They mention Nike having started to product a line like that, but in the article they were mostly talking about people from poor areas wearing sandals or other simple footwear to protect their feet.
I can see your point a bit better now. Let me explain that we didn't use the "talk-abouts" outside the wire. We were on one of the larger camps in country and considered the unsecured radios sufficient for inside the wire communications about non-classified matters. To make use of the info we passed over these things you'd have had to have infiltrated probably the second or third most secure location in the country and been there long enough to setup surveillance of the radios and figure out our (fairly simple, I'll grant you) codes.
SETI is based on a scientific hypothesis: "Given the number of stars and planets in the universe, it is statistically likely that intelligent life has developed on planets other than Earth." SETI itself is merely attempting to gather data in support of this hypothesis. The hypothesis is provable (If aliens land on the planet tomorrow, it would be proven; if we find the functional equivalent of TV signals in our observation of interstellar waves it would be proven; if we land on Alpha Centari in 200 year and find primitive lizard men carrying crystal tipped spears it would be proven; etc), and SETI is one attempt to gather data which might prove it. No one at SETI is making an absolute declaration that "Intelligent life absolutely exists in the universe and even though we've never found any hard evidence, we've proved it." They have a theory, and they are gathering evidence in support of that theory.
In contrast, Intelligent Design advocates are taking a gap in knowledge and declaring it "proof" of some other knowledge. What they're saying is "Because we cannot figure out how 'x' happened, it must be proof that some outside force or being made it happen." First of all, this is an unprovable hypothesis. Even if a being showed up tomorrow and claimed to be God, and demonstrated phenomenal cosmic powers, there is no way to be sure that this being was or was not THE designer, as opposed to something that perhaps has enough power to have done it (I doubt there are any measurement units of Earth that could comprehend whether a being actually has "limitless power" or "apparently limitless power"). Secondly the methodology is flawed. The equivalent with SETI would be a researcher discovering an anomalous unexplained signal, and unilaterally declaring it proof of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence without first attempting to understand the origin of the signal, whether it has any intelligent pattern or looking at other theories.
Absence of an explanation for a phenomenon does not constitute proof of the explanation you're currently trying to sell. Just because primitive man didn't understand how gravity works, doesn't mean that they would have been correct to assume that there are giant suckerfish under the ground constantly inhaling to keep us all tied to the Earth. A divine being wandering about changing reality at his or her whim might constitute evidence for a supreme creator (though not definitive proof, it could be a different divine being for all we know), but a lack of explanation for certain phenomenon does not.
Having said all of that, I believe that there are beings and forces that exist outside of what we consider "nature". Since I can't defend those beliefs via repeatable experiments or hard evidence I don't present them as "science" or try to teach them in "science class". You can HAVE religious or other superstitious beliefs without insisting that those beliefs be taught as facts. If you want to believe that the world was created, or that there is a supreme intelligence guiding its development, by all means do. Just don't try to present those beliefs as if they were provable facts.
You're assuming the enemy knows where the Mountain Dew is kept. You're assuming that the enemy cares that some random guy from my squad (as opposed to the hundred of other random soldiers and civilians that might be there) is at the PX picking up Mountain Dew. You're assuming the enemy knows that our random call signs for each other indicate whether someone important is being asked for. You're assuming that every time I ask somebody to go to phone I want to hold super secret conversations, as opposed just being tired of the mediocre reception and the push-to-talk button.
While dedicated surveillance of these radios, combined with a fairly in depth knowledge of camp procedures might allow an enemy to piece together such useful facts as "SSG Rodriguez is in the Porta-potty, and SPC Smith has run to the PX", how useful is that really? They're not going to risk the cover of any operatives they've gotten into one of the most secure facilitates in the country to take out a couple of random soldiers. Especially since if they have someone capable of doing so in position, they'd probably just observe and wait for their chance.
And given that human evolution selected for small numbers of slow to develop but relatively long lived children, it seem like we should be built to survive to take care of them as much as possible.If we had a hundred kids at a go, and expected to lose 98% of them before sexual maturity, it wouldn't matter if we lived two seconds past birth.
They wear strips of leather or rubber to protect their soles from being actually cut. if you read the article, there's quite a bit of talk of "barefoot" runners wearing simple sandals of various designs to prevent cutting injuries while still being essentially "barefoot".
