Yep - this is clearly a "drivable plane", not a "flying car".
That still has utility to be sure: it means you can store your plane in your own garage, and it gives you ground transport at your destination. But it still looks like you'd need to drive to the local small airport, fly to the destination small airport, then drive from there.
A proper "flying car" needs to be VTOL, so you can drive because that's cheaper, but switch to flying when you get caught in traffic.
While that's true, they cost more than a village and you can only carry a few. Allowing naval arty to service normal arty fire missions returns a traditional (and useful at this range!) role to naval ships.
To be fair, the Navy doesn't really do anything to small countries, only big ones that can also have Navies.
Ha! That's one of the specific limitations the Zumwalt-class destroyer was invented to solve. With the demise of the battleship, the role of the Navy in providing artillery support when invading small countries was sadly lacking.
The Zumwalt features a pair of new 6 inch guns specifically designed to hit ground targets at 100 km inland. No longer will the Navy trail the other services in its ability to do anything to small countries - the decades of shame can finally end!
OK, OK, aircraft carriers, yes, yes, but they're boring.
A huge part of good remote desktop protocols is just that! Keeps the bandwidth down. If your graphics card could know "for free" that all changes were in a given rectangle, and I bet it often could, that doesn't even sound hard to do.
Myst was written using HyperCard, which no one at the time thought you could make a game with. This is one group of devs who I'm not going to tell what engine to use!
Sure, sure, but if a scientist can have a successful career based on fraudulent results - if the feedback is too slow - that will destroy the culture of science. If a scientist, not intending fraud, can get away with sloppy process his whole career, that will damage science. Published results guide thinking.
If published results are often wrong (or simply unfalsifiable), that has really bad effects on where research goes from there. The waste of multiple decades of research on string theory in the last century is a testament to that.
I just finished playing through RealMyst (the version with a 3D engine and modern movement). Gaming has come such a long way, but as a small puzzle game it still stands up. Just a tiny amount of "hunt the pixel", mostly solvable without clicking everywhere to see what moves. These guys knew their stuff - here's hoping they still do.
Off to check out the kickstarter - I love that method of funding games.
Other posters have indicated that other industrialized countries spend greater than that number (as a percentage). Let me present another version of the same story: 40% of GDP is expended on things which are considered to be of public good.
Oh, you can always claim that, and whoever gets the checks always will. However, IMO it's short sighted: you can always live better by running up the credit card than by living with your means. You can always live better this year by failing to insure against future problems, even certain ones. Most importantly, long term standard of living is dominated by technological progress, and division of income is a rounding error by comparison.
But politics is all about the short term. It's say it's worse that corporate governance, but really, there's no difference any more.
It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. (There's no recording AFAIK, that link is to someone reading the transcript).
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try, unless it's something very sexy like observing the Higgs boson or something. It's an important structural problem, and it was worth calling attention to forty years ago.
There's no doubt that some unscrupulous researchers have noticed this and are gaming the system. The incentives to do so are particularly high in biochem.
A) Increasing CO2 is poisonous to us. B) a run away green house effect means we die. Not hyperbole
Ahh, disaster-mongering at its finest.
(A) is technically correct (which is the best kind of correct). We're at about 400 ppm. At about 40000 ppm, people would be dying.
(B) is quite absurd. There just isn't that mass of carbon available. We know what the Earth looks like with 6-10x the current CO2 concentrations, and it's not much warmer at the equator (it's far, far warmer at the poles). No boiling oceans, no runaway CO2. I'm not sure we'd even get "runaway" feedback below toxic levels anyhow.
Also, the phrase "green house effect" is a very poor choice of words (Morbo says "green houses do not work that way!").
The IPCC predictions from 1990 were terrible. Whatever quantitative hypotheses underlied those models have been falsified. Models continue to improve, and today's may well be making accurate predictions - we'll know in 20 years. Once we know we have reliable models, then a sane, rational person can start discussing the economic trade offs.
Well, one can never know for sure, can one? But one can be guided by the success (or otherwise) of one's predictions - or at least that's the best method anyone's yet figured out.
Turning any discussion of government spending into a partisan argument makes you a tool of the establishment. There are two pro-big-government, pro-corporation parties. Fighting about which one is better means you've succumbed to the illusion that there are any significant differences.
But we are still a democracy, and if people actually let unsustainable government spending influence how they vote, one of the parties may crack and become a fiscally conservative party. I honestly couldn't care less which party makes that change - but either one does, or unsustainable spending comes home to roost (and that government shutdown will last years).
The hindenburg comes to mind, hydrogen is dangerous.
What a strange non-sequitur. You do know that the lesson from the Hindenburg is that rocket fuel is dangerous, and you shouldn't paint your airship with it, right?
