Posts by Greg Trocchia

Mozilla boudoir shoots out second Firefox 3.1 beta

@Jacob Reid

You do have the ability to turn off the "Awesome Bar", you just have to go to about:config to do it. Set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 and that should give you a regular address bar without auto-suggest (this was one of the first things I did upon upgrading to FF3). I agree that this should have been made configurable from the options (preferences, on a Mac) dialog, but simply Googling "disable awesome bar" would give you a bunch of links that tell you how to edit about:config. Not optimal, but acceptable (since you can, indeed, turn the thing off, provided you know how), I guess.

McKinnon faithful to stage further US embassy demo

@Surprised at attitudes here

As a US citizen, I can assure you that most of us have never heard of Gary McKinnon, even those of us who follow technology. The only reason *I* know about McKinnon is that I read the Register on a regular basis. I would also like to point out that, even if Mr. McKinnon is extradited here, a conviction is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. The belief that UFOs are of alien origin, and the suspicion that the US government is conspiring to withhold evidence of the same, is not exactly unknown here and it would only take one individual with such beliefs to deadlock a jury (supposing that such an individual would be unwilling to convict McKinnon for trying to "get at the truth"). Furthermore, if Simon Brown is correct about the McKinnon doing his looking around prior to passage of a law against it, that would sound like something which runs hard up against the Constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws (Article 1, Section 9).

As one of those rare Americans who has been following the McKinnon case, thanks to the coverage at the Reg, I can give you my personal opinion: it would not bother me if he succeeded in avoiding extradition. My reasoning is that lack of malevolent motivation + failure to mount a serious hacking attack = A case the prosecution should have used its discretion not to push in the first place.

If McKinnon actually was a terrorist, say looking for info to hand over to Bin Laden and company, or if he was mounting a more invasive attack, say installing keyloggers or doing a man-in-the-middle attack or trying a buffer overrun exploit, then it might be worth going after the dude as a deterrent. As it is, I come away with the distinct impression that the zeal in going after the guy is more a matter of the amount of embarrassment he is supposed to have caused and I find it hard to get worked up over that. Of course that is just my opinion, but I think it worth stating as contrary evidence to the notion that all of us in the US want to see them lock McKinnon up and throw away the key.

YouTube virals must play by US ad rules

@IR (and jeremy)

Things aren't quite as easy for advertisers in here in the US as you imagine. Remember, in addition to being the "Land of the Free", America is also the Land of the Litigious (as Steve Ballmer and the crew at Microsoft can attest to, given their recent troubles over the "Vista Capable" campaign).

WRT the "male enhancement" commercials: the FTC may not be overly quick, but they do respond eventually, boy do they: Steve Warshak, owner of Berkley Neutraceuticals (makers of the "Smiling Bob" Enzyte commercials) has recently been sentenced to 25(!) years in prison and ordered to hand over $500 million in profits for fraud conspiracy and money laundering http://tiny.cc/CqQXq

Regulatory Remit?

>>In the US, industry watchdog the National Advertising Division (NAD), part of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, made clear last week that YouTube falls within its regulatory remit.

The Better Business Bureau, as your phrase "industry watchdog" should make clear, is a private organization that, as such, doesn't have a "regulatory remit". This is from the BBB website FAQ:

[Q] Why can't the BBB stop rip-offs and scams?

[A] Many times, BBBs do. Although we do not have legal and policing powers, we provide information about marketplace fraud through scam reports to the public, media releases and alerts.

FYI, the organization that DOES have a regulatory remit is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), specifically, the Division of Advertising Practices. This is the US equivalent of the ASA, not the NAD.

Chrysler: the future's bright, the future's electric

@AC (More of this, less of that?)

In addition to being the road-going equivalent of nerd glasses (you know, the black plastic ones, taped together at the bridge), there is the fact that the Peapod is incapable of even getting out of its own way. I don't know how things are in the UK, but for use here in the US, I would regard the stated top speed of 25mph as being inadequate even for use on non-highway roads. Needless to say, being incapable of being driven on the highways means that the Peapod would never be more than a niche vehicle anyway.

The Zeo, OTOH, should be capable of being used as a primary vehicle, provided the 250 mile range is something that can be achieved in anything like real-world use. A word of advice here. If you really care about weaning people away from the internal combustion engine, forget about the aversion to powerplants which which actually provide power in significant quantities.

Even if you think foregoing speed is desirable for its own sake, you are not going to convince the rest of us. What _can_ be done is to convince people to drive a "greener" car, provided they don't have to surrender any semblance of power and sex-appeal to do so. This is what cars like the Zeo can do.

Even if the Zeo styling is too over the top for some and it has insufficient room for others, it sends a message to drivers that they can do their part to save the ecosystem while still having a desirable ride. This message is much more likely to work than insisting that everyone don a hairshirt. After all, the ecosphere only responds to what we do or what we fail to do and is indifferent to how "virtuous" we are in the process.