We prove that it's a bad argument. Since a significant chunk of people are trying to push it as something that should be taught as valid scientific theory, it makes sense to refute it in any way possible. As you say, it's not even good philosophy, why should we teach it as good science?
Re:The internal announcement
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
They still require the approval of the Board of the taken over company, they just use various, often under-handed, means to get the approval. You cannot unilaterally decide that you've bought something without the approval of the seller.
For the real "In the field" applications, I feel comfortable recommending Panasonic's "Toughtbook" line. We had very few problems with them relative to anything else. If you're just looking for something to take over there to play with in your room, get the cheapest thing you can and don't be to concerned if it dies before you get back. Couple of guys I knew bought expensive laptops (one guy had an Alienware), while only a few died in country (and usually from replaceable stuff, like HDDs), I hate to think they spent that kind of money then took years off the life of the machine (which they probably did).
Loved those things. We used them through most of our deployment. You couldn't say everything, but we used code for some stuff or just told people to get to a phone or encrypted radio so you could talk in the clear. The range was short, but usually enough for talking around the camp or for a gate detail or patrol to communicate. It wasn't actually that we had a shortage of milspec radios, it was more that the damned things weigh 25 pounds. Not something you want to be carrying in addition to your weapon, ballistic vest, ammo, helmet, water, etc. We had a small supply of police type radios that could be encrypted for clear communications, but even those are fairly heavy and we had fewer of them. The battalion commander briefly tried to ban them, but we convinced him that we knew how to avoid classified conversations over plain text, and that there were no real practical alternatives.
This. We brought over more personal electronics gear than most people who haven't seen would believe. AND there's PXs on most of the bigger posts that will sell you more. AND Amazon.com ships to APOs (yes we could get to Amazon.com, don't be silly). We brought back more personal electronics gear than we brought over by probably at least an order of magnitude:-). The vast majority of it survived just fine. One guy blew out his X-Box plugging it into the wrong power, and digital camera screens got kinda scratched up from the dust, but in general, consumer spec gear did just fine (iPhones and iPod Touches having glass screens would be a big advantage there. Much harder to scratch).
Now computers... those didn't survive as well. Personal game systems tended to stay in peoples relatively well sealed quarters, so they were mostly fine, but the grit really got into to anything that got taken outside much. Moving parts like hard drives, fans, and CD-ROMs failed a lot on our non-ruggedized laptops. The iPhone/Pods are fairly well sealed, all solid state, and like I said, have glass screens. Get a little plug to put into the ear phone holes and I think they'd have quite a reasonable failure rate.
Largely in an effort to force God's hand and induce the Rapture, so all the Jews can be converted or die horrible deaths. Not that this invalidates your point, you are quite accurate, but the background helps to explain why this is true.
Re:The internal announcement
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Yea... umm, no. Of course Sun's board has to approve the decision to be bought. What, you think that companies have to agree to any reasonable offer? The fact that IBM had backed out and oracle offered even more money made it likely that Sun's board would accept, but they had the right to say no. It's not like they were in bankruptcy and being compelled to sell themselves.
SGI and Cray (and for that matter Sun and IBM) run Linux on some of the most powerful computers in the world. In fact, the in the November 2008 top 500 supercomputers list 9 of the top 10 run Linux (CNL is Compute Node Linux, a light kernel used for cluster nodes). The tenth runs... well MS Windows HPC... Go figure. There's actually a Sun machine in that top 10 list. It runs Linux too.
I could convince myself that tattooing my hand with a screen for data is a good idea, maybe. No one is getting near my eyes with something like that. While a continuous HUD might have its uses, vision is nice too. Worse that can happen to your hand is the thing dies and you have a permanent black square tattooed on your palm.
We had a lot of success with Toughbooks in Iraq. As far as heat and dust go they are amazing. We never dealt with the kind of cold you're talking about, but since the Army uses them for arctic ops I assume they're capable there too. Of the roughly 25 Toughbooks my command was issued at the beginning of our 1 year tour, we had hard drives die in 2 of them, and no other problems. By my estimation that's more or less normal failure expectation for 25 machines. My thought on OPs problem is a cluster of Toughbooks. 4 of them with a clustered file system setup with the clustered equivalent of a RAID5 for storage. A lot depends on his definition of cheap. Something like I'm talking about would be redundant, able to handle long term power outages, and provide the needed horsepower, for a cost in the neighborhood of 10-15K. It would burn more power than a single server when running on solar though.
