Whoever wins the X-prize will accomplish what no government has ever been able to do.
Not entirely accurate. The X-15 could have flown to space twice in two weeks, if they just had had a reason to do so. (X-prize didn't exist at the time)
so that it works on every system and tell me again about the "UNIX API"... We're talking major #ifdef hell here. The PTY allocation is the cleanest here, it just requires eight-branched #ifdefs. The two others are much worse.
Theirs just something about developing your own B and W film. You just can't do that with digital.
You mean sloshing chemicals around in a closed tank? I didn't find that very interesting:-) Making prints was a different ballgame though.
If you want the ultimate B&W print, I don't think you can beat all-chemical process.
But making color prints was a real pain in the butt. I did prints from color negatives and Ilfochromes from slides, but most of the time I ran out of patience before getting everything just right. Sending the images over the net to a printing service, where they are printed straight onto photographic paper, and sent to me via the post, is so much easier and produces so good results that I don't want to go back to the color chemicals ever again.
I mean, it'd be better if cameras had zoom like those old cameras that photographers use.
Old cameras didn't have zooms.
I'd LOVE a digitam cam like that
Check out Canon EOS 300D (Canon Rebel Digital in the US), it's around 1000 monetary units on both sides of the pond. The lack of noise from the big sensor, excellent viewfinder, focusing and responsiveness beat the latest fixed-lens 8-mpix wonders 4-0.
Never seen a Faraday cage made of chicken wire then? A screen need not be solid.
Anyone that talks about Faraday cages as RF protection doesn't know what they are talking about.
Faraday cage is for protection from electric fields, not RF radiation. Sure, RF has the E-field component, but RF can go through the holes in a Faraday cage, depending on the wavelength. Would you think that a microwave oven with chicken wire as the door would be safe? Think again. There's a reason why the holes in the microwave oven doors are the size they are.
Faraday cages and RF enclosures are not synonyms. Modern processors operate far above the frequencies where chicken wire would block RF.
The same Switzerland that's so committed to defending itself that until recently its military personnel didn't carry guns?
What Switzerland? The one where the reservists keep their guns at home just in case someone tried to catch them off guard like Norway in WW2?
So, tell me again how much danger Sweden faces from its neighbours in the 21st century?
You gazed into your crystal ball and saw that Russia has a peaceful, democratic rest of the century ahead of it? No chance whatsoever that anything else could happen? No need to consider alternatives even when your national existence could be at stake?
Could you also check out the next week's lottery numbers while you're at it?
They all know how international politics is played; you'll do what the US tells you to, or you'll get "regime change".
Get real, we're talking about the western world here, not the third world. Still remember Bush's steel tariffs? Remember how EU gave him an ultimatum to get rid of them? And how he dropped them just days before the EU counter-tariffs were to take effect? And the absence of US CVBGs off the EU coasts?
The 10D uses a prism system to direct the image to the CCD, while the Rebel uses a rotating mirror. This results in a "slap-back" effect on the Rebel that shows up in your pictures at higher magnifications.
Uhh... this is completely incorrect. When taking the picture, there's nothing "directing the image to the CCD" - the mirror just flips out of the way. You must be thinking how the image from the ground glass is directed into the viewfinder - pentamirror vs. pentaprism. But this has nothing to do with mirror slap, which happens in both cameras.
I have the 300D (Rebel) and Canon's 100mm macro lens that goes to 1:1 magnification and I have not been able to see any effect from the mirror slap in the pictures. I strongly suspect that it's just academic whining, or at best manifests itself only under pretty esoteric conditions.
The 10D has a hefty magnesium case, where the Rebel uses a less durable, plastic or composite case.
Mostly a psychologic issue. The plastic cases of the Canon cameras are very durable and anyway, not the first thing that breaks.
I don't agree. It was mothballed as recently as in 1992 and the company that made it (S.P.Korolev RSC Energia) is still in business making rockets. I don't claim that they could take the Energia out, fuel and launch it, but the availability of the manufacturing equipment, launch facilities and especially the people who could make it happen are on a completely different level when compared to Saturn V.
If you had enough money, you could buy an Energia launch from RSC Energia - but not a Saturn launch from NASA. (Well, maybe you could with really enough money...)
here are a few launch prices:... Falcon I... Falcon V...
Those Falcon launchers sound impressive, but are completely unproven and it remains to be seen how they perform in reality and what the real cost is. Saying that something is "a step backward" from stuff that doesn't exist doesn't make much sense.
On the other hand, vega is a decent ICBM with MIRV capability.
