The problem is most high-level predator species don't eat only one thing. Whenever this is tried, invariably the predator species eats some of the invasive species, but also eats ALL of some other native species.
Even if the predators are able to effectively kill off the invader (which they often aren't), and they don't just switch to some other native species, then the predators start dying too. Eventually, the predator goes extinct due to lack of food supply, but some small portion of the original invader remains to repopulate, and the problem remains unsolved.
Honestly, nobody has ever succeeded in controlling an invasive species once it becomes established, using any method. In that light, you may as well avoid control methods that are known to have massive collateral damage.
I just saw Difference Engine No. 2 in action this weekend at the Computer History Museum. This is clearly the oldest code in the world that is running today.
(yes, I know it's not really a computer, just a calculator, but I think we can bend the spirit of the question a little to get such a clear answer.)
Am I the only person on/. genuinely excited to see this movie? Watching the trailer, I've never seen anything so gloriously, uniquely beautiful in the entire history of cinema. The Wachowskis and their art/vfx teams are doing something with the medium that's never been done before, I mean forget inventing bullet time, we're talking inventing a whole new artistic paradigm.
So what if the plot sucks and the acting is terrible? Honestly I'm looking at this movie from a purely visual standpoint. It's like Electric Sheep (http://www.electricsheep.org/)--you don't watch it because of the story, you watch it because it's *pretty*. As long as the actors aren't so putrid I'm forced to leave the theater due to uncontrollable retching, I am going to enjoy this movie. Honestly, they could just excise the plot entirely and I would still watch it, for the same reasons that I like to listen to instrumental music and look at abstract paintings. Not everything has to have story and intellectual meaning behind it.
When did it become unforgivable to just look at pretty things for their own sake?
I find it interesting that Russia makes (made) both the Soyuz and the AK-47, which have reputations for robustness and ability to function in adverse conditions, while America makes the M16 and the Space Shuttle, which have reputations for failure in less-than-ideal conditions.
Granted, I hear the latest versions of the M16 and its descendants are much better.
You, like so many supposedly "rational" people, have fallen into the aerodynamics trap. Yes, 90% of bolt-on aftermarket aerodynamic devices are useless crap. On the other hand, the simple truth is that 1: almost everyone overestimates how fast you have to go to generate meaningful force from a well-designed wing, and 2: almost everyone overestimates how much force is needed to be meaningful.
Wings can produce significant downforce at speeds significantly less than 120 MPH. How do I know this? Basic real-world examples. Rally cars rarely top 100 mph, and yet feature prominent wings and other aero devices (it's worth noting that the sort of bizarre crap they stick all over rally cars also most closely resembles the exact sorts of modifications people criticize most on road cars--the difference of course being that rally teams know what they're doing and the crap actually works). If they didn't work, the teams wouldn't use them. Even Formula 1 cars spend most of their cornering time, when aero devices are most needed, at sub 120 mph speeds. In fact, a modern F1 car generates its own weight in downforce at around a mere 80 mph.
You say that wings have to produce many hundreds or even thousands of pounds of force to be meaningful. This is ridiculous. "Thousands of pounds of force" are only generated by the most extremely tuned cars--most common racing cars (nascar, rally cars, touring cars) produce far less. Yes, a F1 car can generate perhaps 3000 pounds of downforce at its highest speeds. However, ANY amount of downforce is valuable, even the 200 pounds you say Porsches can't handle more than. On a typical car, that's an extra 7%+ relative to the real weight of the car, a small but not trivial amount.
Besides, a wing doesn't have to produce net downforce to be useful. It can shape the airflow over the car to reduce or eliminate aerodynamic lift, a problem that plagues most production cars. A prime example is the older Audi TT, a car that was notorious for generating so much rear lift at freeway speeds that it was potentially unsafe. Later versions all came with a small spoiler that fixed this issue, before the car was totally redesigned. These changes don't have to be huge and dramatic to work--compare a Nissan 350z with the zero-lift package to the standard model. It's also worth noting that the zero-lift Nissan also has less aerodynamic drag than the normal model, which raises another point--aerodynamic devices aren't just for producing downforce, but can in some cases actually make the car more aerodynamic.