As a thought (I'm replying to you since you're apparently somewhat expert at this), how does a cluster of ruggedized laptops sound? I worked with these thing in Iraq, and I was quite impressed with their ability to resist the elements. On the plus side, the machines are very rugged, very portable, and when combined make for a fair amount of processing power. They're more resistant to power outages than even a good UPS setup would allow and with a clustered file system they have a good amount of storage. On the downside they're going to used more power. A cluster is always going to used more power than single system. This can mitigated by allowing systems to use power management, but no matter how you do it, a fully loaded cluster is going to consume more power than a fully loaded server.
This may be true, but it also says something about the industry that it has thousands or even millions of potential customers out there that it simply won't sell to in order to protect a business model that seems in danger of dying. I've posted, many times and some quite recently, about how I don't want to see the content industries fail, and want to see them come up with viable Internet business models. I'm not a "pirate everything and let artists produce for free like God intended" type, by any means. The problem is as much to do with the way the content industry refuses to adapt at all, as it is with the "everything should be free" pirates.
It's like there's two opposing forces: The ultra conservative "Why should I ever have to change anything about the way I do business? I've made money with this exact model for 50 years now and I demand to be able to continue the same way for another 50!" entertainment industry, and the "Nothing digital has any value since it's infinitely copyable. Even though I clearly want it, and consume it voraciously, I somehow think it should be valueless" radical pirates. The rest of us have to site here trying to find something to watch or listen to that isn't illegal, immoral, unusably tied with DRM, unavailable in our countries of origin, or otherwise annoying.
If someone doesn't compromise on one end or the other, I fear that as the digital divide closes and more and more people have data access, original content will be forced to disappear or become wholly amateur. Quite frankly I don't see us getting much LOTR or Batman Begins out of wholly amateur content.
Except I think they have a much greater percentage of music than movies. Pretty much everything release by a major label in the last 20 years or so is on iTunes, as is a lot of older stuff released by major labels. Pretty much anything released by minor and indy labels in the last 5 years or so is on iTunes, and a lot of them are making efforts to release their older catalogs. A good bit of stuff released completely independently (no label at all) is even available on iTunes assuming the band has a least one member savvy enough to realize it's a way to make a few extra bucks and motivated enough to learn how to use the system.
Why? Because it costs them almost nothing to put more songs on the store, so even if a given title only sells 500 copies to a few enthusiasts that's probably $400 in the pockets of the label, band, or whoever. I'd venture to guess that iTunes has more like 30% of the songs recorded and released in the last 50 years, and if you changed that to the last 5 years the number probably jumps to 50% or 60%. Make it recorded and released by a label (even a really small indy label) and I bet the number is more like 80% or higher. By contrast they probably have less than 10% of movies released by a major production house in the last 5 years. It took the labels a while to realize that iTunes was a runaway success that they needed to support, but once they did they've filled out the catalogs available nicely. The question is why video production houses haven't realized that iTunes is a license to print money the way that music production companies have.
Actually, you're pretty much the odd man out when it comes to e-mailng large files. People that use e-mail services provided by someone else or use shared hosting for their web sites and e-mail server have no real flexibility in the matter. I could up the attachment sizes on my e-mail, but I have a hosting company imposed 2 GB limit on my e-mail storage. HD video would eat that before I had time to think about the problem. I would venture to guess that 99% or greater of Internet users would find some reason that that could not receive large video files via e-mail. I doubt anybody is going to setup an "e-mail you videos" service when only people who happen to run their own e-mail servers out of a well connected office or collocation facility can receive them. While saying the there is a 10MB limit on e-mail attachments is technically inaccurate, saying that the vast majority of people have a reasonably small limit on the size of their e-mail attachments is not.
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They mention Nike having started to product a line like that, but in the article they were mostly talking about people from poor areas wearing sandals or other simple footwear to protect their feet.
