What are you talking about? No one was going around asking each individual soldier, sailor and Marine what their personal thoughts were on invasion. Had they done it, the overwhelming vote would have been to abandon it. They knew they were the ones going onto the beaches and about to be shot. But the "US forces" are not a democracy.
The only people that matter at this level of discussion are the people in the headquarters. And while they as individuals were somewhat split, the decision taken and the actions initiated said "Invasion". The bomb was a sideline, a Hail Mary, high-risk bet, that they all hoped would pay off. It did.
The US forces were not planning an invasion until October-November anyway. Those peole would have died had the bombs not worked or Japan not surrendered. The bomb was first an effort to save the lives of American soldiers, and second an effort to forestall serious Russian incursions into Japanese territory. The Russians were our allies, but we knew they wanted parts of the Japanese islands back from losses in the Russo-Japanese War.
Saving the lives of civilians was a poor third at best. The war was already in progress. They would be saved or die as chance would allow. The US was not fighting on the basis of liberating the most subjugated people first. It was moving on the basis of strategic advantage to get at the Japanese home islands and end the war soonest. Saving civilian lives was a byproduct.
The name's Fermi, and seeing as NASA already knows how to paint the tank (they've done it on two flights in the past), I don't see the need to teach them again. Hint: the insulation is porous, part of the ice problem in the first place.
The trick is to get the non-stick coating to stick to the paint. But really the non-stick just needs to be good enough that the ice will shed when it is in very thin layers, not big thick chunks. Not much more than freezer wrap really.
I only meant to paint the parts of the tank next the shuttle. Not as much weight as the original paint scheme.
The hazard is ice falling off the tank and hitting the orbiter. It *should* be relatively easy to figure out where it would come from and where it will go. The rest of the tank can shed ice as it always has.
The insulation is only for use on the ground anyway, during filling and test operations. They don't actually need it in flight. As you say, it is just more weight.
Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired.
Remember, SpaceShipOne is not orbital capable. It is capable of going straight up, then straight back down. Achieving orbit (and recovering to earth sucessfully) requires 30 - 50 times more energy due to the much higher velocities to get to orbit.
Lots of speed = lots of heat, and you need a way to shed it if you don't want to burn up. They've known that for years and it doesn't change just because you have a famous name and don't work for NASA.
They may have hosed the shuttle program as a whole, but the technology involved to make it work is some of the best ever invented. Being Burt Rutan doesn't change that. For Ex: part of the reason the first SpaceShipOne flight went swooping in corkscrews is because Rutan decided it didn't need a gimbaling engine. The one they installed was off alignment. Ooops.
NASA needs to re-adopt the paint on the external tank. At least on the shuttle side of the tank, the foam insulation needs a coat of paint to eliminate the porosity of the foam. That will lock the ice out of the foam and prevent it from tearing it off the tank.
The paint probably ought to be non-stick coated to inhibit excess ice formation too. Then put heaters in critical locations to break up the ice while the shuttle stack is sitting on the ground, or still moving at slow speeds. That way, supersonic chunks of ice won't go zinging into the shuttle body and we don't have to wonder if we've launched another one way mission to space.
I've seen the preview, and I have to say I disagree with the parent on some grounds, but not all.
Whedon is formulaic, but formulaic like Silverado or Raiders of the Lost Ark were. He knows the genre and he knows what buttons to push and he tries to push all of them. That means he needs interesting plot twists and unexpected surprises, but it also means the audience knows that the "thump in the dark" is really a cat, and when they calm down the bad guys jumps out at you anyway.
For example, this film has two characters that go in two completely different directions. One is, I think, indispensible to the plot. Interesting and dark and different. We need like this one. The other was totally forgettable. I think they created that one just to be sacrificed. That is formula too. You need cannon fodder so the hero can look heroic.
Bottom line: Hollywood is about the money. They don't make what won't sell. Oddball may be artisically cool, but it goes straight to video, then the Late Late Show two weeks later. Whedon is making stuff that sells, and is getting as close to the edge as he dares.
"How many fight scenes did you see in firefly? Or are you judging a movie..."
Actually, I did see an early preview, and the unrealisitc fight scenes were my biggest (and really only) criticism in the feedback.
