OK, so let's assume that a student encounters one of these "well-versed" atheists. He is polite, he is respectful, and he is able to counter every single point raised by the student with a devastatingly effective counter-argument - and is able to raise points of his own that the student is unable to counter.
Does that not suggest that maybe the atheist's POSITION is stronger, not the atheist himself?
The LAW states that the bike has a right to the whole lane from the INSIDE of the white line to the yellow line.
Many states have laws that compel cyclists to keep as far right WITHIN THE LANE as safely practicable, but they are explicitly NOT compelled to ride on the shoulder (although it is permitted) AND they have a right to move leftward for safety purposes.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly. YOU are the jackass, not the cyclists.
Do you honk and swear at tractors, funerals, and Amish buggies too?
I recently built a similar system - Radeon HD3200 integrated graphics, Phenom II Quad 940, Ubuntu Jaunty. Box absolutely screams (it replaced an Athlon 3200+) and I'm very happy with the Ubuntu user experience (recent convert from Fedora)
But Lord of Guns and Butter, the ATI 3D drivers SUCK. Crash crash crash, where the NVidia drivers Just Work.
In retrospect, I wish I had skipped the integrated graphics and just bought an NVidia card.
Actually, the increased effective octane of E85 means that it is much more detonation resistant than pure pump gas. That means you can run a lot more turbo boost than you'd normally be able to get away with on a "street" fuel.
You have to increase injector size quite a bit to offset the lower energy per volume, but with all the extra air crammed into the motor at high boost values, the net result is a metric assload of power from a freely available fuel.
Making 500 HP out of a turbo 2 litre street motor is entirely doable running this fuel. I had to run 118 octane C16 race fuel (at $10 US / gal) to get similar performance.
The Soviets designed and built a class of extremely high-yield devices (50-100Mt) explicitly to detonate as high-altitude airbursts to create massive EMP and disrupt communications and control networks.
A 5 Mt city-cracker is more about the blast/heat effects, but a 100 Mt device makes a HUGE EMP.
They made the neutron-reflective tamper out of fissionable material. Dirty and inefficient as hell, but it sure 'nuff boosted yield.
...I'm a huge fan of these devices. I didn't think I would be, but that has changed.
The ability to remove the operator from physical danger - in this case, I'm speaking of Predator and Reaper and similar UAVs - has made huge strides in removing the "fog of war". You aren't seeing as many life-or-death decisions made by a 17 year old scared witless, or by a cowboy pilot strung out on amphetamines looking for an excuse to use his weapons, or major decisions made on partial information, rumour, and the threat of risk. Instead, the people processing the information are well-rested, alert, and calm - and they can easily get a second opinion on what they are seeing.
So when UAV overwatch tells a unit under fire that the shooter is over by those trees, not in the village, lives are saved. When a couple of UAV operators put their heads together and determine that the dude digging in a culvert in the middle of the night is actually a farmer cleaning out his irrigation ditch, not an IED emplacer, lives are saved. And when the UAV sees a guy plant an IED and it both reports the IED location and blows the bomb emplacer up, lives are saved.
Yes, it would be better for everyone if there were no wars. It would also be better if there were no murderers, adulterers, rapists, and child molesters too. Given that war is not going away any time soon, I'm all for technology enabling that the right people get killed and the innocents be let be.
DG
More likely to go the other way
on
Tactical Camera
·
· Score: 1
All our main battle rifles have optical scopes on them, and many other nations are using optics or red-dots like the Aimpoint sights.
It is only a matter of time before someone integrates a cheap digital camera into those scopes that takes a picture every time the weapon is fired.
Look, 99% of the time, the people performing the actions on that list are doing perfectly innocent and legal things.
Guess what - law enforcement and security agencies know that. They aren't stupid or paranoid.
But they are also tasked with protecting the public from that 1% (if it is even that high) that really DO have nefarious purposes, and they need to be able to tell the difference between somebody boarding a plane to visit their grandmother and somebody boarding a plane to smash it into a building.
So they study the problem, and they try and find ways to isolate indicators and warnings so they can prevent attacks vice cleaning up after them.
And the big part of the problem is that most activity that facilitates a terrorist attack is completely legal. That's how they hide. The best terrorist never does a single illegal thing (besides conspiracy) right up until he strikes.
The outrage is entirely misplaced. Could Slashdot be used as a tool to help commit a terrorist act? Absolutely it could. So can a cellphone, or a bag of fertilizer, or a shovel.
