You might want the reflectors to be larger then the wavelength of the EM that you want them to reflect.
What you could do is launch a few cheap decoy missiles that are basically just big corner reflectors with no payload.
Great big radar signature... laser targeting systems lock on and fire... laser beam gets reflected straight back at the laser platform.
Then I guess it's be a question of what gets destroyed first, the multi-billion-dollar laser platform or the cheap-and-dumb reflector.
Or use "non-explosive" ceramic shells that "detonate" as a shaped fragmentation effect, converting the impact energy into a nasty cloud of computer-designed shrapnel. Aim a laser at one of those, and all that happens is that when it impacts, the shrapnel is now hot shrapnel.
A longstanding problem with the police system is that it's dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. There's no national "non-emergency" police switchboard. There's been talk about having one for years ("998"), but I think the worry is that if they set one up, it'd be too popular.
So they don't do it.:(
There are special separate helplines for shopping drug-dealers, but there's nothing for non-emergency help, or for contacting the police on general matters that aren't emergencies. So suppose that you see something that ought to be brought to the police's attention, but it's not obviously an emergency, what do you do? As good citizens, we're supposed to call the police, but the only number we have for the police, we're not supposed to call. Maybe we're supposed to call in in person and talk to the desk sergeant instead of using these new-fangled telephonic devices.
Martin had also shown premeditation, in standing up at public meetings and declaring that he had the right to shoot trespassers, and that the "law of the wild west" should hold. He wasn't a "law-abiding citizen" in that his shotgun was illegally held: since his attitudes were known to the police it was unlikely that he'd have been granted a shotgun license if he'd applied for one -- the concern would have been that if this person had a shotgun, it'd only be a matter of time before he killed someone with it.
So his shooting the two intruders and killing one of them was a compounding of the offence of having the illegally-held gun in the first place. It's like the difference between killing someone in a car accident, and killing someone in a car accident when you aren't legally entitled to be driving the car in the first place. It makes things worse. If you weren't already breaking the law, the person wouldn't have died. Martin and the lads were all lawbreakers: his lawbreaking was with murderous intent, theirs wasn't.
Martin then seemed to be saying that he'd had the right to kill the person he shot, and that he'd do it again given the chance. If he'd claimed to be frightened and acting in self-defence, the jury might have been more sympathetic, but Martin seemed to be saying that the intruders were fair game, and his previous public statements seemed to suggest that perhaps he'd been itching for a chance to do something like this for some time.
It also didn't help that his house was an isolated ramshackle building that looked abandoned, with no stairs, smashed windows and no lights on. In other words, exactly the sort of abandoned-looking building that kids like to explore or use as a den. When they entered his property, Martin was apparently hiding in wait, in the dark, with his gun. He confronted them, they ran away, he shot them anyway.
Ironically, if "The Laws of the Wild West" really HAD applied, then Martin would have been hanged for his actions as a "backshooter". The old "W-W" rules used to be, if you deliberately shot someone in the back, it was murder.
They figure that it's a significant success to be 38 hours ahead of the pirates with a US movie release... and then they don't allow the German audience any legal way to see the movie for another month? Whuh?
So the global hype machine has kicked in, the net's full of people saying, "Man, you GOTTA see this movie!", and when the poor old Germans turn up at the cinema desperate to hand over their cash to join the party, the studios turn them away. "We don't want your money now, come back in a month's time."
A month is a long time to wait, and it's not going to be too surprising if a bunch of twitchy germans decide that they want to watch this thing while the buzz is still there, and try to get to see it by some other route. They aren't allowed to watch in it cinemas, they aren't yet allowed to buy it on DVD.
If they're already being hit by the marketing hype, but there's NO LEGAL WAY for them to watch this movie, what's the logical result?
If a manufacturer spends millions building up demand for a product, and then refuses to sell it to some of their customers, not because of any intrinsic shortage of material, but as part of a clever marketing strategy, then that manufacturer has lost the right to complain when people start pirating it.
As a general rule, you aren't supposed to advertise a product that isn't available, and you aren't supposed to manipulate markets by deliberately creating regional shortages and banning people from cross-importing. I mean, I know the media companies probably have a special dispensation that makes them immune to the WTO rules that everyone else has to play by, but just because they can legally manipulate markets in ways that would be illegal for other businesses, it doesn't make them immune to the bad karma.
