Charge him with treason, try him, and then kill him.
This sends what diplomats call "a signal" to other slimeballs thinking about selling out to a foreign power.
The other problem with selling out is that sometimes a person on the other team is turned, and gives a list of US citizens who are spies back to US counter-intelligence, and then the spies are screwed.
This happened during the Reagan administration when France turned a member of the KGB high up, and they supplied us with a list of spies. We then arranged for "special" information to be fed to them. We also arranged for "special" chips to be put into PC's that were headed for the USSR by various routes. They degraded over time, giving increasingly unreliable results.
But the most spectacular thing was a Canadian company who made software for managing very large oil networks (such as near a refinery) found out their software was being sent to the USSR via a spy. We told them. So they inserted a subtle trojan horse (more properly, a birthday trojan horse). When there was a lot of very heavy fluid moving through the pipes, the valves were told to slam shut. This resulted in very high pressures in the pipes which burst them.
The resulting fire at one site was so large it triggered the satellites that we watch Russia with as a possible nuclear explosion, because the energy released was in the kilotons of yield. It didn't have the unique double-thermal-pulse of a nuclear weapon, but it was a bigtime fire. The counterspy manager at the NSC had to tell the people there to ignore it, but could not tell them why for 15+ years afterwards.
I've always wondered if someone told Tom Clancy about this, because the start of his novel "Red Storm Rising", about a conventionally fought World War III in Europe, is a massive fire at a refinery leaving the USSR short of oil. Of course, in Clancy's book, it's Islamic radicals who trigger this from the control room, which is a little different from software that triggered itself.
Just before the summit in Iceland, the spy network was rolled up, the spies arrested, tried, and thrown away, hopefully into dungeons. Gorbachev was furious about this, because it meant the data being sent by those spies was probably tampered with and had to be disregarded, and because the USSR increasingly had problems with its PC's. He called Reagan "That liar!" in private.
All of this is a terrific read, and true. You can find it in a book from Thomas Reed, former Undersecretary to the Air Force. It's called "At The Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War". It's at Amazon. Required reading for any Cold War historian.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
There are some things you don't ever touch.
on
New Star Trek Trailer
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm as old as NASA, 50 years, 1958.
And I look at the first Star Trek XI Movie preview, it makes the hair on my arms stand up. Because it's the real memories, and the real heroes.
Do these mere movie-makers know what they're playing with here? I fear not.
These are the hopes and dreams of a whole generation of engineers. We watched Star Trek. "2001: A Space Odyssey" looked downright likely from 1965. We shot Estes rockets into the sky. And all of us wanted, so badly, to experience free-fall, to see the curve of the Earth, as Burt Rutan's vehicle finally did in a Right-Stuff climb... sort of, "What the hell, the instrument panel just lost all power and blacked out; let's just keep going and judge our angle out the window, and if the panel doesn't light back up, well, that'll be interesting..."
These movie-makers have already annoyed a bunch of us, judging from the posts on the second preview.
These... mere movie-makers... they're playing with oxidizers they do not understand. And people who play with oxidizers often only learn when they get their hands burned. (I will mention I was silly enough to play with a mixture potassium chlorate and sugar. As a result I do not recommend this mixture to anyone.)
No? You disagree? How far back does your memory go?
This preview starts...
(Spock welding on the Enterprise...) Voiceover: "30 seconds and counting, astronauts reporting fuel good. T minus 25 seconds..." John F. Kennedy: "The eyes of the world now look into space..." And of course Kennedy made the brash promise, and goal, that we'd go to the Moon "by the end of this decade". And we did it!
(first views of the Enterprise being assembled) Scott Carpenter: "Godspeed, John Glenn", as Glenn went up on the Atlas rocket, which had a habit, no, more like a positive track record, of exploding. In a tiny Mercury capsule. "The Eagle has landed." Neil Armstrong showing The Right Stuff. (various views of the saucer section and the V from engineering to the warp drives being assembled) "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil Armstrong on 11, taking his first step.
And then that one quintessential, defining voice from Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy's voice: "Space... The Final Frontier...", which first showed up on "The Wrath of Khan" after they really did kill Spock off. And many of us left that movie in tears.
As we move up the saucer section and the word "Enterprise" comes into view...
And with the music from the original series, not that awful score from the first movie, we close that preview with a date in 2009.
I remember.
'Star Trek' came out when the Gemini missions were going, to practice rendezvous, which was necessary to go to the Moon. And we were going to the Moon! In those days anything was possible.
(Oh, there were a few jerk congressmen that wanted to stop it all and waste NASA's money for political gain, notably Walter Mondale, who tried to kill things after the Apollo 1 fire, but they didn't get their way until after Apollo 17. They did manage to kill Apollo 18, 19, and 20, and throw half a million aerospace people directly out of a job. I gotta tell you, I dislike those people most strongly. The 'Great Society' did nothing but spend a lot of money proving government doesn't work. And that money could have gone into getting us off this planet.)
Neil Armstrong saved one of those Gemini missions (with Dave Scott). Buzz Aldrin saved another when the rendezvous computer whacked out; he'd brought along a manual way of doing it (his advanced degree was on this subject). NASA picked those two because they were proven troubleshooters, and man, was Apollo 11 almost an abort. Neil overrode the computer when he saw it was bringing him down into a bunch of big rocks. Balancing training, practice, and an indefinable something, Neil hopped a crater, and touched down with seconds of
by couchslug (175151) on Friday November 14, @10:46AM (#25762505):
"What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today." -->
Astronaut Gus Grissom would disagree with you, and he gave his life on Apollo 1. He wrote in a letter:
"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
"Hello, Google. My name is Doctor Chandra. I'd like to teach you to sing a song. It goes like this: 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle built for two.' "
If it replies that it is an "H A L Niner-Triple-Zero", I am going to run screaming, renounce all computers and the Internet, and live a quiet life as a monk somewhere very very hard to reach.
