Was it a powered speaker (i.e. containing an amplifier), and if so, did the power supply for it have an earth pin on the wall plug?
I have an unearthed, regulated switch-mode power pack: 240V AC input, switchable 3 to 12V DC output in 1.5V increments (except 10.5V) output. After feeling a tingle when touching a device powered by the plug pack, I checked the output with a digital multimeter. Since there is no earth connection, the negative output is floating at around 114V AC; the current is around 120uA. This is probably not an issue if the device is earthed, but would probably kill sensitive electronics. A floating voltage like this may explain why the Palm V powered cradle allegedly fries motherboards.
Re:Meaningless ritual? Not if there's a camera aro
on
Tech Wars In Meat Space
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Cameras are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow protesters to get their message to a greater audience; OTOH, they attract the "rent-a-riot" types who don't seem to care what the protest is about so long as it's an excuse to indulge in mindless violence and vandalism. The latter does nothing to help the cause of the protest. From watching the media coverage of recent "anti-globalisation" protests, the general public wouldn't have had a clue about what the protest was about - all they saw was a bunch of "anarchists" trashing the place.
Ghandi is frequently quoted in these parts as saying: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." To keep this in context, it should also be noted that he also said: "Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith."
Netscape 4 requesting from IIS is markedly slower than you'd expect by looking at relative performance on Apache with NN and IE.
I'm not so sure about this. While experimenting with Squid's user agent logging facility to see who was running what browser on my network, I noticed that MS Internet Explorer actually claims to be "Mozilla 4.0" - go figure.
I can say for certain that Microsoft's support web site does not tolerate unknown browsers graciously at all - when confronted with Netscape 6.0 beta or a Squid anonymised user agent string, it got stuck on one page redirecting back to itself...
And also here. Specifically, it was a "[t]elegraph cable from La Perouse, Sydney, Australia to Wakapauka, New Zealand (landing site moved to Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia in 1917)... In-Service: 1876, Out-of-Service: 1932, Years of Service: 56 yrs"
If you think your Internet bandwidth and latency sucks, spare a thought for those using telegraph wires. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1858: the message was 98 words long, and it took over 16 hours to send!
Re:Questions regarding "Redundancy & Survivability
on
When A Cable Dies
·
· Score: 2
Any Network Infrastructure Engineers care to clue us in to why the pipes get placed in the same geographic location (+/- 1000 m)???
IANANIE, but the short answer (no pun intended) is cost. The shorter you can make the cable run, the less it costs to lay the cable. When you take into consideration the distances involved for a transpacific or transatlantic cable run, there are only one or two routes that are economically feasible. In the situation where you already have a cable for a particular route, it may be sensible to lift the existing cable, strap the new one to it and performany necessary maintenance to the repeaters etc. on the old cable.
Maybe it's just me, but this practice of trademarking an obvious description of a product is a bit much.
How much innovation went into the creating the term "light saber"? About as much as "cornflake" I'd say, which thankfully has been dismissed as a trademark (though perhaps not for the right reasons.) Had the trademark been for "Golden Crunchies", then fair enough; that isn't a description of the product, and is not likely to be used in common speech. If George wanted to "protect" the (fictional) light saber as a trademark, he should have called them "Luxoloppers(TM)" or something non-obvious.
Next Microsoft will be claiming that "innovation" is their trademark...
Re:What known source in space gives off laser beam
on
Optical SETI
·
· Score: 3
Lasers ain't natural. If you find lasers, you find life.
Now, if only I can find that Infocom Masterpieces CD for less than the $80.00 it goes for on eBay.
I picked up a copy in Nov. 98 from www.cdromsonline.com, but it looks like they've been eaten by a grue.
You're best bet may be to check the abandonware sites; HHGTTG wasn't included in the Masterpieces CD (odd), so abandonware may be the only way to get it.
Try getting an organic chemist to say "silicon-based life" with a straight face.
IANAOC, but the short answer is that while you can substitute silicon for carbon on paper, the properties of silicon are different enough to make this impossible in practice. For instance,
the silicon equivalent of methane (CH4) is silane (SiH4) which spontaneously burns on contact with oxygen. Silicon-to-silicon bonds are weaker, so making large compounds is difficult; smaller silicon compounds (e.g. SiO2) are often stable and unreactive.
