Re:Soldiers aren't worth as much.
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
Oh, bullshit.
All active duty personnel are enrolled in Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance (SGLI). If you die while in active duty, your family immediately gets $250,000. Can you see that number? *I* don't have $250k of life insurance, and I think very few people do.
Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance
The following are automatically insured for $250,000 under Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance (SGLI): active-duty members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard; commissioned members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Public Health Service; cadets or midshipmen of the service academies; members, cadets and midshipmen of the ROTC while engaged in authorized training; members of the Ready Reserves; and members who volunteer for assignment to a mobilization category in the Individual Ready Reserve. Individuals may elect to be covered for a lesser amount or not to be covered at all. Part-time coverage may be provided to members of the Reserves who do not qualify for full-time coverage. Premiums are deducted automatically from an individual's pay or are collected by the individual's service branch.
This is in addition to various burial benefits and (I believe) a pension to the survivors of the deceased for the remainder of those people's lives.
Stop promulgating lies about shit you know nothing about, and frankly, fuck you for indicating that the servicemen and women of the United States armed forces aren't the best cared for in the world. Eat a dick.
I love how it is so easy to wave your hand and accuse thousands of hard-working scientists and engineers of fraud and deception, rather than acknowledge that hitting a goddamn target the size of a small car with something the size of a basketball (or slightly larger, depending) with closing velocities of 15,000+ feet per second is trivial.
Yeah, people basically just sit around all day and dream up ways of burning cash. For fuck's sake, no one would dream of trying to detect some little tiny target that's hundreds of miles with an IR sensor, or try and discern decoys from real targets. No one would work on next generation Kill Vehicles that work like shotguns to blast every single incoming vehicle, decoy or real warhead alike.
No, basically it's all a giant scam that will never produce giant targeting radars that are the sweat and tears and blood of thousands of man years of effort, or try and accurately simulate the most complex interaction of systems that the world has seen, coordinating space-based sensors with ground tracking radar, Aegis systems at sea, plus a string of interceptors somewhere else. No, people just basically fuck off because there's there's nothing interesting or challenging or technically sweet to do.
We need competent politicians of principle and vision who can think beyond warfare to solve the problems of the world.
But on *this* planet, we work with what we got.
Additionally, if you think someone in the 3rd world is going to magically come up with some kind of wackiness that will remote the efficacy of a defensive net like that which is being talked about, I think you're on crack. No one is launching a rocket that doesn't have an IR plume, and the track radars that are being built are sophisticated enough that I think stealthing technology would have to be crazy good to avoid being detected -- and what are these parties supposed to test against, since they can't build radars of that sophistication currently, etc.?
It's more likely a low-tech approach (sneaking over the border) would work better than some fantastical high-tech approach, but obviously we have border guards, so why not have the defensive net and try to cover both angles.
which is, I believe, the default for Redhat. I also believe that there are (at least prototype) undelete utilities for ext2. People knowing about these things is another issue, but if you can't be bothered to "man rm", it's probably too late for you. The tools are there. Or consider chmod-ing the file to something that would require a prompt (unless you use rm -f) on deletion. There are many possiblities. Hell, you could even move to the "Windows-alike" way of only deleting stuff using a file manager in KDE or Gnome. By using the command line, you accept that with the additional power comes additional responsibility not to be a dumbass.
At least Linux builds on a stable foundation: if you delete a paper (even if it's an "accident") it was you deleting the paper, not Linux -- but stay away from experiemental file systems. This is in contrast to Windows.
Absolutely not fucking true. We have maybe a dozen of them at work for various purposes, and the things are extremely fragile: we're always sending them back to get serviced. It's weird, because they *look* really tough, like something you'd want in a desert or whatever, but they just aren't.
Frankly, they suck and I rue the day I ever started using them.
SGI deserves to die. Their service is shit, their hardware is shit, and their O.S. (IRIX) is ultra super duper shit. Why do we pay 6-figures for an 8 processor box and then have parts of it break within a month? Yeah, they come out and replace it for "free" (if you don't count the $$$ on the support contract), but the hassle of that is more than doing simple stuff myself. And, oh GOD, don't mention licensing!
