Man-portable weapons of this type would have extreme issues with recoil, however; accelerating a 1 gram projectile up to a mere 1% of light speed would produce enough force to send a 100 kg (220 pound) man flying backward at 30 meters per second (98 feet per second or 67 miles per hour).
Also interesting is the fact that:
A 1 kg mass traveling at 99% of the speed of light would have a kinetic energy of 5.47Ã--1017 joules. In explosive terms, it would be equal to 132 megatons of TNT. That's about 32 megatons more than the theoretical max yield of the tsar bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. 1 kg of mass-energy is 8.99Ã--1016 joules or about 21.5 megatons of TNT.
So at 0.99c, that 1kg (at rest) mass is storing more energy as inertia than it is as raw energy bound into matter.
Then again, Mapparent = Mrest / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2), giving that 1kg projectile an apparent mass of 50.25kg.
Not to mention that occasionally male dolphins have been known to make advances on human swimmers. I wonder if they've ever been taken up on those advances...?
60 years ago, nuclear weapons were hard to make. Now, the principles are well understood and you can pretty much learn how to build one on Wikipedia. Even if not, you wave a million dollars at any slightly self-serving nuclear physicist and he can probably build one for you. The Sum of All Fears (the book, not the movie) had a scarily plausible plot covering just this. The capability to build a small nuclear weapon, possibly even a fusion weapon, has been within reach of a wealthy industrialist or oil baron for quite some time now, let alone a small nation.
Humans of 2009 would be eaten alive by the Romans without support from institutions of 2009 providing them with weapons, rations and medicines.
It depends on the situation. If it were a small squadron of special-ops who *knew* they would be operating without backup or resupply for a long time, then they could gear accordingly, and they'd probably kick the ass of a Roman force 10 times their size through superior strategy and firepower. If it were just a bunch of marines magically transported from patrol in Iraq to the middle of a battle in Italy somewhere, then of course they'd have more success.
Ah, what a great movie! Well, I thought it was, some others differed.:P What really made it funny for me was that until *years* after I first saw it, I thought Head and Shoulders was a fictional brand that had been made up for the movie. When I first saw Head and Shoulders in a supermarket I thought it was some kind of brand merchandising... it turned it from an exceptionally cheesy product placement into an exceptional funny.:P
Coupla things - 1) roof mounted solar panels rarely have active tracking, 2) they very rarely cover anywhere near the whole roof because the cost of solar panels is still very prohibitive.
It's because of scale. A decent photovoltaic set can power your house and, combined with a battery bank, make you completely independent from the grid. A solar fired steam plant with a molten salt heat reservoir is only really practical at large (multi-megawatt and up) scales. The other problem with using it in a desert is that you need a good cold source to run an efficient steam turbine, which is why power plants (regardless of source) are generally built near bodies of water. You can get past that with cooling towers etc. but it's probably still a factor.
Overall, though, I agree - solar fired steam is as close to perfect as you can get for a solar power plant. The problem is that greenies want solar panels on their roof to *prove* they're doing something. Damn preachy greenies.
Also, consider that a web search is effectively an attempt at reverse hashing. You take a small key, and try to map it into a large number of much bigger data points. There will come a point when a two word (or three, or five) search phrase is insufficient even to properly define the 'best' result. That's when the people come in, because they can tune results for relevance to current events using their general knowledge. The example they give in TFA is a good one - if you search for 'olympics' then you probably want info about the most recent olympics, then info about the next olympics, then general facts and historical information after that.
Hey, drug cartels push some pretty damn good products, thankyou!
Ahem, I mean... Honestly, I don't think the 'perils of DRM' are going to be much of a problem. If the content provider is alive, then you can just re-download or re-authenticate the media. If the content provider dies, then there's no-one with any interest in enforcing the copyright on the works, and you can just download a cracked / un-DRM'd copy without fear of persecution.
Of course, this assumes that all DRM is inherently crackable. That's because it is.
