They're still able to be overriden by a human, but that's considered an action reserved only for the direst of emergencies
Shut the hell up. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. All takeoffs and almost all landings (except when weather or currency requirements dictate) are hand-flown. Flying manually is entirely and completely normal. Autopilots aren't some magic button used because they're "better" than pilots; they're simply PID controllers that close on desired navigation and flight condition information set by the pilots. Autopilots are there to do the base-level or boring flying tasks (like droning on in cruise for hours at a time, or flying preprogrammed routes in busy airspace) so the pilots can concentrate on higher-order tasks like navigation, communications, general awareness of the aircraft and its surroundings, and handling any system faults.
The autoflight systems on airplanes are nothing more than glorified cruise controls, not omniscient uber-pilots that keep those poor dumb pilots in line.
Stick to the things you actually know about instead of spouting bullshit out your ass.
Second, please give me more information about this "grenade like device that will snuff out a fully engulfed house", because I'm sure our chief would like to buy a case or three of them to try out. It would make things a lot easier if all we had to do was lob a grenade into a house instead of humping a bunch of hose.
To get back on subject, this technology doesn't appear to do anything to cool the heated gases down, put out smoldering embers, get rid of smoke or prevent reignition (or backdraft/flashover). Putting the flame out is great, but without adequate ventilation and some means to cool the surroundings, you're not doing too much for the people inside. Everything else will still have to be done the old way.
Your best bet is going to be contacting some existing launch provider or microsat company to see if you can piggyback along.
I hate to put it bluntly, but an orbital launcher is a bit outside the range of a high school science project. Maybe a team of grad students (or even bright undergrads) could pull it off with sufficient funding.
In space, it's not as much of an issue. But it is when your spacecraft is sitting on the pad a quarter-mile from the Atlantic Ocean, getting doused in rain showers every couple days, it becomes an issue.
The bare metal scheme requires constant polishing. However, it's also in an easily-visible location without holes or corners to trap moisture like the inside of a structure would have. It's workable on the outside of an aircraft, but really not practical for the inside.
Look, I've built an airplane and work on airplanes for a living. I think I know what I'm talking about.
Why bother coating the aluminum? Aluminum oxide does a pretty good job of preventing corrosion.
Not really. Exposure to salty, humid air (think naval aircraft or anything sitting on the pad at KSC), dissimilar metal contact, etc. will all cause corrosion. Plus, aluminum alloys are more susceptible to corrosion than pure aluminum (or alloy sheets with thin aluminum coatings). Stress concentrations can exacerbate corrosion.
Plus, corrosion spreads, and the more widely spread it is, the harder it is to repair.
Think about it for a minute. We've been building airplanes made of aluminum for decades. If we could leave the primer off and not have to worry about corrosion, do you think anyone would still be using it?
That's also why stealth spacecraft are effectively impossible. You can hide from radar all you want, but there's no way you can keep yourself as cool as the background of space (2K, was it?) for reasonable times.
But, in this case, the green paint is a corrosion-inhibitive primer on the internal structure. Pretty much the same stuff you'll see on aircraft.
Yes, that is corrosion-inhibiting primer. It's toxic and carcinogenic, but we don't (yet) have anything better. There are several promising alternatives in the works but none that are quite mature enough to be used.
I'm at work before dawn, DST or not. I'd rather have that extra hour of sunlight year-round, so I can actually try and do something productive when I get home.
The "we shouldn't pay any taxes at all" group is actually a very tiny minority. Most grumbling on taxes comes about from:
Inefficiency (when money being spent on project X greatly exceeds what it should cost)
Waste (eg, having to spend all the budget this year to ensure it doesn't get cut next year, so things are bought and then immediately thrown away)
Irrresponsibility/abuse (like vacations and luxury for lawmakers under the guise of official business)
Superfluous projects (ie, government spending money to do things that it shouldn't be doing in the first place)
There's a big continuum between "I don't want to pay any taxes" and "here's my open wallet and a blank checkbook, take everything you'd like", and trying to portray everyone who's not at the one end as being at the other is childish at best.
