I thought that Apple's market was supposed to be flakey arty creative types, with a smattering of unix geeks who either needed to use Word from time to time, or just didn't feel like fighting with pulseaudio anymore....
When did they add sociopathic assholes to the mix?
Since this particular science doesn't either A)make baby jesus cry or B)arguably support stronger environmental restrictions on some corporation; we probably don't actually hate it....
Although it hasn't been relevant in ages, technically your old SCSI monster takes up one 5 1/4 inch bay, and virtually all modern optical drives take up 1/2 of a bay.
Such "Full-height" devices are essentially extinct(if anything, more servers are going with 2.5 inch drives, for zippiness, with 3.5s in the SAN if you need bulk storage); but their descendants are still "half-height"...
Any 3D iDevice game is being done in OpenGL ES, which counts for a fair few(albeit mostly small and casual) games. Android likely accounts for fewer; but doesn't exactly do directx either.
According to these guys Nvidia will have test drivers sometime this week. Since that is also when the spec becomes generally available, it seems safe to assume that the spec was written in fairly close consultation with at least the big graphics players.
I assume AMD's graphics drivers have also been in development, in concert with the spec, for some time, and will be available soonish, albeit with the usual lag after Nvidia. As for the various embedded guys, hard for me to say. I'm sure that having OpenGL ES made a proper subset, as opposed to a somewhat different near-subset, will be attractive for mobile developers, since it will make desktop to phone/console/embedded and back portability easier; but I don't know whether the embedded graphics hardware that is out there now can be updated with just drivers, or whether some 4.0 features will require an upcoming generation of silicon.
As for games, the first tech demo/fanboy wank publicity stunt will probably be available about 15 minutes after the Nvidia drivers. Widespread use might be a while.
They would probably be less than happy with either of those outcomes...
As philosophy, creationism is basically just the parts of Aristotle that have held up least well, with some tacky jesus stuff pasted on. Basically just a not-very-interesting footnote to the section on teleology.
As religion, it is arguably even worse: somebody espousing creationism(especially its "intelligent design" variant, where it wears a lab coat), is doing one of two things: they have either, because of the overwhelming empirical evidence around them, accepted the scientific method; but are petulantly demanding that they be allowed to have it both ways, science; but science that says what they want to hear; or they are simply propagandizing, dressing their sectarian nonsense as "science" in order to sneak it past the establishment clause. The former group is deluded. Science will give you incredible power over, and great understanding of, nature; but it doesn't take orders. The second group is even worse. I don't remember Jesus approving very much of liars, even pious ones....
Don't be surprised. He suffered some serious head trauma disproving the liberal so-called "universal gravitation" before a quick-thinking doctor introduced him to the theory of intelligent falling just to get him to stop hurting himself....
It's more than that: All antennae in the frequency bands used by cellphones will suffer some attenuation if your meaty hands are wrapped around them. You are absorbing a chunk of the radiation. This applies to all brands, and is why many cellphones have an area, or areas, they encourage you not to touch during use. Typically, phones are designed so that you won't tend to hold this part during routine use.
On the iPhone 4, the antenna is external and does not have a dielectric coating. In addition to attenuating the signal with their meaty consumer-hands, the user can actually modify the performance characteristics of the antenna(for the worse); by being conductive enough to count as part of it, or by bridging the two sections.
Apple has, naturally, been doing their best to conflate these two distinct antenna issues. All phones suffer from finger-meat signal attenuation. The iPhone is pretty much the only phone in the industry that has an exposed, externally conductive, antenna. Even the old-school designs with external pull-up antennas generally had those coated with plastic, and the user was hardly encouraged to hold the phone by a flexible extending antenna, rather than by the body.
The "ebay-low" price is probably a scam(or just a link to something that is early in its bidding lifecycle/not going to hit reserve this round); but the real world cash-and-go price for those horrid little WinCE based 'netbooks' is $80-$100. Not quite as rosy as 24.99; but still fairly cheap and falling.
My concern is not the war(I don't like wars; but I recognize that they are sometimes necessary, and we had an actual case for the Afghan campaign, unlike the Iraqi one), my concern is the fact that we seem to be, at best, absurdly inefficient at converting blood and treasure into victory, and, at worst, actively counterproductive.