Yes, magnesium is dangerous, what's your point (and yet you can still buy magnesium wheels)? Palladium hydride is far safer, and was the choice the DOE threw a ton of research money at.
In the USSR it was farmers - they took your land (and all stored food) and offered you the opportunity to work on government farms - but child labor was normal on farms throughout history, so maybe that's a bad example.
But Poland and the USSR were both quite prosperous compared to Bulgaria, Romania, and the like. Conditions were worse in the satellites, in general.
If shutting down the government for a few days hurts GDP noticeably, then that's your problem right there. BUt of course we knew this: government spending is almost 40% of GDP. That number is just so insane I have trouble accepting it (though most of that spending is checks mailed to old people who then spend it normally, and none of that was affected by the shutdown).
TOR is a poor choice for media sharing as it's not P2P. Freenet was written as secure P2P from the ground up, and has had plenty of security review. While I don't trust anything to be safe from the NSA, the known attacks require far more resources than the *AA will ever use.
I doubt it's any faster than TOR, but being P2P if people actually started using it instead of open torrents, it would be.
The problem of course is "network effect". There's no content because no one uses it and vice versa. But it is the correct technical solution, with years in the field and years of security review.
Anything that stores energy, particularly electrical energy, is a fire risk, particularly when it involves sudden grievous damage to the structure containing that energy
That's just not true. There are many ways of storing power. Take hydrogen for example: you can store power by cracking water to get it, but how do you store it? If you store it in some compressed gas form, you're asking for trouble. If you store it in a big low-pressure balloon on top the bus (people actually do this), the practical risk is low, since with any rupture the hydrogen will move up quickly. But you can also store it as an metal hydride, which requires electrical power to release at any speed. Yes, it can catch fire, but it will just burn slowly for a long time, and can be extinguished normally.
Another example are the kinetic batteries occasionally used by satellites - storing power in a flywheel sounds dangerous, but not if you make the flywheel of soft plastic, so that it lacks the structural integrity to fly off the axel and will instead just shred itself if damaged. That was prototyped for electric car battery use, but the need to gimbal-mount the batteries was prohibitive.
Really, for electric car batteries the bar is pretty low - as safe as a tank of gasoline. For home solar to ever really take off it will be a greater safety concern, at least if you want to store enough power to run your house for a day (which seems like a minimum to not need grid power). I do wonder if the flywheel concept might not be worth a second look for the home - weight no longer an issue, and no need for gimbals.
Don't think "jobs for all" means "pay for all". I used to work with a guy who grew up in Bulgaria under communism there. Starting at about age 13, he was required to work a few hours every day in a local factory.
The sort of exploitation of workers, especially child labor, that was normal for capitalism in the late 19th century was normal for communism in the late 20th century. People are just dicks, and changes in economic systems can't fix that.
DDO doesn't really have any mindless grind to automate, and I've never seen a bot in it. Heck, if you choose the run the same content repeatedly, the XP and loot falls off quite rapidly.
There's no need to make an MMO that way. Make the game, from start to the endgame raids, have no need to repeat a quest, no mindless timesyncs. It's just not that hard to make quests if your world designers are given good automation for laying out content.
Sure, you'll need to repeat the endgame raids, but that's not usually the part the players call the grind.
I had great fun writing a crafting bot for EQ2, since it required fast matching of icons appearing on screen with actions to take, and a bit of strategy in doing so. Same experience: it kept me playing (and paying) for several more months than I would have otherwise.
Well, a judge can order you to preserve electronic communication almost on a whim - but really, if there's a judge involved here I'd be shocked. Importantly, you have to deal with that for civil matters, where there will never be a warrant, but you're still on the hook.
In many states, you need a drivers licence (or alternative state ID for those w/o cars) to walk down the street. Not showing ID to any cop who asks is already a crime in many places.
"Wake up, Neo, it's later than you think." We're already a totalitarian state, it just looks different from WWII-era states because the continuous monitoring of all citizens is done secretly, rather than overtly as an instrument of authority. The government feels free to make laws about every little detail of our personal lives, and many people will rally to defend those laws. The volume of laws has become too much for even a single expert to fully understand. The notion that every law has a cost paid in reduced freedom has long been lost. Presidents have increasingly felt free to ignore the law and just act (and direct government workers) as they see fit. There's really no line that hasn't been crossed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep - this is clearly a "drivable plane", not a "flying car".
That still has utility to be sure: it means you can store your plane in your own garage, and it gives you ground transport at your destination. But it still looks like you'd need to drive to the local small airport, fly to the destination small airport, then drive from there.