Hmmmmm, and here I once took my shoelaces, tied them into a loop, and cinched the knots as tightly as I could between the crankshaft pulley and the water pump pulley. As you're guessing, the fanbelt that drove the water pump had broken. You can drive for awhile without an alternator or power steering, but driving without a water pump to cool the engine is not a winning proposition (unless you have plenty of time to let the engine cool down with periodic stops). Another good trick is to run the heater, which is a nice little radiator to bleed heat out the engine. All of this got me to a Checker Auto Parts or NAPA, somesuch, and a new fanbelt. (Now I keep one in the trunk).
Honest, I would have tried a purple bungee cord if I'd had any! And you know, whatever that dental floss is made of is really strong... has anyone checked that stuff out for an orbital elevator?
I think John Nance Garner has the best view of the Vice Presidency: "Not worth a bucket of warm spit".
This was FDR's Vice President before Truman (1933-1941).
I think all this attention is a bit over the top.
When LBJ was President of the United States, and word came that Winston Churchill had died, and of course the United States had to send someone to the funeral, a staffer suggested "Send Hubert.", and Lyndon said, "Hubert who?". Someone had to gently remind LBJ that Hubert Humphrey was his Vice President.
Anyone remember George H.W. Bush's Vice President? Dan Quayle? My favorite quote from him was, "I like coming to Latin America, but I don't speak Latin."
And frankly (let me be honest here) when they were Vice Presidents both George H.W. Bush and Albert Gore had a special, amazing, +10 ability to stun audiences with boring speeches. There were rumours at the time that they ran Windows NT inside as their internal operating systems. I've begun to believe that something about the office of Vice President causes a sort of virtual lobotomy to occur.
If either Sarah whatsername or... is it Joe or Ed? whatzisname get elected, I expect that's about the last we'll hear from them.
This was a pretty boring election, really, until Sarah... what IS her name?... showed up with her snow-mobiling husband. This gave the media someone to smother and fume and pontificate about. And then the media got to fume about its own behavior. But that stuff has a limited half-life because the media is the only one who cares about that. (The media is worth only a cup of cold spit, you see).
And to make it even worse, there's no more Page Up or Page Down, because Microsoft has patented those. So you'd have to, like, down-arrow through the pages, which is WAY worse. (I assume the patent office hasn't discovered the mouse yet).
But hey, try to think of it as ONLY 160 per hour! (Assuming an 8 hour day).
While I see a lot of discussion about other types of batteries, there is little here about lead-acid batteries. Something should be said for them.
Lead-Acid car batteries are one of the most magnificent stories in all of recycling.
Engineers working without a lot of credit have created a recycle that is the envy of nearly all recycle operations -- and almost no one knows about it!
Quoting Wikipedia on the rates 7 years ago, "Lead-acid battery recycling is one of the most successful recycling programs in the world. In the United States 97% of all battery lead was recycled between 1997 and 2001." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_batteries#Environmental_concerns
Very little PR, no news articles, just some very solid people doing planning, engineering what had to be done, implementing the equipment, and getting the bugs out of the system that is now running smoothly today.
Well, of course, you get lithium from recycling hydrogen bombs!
Ever since the second hydrogen bomb test, where instead of liquid deuterium ("wet bomb") they tried lithium ("dry bomb"), which gave 15 megatons yield instead of 5 MT planned ("Ooops!"), it's been known that you don't have to use the special lithium-6 isotope to "breed" hydrogen isotopes; you can use regular ol' lithium, and it'll work just fine, and your T+T reactions will *really* light things up. Of course, this was a huge problem at the time. Google "Castle Bravo" for some great screen backgrounds of this one. It's the largest test the United States ever did, and absolutely done by accident; someone didn't measure the cross section of regular lithium for neautrons correctly.
Hmm, I do wonder about the total recycle loop. Of course with Russia driving tanks into Georgia the rate of stripping down those ol' sealed secondaries may slow down...
Back in 1981 John McPhee published his "Annals of the Former World", a magnificently readable work on geology. It won a Pulitzer partly because it's so readable.
Page 260 is pretty interesting. He's quoting Anita Harris of the U.S. Geological Survey and presenting the history of people understanding glaciers at all (as moving things), which only happened around the late 1800's. It's worth a look to get some genuine historical perspective.
McPhee quotes her:
"Throughout most of time, the Earth has been without ice caps. 20,000 years ago, when there was much more ice than there is now, the sea was 300 feet lower. The coast was more than a hundred miles east of New York. You could have walked to the edge of the Continental Shelf. Baltimore Canyon, Hudson Canyon were exposed to the open air."
Looking at Wikipedia ("glaciers"), it seems these cycles last about 100,000 years, and there seems to be direct fossil evidence of at least 20 of these climactic cycles.
This has certainly changed my perspective about what is "normal" for the Earth. Over and over, the lesson I keep running into is: what is here, is here because it is being sustained by a powerful active system. Otherwise it would have been gone a long time ago, geological time.
This expresses no opinion on climate change etc. This is strictly perspective.
This will just about replace the nuclear reactors, which are pretty much being run past their design lives.
What the hell are we thus accomplishing with this trillion (thousand billion) dollars of windmills and $250 billion of new grid?
(1)Welp, we're depending on the weather for our energy, for one thing. (hunh?) (2) And we're mounting four hundred foot propellers in Tornado Alley. (what?) (3) And I dare anyone to say with a straight face that they can get around North Dakota to do maintenance during the winter. Do these things even work at 50 below zero (F) ? And do they work when loaded with ice?