If customers think that your business is crooked, and your business refuses to supply those customers, they're less likely to feel bad about pirating your material. And once they've gotten into the piracy habit, and they've made the contacts and found the websites, and installed the software, they're going to continue doing it.
Business Rule #1: Create a product or service that people want or need.
Business Rule #2: Make it easy for them to buy it from you.
The ==exact== nature of the catastrophe isn't a necessary part of the plot, and if anything, I thought that that was perhaps the weak point of the original book. The original Masterplan was a little ornate and was stretching disbelief a little further than necessary. When you think of all the invented technologies required for The Plan as described in the book, when all you'd actually have needed to create the same effect would have been a little hydrogen bomb and some faked incriminating evidence...
If they've slimmed the components of that that original Plan down a little to cut down on exposition, I probably won't miss them.
Post 9-11, we know how easy it//really// was to plunge the world into turmoil, and how easy it was for some people to exploit that to their own ends. Hell, just use a small asteroid and precede it with a garbled transmission saying "Die Earthling Scum!" and the Plan would be complete. You wouldn't need actual alien technology. Fear and paranoia would allow people to fill in the gaps for themselves. People who are scared and are fed a suggestive line don't need concrete evidence to believe in it.
Hell, a significant chunk of the US population still believe that Iraq was somehow behind 9-11. If you're gonna do a Plan, keep it simple.
Yeah, Ozzie is desperate for absolution for his sins. He's been keeping this secret for years, and he needs the others to tell him that he did the right thing. So he puts them in an impossible situation, whereby they have to agree to be retrospective accomplices to mass murder and massive fraud, or bring down the whole house of cards and have it on their consciences that all those people have already died for a scheme that they've then been responsible for destroying.
Rorschach, supposedly the most morally ambiguous character amongst them, is the only one who refuses to be blackmailed into going along with the plan. He's the only one who says, no, this is wrong, I'm not going to agree to be a part of this, I'm not going to be corrupted like that. Kill me if you have to, but I'm not going to make things easier for you by signing up and saying that it's all okay. If you kill me to save the plan you'll have to live with the knowledge that that's the level that you've had to sink to. It's your plan, you never asked anyone else's permission, and you're responsible for whatever happens as a result.
And at that point we jump back to the first sentence on the first page of the book.
Yeah, Ozzie's justification of his own moral relativism is that "the ends justify the means".
However, we know how badly plans based on THAT sort of argument tend to work out... they end up with innocent people paying the cost for someone else's masterplan, which often doesn't come to pass anyway.
And as Big Blue rather enigmatically points out, how do we really know how things end? The ethical barriers that stop us acting in certain ways are there partly for our own protection. If we force an artificial fixed point in history, a day or a year or a decade later, the forces that we've set up "blow back" and things end up even worse.
Amoral masterplans for the Greater Good tend to have their own special dynamic. We wanted a proxy war with the USSR, so we whipped up Islamic fundamentalism and helped train up the organisation that became Al Queda. Oops. We wanted to fight Al Queda, so we helped set up Blackwater, which turned into an international mercenary army for hire. Ten years from now, the Evil Organisation threatening us may be Blackwater.
Grandiose plans by people who set themselves outside normal ethical rules tend to set up tensions that explode later. You never//really// know how it all ends, or whether the nasty "means" were really justified, not unless you're around at the end of the human race to perform the final calculation. And if you ARE around at that point, things have probably gone horribly wrong.
So yes, I think the "Ozymandias" name was supposed to be a deliberate reference to the futility of these sorts of master-plans and calculations.
Not just sending up comic books: also the inevitable scene at the end of James Bond movies where the baddie outlines their plans, and Bond declares, "You'll never get away with this!", and then uses the information gained to thwart the plot.
Watchmen has a more competent villain who appears to be falling for the same trick, but turns out to have thought things through in a rather crushing way, so as to have his cake and eat it. He gets to do the Big Reveal without jeopardising the Plan.