Perth, Australia.:/ Admittedly I haven't sold or bought a second-hand CD that recently but $30 is about the figure for a recent release album, and $20 is what you'll pay at a 2nd hand music store for a good condition second hand album.
I find that most of the people who are concerned the most about "resale value" are the ones who are using twisted reasoning to try to justify something they can't afford. "It's not a $60,000 car, it's a $20,000 car because I'll sell it for $40,000 in a couple of years!" I leave applying the same kind of logic to real estate as an exercise for the reader.
True as far as it goes - for example, when I buy something I don't consider resale value because I tend to only buy things I want to keep. I've had my car for 8 years now, and I fully intend to still be driving it when it clocks over a million kilometers (at 380k now). That said, I bought it when it was 12 years old, and I have no problem buying used stuff when possible.
Regardless of trying to justify an unnecessarily expensive purchase, the sale price of many goods with long lives _does_ have the resale value rolled into it. If cars lasted 3 years and then had a resale value of $0, they wouldn't cost anywhere near what they do. Likewise, you couldn't sell CDs for $30 each if you didn't count on at least having the option of trading them in for $10 when you're sick of them.
Oh, and as for the real-estate market, the logic is skewed there because unlike the other goods we've discussed, land actually *appreciates* rather than depreciating. Unless you're unfortunate enough to have to sell in the middle of a property crash (such as we're currently undergoing), you will always sell land for more than you paid for it.
What I think would be best for Google would be to fork a version of OOo to include "Save to the cloud" support and integration with Google Docs.
"Save to the cloud"? Oh god, make the buzzing stop! You mean "add an option to OpenOffice to save your files to a remote server". Calling it "the cloud" is like calling the contents of your hard drive "cyberspace".
Along with that is the fact that when you spend $60 (more like $80-$90 in Australia) on a new game, you're committing another 20-30 hours of your time to it as well. Take into account that you get all the 'value' out of that $10 casual game after maybe 5-10 hours play, and the fact that your $90 'triple-A' title will require you to play for 20 hours just to finish the main storyline, and you see where casual games get their appeal.
Which reminds me, must go get Defense Grid. Although I hear it doesn't let you maze (a la some Warcraft 3 TD maps)... must finish writing my own TD/hero map engine.;)
At least part of the lock-in from Active Directory is the simple fact that it's a comprehensive system that can be managed by someone with very little experience. You ever tried teaching yourself in a week of on-the-job "how the f**k do I do this" how to run a mid-sized office network? I have. Using Active Directory and with no prior sysadmin experience it was possible, if a little rough. Trying to do the same thing using open source software would probably have taken me six weeks rather than six hours to start getting results. And even then, I'd have spent weeks looking up obscure config problems and installation how-tos.
To someone equally fluent in both OS and MS systems, sure, an open source solution is fine, probably even superior. But the business case for using MS software is undeniable.
What will be interesting about this lawsuit is how the court assigns responsibility for a breach at a certified business. Audits, by their very nature, are point-in-time or snapshot checks. They cannot account for the dynamic variables of business and IT operations that may weaken security over the long-haul.
If they win this lawsuit, they're setting a dangerous precedent - anyone who at any stage has certified a system as secure becomes responsible for its ongoing security, and can potentially be held liable for stupid user errors by users of that system.
I meant 'does nothing for me' in the sense of 'the experience is mildly unpleasant and I have no motivation to seek it out'. Unlike, say, alcohol, which I very much enjoy (and has none of the pesky legal issues). It was meant to indicate that my post was on principle rather than being self-serving.
Slashdot Mirror
Man-portable weapons of this type would have extreme issues with recoil, however; accelerating a 1 gram projectile up to a mere 1% of light speed would produce enough force to send a 100 kg (220 pound) man flying backward at 30 meters per second (98 feet per second or 67 miles per hour).