Allow me to propose the much, much less expensive David Small variant of the Pickens Plan. (Call it the Slim Pickens plan if you like old movies).
We could feed vultures with a much less expensive "Line Of Death" by selling hunting licenses in the Great Plains. Hunters could blast away randomly at birds, something like prop tips. In most states licenses like this completely pay for State Game and Fish departments.
We could do the 1950's SF Movie Sound Effects with big speakers emitting a low frequency "WAUM-WAUM-WAUM" sound to keep people up at night. And we could periodically have big cargo planes dropping huge fragments of propellers randomly out of the sky to simulate fractures.
Thus, we have all the pains of propellers, but none of the actual hassle, and an income source!
I agree, it's nice to have proof. But Slashdot is only for a day or two.
Wikipedia can be forever, and it seems to me that that's exactly what regimes like China deserve for doing this to kids.
How's about a short, to-the-point page on "Gymnastic Cheating Scandal at 2008 China Olympics" with the top-mentioned pages (in Chinese, and translated to English) and a short explanation that yes, even though the censors tried, the kids really were 14. Some of the writeups in here would be just fine.
There's been other weirdness about this Olympics. It should be remembered. Wikipedia is a fairly good collective memory. Truth is a potent weapon and it scares dictators.
I'm having one of those days where I can't find a reference book (dammit!)... sorry...
What you want is "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee, (ISBN 0374515980) which is the story of Ted Taylor. In it Taylor describes digging tunnels with directed nuclear explosives. I recall him muttering that this isn't done because of incredible conservatism in civil engineering. Taylor also says that such explosives can be tuned up and down the electromagnetic band.
Ted Taylor has been described as the best designer of nuclear weapons that the U.S. ever had, so he probably would know.
"Project Orion" by George Dyson (ISBN 0805072845) has a nice diagram on pp. 113 of a sample "pulse unit" that's setup to direct its energy mostly at the pusher plate. Taylor did that design. It's a 1 kiloton design for outer space, but it's not hard to imagine it set up for nuclear digging.
One problem you're going to run into with "channeled radiation" and so forth is that classification people get touchy in this area. It's known that channeled soft X-rays from the primary fission device help set off a series of steps that trigger the secondary fusion device in modern hydrogen bombs (see, for example, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', 'The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', both by Richard Rhodes, and Wikipedia). The precise details are not talked about. Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor have to not discuss certain areas of "Project Orion" and they say so. Stuff like opacities of materials which are critical to Orion have other applications and they stay classified.
And George Dyson carefully notes that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (as amended in 1954)forces his Appendix to be incomplete. If you haven't looked at the "Born Classified" aspects of the AEC act, you should. It's quite amazing.
Oh, goodness, a nuclear pipe bomb? No, they were looking into the curious fact that things extremely close to the zero point did *not* melt or vaporize.
I'm sorry, 20/20 hindsight shows me that not everyone is familiar with Lew Allen's experiments. Lew did many things with his career such as be director of the JPL and Sec'y of the Air Force. In "Project Orion", by George Dyson (Freeman's son), ISBN 0-8050-7284-5, ch.8, irreverently titled "Lew Allen's Balls", Lew is described hanging discs 3-4 feet across and 6-8 inches high, and spheres covered with graphite, at the base of "shot" towers.
Quoting Dyson directly, "The surprise result -- and one of the germs of Orion -- was that some of the spheres were propelled farther than could be explained by blast effect alone." Dyson goes on to explain that some tests were with spheres made of plastic 100 feet from 15-25 kt. Iron spheres were within 150,000 Kelvin temperature of the fireball. They survived. Many are still at the test site.
'It was Lew Allen's experiments that helped to convince Ted Taylor that Orion was feasible. "Bring able to preserve things that were within twenty feet from the center of the explosion of tens of kilotons, was a big surprise to a lot of people." '
I strongly recommend "Project Orion" (and the History Channel's DVD of it). Very good stuff.
Weapons effects are extremely interesting and useful. The first effect to know about is that stuff survives amazingly close to a nuclear explosion. The second effect is that you can "tune" a fission bomb to direct its energy output largely in one direction. (Don't jump on me, this is in the open literature now.) Which gives a different method of dealing with asteroids; a series of powerful, but not shattering, plasma "slaps" to change its orbit.
Send a spacecraft armed with lots of quite small fission weapons that are set up to direct their weapons effects mostly in one direction and with a very basic, robust guidance system. Each one needs to get tossed out, line up with the asteroid, trigger, and "slap" it with high-speed plasma. Enough "slaps" change its orbital characteristics. You don't try to shatter it.
Each fission weapon looks like this: Wrap up a small (5 kt?) fission core with something like polyethylene or anything that absorbs prompt soft X-rays. Anything that has mass. The onboard computer works with guidance (my guess would be aims for a laser point on the asteroid, but who knows), the guidance just lines it up properly with the asteroid, and triggers the fission.
Position it so that when it goes off, the plasma of the polyethylene (and the former physics package, etc), moving around 2.5 million miles per hour, strikes the asteroid. You don't try to break the asteroid up -- far from it. You go for a series of "slaps" with very hot material. As the physics formula says, Mass times Velocity Squared -- and here you have all kinds of velocity.
As Lew Allen proved, with his famous tests with steel spheres just a few feet from ground-zero of a nuclear test survive just fine, and they are accelerated quite briskly. This was one basis of Project Orion later on.
It would be quite interesting to model this against some asteroid sizes and get an idea of what would be required to change the trajectory. We certainly have enough plutonium cores laying around.
Ever since Bill Gates found that his BASIC was getting pirated, newer and weirder stuff has been going on from Microsoft to prevent piracy of their operating systems.