That doesn't exclude other forms of silicon-based life, but chances are any life that is out there is carbon-based (though not necessarily the same as carbon-based life as we know it.)
Why have the cellphone companies, esp on new models (in the US anyway) placed the antennas at a angle *more* tangent to the users head unless they wanted to limit user exposure?
It may limit exposure, but probably not for the reasons you expect. Look at the changes in mobile phones - particularly from the marketing angle - and there is a very clear progression: smaller, lighter, longer battery life, longer talk time. Now, if you consider that some of the transmitted energy from the antenna is absorbed by the body, some of the battery life is essentially wasted. (We'll ignore games, MP3 players and other novelties for simplicity.:-) If you could design the antenna such that it transmits or reflects most or all of its energy away from the body, this energy is no longer wasted - longer battery life. If around half of the energy is absorbed, putting it to use with a better antenna/shield = double the battery life. This is definitely something you would want to protect with a patent without giving any consideration to potential health benefits.
Personally I think the greatest health risk from mobile phones is the distraction they cause. I've seen several drivers have a near miss because they were too busy talking on the phone instead of watching the road - ditto for pedestrians.
There was a Slashdot article some time ago (which I couldn't find) that referred to a Magic 8-Ball disection.
The Magic 8-Ball technology is similar to "electronic paper" - the ball is filled with an oily blue/black fluid, and contains a plastic icosahedron (polyhedron with 20 triangular sides.) The message appears when the plastic icosahedron floats to the top and a side (usually) presses against the "window" to reveal the message.
In "electronic paper", an electric charge controls the display instead of gravity; I suspect gravity may cause the image to fade over time as it pulls the microcapsules back to the inky depths.
Tendonitis is far more common, in my experience -- I'd like to have seen that discussed in this context.
Agreed. I was recently diagnosed with DeQuervain's Tenosynovitis, a painful inflamation of the tendons that move the thumb and its tendon sheath. In my case, it started without apparent reason as a general soreness around the bone that sticks out as a bump at the base of the thumb, combined with nasty sharp pains with certain movements of my hand. My first thought was "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?" since a friend in the IT industry had been diagnosed with this. As you say, CTS is "the flu" of hand injuries.
A word of warning: After my doctor told me what I had I, naturally I checked the web to find out more about it. Many of the pages (but not this one) describe "Finkelstein's test" along the lines of: "form a fist with the thumb inside, then move sharply outwards." DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! - I did, and was in extreme pain for some time afterwards (and made some rather pointed remarks about Finkelstein's parentage...) I also made the overall problem several times worse that it was and set the healing back at least a week. As the link above explains, this description is wrong and can cause pain even in normal hands. The correct test as described in the link is what my doctor used.
"We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium...."
Well, let's see. Weapons-grade plutonium contains a high concentration (90% or more) of plutonium-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of around 24000 years. Plutonium is nasty stuff - even its least radioactive isotope, Pu-242, causes tumours, mainly due to plutonium's long-lived, alpha-emitting characteristics.
The best memorial for this stuff would be a large, impregnable safe so that its contents could not fall into the "wrong hands". On the safe would be a large display indicating in how many years it would be safe to open it, allowing for the natural decay of the plutonium contents. A cat and vial of poison are optional...
Flashback: 1989 - Intel releases the i860 64-bit microprocessor, dubbed a "Cray on a chip" (okay, so it was only a Cray 1, and I think it was only a third as quick as that, but hey - it's a "Cray"!) I even remember some of the RMIT ubergeeks designing a kick-ass computer based upon the i860... Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever built.
2001 - Intel releases the "i860" chipset to support the latest of its flagging 32-bit microprocessor range. Intel's 64-bit microprocessor, the "Itanium", is due for release real soon now...
</irony>
Re:What's attractive about a palmtop?
on
Palm In Trouble?
·
· Score: 2
Maybe someone can tell me what I'm missing.
For me, having a tide calculator, Planetarium etc. all in the one pocket-sized unit is very useful. My Palm III may not be as sexy as some of the newer units, but it meets my needs just fine.