For instance, the amount(in cash and hardware) that we are shelling out to ostensibly friendly Pakistani and Afghan forces would be a relatively modest investment, of no real concern, except that it keeps coming back to bite us. Little groups of Afghan security forces turning on their handlers are a weekly to monthly thing at this point, and that doesn't even count the ones who just go AWOL and turn up in some other militia, who are hard to count.
What I find particularly troubling is the degree to which internal corruption, and tolerance for corruption, weakens our efforts. There are the direct costs in the sense of inflating the costs of fielding our forces, causing our forces to have to fight with the weapons that contractors wanted to sell, rather than the ones they need, causing our planned(and often paid for) construction projects to be abandoned partway through, or so broken as to be dangerous.
There are also the indirect costs: One of the major PR points that Islamic fundamentalists like to harp on is desirability and benefit of establishing Islamic law(there are fringe groups in Christianity and Judaism that have a similar position on mosaic law; but they are statistically of much less concern). Now, if you are opposing such people, your legal system and social institutions are, implicitly or explicitly, being compared to theirs by the apathetic masses. The fact that we can't kick our own contractors' asses hard enough to get from them what they agreed to deliver, and the fact that we consistently prop up ghastly, openly corrupt, sleazeballs like Hamid Karzai really doesn't help.
Now, anyone who thinks that theocracy will actually end up being less corrupt is dreaming; but there is nothing like a corrupt, ineffectual, secular government to inspire people to give it a shot. Once they do, it is hard to get the place back.
Unless we are capable of demonstrating our virtues, as well as our power, we will keep being called upon to display our power until we simply run out of money and have to leave.
I was using "isn't even fair" in the idiomatic sense of "the parties would be extraordinarily unequally matched, the domination of one by the other would be so complete, and so unsurprising, as to make the comparison hardly worth it".
I can't think of an abstract moral notion of "fairness" that would apply to inanimate objects; which quite arguably makes the idiom really weird, in context; but idioms are sneaky like that...
I'm not sure how useful this stuff would be for that purpose. When the cops are conducting one of their we-don't-need-a-warrant-anybody-who-happened-to-be-carrying-a-10K-FLIR-scanner-down-this-public-road-could-have-seen-it... "non-searches", they aren't looking for reflected IR(that would be pointless, there is plenty of visible light around, and everybody knows where the house is), they are looking for IR emissions. Presumably, a house shielded with this stuff would react very oddly to IR light sources, bending those around it like it didn't exist; but it would behave itself like a more or less ordinary blackbody. For something as toasty as a grow-op, that would mean pumping out substantial IR from the walls and roof.
One would probably have better luck with the much lower tech(though probably pretty tricky to engineer in a way that isn't wildly suspicious) refrigeration technologies and/forced air cooling of areas immediately adjacent to exterior walls(attic particularly).
You would still need somewhere to dump the heat, I'm guessing that having enough chillers to serve a modest datacenter in your back yard would be pretty suspicious; but you could keep your walls at non-suspicious temps, and concentrate the heat output so that it could be dumped in the least suspicious place. A river would, of course, be ideal. A decent size aquifer might do as well. The air speed you would need to achieve to have a forced air cooling setup emit exhaust that doesn't trip every helicopter-mounted FLIRcam in the area would probably draw attention, so that might not work.
You neither block nor reflect, you cause the light to bend around you.
Imagine a smoothly-flowing stream: If you put a rock in it, the flow will be disturbed. If the rock is irregularly shaped, some of the water will "bounce" back(because this is water, and not photons, it will only cause some turbulence, not actually be reflected; but such is the weakness of analogies...). If the rock has a nice, smooth, hydrodynamic sort of shape, the water will part smoothly when it hits the rock and then come back together behind the rock, with minimal disruption to the flow. The rock exists; but for a hypothetical organism that can only detect water currents(say a water bug with sensory hairs, sitting downstream), it will be invisible.
It turns out that, on small scales, under laboratory conditions(and often only in two dimensions), with exotic materials, you can cause photons to "bend around" an object, thus rendering the object effectively invisible. They don't get absorbed, so you can't detect the object by their absence, and they don't get reflected, so you can't see the object, they just take a circuitous path around the object, and continue on their merry way as though nothing was there(though, since a semicircular path is slightly longer than the straight path would have been, I suppose a sufficiently sensitive travel-time comparison system could still detect the cloaked object...)