I can see your point a bit better now. Let me explain that we didn't use the "talk-abouts" outside the wire. We were on one of the larger camps in country and considered the unsecured radios sufficient for inside the wire communications about non-classified matters. To make use of the info we passed over these things you'd have had to have infiltrated probably the second or third most secure location in the country and been there long enough to setup surveillance of the radios and figure out our (fairly simple, I'll grant you) codes.
SETI is based on a scientific hypothesis: "Given the number of stars and planets in the universe, it is statistically likely that intelligent life has developed on planets other than Earth." SETI itself is merely attempting to gather data in support of this hypothesis. The hypothesis is provable (If aliens land on the planet tomorrow, it would be proven; if we find the functional equivalent of TV signals in our observation of interstellar waves it would be proven; if we land on Alpha Centari in 200 year and find primitive lizard men carrying crystal tipped spears it would be proven; etc), and SETI is one attempt to gather data which might prove it. No one at SETI is making an absolute declaration that "Intelligent life absolutely exists in the universe and even though we've never found any hard evidence, we've proved it." They have a theory, and they are gathering evidence in support of that theory.
In contrast, Intelligent Design advocates are taking a gap in knowledge and declaring it "proof" of some other knowledge. What they're saying is "Because we cannot figure out how 'x' happened, it must be proof that some outside force or being made it happen." First of all, this is an unprovable hypothesis. Even if a being showed up tomorrow and claimed to be God, and demonstrated phenomenal cosmic powers, there is no way to be sure that this being was or was not THE designer, as opposed to something that perhaps has enough power to have done it (I doubt there are any measurement units of Earth that could comprehend whether a being actually has "limitless power" or "apparently limitless power"). Secondly the methodology is flawed. The equivalent with SETI would be a researcher discovering an anomalous unexplained signal, and unilaterally declaring it proof of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence without first attempting to understand the origin of the signal, whether it has any intelligent pattern or looking at other theories.
Absence of an explanation for a phenomenon does not constitute proof of the explanation you're currently trying to sell. Just because primitive man didn't understand how gravity works, doesn't mean that they would have been correct to assume that there are giant suckerfish under the ground constantly inhaling to keep us all tied to the Earth. A divine being wandering about changing reality at his or her whim might constitute evidence for a supreme creator (though not definitive proof, it could be a different divine being for all we know), but a lack of explanation for certain phenomenon does not.
Having said all of that, I believe that there are beings and forces that exist outside of what we consider "nature". Since I can't defend those beliefs via repeatable experiments or hard evidence I don't present them as "science" or try to teach them in "science class". You can HAVE religious or other superstitious beliefs without insisting that those beliefs be taught as facts. If you want to believe that the world was created, or that there is a supreme intelligence guiding its development, by all means do. Just don't try to present those beliefs as if they were provable facts.
You're assuming the enemy knows where the Mountain Dew is kept. You're assuming that the enemy cares that some random guy from my squad (as opposed to the hundred of other random soldiers and civilians that might be there) is at the PX picking up Mountain Dew. You're assuming the enemy knows that our random call signs for each other indicate whether someone important is being asked for. You're assuming that every time I ask somebody to go to phone I want to hold super secret conversations, as opposed just being tired of the mediocre reception and the push-to-talk button.
While dedicated surveillance of these radios, combined with a fairly in depth knowledge of camp procedures might allow an enemy to piece together such useful facts as "SSG Rodriguez is in the Porta-potty, and SPC Smith has run to the PX", how useful is that really? They're not going to risk the cover of any operatives they've gotten into one of the most secure facilitates in the country to take out a couple of random soldiers. Especially since if they have someone capable of doing so in position, they'd probably just observe and wait for their chance.
Read the article, when they talk about "barefoot" allowances are made for various types of sandals and such to protect the sole from cutting hazards.
And given that human evolution selected for small numbers of slow to develop but relatively long lived children, it seem like we should be built to survive to take care of them as much as possible.If we had a hundred kids at a go, and expected to lose 98% of them before sexual maturity, it wouldn't matter if we lived two seconds past birth.
They wear strips of leather or rubber to protect their soles from being actually cut. if you read the article, there's quite a bit of talk of "barefoot" runners wearing simple sandals of various designs to prevent cutting injuries while still being essentially "barefoot".