Maybe it's just me, but it bothers me that people have short memories - I remember when a 16MHz processor and a couple of megabytes of memory was a kick-ass machine, and you could write killer programs in kilobytes of memory. Sure, the Palms are spartan by today's desktop standards, but they demonstrate that you can still do a lot with limited resources - bloatware programmers need to take a good hard look at themselves.
Whether or not the censorship is working is irrelevant if you look at the history behind it. Put simply, the current Oz government needed the support of an independent Senator in the Upper House to pass its policies. In exchange for passing the censorship bill, they got his vote.
Okay, so it cost $2.5M - what's the going rate for "encouraging" politicians in other countries?
Internet censorship software: $50
Yearly ISP dial-in account fees: $360
Buying a Senator's vote: $2.5M
Pissing off thousands of voters: Priceless
Ransom Love (CEO of Caldera) said he thinks Microsoft was right in its claim that the GPL doesn't make much business sense. And so, Caldera is mulling a non-GPL licensing mechanism -- most likely one based on the BSD license.
This could be an interesting test case for the GPL business model, but to paraphrase The Matrix:
"Tell me Mr. Love, what good is a business model if you have no customers?"
On the other hand, Caldera probably doesn't have a lot to lose - there are a lot of distributions out there, so perhaps having a modified BSD licensed one may be the gimmick they need to find a viable niche.
Re:I hope they don't make fridge magnets
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 2
If you ever have a hard drive go bad, you should get yourself a set of tiny torx drivers and disassemble it. You will find a pair of insanely strong magnets around the head positioning coil.
Watch your fingers, when those magnets take a notion to slam together they will pinch through your flesh.
These magnets are also quite brittle - they will break if struck (particularly with another magnet.) Also, don't even think about putting these magnets near a CRT, credit cards, or disks...
The aluminium rings that separate the disk platters are also worth salvaging. For instance, with a suitable diameter pipe, coil and battery these would make ideal "jumping rings."
The Festival speech synthesis system page also has a web-based text-to-speech converter here, without the filter. It's free software, and does a pretty good job.
The automatic voice pitch is pretty neat; I built a hardware text-to-speech converter around 10 years ago, and it only produced a monotone voice that got pretty annoying after a while. Don't feed Festival raw HTML documents, though - it can cause the voice to get deeper and deeper until it has to reset the pitch.;-)
I've been running Linux on a variety of Sparc boxes (mostly SPARCStation 20's, but also on an E250.) I'm using RedHat 6.2 since I also use RH on PCs, and the fact that you could run the same operating system on different platforms is a big selling point to management. ("No, I'm not playing - I'm investigating seamless interoperability between our existing hardware platforms, boss.";-) RedHat dropping support for Sparc knocked the wind out of that idea. (Yes, I could switch to a different distribution, but once you've learnt the ins and outs of one, changing to another is about as much fun as changing versions of Windows.)
The biggest stumbling block to using non-Intel platforms with Linux is application support. Look for Sparc (or Alpha) versions of Acrobat Reader, Applix etc. and you won't find them -
sure there are "Linux" versions, but only if
you're running on Intel platforms. Netscape
was available for Sparc Linux (built by RedHat?)
but it stuck at around 4.51 compared to the
"current" 4.77. Given the prospect of explaining to my users why these applications aren't available, and Solaris seemed a lot easier despite the ridiculous licensing fees. (The DiskSuite RAID tools are very nice, though.)
IBM seems to be doing the right thing by providing a machine for Linux developers to try their applications on the S/390 - presumably this is also open to the likes of Adobe to build Acrobat Reader for this platform. I'm not holding my breath for Sun to follow suit... yet.
New! Enhance your gameplay with the DirectPace API! Experience blackouts and redouts in your favourite flight simulator! Make those heart-stopping moments in your favourite action or adventure come alive!
The key advantage of unmanned combat aircraft over tanks or F1 racers is that the pilot is the biggest performance bottleneck. The pilot places a limit on how tightly the aircraft can turn, and out-turning your opponent is the key to winning dogfights (or evading missiles.) If you remove the pilot, the dynamic performance of the aircraft is limited only by the airframe.