Now we see the logical conclusion of such efforts:
Make an operating system no one wants in the first place, and no one will want to pirate it!
(And how many people REALLY pirated "Snakes On A Plane", anyway?!@?)
Hmmm. When I read someone saying that it's hard to not laugh about the phrase, "We have always held American forces to a higher standard", and justify that bitterness by mentioning "Guantanamo", I am well and truly shocked and saddened.
I know it is trendy to say things like that now, but I remember when it was trendy to spit on vets returning from Vietnam, too.
You have consciously restricted your view to far less than a percentage point of the picture. My experience is that people do that to match their inner world picture.
Why don't you meet some real American soldiers? It might broaden your mind.
In college one of my roommates was engaged to a guy going to the Air Force Academy. He graduated and is now a J.A.G. (Judge Advocate General). He is among the finest human beings I know. When there was a problem out in Japan a few years ago, I saw his name in the paper, and I just thought, "Well, that'll get straightened out", because I know Steve.
Their daughter just graduated from the Air Force Academy.
My cousin's son just graduated from the Air Force Academy.
My ex's dad was REO for SR-71's all over the place.
I just got back from the marriage of one of my relatives to a former US Army drill instructor, who describes himself as a "geek" and "Drill Instructor". He's a fascinating guy. He tells me of how hard he and his fellow instructors work to teach the recruits skills to stay alive out there. He is deeply concerned about each and every one of them. He's now gone to work in engineering in renewable energy.
All of these people have a sense of "Duty, Honor, Country". It's drilled into them until it's part of them. But they wouldn't have gone into the Army or the AFA if they weren't resonant with those words in the first place.
All of them deeply understand and are concerned about Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, security measures. They're more up to speed on world events than you think. They are most definitely not wind up toys. And at the CIA, you will find more Democrats than Republicans, by far. They joke about it.
If you warp your inner space enough, you can make any two lines seem equivalent. Let me give you a quick unwarping tool.
You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs timed for rush hour in London and Spain. You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs to kill random civilians in Iraq, with follow-on bombs to kill first-responders. You let me know when American soldiers start cutting the heads off captives with swords, video tape it, and post the tapes to the Internet.
Mattr, you said, >The most surprising part of this whole interview and response to it, is the lack of rethinking military in cyberspace.
But, if you read the opening statement, Lt. Col. Bircher says this directly:
> I have been given the challenge of helping the Army map out the concepts for how we will operate in and through cyberspace in the future: specifically, 2015 and beyond. Sometimes I feel like I'm part science fiction writer, part futurist, part planner.
>>>>>> Hmmm. I don't understand your reply, given this, Matt. I believe you must be meaning something a bit different than "rethinking". Could you expand on that?
Specifically under "threat assessment", Bircher says, >Part of threat assessment is not only tallying up an adversary's arsenal of weapons but also getting inside his head. Cyberspace is highly cerebral and highly diffused, where threats can come from any corner. This reality demands new assessment tools. It's all unfolding fast and furiously, and we're working hard to ensure we have the capabilities needed to assess and defeat these new threats effectively. The Army is not acting alone. He also says as an example, > A virus can crash systems, rendering hardware useless. Malicious rumors on the Internet can result in someone taking their own or someone else's life.
I must be missing something here between his replies and your dismissing them. Is there an impedance mismatch?
To me this shows an example of how the guy is thinking. He's in long-term planning, and I think he's smart. Reading science fiction alone is a really good sign, because it's the literature of the future -- taking a look at the future and the consequences if we go a particular way.
He did NOT say, Well, we're currently using virus scanners from XX company and firewalls from YY company and we found the Chinese-brand "Cisco" routers THIS way and they have extra code that does THIS in the event of a conflict. And I would hope he would not. Slashdot gets read 'round the world, and not everyone is a friend to the United States.
While a daily cyberwar is indeed going on, as you mention, that isn't common knowledge as it should be among people like, let's say, my Dad, whom I struggled to get onto e-mail. (Many of us have been through that).
The purpose of the Armed Forces is to support the political and diplomatic decisions of the U.S. through force.
If you'll forgive me the analogy, the purpose of the Army is not to sit on the borders looking at packets of data, one by one.
Right now cyberwarfare isn't on the radar screen of most of the Congress; they're busy with elections and elections occupy their primary interest. I suspect some sort of attack will be needed to get interest, and then, poorly done, rushed legislation will go through quickly to "defend our cyberspace". See also: DMCA and other horrific legislation.
And yet, Matt, I fully support you that something needs to be done. Please do not take this as a personal attack. It isn't. I am just uncertain that the Armed Forces are the agent that should implement the change; in fact Bircher posted a quote from the Atlantic that seems to show his concerns about it, too.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be a stupid question, but, where does Linus work now?
-- thanks, Dave
What's Steve Jobs' signon at Apple, anyway?
I was planning on getting Mom a Mac, but they can forget it now.
I thought I'd tell him. He doesn't like me anyway (old disagreement) but why not.
-- thanks,
David
Charge him with treason, try him, and then kill him.
This sends what diplomats call "a signal" to other slimeballs thinking about selling out to a foreign power.
The other problem with selling out is that sometimes a person on the other team is turned, and gives a list of US citizens who are spies back to US counter-intelligence, and then the spies are screwed.
This happened during the Reagan administration when France turned a member of the KGB high up, and they supplied us with a list of spies. We then arranged for "special" information to be fed to them. We also arranged for "special" chips to be put into PC's that were headed for the USSR by various routes. They degraded over time, giving increasingly unreliable results.