A proper "flying car" needs to be VTOL, so you can drive because that's cheaper, but switch to flying when you get caught in traffic.
I'd never seen that. That's awesome!
While that's true, they cost more than a village and you can only carry a few. Allowing naval arty to service normal arty fire missions returns a traditional (and useful at this range!) role to naval ships.
To be fair, the Navy doesn't really do anything to small countries, only big ones that can also have Navies.
Ha! That's one of the specific limitations the Zumwalt-class destroyer was invented to solve. With the demise of the battleship, the role of the Navy in providing artillery support when invading small countries was sadly lacking.
The Zumwalt features a pair of new 6 inch guns specifically designed to hit ground targets at 100 km inland. No longer will the Navy trail the other services in its ability to do anything to small countries - the decades of shame can finally end!
OK, OK, aircraft carriers, yes, yes, but they're boring.
A huge part of good remote desktop protocols is just that! Keeps the bandwidth down. If your graphics card could know "for free" that all changes were in a given rectangle, and I bet it often could, that doesn't even sound hard to do.
Myst was written using HyperCard, which no one at the time thought you could make a game with. This is one group of devs who I'm not going to tell what engine to use!
Sure, sure, but if a scientist can have a successful career based on fraudulent results - if the feedback is too slow - that will destroy the culture of science. If a scientist, not intending fraud, can get away with sloppy process his whole career, that will damage science. Published results guide thinking.
If published results are often wrong (or simply unfalsifiable), that has really bad effects on where research goes from there. The waste of multiple decades of research on string theory in the last century is a testament to that.
Yep - it's the Unreal 4 engine.
I just finished playing through RealMyst (the version with a 3D engine and modern movement). Gaming has come such a long way, but as a small puzzle game it still stands up. Just a tiny amount of "hunt the pixel", mostly solvable without clicking everywhere to see what moves. These guys knew their stuff - here's hoping they still do.
Off to check out the kickstarter - I love that method of funding games.
Other posters have indicated that other industrialized countries spend greater than that number (as a percentage). Let me present another version of the same story:
40% of GDP is expended on things which are considered to be of public good.
Oh, you can always claim that, and whoever gets the checks always will. However, IMO it's short sighted: you can always live better by running up the credit card than by living with your means. You can always live better this year by failing to insure against future problems, even certain ones. Most importantly, long term standard of living is dominated by technological progress, and division of income is a rounding error by comparison.
But politics is all about the short term. It's say it's worse that corporate governance, but really, there's no difference any more.
It's not about being lazy. Feynman famously addressed this in his "Cargo Cult Science" rant in his Caltech commencement address given in 1974. (There's no recording AFAIK, that link is to someone reading the transcript).
He makes very good points: funding is for new results. Attempting to repeat another scientists published work is not a new result (unless you can't), and many places won't even allow you to try, unless it's something very sexy like observing the Higgs boson or something. It's an important structural problem, and it was worth calling attention to forty years ago.
There's no doubt that some unscrupulous researchers have noticed this and are gaming the system. The incentives to do so are particularly high in biochem.
A) Increasing CO2 is poisonous to us.
B) a run away green house effect means we die. Not hyperbole
Ahh, disaster-mongering at its finest.
(A) is technically correct (which is the best kind of correct). We're at about 400 ppm. At about 40000 ppm, people would be dying.
(B) is quite absurd. There just isn't that mass of carbon available. We know what the Earth looks like with 6-10x the current CO2 concentrations, and it's not much warmer at the equator (it's far, far warmer at the poles). No boiling oceans, no runaway CO2. I'm not sure we'd even get "runaway" feedback below toxic levels anyhow.
Also, the phrase "green house effect" is a very poor choice of words (Morbo says "green houses do not work that way!").
The IPCC predictions from 1990 were terrible. Whatever quantitative hypotheses underlied those models have been falsified. Models continue to improve, and today's may well be making accurate predictions - we'll know in 20 years. Once we know we have reliable models, then a sane, rational person can start discussing the economic trade offs.
Well, one can never know for sure, can one? But one can be guided by the success (or otherwise) of one's predictions - or at least that's the best method anyone's yet figured out.
Turning any discussion of government spending into a partisan argument makes you a tool of the establishment. There are two pro-big-government, pro-corporation parties. Fighting about which one is better means you've succumbed to the illusion that there are any significant differences.
But we are still a democracy, and if people actually let unsustainable government spending influence how they vote, one of the parties may crack and become a fiscally conservative party. I honestly couldn't care less which party makes that change - but either one does, or unsustainable spending comes home to roost (and that government shutdown will last years).
The hindenburg comes to mind, hydrogen is dangerous.