Also interesting is the fact that:
A 1 kg mass traveling at 99% of the speed of light would have a kinetic energy of 5.47Ã--1017 joules. In explosive terms, it would be equal to 132 megatons of TNT. That's about 32 megatons more than the theoretical max yield of the tsar bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. 1 kg of mass-energy is 8.99Ã--1016 joules or about 21.5 megatons of TNT.
So at 0.99c, that 1kg (at rest) mass is storing more energy as inertia than it is as raw energy bound into matter.
Then again, Mapparent = Mrest / sqrt(1 - v^2 / c^2), giving that 1kg projectile an apparent mass of 50.25kg.
Yeah, regular experimentation with psilocybin mushrooms tends to lead to that sort of theory. :P
Not to mention that occasionally male dolphins have been known to make advances on human swimmers. I wonder if they've ever been taken up on those advances...?
60 years ago, nuclear weapons were hard to make. Now, the principles are well understood and you can pretty much learn how to build one on Wikipedia. Even if not, you wave a million dollars at any slightly self-serving nuclear physicist and he can probably build one for you. The Sum of All Fears (the book, not the movie) had a scarily plausible plot covering just this. The capability to build a small nuclear weapon, possibly even a fusion weapon, has been within reach of a wealthy industrialist or oil baron for quite some time now, let alone a small nation.
Humans of 2009 would be eaten alive by the Romans without support from institutions of 2009 providing them with weapons, rations and medicines.
It depends on the situation. If it were a small squadron of special-ops who *knew* they would be operating without backup or resupply for a long time, then they could gear accordingly, and they'd probably kick the ass of a Roman force 10 times their size through superior strategy and firepower. If it were just a bunch of marines magically transported from patrol in Iraq to the middle of a battle in Italy somewhere, then of course they'd have more success.
Ah, what a great movie! Well, I thought it was, some others differed. :P What really made it funny for me was that until *years* after I first saw it, I thought Head and Shoulders was a fictional brand that had been made up for the movie. When I first saw Head and Shoulders in a supermarket I thought it was some kind of brand merchandising... it turned it from an exceptionally cheesy product placement into an exceptional funny. :P
And this, my friend, is why so many software releases (including games) fail.
Pissing people off costs you FAR more, in terms of lost custom and bad press, than any amount of testing could do.
Coupla things - 1) roof mounted solar panels rarely have active tracking, 2) they very rarely cover anywhere near the whole roof because the cost of solar panels is still very prohibitive.
It's because of scale. A decent photovoltaic set can power your house and, combined with a battery bank, make you completely independent from the grid. A solar fired steam plant with a molten salt heat reservoir is only really practical at large (multi-megawatt and up) scales. The other problem with using it in a desert is that you need a good cold source to run an efficient steam turbine, which is why power plants (regardless of source) are generally built near bodies of water. You can get past that with cooling towers etc. but it's probably still a factor.
Overall, though, I agree - solar fired steam is as close to perfect as you can get for a solar power plant. The problem is that greenies want solar panels on their roof to *prove* they're doing something. Damn preachy greenies.
Also, consider that a web search is effectively an attempt at reverse hashing. You take a small key, and try to map it into a large number of much bigger data points. There will come a point when a two word (or three, or five) search phrase is insufficient even to properly define the 'best' result. That's when the people come in, because they can tune results for relevance to current events using their general knowledge. The example they give in TFA is a good one - if you search for 'olympics' then you probably want info about the most recent olympics, then info about the next olympics, then general facts and historical information after that.
Those lovely ads equating car theft to movie piracy... did that convince anyone?
Nope. When will I be able to download my copy of a Porsche GT2?
Hey, drug cartels push some pretty damn good products, thankyou!
Ahem, I mean... Honestly, I don't think the 'perils of DRM' are going to be much of a problem. If the content provider is alive, then you can just re-download or re-authenticate the media. If the content provider dies, then there's no-one with any interest in enforcing the copyright on the works, and you can just download a cracked / un-DRM'd copy without fear of persecution.
Of course, this assumes that all DRM is inherently crackable. That's because it is.