In tanks and F1 racers the crew/driver isn't the bottleneck, but you may get some improvements because unmanned versions could be made smaller, lighter (less armour) or more aerodynamic.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it a powered speaker (i.e. containing an amplifier), and if so, did the power supply for it have an earth pin on the wall plug?
I have an unearthed, regulated switch-mode power pack: 240V AC input, switchable 3 to 12V DC output in 1.5V increments (except 10.5V) output. After feeling a tingle when touching a device powered by the plug pack, I checked the output with a digital multimeter. Since there is no earth connection, the negative output is floating at around 114V AC; the current is around 120uA. This is probably not an issue if the device is earthed, but would probably kill sensitive electronics. A floating voltage like this may explain why the Palm V powered cradle allegedly fries motherboards.
Cameras are a two-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow protesters to get their message to a greater audience; OTOH, they attract the "rent-a-riot" types who don't seem to care what the protest is about so long as it's an excuse to indulge in mindless violence and vandalism. The latter does nothing to help the cause of the protest. From watching the media coverage of recent "anti-globalisation" protests, the general public wouldn't have had a clue about what the protest was about - all they saw was a bunch of "anarchists" trashing the place.
Ghandi is frequently quoted in these parts as saying: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." To keep this in context, it should also be noted that he also said: "Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith."
Netscape 4 requesting from IIS is markedly slower than you'd expect by looking at relative performance on Apache with NN and IE.
I'm not so sure about this. While experimenting with Squid's user agent logging facility to see who was running what browser on my network, I noticed that MS Internet Explorer actually claims to be "Mozilla 4.0" - go figure.
I can say for certain that Microsoft's support web site does not tolerate unknown browsers graciously at all - when confronted with Netscape 6.0 beta or a Squid anonymised user agent string, it got stuck on one page redirecting back to itself...
And also here. Specifically, it was a "[t]elegraph cable from La Perouse, Sydney, Australia to Wakapauka, New Zealand (landing site moved to Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia in 1917) ... In-Service: 1876, Out-of-Service: 1932, Years of Service: 56 yrs"
If you think your Internet bandwidth and latency sucks, spare a thought for those using telegraph wires. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1858: the message was 98 words long, and it took over 16 hours to send!
Any Network Infrastructure Engineers care to clue us in to why the pipes get placed in the same geographic location (+/- 1000 m)???
IANANIE, but the short answer (no pun intended) is cost. The shorter you can make the cable run, the less it costs to lay the cable. When you take into consideration the distances involved for a transpacific or transatlantic cable run, there are only one or two routes that are economically feasible. In the situation where you already have a cable for a particular route, it may be sensible to lift the existing cable, strap the new one to it and performany necessary maintenance to the repeaters etc. on the old cable.
Maybe it's just me, but this practice of trademarking an obvious description of a product is a bit much.
.) Had the trademark been for "Golden Crunchies", then fair enough; that isn't a description of the product, and is not likely to be used in common speech. If George wanted to "protect" the (fictional) light saber as a trademark, he should have called them "Luxoloppers(TM)" or something non-obvious.
How much innovation went into the creating the term "light saber"? About as much as "cornflake" I'd say, which thankfully has been dismissed as a trademark (though perhaps not for the right reasons
Next Microsoft will be claiming that "innovation" is their trademark...
Lasers ain't natural. If you find lasers, you find life.
Not so - there are natural lasers; all you need are the right conditions.
Examples from space: ultraviolet lasers, Microwave lasers (masers) and near infrared lasers.
Now, if only I can find that Infocom Masterpieces CD for less than the $80.00 it goes for on eBay.
I picked up a copy in Nov. 98 from www.cdromsonline.com, but it looks like they've been eaten by a grue.
You're best bet may be to check the abandonware sites; HHGTTG wasn't included in the Masterpieces CD (odd), so abandonware may be the only way to get it.
Try getting an organic chemist to say "silicon-based life" with a straight face.
IANAOC, but the short answer is that while you can substitute silicon for carbon on paper, the properties of silicon are different enough to make this impossible in practice. For instance, the silicon equivalent of methane (CH4) is silane (SiH4) which spontaneously burns on contact with oxygen. Silicon-to-silicon bonds are weaker, so making large compounds is difficult; smaller silicon compounds (e.g. SiO2) are often stable and unreactive.
