Apparently word hasn't gotten out that you "know horses"... Those fuckers are about as fun to fix as eMachines, and substantially more likely to attack you.
A lot of legacy or 'copy-protected'(RTMPE) stuff is; but a fair amount these days is done with just a.swf container providing a few playback control widgets and pulling an.flv or.mp4 video from a URL. Most RTMP servers cost money, while bulk HTTP serving commands virtually no premium over the cost of hardware, power, and bandwidth. No assurances; but often worth a quick look at the page source or a packet sniff...
I'm not conflating the two, or arguing that they deserve analogous treatment. I'm simply noting that the American market has a relatively high tolerance for violence in media, compared to its tolerance for sex in media, and thus making games about violence is a much better mass-market strategy.
There is the additional fact that strong disapproval of overt pornographic content(combined with strong covert demand for it) has built up a solid parallel distribution network for sexual films and images. Since violence-related media have enjoyed much broader acceptance, there was no need for such a parallel market. This means that violent games can be stocked much more broadly(computer related stores, wal-mart, etc.) while a sex-related game would find itself in a comparatively seedy secondary channel.
This is less of an issue now that we have the internet; but you are still going to have a much harder time moving boxed games(especially, as noted, if you are shooting for the "Officially M; but with tacit crossover down to low teens" market that shooters and the like usually go for). If you are consigned to the sex-only distribution channels, your only customers are going to be adults, or non-paying internet kiddies. If you make it into general retail, you'll have both adults, adults buying for children, and some paying children, at laxer outlets.
Personally, I find the fact that sex-related media are treated as more damaging to children/people than violence related ones rather weird; but that is largely irrelevant to my point, which is purely about the economics of the situation: Given the culture of one of the major markets, it is much easier to move product if product is ultraviolent; but sexually tame, than the reverse, or high in both categories.(Consider, for instance, how much flack the GTA games drew for the inclusion of prostitutes and the potential for violence against them. The entire game was, as typically played, about sociopathic mayhem and spree-killer level body counts; but it was the added sex that really got people worked up...) That's the market and(given that major games have high production costs and absolutely depend on moving serious units) the market gets what it wants.
Web-distributed Indie titles would be a much more plausible candidate for sex-related games, except that the technology is also pretty challenging to do properly.
I was thinking less in terms of "not dispensing money"(though inconveniencing your customer's customers is bad) and more in terms of "I'm assuming that the GPS is there, in part, as a theft deterrent".
Location awareness along with the ability to phone home, would be pretty useful for something that may be filled with a substantial amount of cash; but cannot be breached fast enough(in most cases) in its installed location. Since jammers are so cheap and common, I would have expected a backup system to detect movement/tampering, and provide an internal timebase, to try to exclude false positives(you can't call the cops every time some trucker trying to evade "fleet management" drives by) and false negatives(if a reasonably sophisticated team with an ebay-ed GPS simulator dials in the correct static coordinates and then trucks the ATM away to be cut open, you want to know about that).
Just technologically, sex is arguably pretty tricky. You can do plain porn easily enough(especially if you just use stills and video shot with real people); but simulating complex character interactions or in-engine naked-bodies-and-fluids without falling into the horrors of the uncanny valley is quite difficult. Thus, games tend either to ignore the subject, or just toss in some pin-ups at reward points.
Then, of course, you have the US market's rather curious stance toward sex vs. violence. Violence may well get you rated M; but M is hardly the kiss of death. Sex will probably get you AO, which is.(Even if the selling point of the violence is realistic depictions of human suffering and death, and the game is all about tasteful loving relationships or something; but so it goes...) Even as the market of adult videogamers expands, you still can't get a mass-market game out the door if it won't be at least tacitly accepted by the households of millions of 14 year olds(because who else is going to scream "FAGGOT HACKER!!@!!" into the microphone all night on XBL?)
Finally, there is the matter of competition and competitive advantage: For things like violence and empire building, most people either have no options, or only options that are actually pretty costly, and thus not competitors as entertainment(Well, let's see... I could download America's Army or I could join America's Army...). There is some competition from film; but that is about it. For things like sex, a decent percentage of gamers old enough to be interested in a serious in-game depiction are substantially more interested in real life. Failing that(because of technological limitations, as described above) the conventional pornography industry is arguably pretty superior to the video game industry in terms of efficiently titillating depictions, and the film and novel industries are substantially ahead if you want deep characters and romance and things.
You still need the Adobe plugin(unless Gnash just happens to support your specific.swf files); but VLC has support for treating the contents of the screen as an input stream, which should allow you to do an ugly-but-functional transcode... There is another cute utility that emulates a VNC client; but, instead of doing the usual VNC client thing, writes out an flv movie of the on-screen action (vnc2flv, I think is the name). If you install a VNC server on the machine being used to show the swf, you could also get a video file out of it that way... Also ugly; but might be good enough.