Yes. Plus, it also picked up the LDEF (Long-Duration Exposure Facility) launched by a previous mission and returned it as well (on a separate mission).
One thing to point out about the online posting of TSW is that the version posted online is essentially a first draft. Mr. Slade's usual pattern is to post a story online, chapter-by-chapter as its being written, and then once it's complete, get it edited and revised before publishing in dead-tree format. At least, that's what he's done with his other books.
Also, he's not just a "military geek"... he started out as a naval architect and eventually became a defense analyst. I think he's met with a couple of Presidents before, and has plenty of published papers (though most of us probably don't have the proper security clearances to read them).
Unfortunately, the chances of Salvation War being published are about shot, because some jackass copied it over and put it on a torrent. No publisher will even look at it now.
Uhh, no. "I don't really know anything about nuclear devices, but that qualifies me to make statements about exactly what they can do and what they're capable of?"
That doesn't fly.
Even if every warhead in every country was launched (all-out global nuclear war) life would survive. A bunch of humans would be left, too (the vast majority in the rural areas), though they'd be living a crappy, brutal, medieval-level existence with short life expectancies.
See, you don't just drop a single device in a city and declare it wiped off the map. A 1MT device in the middle of London would leave 90% of the infrastructure and 80% of the population.
The reason we have so many warheads is because nuclear targeting plans involve hitting infrastructure--transportation, manufacturing, military facilities, power generation, etc. The idea is to deter attack by threatening that which makes modern, industrial life possible. The goal is not "kill as many people as possible"--the above targets just happen to be in populated areas. Once you account for failures of devices or their delivery systems, possible defenses, etc. and accounting for how hard some targets are to destroy (hardened installations and things like runways and railyards are particularly tough), it starts explaining why there are so many warheads. To give you an idea, the entire nuclear arsenal of the UK was enough for a proper "working-over" of Moscow. That's it--just the military, industrial, and infrastructure targets around one city. There's no secret ulterior motive, no hidden conspiracy. Those numbers are high because they have to be to achieve deterrance.
Just, you know, some of use don't like going to work AND coming home from work in the dark.
Some of us go to work before sunrise all year, DST or not. I work 0600-1630, which means that it's always dark when I'm going to work. That also means traffic is lighter. And, during the summer, it means I actually have a little time to do things after work, even if I stop at the gym on the way home. With DST in effect, it doesn't get dark until 2130 or so, which means I can do things like mowing the lawn, yardwork, other outside chores, ride my bike, etc. during the week, freeing up Fri-Sun for doing other stuff.
Of course, during the winter, these hours suck--by the time I leave the gym, it's dark. And when I was working in another department that normally went 0700-1730, I never saw daylight at all unless I left the building for lunch. That's part of why I hate winter--it's depressing as shit.
Basically, due to the hours I work I never have time to do anything in the morning before work. Therefore, it is in my best interest to maximize the daylight time after I leave work, and so I support instituting a permanent, two-hour, year-round DST jump.
There's more than just earth, you know. And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself? Then the rest of us can get on with expanding the human race and moving off this rock.
The wedding was probably conducted at a place of business--an event hall, for example. Such places, because they are businesses, are required to have liquor licenses to sell alcohol. They aren't likely to allow outside alcohol for liability reasons. Further, the DJ was probably hired; anyone acting as a DJ for hire is also a business, and that carries with it certain restrictions.
That's different if you're having the wedding in your back yard, your friend is bartending using liquor you bought at the store the other day, and your brother is doing the music. None of that requires the licensing and fees.
The difference, basically, is in whether you hired people to do those functions of your wedding, or you do them yourself. Judging by the amount spent on the wedding in question, I highly suspect it was the former.
