It's not terribly hard to believe that it came down -- it's a brand new system, and as it is a drone and not a manned aircraft probably is at risk of more catastrophic single-point failures.
But if a small, stealthy drone was taken down by the Iranians, I'd be shocked. Even the slow, big, horribly non-stealthy Predator and Reaper drones hardly ever get shot down. This RQ170 is clearly designed to be hard to see on radar; is reasonably fast, and quite small.
As others have said, it's not real until there are pictures.
I read the summary as saying that it was almost *not* the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. But then, the TFA doesn't really say that -- there was very little that could have been done once the earthquake happened to prevent most of what came afterward.
The government often insists that they should get the best price, the greatest discount, that the supplier gives to anybody. It makes some sense, the government is often the largest customer -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if the US Federal Government was the largest single customer of Oracle.
The interesting part of this is that the sales department often uses this when people try to negotiate a lower price. "Sorry, we are required by law to not give you a lower price than we charge the government. It's out of our control, sorry."
Now, there are ways to get around this, covering the spectrum from legitimate to fraud and everywhere in between, but it's a ubiquitously used negotiating point.
Curiously, the exact same idea has been used to detect (ok, after the fact) nuclear tests. For nuclear tests, the mechanism of the ionosphere disturbance makes a little more sense than for an earthquake.
I was with Musk right up until he said 100x cheaper.
If he had said 2x cheaper, that would have been a revolution, 10x cheaper is substantially beyond believability, but 100x cheaper just means that he's lying, and doesn't care that you know it.
Landing the first stage makes some sense -- it's the biggest part, and it's not going all that fast at burnout, and it's not all that far from the launch pad at that point, either. It's light and has a lot of drag, and should slow down quickly.
The second stage though, is really iffy. It appears that they're going to land it at the end of the first orbit. All the weight of the stage is toward the back -- the engines, and the landing struts. But, they're showing the stage re-entering nose-first -- unless they're carrying a lot of balllast (or a *lot* of fuel) the stage will be unstable for reentry -- and stability during reentry is not something you want to be unsure about! Keeping the cryogenic fuel and oxidizer cold in flight-weight tanks during four of five minutes of reentry is going to be a massive challenge -- and if you're going to do it with ablative surfaces then it's really not all that reusable, is it?
Anyway, I admire the man and the company enormously; and wish him all the best. There are surely things I don't know about the program, but I'll enjoy watching!
At the local RC airport here in Van Nuys (probably the busiest RC airport in the world) they have a couple of days of LA JETS each year. The variety and sophistication of the equipment is amazing. Each of those planes probably is a multi-thousand dollar investment.
But what's also amazing is how well the community polices itself. There are safety interlocks on each plane, and very strict rules about speed, altitude, and range; and everybody watches everybody else extremely closely. They all know that the first time a 200mph 15-lb jet plows through a crowd of spectators, it's all over -- so they are fanatical about safety. It's very impressive to see. So far, I believe that the safety record has been extremely good.
Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times on intelligence gathering. He has an article today that dovetails nicely into this Wall Street Journal article. Savage reports that two senators are concerned that the government is using secret means to surveil US citizens based on a ruling from the FISA court -- rulings that are secret. This is tantamount to having a secret law; something that is anathema to the Constitution.
Progressive Insurance is busy flogging their "Snapshot" system, which is exactly that. They give you a tracking device, and you put it in your car, and if you are the "good" driver you say that you are you get a discount in your insurance. I'd love to see the TOS on that baby.
The article unfortunately doesn't say this, but these satellites are very similar to the GRACE pair of satellites still orbiting the earth. There are a couple of things that make this different.
1) One of the limitations GRACE has is that the satellites have to orbit pretty high, to stay out of the influence of the Earth's atmosphere. Their orbits are about 300 miles high, and that limits the resolution of the gravity map to dozens of miles at very best. GRAIL will not have that limitation, and I hope they can fly the satellites much lower. The tidal forces of the Earth at the Moon are probably about 100 times stronger than our tides from the Moon, that might limit how low they can fly -- but it should allow a much more precise measurement of the Moon's gravity map than we have of Earth.
2) One of the fascinating things about GRACE, that has proven more exciting than would have thought possible, is that the Earth's gravity is a function of time. GRACE is able to detect when large areas of earth are saturated with water, or changes in ocean currents, from the change in gravity. The Moon probably doesn't change at all. If they do detect changes, though...that would be exciting!