Studying methods of shovel use in support of terrorist activities does not mean the student of shoveling thinks all shovelers are terrorists. It means they want to understand how a shovel might be incorporated into a terrorist act, so that if they see that, in concert with other indicators, MAYBE you have something worth investigating.
I did all my web development circa 1996 on an Amiga. One problem - no Netscape. So I'd run MacOS in ShapeShifter to run Netscape, and do all my graphics and HTML editing on the Amiga side.
Amazingly, the emulated Mac (on a 68040 Amiga 4000) ran faster than a "real" Mac, and the whole system had no appreciable slowdown.
But imagine discovering a 1G +/-.2G planet, temp range -35C-40C, 75%N 25%O. Doesn't matter how far away; imagine finding one.
I'd bet we'd start spooling up our manned spaceflight capability pretty darned quickly after that, and actual money would start being spent on solving the distance problem (propulsion techniques, suspended animation, longevity, generation ships...)
When all that is "out west" is the edge of the earth, why bother? But as soon as the New World is discovered, all of a sudden the rewards outweigh the risks.
If Venus was inhabitable, we'd've had routine interplanetary spaceflight 20 years ago. Manned spaceflight has gone nowhere because there is no decent place to go.
Because anarchy is more dangerous to "us" than any other option.
The lawlessness of the Civil War/Taliban era (the Taliban were far more concerned with beard length than most else) is what allowed Al Quaida to operate unopposed and unfettered, and that is what directly led to the attacks on the WTC....but you also seem to have an odd view of how the current Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan conducts itself. As new and faltering as it is, its heart is certainly in the right place. There is no state-sanctioned religious persecution here. And it certainly is not a theocracy.
There are plenty of Muslim influences, yes - but that's not a bad thing, and if that's what they want, who are we to say otherwise?
Have they made mistakes? Of course they have. They are building all the mechanisms of state quite literally out of nothing, and that is a slow process even without the neo-Taliban, the ISI, and the narco-lords running amok. But you don't give up just because not everything goes 100% according to plan and schedule.
Rebuilding a failed state is not a black-and-white game; everything is a billion shades of grey, and sometimes you hold your nose and work with a darker shade of grey than you might like if it means improvement in an area that is darker yet.
Sure there is - the democratically elected Afghan government.
Nobody here is a saint; everybody has a history. You can't go through what Afghanistan has and expect that everybody involved kept their nose clean the entire time.
But starting with President Karzai, the Afghan people got to choose (and very soon, they'll get to choose again)
At the end of the day, it is their country and their government. We support who they pick - we don't pick who they are supposed to support.
Here's a quick summary (which is itself nowhere near the full story)
Afghanistan was ruled by a king, but then it had a Communist student revolution. They happened. Lots of people saw Communism as a way to eliminate social injustice and more than one country had themselves a Communist revolution spearheaded by idealists (and no doubt encouraged and supported by the Soviets with whom they shared a border)
But like a lot of revolutions, it is one thing to be outraged by social inequity and take action to overthrow a government; it is quite another to sucessfully pick up the controls of state machinery and run an effective government - student revolutionary committees aren't particularly good at training adminstrative skills (they do better with sloganeering and inspirational poetry). The new Afghan Communist government simply wasn't very good at governing. And they did themselves no favours by trying in fix every single perceived social problem (some of which were real, like poor education amongst rural women) all at once. In particular, the Communist outlawing of religion did not go over very well in a nation where the majority self-identify as devout Muslims.
So in very short order, they were having to get increasingly heavy-handed when it came to ruling the population, and as a direct side effect, were soon facing a counter-revolution. Backed into a corner, the Afghan government called for Soviet help, and the Red Army rolled in.
Of course, Russia had had Afghan ambitions since the days of the Czar....
The problem was that the Red Army was not particularly suited for fighting counter-insurgancy warfare. It was comprised primarily of undertrained conscripts, and was much better off fighting large-scale manouvre warfare that required mass and firepower but little finesse or skill. The Red Army started taking horrific casulties, and inflicting horrific reprisals (which only fueled the insurgency)
And then the West (primarily the US) realized that the USSR more-or-less had its own Vietnam on the go (there are many similarities) and started arming and supporting the insurgents, providing them with weapons well suited to the kinds of battles they were fighting. Of course, most of these insurgents were motivated by a radical Islamic worldview... but the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
The bleeding of the Red Army got worse and worse and worse, and finally the whole operation reached the point of untenability, and the Soviets left. But they left behind the Afghan Communist government that had invited them in the first place. The Mujahadeen kept fighting the remnents of the Afghan government, and soon started fighting each other.