Y'know what really puts the 300 billion figure in perspective? That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion. If you can't crush an adversary like a bug for almost a quarter-century's worth of its GDP(and that is comparing your military expenditures vs. their entire economy) there is some part of you technique that you really need to take a hard look at...
Worse, even if we were having it all our way in military terms, our best case scenario seems to be installing our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader sufficiently securely that we can leave before he gets overthrown. Given what happened in Iran when our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader fell, this strategy seems to have a strong structural weakness.
Oh, I'm typing this(and typed the above) on a 2.0 GHz dual core A64. Even assuming no architectural tweaks, or more cache or anything, we are talking only 2/3s the speed of their $200 box, and performance for all basic applications is just fine.
Once I threw a $30 graphics card in there, it even plays the games I care about on adequately attractive settings.
I just wished to acknowledge that(unlike in the P4 days), the A64 is the price/performance winner, not the performance winner. The vast majority of the market is better off with the price/performance winner; but the performance high end hasn't been AMD's for some time.
Compared to any of the atoms, though, it isn't even fair(unless thermal dissipation is a primary concern). Not only are the atoms worse clock-for-clock, the A64 is clocked almost twice as high.
Did you see the CPU that they used? A 2.9GHz, dual core, A64? That doesn't compare to the latest Nehalems by any stretch of the imagination; but it will absolutely annihilate the Atom at everything except power draw.
Not to mention the fact that most of the Atom motheboards have pretty limited expansion. Not many people replace their CPUs; but being able to add a bunch more RAM, without throwing out your existing stuff, is a very convenient upgrade.
Unfortunately, "reliability" is something of a crapshoot. All the branded OEMs have a whole bunch of models, manufactured by one or more contractors, often at multiple facilities, out of parts made by dozens or hundreds of further entities, with designs changing all the time and without clear warning(ie. two "Brand X Model 123"s might have completely different PSU designs, one rev0 that is a piece of shit, one rev4 that is rock solid, while a "Brand X Model 123" and a "Brand X model 234" might have identical designs).
Some models suck, some just last and last(same goes if you are buying the bits and assembling yourself. Some revisions of some designs are just crap, some are excellent).
At least for me, I've gotten to the point where I wouldn't trust a single piece of hardware from anybody to handle something critical. There is no HDD manufacturer good enough that you want data you care about to only be on a single drive. There is no computer maker good enough that you want your ability to do you Very Important Work hinge on the uptime of a single machine(never mind the risk that you'll spill a drink on the thing at the wrong moment). I am less concerned about trying to optimize for reliability of any specific system than I am about making sure that backups and some amount of redundancy are in place, and trying to buy from sellers with a reputation for not screwing around and wasting your time if you need support.
My advice, assuming an adequately well-heeled questioner of no particular technical competence, is first "Get a backup service, or device, or both. All hard drives die. Some die sooner than others. When yours dies, you will be very sad if you do not have backups." After that, we can discuss the much less important question of what brand to buy.
While it certainly appears, from TFA, that tales of Dell's l33t supply chain ninja-ness were fraudulently overstated, the sheer magnitude of their dependence on Intel's "rebates" makes me wonder if they were the only one.
During that period, whenever I went shopping(either for personal use, or doing comparisons for employer bulk purchases) Dell always had very competitive prices; but not wildly different from comparable stuff from HP and friends. Either Dell's supply chain management absolutely sucked goats through capillary tubing, or some of their competitors must have had similar slush funds to work with.
I'd say that trying to draw meaningful conclusions from a study of traffic fatalities is even more doomed(without substantial care) than you describe.
1994-2008 is 12 years. Any changes in quality of trauma surgery, and emergency responder response time?
What were average vehicle masses doing during that time? Were there any changes(either regulatory demands or industry shifts) in things like bumper geometry and height?
Most importantly, what about non-fatal incidents? There are some pretty ghastly ways to not-quite-die in a car accident, particularly if the medics scrape you off the pavement before you bleed out. With possibilities like "massive spinal column injury" or "so brain damaged you are good for drooling into your sock and burdening your family" on the table, 'not dead' is far from equaling 'not endangered'...
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You share your tech toys with the help? Fucking hippy.
That's just apathy, rather than real hatred.
I thought that Apple's market was supposed to be flakey arty creative types, with a smattering of unix geeks who either needed to use Word from time to time, or just didn't feel like fighting with pulseaudio anymore....