(Actually, I thought that "Goldfinger" was a good movie because it does a different spin on the Big Reveal. Bond works out that the plan to steal Fort Knox's gold can't possibly work. Goldfinger has neglected the economic angle. The bad guy can't win! But Goldfinger hasn't just considered the economic complexities, his plan actually relies upon them. He's thinking on a different level of sophistication to Bond).
Re:Can Oscar's be given posthumously?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I wasn't a fan of Nicholson' Joker, 'cos to me, it just looked like Jack playing "Crazy Jack" again. He looked like he was having a lot of fun, but I thought he was making it "his" part, rather then the Joker's.
Very much look forward to seeing Ledger's version.
Reading this as an email digest, I thought,
What? Astronomers claim discovery of Earth?
Isn't that a bit cheeky?
Still, (I thought) if Columbus could claim to have discovered America (despite the little fact that there were already people living there, who presumably already knew that it existed), then perhaps the Hubble telescope guys are entitled to swing it around so it points straight down and say, Look! A life-supporting planet! And it's really close!
...
But then I read the actual article and it wasn't nearly so funny.:(
Have I understood this H-1B visa business properly?
Are Nielsen actually sacking US workers and importing cheaper foreign labour into the US to do the jobs, on visas that are supposed to only be for specialists whose expertise is lacking in the US, and who are filling a gap in the market that can't easily be filled by locals?
In this case, the company clearly isn't having to import the labour to fix a local skill shortage, if they're only creating the vacancies for those H-1B guys in the first place by sacking their existing employees.
It sounds like their corporate visa sponsorship forms may be slightly ficticious.
So who investigates cases of misleading visa applications? Would that be Homeland Security?
If a company is found to be abusing the visa system, does that mean that they can be booted out of the scheme, and can lose the ability to get US work visas for all their other foreign employees? Including their foreign staff who have genuinely criticial skills?
If the penalty was that their European legal and management and technical guys couldn't get automatic US work visas, that could hurt. Someone should suggest it.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to reinvent the Nipkow disk?
Yeah, you'd have to be really, REALLY careful not to spill beer on it.
That would be cool.
Add it to the list of cool places to shag.
Have you never seen an episode of Time Tunnel?
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/timetunnel.htm
Mars mission canceled after acrimonious White House briefing
Ah, but that's only in the Earth version of the Bible. You should read it in the original Martian.
Okay, that gives away the ending of the final episode of "Lost" ...
What you could do is launch a few cheap decoy missiles that are basically just big corner reflectors with no payload.
Great big radar signature ... laser targeting systems lock on and fire ... laser beam gets reflected straight back at the laser platform.
Then I guess it's be a question of what gets destroyed first, the multi-billion-dollar laser platform or the cheap-and-dumb reflector.
Or use "non-explosive" ceramic shells that "detonate" as a shaped fragmentation effect, converting the impact energy into a nasty cloud of computer-designed shrapnel. Aim a laser at one of those, and all that happens is that when it impacts, the shrapnel is now hot shrapnel.
So the famous Chinese air pollution problem may actually be an exceedingly clever anti-laser defence?
Ah, but by then, we'll probably be subcontracting the construction of the laser to China anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
Imagine covering your spinning target with these, and then try to imagine what might happen if someone fired a laser at it.
Why do people always talk about the rights of "homeowners" in these cases? What about if you only rent?
So they don't do it.
There are special separate helplines for shopping drug-dealers, but there's nothing for non-emergency help, or for contacting the police on general matters that aren't emergencies. So suppose that you see something that ought to be brought to the police's attention, but it's not obviously an emergency, what do you do? As good citizens, we're supposed to call the police, but the only number we have for the police, we're not supposed to call. Maybe we're supposed to call in in person and talk to the desk sergeant instead of using these new-fangled telephonic devices.
Martin had also shown premeditation, in standing up at public meetings and declaring that he had the right to shoot trespassers, and that the "law of the wild west" should hold. He wasn't a "law-abiding citizen" in that his shotgun was illegally held: since his attitudes were known to the police it was unlikely that he'd have been granted a shotgun license if he'd applied for one -- the concern would have been that if this person had a shotgun, it'd only be a matter of time before he killed someone with it.