The patent that Apple has used to pull Samsung Galaxy Tabs from the shelves isn't a software patent. It's a design patent for a thin, rounded-rectangle, flatscreen computer. It's even more absurd.
Many of the commercial ray tracing packages have written GPU-based versions that work remarkably well.
V-Ray and mental ray, in particular, have very exciting GPU implementations. A presentation by mental images showed some very high-quality global illumination calculations done on the GPU. Once you get good sampling algorithms, the challenge is dealing with memory latency. It's very slow to do random access into memory on a GPU. mental images solved that problem by running a lot of threads, as GPU's context switch very quickly. When I said "a lot of threads", I wasn't kidding -- the demo I saw was running 100,000 threads over 10 graphics cards. The huge majority of those threads are stalled waiting for memory, but it doesn't cost anything to wait for those accesses to be satisfied if you have other threads to run.
I can't say that I knew for certain. I do know for sure that the gaseous diffusion operation at Oak Ridge was still running during that period, and I assumed that there was no need to find another way if you already have a way that works. At about that time there was a scandal about tons of missing uranium deposited along the miles and miles of tubing in the Oak Ridge plants, clearly they were still active then to some extent.
There are a couple of other uranium separation technologies too, that I don't think are being used by anybody now. The South Africans used Hilsch vortex tubes, insanely simple (no moving parts!) devices, but are quite inefficient (about 1% of the efficiency!) compared to centrifuges and gaseous diffusion. Scientific American had some articles about laser-excited separation back in the 70's -- one can tune a laser to the very precise frequency that would ionize U235 preferentially from U238, which makes it trivial to separate electromagnetically. I don't believe that anybody's using either of these techniques except in research.
In 1993, I was working one Saturday at Pacific Data Images in Sunnyvale. (who later went on to make such classics as "Shrek", but that's another story.) At the time we were one of the leading CG advertising companies in the world.
Anyway, I wandered into the front lobby, and there was a guy there, the husband of the receptionist, that had this very long roll of paper, maybe 20 feet, with a undulating line drawn along it it. He was searching up and down along the line, for quite some time....well, I couldn't help but ask what it was.
He said that it was the fourier transform of the power line going into a plant. He and his company were examining the spectrum to see if they could deduce what was going on inside the plant -- if the machines inside the plant would leak substantial information back onto the power line. Anybody with any electrical engineering experience would know that of course this would be true. I said, OK, that's interesting. What do you see in this spectrum?
And he pointed to a little sinc() shaped (kind of sombrero shaped) area at a particular frequency. And then showed the aliases of that at higher frequencies. He said that these were clearly signatures of many six-pole electrical motors running all at almost exactly the same speed. I looked inquistitive, and he said, "you know, like if you had a bunch of uranium gas centrifuges running." I thought about this for a few minutes....and said, "uhm, OK, but we don't use centrifuges to separate uranium", and he said "no, we don't" and left it at that.
Soon, he was back to Iraq, using a ground-penetrating radar he developed to look for buried weapons. I never saw him again.
The previous Slashdot article is about the NSA trying to live without the internet -- they say it's about trying to set up an independent network, but experience has shown 1,000 times over that networks get connected -- that's what they do. Especially for NSA, they clearly *have* to be connected to the internet, that's where the communications they are trying to surveil are. And the rest of their job, making finding the human connections that bear on the message traffic they intercept all desperately needs the internet.
It's just as true for you -- cutting yourself off from the 'net altogether is really not that different from cutting off your head. There's just an expectation of access to information, and the world doesn't work if you don't have it.
I agree with others that what you really want is therapy. Find out what your issues are, and deal with them. You're not going to get to the bottom of an addictive behavior by putting something somewhat out of reach.
Unfortunately, the way to proceed is clear
on
Righthaven Loses
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I am sure that the newspapers will just grant full copyright to RightHaven, for a right to share in the spoils of the lawsuits. This might have been RightHaven's plan all along...
It's not hard to make spread spectrum/UWB networks that are very difficult to detect if you don't have the keys; much less track down. Sending out 2.4GHz routers is just the American version of a suicide vest -- if you try to use it, you are literally broadcasting your location and your intentions. But a true stealth network (maybe not that high a bandwidth, but we're not talking about downloading Transformers 3 in stereo) could be relatively risk-free; especially if the network cards were tamper-resistant.