I have three biggish (8 processor) and three little (Octanes) that I kinda have to maintain as lead developer of some simulation software, and I hate hate hate SGI and pray daily for their death. As soon as I can convince someone to let us move to Linux, I'm putting a boot to SGI's head.
That's what I call mine: "Hey, hit up the weenie, he broke something." Me? Since I'm the main developer and user of our systems, as well as in charge of Making Things Work, I'm Uber-Weenie. I think you could go with multiple levels:
Junior Weenie Assistant Weenie Weenie Senior Weenie Uber Weenie Lord High Weenie
Of course there's plug-and-play in later versions of Windows: the PCI bus auto-configures itself. You just run down the ID selects and go through the config registers. Sure ACPI is pretty nice, but none of these things are Windows-specific innovations. I applaud Microsoft for finally getting it right (even if they used to force you to reboot the hell out of your machine to get all drivers and whatnot working), but it's not like they did some magical software work and invented plug-and-play.
I'd've been more impressed if Windows had had real support for *ISA* plug-and-play. As far as I know, you're SOL there. I know Linux supposedly has this feature, but I don't know that I ever experimented with it when I had ISA cards.
So, yeah, reasonably nice software finally solidified after a number of years, but that's what I'd expect from a company with a 90% market share.
Uh, the oil fields that are on fire are in the south, close to the Kuwaiti border, so they're easy to get to?
Also, wouldn't it better for the Iraqi people (and the U.S., no doubt) if they could immediately start pumping oil rather than having to spend two years putting out fires and cleaning up damage (I think that's about what it took in Desert Storm for the rather more extensive damage then)?
Also, burning oil is kind of ecologically unfriendly, no?
Also, oil smoke can reduce the efficacy of laser-guided weapons, which are the last word in accurate guidance for bombs: far better the GPS-alone: i.e., if we want to keep civilian casualties low, we want accurate weapons.
Also, the oil fields are close to Basra (sp?) which is apparently the first objective for the U.S. (and U.K/Australian) forces. So having Marines in the surrounding oilfields serves a dual purpose.
1) Going to Mars would probably suck. For example, I think living in Anarctica sounds a lot better. I predict the population of Mars will never exceed that of Antarctica.
Memo's can be sent via email, fax, or courier. They may generate related Memo's in response, which can serve to document progress.
Tons more snipped.
Jesus, thank god I don't work there, cuz I don't want to work somewhere that there're people who have power to send company-wide email and yet don't know the difference between plurals and possessives. What a tool.
3.)I have 64 bit memory access and integers for workstation cad apps as well as database access. Type double in C/c++ does not allow enough precision. Int64 ?? I can use larger numbers with more decimal points.
Er, are you high? A floating point double is 64-bit no matter where you go. In fact, on Intel hardware it's 80 bit during calculation, and when rounded to 64-bit when stored. I dunno if there's any easy way to get at this 80-bit data raw, and I hear there're issues with this 80-64 bit conversion (I think: see comp.arch), but don't try to indicate that somehow doubles for Solaris are different then doubles for x86 (and anyway there's a 64-bit Linux port to Sun hardware) for systems supporting the IEEE754 floating point standard.
Frankly, this is the weirdest criticism for an OS (as opposed to a platform) that I've ever seen.
Doubles is doubles.
And I *hope* that you understand that you can use 64-bit integer types on a 32-bit platform (example: long long is 64-bit on x86 Linux), though there are issues with shifts.
I agree that not having a flat 64-bit address space is yucky, but then run Alpha Linux or the Sparc64 port or whatever. I dunno about the other stuff.
Yeah, and I'm sure that the Criminal Education Handbook lists this as point 1:
1) In being a criminal, it is important to remember that you must have a living eyeball to use iris scanners.
Hel-fucking-lo, how many people do you think the average street thug will go through before he's like, "You, man, this eyeball shit is wack! Don't nobodies eyeballs be working."