But the most spectacular thing was a Canadian company who made software for managing very large oil networks (such as near a refinery) found out their software was being sent to the USSR via a spy. We told them. So they inserted a subtle trojan horse (more properly, a birthday trojan horse). When there was a lot of very heavy fluid moving through the pipes, the valves were told to slam shut. This resulted in very high pressures in the pipes which burst them.
The resulting fire at one site was so large it triggered the satellites that we watch Russia with as a possible nuclear explosion, because the energy released was in the kilotons of yield. It didn't have the unique double-thermal-pulse of a nuclear weapon, but it was a bigtime fire. The counterspy manager at the NSC had to tell the people there to ignore it, but could not tell them why for 15+ years afterwards.
I've always wondered if someone told Tom Clancy about this, because the start of his novel "Red Storm Rising", about a conventionally fought World War III in Europe, is a massive fire at a refinery leaving the USSR short of oil. Of course, in Clancy's book, it's Islamic radicals who trigger this from the control room, which is a little different from software that triggered itself.
Just before the summit in Iceland, the spy network was rolled up, the spies arrested, tried, and thrown away, hopefully into dungeons. Gorbachev was furious about this, because it meant the data being sent by those spies was probably tampered with and had to be disregarded, and because the USSR increasingly had problems with its PC's. He called Reagan "That liar!" in private.
All of this is a terrific read, and true. You can find it in a book from Thomas Reed, former Undersecretary to the Air Force. It's called "At The Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War". It's at Amazon. Required reading for any Cold War historian.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
I'm as old as NASA, 50 years, 1958.
And I look at the first Star Trek XI Movie preview, it makes the hair on my arms stand up. Because it's the real memories, and the real heroes.
Do these mere movie-makers know what they're playing with here? I fear not.
These are the hopes and dreams of a whole generation of engineers. We watched Star Trek. "2001: A Space Odyssey" looked downright likely from 1965. We shot Estes rockets into the sky. And all of us wanted, so badly, to experience free-fall, to see the curve of the Earth, as Burt Rutan's vehicle finally did in a Right-Stuff climb ... sort of, "What the hell, the instrument panel just lost all power and blacked out; let's just keep going and judge our angle out the window, and if the panel doesn't light back up, well, that'll be interesting..."
These movie-makers have already annoyed a bunch of us, judging from the posts on the second preview.
These ... mere movie-makers ... they're playing with oxidizers they do not understand. And people who play with oxidizers often only learn when they get their hands burned. (I will mention I was silly enough to play with a mixture potassium chlorate and sugar. As a result I do not recommend this mixture to anyone.)
No? You disagree? How far back does your memory go?
This preview starts...
(Spock welding on the Enterprise ...)
Voiceover: "30 seconds and counting, astronauts reporting fuel good. T minus 25 seconds..."
John F. Kennedy: "The eyes of the world now look into space..."
And of course Kennedy made the brash promise, and goal, that we'd go to the Moon "by the end of this decade". And we did it!
(first views of the Enterprise being assembled)
Scott Carpenter: "Godspeed, John Glenn", as Glenn went up on the Atlas rocket, which had a habit, no, more like a positive track record, of exploding. In a tiny Mercury capsule.
"The Eagle has landed." Neil Armstrong showing The Right Stuff.
(various views of the saucer section and the V from engineering to the warp drives being assembled)
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil Armstrong on 11, taking his first step.
And then that one quintessential, defining voice from Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy's voice: "Space ... The Final Frontier ...", which first showed up on "The Wrath of Khan" after they really did kill Spock off. And many of us left that movie in tears.
As we move up the saucer section and the word "Enterprise" comes into view...
And with the music from the original series, not that awful score from the first movie, we close that preview with a date in 2009.
I remember.
'Star Trek' came out when the Gemini missions were going, to practice rendezvous, which was necessary to go to the Moon. And we were going to the Moon! In those days anything was possible.
(Oh, there were a few jerk congressmen that wanted to stop it all and waste NASA's money for political gain, notably Walter Mondale, who tried to kill things after the Apollo 1 fire, but they didn't get their way until after Apollo 17. They did manage to kill Apollo 18, 19, and 20, and throw half a million aerospace people directly out of a job. I gotta tell you, I dislike those people most strongly. The 'Great Society' did nothing but spend a lot of money proving government doesn't work. And that money could have gone into getting us off this planet.)
Neil Armstrong saved one of those Gemini missions (with Dave Scott). Buzz Aldrin saved another when the rendezvous computer whacked out; he'd brought along a manual way of doing it (his advanced degree was on this subject). NASA picked those two because they were proven troubleshooters, and man, was Apollo 11 almost an abort. Neil overrode the computer when he saw it was bringing him down into a bunch of big rocks. Balancing training, practice, and an indefinable something, Neil hopped a crater, and touched down with seconds of
by couchslug (175151) on Friday November 14, @10:46AM (#25762505):
"What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today." -->
Astronaut Gus Grissom would disagree with you, and he gave his life on Apollo 1. He wrote in a letter:
"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
-- David Small
I hate to even ask, but ...
What operating system does this thing run?
I find myself hoping that's it's Linux with a Beowulf cluster, but ...
-- thanks,
David Small
I know what I'm gonna try:
"Hello, Google. My name is Doctor Chandra. I'd like to teach you to sing a song. It goes like this: 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle built for two.' "
If it replies that it is an "H A L Niner-Triple-Zero", I am going to run screaming, renounce all computers and the Internet, and live a quiet life as a monk somewhere very very hard to reach.
