Posts by loren massie

Fossett aircraft contains 'minimal' human remains

bing, bang, boom

Did you see the photos? The engine was 300' above the rest of it. A body would have been in smaller pieces. Ants, birds and various critters would have left nothing in a week or so. He didn't take a parachute according to the ranch staff. Real hard for a 60 year old to get out the door of a flying aircraft anyway.

You have to admire a guy who took those risks when he could have sat at home counting his money. He died doing what he liked best and it sure beats dying in a hospital with tubes and lawyers.

UN urged to prep for non-fiction Deep Impact

easy

Just nuke it with anything big a few years before it might hit. Whatever happens, none of the asteroid will be going exactly where it was going. Blow it up. Nudge it. Doesn't matter. The velocity vector of all of it changes.

IBM tries its hand in the lawn sprinkler biz

to "All your base are belong to us"

With your language skills, I hope you've employed a good secretary.

Godfather dons 'best ever film' mantle

mu choice

If you haven't seen Tremors (1), Caddyshack or Second hand lions, do yourself a favor and rent them.

EFF reveals vastly expanded search policy at US borders

well traveled

Put military grade encryption on your hard drive. Now there's a great way to get through customs. Do you really think US customs goes through every dickweed's computer. Act like a semi intelligent traveler and visitor instead of a 20 year old asshole and you'll walk right through, just like any other country that's had 3,000 of it's citizens killed by "visitors". Actually act like a prick and get sent back. Too damn many tourists around anyway.

Axon takes 100mpg wonder car for a spin

The Future?

I had an E Type in the 60's that got 25 mpg and went like a rocket. It's still the best looking car ever made and when I stupidly drove through a red light and got T-boned I walked away unhurt.

Seems that in almost 50 years, we haven't progressed much if this Axon is the best we can come up with. Go nukes/hydrogen and quit with this junk.

Climate change blows out eco-boss's record bid

Dubai

Perth, just a reasonably short (by Oz standards) distance form this dry lake is having a rather dry Winter(the wet season). Must be global warming or the cows fault or something other than weather. Either that or he could have come in summer, the dry season instead and had better luck.

Wind power or other unreliable power collection systems can't supply much more than 25% of total system requirements. Something about destabilizing the grid. They also can't replace any of the generating capacity since as someone said, it doesn't always blow or shine or whatever.

But what really pisses me off me is these guys always give us the maximum capacity of their turbines not the average generated over a reasonable time span.

The one thing I'll remember from a visit to Pommy land, was all those wind turbines sitting atop otherwise pretty green hills. Go Nukes.

Northrop in electric blaster cannon milestone

Dubai

The laser will be truck mounted or stationary as the beam control system is another laser and it's all quite large. Power generation isn't an issue. Small turbines as in the A1A would work fine. Heat sink isn't all that big a problem although it would be a large IR source. The initial targeting would be a rather large radar on another unit. The laser puts out IR itself and that's often difficult to reflect in battlefield conditions. Motor shells are smoke covered after launching, etc. The aim point will be on the nose of the incoming round as they will be falling when engaged. Spinning isn't a big issue as the beam would be rather large compared to the target.

Let's all of us try and remember that several thousand bright engineers have been working on these systems since the early 70's and the chances of any reader here picking up that wasn't thought of is well..........nil actually.