact was clearly a hyper-velocity impact on the order of miles/second.
Brett
Those are some good examples of how the generate new features incorrectly. But, the biggest problem with MS products are the goddam bugs, and they are doing absolutely nothing to fix those, near as I can tell. I just want to be able to edit a minimally-formatted Word document for more than half an hour and through a few saves without the fucking thing getting corrupted. But no, we got tons of unusable features (like the idiotic "collapsed menus" thing, as you mentioned), and the same "Disk is full" errors and randomly-exploding table formats that they had in Word 97. With no end in sight.
Brett
from TFS:
>What makes this particularly interesting
>is that Erlich is a Republican -- the
>party often maligned for exploiting
>flaws in electronic systems -- and his
>attempts to clean up Maryland's voting
>problems are being opposed by Democrats,
>the party that is usually complaining
>about electronic voting!"
I suppose that you have forgotten that those claims of manipulating electronic votes were not valid, and typical hyper-partisan drivel. Maybe it has been repeated as a mantra often enough to make it seem real to some, but that has no bearing on its accuracy or prove that it's based on something valid.
This sort of idiotic conspiracy theory crap doesn't pass the basic tenets of common decency, much less public discourse.
MOST people holding public office are genuinely trying to do the right thing. And, most believe that their own personal positions are the right positions and therefore would prefer honest votes. It doesn't matter which party they happen to belong to.
Brett
500W? I don't think so! Maybe if Sony wants to sell it as a combination game console/TOASTER. High-def Blu-Ray English muffins are teh bom!
50W would be pretty reasonable, 100W would surprise me a bit.
Brett
I had an Ionic breeze, and it definitely works. It moves a fair bit of air, and it definitely takes dust out. Those plates get dirty pretty quickly, and you do just have to wipe it off.
However, I found that it while it's silent to start with, it doesn't stay "silent. As it gets dirty, it start to buzz a little bit. Wiping the plates doesn't entirely fix it, because stuff also sticks to the other pole of the circuit. There are 4 long wires suspended in the case from top to that ionize the dust, and then the plates attract it. Eventually, the wires get dirty too, and to clean them you need to wipe them somehow. I used a bit of paper towel taped to the end of a piece of arrowshaft tubing. It's a pain to do, and while I never did it, it would be easy to break the wire.
My ionic breeze blew the internal fuse one day, when one of the capacitors in the high-voltage power supply spewed it's guts out, and I never bothered to fix it.
There's probably a lot better ways to cool off computer chips, I would think. A heat sink with a thermionic cooler would seem a lot more practical.
Brett
Why do you think it's contaminated? It's different. I fail to see why anyone is happy having rice with unintentional, random genetic changes (i.e. natural rice) and concerned over intentional changes.
brett
> Why is congress getting involved? Isn't this area sufficiently covered
> by state and federal law that they can leave it up to an Attorney General somewhere?
> I suspect grandstanding.
A chance to grill one of the those terrible corporate executive fat cats, possibly on TV? Two months before a mid-term election? I just can't see the connection...
Brett
The problem is that (many) parents are taking the tack that the "Nanny State" should do their jobs for them.
Brett
Window shielding is a well-established technology. Note http://www.lessemf.com/plastic.html. This has been done for decades for secure facilities. There's nothing new about RF shielded/Faraday cage buildings.
Brett
$52 million is ultra-cheap in the supercomputer world.
Brett
Given that it's slashdot, no. If that had happened, the board would be filled with posts about how Chimpy McBushitler failed to protect America and got those otherwise thoughtful and kind guys in al Queda and Hezbollah mad at us by invading the peaceful and happy shangri-la of Iraq. Where little kids flew kites in carefree safety and freedom.
Instead we get a board with posts about how terrible it is for people to have to take their shoes off and put toothpaste in their checked baggage, because Chimpy McBushitler... (fill in the rest with typical DU and KosKids tinfoil hat conspiracy theories).
Brett
What will get this stopped is if the noise level is above the legal limit at the edge of his property.
Get a DB meter (Radio Shack's is as good as any).
Go to nearest point before entering his property.
Record DB level. If it's above the legal limit for your community, call police with noise complaint.
Show them DB meter reading. They will probably attempt to confirm you results. If they confirm the reading, they will make him shut it off.