They are cool to watch, but really are more fanboy fantasy that barroom brawl. You know, how we're all Muhammed Ali and Bruce Lee in our own minds? That is how they played to me. It was too easy to kick the bad guy's a**.
But on the good side, I agree with the cast (Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Jewel Staite at Dragoncon) when I say "SUMMER GLAU IS AMAZING!!" I guess ballet training really makes you a *GREAT* stuntwoman. Really can't wait to see more of her.
The parent message might be a little paranoid, but this is a real consideration. The former Soviet Union considered maps to be a weapon for almost this exact reason. Same goes for some of the Central American jungle wars in the 80s and 90s.
In any case, in addition to considering the GPS unit itself, consider the mapping software. Most people get software that tells them how to go places. You will need software that lets you build new maps. It has to store and lable many hundreds, if not thousands, of new points. Many of those points will need specific lables like "Intersection, First and Main" or "Junction, Highway 1 and West Africa Blvd" or "community well" or "village market, east end entrance".
Plus, accuracy is a problem too. GPS is generally good to 30 meters, and can be as good as 10 meters without using Differential GPS. That is a big deal if you are marking the ends of runways, or road intersections, or the edges of cliffs, or the tops of peaks. You might want a GPS unit that can give you an accuracy estimate, or one that integrates over time to improve its own accuracy. Plus it would be nice if it gives you elevation as well as Lat and Long.
If you are just walking down the course of a road, a reading every few hundred meters would be nice. Especially every time you hit a significant turn in the road. A good rule of thumb (maybe just a marginally OK rule of thumb) is to not get out of sight of the last spot you took a reading at. It is like having a trail of breadcrumbs when you take all those data points and try to build a map from them.
Last tidbit: you might want to stop by a Professional Land surveyor's office before you go, to see if he (or she) has any tips for you. They do this sort of thing for a living.
See, the think of it is, I sort of agree that the US should not have a monopoly on Internet governance. That's only fair.
But I ALSO don't think control should be given to the UN. Too much corruption and "compromise". We'll end up with Malfeasance, Misfeasance, and Non-feasance all standing in the server room staring at each other, wondering how to plug in the router.
Damn this democratic control stuff anyway. The Internet elite and the Political elite don't share the same values and the Internet people don't want to be regulated by the priorities of the Political side.
If only mp3.com had not got so greedy and stupid with their My Mp3 site. That was when the RIAA had them. Trying to say that listening to a pre-uploaded copy of a song was the same as listening to the copy of that song you had at home was logically and legally dubious at best.
Had Mp3.com just stayed a simple portal for no name bands, they would be as big as Yahoo is today. Instead, they folded, sold out and are now just an empty husk.
Anyone that thinks they can just jump into Linux from Windows or Mac is kidding themselves, unless they really like big learning experiences. Especially if they are doing their own maintainence.
[Long diatribe on Linux isn't ready for the desktop]
But once it becomes oreiented to the users and usability and away from Geek-heaven-creeping-featurism, it will be. Make it Easy and they will come.
Its more of a hack on the keyboard itself. The traces behind the buttons can (could) be made to do reciprocal things. If you wanted to activate the funtion in the upper right corner, you pressed the three buttons on the upper left, lower left, and lower right simultaneously.
You can see the same sort of thing on older touch tone telephones. Press adjacent buttons and you can hear one of the pure tones touch tone is made of.
Unfortunately, there are programmers using CLI out there developing tools for GUI users. The GUIs function, sorta, kinda, after a fashion, but the programmers never have to actually use them, so they don't understand all the complaints and whining over how crappy the GUIs are.
This should sound really familiar to Linux developers. If it doesn't, perhaps you are POTP. The Apple HIG have been out for, what, about 20 years now?
If you can get enough whole DNA, you could at least seriously think about putting it into an egg and gestating another animal. But in the current climate of hysteria over cloning, you can't say that out loud or the whackos will be all over you.
If it isn't at least thinkable, why are they denying it is possible? Because they know it is a conclusion people will jump to. The creation process may be difficult and error-prone, but it isn't outside the realm of possibility, as Dolly the shppe would tell you if she were alive (and had a working vocal system).