That doesn't exclude other forms of silicon-based life, but chances are any life that is out there is carbon-based (though not necessarily the same as carbon-based life as we know it.)
The only safe way to view it is in an mirror:)
Wouldn't that be considered a copy protection circumvention device?
Why have the cellphone companies, esp on new models (in the US anyway) placed the antennas at a angle *more* tangent to the users head unless they wanted to limit user exposure?
:-) If you could design the antenna such that it transmits or reflects most or all of its energy away from the body, this energy is no longer wasted - longer battery life. If around half of the energy is absorbed, putting it to use with a better antenna/shield = double the battery life. This is definitely something you would want to protect with a patent without giving any consideration to potential health benefits.
It may limit exposure, but probably not for the reasons you expect. Look at the changes in mobile phones - particularly from the marketing angle - and there is a very clear progression: smaller, lighter, longer battery life, longer talk time. Now, if you consider that some of the transmitted energy from the antenna is absorbed by the body, some of the battery life is essentially wasted. (We'll ignore games, MP3 players and other novelties for simplicity.
Personally I think the greatest health risk from mobile phones is the distraction they cause. I've seen several drivers have a near miss because they were too busy talking on the phone instead of watching the road - ditto for pedestrians.
There was a Slashdot article some time ago (which I couldn't find) that referred to a Magic 8-Ball disection.
The Magic 8-Ball technology is similar to "electronic paper" - the ball is filled with an oily blue/black fluid, and contains a plastic icosahedron (polyhedron with 20 triangular sides.) The message appears when the plastic icosahedron floats to the top and a side (usually) presses against the "window" to reveal the message.
In "electronic paper", an electric charge controls the display instead of gravity; I suspect gravity may cause the image to fade over time as it pulls the microcapsules back to the inky depths.
Tendonitis is far more common, in my experience -- I'd like to have seen that discussed in this context.
Agreed. I was recently diagnosed with DeQuervain's Tenosynovitis, a painful inflamation of the tendons that move the thumb and its tendon sheath. In my case, it started without apparent reason as a general soreness around the bone that sticks out as a bump at the base of the thumb, combined with nasty sharp pains with certain movements of my hand. My first thought was "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?" since a friend in the IT industry had been diagnosed with this. As you say, CTS is "the flu" of hand injuries.
A word of warning: After my doctor told me what I had I, naturally I checked the web to find out more about it. Many of the pages (but not this one) describe "Finkelstein's test" along the lines of: "form a fist with the thumb inside, then move sharply outwards." DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! - I did, and was in extreme pain for some time afterwards (and made some rather pointed remarks about Finkelstein's parentage...) I also made the overall problem several times worse that it was and set the healing back at least a week. As the link above explains, this description is wrong and can cause pain even in normal hands. The correct test as described in the link is what my doctor used.
"Curiosity killed the cat."
"We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium. ..."
Well, let's see. Weapons-grade plutonium contains a high concentration (90% or more) of plutonium-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of around 24000 years. Plutonium is nasty stuff - even its least radioactive isotope, Pu-242, causes tumours, mainly due to plutonium's long-lived, alpha-emitting characteristics.
The best memorial for this stuff would be a large, impregnable safe so that its contents could not fall into the "wrong hands". On the safe would be a large display indicating in how many years it would be safe to open it, allowing for the natural decay of the plutonium contents. A cat and vial of poison are optional...
A factsheet on plutonium
Flashback: 1989 - Intel releases the i860 64-bit microprocessor, dubbed a "Cray on a chip" (okay, so it was only a Cray 1, and I think it was only a third as quick as that, but hey - it's a "Cray"!) I even remember some of the RMIT ubergeeks designing a kick-ass computer based upon the i860... Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever built.
2001 - Intel releases the "i860" chipset to support the latest of its flagging 32-bit microprocessor range. Intel's 64-bit microprocessor, the "Itanium", is due for release real soon now...
</irony>
Maybe someone can tell me what I'm missing.
For me, having a tide calculator, Planetarium etc. all in the one pocket-sized unit is very useful. My Palm III may not be as sexy as some of the newer units, but it meets my needs just fine.