Conspiracy theory time! I wonder what the throw weight is, say, halfway around the globe?
Ever since NASAs dead hand crushed the Saturn as a launch vehicle, there hasn't been anything really capable of putting my large granite house into geosychronous orbit.
Not true. Russian Energia can lift considerably more than Saturn. (175 tons to LEO in the maximum configuration, although only lighter configurations have actually flown). There just hasn't been much demand for this sort of capability, so the last Energia sits mothballed in a hangar...
I call bullshit. Like US would have left his intelligence HQ alone otherwise? Come on, that's one of the most high-value targets they had. It's gonna get hit as soon as the shooting starts no matter what.
And how credible was that assassination attempt anyway? Did they have a real chance or was it just some pathetic gesture?
Bizarelly I find myself in agreement with Ashcroft, plea bargains should be *only* be offered in return for becoming an informant
If the government can buy someone's testimony by giving them their freedom, why can't they buy it with money? Just wonderin'... There shouldn't be any fundamental difference in the accuracy and truthfulness of the testimony either way, right?
So, you should publish all the capabilities of all your defense systems, so that a potential enemy has an early heads up as to how to defeat them?
No, you publish them (to a point), so that the potential enemies see that it's not worth it to mess with you in the first place. Deterrent, you see.
You would, for example, hide the fact that US has ICBMs and SLBMs at all, and when some loony fires his ICBMs, gloat "Fooled ya! You didn't know we had these, did you?" and press the red button?
They were talking of building new capacity maybe in 50 years' time.
Finnish TVO (roughly translated "Industrial Power") just ordered a new nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. A private company is building a nuclear power plant with private money in an EU nation right now! So maybe the situation is not so dark after all. The dumbasses in Sweden and Germany still think they can close down their plants, but Finns have faced the reality and realized that the fossil fuels are not a long-term option and the alternatives are not going to cut it yet either - we need power in the middle of a cold, still winter night too.
The waste is going to be buried in the stable groundrock, and we know it'll stay there until the next ice age in 10000 years. What happens then is a bit of an open question, though...
Free unfettered speech. The kind that will offend my neighbor, my government, anyway.
EU does not have this right, nor do they believe they need it.
Can you Americans please stop spreading this manure? The European Charter of Human Rights, adopted by the EU countries, along with the Constitutions of the countries, guarantees the same right of free speech as the US Constitution.
Note that the right of free speech does not mean that you can't be punished for what you say. There are hundreds if not thousands of crimes you can commit in the US by exercising this right. Libel, slander, unlawful threat, all sorts of breaches of confidentiality, revealing official secrets, etc etc etc.
The tungsten darts dropped from the orbit (forgetting for a moment that you can't drop anything from orbit) will burn up on the way down. Tungsten or not, they're too small and light to penetrate the atmosphere at any useful speed.
Railguns for DD(X) - fantasy too. A ship could generate enough power, but that's not all. The power needs to be supplied in an insanely short time. A warehouse full of car batteries (14000 of them) or a ridiculously large capacitor bank are some of the current "solutions" - but the energy density sucks ass and they would need to be scaled up, a lot, for blasting bunkers 290 miles away. And they are talking about superconducting rails in an application where the power has to arc from one rail to the projectile and from the projectile to the other rail. Good luck keeping those rails at superconducting temperatures while arcing hundreds of kiloamps straight from them.
Not to mention that point targets have been getting scarcer and scarcer in the recent wars.
This wasn't in the article, but US is now trying to make small, earth-penetrating nukes (in fact US has raised the nuclear weapon budget to what it was at the height of the cold war - like the current arsenal wasn't enough for every conceivable scenario). I just want to say one thing: look at the quality of the intelligence US had about Iraq's WMDs, and tell me how the hell do they think they're going to get accurate enough data to nuke someone's WMD program?
Yeah and another thing. I think that the threat of chemical weapons has been raised out of all proportion. Consider the track record: Aum Shinrikyo strikes the Tokyo subway with nerve gas: 12 dead. One crazy guy attacks the Seoul subway with a friggin' milk carton filled with gasoline: 120 dead.
Considering that the rate of fire on existing weapons max out at around 6,000 rounds per minute, it's a large step forward.
Why do you need so many rounds per minute? The target can manouever out of the path of the incoming projectiles just the same. Consider an anti-ship missile pulling 10-20 g. It's already out of the way before the projectiles have travelled 100 meters. And something like Sunburn will be closing in at the speed of 1 km/s.
I'm sure it's a very cool thingy - an ordinary ZSU-23-2 is damn fun to fire - but what's the real scenario where it is essential?