The term among lawful users is "GPS Simulator"; but yeah, those are over-the-counter RF test equipment. Not even close to being as cheap as the jammers; but very much out there.
While Microwaves are, indeed, quite excellent fun(It'd be downright unpatriotic to not like cavity magnetrons: they helped defeat Hitler and provide us with nourishing instant popcorn); but caution is advised.
Shockingly enough, microwaves heat moist things. Like Humans. Now, your body has some degree of liquid cooling built in, handily provided by your bloodstream. However, your Corneas are, shall we say, a bit under-vascularized... Unless you really know what you are doing or don't mind having cataracts like your great grandparents before you graduate from high school Do. Not. Fuck. With. Microwaves.(The fact that the magnetron circuit requires a capacitor that stands a very good chance of killing your punk ass if disrespected is just icing on the cake...)
In all seriousness, microwaves are quite possibly the worst commonly available appliances to play junior tinkerer with.
Just.. um... incidentally... if you want to simply jam GPS, your favorite dodgy Chinese drop-shipper should have what you are looking for by name.
If you want to do anything more elegant or sophisticated in terms of spoofing, they probably won't. However "GPS Simulators" are entirely legitimate pieces of RF test equipment, for use by responsible engineers in closed test environments to evaluate the performance of their GPS-using products against an.. um... "variety of input situations"...
Only time will tell, in terms of Adobe's specific implementation; but given that Flash consists of Actionscript(practically Javascript), bitmap and vector graphics(canvas/SVG), A/V decode support for specific codecs(HTML5 video), and flash cookies/data storage(HTML5 local data store), there is no broad reason to expect that HTML5(at least in the medium term) shouldn't be able to do the majority of Flash stuff(omitting specific cases like some special streaming capabilities and DRM) with efficiency on roughly the same order as Flash(better if the browser maker is more competent/platform integrated than Adobe, worse if they are less competent, or if Adobe's conversion tool produces pathological code)...
Unfortunately, drawing lots and lots of fancy vectors with an interpreted language is always going to be more computationally expensive than more... restrained... tastes in web design; but at least it won't all be crammed into a proprietary runtime with a ghastly security record...
Very, very FCC non-compliant. Possibly other crimes as well, if used with specific intents(skimming tracked goods, shutting down airports, etc.)
Because they are relatively simple to build, and pretty cheap to buy, and virtually impossible to detect unless operating, enforcement of that fact is pretty spotty...
I suspect that there is (in addition to any device-specific fallbacks, inertial, optical, radar, dead reckoning, whateer) one major factor that helps that be less of an issue:
Jamming/spoofing requires emitting an RF signal, typically one stronger than the legitimate one. There are weapons(such as the oh-so-cleverly named HARM missile that are specifically designed to lock on to RF sources and follow them back to their transmitters.
A sufficiently clever opponent could(given the relative cheapness of GPS jammers) try something like spreading hundreds or thousands of low-power units(mandate their inclusion on utility poles and cell towers for activation in wartime, or produce a version consisting of the RF circuit, an antenna, and a couple of big sealed-lead-acid batteries in a cooler-sized unit that can be plunked anywhere), with each unit configured to turn itself on and off randomly and fairly rapidly, providing an overall storm of RF noise; but no terribly useful targets...
Big jammers, though, would be among the top targets for anti-radiation missiles and small ones(say vehicle mounted) would likely be too short ranged to be effective until the weapon being jammed was already too close for comfort.
Directional antennas might also come into play... Your basic consumer GPSes tend to have at least modestly omnidirectional antennas; because it isn't acceptable for a consumer product to require a plumb line and a knowledge of geometry just to get working and keep working. Something like a missile or drone aircraft, though, might well make use of the fact that(unless the enemy still has enough of an air force that they can afford to keep electronic warfare aircraft lofted...) GPS signals come from space, while jammers are on the ground...
I'm not surprised by how many devices would use GPS(the ability to get a fairly accurate location fix and a damn accurate timebase for peanuts and an OK view of the sky is certainly attractive...); but I am surprised, a bit, at how many "serious" systems(even ones where hostile action is to be expected, like ATMs, or where failure Just Isn't Acceptable, like air traffic control) wouldn't have some degree of redundancy, if only because of the risk of a cheap GPS module burning some sensitive RF chip because the local arc-welder user fired up again...
Your basic RTC, say, isn't as accurate as GPS time; especially in the long term, or if not temperature compensated and subject to variable conditions; but it should still deviate by less than a second over a day or two of lost GPS(never mind 10-60 minutes of jamming) and can, if needed, retain reasonably accurate time for as long as power holds out, and they don't need much power.