The fighting in Afghanistan never really stopped after the Soviets left... it just kept right on going, and what little was left of any sort of state infrastruture was pounded into mush.
Of course, once the Soviets pulled out, the West stopped paying the area any attention. The goal was "bleed the Soviets dry" not "Help restore Afghanistan".
Eventually, Mullah Omar and the Taliban took over - that's a fascinating story in of itself - the Taliban started out as the good guys - but after corruption set in, they allowed Al Quaida to operate in their territory (and they weren't really very big on rule of law either)
There hasn't been a real, true, functional Afghan government since the early 80s - and the life expectancy is *** 35 *** years. The place is a mess. This is state-building in the rawest sense.
Progress IS being made. Things ARE getting better. But Lord O Mercy is there a long way to go.
Scorched earth? Not likely. All our efforts are are focussed on either rebuilding Afghan state capacity (police, fire, hospital, army, and government institutions) or on providing security for those rebuilding efforts.
The Afghans scorched their own earth during the civil war that followed the end of the Soviet occupation (and the Soviets gave them a good head start). Al Quaida and the Taliban occupied the law vacuum left by the collapse of the Afghan government.
The tough part about the Afghan mission is attempting to build reliable, non-corrupt government institutions in a land where almost nobody has any experience with a life in a place that is governed by rule of law. That's the major obstacle.
The Afghan mission is marked by its LACK of revenge-based policy. It is Marshall Plan 2 (although not as well funded or manned, to its detriment)
...that consistancy with historical data is worthless if that data is wrong.
Using your game analogy, assume that the metric for video card speed was a specific timedemo for Game X. There exists framerate data for Game X going back 10 years, so it is nice for showing historical trends.
Then a bug is discovered in the game rendering engine that causes actual delivered framerate to be understated by somewhere between 20-50%.
Well guess what - your test is WRONG. And all that lovely historical data is worthless, no matter how pretty the graph.
Yup. And you could grab the titlebar of a screen and drag it down, and it would reveal the workspace behind it, upscaled to the resolution of the forward screen.
One of my favourite "blow friends away" demos was to pull a screen halfway down with F18 Interceptor running behind it, and then type in a word processor (or whatever) in the forward screen with no slowdown in either the game or the application.
That computer had its quirks, but it was powerful way beyond its time.
I did a ton of shock development as part of my race car engineering job.
We had sensors on the suspension to directly measure suspension travel, with a view towards measuring suspension velocity as part of shock development.
Even on what feels like a perfectly smooth track, there's still a lot of humping and bumping going on.
Actually, it is a pair of nested cylinders, and the rationale behind it is brilliant.
To get the biggest possible boom, you want to bring together the largest possible mass of fissile material. Problem: if you accumulate too large a mass, it starts a chain reaction on its own.
But if you form that mass into a ring shape, and make the hole in the ring large enough, you create extra surface area for neutrons to escape, but the gap is too big for them to have sufficient energy to split an atom on the other side of the gap.
For a given outer diameter (fixed by the inner diameter of the bomb casing) the maximum mass of fissile material is obtained with a cylinder whose height is determined by the mass on the "side" of the cylinder nox exceeding criticality. A mating cone shape results in a smaller usuable mass.
So why make the projectile hollow instead of shooting a slug into a hollow target? Because the sides of the gun barrel constrain the movement of the projectile and ensure that the mating surfaces are aligned.
It's actually, for such a "crude" design, brilliant engineering.
I found out from my wife that our home server died and won't reboot. AMD Athlon 3200+ running Fedora.
It is almost certainly a hardware problem, and that server has been running 24/7 for years now... time to upgrade.
My hardware philosophy has been to buy big and milk it for a long time. You pay more up front for that power, but the fact that it has power means it doesn't get obsoleted immediately either.
So then, cut through the marketing crap. Assume a desktop PC purchase in the May-ish time frame, to run Linux. What is likely to be the way to go from a hardware perspective?
DG
Re:This is Neal's Best Book Yet
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so let's assume that a student encounters one of these "well-versed" atheists. He is polite, he is respectful, and he is able to counter every single point raised by the student with a devastatingly effective counter-argument - and is able to raise points of his own that the student is unable to counter.
Does that not suggest that maybe the atheist's POSITION is stronger, not the atheist himself?
DG
The LAW states that the bike has a right to the whole lane from the INSIDE of the white line to the yellow line.