The composites are actually a fairly minor part of Boeing's current problems. What's biting them much harder is poor program and supplier management. Schedules and milestones were set by marketing, not by engineering, and assumed a best-case, everything-will-work-as-it's-designed-and-all-our-suppliers-will-be-on-time basis. Schedules were ridiculously unrealistic (rollout to delivery in less than a month), and lots of corners got cut to meet deadlines and show "visual progress" on paper (like rolling out an empty shell of an airplane to meet marketing's deadline, but then having to take it all back apart again to put the missing components in). It's like they tossed everything they knew about building airplanes out the window and started with new ideas that weren't held up by the "hide-bound traditions of the past".
The composites are responsible for part of the delay, but system integration, configuration control, and overall poor planning are what's really killing them. It's a classic case of there never being time to do it right, but always time to do it over.
Yeah, like there are only two two kinds of people in this country... and there are just as many on the "American Left" who will happily and blindly lap up what their "leaders" tell them to.
This appears to be a combined case of blind partisanship ("they support it, so we must oppose it because they're the other side"), stupidity, and "a free market isn't defined by the presence of competition or the ability for all parties to make free, informed choices, but rather whether large corporations have any restrictions on them or not".
I have no love for a lot of the "American Left" as most would think of it, nor for the "Right". But this is just fucking stupid.
Most of the pedestrians I've read about that get hit by trains were either there on purpose (ie, attempting suicide), or walking down the tracks away from any marked crossing (and maybe even with headphones in, drunk, or otherwise distracted).
There are also cases of railyard workers being struck by a loose railcar rolling around (which can be all but silent), or pinned between two of them.
But most train accidents I read about are train vs. vehicle, where the driver of said vehicle did something stupid like stop on the tracks, go around the gate arms, or try to beat the train and cross before it got there.
A large, modern diesel train can be surprisingly quiet if it's not blowing the horn, especially if it's moving fast.
I would have thought that, on a website full of people in programming and engineering (both fields where proper syntax and precision are critical), those people would understand the need for precise, standardized communication.
I guess I was wrong.
My faith in humanity dies a little more every day...
The important part isn't writing by hand. I hate writing by hand, and my teachers always made me type things because my handwriting sucks. The important part is knowing how to spell properly without having to use spellcheck; assuming that has been taught and evaluated properly, I have no problem with computers being used on tests so long as the appropriate restrictions are in place (no internet access, etc.). Besides, editing is much easier on a computer.
The bit about the calcluators stems from comments I've seen on this site claiming that students (primary K-5, not college) shouldn't have to learn how to do math by hand, but should instead just be issued calculators right from the start, and be allowed to use anything up to and including a regular computer for math tests.
I guess I'm just tired of hearing that we shouldn't be teaching kids how to do things by hand now that we have computers to do those things for us.
"But the tool is there, so why should people have to learn proper spelling? Why should people have to learn to do math by hand if they have computers available?"
But that's just a circular argument. The definition you give of (simplified) "left=reality" can then be substituted in to say "reality=reality". For these purposes, we could thus say "reality shows a purple bias" where we define "purple" to be "the point of view that best reflects reality". You can't offer your own definition for something and then try to use that definition as proof that the thing you are defining is as you defined it.
It's like a fundie arguing that the bible is right because the bible says it's right--it just doesn't work. And besides, I don't like the original statement in question because it is always presented as "reality has this bias" with the statement alone intended to be proof. I never see anyone provide evidence as to why reality might have that bias, much less an explanation of how reality can have a bias in the first place. Yet people still throw it out like it's the panacea of arguments, that all they have to do is quote it and the argument is irrefuteably over.