Besides, they don't want to spoil the surprise when the pre-historic animals inevitably escape from their foolproof enclosures.
The crime here is not that you know someone that knows someone that is a criminal. That sort of progression may very well cover a huge fraction of the earth's population.
The crime is in knowingly putting someone in contact with someone else for a criminal purpose. That sort of thing has the flavor of criminal conspiracy. This is not a case of, "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I barely know through a third person", this is "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I'm pretty sure can supply you with the illegal products you were actively soliciting for just a momement ago". It has those two great legal requirements, active participation and guilty knowledge.
In the legitimate business world it would be known as a sales referral, and you might get a finder's fee for doing it. Same goes for crimnals (I guess).
"Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so"
They picked up several dozen people at my high school for doing exactly that.
In that case it was a drug sting operation, but the principle is the same. If you tell me about a friend of a friend that can get me weed/pills/blow, you go to jail for facillitation. Why would that not also be true of warez and music/movies?
I will admit my understanding of the protocol is not great. But I had alwasy thought the point of the tracker was to provide a list of the modules in the total file to be downloaded, a hash/checksum of the pieces, and to provide an "anchor" / mount point / directory for new people entering the torrent.
Say a new guy sees a file he wants and downloads the.torrent file. The client needs to know where to start looking for the pieces. Since the individual members of the torrent changes every moment, there needs to be a way to find out who is in it to ask for the first piece. And (at least) that first address has to be fixed so that a new member can join a torrent that has been running for weeks.
I've always thought of it as sort of an anchor spot, that the rest of the torrent sort of revolves around as people come and go. If that spot disappeared, the members of the torrent AT THAT TIME could continue to exchange data, since they know each other's addresses in thier ad hoc private network. But a new guy wouldn't have a clue who they are, since it is a dynamic process not encoded in the.torrent file.
A similar situation would be if all the seeds in a torrent dropped off. That is bad, but it might be survivable if all the clients had all the pieces distributed. Once they handed all the pieces around to each other, they'd be fine. But if all the pieces aren't out there, then a new guy would be screwed, since there is no seed to pick up unknown pieces from.
The correct pronunciation of SQL is "skweel", as in "squeal like a pig". But this usage is rarely heard, due to the unfortunate but inevitable comparisons to the database admin's home life.
The point is that searching for something you haven't seen in a while is compute intensive and the harder part of the job. Any decent database system can track whatever you run past the scanner. But it takes power to notice that something is missing.
It isn't like all the inmates get searched in sequential order ever 20 minutes like on a carousel or something. They are milling around the whole prison. Some may get hits 50 times daily, some 5 times. RFID has limited useful range, so it is possible for an inmate to NOT walk past a sensor for long periods of time, but still be inside the prison. It is an ansynchronous, chaotic thing. And like any alarm system, you need to detect the problems without firing off "too many" false alarms. Doing it well is going to need lots of fine tuning on the hardware placement too.
And, by the way, the prisoners may just decide to screw with you, so they may go out of their way to not walk past a sensor, thus creating false alarms.
The trouble is, the database tracks the wrong thing.
It tracks RFID on prisoners in the prison. So you know a lot about the positions of the inmates THAT AREN'T A PROBLEM.
What you really need to know is: 1) are inmates getting into areas they SHOULDN'T be in? and; 2) have you seen every inmate recently?
If a tag doesn't come up on the hit list every X hours, then you have a problem. For all the high tech hacks I've seen discussed on the article, all an inmate really needs to do is wrap his bracelet with a few layers of foil and walk past every detector in the place on his way out the door.
depending on how smart the electronics are, then connectivity is not the only thing a continuity wire give you.
Think Wheatstone Bridge. The wire loop is part of a balanced circuit. Putting a jumper wire around the cut still sets off an alarm because the resistance changes. Get fancier and you can send pulses down the wire and detect the break that way, through impedance/induction changes.
The skin contact detection is probably some kind of capacitance thing. Even small people have relatively huge capacitance compared to the bracelet alone.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you talking about? No one was going around asking each individual soldier, sailor and Marine what their personal thoughts were on invasion. Had they done it, the overwhelming vote would have been to abandon it. They knew they were the ones going onto the beaches and about to be shot. But the "US forces" are not a democracy.