Cut the crap already. They're elected just like every national government. I suppose it's undemocratic to you when someone else than you has a say in it?
Besides, even if EU allowed similar class of software patents as US, the system doesn't have to be as broken as it is there. EPO (European Patent Office) could have sane interpretations of the required "novelty" and "innovative step". USPTO doesn't seem to require much of an innovative step... I mean, let's take something that has been done decades and stick it on the net, and whoa, no one could have thought of this! To do something on the net! If I had enough money, I'd take every patent, add "on the net" to it and patent it. Steam locomotives on the net? You gotta pay me first!
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely accurate. The X-15 could have flown to space twice in two weeks, if they just had had a reason to do so. (X-prize didn't exist at the time)
--
Oh yeah? Try to do:
- PTY allocation
- Bookkeeping for user login/logout
- Accepting user's login (password itself, password aging, expiration, etc etc)
so that it works on every system and tell me again about the "UNIX API"... We're talking major #ifdef hell here. The PTY allocation is the cleanest here, it just requires eight-branched #ifdefs. The two others are much worse.--
You mean sloshing chemicals around in a closed tank? I didn't find that very interesting :-) Making prints was a different ballgame though.
If you want the ultimate B&W print, I don't think you can beat all-chemical process.
But making color prints was a real pain in the butt. I did prints from color negatives and Ilfochromes from slides, but most of the time I ran out of patience before getting everything just right. Sending the images over the net to a printing service, where they are printed straight onto photographic paper, and sent to me via the post, is so much easier and produces so good results that I don't want to go back to the color chemicals ever again.
--
Old cameras didn't have zooms.
I'd LOVE a digitam cam like that
Check out Canon EOS 300D (Canon Rebel Digital in the US), it's around 1000 monetary units on both sides of the pond. The lack of noise from the big sensor, excellent viewfinder, focusing and responsiveness beat the latest fixed-lens 8-mpix wonders 4-0.
--
Anyone that talks about Faraday cages as RF protection doesn't know what they are talking about.
Faraday cage is for protection from electric fields, not RF radiation. Sure, RF has the E-field component, but RF can go through the holes in a Faraday cage, depending on the wavelength. Would you think that a microwave oven with chicken wire as the door would be safe? Think again. There's a reason why the holes in the microwave oven doors are the size they are. Faraday cages and RF enclosures are not synonyms. Modern processors operate far above the frequencies where chicken wire would block RF.
--
What Switzerland? The one where the reservists keep their guns at home just in case someone tried to catch them off guard like Norway in WW2?
So, tell me again how much danger Sweden faces from its neighbours in the 21st century?
You gazed into your crystal ball and saw that Russia has a peaceful, democratic rest of the century ahead of it? No chance whatsoever that anything else could happen? No need to consider alternatives even when your national existence could be at stake?
Could you also check out the next week's lottery numbers while you're at it?
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No they aren't. Everything above the deck is essentially unarmored.
*WE ALREADY HAVE THEM*
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Get real, we're talking about the western world here, not the third world. Still remember Bush's steel tariffs? Remember how EU gave him an ultimatum to get rid of them? And how he dropped them just days before the EU counter-tariffs were to take effect? And the absence of US CVBGs off the EU coasts?
--
Uhh... this is completely incorrect. When taking the picture, there's nothing "directing the image to the CCD" - the mirror just flips out of the way. You must be thinking how the image from the ground glass is directed into the viewfinder - pentamirror vs. pentaprism. But this has nothing to do with mirror slap, which happens in both cameras.
I have the 300D (Rebel) and Canon's 100mm macro lens that goes to 1:1 magnification and I have not been able to see any effect from the mirror slap in the pictures. I strongly suspect that it's just academic whining, or at best manifests itself only under pretty esoteric conditions.
The 10D has a hefty magnesium case, where the Rebel uses a less durable, plastic or composite case.
Mostly a psychologic issue. The plastic cases of the Canon cameras are very durable and anyway, not the first thing that breaks.
Just like SQL!
If you had enough money, you could buy an Energia launch from RSC Energia - but not a Saturn launch from NASA. (Well, maybe you could with really enough money...)
--
Those Falcon launchers sound impressive, but are completely unproven and it remains to be seen how they perform in reality and what the real cost is. Saying that something is "a step backward" from stuff that doesn't exist doesn't make much sense.
On the other hand, vega is a decent ICBM with MIRV capability.
Conspiracy theory time! I wonder what the throw weight is, say, halfway around the globe?