Re: the 200 mph club, the problem is not so much a matter of aerodynamic stability as it is just one of drag and horsepower. Yes, it is important to have a reasonably stable car at those speeds, but just look at a Bentley Flying Spur, which has no outwardly obvious aerodynamic devices at all (okay, so it "only" goes 195). The reason it doesn't go any faster is not because it's unstable--it's because the poor Bentley's "mere" 552 Hp can't push it any faster. Many older Le mans cars could top 200 mph, but they actually generated lift at those speeds (drivers had balls of titanium in those days). Stability is good, but it's not why 200 mph is uncommon, it's because you need a honking huge engine and few cars have that.
Dragsters are such an extreme example that they basically don't even matter to the argument. A vehicle that can reach speeds in excess of 300 mph within 400 meters, and which can accelerate at over 5.5 Gs, is not a reasonable comparison to anything one might consider a normal car. Yes, they raise their wings high up into the clean air to get maximum effectiveness, and this principle universally applies, but this doesn't mean that any wing that isn't ludicrously tall is useless. It just means that normal cars don't have the same ultra-extreme requirements of dragsters.
And I suppose that psychological counseling doesn't exist, then? You know, they do a lot more in those weekly therapy sessions than cram pills down your throat.
As for chemical lobotomies, that's such a gross misrepresentation of most psychoactive drugs that I'm tempted to call you out as a troll.
"All earthbound meteors catch an excess of one of the two polarized rays." [which are generated by neutron stars]
Doesn't this imply that there is a neutron star somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Earth that's zapping all our incoming meteors? Wouldn't we, um, notice?
I mean, neutron stars are pretty rare things (~2000 known in our galaxy, nearest known is 280 lt/yrs away). I find it improbable that a significant majority of the incoming material has passed by one at some point in its life.
"Matrix-like"? Doesn't that kind of imply a totally transparent full-body haptic control system on top of totally realistic real-time 3d graphics? Maybe the latter is possible with today's fastest supercomputers, but somehow I doubt the former is.
I thought advertising agencies had been doing this for years. Or do you mean to imply that those flashing "YOU'RE A WINNER!!!!!11threeminustwo" banners aren't specifically designed as a mental assault?
On the other hand, he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves. He may have incidentally made the first steps towards sound recording, but frankly his personal invention was totally useless. It took 150 years of advancement to sneak in the back door and get anything useful at all out of his technology, and by that point massive advancements in sound recording, as well as speech-to-text technology that actually works, had both already been invented.
It sounds a bit like Niecpe's first photograph, except even more so. Niecpe's method made a photograph in 1826, but the exposure time was 8 hours and it couldn't be reproduced (no negative). The difference is that in Niepce's case, at least he produced a recognizable image, wheras all Scott managed was some indecipherable (until seriously modern technology came along) squiggly lines on a piece of paper.
On further reflection, there's a few errors in there. One, the formatting is borked, for some reason, so sorry about not paragraph breaks. Two, I meant Whyachi, not Son of Whyachi.
Sorry. Should have hit preview, I know.
As mentioned, there is bonus mass for walking robots. but it's not big enough and the rules defining a "walking" robot are very strict. The bonus in Battlebots is only 50% extra, and the walking system can have no continuously rotating parts, so any sort cam-based or eccentric driveshaft-based movement is totally out. Bear in mind, you have to deal with not only increased complexity, but also walking systems are generally more fragile than wheels, making them doubly unnatractive. There was only ever one robot I can think of that matched these rules, which was Mechadon (seriously worth a Google search to see), but it was an art-robot, not seriously intended to win, and it was later unable to compete because the weight limit rules were changed.
Before the "no rotary parts" rule, there were a few others (Man Of War, early versions of Son of Whyachi), and Pretty Little Hate Machine to name a few) but these rotary-based "walkers" tended to stretch the limits of what might be considered "walking". Which is why the rules were changed.
A 100% weight bonus would probably be enough to entice builders to seriously consider a walking robot. But that's an awful lot--it means a superheavyweight walker would be 680 lbs.
On another subject, the uneven arena is a great idea. Actually, I've had a related concept for a while--"off road" events, held in dirt-floored arenas. The uneven surface would discourage wedges, and the organizers wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about damage to the arena floor (notably, in the case of The Judge, a very cool hammer-bot that unfortunately would literally put a hole in the floor of the arena every time it missed--and that's usually 1/4" steel plate, folks).
