I'd be more concerned with whether tin foil is a sufficient conductor for the higher frequencies.
Tin or lead foil is not a good conductor anyway. What you need is a copper or silver foil, best if polished. Aluminum is also OK. Direction of polishing affects the conductivity.
Unfortunately it's true that very many people associate book stores with coffee, and not with books. We, as a society, are past the Age of Enlightening now, and deep into the Age of Ignorance.
I'm a "religious thinker" and this didn't take long. The definition of human in Jewish law is the ability to speak.
First, what would you make of telepathic species? They don't speak as far as you know. Ants don't speak, but they communicate chemically - this is an example of communication beyond our understanding. Dolphins speak ultrasound; whales speak infrasound; some fish speaks electrically.
Second, apes can be taught human sign language, and they then can talk about simple matters. So do mute/deaf people. How such apes fit into your classification?
Third, as someone already mentioned, parrots speak. Even my radio speaks. They do it mechanically, but they nevertheless do it. Do they have souls, whatever that means?
IMO, the definition of a human will be getting more and more fuzzy as humanity migrates to other planets. This is a popular subject in SciFi.
However, we should prepare society for the consequences when we start creating pleasure slaves and the like
We actually already create pleasure slaves - they are called "pets", cats and dogs and other animals that are intentionally bred (poor man's gene engineering) into often something unnatural and unhealthy. It's a large industry, and it doesn't offer any medical benefits to humanity (as opposed to scientifically created chimeras.)
Any moralist is welcome to start with pets right now; it will keep him busy for a long time because people's morals are a strangely flexible thing depending on who these morals apply to.
I see no "moral" rights with these experiments. Humans themselves are likely a result of such an experiment, carried out by Green Mother Geia.
Creatures born with such mixed genes are generally neither better nor worse than any other creature with "pure" genes. If they are actually worse they will die. If they are better, they will thrive. Nothing wrong here, that's how the biosphere of this planet operates.
And besides, why should we automatically assume that a being with some "standard" set of genes is by default better than a chimera? Humans lost a lot of senses and a lot of survival traits in their evolution. Maybe these chimeras are, in fact, the future humans? If a man-mouse chimera is capable of teleportation and telekinesis, like Lt. Puck, for example, then I am all for it.
A) So as long as Ford sells enough cars to "be successful", they shouldn't make attempts to keep cars from being stolen off their lots or from their factories?
This is a bad example. Cars cost Ford some money to make. Games don't cost Valve anything co copy. Only the lost sale counts, and even that is often debated.
A better example would be this: "Ford should punish people who buy (or borrow) exact replicas of Ford cars from someone else."
They would have to hit everyone all at once, but they don't have the logistics.
If I were in charge in Pentagon I wouldn't dismiss them just like that. There are many large cities in USA, and people there -are- vulnerable. The attackers won't need much of logistics to inflict an "unacceptable damage" (the term comes from MAD) to the USA. You just can't write off a city like NYC or Chicago. What logistics are sufficient? I am not going to spell that out, but the attackers don't seem to be in any need of hints anyway. The retaliation is, of course, expected - but that is not likely to stop the attackers.
A significant portion of US population is of jewish descent. I haven't found any numbers on the matter, and I am unsure if they even exist (don't remember how the census form looks like). But it is not unreasonable, given the origin (Europe) of non-native americans.
With regard to carpet-bombing, aside from moral aspects of it, it won't be effective because it will hurt mostly noncombatants, and will push the survivors toward Osama. The only way to "win" that war would be to exterminate at least 1 billion people. I don't think this can be done without anyone noticing, and I don't think those people will just curl up and die. Chances of asymmetric counter-strike - biological for example - would be 100%, and USA would be destroyed. Many countries are in posession of deadly viruses, and it is pretty much guaranteed that some will be stolen, if not passed "under the table" like Khan did with nukes in Pakistan. Oh, I forgot that Pakistan has nukes, rockets, and is 100% moslem...