We prove that it's a bad argument. Since a significant chunk of people are trying to push it as something that should be taught as valid scientific theory, it makes sense to refute it in any way possible. As you say, it's not even good philosophy, why should we teach it as good science?
They still require the approval of the Board of the taken over company, they just use various, often under-handed, means to get the approval. You cannot unilaterally decide that you've bought something without the approval of the seller.
For the real "In the field" applications, I feel comfortable recommending Panasonic's "Toughtbook" line. We had very few problems with them relative to anything else. If you're just looking for something to take over there to play with in your room, get the cheapest thing you can and don't be to concerned if it dies before you get back. Couple of guys I knew bought expensive laptops (one guy had an Alienware), while only a few died in country (and usually from replaceable stuff, like HDDs), I hate to think they spent that kind of money then took years off the life of the machine (which they probably did).
Of all the times to not have mod points... LOL
Loved those things. We used them through most of our deployment. You couldn't say everything, but we used code for some stuff or just told people to get to a phone or encrypted radio so you could talk in the clear. The range was short, but usually enough for talking around the camp or for a gate detail or patrol to communicate. It wasn't actually that we had a shortage of milspec radios, it was more that the damned things weigh 25 pounds. Not something you want to be carrying in addition to your weapon, ballistic vest, ammo, helmet, water, etc. We had a small supply of police type radios that could be encrypted for clear communications, but even those are fairly heavy and we had fewer of them. The battalion commander briefly tried to ban them, but we convinced him that we knew how to avoid classified conversations over plain text, and that there were no real practical alternatives.
This. We brought over more personal electronics gear than most people who haven't seen would believe. AND there's PXs on most of the bigger posts that will sell you more. AND Amazon.com ships to APOs (yes we could get to Amazon.com, don't be silly). We brought back more personal electronics gear than we brought over by probably at least an order of magnitude :-). The vast majority of it survived just fine. One guy blew out his X-Box plugging it into the wrong power, and digital camera screens got kinda scratched up from the dust, but in general, consumer spec gear did just fine (iPhones and iPod Touches having glass screens would be a big advantage there. Much harder to scratch).
Now computers... those didn't survive as well. Personal game systems tended to stay in peoples relatively well sealed quarters, so they were mostly fine, but the grit really got into to anything that got taken outside much. Moving parts like hard drives, fans, and CD-ROMs failed a lot on our non-ruggedized laptops. The iPhone/Pods are fairly well sealed, all solid state, and like I said, have glass screens. Get a little plug to put into the ear phone holes and I think they'd have quite a reasonable failure rate.
Largely in an effort to force God's hand and induce the Rapture, so all the Jews can be converted or die horrible deaths. Not that this invalidates your point, you are quite accurate, but the background helps to explain why this is true.
Yea... umm, no. Of course Sun's board has to approve the decision to be bought. What, you think that companies have to agree to any reasonable offer? The fact that IBM had backed out and oracle offered even more money made it likely that Sun's board would accept, but they had the right to say no. It's not like they were in bankruptcy and being compelled to sell themselves.
SGI and Cray (and for that matter Sun and IBM) run Linux on some of the most powerful computers in the world. In fact, the in the November 2008 top 500 supercomputers list 9 of the top 10 run Linux (CNL is Compute Node Linux, a light kernel used for cluster nodes). The tenth runs... well MS Windows HPC... Go figure. There's actually a Sun machine in that top 10 list. It runs Linux too.
The author later called it "The Increasingly Misnamed Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy"
I could convince myself that tattooing my hand with a screen for data is a good idea, maybe. No one is getting near my eyes with something like that. While a continuous HUD might have its uses, vision is nice too. Worse that can happen to your hand is the thing dies and you have a permanent black square tattooed on your palm.
He's right an wrong. If the Laptops happen to be Panasonic Toughbooks it could work.
This. Those things are fucking tanks. Used them in Iraq, and I'll swear by them.