Maybe it's just me, but it bothers me that people have short memories - I remember when a 16MHz processor and a couple of megabytes of memory was a kick-ass machine, and you could write killer programs in kilobytes of memory. Sure, the Palms are spartan by today's desktop standards, but they demonstrate that you can still do a lot with limited resources - bloatware programmers need to take a good hard look at themselves.
... does buttered bread still land butter side down in zero gravity?
Whether or not the censorship is working is irrelevant if you look at the history behind it. Put simply, the current Oz government needed the support of an independent Senator in the Upper House to pass its policies. In exchange for passing the censorship bill, they got his vote.
Okay, so it cost $2.5M - what's the going rate for "encouraging" politicians in other countries?
Internet censorship software: $50
Yearly ISP dial-in account fees: $360
Buying a Senator's vote: $2.5M
Pissing off thousands of voters: Priceless
This could be an interesting test case for the GPL business model, but to paraphrase The Matrix: On the other hand, Caldera probably doesn't have a lot to lose - there are a lot of distributions out there, so perhaps having a modified BSD licensed one may be the gimmick they need to find a viable niche.
If you ever have a hard drive go bad, you should get yourself a set of tiny torx drivers and disassemble it. You will find a pair of insanely strong magnets around the head positioning coil.
Watch your fingers, when those magnets take a notion to slam together they will pinch through your flesh.
These magnets are also quite brittle - they will break if struck (particularly with another magnet.) Also, don't even think about putting these magnets near a CRT, credit cards, or disks...
The aluminium rings that separate the disk platters are also worth salvaging. For instance, with a suitable diameter pipe, coil and battery these would make ideal "jumping rings."
The Festival speech synthesis system page also has a web-based text-to-speech converter here, without the filter. It's free software, and does a pretty good job.
;-)
The automatic voice pitch is pretty neat; I built a hardware text-to-speech converter around 10 years ago, and it only produced a monotone voice that got pretty annoying after a while. Don't feed Festival raw HTML documents, though - it can cause the voice to get deeper and deeper until it has to reset the pitch.
I've been running Linux on a variety of Sparc boxes (mostly SPARCStation 20's, but also on an E250.) I'm using RedHat 6.2 since I also use RH on PCs, and the fact that you could run the same operating system on different platforms is a big selling point to management. ("No, I'm not playing - I'm investigating seamless interoperability between our existing hardware platforms, boss." ;-) RedHat dropping support for Sparc knocked the wind out of that idea. (Yes, I could switch to a different distribution, but once you've learnt the ins and outs of one, changing to another is about as much fun as changing versions of Windows.)
The biggest stumbling block to using non-Intel platforms with Linux is application support. Look for Sparc (or Alpha) versions of Acrobat Reader, Applix etc. and you won't find them - sure there are "Linux" versions, but only if you're running on Intel platforms. Netscape was available for Sparc Linux (built by RedHat?) but it stuck at around 4.51 compared to the "current" 4.77. Given the prospect of explaining to my users why these applications aren't available, and Solaris seemed a lot easier despite the ridiculous licensing fees. (The DiskSuite RAID tools are very nice, though.)
IBM seems to be doing the right thing by providing a machine for Linux developers to try their applications on the S/390 - presumably this is also open to the likes of Adobe to build Acrobat Reader for this platform. I'm not holding my breath for Sun to follow suit... yet.
Catamarans are double hulled sailboats, small difference :)
"Catamaran" is a term used (perhaps loosely) for any twin-hulled vessel e.g. the Incat high speed ferries.
New! Enhance your gameplay with the DirectPace API!
Experience blackouts and redouts in your favourite flight simulator!
Make those heart-stopping moments in your favourite action or adventure come alive!
(Medical insurance not included.)
The key advantage of unmanned combat aircraft over tanks or F1 racers is that the pilot is the biggest performance bottleneck. The pilot places a limit on how tightly the aircraft can turn, and out-turning your opponent is the key to winning dogfights (or evading missiles.) If you remove the pilot, the dynamic performance of the aircraft is limited only by the airframe. In tanks and F1 racers the crew/driver isn't the bottleneck, but you may get some improvements because unmanned versions could be made smaller, lighter (less armour) or more aerodynamic.