--
Not true. Russian Energia can lift considerably more than Saturn. (175 tons to LEO in the maximum configuration, although only lighter configurations have actually flown). There just hasn't been much demand for this sort of capability, so the last Energia sits mothballed in a hangar...
--
And how credible was that assassination attempt anyway? Did they have a real chance or was it just some pathetic gesture?
--
Yea, but you need piles of money to go to court to get money. Catch 22.
If the government can buy someone's testimony by giving them their freedom, why can't they buy it with money? Just wonderin'... There shouldn't be any fundamental difference in the accuracy and truthfulness of the testimony either way, right?
--
No, you publish them (to a point), so that the potential enemies see that it's not worth it to mess with you in the first place. Deterrent, you see.
You would, for example, hide the fact that US has ICBMs and SLBMs at all, and when some loony fires his ICBMs, gloat "Fooled ya! You didn't know we had these, did you?" and press the red button?
Makes me glad you're not in charge of things.
--
Finnish TVO (roughly translated "Industrial Power") just ordered a new nuclear power plant from french-german Framatom. A private company is building a nuclear power plant with private money in an EU nation right now! So maybe the situation is not so dark after all. The dumbasses in Sweden and Germany still think they can close down their plants, but Finns have faced the reality and realized that the fossil fuels are not a long-term option and the alternatives are not going to cut it yet either - we need power in the middle of a cold, still winter night too.
The waste is going to be buried in the stable groundrock, and we know it'll stay there until the next ice age in 10000 years. What happens then is a bit of an open question, though...
--
EU does not have this right, nor do they believe they need it.
Can you Americans please stop spreading this manure? The European Charter of Human Rights, adopted by the EU countries, along with the Constitutions of the countries, guarantees the same right of free speech as the US Constitution.
Note that the right of free speech does not mean that you can't be punished for what you say. There are hundreds if not thousands of crimes you can commit in the US by exercising this right. Libel, slander, unlawful threat, all sorts of breaches of confidentiality, revealing official secrets, etc etc etc.
--
--
The tungsten darts dropped from the orbit (forgetting for a moment that you can't drop anything from orbit) will burn up on the way down. Tungsten or not, they're too small and light to penetrate the atmosphere at any useful speed.
Railguns for DD(X) - fantasy too. A ship could generate enough power, but that's not all. The power needs to be supplied in an insanely short time. A warehouse full of car batteries (14000 of them) or a ridiculously large capacitor bank are some of the current "solutions" - but the energy density sucks ass and they would need to be scaled up, a lot, for blasting bunkers 290 miles away. And they are talking about superconducting rails in an application where the power has to arc from one rail to the projectile and from the projectile to the other rail. Good luck keeping those rails at superconducting temperatures while arcing hundreds of kiloamps straight from them.
Not to mention that point targets have been getting scarcer and scarcer in the recent wars.
This wasn't in the article, but US is now trying to make small, earth-penetrating nukes (in fact US has raised the nuclear weapon budget to what it was at the height of the cold war - like the current arsenal wasn't enough for every conceivable scenario). I just want to say one thing: look at the quality of the intelligence US had about Iraq's WMDs, and tell me how the hell do they think they're going to get accurate enough data to nuke someone's WMD program?
Yeah and another thing. I think that the threat of chemical weapons has been raised out of all proportion. Consider the track record: Aum Shinrikyo strikes the Tokyo subway with nerve gas: 12 dead. One crazy guy attacks the Seoul subway with a friggin' milk carton filled with gasoline: 120 dead.
Nuclear and biologic are another story, though.
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I don't know about that, but I inadvertently tried a "Sea Dart" with my -66...
--
Why do you need so many rounds per minute? The target can manouever out of the path of the incoming projectiles just the same. Consider an anti-ship missile pulling 10-20 g. It's already out of the way before the projectiles have travelled 100 meters. And something like Sunburn will be closing in at the speed of 1 km/s.
I'm sure it's a very cool thingy - an ordinary ZSU-23-2 is damn fun to fire - but what's the real scenario where it is essential?
--
Cut the crap already. They're elected just like every national government. I suppose it's undemocratic to you when someone else than you has a say in it?
Besides, even if EU allowed similar class of software patents as US, the system doesn't have to be as broken as it is there. EPO (European Patent Office) could have sane interpretations of the required "novelty" and "innovative step". USPTO doesn't seem to require much of an innovative step... I mean, let's take something that has been done decades and stick it on the net, and whoa, no one could have thought of this! To do something on the net! If I had enough money, I'd take every patent, add "on the net" to it and patent it. Steam locomotives on the net? You gotta pay me first!
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