When did they add sociopathic assholes to the mix?
Since this particular science doesn't either A)make baby jesus cry or B)arguably support stronger environmental restrictions on some corporation; we probably don't actually hate it....
Doublethink is all the rage on airstrip one, I hear...
Although it hasn't been relevant in ages, technically your old SCSI monster takes up one 5 1/4 inch bay, and virtually all modern optical drives take up 1/2 of a bay.
Such "Full-height" devices are essentially extinct(if anything, more servers are going with 2.5 inch drives, for zippiness, with 3.5s in the SAN if you need bulk storage); but their descendants are still "half-height"...
Any 3D iDevice game is being done in OpenGL ES, which counts for a fair few(albeit mostly small and casual) games. Android likely accounts for fewer; but doesn't exactly do directx either.
According to these guys Nvidia will have test drivers sometime this week. Since that is also when the spec becomes generally available, it seems safe to assume that the spec was written in fairly close consultation with at least the big graphics players.
I assume AMD's graphics drivers have also been in development, in concert with the spec, for some time, and will be available soonish, albeit with the usual lag after Nvidia. As for the various embedded guys, hard for me to say. I'm sure that having OpenGL ES made a proper subset, as opposed to a somewhat different near-subset, will be attractive for mobile developers, since it will make desktop to phone/console/embedded and back portability easier; but I don't know whether the embedded graphics hardware that is out there now can be updated with just drivers, or whether some 4.0 features will require an upcoming generation of silicon.
As for games, the first tech demo/fanboy wank publicity stunt will probably be available about 15 minutes after the Nvidia drivers. Widespread use might be a while.
Does the world really need another petrodollar theocracy?
They would probably be less than happy with either of those outcomes...
As philosophy, creationism is basically just the parts of Aristotle that have held up least well, with some tacky jesus stuff pasted on. Basically just a not-very-interesting footnote to the section on teleology.
As religion, it is arguably even worse: somebody espousing creationism(especially its "intelligent design" variant, where it wears a lab coat), is doing one of two things: they have either, because of the overwhelming empirical evidence around them, accepted the scientific method; but are petulantly demanding that they be allowed to have it both ways, science; but science that says what they want to hear; or they are simply propagandizing, dressing their sectarian nonsense as "science" in order to sneak it past the establishment clause. The former group is deluded. Science will give you incredible power over, and great understanding of, nature; but it doesn't take orders. The second group is even worse. I don't remember Jesus approving very much of liars, even pious ones....
Don't be surprised. He suffered some serious head trauma disproving the liberal so-called "universal gravitation" before a quick-thinking doctor introduced him to the theory of intelligent falling just to get him to stop hurting himself....
It's more than that: All antennae in the frequency bands used by cellphones will suffer some attenuation if your meaty hands are wrapped around them. You are absorbing a chunk of the radiation. This applies to all brands, and is why many cellphones have an area, or areas, they encourage you not to touch during use. Typically, phones are designed so that you won't tend to hold this part during routine use.
On the iPhone 4, the antenna is external and does not have a dielectric coating. In addition to attenuating the signal with their meaty consumer-hands, the user can actually modify the performance characteristics of the antenna(for the worse); by being conductive enough to count as part of it, or by bridging the two sections.
Apple has, naturally, been doing their best to conflate these two distinct antenna issues. All phones suffer from finger-meat signal attenuation. The iPhone is pretty much the only phone in the industry that has an exposed, externally conductive, antenna. Even the old-school designs with external pull-up antennas generally had those coated with plastic, and the user was hardly encouraged to hold the phone by a flexible extending antenna, rather than by the body.
The "ebay-low" price is probably a scam(or just a link to something that is early in its bidding lifecycle/not going to hit reserve this round); but the real world cash-and-go price for those horrid little WinCE based 'netbooks' is $80-$100. Not quite as rosy as 24.99; but still fairly cheap and falling.
My concern is not the war(I don't like wars; but I recognize that they are sometimes necessary, and we had an actual case for the Afghan campaign, unlike the Iraqi one), my concern is the fact that we seem to be, at best, absurdly inefficient at converting blood and treasure into victory, and, at worst, actively counterproductive.