Similarly, today's MEMS accelerometers and on-chip magnetometers/compasses, while you might not want to dead-reckon your way around the world with them, can easily enough compensate for losses in GPS fix over the short term, and can 'sanity-check' abrupt changes in GPS readings.
For static objects(like radar towers) you can basically treat position as a constant(possibly with recalibration from time to time if there are structural shifts) and calculate dish position based on a simple rotary encoder or the like.
Obviously, for space, power, and cost reasons, Joe Consumer's $50 cellphone or $80 dash-nav isn't necessarily going to incorporate multiple layers of GPS failsafe. If the GPS stops working, Joe can just use the meat-coprocessor he stores in his skull to suck it up and figure it out until GPS comes back online.
For more important systems, though, I would honestly have hoped for better, especially in situations(like cell towers and most ATMs) where the equipment itself isn't exactly inexpensive, so $50 or $100 worth of accelerometer and RTC failsafe would be reasonable, and where they usually have a network hard-line. NTP isn't perfect; but it certainly is handy(if necessary, users of dedicated circuits, rather than those who rely on public internet, might be able to achieve even greater accuracy by comparing their GPS time with the GPS time reported by the hardware on the other end of the circuit, to determine the round-trip time fairly exactly...)
Also, the "backup" gyrocompass mentioned in TFA, that failed to act as a backup to GPS because it crashed when it lost GPS signal is just sad. Perhaps it was purchased from the same company who provides emergency generators that can only be started by mains-powered control systems?
The question that this raises, for me, is as follows: "If Microsoft paid Nokia $1 billion(plus the special-BFF ability to customize WP7 to a degree that others cannot), this suggests that either A) Nokia was largely willing, possibly with the customization proviso; but one or both parties were worried about Nokia's ability to keep on course long enough to iterate out a good WP7 product(not necessarily because of bankrupcy, from which they are a good ways off; but because of shareholders demanding a new plan with expected better returns, or similar pressure) or B)Our Google Overlords had an offer that needed to be outbid... If A, what hold-ups were MS and or Nokia worried about? If B, was Google also offering sweet, sweet, cash money? Or was the perceived superiority of the Android world worth less than; but not too much less than, $1billion?
You don't get as rich as Microsoft by paying for things that you can get for free. So, that strongly suggests that there was an offer(in cash or in code) worth not too much less than $1 billion on the table, presumably from Google(or possibly Intel). Who was it from? Was there also substantial cash in it? Or is the perceived delta between WP7 and the alternatives actually ~$1billion in the eyes of Nokia and MS?
I certainly wouldn't argue with the contention that this device(especially if paired with one of the more limited Arduino boards) would be a very limited 3D device. Getting it to do 3D would be a bit of a hack, and you would be severely limited in scene complexity(and quite possibly refresh rate) if you wanted to do any real 3D. I just wanted to argue that it would be better than completely useless, just challenging and limited for the reasons you describe...
With storage being so cheap and capacious now, though, you might be able to do pretty decent fake-3D with an SD card full of pre-rendered sprites for the objects in your gameworld, and a somewhat granular model of space, to keep the number of possible perspectives sufficiently low...
It's arguably overkill for debugging purposes, since the Arduino already has USB -> serial support for communication with a computer(and on the bench, you'll have your computer, and in the field, a cheap 'n nasty laptop just new enough to have a USB port and run a terminal emulator will be cheaper and more battery powered than just about anything that accepts VGA input), or a logic-level Rx/Tx for chatting some more basic serial device, or can drive an HD44780 display with 6 pins(fewer if you snag one of the ones with a serial drive mode).
On the other hand, getting a VGA-compatible graphics device(plus sound) in only 4 data pins plus power is pretty cool, and certainly opens up a world of sensor-data visualization and other cool stuff, not necessarily gaming related, that would otherwise require dragging along an entire computer, just using the arduino as a more or less dumb ADC/TTL GPIO module, or building lots and lots of clunky LED arrays and such...
Depends on how fast the device(plus whatever i2c master is controlling it) can generate new sprites, I suppose.
Since the display is actually 2D, the camera's view of the 3D scene could be represented as a collection of sprites generated from the surfaces of the 3D polygons by the perspective-appropriate transformation...
Given the relatively low ceiling on number of sprites, and the fairly limited RAM and computational capacity of the arduino, you might well have real trouble getting good 3D; but I can imagine something like the classic Alone In The Dark, with a limited number of single-colored(rather than actually textured) polygons are used on top of a static background...