What a strange non-sequitur. You do know that the lesson from the Hindenburg is that rocket fuel is dangerous, and you shouldn't paint your airship with it, right?
Yes, magnesium is dangerous, what's your point (and yet you can still buy magnesium wheels)? Palladium hydride is far safer, and was the choice the DOE threw a ton of research money at.
In the USSR it was farmers - they took your land (and all stored food) and offered you the opportunity to work on government farms - but child labor was normal on farms throughout history, so maybe that's a bad example.
But Poland and the USSR were both quite prosperous compared to Bulgaria, Romania, and the like. Conditions were worse in the satellites, in general.
You might still be insane even if surrounded by people who agree with you - there are institutions that accomplish just that, after all.
If shutting down the government for a few days hurts GDP noticeably, then that's your problem right there. BUt of course we knew this: government spending is almost 40% of GDP. That number is just so insane I have trouble accepting it (though most of that spending is checks mailed to old people who then spend it normally, and none of that was affected by the shutdown).
TOR is a poor choice for media sharing as it's not P2P. Freenet was written as secure P2P from the ground up, and has had plenty of security review. While I don't trust anything to be safe from the NSA, the known attacks require far more resources than the *AA will ever use.
I doubt it's any faster than TOR, but being P2P if people actually started using it instead of open torrents, it would be.
The problem of course is "network effect". There's no content because no one uses it and vice versa. But it is the correct technical solution, with years in the field and years of security review.
Anything that stores energy, particularly electrical energy, is a fire risk, particularly when it involves sudden grievous damage to the structure containing that energy
That's just not true. There are many ways of storing power. Take hydrogen for example: you can store power by cracking water to get it, but how do you store it? If you store it in some compressed gas form, you're asking for trouble. If you store it in a big low-pressure balloon on top the bus (people actually do this), the practical risk is low, since with any rupture the hydrogen will move up quickly. But you can also store it as an metal hydride, which requires electrical power to release at any speed. Yes, it can catch fire, but it will just burn slowly for a long time, and can be extinguished normally.
Another example are the kinetic batteries occasionally used by satellites - storing power in a flywheel sounds dangerous, but not if you make the flywheel of soft plastic, so that it lacks the structural integrity to fly off the axel and will instead just shred itself if damaged. That was prototyped for electric car battery use, but the need to gimbal-mount the batteries was prohibitive.
Really, for electric car batteries the bar is pretty low - as safe as a tank of gasoline. For home solar to ever really take off it will be a greater safety concern, at least if you want to store enough power to run your house for a day (which seems like a minimum to not need grid power). I do wonder if the flywheel concept might not be worth a second look for the home - weight no longer an issue, and no need for gimbals.
Don't think "jobs for all" means "pay for all". I used to work with a guy who grew up in Bulgaria under communism there. Starting at about age 13, he was required to work a few hours every day in a local factory.
The sort of exploitation of workers, especially child labor, that was normal for capitalism in the late 19th century was normal for communism in the late 20th century. People are just dicks, and changes in economic systems can't fix that.
DDO doesn't really have any mindless grind to automate, and I've never seen a bot in it. Heck, if you choose the run the same content repeatedly, the XP and loot falls off quite rapidly.
There's no need to make an MMO that way. Make the game, from start to the endgame raids, have no need to repeat a quest, no mindless timesyncs. It's just not that hard to make quests if your world designers are given good automation for laying out content.
Sure, you'll need to repeat the endgame raids, but that's not usually the part the players call the grind.
I had great fun writing a crafting bot for EQ2, since it required fast matching of icons appearing on screen with actions to take, and a bit of strategy in doing so. Same experience: it kept me playing (and paying) for several more months than I would have otherwise.
Yes, good old right-wing early childhood indoctrination. Murrica!
Beloved by such right-wing icons as Charles Schulz, Oprah Winfrey, and Michele Obama.
Well, a judge can order you to preserve electronic communication almost on a whim - but really, if there's a judge involved here I'd be shocked. Importantly, you have to deal with that for civil matters, where there will never be a warrant, but you're still on the hook.
In many states, you need a drivers licence (or alternative state ID for those w/o cars) to walk down the street. Not showing ID to any cop who asks is already a crime in many places.
"Wake up, Neo, it's later than you think." We're already a totalitarian state, it just looks different from WWII-era states because the continuous monitoring of all citizens is done secretly, rather than overtly as an instrument of authority. The government feels free to make laws about every little detail of our personal lives, and many people will rally to defend those laws. The volume of laws has become too much for even a single expert to fully understand. The notion that every law has a cost paid in reduced freedom has long been lost. Presidents have increasingly felt free to ignore the law and just act (and direct government workers) as they see fit. There's really no line that hasn't been crossed.