Many states have laws that compel cyclists to keep as far right WITHIN THE LANE as safely practicable, but they are explicitly NOT compelled to ride on the shoulder (although it is permitted) AND they have a right to move leftward for safety purposes.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly. YOU are the jackass, not the cyclists.
Do you honk and swear at tractors, funerals, and Amish buggies too?
DG
I recently built a similar system - Radeon HD3200 integrated graphics, Phenom II Quad 940, Ubuntu Jaunty. Box absolutely screams (it replaced an Athlon 3200+) and I'm very happy with the Ubuntu user experience (recent convert from Fedora)
But Lord of Guns and Butter, the ATI 3D drivers SUCK. Crash crash crash, where the NVidia drivers Just Work.
In retrospect, I wish I had skipped the integrated graphics and just bought an NVidia card.
DG
Nope. As long as the cooling system is up to the job (which it usually is) and you use decent oil, you don't see any extra wear.
Most wear occurs at startup anyway (when there is no oil film in place)
Mind you, you must know what you are doing to pull this sort of thing off....
DG
Actually, the increased effective octane of E85 means that it is much more detonation resistant than pure pump gas. That means you can run a lot more turbo boost than you'd normally be able to get away with on a "street" fuel.
You have to increase injector size quite a bit to offset the lower energy per volume, but with all the extra air crammed into the motor at high boost values, the net result is a metric assload of power from a freely available fuel.
Making 500 HP out of a turbo 2 litre street motor is entirely doable running this fuel. I had to run 118 octane C16 race fuel (at $10 US / gal) to get similar performance.
DG
The Soviets designed and built a class of extremely high-yield devices (50-100Mt) explicitly to detonate as high-altitude airbursts to create massive EMP and disrupt communications and control networks.
A 5 Mt city-cracker is more about the blast/heat effects, but a 100 Mt device makes a HUGE EMP.
They made the neutron-reflective tamper out of fissionable material. Dirty and inefficient as hell, but it sure 'nuff boosted yield.
DG
...I'm a huge fan of these devices. I didn't think I would be, but that has changed.
The ability to remove the operator from physical danger - in this case, I'm speaking of Predator and Reaper and similar UAVs - has made huge strides in removing the "fog of war". You aren't seeing as many life-or-death decisions made by a 17 year old scared witless, or by a cowboy pilot strung out on amphetamines looking for an excuse to use his weapons, or major decisions made on partial information, rumour, and the threat of risk. Instead, the people processing the information are well-rested, alert, and calm - and they can easily get a second opinion on what they are seeing.
So when UAV overwatch tells a unit under fire that the shooter is over by those trees, not in the village, lives are saved. When a couple of UAV operators put their heads together and determine that the dude digging in a culvert in the middle of the night is actually a farmer cleaning out his irrigation ditch, not an IED emplacer, lives are saved. And when the UAV sees a guy plant an IED and it both reports the IED location and blows the bomb emplacer up, lives are saved.
Yes, it would be better for everyone if there were no wars. It would also be better if there were no murderers, adulterers, rapists, and child molesters too. Given that war is not going away any time soon, I'm all for technology enabling that the right people get killed and the innocents be let be.
DG
All our main battle rifles have optical scopes on them, and many other nations are using optics or red-dots like the Aimpoint sights.
It is only a matter of time before someone integrates a cheap digital camera into those scopes that takes a picture every time the weapon is fired.
DG
Oh no it isn't.
Look, 99% of the time, the people performing the actions on that list are doing perfectly innocent and legal things.
Guess what - law enforcement and security agencies know that. They aren't stupid or paranoid.
But they are also tasked with protecting the public from that 1% (if it is even that high) that really DO have nefarious purposes, and they need to be able to tell the difference between somebody boarding a plane to visit their grandmother and somebody boarding a plane to smash it into a building.
So they study the problem, and they try and find ways to isolate indicators and warnings so they can prevent attacks vice cleaning up after them.
And the big part of the problem is that most activity that facilitates a terrorist attack is completely legal. That's how they hide. The best terrorist never does a single illegal thing (besides conspiracy) right up until he strikes.
The outrage is entirely misplaced. Could Slashdot be used as a tool to help commit a terrorist act? Absolutely it could. So can a cellphone, or a bag of fertilizer, or a shovel.
Studying methods of shovel use in support of terrorist activities does not mean the student of shoveling thinks all shovelers are terrorists. It means they want to understand how a shovel might be incorporated into a terrorist act, so that if they see that, in concert with other indicators, MAYBE you have something worth investigating.
And that isn't outrageous; it is due diligence.