I was responding to the specific claim that three rather notorious dictators had "never attended a Christian mass"; by pointing out that two of the three almost certainly attended quite a few. I have no position on what their belief state was at any given time.
Oh, I'm sure that international opinion on proliferation is quite clear, and quite negative. What I'm less sure about is what would happen if somebody were to use one, particularly against some unequivocally military target, rather than a population center.
Just FYI... Joseph Stalin attended(but left just short of graduating) from a Georgian Orthodox Seminary. He could afford to do so because of a scholarship earned during his earlier years at a church school. His theistic activities were largely confined to his early life; but he probably went to a great many masses, after the eastern orthodox style.
Ironically, Pol Pot attended a Catholic school, and so probably also had a few masses under his belt as well. Only Mao appears to have a reasonably clean bill of health...
Suicide bombers are arguably the most dramatic example; but they are hardly the only ones who threaten the classic MAD/Deterrence model of nuke use.
For the classic model of nuclear deterrence to work, you must have two or more rational actors, with access to good information, with interests that would be unacceptably threatened by the use of nuclear weapons against them, and with access to nuclear weapons and the ability to perform reprisals with them. That is actually a fairly tight set of requirements.
Even during the Cold War, for instance, there were a few situations where technical and/or command & control glitches left some number of warheads in the hands of local officers with either false positives, or highly limited information. Since the ability to perform reprisals requires an emphasis on designing "fail-unsafe" systems that launch if the nation's infrastructure is damaged, you enormously magnify the potential costs of infrastructure glitches.
Another quite plausible attack on the classic deterrence model is the use of proxies or non-state actors(whether suicidal or not: it isn't hugely pertinent whether or not the chap who carried the bomb onto the plane is also on the plane when the trivial-for-an-arduino-hobbyist-with-$100 GPS/alteometer system triggers the bomb at perfect airburst altitude over a major city...) If you don't know who provided the bomb, you don't have anybody to perform a reprisal against, and thus your threat of reprisal is hollow, and does not deter an attacker with access to covert operators. Your basic "Hey guys, let's build a limited number of big, hardened, silos, trivially visible from orbit, from which to launch extremely dramatic ICBMs" strategy makes retaliation easy; but is increasingly obsolete. Even aside from the cargo planes and panel vans school of sneaking about, the steady proliferation of the expertise to build short to medium range missiles(or just the finished missiles) which can be launched from all sorts of improv platforms is going to make aggressor ID harder as time goes on.
There is also the "star wars" concern: Were some rational actor locked in a classic deterrence scenario to develop an anti-missile technology that actually worked, their opponent would no longer have a viable deterrent, which would upset the equilibrium(as would a rational; but misinformed actor who thinks he has an effective anti-missile system, or an irrational actor who believes
There is also the sticky issue of the potential for proliferation and increased use of smallish, tactical nuclear devices. International opinion on the use of strategic nuclear devices, particularly against population centers, is pretty uniformly negative. It is less clear how a situation involving something on the scale of a Davy Crockett style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives. Even in a simple "two powers, clear attribution" scenario, it isn't clear that such devices would escalate to a full-scale strategic armageddon; but they would certainly make conventional warfare extra ugly. Perhaps of greater interest to today's major powers, such devices would be a godsend to the scruffy proxy-forces of the world: All the power of a GBU-43 or some sort of particularly nasty cluster/carpet munition, in a delivery system not much larger than a simple mortar, and capable of being broken down and hand carried by a small team, whatever rickety pickup trucks are the local favorite, etc. Easy to hide in a populated area against anything but a house-by-house operation(unlike the aircraft or heavy artillery you would ordinarily need to deliver such firepower); but capable of inflicting ghastly casualties on even advanced military forces...
So. Yeah. I can't really blame them for being concerned...
On the one hand, a proposal to allow teachers to search smartphones is an expansion of the invasive-yet-dubiously-competent surveillance state. Therefore, our limey friends on airstrip one have an obligation to adopt it, it's in their national character or something.
On the other hand, such a proposal will, almost certainly, provide teachers with a supply of kiddie porn, thus abetting the paedophile menace, perhaps the only thing that your average Daily Mail reader fears and loathes more than immigrants on the dole...
The prevailing wisdom among economists is that there is a trade-off between employment and inflation.
The process then goes something like this: Members of the country or region's reserve bank get together to decide what policy to follow, and where on the trade-off curve to attempt to land. For reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that the decision making members of reserve banks consist more or less exclusively of bankers, whose holdings would be damaged by inflation; but who need not fear for their jobs, they conclude that inflation is a terrible scourge that must be prevented at any cost, and a certain amount of "structural unemployment" just comes with the territory...