We had a lot of success with Toughbooks in Iraq. As far as heat and dust go they are amazing. We never dealt with the kind of cold you're talking about, but since the Army uses them for arctic ops I assume they're capable there too. Of the roughly 25 Toughbooks my command was issued at the beginning of our 1 year tour, we had hard drives die in 2 of them, and no other problems. By my estimation that's more or less normal failure expectation for 25 machines. My thought on OPs problem is a cluster of Toughbooks. 4 of them with a clustered file system setup with the clustered equivalent of a RAID5 for storage. A lot depends on his definition of cheap. Something like I'm talking about would be redundant, able to handle long term power outages, and provide the needed horsepower, for a cost in the neighborhood of 10-15K. It would burn more power than a single server when running on solar though.
As a thought (I'm replying to you since you're apparently somewhat expert at this), how does a cluster of ruggedized laptops sound? I worked with these thing in Iraq, and I was quite impressed with their ability to resist the elements. On the plus side, the machines are very rugged, very portable, and when combined make for a fair amount of processing power. They're more resistant to power outages than even a good UPS setup would allow and with a clustered file system they have a good amount of storage. On the downside they're going to used more power. A cluster is always going to used more power than single system. This can mitigated by allowing systems to use power management, but no matter how you do it, a fully loaded cluster is going to consume more power than a fully loaded server.
This may be true, but it also says something about the industry that it has thousands or even millions of potential customers out there that it simply won't sell to in order to protect a business model that seems in danger of dying. I've posted, many times and some quite recently, about how I don't want to see the content industries fail, and want to see them come up with viable Internet business models. I'm not a "pirate everything and let artists produce for free like God intended" type, by any means. The problem is as much to do with the way the content industry refuses to adapt at all, as it is with the "everything should be free" pirates.
It's like there's two opposing forces: The ultra conservative "Why should I ever have to change anything about the way I do business? I've made money with this exact model for 50 years now and I demand to be able to continue the same way for another 50!" entertainment industry, and the "Nothing digital has any value since it's infinitely copyable. Even though I clearly want it, and consume it voraciously, I somehow think it should be valueless" radical pirates. The rest of us have to site here trying to find something to watch or listen to that isn't illegal, immoral, unusably tied with DRM, unavailable in our countries of origin, or otherwise annoying.
If someone doesn't compromise on one end or the other, I fear that as the digital divide closes and more and more people have data access, original content will be forced to disappear or become wholly amateur. Quite frankly I don't see us getting much LOTR or Batman Begins out of wholly amateur content.
Except I think they have a much greater percentage of music than movies. Pretty much everything release by a major label in the last 20 years or so is on iTunes, as is a lot of older stuff released by major labels. Pretty much anything released by minor and indy labels in the last 5 years or so is on iTunes, and a lot of them are making efforts to release their older catalogs. A good bit of stuff released completely independently (no label at all) is even available on iTunes assuming the band has a least one member savvy enough to realize it's a way to make a few extra bucks and motivated enough to learn how to use the system.
Why? Because it costs them almost nothing to put more songs on the store, so even if a given title only sells 500 copies to a few enthusiasts that's probably $400 in the pockets of the label, band, or whoever. I'd venture to guess that iTunes has more like 30% of the songs recorded and released in the last 50 years, and if you changed that to the last 5 years the number probably jumps to 50% or 60%. Make it recorded and released by a label (even a really small indy label) and I bet the number is more like 80% or higher. By contrast they probably have less than 10% of movies released by a major production house in the last 5 years. It took the labels a while to realize that iTunes was a runaway success that they needed to support, but once they did they've filled out the catalogs available nicely. The question is why video production houses haven't realized that iTunes is a license to print money the way that music production companies have.
Actually, you're pretty much the odd man out when it comes to e-mailng large files. People that use e-mail services provided by someone else or use shared hosting for their web sites and e-mail server have no real flexibility in the matter. I could up the attachment sizes on my e-mail, but I have a hosting company imposed 2 GB limit on my e-mail storage. HD video would eat that before I had time to think about the problem. I would venture to guess that 99% or greater of Internet users would find some reason that that could not receive large video files via e-mail. I doubt anybody is going to setup an "e-mail you videos" service when only people who happen to run their own e-mail servers out of a well connected office or collocation facility can receive them. While saying the there is a 10MB limit on e-mail attachments is technically inaccurate, saying that the vast majority of people have a reasonably small limit on the size of their e-mail attachments is not.