Yes, but then why would (assuming this is what the screeners were afraid of) terrorists make a fake laptop that is unusually small? If I were in the market for concealed explosives, I'd get some junky antique real laptop that's bigger than a college textbook, hollow it out, and pack it full. You'd probably get 2 or 3 times more crammed in there than you could possibly fit in a container the size of a Macbook Air.
Now if you'll excuse me, the FBI is knocking.
Liquid nitrogen? No liquid weapons allowed.
High voltage? With permission if you want more than (IIRC) 72 volts.
Blue tack? No entanglement weapons, which this would fall under.
Maximum weight of hammer? Whatever fits in your weight class.
Cannon? No untethered projectiles.
Tack welder? Entanglement rules again (probably) as well as no open electrical discharges (as weapons--those caused by damage are of course permitted).
Cowboy Neal? not a robot. (or RC machine)
Also, EMPs are also not allowed, and you can't use Halon or other extinguishing gases to kill gas-powered robots. They're boring.
Speaking as someone who has actually competed in Battlebots, I'll address some of your questions.
1: It's a legitimate concern, one that crops up time and again in the builder community. The simple answer is, basically nothing can be done about it. We want to encourage everyone to join the sport, including people who don't have an extreme amount of technical skill, and a wesgebot is the simplest kind to build. Many teams build a wedge for their first robot, just to "learn the ropes", and then go on to build other more complex and interesting designs. We can't get rid of the wedges without scaring new competitors off, and in the end, I think it's worth it.
However, Re: the hydraulic arm, you're misunderstanding a couple things. First, I only know of two robots in the entire sport that ever used real hydraulics (not to say there aren't more, but it's extremely rare). You're probably thing either of pneumatics, or, more commonly, just regular linear electric actuators. The former is very hard to use and should never be denigrated as too easy (or boring for that matter--see Inertia Labs, The Judge and Ziggy, for example). The latter is relatively easy, but see above, and give the team credit for making a 'bot that actually does something instead of being a totally basic ramming wedge.
2: Time is money. Everyone would like to have more matches and more fighting, but it isn't cheap to run a tournament, and it isn't cheap for the teams to be at the tournament competing. Of course, better prizes and more publicity for sponsorship would fix some of this.
2.1: Yes. Most tournaments these days have very minimalist arenas, and most builders like it that way.
3: Yes.
4: Are you male? EVERYTHING needs bikini babes.
5: If ESPN can afford it, sure. but I doubt they're willing to shell out. On the other hand, ESPN coverage will be a tremendous boon for sponsorship deals. Nobody is sponsoring these days (even though for most companies a significant sponsorship deal would be a drop in the bucket) because nobody sees the competitions, but international coverage would certainly do the trick.
6: They'd have to calibrated to each other i.e. weight class AND price. I could easily make an indestructible half-ton wedge for $10k, and that would be stupid.
For my own part, I'm worried about the experimental class. As someone who has seen and been close to these things, the current crop of superheavyweight shell spinner robots genuinely scare me. In all honesty, the current standards of arena design are already not totally safe for these things to be fighting in. Any significantly larger version of these robots with the same design, which seems probable, would be quite simply a danger to the audience and everyone else around it, even within the arena. Now, I'm all for Mechadon coming out of retirement, but if I was in charge, I wouldn't let (for example) a 500-pound shell spinner actually fight in anything resembling a conventional arena.
This reminds me a lot of a story I read once about a professor who had a blinding flash of the obvious (I wish I could remember who it was now). Basically, he instituted a new rule in his classroom which was this:
"Cheating is defined as refusing to give assistance when asked."
That's it. Everyone was expected to ask everyone else questions on all subjects at all times, even during (especially during) tests, and everyone was expected to give help when asked for it.
Of course, the administration didn't like this, and called the professor in for a reprimand. The administrator in question actually ended up saying "Do you realize what woould happen in this university if all the students began helping one another?" To his credit, apparently he followed this statement with a period of silence and then "I'll have to think about this," before finally letting the Prof do what he wanted.