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently word hasn't gotten out that you "know horses"... Those fuckers are about as fun to fix as eMachines, and substantially more likely to attack you.
A lot of legacy or 'copy-protected'(RTMPE) stuff is; but a fair amount these days is done with just a .swf container providing a few playback control widgets and pulling an .flv or .mp4 video from a URL. Most RTMP servers cost money, while bulk HTTP serving commands virtually no premium over the cost of hardware, power, and bandwidth. No assurances; but often worth a quick look at the page source or a packet sniff...
I'm not conflating the two, or arguing that they deserve analogous treatment. I'm simply noting that the American market has a relatively high tolerance for violence in media, compared to its tolerance for sex in media, and thus making games about violence is a much better mass-market strategy.
There is the additional fact that strong disapproval of overt pornographic content(combined with strong covert demand for it) has built up a solid parallel distribution network for sexual films and images. Since violence-related media have enjoyed much broader acceptance, there was no need for such a parallel market. This means that violent games can be stocked much more broadly(computer related stores, wal-mart, etc.) while a sex-related game would find itself in a comparatively seedy secondary channel.
This is less of an issue now that we have the internet; but you are still going to have a much harder time moving boxed games(especially, as noted, if you are shooting for the "Officially M; but with tacit crossover down to low teens" market that shooters and the like usually go for). If you are consigned to the sex-only distribution channels, your only customers are going to be adults, or non-paying internet kiddies. If you make it into general retail, you'll have both adults, adults buying for children, and some paying children, at laxer outlets.
Personally, I find the fact that sex-related media are treated as more damaging to children/people than violence related ones rather weird; but that is largely irrelevant to my point, which is purely about the economics of the situation: Given the culture of one of the major markets, it is much easier to move product if product is ultraviolent; but sexually tame, than the reverse, or high in both categories.(Consider, for instance, how much flack the GTA games drew for the inclusion of prostitutes and the potential for violence against them. The entire game was, as typically played, about sociopathic mayhem and spree-killer level body counts; but it was the added sex that really got people worked up...) That's the market and(given that major games have high production costs and absolutely depend on moving serious units) the market gets what it wants.
Web-distributed Indie titles would be a much more plausible candidate for sex-related games, except that the technology is also pretty challenging to do properly.
I was thinking less in terms of "not dispensing money"(though inconveniencing your customer's customers is bad) and more in terms of "I'm assuming that the GPS is there, in part, as a theft deterrent".
Location awareness along with the ability to phone home, would be pretty useful for something that may be filled with a substantial amount of cash; but cannot be breached fast enough(in most cases) in its installed location. Since jammers are so cheap and common, I would have expected a backup system to detect movement/tampering, and provide an internal timebase, to try to exclude false positives(you can't call the cops every time some trucker trying to evade "fleet management" drives by) and false negatives(if a reasonably sophisticated team with an ebay-ed GPS simulator dials in the correct static coordinates and then trucks the ATM away to be cut open, you want to know about that).
Just technologically, sex is arguably pretty tricky. You can do plain porn easily enough(especially if you just use stills and video shot with real people); but simulating complex character interactions or in-engine naked-bodies-and-fluids without falling into the horrors of the uncanny valley is quite difficult. Thus, games tend either to ignore the subject, or just toss in some pin-ups at reward points.
Then, of course, you have the US market's rather curious stance toward sex vs. violence. Violence may well get you rated M; but M is hardly the kiss of death. Sex will probably get you AO, which is.(Even if the selling point of the violence is realistic depictions of human suffering and death, and the game is all about tasteful loving relationships or something; but so it goes...) Even as the market of adult videogamers expands, you still can't get a mass-market game out the door if it won't be at least tacitly accepted by the households of millions of 14 year olds(because who else is going to scream "FAGGOT HACKER!!@!!" into the microphone all night on XBL?)
Finally, there is the matter of competition and competitive advantage: For things like violence and empire building, most people either have no options, or only options that are actually pretty costly, and thus not competitors as entertainment(Well, let's see... I could download America's Army or I could join America's Army...). There is some competition from film; but that is about it. For things like sex, a decent percentage of gamers old enough to be interested in a serious in-game depiction are substantially more interested in real life. Failing that(because of technological limitations, as described above) the conventional pornography industry is arguably pretty superior to the video game industry in terms of efficiently titillating depictions, and the film and novel industries are substantially ahead if you want deep characters and romance and things.
You still need the Adobe plugin(unless Gnash just happens to support your specific .swf files); but VLC has support for treating the contents of the screen as an input stream, which should allow you to do an ugly-but-functional transcode... There is another cute utility that emulates a VNC client; but, instead of doing the usual VNC client thing, writes out an flv movie of the on-screen action (vnc2flv, I think is the name). If you install a VNC server on the machine being used to show the swf, you could also get a video file out of it that way... Also ugly; but might be good enough.