So his shooting the two intruders and killing one of them was a compounding of the offence of having the illegally-held gun in the first place. It's like the difference between killing someone in a car accident, and killing someone in a car accident when you aren't legally entitled to be driving the car in the first place. It makes things worse. If you weren't already breaking the law, the person wouldn't have died. Martin and the lads were all lawbreakers: his lawbreaking was with murderous intent, theirs wasn't.
Martin then seemed to be saying that he'd had the right to kill the person he shot, and that he'd do it again given the chance. If he'd claimed to be frightened and acting in self-defence, the jury might have been more sympathetic, but Martin seemed to be saying that the intruders were fair game, and his previous public statements seemed to suggest that perhaps he'd been itching for a chance to do something like this for some time. It also didn't help that his house was an isolated ramshackle building that looked abandoned, with no stairs, smashed windows and no lights on. In other words, exactly the sort of abandoned-looking building that kids like to explore or use as a den. When they entered his property, Martin was apparently hiding in wait, in the dark, with his gun. He confronted them, they ran away, he shot them anyway. Ironically, if "The Laws of the Wild West" really HAD applied, then Martin would have been hanged for his actions as a "backshooter". The old "W-W" rules used to be, if you deliberately shot someone in the back, it was murder.
They figure that it's a significant success to be 38 hours ahead of the pirates with a US movie release ... and then they don't allow the German audience any legal way to see the movie for another month? Whuh?
So the global hype machine has kicked in, the net's full of people saying, "Man, you GOTTA see this movie!", and when the poor old Germans turn up at the cinema desperate to hand over their cash to join the party, the studios turn them away. "We don't want your money now, come back in a month's time."
A month is a long time to wait, and it's not going to be too surprising if a bunch of twitchy germans decide that they want to watch this thing while the buzz is still there, and try to get to see it by some other route. They aren't allowed to watch in it cinemas, they aren't yet allowed to buy it on DVD.
If they're already being hit by the marketing hype, but there's NO LEGAL WAY for them to watch this movie, what's the logical result?
If a manufacturer spends millions building up demand for a product, and then refuses to sell it to some of their customers, not because of any intrinsic shortage of material, but as part of a clever marketing strategy, then that manufacturer has lost the right to complain when people start pirating it.
As a general rule, you aren't supposed to advertise a product that isn't available, and you aren't supposed to manipulate markets by deliberately creating regional shortages and banning people from cross-importing. I mean, I know the media companies probably have a special dispensation that makes them immune to the WTO rules that everyone else has to play by, but just because they can legally manipulate markets in ways that would be illegal for other businesses, it doesn't make them immune to the bad karma.
If customers think that your business is crooked, and your business refuses to supply those customers, they're less likely to feel bad about pirating your material. And once they've gotten into the piracy habit, and they've made the contacts and found the websites, and installed the software, they're going to continue doing it.
Business Rule #1: Create a product or service that people want or need.
Business Rule #2: Make it easy for them to buy it from you.
The ==exact== nature of the catastrophe isn't a necessary part of the plot, and if anything, I thought that that was perhaps the weak point of the original book. The original Masterplan was a little ornate and was stretching disbelief a little further than necessary. When you think of all the invented technologies required for The Plan as described in the book, when all you'd actually have needed to create the same effect would have been a little hydrogen bomb and some faked incriminating evidence ...
If they've slimmed the components of that that original Plan down a little to cut down on exposition, I probably won't miss them.
Post 9-11, we know how easy it //really// was to plunge the world into turmoil, and how easy it was for some people to exploit that to their own ends. Hell, just use a small asteroid and precede it with a garbled transmission saying "Die Earthling Scum!" and the Plan would be complete. You wouldn't need actual alien technology. Fear and paranoia would allow people to fill in the gaps for themselves. People who are scared and are fed a suggestive line don't need concrete evidence to believe in it.
Hell, a significant chunk of the US population still believe that Iraq was somehow behind 9-11. If you're gonna do a Plan, keep it simple.