For instance, the amount(in cash and hardware) that we are shelling out to ostensibly friendly Pakistani and Afghan forces would be a relatively modest investment, of no real concern, except that it keeps coming back to bite us. Little groups of Afghan security forces turning on their handlers are a weekly to monthly thing at this point, and that doesn't even count the ones who just go AWOL and turn up in some other militia, who are hard to count.
What I find particularly troubling is the degree to which internal corruption, and tolerance for corruption, weakens our efforts. There are the direct costs in the sense of inflating the costs of fielding our forces, causing our forces to have to fight with the weapons that contractors wanted to sell, rather than the ones they need, causing our planned(and often paid for) construction projects to be abandoned partway through, or so broken as to be dangerous.
There are also the indirect costs: One of the major PR points that Islamic fundamentalists like to harp on is desirability and benefit of establishing Islamic law(there are fringe groups in Christianity and Judaism that have a similar position on mosaic law; but they are statistically of much less concern). Now, if you are opposing such people, your legal system and social institutions are, implicitly or explicitly, being compared to theirs by the apathetic masses. The fact that we can't kick our own contractors' asses hard enough to get from them what they agreed to deliver, and the fact that we consistently prop up ghastly, openly corrupt, sleazeballs like Hamid Karzai really doesn't help.
Now, anyone who thinks that theocracy will actually end up being less corrupt is dreaming; but there is nothing like a corrupt, ineffectual, secular government to inspire people to give it a shot. Once they do, it is hard to get the place back.
Unless we are capable of demonstrating our virtues, as well as our power, we will keep being called upon to display our power until we simply run out of money and have to leave.
I was using "isn't even fair" in the idiomatic sense of "the parties would be extraordinarily unequally matched, the domination of one by the other would be so complete, and so unsurprising, as to make the comparison hardly worth it".
I can't think of an abstract moral notion of "fairness" that would apply to inanimate objects; which quite arguably makes the idiom really weird, in context; but idioms are sneaky like that...
I'm not sure how useful this stuff would be for that purpose. When the cops are conducting one of their we-don't-need-a-warrant-anybody-who-happened-to-be-carrying-a-10K-FLIR-scanner-down-this-public-road-could-have-seen-it... "non-searches", they aren't looking for reflected IR(that would be pointless, there is plenty of visible light around, and everybody knows where the house is), they are looking for IR emissions. Presumably, a house shielded with this stuff would react very oddly to IR light sources, bending those around it like it didn't exist; but it would behave itself like a more or less ordinary blackbody. For something as toasty as a grow-op, that would mean pumping out substantial IR from the walls and roof.
One would probably have better luck with the much lower tech(though probably pretty tricky to engineer in a way that isn't wildly suspicious) refrigeration technologies and/forced air cooling of areas immediately adjacent to exterior walls(attic particularly).
You would still need somewhere to dump the heat, I'm guessing that having enough chillers to serve a modest datacenter in your back yard would be pretty suspicious; but you could keep your walls at non-suspicious temps, and concentrate the heat output so that it could be dumped in the least suspicious place. A river would, of course, be ideal. A decent size aquifer might do as well. The air speed you would need to achieve to have a forced air cooling setup emit exhaust that doesn't trip every helicopter-mounted FLIRcam in the area would probably draw attention, so that might not work.
You neither block nor reflect, you cause the light to bend around you.
Imagine a smoothly-flowing stream: If you put a rock in it, the flow will be disturbed. If the rock is irregularly shaped, some of the water will "bounce" back(because this is water, and not photons, it will only cause some turbulence, not actually be reflected; but such is the weakness of analogies...). If the rock has a nice, smooth, hydrodynamic sort of shape, the water will part smoothly when it hits the rock and then come back together behind the rock, with minimal disruption to the flow. The rock exists; but for a hypothetical organism that can only detect water currents(say a water bug with sensory hairs, sitting downstream), it will be invisible.
It turns out that, on small scales, under laboratory conditions(and often only in two dimensions), with exotic materials, you can cause photons to "bend around" an object, thus rendering the object effectively invisible. They don't get absorbed, so you can't detect the object by their absence, and they don't get reflected, so you can't see the object, they just take a circuitous path around the object, and continue on their merry way as though nothing was there(though, since a semicircular path is slightly longer than the straight path would have been, I suppose a sufficiently sensitive travel-time comparison system could still detect the cloaked object...)