Perth, Australia. :/ Admittedly I haven't sold or bought a second-hand CD that recently but $30 is about the figure for a recent release album, and $20 is what you'll pay at a 2nd hand music store for a good condition second hand album.
+1, LOL Gravity to you sir.
If such an option were to be added, please let it be called "Save it to Google docs" :)
Yes please. We have enough mumbo jumbo, as you put it, without inventing new wannabe-cool terms for things.
I find that most of the people who are concerned the most about "resale value" are the ones who are using twisted reasoning to try to justify something they can't afford. "It's not a $60,000 car, it's a $20,000 car because I'll sell it for $40,000 in a couple of years!" I leave applying the same kind of logic to real estate as an exercise for the reader.
True as far as it goes - for example, when I buy something I don't consider resale value because I tend to only buy things I want to keep. I've had my car for 8 years now, and I fully intend to still be driving it when it clocks over a million kilometers (at 380k now). That said, I bought it when it was 12 years old, and I have no problem buying used stuff when possible.
Regardless of trying to justify an unnecessarily expensive purchase, the sale price of many goods with long lives _does_ have the resale value rolled into it. If cars lasted 3 years and then had a resale value of $0, they wouldn't cost anywhere near what they do. Likewise, you couldn't sell CDs for $30 each if you didn't count on at least having the option of trading them in for $10 when you're sick of them.
Oh, and as for the real-estate market, the logic is skewed there because unlike the other goods we've discussed, land actually *appreciates* rather than depreciating. Unless you're unfortunate enough to have to sell in the middle of a property crash (such as we're currently undergoing), you will always sell land for more than you paid for it.
What I think would be best for Google would be to fork a version of OOo to include "Save to the cloud" support and integration with Google Docs.
"Save to the cloud"? Oh god, make the buzzing stop! You mean "add an option to OpenOffice to save your files to a remote server". Calling it "the cloud" is like calling the contents of your hard drive "cyberspace".
Along with that is the fact that when you spend $60 (more like $80-$90 in Australia) on a new game, you're committing another 20-30 hours of your time to it as well. Take into account that you get all the 'value' out of that $10 casual game after maybe 5-10 hours play, and the fact that your $90 'triple-A' title will require you to play for 20 hours just to finish the main storyline, and you see where casual games get their appeal.
;)
Which reminds me, must go get Defense Grid. Although I hear it doesn't let you maze (a la some Warcraft 3 TD maps)... must finish writing my own TD/hero map engine.
At least part of the lock-in from Active Directory is the simple fact that it's a comprehensive system that can be managed by someone with very little experience. You ever tried teaching yourself in a week of on-the-job "how the f**k do I do this" how to run a mid-sized office network? I have. Using Active Directory and with no prior sysadmin experience it was possible, if a little rough. Trying to do the same thing using open source software would probably have taken me six weeks rather than six hours to start getting results. And even then, I'd have spent weeks looking up obscure config problems and installation how-tos.
To someone equally fluent in both OS and MS systems, sure, an open source solution is fine, probably even superior. But the business case for using MS software is undeniable.
What will be interesting about this lawsuit is how the court assigns responsibility for a breach at a certified business. Audits, by their very nature, are point-in-time or snapshot checks. They cannot account for the dynamic variables of business and IT operations that may weaken security over the long-haul.
If they win this lawsuit, they're setting a dangerous precedent - anyone who at any stage has certified a system as secure becomes responsible for its ongoing security, and can potentially be held liable for stupid user errors by users of that system.
Manned flying dinosaurs are SO much cooler. Vote for sky riders today! :D
Aha! They're really trying to say: "An indecent manure".
Generic algorithms are only really useful if you want to model evorution. :P
Doesn't it have a web browser and a wi-fi connection?
I meant 'does nothing for me' in the sense of 'the experience is mildly unpleasant and I have no motivation to seek it out'. Unlike, say, alcohol, which I very much enjoy (and has none of the pesky legal issues). It was meant to indicate that my post was on principle rather than being self-serving.