DG
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Strict;
use Slashdot::Achievements;
$DG = Slashdot::Achievements->new('April Fools');
DG
You have NO IDEA how true this is....
DG
It's dead.
Wait. Maybe not.
DG
...run it on an Amiga using ShapeShifter.
I did all my web development circa 1996 on an Amiga. One problem - no Netscape. So I'd run MacOS in ShapeShifter to run Netscape, and do all my graphics and HTML editing on the Amiga side.
Amazingly, the emulated Mac (on a 68040 Amiga 4000) ran faster than a "real" Mac, and the whole system had no appreciable slowdown.
It was an incredible machine, that Amiga.
DG
In the near term, certainly.
But imagine discovering a 1G +/- .2G planet, temp range -35C-40C, 75%N 25%O. Doesn't matter how far away; imagine finding one.
I'd bet we'd start spooling up our manned spaceflight capability pretty darned quickly after that, and actual money would start being spent on solving the distance problem (propulsion techniques, suspended animation, longevity, generation ships...)
When all that is "out west" is the edge of the earth, why bother? But as soon as the New World is discovered, all of a sudden the rewards outweigh the risks.
If Venus was inhabitable, we'd've had routine interplanetary spaceflight 20 years ago. Manned spaceflight has gone nowhere because there is no decent place to go.
DG
Similarly we need to figure out how the universe 'cheated' and made the Higgs mass so light.
Because if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to observe it?
DG
Because anarchy is more dangerous to "us" than any other option.
The lawlessness of the Civil War/Taliban era (the Taliban were far more concerned with beard length than most else) is what allowed Al Quaida to operate unopposed and unfettered, and that is what directly led to the attacks on the WTC. ...but you also seem to have an odd view of how the current Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan conducts itself. As new and faltering as it is, its heart is certainly in the right place. There is no state-sanctioned religious persecution here. And it certainly is not a theocracy.
There are plenty of Muslim influences, yes - but that's not a bad thing, and if that's what they want, who are we to say otherwise?
Have they made mistakes? Of course they have. They are building all the mechanisms of state quite literally out of nothing, and that is a slow process even without the neo-Taliban, the ISI, and the narco-lords running amok. But you don't give up just because not everything goes 100% according to plan and schedule.
Rebuilding a failed state is not a black-and-white game; everything is a billion shades of grey, and sometimes you hold your nose and work with a darker shade of grey than you might like if it means improvement in an area that is darker yet.
DG
Sure there is - the democratically elected Afghan government.
Nobody here is a saint; everybody has a history. You can't go through what Afghanistan has and expect that everybody involved kept their nose clean the entire time.
But starting with President Karzai, the Afghan people got to choose (and very soon, they'll get to choose again)
At the end of the day, it is their country and their government. We support who they pick - we don't pick who they are supposed to support.
DG
Well... the truth is considerably more nuanced.
Here's a quick summary (which is itself nowhere near the full story)
Afghanistan was ruled by a king, but then it had a Communist student revolution. They happened. Lots of people saw Communism as a way to eliminate social injustice and more than one country had themselves a Communist revolution spearheaded by idealists (and no doubt encouraged and supported by the Soviets with whom they shared a border)
But like a lot of revolutions, it is one thing to be outraged by social inequity and take action to overthrow a government; it is quite another to sucessfully pick up the controls of state machinery and run an effective government - student revolutionary committees aren't particularly good at training adminstrative skills (they do better with sloganeering and inspirational poetry). The new Afghan Communist government simply wasn't very good at governing. And they did themselves no favours by trying in fix every single perceived social problem (some of which were real, like poor education amongst rural women) all at once. In particular, the Communist outlawing of religion did not go over very well in a nation where the majority self-identify as devout Muslims.
So in very short order, they were having to get increasingly heavy-handed when it came to ruling the population, and as a direct side effect, were soon facing a counter-revolution. Backed into a corner, the Afghan government called for Soviet help, and the Red Army rolled in.
Of course, Russia had had Afghan ambitions since the days of the Czar....
The problem was that the Red Army was not particularly suited for fighting counter-insurgancy warfare. It was comprised primarily of undertrained conscripts, and was much better off fighting large-scale manouvre warfare that required mass and firepower but little finesse or skill. The Red Army started taking horrific casulties, and inflicting horrific reprisals (which only fueled the insurgency)
And then the West (primarily the US) realized that the USSR more-or-less had its own Vietnam on the go (there are many similarities) and started arming and supporting the insurgents, providing them with weapons well suited to the kinds of battles they were fighting. Of course, most of these insurgents were motivated by a radical Islamic worldview... but the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?