Power needed to hover would go down with the square of the rotor diameter. Why not make them, say, 6ft instead of 4ft in diameter -- you'd need less than half the power.
I've never really understood why people will piss and moan for days about how they need this or that $100 thing to make them much more productive, rather than clicking on a button on Amazon and having it show up at your desk a couple of days later.
If your life is really miserable using one monitor, isn't it worth $130 to get a second one? If you feel you could be 20% more productive with two monitors, wouldn't that look good at next review time?
From the fine article: "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency..."
So, with a ridiculously bad solar cell, they could increase the efficiency to something that's still ridiculously bad.
There are a couple of issues with this theory about focus being an issue. The largest one is that for human eyes, there's really not that much difference between focusing on something 10 meters away and 30 meters away, the hyperfocal distance for the human eye isn't very far. Most stereo movies, also, are being designed so that the convergence point stays pretty close to the screen; because reconverging the eyes all the time causes strain even if there isn't a focus/convergence conflict.
There are lots of cars stolen in Los Angeles, and I was thinking that it would be useful to have a system kind of like this, but done privately.
I would build cameras that are far less intrusive than the NYPD ones, and offer to put them in people's cars for free. If they spot a car that has been stolen, we'd contact the police, and try to negotiate a reward from the owner, which we'd split 50:50.
A few hundred cars prowling the streets of LA, gobbling up all the license plates they see, would make stealing cars in LA a lot more dangerous. And cheating on your spouse, and calling in sick at work -- all kinds of nefariousness.
And all perfectly legal, I would think. After all, your license plate is displayed for all the world to see.
It's said that in the Olden Days, back in the 80's, any tiny cracks were obvious from nicotine stains streaming downwind. This might be a case of smoking saving lives...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not terribly hard to believe that it came down -- it's a brand new system, and as it is a drone and not a manned aircraft probably is at risk of more catastrophic single-point failures.
But if a small, stealthy drone was taken down by the Iranians, I'd be shocked. Even the slow, big, horribly non-stealthy Predator and Reaper drones hardly ever get shot down. This RQ170 is clearly designed to be hard to see on radar; is reasonably fast, and quite small.
As others have said, it's not real until there are pictures.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/05/04/20/2251203/offshoring-to-a-ship-in-international-waters
This is a very attractive idea, and people have been attracted to it a few times before!
This article isn't exactly a dup, but as Mark Twain said "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes"
> People need to keep in mind that Life causes Death 100% of the time, You can take that to the bank!
So far, for humans, it's only about 90% of the time. At least 10% of the humans ever alive are still alive.
I read the summary as saying that it was almost *not* the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. But then, the TFA doesn't really say that -- there was very little that could have been done once the earthquake happened to prevent most of what came afterward.
The government often insists that they should get the best price, the greatest discount, that the supplier gives to anybody. It makes some sense, the government is often the largest customer -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if the US Federal Government was the largest single customer of Oracle.
The interesting part of this is that the sales department often uses this when people try to negotiate a lower price. "Sorry, we are required by law to not give you a lower price than we charge the government. It's out of our control, sorry."
Now, there are ways to get around this, covering the spectrum from legitimate to fraud and everywhere in between, but it's a ubiquitously used negotiating point.
Curiously, the exact same idea has been used to detect (ok, after the fact) nuclear tests. For nuclear tests, the mechanism of the ionosphere disturbance makes a little more sense than for an earthquake.
I was with Musk right up until he said 100x cheaper.
If he had said 2x cheaper, that would have been a revolution, 10x cheaper is substantially beyond believability, but 100x cheaper just means that he's lying, and doesn't care that you know it.
Landing the first stage makes some sense -- it's the biggest part, and it's not going all that fast at burnout, and it's not all that far from the launch pad at that point, either. It's light and has a lot of drag, and should slow down quickly.
The second stage though, is really iffy. It appears that they're going to land it at the end of the first orbit. All the weight of the stage is toward the back -- the engines, and the landing struts. But, they're showing the stage re-entering nose-first -- unless they're carrying a lot of balllast (or a *lot* of fuel) the stage will be unstable for reentry -- and stability during reentry is not something you want to be unsure about! Keeping the cryogenic fuel and oxidizer cold in flight-weight tanks during four of five minutes of reentry is going to be a massive challenge -- and if you're going to do it with ablative surfaces then it's really not all that reusable, is it?