(And for the record, I consider myself neither "left" nor "right"--though trying to simplify all of the possible social and political views into two simple categories is completely absurd in the first place)
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They're still able to be overriden by a human, but that's considered an action reserved only for the direst of emergencies
Shut the hell up. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. All takeoffs and almost all landings (except when weather or currency requirements dictate) are hand-flown. Flying manually is entirely and completely normal. Autopilots aren't some magic button used because they're "better" than pilots; they're simply PID controllers that close on desired navigation and flight condition information set by the pilots. Autopilots are there to do the base-level or boring flying tasks (like droning on in cruise for hours at a time, or flying preprogrammed routes in busy airspace) so the pilots can concentrate on higher-order tasks like navigation, communications, general awareness of the aircraft and its surroundings, and handling any system faults.
The autoflight systems on airplanes are nothing more than glorified cruise controls, not omniscient uber-pilots that keep those poor dumb pilots in line.
Stick to the things you actually know about instead of spouting bullshit out your ass.
Not all of use use Scott packs... ours are MSA.
Second, please give me more information about this "grenade like device that will snuff out a fully engulfed house", because I'm sure our chief would like to buy a case or three of them to try out. It would make things a lot easier if all we had to do was lob a grenade into a house instead of humping a bunch of hose.
To get back on subject, this technology doesn't appear to do anything to cool the heated gases down, put out smoldering embers, get rid of smoke or prevent reignition (or backdraft/flashover). Putting the flame out is great, but without adequate ventilation and some means to cool the surroundings, you're not doing too much for the people inside. Everything else will still have to be done the old way.
Your best bet is going to be contacting some existing launch provider or microsat company to see if you can piggyback along.
I hate to put it bluntly, but an orbital launcher is a bit outside the range of a high school science project. Maybe a team of grad students (or even bright undergrads) could pull it off with sufficient funding.
It's manageable, but a big (and expensive) pain in the ass. And it causes lots of environmental issues, too.
In space, it's not as much of an issue. But it is when your spacecraft is sitting on the pad a quarter-mile from the Atlantic Ocean, getting doused in rain showers every couple days, it becomes an issue.
The bare metal scheme requires constant polishing. However, it's also in an easily-visible location without holes or corners to trap moisture like the inside of a structure would have. It's workable on the outside of an aircraft, but really not practical for the inside.
Look, I've built an airplane and work on airplanes for a living. I think I know what I'm talking about.
Why bother coating the aluminum? Aluminum oxide does a pretty good job of preventing corrosion.
Not really. Exposure to salty, humid air (think naval aircraft or anything sitting on the pad at KSC), dissimilar metal contact, etc. will all cause corrosion. Plus, aluminum alloys are more susceptible to corrosion than pure aluminum (or alloy sheets with thin aluminum coatings). Stress concentrations can exacerbate corrosion.
Plus, corrosion spreads, and the more widely spread it is, the harder it is to repair.
Think about it for a minute. We've been building airplanes made of aluminum for decades. If we could leave the primer off and not have to worry about corrosion, do you think anyone would still be using it?
That's also why stealth spacecraft are effectively impossible. You can hide from radar all you want, but there's no way you can keep yourself as cool as the background of space (2K, was it?) for reasonable times.
But, in this case, the green paint is a corrosion-inhibitive primer on the internal structure. Pretty much the same stuff you'll see on aircraft.
Yes, that is corrosion-inhibiting primer. It's toxic and carcinogenic, but we don't (yet) have anything better. There are several promising alternatives in the works but none that are quite mature enough to be used.
I'm at work before dawn, DST or not. I'd rather have that extra hour of sunlight year-round, so I can actually try and do something productive when I get home.
The "we shouldn't pay any taxes at all" group is actually a very tiny minority. Most grumbling on taxes comes about from:
Inefficiency (when money being spent on project X greatly exceeds what it should cost)
Waste (eg, having to spend all the budget this year to ensure it doesn't get cut next year, so things are bought and then immediately thrown away)
Irrresponsibility/abuse (like vacations and luxury for lawmakers under the guise of official business)
Superfluous projects (ie, government spending money to do things that it shouldn't be doing in the first place)
There's a big continuum between "I don't want to pay any taxes" and "here's my open wallet and a blank checkbook, take everything you'd like", and trying to portray everyone who's not at the one end as being at the other is childish at best.