In the end, the result was instead of the "normal" bell-curve of grades in the class, he ended up with a sort of two-peak curve for each assignment. The large peak, making the vast majority of the students, was at the "A" end of the spectrum--since collaboration was total, everybody had access to the best methods and answers. The other smaller peak was at the "F" and "D" end, and simply represented students who had fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
I may be being a bit dense, but I have no idea what any of this means. Apparently it's a good thing? Can anyone translate from telecom industry jargon into English?
Also, the link isn't a.pdf, at least not at this moment.
I'd say it definitely happens, and not just because of diamond dust--pretty much all the dust in space would do it. That said, "prevalent" is a relative term. Space is still pretty incomprehensibly empty, even in the really "dirty" parts. See http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dust_storm_030814.html where a "dust storm" is described as being the impact of 12 particles of dust per square meter per day.
Has nobody else commented on the fact that the basis of this legislation is obviously false?
The idea is that, in light of fear of terrorism, people are generating oodles of false alarms with their detectors, generating mass panic and sending police on endless wild goose chases. It's been 6 years since 9/11/2001, and if any panics were going to happen they would have been happening 6 years ago. Nothing has happened since then that means people are only now suddenly rushing out and buying crappy air monitors and flooding the police switchboards.
I mean, complexities of the issue aside, they're trying to pass a law to fix a problem that doesn't exist. Not that this would be the first time, I suppose.
You know, I wasn't attempting to imply anything about Edison being a pioneer of electric lighting, or a genius, or anything like that. I was merely pointing out that it was through sheer persistence and trial and error that his optimum choice of filament was arrived at. His brute-force repetition succeeded at making a higher-quality filament than anyone else up to that point had made. The choice of the Edison light bulb story is just an example of brute-forcing a problem that is widely known in popular culture. I could have chosen the man who invented colored bubbles, but he's much less widely known.
Was this the best way to solve the problem? Maybe not. But it worked, therefore the "stubbornness" gene is not totally without advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is most high-level predator species don't eat only one thing. Whenever this is tried, invariably the predator species eats some of the invasive species, but also eats ALL of some other native species.
Even if the predators are able to effectively kill off the invader (which they often aren't), and they don't just switch to some other native species, then the predators start dying too. Eventually, the predator goes extinct due to lack of food supply, but some small portion of the original invader remains to repopulate, and the problem remains unsolved.
Honestly, nobody has ever succeeded in controlling an invasive species once it becomes established, using any method. In that light, you may as well avoid control methods that are known to have massive collateral damage.
I just saw Difference Engine No. 2 in action this weekend at the Computer History Museum. This is clearly the oldest code in the world that is running today.
(yes, I know it's not really a computer, just a calculator, but I think we can bend the spirit of the question a little to get such a clear answer.)
Am I the only person on /. genuinely excited to see this movie? Watching the trailer, I've never seen anything so gloriously, uniquely beautiful in the entire history of cinema. The Wachowskis and their art/vfx teams are doing something with the medium that's never been done before, I mean forget inventing bullet time, we're talking inventing a whole new artistic paradigm.
So what if the plot sucks and the acting is terrible? Honestly I'm looking at this movie from a purely visual standpoint. It's like Electric Sheep (http://www.electricsheep.org/)--you don't watch it because of the story, you watch it because it's *pretty*. As long as the actors aren't so putrid I'm forced to leave the theater due to uncontrollable retching, I am going to enjoy this movie. Honestly, they could just excise the plot entirely and I would still watch it, for the same reasons that I like to listen to instrumental music and look at abstract paintings. Not everything has to have story and intellectual meaning behind it.
When did it become unforgivable to just look at pretty things for their own sake?
Why hasn't any candy company made chocolate morsels filled with gooey peanut butter and honey?
I find it interesting that Russia makes (made) both the Soyuz and the AK-47, which have reputations for robustness and ability to function in adverse conditions, while America makes the M16 and the Space Shuttle, which have reputations for failure in less-than-ideal conditions.
Granted, I hear the latest versions of the M16 and its descendants are much better.
*sigh*
You, like so many supposedly "rational" people, have fallen into the aerodynamics trap. Yes, 90% of bolt-on aftermarket aerodynamic devices are useless crap. On the other hand, the simple truth is that 1: almost everyone overestimates how fast you have to go to generate meaningful force from a well-designed wing, and 2: almost everyone overestimates how much force is needed to be meaningful.