Or maybe robbery will, instead of being "Give me your wallet and get lost", be "follow me to this ATM where I will use your eyeball to withdraw your life's saving, and then put 2 in your head".
And it's, what, only a hojillion times more expensive than a P4 that gets about 75% of the same score? It only consumes about 150W of power, weighs 2.3743 metric tons with the heatsink on, and sterilizes small children.
Whoopty-do: you don't think, given essentially unlimited dollars (Intel and HP have spent, what, 5 or 6 billion on this, right?) that someone else could have come up with a processor that scores 30% better on SPEC than a commodity processor?
I hate SGI, but I have an EIGHT processor box that consumes less power than a SINGLE processor Itanium 2. And while 600MHz R14ks suck, they don't suck that much.
The land area of the United States is 9363130 square kilometers.
0.06 * 9363130 = 561787.8 square kilometers
or to use square miles:
0.06 * 3,794,083.06 = 227644.9836 square miles
Or the size of the *entire* states of Arizona and New Mexico together.
Sure. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and use about one sixteenth of our total land area for nothing but windmills. It'll be like a chipper-shredder for birds the likes of which the world has never seen. I like wind power just fine, but let's be sane about what kinds of quantities of power we can extract from it.
Besides, I'd be curious to know what kind of effects pulling this much energy out of the air would have on the weather. According to this, the U.S. generates about 3.6 billion kWh of power a year. What would happen if we sucked all that juice out of the air? No more tornadoes maybe, but what if no more thunder storms to dump rain on crops? I'm not sure if we could affect the weather this way, but I would imagine that there'd be *some* consequences.
Let's say you own a gigantic ranch in Arizona, and someone from Davis Monthan Air Force Base is in an F-16 which craps out and he parks it in your yard. I cannot believe that you now own a multi-million dollar American fighter.
This situation is pretty analagous to the shuttle disaster (with hopefully fewer chunks of people), so you'd better present evidence that finding a random chunk of something in your yard makes it yours.
Also, I'd never take my glasses or watch off at a party if I were you.
Trust me, those guys who hit the Cole would have been pizza stains in the harbor, except Phalanx was off because they were close in to a dock. Usually you don't want a 20mm chaingun going off while you're that close in to friendlies (although Phalax is pretty good and likely would only have splashed the boat). So either (a) you take the chance on greasing friendlies who get too close (b) you park farther out and carry the supplies out on boats.
Re:Oldest working code...
on
Immortal Code
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Not exactly out in the wild, but not exactly purely for an industry, are mathematical routines and the like.
For instance, a lot of aerodynamics code I've seen is written in Fortran IV or Fortan 77. It's often not the nicest formatting and stuff, but Fortran compiles cleanly, and the code still does it's job, so people still use it: it's also easy to interface Fortran and C/C++, which is a bonus. So you build on the core of this hard mathematical stuff that was written long ago.
Of course, part of that's bad, because there's a chance there're some gotchas still in there that wouldn't be understood anymore, but thankfully a career in my industry is quite long typically, so there's often a gray-haired sage that you can consult.
I think things that do math (even financial calculations) are more likely to last, because those kinds of operations endure.
Re:Forgive the obvious question...
on
Superbowl XXXVII
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· Score: 1
Oh bullshit. I realize this is well after the fact, but I want this in here for posterity.
No likes F1 because it's a parade: it isn't racing anymore. No ones comes from the back of the field, pit stops are usually the defining moment in the race, and the obsessive use of technology (plus Bernie's crushing ego) have made the racing dull dull dull. It's largely point and squirt now, with the automated launches, the shift patterns in the corners, etc.
An example of how stupid F1 is: they wanted to reduce grip. Could they do the obvious and make the rear wings smaller: hell no, because that's where advertising goes. Instead they put the cars on the grooved tires, which is fucking stupid because now when the cars slow down for corners, they have no adhesion. Boooorrrriiiinnnnnng! Whee, that'll lead to a lot of fun passing.