The only people that matter at this level of discussion are the people in the headquarters. And while they as individuals were somewhat split, the decision taken and the actions initiated said "Invasion". The bomb was a sideline, a Hail Mary, high-risk bet, that they all hoped would pay off. It did.
The US forces were not planning an invasion until October-November anyway. Those peole would have died had the bombs not worked or Japan not surrendered. The bomb was first an effort to save the lives of American soldiers, and second an effort to forestall serious Russian incursions into Japanese territory. The Russians were our allies, but we knew they wanted parts of the Japanese islands back from losses in the Russo-Japanese War.
Saving the lives of civilians was a poor third at best. The war was already in progress. They would be saved or die as chance would allow. The US was not fighting on the basis of liberating the most subjugated people first. It was moving on the basis of strategic advantage to get at the Japanese home islands and end the war soonest. Saving civilian lives was a byproduct.
De Nada. I live to serve.
The name's Fermi, and seeing as NASA already knows how to paint the tank (they've done it on two flights in the past), I don't see the need to teach them again. Hint: the insulation is porous, part of the ice problem in the first place.
The trick is to get the non-stick coating to stick to the paint. But really the non-stick just needs to be good enough that the ice will shed when it is in very thin layers, not big thick chunks. Not much more than freezer wrap really.
I only meant to paint the parts of the tank next the shuttle. Not as much weight as the original paint scheme.
The hazard is ice falling off the tank and hitting the orbiter. It *should* be relatively easy to figure out where it would come from and where it will go. The rest of the tank can shed ice as it always has.
The insulation is only for use on the ground anyway, during filling and test operations. They don't actually need it in flight. As you say, it is just more weight.
Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired.
Remember, SpaceShipOne is not orbital capable. It is capable of going straight up, then straight back down. Achieving orbit (and recovering to earth sucessfully) requires 30 - 50 times more energy due to the much higher velocities to get to orbit.
Lots of speed = lots of heat, and you need a way to shed it if you don't want to burn up. They've known that for years and it doesn't change just because you have a famous name and don't work for NASA.
They may have hosed the shuttle program as a whole, but the technology involved to make it work is some of the best ever invented. Being Burt Rutan doesn't change that. For Ex: part of the reason the first SpaceShipOne flight went swooping in corkscrews is because Rutan decided it didn't need a gimbaling engine. The one they installed was off alignment. Ooops.
NASA needs to re-adopt the paint on the external tank. At least on the shuttle side of the tank, the foam insulation needs a coat of paint to eliminate the porosity of the foam. That will lock the ice out of the foam and prevent it from tearing it off the tank.
The paint probably ought to be non-stick coated to inhibit excess ice formation too. Then put heaters in critical locations to break up the ice while the shuttle stack is sitting on the ground, or still moving at slow speeds. That way, supersonic chunks of ice won't go zinging into the shuttle body and we don't have to wonder if we've launched another one way mission to space.
I've seen the preview, and I have to say I disagree with the parent on some grounds, but not all.
Whedon is formulaic, but formulaic like Silverado or Raiders of the Lost Ark were. He knows the genre and he knows what buttons to push and he tries to push all of them. That means he needs interesting plot twists and unexpected surprises, but it also means the audience knows that the "thump in the dark" is really a cat, and when they calm down the bad guys jumps out at you anyway.
For example, this film has two characters that go in two completely different directions. One is, I think, indispensible to the plot. Interesting and dark and different. We need like this one. The other was totally forgettable. I think they created that one just to be sacrificed. That is formula too. You need cannon fodder so the hero can look heroic.
Bottom line: Hollywood is about the money. They don't make what won't sell. Oddball may be artisically cool, but it goes straight to video, then the Late Late Show two weeks later. Whedon is making stuff that sells, and is getting as close to the edge as he dares.
"How many fight scenes did you see in firefly? Or are you judging a movie..."
Actually, I did see an early preview, and the unrealisitc fight scenes were my biggest (and really only) criticism in the feedback.
They are cool to watch, but really are more fanboy fantasy that barroom brawl. You know, how we're all Muhammed Ali and Bruce Lee in our own minds? That is how they played to me. It was too easy to kick the bad guy's a**.