Lord Ahmed faces dangerous driving charge

@ BillyBoy

Like all automobiles manufactured in the last decade or two that I am aware of, an X-type Jaguar will have anti-lock (aka anti-skid) brakes. The Jag could have been doing a full panic brake just prior to the accident without necessarily leaving skid marks.

'Ruggedised, weaponised' raygun modules now on sale

What this might be like in the field

First off, let's talk about the power plant. The AGT 1500 (the power plant used in the M1 Abrams) produces over twice the required power, 1,120 kW. It weighs in at a bit over a metric ton, 1,134 kg and takes up about 1.3 cubic meters of space (1.629 m long X 0.991m wide X 0.807m high). So even with the extra radiator capacity and the like that you would require for such a system, you shouldn't have any trouble fitting one into an AFV (Armored Fighting Vehicle). Indeed, instead of having two power plants in the AFV, you could just uprate the vehicle's power plant and use the excess to power the laser. In an M2 Bradley chassis, for instance, you could install a power plant with the output of the AGT 1500 and you could power the laser and still have remaining the 600 hp that the Bradley uses to propel itself. Since the laser will be replacing the main armament and ammo for that main armament, this seems quite doable.

As to the kind of damage it would do, I made some assumptions about the system: that it would use a 1 micron wavelength beam (Northrup Grumman didn't specify the beam wavelength) and that these laser modules would feed into a set of steering optics 1 meter in diameter. Being a bit more pessimistic about beam quality than the spec sited at twice the diffraction limit you get a beam width of ~4.8mm (a little smaller than a NATO standard 5.56mm bullet) for a target 2km distant. I then plugged this beam diameter and the 100 kw beam power into the calculator provided at this site: http://tiny.cc/8oNrW which told me that this beam ought to chew through something on the order of 9cm of steel or 15cm of aluminum a second (the calculator assumes that the absorptivity=1, so these numbers might need downward adjustment for targets with a shiny surface).

As an added bonus, the main page of the above site has a plausible-looking artists conception of such a vehicle mounted laser, albeit one mounted on a wheeled rather than tracked chassis and operating in the green part of the visible spectrum as opposed to an IR wavelength, as I had been assuming.

Palin didn't know Africa is a continent, McCain aides say

@James

>>Half of America seems to think Europe is one [a country] as well.

A notion shared by a majority of the Eurocrats, judging by what I read in the Economist...

-Mine's the one with "Livin' in the USA" in the pocket

Webcast quango: One-third of UK teachers are creationists

@John Savard

So, do non-parents get to avoid paying school taxes in Alberta and Quebec then? It is not an establishment of religion to insist that everyone's taxes should go to pay for the public schools, whether or not one uses them. It is also not an establishment of religion (nor a prohibition of the free exercise of religion) for the government to pass on picking up the tab for someone wishing to send their children to a religious school.

Astronaut space dump pong-bomb frag shower today

@AC (shoving the space junk to the Sun)

" I think the clue was in the word 'propelled' - I was hardly suggesting that an astronaut should give a gentle push to this chunk of space stuff, and expected it to whiz off sun-wards.

Perhaps someone knowledgeable (like a few of the subsequent posters?) could assess how much effort would be required to break it out of orbit and direct it towards the sun?"

Sure thing. According to the article, the tank is 1400 lbs (call it ~600 kg) and tudelft.nl lists impulsive shot (i.e. all the delta v is applied in a short time period) delta v for LEO to escape velocity as 3.2 km/sec. From kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2, this gives us 300 * 3200 * 3200 or ~ 3 gigajoules (roughly 850 KWh) of energy. From there, if you were to kill off your orbital velocity around the Sun, then the Sun's gravity would take over and the tank would fall into the Sun. I didn't see any delta v listed (Solar impact is not a very popular space probe mission), but I can't see it as being worse than Earth's orbital velocity of ~30 km/sec which would require about 270 gigajoules (75000 KWh). In other words, I think you could safely characterize the energy requirements for solar impact as a "sh*t load"

Even if you used some really fancy orbital slingshot trajectory work to reduce the solar impact delta v to little more than Earth escape delta v, you would still have to bring up a rocket motor and reaction mass (at a price of ~ $10,000 a pound or more) to manage this. Executive summary- using the Sun as a trash disposal is extremely expensive.

Plasma rocket space drive in key test milestone

@gives you wings

You are correct in that it is not wings that is depicted in Dr. Chan-Diaz's artist's conception. Your first conjecture, that they are waste heat radiators is almost certainly the correct one- with a 10 megawatt nuclear plant, there is a LOT of waste heat to get rid of and very little need for solar panels (which would be near useless by the time you got to Jupiter what with solar power falling off as distance squared). As for why they are shaped like arrow feathers, I would wager that the 10MW nuclear power plant uses a shadow shield to keep it from irradiating the rest of the spacecraft. The angling of the waste heat radiators serves to keep them in the "shadow" cast by the shield placed in between it and the reactor, which is otherwise left unshielded to save on mass.

Here are links for waste heat radiators:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3e.html#radiator

and radiation and shielding (including shadow shields) in the context of nuclear rockets:

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3ah.html