Plus Michael Shumacher is a goddamn thug who's crashed into I don't know how many other competitors to win his driver's championships.
Mika Hakkinen (sp?) had it right when he left. All the good racing is in WRC, to my mind. Nothing beats watching Colin McRae throw away championship after championship.
Er, how many potential enemies do we have who live in desert countries? I mean, are you complaining that the non-desert guys are European-looking?
"Hey, goddamn it, I'm playing an arctic mission and no one is wearing a turban! How racist to assume that all combatants in an arctic environment would be European!"
Seriously, dude, get a grip. If we're killing people in a desert, it's likely to be desert-dwelling people, and these people are usually of a certain coloration and style of clothing.
Also, feel free to make your own game where you fight only Whitey in every single environment you could encounter. Good luck.
What if you have $100 million dollars? What if you have $500 million? I think being able to quickly crack long keys is sufficiently important to certain national governments that they would spend a significant amount of money on a device that made pretty much all communications transparent.
Going through the paper, section 4 seems to indicate that you can get a reasonably linear speed-up for more money. So figure that your $100 million could get you a 1024-bit key in a month or so: that would be usefully fast enough for a lot of investigations.
However, I note from section 4.1 that their device is 1423mm^2, which is absolutely ferociously large, and in.13 micron silicon, a pretty new process. I think their yield would suck.
Going over the paper makes my brain hurt, but I have to say that it seems like keys that were safe yesterday are not safe today. However, I don't know how large the sieving step (all this device performs) is in the total process of cracking a key. Time to hit up those truly enormous keys now.
And though EMP would degrade at 1/R^2, you would probably have a massive burst (because you'd assume rad-hardening on the incoming missile), which might prove worrisome to any nearby communications or other satellites/orbiting vehicles (Iridium, etc.).
Yeah, cuz they obviously have to know the exact RFID of your tire to know it's got an outstanding recall, right? God forbid they have to read the label that says "Pirelli P-Zero Asymmetrico 225/35R18 Y".
That'd be too much to ask. No, instead of reading a label, let's create an entirely new system of radio tags, radio tag readers, software to run the reader and communicate stuff, and then training the lube monkeys (with 400% turnover a year) in how to use these things.
President George W. Bush today released the details of his 2003 Department of Defense budget proposal to fight the war against terrorism, provide for homeland defense and accelerate changes to transform the U.S. military. To address these needs, the President's budget proposes $369 billion for DoD plus $10 billion, if needed, to fight the war on terrorism - for a total of $379 billion.
A lot of this money is salary and benefits for our volunteer military: about $200 billion (see my comment). You could call that warmongering I guess.
You should feel free to whine, but at least try to use the occasional fact. Fuckwit.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, bullshit.
All active duty personnel are enrolled in Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance (SGLI). If you die while in active duty, your family immediately gets $250,000. Can you see that number? *I* don't have $250k of life insurance, and I think very few people do.
From Here
This is in addition to various burial benefits and (I believe) a pension to the survivors of the deceased for the remainder of those people's lives.Stop promulgating lies about shit you know nothing about, and frankly, fuck you for indicating that the servicemen and women of the United States armed forces aren't the best cared for in the world. Eat a dick.
Also This
You know dick all, frankly.
I love how it is so easy to wave your hand and accuse thousands of hard-working scientists and engineers of fraud and deception, rather than acknowledge that hitting a goddamn target the size of a small car with something the size of a basketball (or slightly larger, depending) with closing velocities of 15,000+ feet per second is trivial.
Yeah, people basically just sit around all day and dream up ways of burning cash. For fuck's sake, no one would dream of trying to detect some little tiny target that's hundreds of miles with an IR sensor, or try and discern decoys from real targets. No one would work on next generation Kill Vehicles that work like shotguns to blast every single incoming vehicle, decoy or real warhead alike.