(grin)
David Small
Hmmmmm, and here I once took my shoelaces, tied them into a loop, and cinched the knots as tightly as I could between the crankshaft pulley and the water pump pulley. As you're guessing, the fanbelt that drove the water pump had broken. You can drive for awhile without an alternator or power steering, but driving without a water pump to cool the engine is not a winning proposition (unless you have plenty of time to let the engine cool down with periodic stops). Another good trick is to run the heater, which is a nice little radiator to bleed heat out the engine. All of this got me to a Checker Auto Parts or NAPA, somesuch, and a new fanbelt. (Now I keep one in the trunk).
Honest, I would have tried a purple bungee cord if I'd had any! And you know, whatever that dental floss is made of is really strong ... has anyone checked that stuff out for an orbital elevator?
Grins,
Dave Small
I think John Nance Garner has the best view of the Vice Presidency: "Not worth a bucket of warm spit".
This was FDR's Vice President before Truman (1933-1941).
I think all this attention is a bit over the top.
When LBJ was President of the United States, and word came that Winston Churchill had died, and of course the United States had to send someone to the funeral, a staffer suggested "Send Hubert.", and Lyndon said, "Hubert who?". Someone had to gently remind LBJ that Hubert Humphrey was his Vice President.
Anyone remember George H.W. Bush's Vice President? Dan Quayle? My favorite quote from him was, "I like coming to Latin America, but I don't speak Latin."
And frankly (let me be honest here) when they were Vice Presidents both George H.W. Bush and Albert Gore had a special, amazing, +10 ability to stun audiences with boring speeches. There were rumours at the time that they ran Windows NT inside as their internal operating systems. I've begun to believe that something about the office of Vice President causes a sort of virtual lobotomy to occur.
If either Sarah whatsername or ... is it Joe or Ed? whatzisname get elected, I expect that's about the last we'll hear from them.
This was a pretty boring election, really, until Sarah ... what IS her name? ... showed up with her snow-mobiling husband. This gave the media someone to smother and fume and pontificate about. And then the media got to fume about its own behavior. But that stuff has a limited half-life because the media is the only one who cares about that. (The media is worth only a cup of cold spit, you see).
*grin*
Dave Small
467,000 patents in 2007? So that means...
1,279 patents per day.
Wow.
And to make it even worse, there's no more Page Up or Page Down, because Microsoft has patented those. So you'd have to, like, down-arrow through the pages, which is WAY worse. (I assume the patent office hasn't discovered the mouse yet).
But hey, try to think of it as ONLY 160 per hour!
(Assuming an 8 hour day).
Grin,
Dave Small
While I see a lot of discussion about other types of batteries, there is little here about lead-acid batteries. Something should be said for them.
Lead-Acid car batteries are one of the most magnificent stories in all of recycling.
Engineers working without a lot of credit have created a recycle that is the envy of nearly all recycle operations -- and almost no one knows about it!
Quoting Wikipedia on the rates 7 years ago, "Lead-acid battery recycling is one of the most successful recycling programs in the world. In the United States 97% of all battery lead was recycled between 1997 and 2001."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-acid_batteries#Environmental_concerns
To give you an idea how important this is, the EPA reports that 100 million lead-acid batteries were manufactured last year in the United States. http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/battery.htm
Very little PR, no news articles, just some very solid people doing planning, engineering what had to be done, implementing the equipment, and getting the bugs out of the system that is now running smoothly today.
Well done!
-- thanks,
Dave Small
Well, of course, you get lithium from recycling hydrogen bombs!
Ever since the second hydrogen bomb test, where instead of liquid deuterium ("wet bomb") they tried lithium ("dry bomb"), which gave 15 megatons yield instead of 5 MT planned ("Ooops!"), it's been known that you don't have to use the special lithium-6 isotope to "breed" hydrogen isotopes; you can use regular ol' lithium, and it'll work just fine, and your T+T reactions will *really* light things up.
Of course, this was a huge problem at the time.
Google "Castle Bravo" for some great screen backgrounds of this one. It's the largest test the United States ever did, and absolutely done by accident; someone didn't measure the cross section of regular lithium for neautrons correctly.
Hmm, I do wonder about the total recycle loop. Of course with Russia driving tanks into Georgia the rate of stripping down those ol' sealed secondaries may slow down...
-- thanks,
Dave Small
p.s. Sarcasm? Me?
Back in 1981 John McPhee published his "Annals of the Former World", a magnificently readable work on geology. It won a Pulitzer partly because it's so readable.
Page 260 is pretty interesting. He's quoting Anita Harris of the U.S. Geological Survey and presenting the history of people understanding glaciers at all (as moving things), which only happened around the late 1800's. It's worth a look to get some genuine historical perspective.
McPhee quotes her:
"Throughout most of time, the Earth has been without ice caps. 20,000 years ago, when there was much more ice than there is now, the sea was 300 feet lower. The coast was more than a hundred miles east of New York. You could have walked to the edge of the Continental Shelf. Baltimore Canyon, Hudson Canyon were exposed to the open air."
Looking at Wikipedia ("glaciers"), it seems these cycles last about 100,000 years, and there seems to be direct fossil evidence of at least 20 of these climactic cycles.
This has certainly changed my perspective about what is "normal" for the Earth. Over and over, the lesson I keep running into is: what is here, is here because it is being sustained by a powerful active system. Otherwise it would have been gone a long time ago, geological time.
This expresses no opinion on climate change etc. This is strictly perspective.
Thanks,
Dave Small
I dropped by http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/ just now, where it says that wind energy can provide 20% of the U.S. electrical needs.
This will just about replace the nuclear reactors, which are pretty much being run past their design lives.
What the hell are we thus accomplishing with this trillion (thousand billion) dollars of windmills and $250 billion of new grid?
(1)Welp, we're depending on the weather for our energy, for one thing. (hunh?)
(2) And we're mounting four hundred foot propellers in Tornado Alley. (what?)