But on the good side, I agree with the cast (Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Jewel Staite at Dragoncon) when I say "SUMMER GLAU IS AMAZING!!" I guess ballet training really makes you a *GREAT* stuntwoman. Really can't wait to see more of her.
The parent message might be a little paranoid, but this is a real consideration. The former Soviet Union considered maps to be a weapon for almost this exact reason. Same goes for some of the Central American jungle wars in the 80s and 90s.
In any case, in addition to considering the GPS unit itself, consider the mapping software. Most people get software that tells them how to go places. You will need software that lets you build new maps. It has to store and lable many hundreds, if not thousands, of new points. Many of those points will need specific lables like "Intersection, First and Main" or "Junction, Highway 1 and West Africa Blvd" or "community well" or "village market, east end entrance".
Plus, accuracy is a problem too. GPS is generally good to 30 meters, and can be as good as 10 meters without using Differential GPS. That is a big deal if you are marking the ends of runways, or road intersections, or the edges of cliffs, or the tops of peaks. You might want a GPS unit that can give you an accuracy estimate, or one that integrates over time to improve its own accuracy. Plus it would be nice if it gives you elevation as well as Lat and Long.
If you are just walking down the course of a road, a reading every few hundred meters would be nice. Especially every time you hit a significant turn in the road. A good rule of thumb (maybe just a marginally OK rule of thumb) is to not get out of sight of the last spot you took a reading at. It is like having a trail of breadcrumbs when you take all those data points and try to build a map from them.
Last tidbit: you might want to stop by a Professional Land surveyor's office before you go, to see if he (or she) has any tips for you. They do this sort of thing for a living.
See, the think of it is, I sort of agree that the US should not have a monopoly on Internet governance. That's only fair.
But I ALSO don't think control should be given to the UN. Too much corruption and "compromise". We'll end up with Malfeasance, Misfeasance, and Non-feasance all standing in the server room staring at each other, wondering how to plug in the router.
Damn this democratic control stuff anyway. The Internet elite and the Political elite don't share the same values and the Internet people don't want to be regulated by the priorities of the Political side.
If only mp3.com had not got so greedy and stupid with their My Mp3 site. That was when the RIAA had them. Trying to say that listening to a pre-uploaded copy of a song was the same as listening to the copy of that song you had at home was logically and legally dubious at best.
Had Mp3.com just stayed a simple portal for no name bands, they would be as big as Yahoo is today. Instead, they folded, sold out and are now just an empty husk.
I for one Welcome our new Pineapple saviours! I look forward to helping them stamp out the insidious Cantelope-Honeydew melon buffet tray cabal.
I sued to work with a guy that would say "Experts were just dried up drips". I had to hear it twice before I got it.
Get Linux and Start complaining.
Anyone that thinks they can just jump into Linux from Windows or Mac is kidding themselves, unless they really like big learning experiences. Especially if they are doing their own maintainence.
[Long diatribe on Linux isn't ready for the desktop]
But once it becomes oreiented to the users and usability and away from Geek-heaven-creeping-featurism, it will be. Make it Easy and they will come.
Its more of a hack on the keyboard itself. The traces behind the buttons can (could) be made to do reciprocal things. If you wanted to activate the funtion in the upper right corner, you pressed the three buttons on the upper left, lower left, and lower right simultaneously.
You can see the same sort of thing on older touch tone telephones. Press adjacent buttons and you can hear one of the pure tones touch tone is made of.
Unfortunately, there are programmers using CLI out there developing tools for GUI users. The GUIs function, sorta, kinda, after a fashion, but the programmers never have to actually use them, so they don't understand all the complaints and whining over how crappy the GUIs are. This should sound really familiar to Linux developers. If it doesn't, perhaps you are POTP. The Apple HIG have been out for, what, about 20 years now?
If you can get enough whole DNA, you could at least seriously think about putting it into an egg and gestating another animal. But in the current climate of hysteria over cloning, you can't say that out loud or the whackos will be all over you.
If it isn't at least thinkable, why are they denying it is possible? Because they know it is a conclusion people will jump to. The creation process may be difficult and error-prone, but it isn't outside the realm of possibility, as Dolly the shppe would tell you if she were alive (and had a working vocal system).