Yes, one way is to make the outer shield reflective. Another way, for example, is to use materials designed for high temperature, such as the outer shell of a spacecraft. Yet another way is to use active cooling. Or decoys. Or maybe just shoot down that aircraft, since it can't be more than a couple hundred miles from the launching position. There are always solutions.
Ok, let's assume Osama gets a bomb and blows it up in a big city. Which country USA should be annihilating? (Answers "Iran", "Syria" and "NK" don't count:-)
ICBMs can only be developed by countries with decent technological infrastructure
Not only that; the country also must have many ICBMs, since some will fail to launch, some will miss the target, some will be shot down.
If the attacking country has, say, 100 ICBMs that it doesn't mind using, then it's enough if 30 get to their targets. But if NK has only three warheads, why will they risk it all, launching first time on a rocket that was never tested for such a range? USSR, for example, regularly launched unarmed ICBMs (with all the proper notifications) as far as possible (South Pacific) and monitored the results. So USSR knew for a fact that it can (or can not) hit the target, and it had plenty of warheads too. But NK would have to be insane to take a gamble with its three (or however many) warheads. They have submarines, though, well tested and actively used... some food for thought...
Is there any law of physics that stops everyone else from learning English? If you don't know already, Indian English is not any better than Polish English, for example. Indians often use a writing style totally alien to western literature and to western readers.
this thing vibrates at approximately 1 KHz. That's probably not only audible, but it probably would cause a noticable vibration in your hand, too.
Audible or not, your hand won't feel it - the frequency is way too high. Put your hand on an audio speaker and change the frequency; on 20 Hz you can feel the vibration, at 100 Hz you can't. But an ear, of course, has smaller and lighter parts and can hear up to 15-20 kHz.
High speed cameras also have to use mirrors because the film never stops, so the frame has to follow the moving film. But mirrors there don't vibrate, they rotate. Each mirror is a hexagonal cylinder (a prism), and each side reflects light. Very simple, and allows for very high "vibration" speed.
Legacy systems, competing systems in different departments, etc. can all cause things to be not where you expect them to be.
Nobody cares where you (as a generic company employee) expect to find some documents. It only matters that the specific person or a group knows their filing system.
This means that HR can use a database, accounting can use filing cabinets and legal can keep all their documents in a fireproof safe, with copies offsite. There is no need for a uniform standard, and often there is no way to get there. For example, lawyers won't part with their paper, and HR people don't need paper - they generate most of their documents themselves anyway.
And finally, it is impossible to imagine any medium- and larger size company not being able to track the minutes of the board meetings. These documents are mandatory and they are extremely important to show that the company as a collective entity, not John Doe as a private person, decided to do this and that.
It's not in their interest to have the trial drag out any longer than it has to.
That is so. However you don't fire the weapon for which you have only one bullet until you are sure of your aim.
weapons - manly rockets, not those pussy quake type ones
I don't know, a rocket is quite deadly in Quake, a salvo of three is even worse (not that Halo has this option.)
alien weapons that can't be reloaded, and overheat
In most|all FPSes all weapons run out of ammo, and there is no difference between picking up some ammo or a new weapon. Besides, I wonder how come the aliens drop their weapons barely used:-)
Overheating is not a new trick. RTCW has a silenced gun that overheats and stops shooting (it burns your hand.) This is a real bug of the real weapon.
first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game
That is probably so, though I am not an expert in all FPSes. Of course, we have to ignore machine-centric games such as HG; there you -are- a vehicle.
first FPS with halfway decent outdoor levels and graphics in those levels.
I respectfully refer you to RTCW. Not only they implemented atmospheric effects, on level 3 you can try to shoot through the fog to take out the guard before you get to the landing. In Halo the snowfall is just cosmetic and has no bearing on the game.
walls tend to be flat, that's what walls are
Haven't been playing Doom, are we?:-)
Bungie invented dual wielding and weapons with more than one firing mode back in the mid 90s with Marathon.
I haven't seen Marathon, but dual wielding is very much present in F.A.K.K.2 and quite a lot of games support multiple firing modes.
Custom manufacturing of replacement cartridges is probably not the easiest way to cheat the vote
No need to worry, the replacement cartridges will come directly from the manufacturer. This is even without any malicious intent - things break and get lost in real life, so there must be a way to replace a lost or damaged part.
