Obama & Shawn

11 responses to “Obama & Shawn”

1. 

   Resh B.

   Dec 18, 2008 at 6:42 pm

   Is this in response to the Inauguration Pastor Hoopla?

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2. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 18, 2008 at 6:44 pm

   Oh, wow. What a coincidence. I had not seen the news at all.

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3. 

   The Rocketeer

   Dec 18, 2008 at 7:31 pm

   What an interesting story… but it didn’t cover the "prison" part. I’m even more curious about that now.

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4. 

   jurvetson

   Dec 18, 2008 at 10:47 pm

   Well… The first question was whether s/he should go to men’s or women’s prison

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5. 

   P^2 – Paul

   Dec 19, 2008 at 12:13 am

   I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but getting to mach 5-6 inside a silo implies an acceleration of around 10,000g. That would turn any kind of structure of that size to a crumpled lump. Mach 0.5 maybe, for 100g. Still impressive. Time fuzzes even the best memories.

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6. 

   rocketmavericks

   Dec 19, 2008 at 12:50 am

   Best our electronics can handle is 150 G’s and that is potted. I wonder how they kept the circuitry on the PC Boards back then? At that G-load, they would shear right off, not to mention the clocking problems with the oscillators being distorted. I was involved earlier this year with a project that had special electronics for GPS flying with a 15,000 G load, but that required a very special set of electronics with no integrated parts. Must have been vacuum tubes or something back in the 70’s, or a typo. Mach .5 or .6 is transonic and is more reasonable I think.

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7. 

   TomiTapio

   Dec 19, 2008 at 3:18 am

   Why would an "anti-ballistic missile" have a nuclear, city-destroying payload??

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8. 

   P^2 – Paul

   Dec 19, 2008 at 4:02 am

   Because at a closing velocity of around 10 km/s, this ain’t a game of horseshoes: just getting close doesn’t count. Conventional explosives would do nothing unless you get a direct hit (and then the kinetic energy of the vehicle alone would be enough for a kill).
   (edit: I’ve always wondered why they can’t just throw up a bucket of ball bearings, disperse to make a cloud, and let the target run into them: should be just as effective)

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9. 

   biotron

   Dec 19, 2008 at 12:07 pm

   what a strange story… and interesting career trajectory:

   sequencers for (presumably?) the Sprint 2 ABM… reverse engineering with AMD… litigation with Silvaco and indirectly embroiled with Avanti!’s own IP theft… board member with MAPS (supporting research treating PTSD with MDMA etc)… now seen echoing the OP’s own Zelig-like hobnobbery *

   like Rocketeer, i’m now curious about the prison stint. it certainly seems like there were potentially good reasons to sell to Avanti! so quickly…

   there are some very enlightening segments of the interview transcript mentioned above, over at Silicon Genesis:

   "RW: Well so far you’ve confessed to stock fraud, stealing intellectual property from Xerox, now Intel. This is being taped. I hope you realize that.

   SH: Well you know, we talked about some of these things over drinks sometimes with some of the old people that were there at that time and it was quite funny to listen to their side of the story of why they saw AMD all the sudden making some major advances not only in the microprocessor area but in the memory area. And to a large degree they were very loose with their information and they really didn’t care a lot about the…how important it was.

   KH: You didn’t call it, you didn’t call it a misappropriation of intellectual property, you called it a drink at the Wagon Wheel.

   SH: But the other side of this was that the various technologies where available Intellectual Property didn’t really have a lot of meaning back then. And it took these type of actions probably to finally get a definition in place of what constituted theft of intellectual property. We certainly learned a lot in a very short term in terms of the legal implications that go with looking at other people’s technology and trying to copy it."

   (video also avaiable to watch)

   what a difference 11 years makes… 🙂

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10. 

    Stewart

    Dec 20, 2008 at 3:51 am

    Lordy, this is one nerdy group …

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11. 

    nhr

    Dec 20, 2008 at 6:13 am

    > I’ve always wondered why they can’t just throw up a bucket of ball bearings

    It seems that the "last line of defense" interception by an ABM is supposed to occur at an altitude of about 20~30Kms.

    I guess that released by a rocket at Mach10+, atmospheric friction would cause small metal balls to get vaporized pretty quickly into a rather low-density and fairly innocuous — from an incoming warhead’s perspective — cloud of smoke wafting in the general direction of the ABM’s trajectory…

    A detonating ABM nuke, OTOH, can probably emit a fairly omnidirectional flash of neutrons that might disable even those enemy warheads that had already travelled past the ABM.

    Reply