Wings can produce significant downforce at speeds significantly less than 120 MPH. How do I know this? Basic real-world examples. Rally cars rarely top 100 mph, and yet feature prominent wings and other aero devices (it's worth noting that the sort of bizarre crap they stick all over rally cars also most closely resembles the exact sorts of modifications people criticize most on road cars--the difference of course being that rally teams know what they're doing and the crap actually works). If they didn't work, the teams wouldn't use them. Even Formula 1 cars spend most of their cornering time, when aero devices are most needed, at sub 120 mph speeds. In fact, a modern F1 car generates its own weight in downforce at around a mere 80 mph.
You say that wings have to produce many hundreds or even thousands of pounds of force to be meaningful. This is ridiculous. "Thousands of pounds of force" are only generated by the most extremely tuned cars--most common racing cars (nascar, rally cars, touring cars) produce far less. Yes, a F1 car can generate perhaps 3000 pounds of downforce at its highest speeds. However, ANY amount of downforce is valuable, even the 200 pounds you say Porsches can't handle more than. On a typical car, that's an extra 7%+ relative to the real weight of the car, a small but not trivial amount.
Besides, a wing doesn't have to produce net downforce to be useful. It can shape the airflow over the car to reduce or eliminate aerodynamic lift, a problem that plagues most production cars. A prime example is the older Audi TT, a car that was notorious for generating so much rear lift at freeway speeds that it was potentially unsafe. Later versions all came with a small spoiler that fixed this issue, before the car was totally redesigned. These changes don't have to be huge and dramatic to work--compare a Nissan 350z with the zero-lift package to the standard model. It's also worth noting that the zero-lift Nissan also has less aerodynamic drag than the normal model, which raises another point--aerodynamic devices aren't just for producing downforce, but can in some cases actually make the car more aerodynamic.
Re: the 200 mph club, the problem is not so much a matter of aerodynamic stability as it is just one of drag and horsepower. Yes, it is important to have a reasonably stable car at those speeds, but just look at a Bentley Flying Spur, which has no outwardly obvious aerodynamic devices at all (okay, so it "only" goes 195). The reason it doesn't go any faster is not because it's unstable--it's because the poor Bentley's "mere" 552 Hp can't push it any faster. Many older Le mans cars could top 200 mph, but they actually generated lift at those speeds (drivers had balls of titanium in those days). Stability is good, but it's not why 200 mph is uncommon, it's because you need a honking huge engine and few cars have that.
Dragsters are such an extreme example that they basically don't even matter to the argument. A vehicle that can reach speeds in excess of 300 mph within 400 meters, and which can accelerate at over 5.5 Gs, is not a reasonable comparison to anything one might consider a normal car. Yes, they raise their wings high up into the clean air to get maximum effectiveness, and this principle universally applies, but this doesn't mean that any wing that isn't ludicrously tall is useless. It just means that normal cars don't have the same ultra-extreme requirements of dragsters.
Okay, I'm done now.
And I suppose that psychological counseling doesn't exist, then? You know, they do a lot more in those weekly therapy sessions than cram pills down your throat.
As for chemical lobotomies, that's such a gross misrepresentation of most psychoactive drugs that I'm tempted to call you out as a troll.
"All earthbound meteors catch an excess of one of the two polarized rays." [which are generated by neutron stars]
Doesn't this imply that there is a neutron star somewhere in the immediate vicinity of Earth that's zapping all our incoming meteors? Wouldn't we, um, notice?
I mean, neutron stars are pretty rare things (~2000 known in our galaxy, nearest known is 280 lt/yrs away). I find it improbable that a significant majority of the incoming material has passed by one at some point in its life.
"Matrix-like"? Doesn't that kind of imply a totally transparent full-body haptic control system on top of totally realistic real-time 3d graphics? Maybe the latter is possible with today's fastest supercomputers, but somehow I doubt the former is.
I thought advertising agencies had been doing this for years. Or do you mean to imply that those flashing "YOU'RE A WINNER!!!!!11threeminustwo" banners aren't specifically designed as a mental assault?