That is not so. One man can dig up only so many references, precedents and prior cases... and a team of lawyers, with assistants of all sorts, can just flood him with precedents and he won't be able to rebut most of them. Lawyers team up not because they want to divide the spoils but because it makes their case stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
Tin or lead foil is not a good conductor anyway. What you need is a copper or silver foil, best if polished. Aluminum is also OK. Direction of polishing affects the conductivity.
Unfortunately it's true that very many people associate book stores with coffee, and not with books. We, as a society, are past the Age of Enlightening now, and deep into the Age of Ignorance.
Sure you can. Visit a good book store :-)
First, what would you make of telepathic species? They don't speak as far as you know. Ants don't speak, but they communicate chemically - this is an example of communication beyond our understanding. Dolphins speak ultrasound; whales speak infrasound; some fish speaks electrically.
Second, apes can be taught human sign language, and they then can talk about simple matters. So do mute/deaf people. How such apes fit into your classification?
Third, as someone already mentioned, parrots speak. Even my radio speaks. They do it mechanically, but they nevertheless do it. Do they have souls, whatever that means?
IMO, the definition of a human will be getting more and more fuzzy as humanity migrates to other planets. This is a popular subject in SciFi.
Chronos, in one of his incarnations, also had a problem with names. I am not any better :-)
There are other ways to obtain pleasure. I hope you will learn them one day :-)
Well, here is a plan then:
We actually already create pleasure slaves - they are called "pets", cats and dogs and other animals that are intentionally bred (poor man's gene engineering) into often something unnatural and unhealthy. It's a large industry, and it doesn't offer any medical benefits to humanity (as opposed to scientifically created chimeras.)
Any moralist is welcome to start with pets right now; it will keep him busy for a long time because people's morals are a strangely flexible thing depending on who these morals apply to.
Creatures born with such mixed genes are generally neither better nor worse than any other creature with "pure" genes. If they are actually worse they will die. If they are better, they will thrive. Nothing wrong here, that's how the biosphere of this planet operates.
And besides, why should we automatically assume that a being with some "standard" set of genes is by default better than a chimera? Humans lost a lot of senses and a lot of survival traits in their evolution. Maybe these chimeras are, in fact, the future humans? If a man-mouse chimera is capable of teleportation and telekinesis, like Lt. Puck, for example, then I am all for it.
You are probably confusing Humans with Aliens.
This is a bad example. Cars cost Ford some money to make. Games don't cost Valve anything co copy. Only the lost sale counts, and even that is often debated.
A better example would be this: "Ford should punish people who buy (or borrow) exact replicas of Ford cars from someone else."
If I were in charge in Pentagon I wouldn't dismiss them just like that. There are many large cities in USA, and people there -are- vulnerable. The attackers won't need much of logistics to inflict an "unacceptable damage" (the term comes from MAD) to the USA. You just can't write off a city like NYC or Chicago. What logistics are sufficient? I am not going to spell that out, but the attackers don't seem to be in any need of hints anyway. The retaliation is, of course, expected - but that is not likely to stop the attackers.
But... you can do it only once.
With regard to carpet-bombing, aside from moral aspects of it, it won't be effective because it will hurt mostly noncombatants, and will push the survivors toward Osama. The only way to "win" that war would be to exterminate at least 1 billion people. I don't think this can be done without anyone noticing, and I don't think those people will just curl up and die. Chances of asymmetric counter-strike - biological for example - would be 100%, and USA would be destroyed. Many countries are in posession of deadly viruses, and it is pretty much guaranteed that some will be stolen, if not passed "under the table" like Khan did with nukes in Pakistan. Oh, I forgot that Pakistan has nukes, rockets, and is 100% moslem...
Yes, one way is to make the outer shield reflective. Another way, for example, is to use materials designed for high temperature, such as the outer shell of a spacecraft. Yet another way is to use active cooling. Or decoys. Or maybe just shoot down that aircraft, since it can't be more than a couple hundred miles from the launching position. There are always solutions.