Anyway, I admire the man and the company enormously; and wish him all the best. There are surely things I don't know about the program, but I'll enjoy watching!
At the local RC airport here in Van Nuys (probably the busiest RC airport in the world) they have a couple of days of LA JETS each year. The variety and sophistication of the equipment is amazing. Each of those planes probably is a multi-thousand dollar investment.
But what's also amazing is how well the community polices itself. There are safety interlocks on each plane, and very strict rules about speed, altitude, and range; and everybody watches everybody else extremely closely. They all know that the first time a 200mph 15-lb jet plows through a crowd of spectators, it's all over -- so they are fanatical about safety. It's very impressive to see. So far, I believe that the safety record has been extremely good.
Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times on intelligence gathering. He has an article today that dovetails nicely into this Wall Street Journal article. Savage reports that two senators are concerned that the government is using secret means to surveil US citizens based on a ruling from the FISA court -- rulings that are secret. This is tantamount to having a secret law; something that is anathema to the Constitution.
Progressive Insurance is busy flogging their "Snapshot" system, which is exactly that. They give you a tracking device, and you put it in your car, and if you are the "good" driver you say that you are you get a discount in your insurance. I'd love to see the TOS on that baby.
The article unfortunately doesn't say this, but these satellites are very similar to the GRACE pair of satellites still orbiting the earth. There are a couple of things that make this different.
1) One of the limitations GRACE has is that the satellites have to orbit pretty high, to stay out of the influence of the Earth's atmosphere. Their orbits are about 300 miles high, and that limits the resolution of the gravity map to dozens of miles at very best. GRAIL will not have that limitation, and I hope they can fly the satellites much lower. The tidal forces of the Earth at the Moon are probably about 100 times stronger than our tides from the Moon, that might limit how low they can fly -- but it should allow a much more precise measurement of the Moon's gravity map than we have of Earth.
2) One of the fascinating things about GRACE, that has proven more exciting than would have thought possible, is that the Earth's gravity is a function of time. GRACE is able to detect when large areas of earth are saturated with water, or changes in ocean currents, from the change in gravity. The Moon probably doesn't change at all. If they do detect changes, though...that would be exciting!
The patent that Apple has used to pull Samsung Galaxy Tabs from the shelves isn't a software patent. It's a design patent for a thin, rounded-rectangle, flatscreen computer. It's even more absurd.
Many of the commercial ray tracing packages have written GPU-based versions that work remarkably well.
V-Ray and mental ray, in particular, have very exciting GPU implementations. A presentation by mental images showed some very high-quality global illumination calculations done on the GPU. Once you get good sampling algorithms, the challenge is dealing with memory latency. It's very slow to do random access into memory on a GPU. mental images solved that problem by running a lot of threads, as GPU's context switch very quickly. When I said "a lot of threads", I wasn't kidding -- the demo I saw was running 100,000 threads over 10 graphics cards. The huge majority of those threads are stalled waiting for memory, but it doesn't cost anything to wait for those accesses to be satisfied if you have other threads to run.
I can't say that I knew for certain. I do know for sure that the gaseous diffusion operation at Oak Ridge was still running during that period, and I assumed that there was no need to find another way if you already have a way that works. At about that time there was a scandal about tons of missing uranium deposited along the miles and miles of tubing in the Oak Ridge plants, clearly they were still active then to some extent.
There are a couple of other uranium separation technologies too, that I don't think are being used by anybody now. The South Africans used Hilsch vortex tubes, insanely simple (no moving parts!) devices, but are quite inefficient (about 1% of the efficiency!) compared to centrifuges and gaseous diffusion. Scientific American had some articles about laser-excited separation back in the 70's -- one can tune a laser to the very precise frequency that would ionize U235 preferentially from U238, which makes it trivial to separate electromagnetically. I don't believe that anybody's using either of these techniques except in research.
If you know more, please fill me in!
In 1993, I was working one Saturday at Pacific Data Images in Sunnyvale. (who later went on to make such classics as "Shrek", but that's another story.) At the time we were one of the leading CG advertising companies in the world.