If the noise level it below the legal limit at the edge of the property you have no recourse, the law/statute is not being broken.
You could try to sue him but that's a crap-shoot. Probably start with trying to get a temporary injunction.
Trying to "fix" the problem yourself by breaking or stealing the device, counter-harrasment of some sort, is just as likely to get you in trouble. Noise cancellation - microphone, amplifier with a high-pass filter, and a cheap stero speaker (or just the tweeter) may work locally.
Brett
>I would find that a true delta configuration would be
>unlikely as there would be little evolutionary advantage
>to developing an inherently less stable "wing" configuration
>for the low speed flying that this creature would be doing.
Probably, but not necessarily. Such wing configurations also allow much wider ranges of angle of attack/higher stall angles. I can see that being useful if you are trying to fly around in a forest.
Brett
What do you mean, the "good old days"? The Saturn S-II and S-IV/IVB LH2 tanks were insulated. The S-II, I beleive, had essentially the same system for insulation as the shuttle main tank, except that it was painted white. LH2 tanks *need* insulation; they are much much colder than liquid oxygen as used in the Atlas example above. Of course, the insulation could be in the inside.
Brett
>Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, >particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. >Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are > degraded beyond use? What in the world are you talking about? I have hundreds of audio CDs dating back to the beginning of the CD (86?), and not a single one of them fails to play. Some have been played perhaps a hundred times over the last 20 years or so. I take no particular precautions, they sit out in the dust sometimes, get tossed into the passenger seat of the car and then fall on the floor and flop around for a while. I may have had one that would skip, and when that happens, usually, just cleaning it off with Windex on my t-shirt fixes it. Note that I am referring are professionally-produced CDs for the most part. Cheapie CD-R media burned at home definitely is not likely to be as durable. If nothing else you can delaminate the plastic from the media if you try. But short of intentionally damaging it, all of mine dating back about 6 years also still work. Brett
>The future will be full of cars that only exaust water....and fueling stations
>brimming with switch-grass, corn-mash, stale beer, human feces, and the
> occasional Rhodoferax ferrireducens bateria
The future? Obviously, you have never been in a typical Tennessee gas station...
Brett
How can there be a "next generation" of fusion reactors that are going to be "more efficient", when the aren't any viable, net-energy-producing fusion reactors AT ALL? To have a next generation, you first have to have a *first generation*. It's still an entirely open question whether functional fusion reactors (with postive energy balance) can even be built.
Brett
It was "SCE" to Aux - Signal Conditioning Electronics to Auxiliary. The SCE was what provided the intrumentation that went to telemetry, so when the primary SCE got zapped, the telemetry itself was invalid, so you couldn't see the actual state of the spacecraft on the ground. Once that was fixed, they could then begin assessing the state and providing corrective reconfiguration commanding.
Brett
A lot of people equate "knowledge about computers" with "intelligence". There are some people in the IT world that consider their completion of a Java programming class as proof that they are the next Einstein. That's where the amazing arrogance comes from -"I know what the word "instantiate" means, therefore, I am far smarter than the average human being, perhaps the next step in human evolution". Where, in fact, they would still fail out of the Airco Institute.
Brett
No offense, but I said nothing about monetary cost. A fast electric car runs for a shorter time/distance than a slow one, because you can't store enough energy.
Brett
It won't be fast for long! There's no particular magic to making an electric car accelerate faster of have a higher top speed than some gasoline-powered cars. Just put in a bigger motor that produces more horsepower.
Problem is obviously that to get more power out, you have to put more amp-hours in, and if you run at a high power level it's not going to last very long. You can still only store so much energy per unit mass in a battery, and it's still FAR less than the energy per unit mass you can store in gasoline.
THAT's the reason all attempts at *practical* all-electric cars result in wimpy performance - they are trying to extend the range by limiting the performance. It's not anything about the inherent weakness of the motor, it's about the limited power you can store.
Brett
Of course, getting some to dump Windoze and use MacOS *IS* a public service...
TRW DIDN'T build the Hubble. It was Lockheed, in Sunnyvale. Lockheed was the prime contractor and built the spacecraft systems, and Perkin-Elmer was contracted for the telescope assembly. I saw the damn thing being put together, and it wasn't in Redondo Beach...
Brett