On the other hand, he failed miserably at this goal, because nobody can read sound waves. He may have incidentally made the first steps towards sound recording, but frankly his personal invention was totally useless. It took 150 years of advancement to sneak in the back door and get anything useful at all out of his technology, and by that point massive advancements in sound recording, as well as speech-to-text technology that actually works, had both already been invented.
It sounds a bit like Niecpe's first photograph, except even more so. Niecpe's method made a photograph in 1826, but the exposure time was 8 hours and it couldn't be reproduced (no negative). The difference is that in Niepce's case, at least he produced a recognizable image, wheras all Scott managed was some indecipherable (until seriously modern technology came along) squiggly lines on a piece of paper.
On further reflection, there's a few errors in there. One, the formatting is borked, for some reason, so sorry about not paragraph breaks. Two, I meant Whyachi, not Son of Whyachi. Sorry. Should have hit preview, I know.
As mentioned, there is bonus mass for walking robots. but it's not big enough and the rules defining a "walking" robot are very strict. The bonus in Battlebots is only 50% extra, and the walking system can have no continuously rotating parts, so any sort cam-based or eccentric driveshaft-based movement is totally out. Bear in mind, you have to deal with not only increased complexity, but also walking systems are generally more fragile than wheels, making them doubly unnatractive. There was only ever one robot I can think of that matched these rules, which was Mechadon (seriously worth a Google search to see), but it was an art-robot, not seriously intended to win, and it was later unable to compete because the weight limit rules were changed. Before the "no rotary parts" rule, there were a few others (Man Of War, early versions of Son of Whyachi), and Pretty Little Hate Machine to name a few) but these rotary-based "walkers" tended to stretch the limits of what might be considered "walking". Which is why the rules were changed. A 100% weight bonus would probably be enough to entice builders to seriously consider a walking robot. But that's an awful lot--it means a superheavyweight walker would be 680 lbs. On another subject, the uneven arena is a great idea. Actually, I've had a related concept for a while--"off road" events, held in dirt-floored arenas. The uneven surface would discourage wedges, and the organizers wouldn't have to worry nearly so much about damage to the arena floor (notably, in the case of The Judge, a very cool hammer-bot that unfortunately would literally put a hole in the floor of the arena every time it missed--and that's usually 1/4" steel plate, folks).
Yes, but then why would (assuming this is what the screeners were afraid of) terrorists make a fake laptop that is unusually small? If I were in the market for concealed explosives, I'd get some junky antique real laptop that's bigger than a college textbook, hollow it out, and pack it full. You'd probably get 2 or 3 times more crammed in there than you could possibly fit in a container the size of a Macbook Air. Now if you'll excuse me, the FBI is knocking.
Liquid nitrogen? No liquid weapons allowed. High voltage? With permission if you want more than (IIRC) 72 volts. Blue tack? No entanglement weapons, which this would fall under. Maximum weight of hammer? Whatever fits in your weight class. Cannon? No untethered projectiles. Tack welder? Entanglement rules again (probably) as well as no open electrical discharges (as weapons--those caused by damage are of course permitted). Cowboy Neal? not a robot. (or RC machine) Also, EMPs are also not allowed, and you can't use Halon or other extinguishing gases to kill gas-powered robots. They're boring.
Speaking as someone who has actually competed in Battlebots, I'll address some of your questions.
1: It's a legitimate concern, one that crops up time and again in the builder community. The simple answer is, basically nothing can be done about it. We want to encourage everyone to join the sport, including people who don't have an extreme amount of technical skill, and a wesgebot is the simplest kind to build. Many teams build a wedge for their first robot, just to "learn the ropes", and then go on to build other more complex and interesting designs. We can't get rid of the wedges without scaring new competitors off, and in the end, I think it's worth it.
However, Re: the hydraulic arm, you're misunderstanding a couple things. First, I only know of two robots in the entire sport that ever used real hydraulics (not to say there aren't more, but it's extremely rare). You're probably thing either of pneumatics, or, more commonly, just regular linear electric actuators. The former is very hard to use and should never be denigrated as too easy (or boring for that matter--see Inertia Labs, The Judge and Ziggy, for example). The latter is relatively easy, but see above, and give the team credit for making a 'bot that actually does something instead of being a totally basic ramming wedge.