The bleeding of the Red Army got worse and worse and worse, and finally the whole operation reached the point of untenability, and the Soviets left. But they left behind the Afghan Communist government that had invited them in the first place. The Mujahadeen kept fighting the remnents of the Afghan government, and soon started fighting each other.
The fighting in Afghanistan never really stopped after the Soviets left... it just kept right on going, and what little was left of any sort of state infrastruture was pounded into mush.
Of course, once the Soviets pulled out, the West stopped paying the area any attention. The goal was "bleed the Soviets dry" not "Help restore Afghanistan".
Eventually, Mullah Omar and the Taliban took over - that's a fascinating story in of itself - the Taliban started out as the good guys - but after corruption set in, they allowed Al Quaida to operate in their territory (and they weren't really very big on rule of law either)
There hasn't been a real, true, functional Afghan government since the early 80s - and the life expectancy is *** 35 *** years. The place is a mess. This is state-building in the rawest sense.
Progress IS being made. Things ARE getting better. But Lord O Mercy is there a long way to go.
DG
I'm in Afghanistan right now.
Scorched earth? Not likely. All our efforts are are focussed on either rebuilding Afghan state capacity (police, fire, hospital, army, and government institutions) or on providing security for those rebuilding efforts.
The Afghans scorched their own earth during the civil war that followed the end of the Soviet occupation (and the Soviets gave them a good head start). Al Quaida and the Taliban occupied the law vacuum left by the collapse of the Afghan government.
The tough part about the Afghan mission is attempting to build reliable, non-corrupt government institutions in a land where almost nobody has any experience with a life in a place that is governed by rule of law. That's the major obstacle.
The Afghan mission is marked by its LACK of revenge-based policy. It is Marshall Plan 2 (although not as well funded or manned, to its detriment)
DG
...that consistancy with historical data is worthless if that data is wrong.
Using your game analogy, assume that the metric for video card speed was a specific timedemo for Game X. There exists framerate data for Game X going back 10 years, so it is nice for showing historical trends.
Then a bug is discovered in the game rendering engine that causes actual delivered framerate to be understated by somewhere between 20-50%.
Well guess what - your test is WRONG. And all that lovely historical data is worthless, no matter how pretty the graph.
DG
Yup. And you could grab the titlebar of a screen and drag it down, and it would reveal the workspace behind it, upscaled to the resolution of the forward screen.
One of my favourite "blow friends away" demos was to pull a screen halfway down with F18 Interceptor running behind it, and then type in a word processor (or whatever) in the forward screen with no slowdown in either the game or the application.
That computer had its quirks, but it was powerful way beyond its time.
DG
I did a ton of shock development as part of my race car engineering job.
We had sensors on the suspension to directly measure suspension travel, with a view towards measuring suspension velocity as part of shock development.
Even on what feels like a perfectly smooth track, there's still a lot of humping and bumping going on.
See http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html for example graphs of suspension velocity pulled right off the car.
DG
Actually, it is a pair of nested cylinders, and the rationale behind it is brilliant.
To get the biggest possible boom, you want to bring together the largest possible mass of fissile material. Problem: if you accumulate too large a mass, it starts a chain reaction on its own.
But if you form that mass into a ring shape, and make the hole in the ring large enough, you create extra surface area for neutrons to escape, but the gap is too big for them to have sufficient energy to split an atom on the other side of the gap.
For a given outer diameter (fixed by the inner diameter of the bomb casing) the maximum mass of fissile material is obtained with a cylinder whose height is determined by the mass on the "side" of the cylinder nox exceeding criticality. A mating cone shape results in a smaller usuable mass.
So why make the projectile hollow instead of shooting a slug into a hollow target? Because the sides of the gun barrel constrain the movement of the projectile and ensure that the mating surfaces are aligned.
It's actually, for such a "crude" design, brilliant engineering.
DG
I found out from my wife that our home server died and won't reboot. AMD Athlon 3200+ running Fedora.
It is almost certainly a hardware problem, and that server has been running 24/7 for years now... time to upgrade.
My hardware philosophy has been to buy big and milk it for a long time. You pay more up front for that power, but the fact that it has power means it doesn't get obsoleted immediately either.
So then, cut through the marketing crap. Assume a desktop PC purchase in the May-ish time frame, to run Linux. What is likely to be the way to go from a hardware perspective?
DG
Petawawa, Ontario to Kandahar, Afghanistan.
It was a long flight.
And yes, I read pretty quickly.
DG