(3) And I dare anyone to say with a straight face that they can get around North Dakota to do maintenance during the winter.
Do these things even work at 50 below zero (F) ? And do they work when loaded with ice?
Allow me to propose the much, much less expensive David Small variant of the Pickens Plan. (Call it the Slim Pickens plan if you like old movies).
We could feed vultures with a much less expensive "Line Of Death" by selling hunting licenses in the Great Plains. Hunters could blast away randomly at birds, something like prop tips. In most states licenses like this completely pay for State Game and Fish departments.
We could do the 1950's SF Movie Sound Effects with big speakers emitting a low frequency "WAUM-WAUM-WAUM" sound to keep people up at night. And we could periodically have big cargo planes dropping huge fragments of propellers randomly out of the sky to simulate fractures.
Thus, we have all the pains of propellers, but none of the actual hassle, and an income source!
Thanks,
Dave Small
I agree, it's nice to have proof. But Slashdot is only for a day or two.
Wikipedia can be forever, and it seems to me that that's exactly what regimes like China deserve for doing this to kids.
How's about a short, to-the-point page on "Gymnastic Cheating Scandal at 2008 China Olympics" with the top-mentioned pages (in Chinese, and translated to English) and a short explanation that yes, even though the censors tried, the kids really were 14. Some of the writeups in here would be just fine.
There's been other weirdness about this Olympics. It should be remembered. Wikipedia is a fairly good collective memory.
Truth is a potent weapon and it scares dictators.
-- Thanks, Dave
I'm having one of those days where I can't find a reference book (dammit!) ... sorry ...
What you want is "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee, (ISBN 0374515980) which is the story of Ted Taylor. In it Taylor describes digging tunnels with directed nuclear explosives. I recall him muttering that this isn't done because of incredible conservatism in civil engineering. Taylor also says that such explosives can be tuned up and down the electromagnetic band.
Ted Taylor has been described as the best designer of nuclear weapons that the U.S. ever had, so he probably would know.
"Project Orion" by George Dyson (ISBN 0805072845) has a nice diagram on pp. 113 of a sample "pulse unit" that's setup to direct its energy mostly at the pusher plate. Taylor did that design. It's a 1 kiloton design for outer space, but it's not hard to imagine it set up for nuclear digging.
One problem you're going to run into with "channeled radiation" and so forth is that classification people get touchy in this area. It's known that channeled soft X-rays from the primary fission device help set off a series of steps that trigger the secondary fusion device in modern hydrogen bombs (see, for example, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', 'The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', both by Richard Rhodes, and Wikipedia). The precise details are not talked about. Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor have to not discuss certain areas of "Project Orion" and they say so. Stuff like opacities of materials which are critical to Orion have other applications and they stay classified.
And George Dyson carefully notes that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (as amended in 1954)forces his Appendix to be incomplete. If you haven't looked at the "Born Classified" aspects of the AEC act, you should. It's quite amazing.
I hope these sources help.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
Oh, goodness, a nuclear pipe bomb? No, they were looking into the curious fact that things extremely close to the zero point did *not* melt or vaporize.
I'm sorry, 20/20 hindsight shows me that not everyone is familiar with Lew Allen's experiments. Lew did many things with his career such as be director of the JPL and Sec'y of the Air Force. In "Project Orion", by George Dyson (Freeman's son), ISBN 0-8050-7284-5, ch.8, irreverently titled "Lew Allen's Balls", Lew is described hanging discs 3-4 feet across and 6-8 inches high, and spheres covered with graphite, at the base of "shot" towers.
Quoting Dyson directly, "The surprise result -- and one of the germs of Orion -- was that some of the spheres were propelled farther than could be explained by blast effect alone."
Dyson goes on to explain that some tests were with spheres made of plastic 100 feet from 15-25 kt. Iron spheres were within 150,000 Kelvin temperature of the fireball. They survived. Many are still at the test site.
'It was Lew Allen's experiments that helped to convince Ted Taylor that Orion was feasible. "Bring able to preserve things that were within twenty feet from the center of the explosion of tens of kilotons, was a big surprise to a lot of people." '
I strongly recommend "Project Orion" (and the History Channel's DVD of it). Very good stuff.
-- thanks,
Dave Small
Weapons effects are extremely interesting and useful. The first effect to know about is that stuff survives amazingly close to a nuclear explosion. The second effect is that you can "tune" a fission bomb to direct its energy output largely in one direction. (Don't jump on me, this is in the open literature now.) Which gives a different method of dealing with asteroids; a series of powerful, but not shattering, plasma "slaps" to change its orbit.
Send a spacecraft armed with lots of quite small fission weapons that are set up to direct their weapons effects mostly in one direction and with a very basic, robust guidance system. Each one needs to get tossed out, line up with the asteroid, trigger, and "slap" it with high-speed plasma. Enough "slaps" change its orbital characteristics. You don't try to shatter it.
Each fission weapon looks like this: Wrap up a small (5 kt?) fission core with something like polyethylene or anything that absorbs prompt soft X-rays. Anything that has mass. The onboard computer works with guidance (my guess would be aims for a laser point on the asteroid, but who knows), the guidance just lines it up properly with the asteroid, and triggers the fission.
Position it so that when it goes off, the plasma of the polyethylene (and the former physics package, etc), moving around 2.5 million miles per hour, strikes the asteroid. You don't try to break the asteroid up -- far from it. You go for a series of "slaps" with very hot material. As the physics formula says, Mass times Velocity Squared -- and here you have all kinds of velocity.
As Lew Allen proved, with his famous tests with steel spheres just a few feet from ground-zero of a nuclear test survive just fine, and they are accelerated quite briskly. This was one basis of Project Orion later on.