2: Time is money. Everyone would like to have more matches and more fighting, but it isn't cheap to run a tournament, and it isn't cheap for the teams to be at the tournament competing. Of course, better prizes and more publicity for sponsorship would fix some of this.
2.1: Yes. Most tournaments these days have very minimalist arenas, and most builders like it that way.
3: Yes.
4: Are you male? EVERYTHING needs bikini babes.
5: If ESPN can afford it, sure. but I doubt they're willing to shell out. On the other hand, ESPN coverage will be a tremendous boon for sponsorship deals. Nobody is sponsoring these days (even though for most companies a significant sponsorship deal would be a drop in the bucket) because nobody sees the competitions, but international coverage would certainly do the trick.
6: They'd have to calibrated to each other i.e. weight class AND price. I could easily make an indestructible half-ton wedge for $10k, and that would be stupid.
For my own part, I'm worried about the experimental class. As someone who has seen and been close to these things, the current crop of superheavyweight shell spinner robots genuinely scare me. In all honesty, the current standards of arena design are already not totally safe for these things to be fighting in. Any significantly larger version of these robots with the same design, which seems probable, would be quite simply a danger to the audience and everyone else around it, even within the arena. Now, I'm all for Mechadon coming out of retirement, but if I was in charge, I wouldn't let (for example) a 500-pound shell spinner actually fight in anything resembling a conventional arena.
Newsweek implicates Wikipedia in "not everything on the Internet is true" shocker!
This reminds me a lot of a story I read once about a professor who had a blinding flash of the obvious (I wish I could remember who it was now). Basically, he instituted a new rule in his classroom which was this:
"Cheating is defined as refusing to give assistance when asked."
That's it. Everyone was expected to ask everyone else questions on all subjects at all times, even during (especially during) tests, and everyone was expected to give help when asked for it.
Of course, the administration didn't like this, and called the professor in for a reprimand. The administrator in question actually ended up saying "Do you realize what woould happen in this university if all the students began helping one another?" To his credit, apparently he followed this statement with a period of silence and then "I'll have to think about this," before finally letting the Prof do what he wanted.
In the end, the result was instead of the "normal" bell-curve of grades in the class, he ended up with a sort of two-peak curve for each assignment. The large peak, making the vast majority of the students, was at the "A" end of the spectrum--since collaboration was total, everybody had access to the best methods and answers. The other smaller peak was at the "F" and "D" end, and simply represented students who had fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
Thank you. That actually makes sense.
I may be being a bit dense, but I have no idea what any of this means. Apparently it's a good thing? Can anyone translate from telecom industry jargon into English?
.pdf, at least not at this moment.
Also, the link isn't a
Just confirms what I've known for years. Wikipedia succeeds despite its staff, not because of it.
I'd say it definitely happens, and not just because of diamond dust--pretty much all the dust in space would do it. That said, "prevalent" is a relative term. Space is still pretty incomprehensibly empty, even in the really "dirty" parts. See http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/dust_storm_030814.html where a "dust storm" is described as being the impact of 12 particles of dust per square meter per day.
Sorry. Godwin's Law doesn't work if you deliberately invoke it.
Has nobody else commented on the fact that the basis of this legislation is obviously false?
The idea is that, in light of fear of terrorism, people are generating oodles of false alarms with their detectors, generating mass panic and sending police on endless wild goose chases. It's been 6 years since 9/11/2001, and if any panics were going to happen they would have been happening 6 years ago. Nothing has happened since then that means people are only now suddenly rushing out and buying crappy air monitors and flooding the police switchboards.
I mean, complexities of the issue aside, they're trying to pass a law to fix a problem that doesn't exist. Not that this would be the first time, I suppose.
You know, I wasn't attempting to imply anything about Edison being a pioneer of electric lighting, or a genius, or anything like that. I was merely pointing out that it was through sheer persistence and trial and error that his optimum choice of filament was arrived at. His brute-force repetition succeeded at making a higher-quality filament than anyone else up to that point had made. The choice of the Edison light bulb story is just an example of brute-forcing a problem that is widely known in popular culture. I could have chosen the man who invented colored bubbles, but he's much less widely known.
Was this the best way to solve the problem? Maybe not. But it worked, therefore the "stubbornness" gene is not totally without advantage.