The term among lawful users is "GPS Simulator"; but yeah, those are over-the-counter RF test equipment. Not even close to being as cheap as the jammers; but very much out there.
http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/guidance.html
While Microwaves are, indeed, quite excellent fun(It'd be downright unpatriotic to not like cavity magnetrons: they helped defeat Hitler and provide us with nourishing instant popcorn); but caution is advised.
Shockingly enough, microwaves heat moist things. Like Humans. Now, your body has some degree of liquid cooling built in, handily provided by your bloodstream. However, your Corneas are, shall we say, a bit under-vascularized... Unless you really know what you are doing or don't mind having cataracts like your great grandparents before you graduate from high school Do. Not. Fuck. With. Microwaves.(The fact that the magnetron circuit requires a capacitor that stands a very good chance of killing your punk ass if disrespected is just icing on the cake...)
In all seriousness, microwaves are quite possibly the worst commonly available appliances to play junior tinkerer with.
Just.. um... incidentally... if you want to simply jam GPS, your favorite dodgy Chinese drop-shipper should have what you are looking for by name.
If you want to do anything more elegant or sophisticated in terms of spoofing, they probably won't. However "GPS Simulators" are entirely legitimate pieces of RF test equipment, for use by responsible engineers in closed test environments to evaluate the performance of their GPS-using products against an.. um... "variety of input situations"...
Only time will tell, in terms of Adobe's specific implementation; but given that Flash consists of Actionscript(practically Javascript), bitmap and vector graphics(canvas/SVG), A/V decode support for specific codecs(HTML5 video), and flash cookies/data storage(HTML5 local data store), there is no broad reason to expect that HTML5(at least in the medium term) shouldn't be able to do the majority of Flash stuff(omitting specific cases like some special streaming capabilities and DRM) with efficiency on roughly the same order as Flash(better if the browser maker is more competent/platform integrated than Adobe, worse if they are less competent, or if Adobe's conversion tool produces pathological code)...
Unfortunately, drawing lots and lots of fancy vectors with an interpreted language is always going to be more computationally expensive than more... restrained... tastes in web design; but at least it won't all be crammed into a proprietary runtime with a ghastly security record...
Very, very FCC non-compliant. Possibly other crimes as well, if used with specific intents(skimming tracked goods, shutting down airports, etc.)
Because they are relatively simple to build, and pretty cheap to buy, and virtually impossible to detect unless operating, enforcement of that fact is pretty spotty...
I suspect that there is (in addition to any device-specific fallbacks, inertial, optical, radar, dead reckoning, whateer) one major factor that helps that be less of an issue:
Jamming/spoofing requires emitting an RF signal, typically one stronger than the legitimate one. There are weapons(such as the oh-so-cleverly named HARM missile that are specifically designed to lock on to RF sources and follow them back to their transmitters.
A sufficiently clever opponent could(given the relative cheapness of GPS jammers) try something like spreading hundreds or thousands of low-power units(mandate their inclusion on utility poles and cell towers for activation in wartime, or produce a version consisting of the RF circuit, an antenna, and a couple of big sealed-lead-acid batteries in a cooler-sized unit that can be plunked anywhere), with each unit configured to turn itself on and off randomly and fairly rapidly, providing an overall storm of RF noise; but no terribly useful targets...
Big jammers, though, would be among the top targets for anti-radiation missiles and small ones(say vehicle mounted) would likely be too short ranged to be effective until the weapon being jammed was already too close for comfort.
Directional antennas might also come into play... Your basic consumer GPSes tend to have at least modestly omnidirectional antennas; because it isn't acceptable for a consumer product to require a plumb line and a knowledge of geometry just to get working and keep working. Something like a missile or drone aircraft, though, might well make use of the fact that(unless the enemy still has enough of an air force that they can afford to keep electronic warfare aircraft lofted...) GPS signals come from space, while jammers are on the ground...
I'm not surprised by how many devices would use GPS(the ability to get a fairly accurate location fix and a damn accurate timebase for peanuts and an OK view of the sky is certainly attractive...); but I am surprised, a bit, at how many "serious" systems(even ones where hostile action is to be expected, like ATMs, or where failure Just Isn't Acceptable, like air traffic control) wouldn't have some degree of redundancy, if only because of the risk of a cheap GPS module burning some sensitive RF chip because the local arc-welder user fired up again...
Your basic RTC, say, isn't as accurate as GPS time; especially in the long term, or if not temperature compensated and subject to variable conditions; but it should still deviate by less than a second over a day or two of lost GPS(never mind 10-60 minutes of jamming) and can, if needed, retain reasonably accurate time for as long as power holds out, and they don't need much power.