Annoying, "Xenon" also refers to a processor...
Y'know what really puts the 300 billion figure in perspective? That the GDP of Afghanistan is ~13 billion. If you can't crush an adversary like a bug for almost a quarter-century's worth of its GDP(and that is comparing your military expenditures vs. their entire economy) there is some part of you technique that you really need to take a hard look at...
Worse, even if we were having it all our way in military terms, our best case scenario seems to be installing our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader sufficiently securely that we can leave before he gets overthrown. Given what happened in Iran when our ridiculously corrupt and dubiously competent puppet leader fell, this strategy seems to have a strong structural weakness.
Oh, I'm typing this(and typed the above) on a 2.0 GHz dual core A64. Even assuming no architectural tweaks, or more cache or anything, we are talking only 2/3s the speed of their $200 box, and performance for all basic applications is just fine.
Once I threw a $30 graphics card in there, it even plays the games I care about on adequately attractive settings.
I just wished to acknowledge that(unlike in the P4 days), the A64 is the price/performance winner, not the performance winner. The vast majority of the market is better off with the price/performance winner; but the performance high end hasn't been AMD's for some time.
Compared to any of the atoms, though, it isn't even fair(unless thermal dissipation is a primary concern). Not only are the atoms worse clock-for-clock, the A64 is clocked almost twice as high.
Did you see the CPU that they used? A 2.9GHz, dual core, A64? That doesn't compare to the latest Nehalems by any stretch of the imagination; but it will absolutely annihilate the Atom at everything except power draw.
Not to mention the fact that most of the Atom motheboards have pretty limited expansion. Not many people replace their CPUs; but being able to add a bunch more RAM, without throwing out your existing stuff, is a very convenient upgrade.
Unfortunately, "reliability" is something of a crapshoot. All the branded OEMs have a whole bunch of models, manufactured by one or more contractors, often at multiple facilities, out of parts made by dozens or hundreds of further entities, with designs changing all the time and without clear warning(ie. two "Brand X Model 123"s might have completely different PSU designs, one rev0 that is a piece of shit, one rev4 that is rock solid, while a "Brand X Model 123" and a "Brand X model 234" might have identical designs).
Some models suck, some just last and last(same goes if you are buying the bits and assembling yourself. Some revisions of some designs are just crap, some are excellent).
At least for me, I've gotten to the point where I wouldn't trust a single piece of hardware from anybody to handle something critical. There is no HDD manufacturer good enough that you want data you care about to only be on a single drive. There is no computer maker good enough that you want your ability to do you Very Important Work hinge on the uptime of a single machine(never mind the risk that you'll spill a drink on the thing at the wrong moment). I am less concerned about trying to optimize for reliability of any specific system than I am about making sure that backups and some amount of redundancy are in place, and trying to buy from sellers with a reputation for not screwing around and wasting your time if you need support.
My advice, assuming an adequately well-heeled questioner of no particular technical competence, is first "Get a backup service, or device, or both. All hard drives die. Some die sooner than others. When yours dies, you will be very sad if you do not have backups." After that, we can discuss the much less important question of what brand to buy.
While it certainly appears, from TFA, that tales of Dell's l33t supply chain ninja-ness were fraudulently overstated, the sheer magnitude of their dependence on Intel's "rebates" makes me wonder if they were the only one.
During that period, whenever I went shopping(either for personal use, or doing comparisons for employer bulk purchases) Dell always had very competitive prices; but not wildly different from comparable stuff from HP and friends. Either Dell's supply chain management absolutely sucked goats through capillary tubing, or some of their competitors must have had similar slush funds to work with.
I'd say that trying to draw meaningful conclusions from a study of traffic fatalities is even more doomed(without substantial care) than you describe.
1994-2008 is 12 years. Any changes in quality of trauma surgery, and emergency responder response time?
What were average vehicle masses doing during that time? Were there any changes(either regulatory demands or industry shifts) in things like bumper geometry and height?
Most importantly, what about non-fatal incidents? There are some pretty ghastly ways to not-quite-die in a car accident, particularly if the medics scrape you off the pavement before you bleed out. With possibilities like "massive spinal column injury" or "so brain damaged you are good for drooling into your sock and burdening your family" on the table, 'not dead' is far from equaling 'not endangered'...
Do you have any idea what welding ramming spikes to my Prius will do to my mileage?