Besides, they don't want to spoil the surprise when the pre-historic animals inevitably escape from their foolproof enclosures.
This is way late, but...
The crime here is not that you know someone that knows someone that is a criminal. That sort of progression may very well cover a huge fraction of the earth's population.
The crime is in knowingly putting someone in contact with someone else for a criminal purpose. That sort of thing has the flavor of criminal conspiracy. This is not a case of, "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I barely know through a third person", this is "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I'm pretty sure can supply you with the illegal products you were actively soliciting for just a momement ago". It has those two great legal requirements, active participation and guilty knowledge.
In the legitimate business world it would be known as a sales referral, and you might get a finder's fee for doing it. Same goes for crimnals (I guess).
"Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so"
They picked up several dozen people at my high school for doing exactly that.
In that case it was a drug sting operation, but the principle is the same. If you tell me about a friend of a friend that can get me weed/pills/blow, you go to jail for facillitation. Why would that not also be true of warez and music/movies?
I will admit my understanding of the protocol is not great. But I had alwasy thought the point of the tracker was to provide a list of the modules in the total file to be downloaded, a hash/checksum of the pieces, and to provide an "anchor" / mount point / directory for new people entering the torrent.
.torrent file. The client needs to know where to start looking for the pieces. Since the individual members of the torrent changes every moment, there needs to be a way to find out who is in it to ask for the first piece. And (at least) that first address has to be fixed so that a new member can join a torrent that has been running for weeks.
.torrent file.
Say a new guy sees a file he wants and downloads the
I've always thought of it as sort of an anchor spot, that the rest of the torrent sort of revolves around as people come and go. If that spot disappeared, the members of the torrent AT THAT TIME could continue to exchange data, since they know each other's addresses in thier ad hoc private network. But a new guy wouldn't have a clue who they are, since it is a dynamic process not encoded in the
A similar situation would be if all the seeds in a torrent dropped off. That is bad, but it might be survivable if all the clients had all the pieces distributed. Once they handed all the pieces around to each other, they'd be fine. But if all the pieces aren't out there, then a new guy would be screwed, since there is no seed to pick up unknown pieces from.
The correct pronunciation of SQL is "skweel", as in "squeal like a pig". But this usage is rarely heard, due to the unfortunate but inevitable comparisons to the database admin's home life.
Thanks for that constructive input.
The point is that searching for something you haven't seen in a while is compute intensive and the harder part of the job. Any decent database system can track whatever you run past the scanner. But it takes power to notice that something is missing.
It isn't like all the inmates get searched in sequential order ever 20 minutes like on a carousel or something. They are milling around the whole prison. Some may get hits 50 times daily, some 5 times. RFID has limited useful range, so it is possible for an inmate to NOT walk past a sensor for long periods of time, but still be inside the prison. It is an ansynchronous, chaotic thing. And like any alarm system, you need to detect the problems without firing off "too many" false alarms. Doing it well is going to need lots of fine tuning on the hardware placement too.
And, by the way, the prisoners may just decide to screw with you, so they may go out of their way to not walk past a sensor, thus creating false alarms.
The trouble is, the database tracks the wrong thing.
It tracks RFID on prisoners in the prison. So you know a lot about the positions of the inmates THAT AREN'T A PROBLEM.
What you really need to know is:
1) are inmates getting into areas they SHOULDN'T be in? and;
2) have you seen every inmate recently?
If a tag doesn't come up on the hit list every X hours, then you have a problem. For all the high tech hacks I've seen discussed on the article, all an inmate really needs to do is wrap his bracelet with a few layers of foil and walk past every detector in the place on his way out the door.
depending on how smart the electronics are, then connectivity is not the only thing a continuity wire give you.
Think Wheatstone Bridge. The wire loop is part of a balanced circuit. Putting a jumper wire around the cut still sets off an alarm because the resistance changes. Get fancier and you can send pulses down the wire and detect the break that way, through impedance/induction changes.
The skin contact detection is probably some kind of capacitance thing. Even small people have relatively huge capacitance compared to the bracelet alone.
This sounds like a pretty smart device.