Similarly, today's MEMS accelerometers and on-chip magnetometers/compasses, while you might not want to dead-reckon your way around the world with them, can easily enough compensate for losses in GPS fix over the short term, and can 'sanity-check' abrupt changes in GPS readings.
For static objects(like radar towers) you can basically treat position as a constant(possibly with recalibration from time to time if there are structural shifts) and calculate dish position based on a simple rotary encoder or the like.
Obviously, for space, power, and cost reasons, Joe Consumer's $50 cellphone or $80 dash-nav isn't necessarily going to incorporate multiple layers of GPS failsafe. If the GPS stops working, Joe can just use the meat-coprocessor he stores in his skull to suck it up and figure it out until GPS comes back online.
For more important systems, though, I would honestly have hoped for better, especially in situations(like cell towers and most ATMs) where the equipment itself isn't exactly inexpensive, so $50 or $100 worth of accelerometer and RTC failsafe would be reasonable, and where they usually have a network hard-line. NTP isn't perfect; but it certainly is handy(if necessary, users of dedicated circuits, rather than those who rely on public internet, might be able to achieve even greater accuracy by comparing their GPS time with the GPS time reported by the hardware on the other end of the circuit, to determine the round-trip time fairly exactly...)
Also, the "backup" gyrocompass mentioned in TFA, that failed to act as a backup to GPS because it crashed when it lost GPS signal is just sad. Perhaps it was purchased from the same company who provides emergency generators that can only be started by mains-powered control systems?
The question that this raises, for me, is as follows: "If Microsoft paid Nokia $1 billion(plus the special-BFF ability to customize WP7 to a degree that others cannot), this suggests that either A) Nokia was largely willing, possibly with the customization proviso; but one or both parties were worried about Nokia's ability to keep on course long enough to iterate out a good WP7 product(not necessarily because of bankrupcy, from which they are a good ways off; but because of shareholders demanding a new plan with expected better returns, or similar pressure) or B)Our Google Overlords had an offer that needed to be outbid... If A, what hold-ups were MS and or Nokia worried about? If B, was Google also offering sweet, sweet, cash money? Or was the perceived superiority of the Android world worth less than; but not too much less than, $1billion?
You don't get as rich as Microsoft by paying for things that you can get for free. So, that strongly suggests that there was an offer(in cash or in code) worth not too much less than $1 billion on the table, presumably from Google(or possibly Intel). Who was it from? Was there also substantial cash in it? Or is the perceived delta between WP7 and the alternatives actually ~$1billion in the eyes of Nokia and MS?
I certainly wouldn't argue with the contention that this device(especially if paired with one of the more limited Arduino boards) would be a very limited 3D device. Getting it to do 3D would be a bit of a hack, and you would be severely limited in scene complexity(and quite possibly refresh rate) if you wanted to do any real 3D. I just wanted to argue that it would be better than completely useless, just challenging and limited for the reasons you describe...
With storage being so cheap and capacious now, though, you might be able to do pretty decent fake-3D with an SD card full of pre-rendered sprites for the objects in your gameworld, and a somewhat granular model of space, to keep the number of possible perspectives sufficiently low...
It's arguably overkill for debugging purposes, since the Arduino already has USB -> serial support for communication with a computer(and on the bench, you'll have your computer, and in the field, a cheap 'n nasty laptop just new enough to have a USB port and run a terminal emulator will be cheaper and more battery powered than just about anything that accepts VGA input), or a logic-level Rx/Tx for chatting some more basic serial device, or can drive an HD44780 display with 6 pins(fewer if you snag one of the ones with a serial drive mode).
On the other hand, getting a VGA-compatible graphics device(plus sound) in only 4 data pins plus power is pretty cool, and certainly opens up a world of sensor-data visualization and other cool stuff, not necessarily gaming related, that would otherwise require dragging along an entire computer, just using the arduino as a more or less dumb ADC/TTL GPIO module, or building lots and lots of clunky LED arrays and such...
Definitely a cool looking device.
Oops, should be SPI, not i2c...
Depends on how fast the device(plus whatever i2c master is controlling it) can generate new sprites, I suppose.
Since the display is actually 2D, the camera's view of the 3D scene could be represented as a collection of sprites generated from the surfaces of the 3D polygons by the perspective-appropriate transformation...
Given the relatively low ceiling on number of sprites, and the fairly limited RAM and computational capacity of the arduino, you might well have real trouble getting good 3D; but I can imagine something like the classic Alone In The Dark, with a limited number of single-colored(rather than actually textured) polygons are used on top of a static background...