No, basically it's all a giant scam that will never produce giant targeting radars that are the sweat and tears and blood of thousands of man years of effort, or try and accurately simulate the most complex interaction of systems that the world has seen, coordinating space-based sensors with ground tracking radar, Aegis systems at sea, plus a string of interceptors somewhere else. No, people just basically fuck off because there's there's nothing interesting or challenging or technically sweet to do.
Yeah, it's all a scam. You caught 'em. Good job.
But on *this* planet, we work with what we got.
Additionally, if you think someone in the 3rd world is going to magically come up with some kind of wackiness that will remote the efficacy of a defensive net like that which is being talked about, I think you're on crack. No one is launching a rocket that doesn't have an IR plume, and the track radars that are being built are sophisticated enough that I think stealthing technology would have to be crazy good to avoid being detected -- and what are these parties supposed to test against, since they can't build radars of that sophistication currently, etc.?
It's more likely a low-tech approach (sneaking over the border) would work better than some fantastical high-tech approach, but obviously we have border guards, so why not have the defensive net and try to cover both angles.
To which we reply:
alias rm="rm -i"
which is, I believe, the default for Redhat. I also believe that there are (at least prototype) undelete utilities for ext2. People knowing about these things is another issue, but if you can't be bothered to "man rm", it's probably too late for you. The tools are there. Or consider chmod-ing the file to something that would require a prompt (unless you use rm -f) on deletion. There are many possiblities. Hell, you could even move to the "Windows-alike" way of only deleting stuff using a file manager in KDE or Gnome. By using the command line, you accept that with the additional power comes additional responsibility not to be a dumbass.
At least Linux builds on a stable foundation: if you delete a paper (even if it's an "accident") it was you deleting the paper, not Linux -- but stay away from experiemental file systems. This is in contrast to Windows.
Absolutely not fucking true. We have maybe a dozen of them at work for various purposes, and the things are extremely fragile: we're always sending them back to get serviced. It's weird, because they *look* really tough, like something you'd want in a desert or whatever, but they just aren't.
Frankly, they suck and I rue the day I ever started using them.
SGI deserves to die. Their service is shit, their hardware is shit, and their O.S. (IRIX) is ultra super duper shit. Why do we pay 6-figures for an 8 processor box and then have parts of it break within a month? Yeah, they come out and replace it for "free" (if you don't count the $$$ on the support contract), but the hassle of that is more than doing simple stuff myself. And, oh GOD, don't mention licensing!
I have three biggish (8 processor) and three little (Octanes) that I kinda have to maintain as lead developer of some simulation software, and I hate hate hate SGI and pray daily for their death. As soon as I can convince someone to let us move to Linux, I'm putting a boot to SGI's head.
That's what I call mine: "Hey, hit up the weenie, he broke something." Me? Since I'm the main developer and user of our systems, as well as in charge of Making Things Work, I'm Uber-Weenie. I think you could go with multiple levels:
Junior Weenie
Assistant Weenie
Weenie
Senior Weenie
Uber Weenie
Lord High Weenie
Of course there's plug-and-play in later versions of Windows: the PCI bus auto-configures itself. You just run down the ID selects and go through the config registers. Sure ACPI is pretty nice, but none of these things are Windows-specific innovations. I applaud Microsoft for finally getting it right (even if they used to force you to reboot the hell out of your machine to get all drivers and whatnot working), but it's not like they did some magical software work and invented plug-and-play.
I'd've been more impressed if Windows had had real support for *ISA* plug-and-play. As far as I know, you're SOL there. I know Linux supposedly has this feature, but I don't know that I ever experimented with it when I had ISA cards.
So, yeah, reasonably nice software finally solidified after a number of years, but that's what I'd expect from a company with a 90% market share.
Uh, the oil fields that are on fire are in the south, close to the Kuwaiti border, so they're easy to get to?
Also, wouldn't it better for the Iraqi people (and the U.S., no doubt) if they could immediately start pumping oil rather than having to spend two years putting out fires and cleaning up damage (I think that's about what it took in Desert Storm for the rather more extensive damage then)?
Also, burning oil is kind of ecologically unfriendly, no?