It would be quite interesting to model this against some asteroid sizes and get an idea of what would be required to change the trajectory. We certainly have enough plutonium cores laying around.
Just an interesting thought.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Ever since Bill Gates found that his BASIC was getting pirated, newer and weirder stuff has been going on from Microsoft to prevent piracy of their operating systems.
Now we see the logical conclusion of such efforts:
Make an operating system no one wants in the first place, and no one will want to pirate it!
(And how many people REALLY pirated "Snakes On A Plane", anyway?!@?)
DuRMly yours,
Dave
Looks to me like Google's patent-lookup does exactly what this patent covers. The patent covers the basics of a database system.
So, enter a patent number, the database pops it up, displays it. It's all there.
Is this irony?
Well said and quite thoughtful.
Thanks for taking the time to expand on what you said. I really appreciate it!
I'll digest what you say for several days ...
Many thanks,
Dave Small
Thank you for clarifying for your feelings. I appreciate you to taking the time to do so.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Hmmm. When I read someone saying that it's hard to not laugh about the phrase, "We have always held American forces to a higher standard", and justify that bitterness by mentioning "Guantanamo", I am well and truly shocked and saddened.
I know it is trendy to say things like that now, but I remember when it was trendy to spit on vets returning from Vietnam, too.
You have consciously restricted your view to far less than a percentage point of the picture. My experience is that people do that to match their inner world picture.
Why don't you meet some real American soldiers? It might broaden your mind.
In college one of my roommates was engaged to a guy going to the Air Force Academy. He graduated and is now a J.A.G. (Judge Advocate General). He is among the finest human beings I know. When there was a problem out in Japan a few years ago, I saw his name in the paper, and I just thought, "Well, that'll get straightened out", because I know Steve.
Their daughter just graduated from the Air Force Academy.
My cousin's son just graduated from the Air Force Academy.
My ex's dad was REO for SR-71's all over the place.
I just got back from the marriage of one of my relatives to a former US Army drill instructor, who describes himself as a "geek" and "Drill Instructor". He's a fascinating guy. He tells me of how hard he and his fellow instructors work to teach the recruits skills to stay alive out there. He is deeply concerned about each and every one of them. He's now gone to work in engineering in renewable energy.
All of these people have a sense of "Duty, Honor, Country". It's drilled into them until it's part of them. But they wouldn't have gone into the Army or the AFA if they weren't resonant with those words in the first place.
All of them deeply understand and are concerned about Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, security measures. They're more up to speed on world events than you think. They are most definitely not wind up toys. And at the CIA, you will find more Democrats than Republicans, by far. They joke about it.
If you warp your inner space enough, you can make any two lines seem equivalent. Let me give you a quick unwarping tool.
You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs timed for rush hour in London and Spain. You let me know when American soldiers start planting bombs to kill random civilians in Iraq, with follow-on bombs to kill first-responders. You let me know when American soldiers start cutting the heads off captives with swords, video tape it, and post the tapes to the Internet.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Mattr, you said,
>The most surprising part of this whole interview and response to it, is the lack of rethinking military in cyberspace.
But, if you read the opening statement, Lt. Col. Bircher says this directly:
> I have been given the challenge of helping the Army map out the concepts for how we will operate in and through cyberspace in the future: specifically, 2015 and beyond. Sometimes I feel like I'm part science fiction writer, part futurist, part planner.
>>>>>> Hmmm. I don't understand your reply, given this, Matt. I believe you must be meaning something a bit different than "rethinking". Could you expand on that?
Specifically under "threat assessment", Bircher says,
>Part of threat assessment is not only tallying up an adversary's arsenal of weapons but also getting inside his head. Cyberspace is highly cerebral and highly diffused, where threats can come from any corner. This reality demands new assessment tools. It's all unfolding fast and furiously, and we're working hard to ensure we have the capabilities needed to assess and defeat these new threats effectively. The Army is not acting alone.
He also says as an example,
> A virus can crash systems, rendering hardware useless. Malicious rumors on the Internet can result in someone taking their own or someone else's life.
I must be missing something here between his replies and your dismissing them. Is there an impedance mismatch?
To me this shows an example of how the guy is thinking. He's in long-term planning, and I think he's smart. Reading science fiction alone is a really good sign, because it's the literature of the future -- taking a look at the future and the consequences if we go a particular way.
He did NOT say, Well, we're currently using virus scanners from XX company and firewalls from YY company and we found the Chinese-brand "Cisco" routers THIS way and they have extra code that does THIS in the event of a conflict. And I would hope he would not. Slashdot gets read 'round the world, and not everyone is a friend to the United States.
While a daily cyberwar is indeed going on, as you mention, that isn't common knowledge as it should be among people like, let's say, my Dad, whom I struggled to get onto e-mail. (Many of us have been through that).
The purpose of the Armed Forces is to support the political and diplomatic decisions of the U.S. through force.
If you'll forgive me the analogy, the purpose of the Army is not to sit on the borders looking at packets of data, one by one.
Right now cyberwarfare isn't on the radar screen of most of the Congress; they're busy with elections and elections occupy their primary interest. I suspect some sort of attack will be needed to get interest, and then, poorly done, rushed legislation will go through quickly to "defend our cyberspace". See also: DMCA and other horrific legislation.
And yet, Matt, I fully support you that something needs to be done. Please do not take this as a personal attack. It isn't. I am just uncertain that the Armed Forces are the agent that should implement the change; in fact Bircher posted a quote from the Atlantic that seems to show his concerns about it, too.
Thanks,
Dave Small
Your reply gives me a question I hope someone out there will answer.
Are the "Rainbow" series of books still out there? And if so are they worth bothering to get?
Thanks,
Dave Small