I was responding to the specific claim that three rather notorious dictators had "never attended a Christian mass"; by pointing out that two of the three almost certainly attended quite a few. I have no position on what their belief state was at any given time.
Oh, I'm sure that international opinion on proliferation is quite clear, and quite negative. What I'm less sure about is what would happen if somebody were to use one, particularly against some unequivocally military target, rather than a population center.
Just FYI... Joseph Stalin attended(but left just short of graduating) from a Georgian Orthodox Seminary. He could afford to do so because of a scholarship earned during his earlier years at a church school. His theistic activities were largely confined to his early life; but he probably went to a great many masses, after the eastern orthodox style.
Ironically, Pol Pot attended a Catholic school, and so probably also had a few masses under his belt as well. Only Mao appears to have a reasonably clean bill of health...
Suicide bombers are arguably the most dramatic example; but they are hardly the only ones who threaten the classic MAD/Deterrence model of nuke use.
For the classic model of nuclear deterrence to work, you must have two or more rational actors, with access to good information, with interests that would be unacceptably threatened by the use of nuclear weapons against them, and with access to nuclear weapons and the ability to perform reprisals with them. That is actually a fairly tight set of requirements.
Even during the Cold War, for instance, there were a few situations where technical and/or command & control glitches left some number of warheads in the hands of local officers with either false positives, or highly limited information. Since the ability to perform reprisals requires an emphasis on designing "fail-unsafe" systems that launch if the nation's infrastructure is damaged, you enormously magnify the potential costs of infrastructure glitches.
Another quite plausible attack on the classic deterrence model is the use of proxies or non-state actors(whether suicidal or not: it isn't hugely pertinent whether or not the chap who carried the bomb onto the plane is also on the plane when the trivial-for-an-arduino-hobbyist-with-$100 GPS/alteometer system triggers the bomb at perfect airburst altitude over a major city...) If you don't know who provided the bomb, you don't have anybody to perform a reprisal against, and thus your threat of reprisal is hollow, and does not deter an attacker with access to covert operators. Your basic "Hey guys, let's build a limited number of big, hardened, silos, trivially visible from orbit, from which to launch extremely dramatic ICBMs" strategy makes retaliation easy; but is increasingly obsolete. Even aside from the cargo planes and panel vans school of sneaking about, the steady proliferation of the expertise to build short to medium range missiles(or just the finished missiles) which can be launched from all sorts of improv platforms is going to make aggressor ID harder as time goes on.
There is also the "star wars" concern: Were some rational actor locked in a classic deterrence scenario to develop an anti-missile technology that actually worked, their opponent would no longer have a viable deterrent, which would upset the equilibrium(as would a rational; but misinformed actor who thinks he has an effective anti-missile system, or an irrational actor who believes
There is also the sticky issue of the potential for proliferation and increased use of smallish, tactical nuclear devices. International opinion on the use of strategic nuclear devices, particularly against population centers, is pretty uniformly negative. It is less clear how a situation involving something on the scale of a Davy Crockett style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives. Even in a simple "two powers, clear attribution" scenario, it isn't clear that such devices would escalate to a full-scale strategic armageddon; but they would certainly make conventional warfare extra ugly. Perhaps of greater interest to today's major powers, such devices would be a godsend to the scruffy proxy-forces of the world: All the power of a GBU-43 or some sort of particularly nasty cluster/carpet munition, in a delivery system not much larger than a simple mortar, and capable of being broken down and hand carried by a small team, whatever rickety pickup trucks are the local favorite, etc. Easy to hide in a populated area against anything but a house-by-house operation(unlike the aircraft or heavy artillery you would ordinarily need to deliver such firepower); but capable of inflicting ghastly casualties on even advanced military forces...
So. Yeah. I can't really blame them for being concerned...
On the one hand, a proposal to allow teachers to search smartphones is an expansion of the invasive-yet-dubiously-competent surveillance state. Therefore, our limey friends on airstrip one have an obligation to adopt it, it's in their national character or something.
On the other hand, such a proposal will, almost certainly, provide teachers with a supply of kiddie porn, thus abetting the paedophile menace, perhaps the only thing that your average Daily Mail reader fears and loathes more than immigrants on the dole...
How will they decide this one?
The prevailing wisdom among economists is that there is a trade-off between employment and inflation.
The process then goes something like this: Members of the country or region's reserve bank get together to decide what policy to follow, and where on the trade-off curve to attempt to land. For reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that the decision making members of reserve banks consist more or less exclusively of bankers, whose holdings would be damaged by inflation; but who need not fear for their jobs, they conclude that inflation is a terrible scourge that must be prevented at any cost, and a certain amount of "structural unemployment" just comes with the territory...