Yes. Plus, it also picked up the LDEF (Long-Duration Exposure Facility) launched by a previous mission and returned it as well (on a separate mission).
One thing to point out about the online posting of TSW is that the version posted online is essentially a first draft. Mr. Slade's usual pattern is to post a story online, chapter-by-chapter as its being written, and then once it's complete, get it edited and revised before publishing in dead-tree format. At least, that's what he's done with his other books.
Also, he's not just a "military geek"... he started out as a naval architect and eventually became a defense analyst. I think he's met with a couple of Presidents before, and has plenty of published papers (though most of us probably don't have the proper security clearances to read them).
Unfortunately, the chances of Salvation War being published are about shot, because some jackass copied it over and put it on a torrent. No publisher will even look at it now.
Uhh, no. "I don't really know anything about nuclear devices, but that qualifies me to make statements about exactly what they can do and what they're capable of?"
That doesn't fly.
Even if every warhead in every country was launched (all-out global nuclear war) life would survive. A bunch of humans would be left, too (the vast majority in the rural areas), though they'd be living a crappy, brutal, medieval-level existence with short life expectancies.
See, you don't just drop a single device in a city and declare it wiped off the map. A 1MT device in the middle of London would leave 90% of the infrastructure and 80% of the population.
The reason we have so many warheads is because nuclear targeting plans involve hitting infrastructure--transportation, manufacturing, military facilities, power generation, etc. The idea is to deter attack by threatening that which makes modern, industrial life possible. The goal is not "kill as many people as possible"--the above targets just happen to be in populated areas. Once you account for failures of devices or their delivery systems, possible defenses, etc. and accounting for how hard some targets are to destroy (hardened installations and things like runways and railyards are particularly tough), it starts explaining why there are so many warheads. To give you an idea, the entire nuclear arsenal of the UK was enough for a proper "working-over" of Moscow. That's it--just the military, industrial, and infrastructure targets around one city. There's no secret ulterior motive, no hidden conspiracy. Those numbers are high because they have to be to achieve deterrance.
Just, you know, some of use don't like going to work AND coming home from work in the dark.
Some of us go to work before sunrise all year, DST or not. I work 0600-1630, which means that it's always dark when I'm going to work. That also means traffic is lighter. And, during the summer, it means I actually have a little time to do things after work, even if I stop at the gym on the way home. With DST in effect, it doesn't get dark until 2130 or so, which means I can do things like mowing the lawn, yardwork, other outside chores, ride my bike, etc. during the week, freeing up Fri-Sun for doing other stuff.
Of course, during the winter, these hours suck--by the time I leave the gym, it's dark. And when I was working in another department that normally went 0700-1730, I never saw daylight at all unless I left the building for lunch. That's part of why I hate winter--it's depressing as shit.
Basically, due to the hours I work I never have time to do anything in the morning before work. Therefore, it is in my best interest to maximize the daylight time after I leave work, and so I support instituting a permanent, two-hour, year-round DST jump.
There's more than just earth, you know. And if you feel so strongly that the population needs to be reduced, that humanity should just let itself fade away, then why don't you lead by example and off yourself? Then the rest of us can get on with expanding the human race and moving off this rock.
The wedding was probably conducted at a place of business--an event hall, for example. Such places, because they are businesses, are required to have liquor licenses to sell alcohol. They aren't likely to allow outside alcohol for liability reasons. Further, the DJ was probably hired; anyone acting as a DJ for hire is also a business, and that carries with it certain restrictions.
That's different if you're having the wedding in your back yard, your friend is bartending using liquor you bought at the store the other day, and your brother is doing the music. None of that requires the licensing and fees.
The difference, basically, is in whether you hired people to do those functions of your wedding, or you do them yourself. Judging by the amount spent on the wedding in question, I highly suspect it was the former.