Ok, let's assume Osama gets a bomb and blows it up in a big city. Which country USA should be annihilating? (Answers "Iran", "Syria" and "NK" don't count :-)
Not only that; the country also must have many ICBMs, since some will fail to launch, some will miss the target, some will be shot down.
If the attacking country has, say, 100 ICBMs that it doesn't mind using, then it's enough if 30 get to their targets. But if NK has only three warheads, why will they risk it all, launching first time on a rocket that was never tested for such a range? USSR, for example, regularly launched unarmed ICBMs (with all the proper notifications) as far as possible (South Pacific) and monitored the results. So USSR knew for a fact that it can (or can not) hit the target, and it had plenty of warheads too. But NK would have to be insane to take a gamble with its three (or however many) warheads. They have submarines, though, well tested and actively used... some food for thought...
Is there any law of physics that stops everyone else from learning English? If you don't know already, Indian English is not any better than Polish English, for example. Indians often use a writing style totally alien to western literature and to western readers.
Audible or not, your hand won't feel it - the frequency is way too high. Put your hand on an audio speaker and change the frequency; on 20 Hz you can feel the vibration, at 100 Hz you can't. But an ear, of course, has smaller and lighter parts and can hear up to 15-20 kHz.
High speed cameras also have to use mirrors because the film never stops, so the frame has to follow the moving film. But mirrors there don't vibrate, they rotate. Each mirror is a hexagonal cylinder (a prism), and each side reflects light. Very simple, and allows for very high "vibration" speed.
Nobody cares where you (as a generic company employee) expect to find some documents. It only matters that the specific person or a group knows their filing system.
This means that HR can use a database, accounting can use filing cabinets and legal can keep all their documents in a fireproof safe, with copies offsite. There is no need for a uniform standard, and often there is no way to get there. For example, lawyers won't part with their paper, and HR people don't need paper - they generate most of their documents themselves anyway.
And finally, it is impossible to imagine any medium- and larger size company not being able to track the minutes of the board meetings. These documents are mandatory and they are extremely important to show that the company as a collective entity, not John Doe as a private person, decided to do this and that.
It's not in their interest to have the trial drag out any longer than it has to.
That is so. However you don't fire the weapon for which you have only one bullet until you are sure of your aim.
Because it is easier to visit one store instead of ten.
I don't know, a rocket is quite deadly in Quake, a salvo of three is even worse (not that Halo has this option.)
alien weapons that can't be reloaded, and overheat
In most|all FPSes all weapons run out of ammo, and there is no difference between picking up some ammo or a new weapon. Besides, I wonder how come the aliens drop their weapons barely used :-)
Overheating is not a new trick. RTCW has a silenced gun that overheats and stops shooting (it burns your hand.) This is a real bug of the real weapon.
first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game
That is probably so, though I am not an expert in all FPSes. Of course, we have to ignore machine-centric games such as HG; there you -are- a vehicle.
first FPS with halfway decent outdoor levels and graphics in those levels.
I respectfully refer you to RTCW. Not only they implemented atmospheric effects, on level 3 you can try to shoot through the fog to take out the guard before you get to the landing. In Halo the snowfall is just cosmetic and has no bearing on the game.
walls tend to be flat, that's what walls are
Haven't been playing Doom, are we? :-)
Bungie invented dual wielding and weapons with more than one firing mode back in the mid 90s with Marathon.
I haven't seen Marathon, but dual wielding is very much present in F.A.K.K.2 and quite a lot of games support multiple firing modes.
No need to worry, the replacement cartridges will come directly from the manufacturer. This is even without any malicious intent - things break and get lost in real life, so there must be a way to replace a lost or damaged part.
Ok, GST+PST is 15% but CDN/USD is 1.21 now. Given the customs duties and general hassle, it just doesn't make sense. At best you break even.
That is not so. One man can dig up only so many references, precedents and prior cases... and a team of lawyers, with assistants of all sorts, can just flood him with precedents and he won't be able to rebut most of them. Lawyers team up not because they want to divide the spoils but because it makes their case stronger.