Anyway, I wandered into the front lobby, and there was a guy there, the husband of the receptionist, that had this very long roll of paper, maybe 20 feet, with a undulating line drawn along it it. He was searching up and down along the line, for quite some time....well, I couldn't help but ask what it was.
He said that it was the fourier transform of the power line going into a plant. He and his company were examining the spectrum to see if they could deduce what was going on inside the plant -- if the machines inside the plant would leak substantial information back onto the power line. Anybody with any electrical engineering experience would know that of course this would be true. I said, OK, that's interesting. What do you see in this spectrum?
And he pointed to a little sinc() shaped (kind of sombrero shaped) area at a particular frequency. And then showed the aliases of that at higher frequencies. He said that these were clearly signatures of many six-pole electrical motors running all at almost exactly the same speed. I looked inquistitive, and he said, "you know, like if you had a bunch of uranium gas centrifuges running." I thought about this for a few minutes....and said, "uhm, OK, but we don't use centrifuges to separate uranium", and he said "no, we don't" and left it at that.
Soon, he was back to Iraq, using a ground-penetrating radar he developed to look for buried weapons. I never saw him again.
The previous Slashdot article is about the NSA trying to live without the internet -- they say it's about trying to set up an independent network, but experience has shown 1,000 times over that networks get connected -- that's what they do. Especially for NSA, they clearly *have* to be connected to the internet, that's where the communications they are trying to surveil are. And the rest of their job, making finding the human connections that bear on the message traffic they intercept all desperately needs the internet.
It's just as true for you -- cutting yourself off from the 'net altogether is really not that different from cutting off your head. There's just an expectation of access to information, and the world doesn't work if you don't have it.
I agree with others that what you really want is therapy. Find out what your issues are, and deal with them. You're not going to get to the bottom of an addictive behavior by putting something somewhat out of reach.
I am sure that the newspapers will just grant full copyright to RightHaven, for a right to share in the spoils of the lawsuits. This might have been RightHaven's plan all along...
It's not hard to make spread spectrum/UWB networks that are very difficult to detect if you don't have the keys; much less track down. Sending out 2.4GHz routers is just the American version of a suicide vest -- if you try to use it, you are literally broadcasting your location and your intentions. But a true stealth network (maybe not that high a bandwidth, but we're not talking about downloading Transformers 3 in stereo) could be relatively risk-free; especially if the network cards were tamper-resistant.
Power needed to hover would go down with the square of the rotor diameter. Why not make them, say, 6ft instead of 4ft in diameter -- you'd need less than half the power.
I've never really understood why people will piss and moan for days about how they need this or that $100 thing to make them much more productive, rather than clicking on a button on Amazon and having it show up at your desk a couple of days later.
If your life is really miserable using one monitor, isn't it worth $130 to get a second one? If you feel you could be 20% more productive with two monitors, wouldn't that look good at next review time?
From the fine article: "With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency..."
So, with a ridiculously bad solar cell, they could increase the efficiency to something that's still ridiculously bad.
The key to solar cells is watts/dollar.
Thad
There are a couple of issues with this theory about focus being an issue. The largest one is that for human eyes, there's really not that much difference between focusing on something 10 meters away and 30 meters away, the hyperfocal distance for the human eye isn't very far. Most stereo movies, also, are being designed so that the convergence point stays pretty close to the screen; because reconverging the eyes all the time causes strain even if there isn't a focus/convergence conflict.
Call them American units!
I mean, we don't use Imperial gallons here anyway
There are lots of cars stolen in Los Angeles, and I was thinking that it would be useful to have a system kind of like this, but done privately.
I would build cameras that are far less intrusive than the NYPD ones, and offer to put them in people's cars for free. If they spot a car that has been stolen, we'd contact the police, and try to negotiate a reward from the owner, which we'd split 50:50.
A few hundred cars prowling the streets of LA, gobbling up all the license plates they see, would make stealing cars in LA a lot more dangerous. And cheating on your spouse, and calling in sick at work -- all kinds of nefariousness.
And all perfectly legal, I would think. After all, your license plate is displayed for all the world to see.
It's said that in the Olden Days, back in the 80's, any tiny cracks were obvious from nicotine stains streaming downwind. This might be a case of smoking saving lives...