The composites are actually a fairly minor part of Boeing's current problems. What's biting them much harder is poor program and supplier management. Schedules and milestones were set by marketing, not by engineering, and assumed a best-case, everything-will-work-as-it's-designed-and-all-our-suppliers-will-be-on-time basis. Schedules were ridiculously unrealistic (rollout to delivery in less than a month), and lots of corners got cut to meet deadlines and show "visual progress" on paper (like rolling out an empty shell of an airplane to meet marketing's deadline, but then having to take it all back apart again to put the missing components in). It's like they tossed everything they knew about building airplanes out the window and started with new ideas that weren't held up by the "hide-bound traditions of the past".
The composites are responsible for part of the delay, but system integration, configuration control, and overall poor planning are what's really killing them. It's a classic case of there never being time to do it right, but always time to do it over.
Yeah, like there are only two two kinds of people in this country ... and there are just as many on the "American Left" who will happily and blindly lap up what their "leaders" tell them to.
This appears to be a combined case of blind partisanship ("they support it, so we must oppose it because they're the other side"), stupidity, and "a free market isn't defined by the presence of competition or the ability for all parties to make free, informed choices, but rather whether large corporations have any restrictions on them or not".
I have no love for a lot of the "American Left" as most would think of it, nor for the "Right". But this is just fucking stupid.
Most of the pedestrians I've read about that get hit by trains were either there on purpose (ie, attempting suicide), or walking down the tracks away from any marked crossing (and maybe even with headphones in, drunk, or otherwise distracted).
There are also cases of railyard workers being struck by a loose railcar rolling around (which can be all but silent), or pinned between two of them.
But most train accidents I read about are train vs. vehicle, where the driver of said vehicle did something stupid like stop on the tracks, go around the gate arms, or try to beat the train and cross before it got there.
A large, modern diesel train can be surprisingly quiet if it's not blowing the horn, especially if it's moving fast.
Wow.
Just wow.
I would have thought that, on a website full of people in programming and engineering (both fields where proper syntax and precision are critical), those people would understand the need for precise, standardized communication.
I guess I was wrong.
My faith in humanity dies a little more every day...
The important part isn't writing by hand. I hate writing by hand, and my teachers always made me type things because my handwriting sucks. The important part is knowing how to spell properly without having to use spellcheck; assuming that has been taught and evaluated properly, I have no problem with computers being used on tests so long as the appropriate restrictions are in place (no internet access, etc.). Besides, editing is much easier on a computer.
The bit about the calcluators stems from comments I've seen on this site claiming that students (primary K-5, not college) shouldn't have to learn how to do math by hand, but should instead just be issued calculators right from the start, and be allowed to use anything up to and including a regular computer for math tests.
I guess I'm just tired of hearing that we shouldn't be teaching kids how to do things by hand now that we have computers to do those things for us.
I can see it already...
"But the tool is there, so why should people have to learn proper spelling? Why should people have to learn to do math by hand if they have computers available?"
But that's just a circular argument. The definition you give of (simplified) "left=reality" can then be substituted in to say "reality=reality". For these purposes, we could thus say "reality shows a purple bias" where we define "purple" to be "the point of view that best reflects reality". You can't offer your own definition for something and then try to use that definition as proof that the thing you are defining is as you defined it.
It's like a fundie arguing that the bible is right because the bible says it's right--it just doesn't work. And besides, I don't like the original statement in question because it is always presented as "reality has this bias" with the statement alone intended to be proof. I never see anyone provide evidence as to why reality might have that bias, much less an explanation of how reality can have a bias in the first place. Yet people still throw it out like it's the panacea of arguments, that all they have to do is quote it and the argument is irrefuteably over.
(And for the record, I consider myself neither "left" nor "right"--though trying to simplify all of the possible social and political views into two simple categories is completely absurd in the first place)
Error: Vague or undefined term "left"
Error: Insufficient evidence/no evidence given