Yeah, Ozzie is desperate for absolution for his sins. He's been keeping this secret for years, and he needs the others to tell him that he did the right thing. So he puts them in an impossible situation, whereby they have to agree to be retrospective accomplices to mass murder and massive fraud, or bring down the whole house of cards and have it on their consciences that all those people have already died for a scheme that they've then been responsible for destroying.
Rorschach, supposedly the most morally ambiguous character amongst them, is the only one who refuses to be blackmailed into going along with the plan. He's the only one who says, no, this is wrong, I'm not going to agree to be a part of this, I'm not going to be corrupted like that. Kill me if you have to, but I'm not going to make things easier for you by signing up and saying that it's all okay. If you kill me to save the plan you'll have to live with the knowledge that that's the level that you've had to sink to. It's your plan, you never asked anyone else's permission, and you're responsible for whatever happens as a result.
And at that point we jump back to the first sentence on the first page of the book.
However, we know how badly plans based on THAT sort of argument tend to work out ... they end up with innocent people paying the cost for someone else's masterplan, which often doesn't come to pass anyway.
And as Big Blue rather enigmatically points out, how do we really know how things end? The ethical barriers that stop us acting in certain ways are there partly for our own protection. If we force an artificial fixed point in history, a day or a year or a decade later, the forces that we've set up "blow back" and things end up even worse.
Amoral masterplans for the Greater Good tend to have their own special dynamic. We wanted a proxy war with the USSR, so we whipped up Islamic fundamentalism and helped train up the organisation that became Al Queda. Oops. We wanted to fight Al Queda, so we helped set up Blackwater, which turned into an international mercenary army for hire. Ten years from now, the Evil Organisation threatening us may be Blackwater.
Grandiose plans by people who set themselves outside normal ethical rules tend to set up tensions that explode later. You never //really// know how it all ends, or whether the nasty "means" were really justified, not unless you're around at the end of the human race to perform the final calculation. And if you ARE around at that point, things have probably gone horribly wrong.
So yes, I think the "Ozymandias" name was supposed to be a deliberate reference to the futility of these sorts of master-plans and calculations.
"Luthor" = ~"Luxor". So it made sense for an alternative Lex Luthor character to be a history/empire obsessive with a fixation on Ancient Egypt.
Not just sending up comic books: also the inevitable scene at the end of James Bond movies where the baddie outlines their plans, and Bond declares, "You'll never get away with this!", and then uses the information gained to thwart the plot. Watchmen has a more competent villain who appears to be falling for the same trick, but turns out to have thought things through in a rather crushing way, so as to have his cake and eat it. He gets to do the Big Reveal without jeopardising the Plan. (Actually, I thought that "Goldfinger" was a good movie because it does a different spin on the Big Reveal. Bond works out that the plan to steal Fort Knox's gold can't possibly work. Goldfinger has neglected the economic angle. The bad guy can't win! But Goldfinger hasn't just considered the economic complexities, his plan actually relies upon them. He's thinking on a different level of sophistication to Bond).
Very much look forward to seeing Ledger's version.
Reading this as an email digest, I thought,
What? Astronomers claim discovery of Earth?
Isn't that a bit cheeky?
Still, (I thought) if Columbus could claim to have discovered America (despite the little fact that there were already people living there, who presumably already knew that it existed), then perhaps the Hubble telescope guys are entitled to swing it around so it points straight down and say, Look! A life-supporting planet! And it's really close!
But then I read the actual article and it wasn't nearly so funny. :(
Are Nielsen actually sacking US workers and importing cheaper foreign labour into the US to do the jobs, on visas that are supposed to only be for specialists whose expertise is lacking in the US, and who are filling a gap in the market that can't easily be filled by locals?
In this case, the company clearly isn't having to import the labour to fix a local skill shortage, if they're only creating the vacancies for those H-1B guys in the first place by sacking their existing employees.
It sounds like their corporate visa sponsorship forms may be slightly ficticious.
So who investigates cases of misleading visa applications? Would that be Homeland Security?
If a company is found to be abusing the visa system, does that mean that they can be booted out of the scheme, and can lose the ability to get US work visas for all their other foreign employees? Including their foreign staff who have genuinely criticial skills?
If the penalty was that their European legal and management and technical guys couldn't get automatic US work visas, that could hurt. Someone should suggest it.