Also, oil smoke can reduce the efficacy of laser-guided weapons, which are the last word in accurate guidance for bombs: far better the GPS-alone: i.e., if we want to keep civilian casualties low, we want accurate weapons.
Also, the oil fields are close to Basra (sp?) which is apparently the first objective for the U.S. (and U.K/Australian) forces. So having Marines in the surrounding oilfields serves a dual purpose.
In short: bite me.
I'd go tomorrow if I could.
Try again.
Tons more snipped.
Jesus, thank god I don't work there, cuz I don't want to work somewhere that there're people who have power to send company-wide email and yet don't know the difference between plurals and possessives. What a tool.
Yeah, I'm anal. SCO me!
Er, are you high? A floating point double is 64-bit no matter where you go. In fact, on Intel hardware it's 80 bit during calculation, and when rounded to 64-bit when stored. I dunno if there's any easy way to get at this 80-bit data raw, and I hear there're issues with this 80-64 bit conversion (I think: see comp.arch), but don't try to indicate that somehow doubles for Solaris are different then doubles for x86 (and anyway there's a 64-bit Linux port to Sun hardware) for systems supporting the IEEE754 floating point standard.
Frankly, this is the weirdest criticism for an OS (as opposed to a platform) that I've ever seen.
Doubles is doubles.
And I *hope* that you understand that you can use 64-bit integer types on a 32-bit platform (example: long long is 64-bit on x86 Linux), though there are issues with shifts.
I agree that not having a flat 64-bit address space is yucky, but then run Alpha Linux or the Sparc64 port or whatever. I dunno about the other stuff.
Yeah, and I'm sure that the Criminal Education Handbook lists this as point 1:
1) In being a criminal, it is important to remember that you must have a living eyeball to use iris scanners.
Hel-fucking-lo, how many people do you think the average street thug will go through before he's like, "You, man, this eyeball shit is wack! Don't nobodies eyeballs be working."
Or maybe robbery will, instead of being "Give me your wallet and get lost", be "follow me to this ATM where I will use your eyeball to withdraw your life's saving, and then put 2 in your head".
Not smart at all.
And it's, what, only a hojillion times more expensive than a P4 that gets about 75% of the same score? It only consumes about 150W of power, weighs 2.3743 metric tons with the heatsink on, and sterilizes small children.
Whoopty-do: you don't think, given essentially unlimited dollars (Intel and HP have spent, what, 5 or 6 billion on this, right?) that someone else could have come up with a processor that scores 30% better on SPEC than a commodity processor?
I hate SGI, but I have an EIGHT processor box that consumes less power than a SINGLE processor Itanium 2. And while 600MHz R14ks suck, they don't suck that much.
I am now going to taunt you.
The land area of the United States is 9363130 square kilometers.
0.06 * 9363130 = 561787.8 square kilometers
or to use square miles:
0.06 * 3,794,083.06 = 227644.9836 square miles
Or the size of the *entire* states of Arizona and New Mexico together.
Sure. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and use about one sixteenth of our total land area for nothing but windmills. It'll be like a chipper-shredder for birds the likes of which the world has never seen. I like wind power just fine, but let's be sane about what kinds of quantities of power we can extract from it.
Besides, I'd be curious to know what kind of effects pulling this much energy out of the air would have on the weather. According to this, the U.S. generates about 3.6 billion kWh of power a year. What would happen if we sucked all that juice out of the air? No more tornadoes maybe, but what if no more thunder storms to dump rain on crops? I'm not sure if we could affect the weather this way, but I would imagine that there'd be *some* consequences.
I call bullshit.
Let's say you own a gigantic ranch in Arizona, and someone from Davis Monthan Air Force Base is in an F-16 which craps out and he parks it in your yard. I cannot believe that you now own a multi-million dollar American fighter.
This situation is pretty analagous to the shuttle disaster (with hopefully fewer chunks of people), so you'd better present evidence that finding a random chunk of something in your yard makes it yours.
Also, I'd never take my glasses or watch off at a party if I were you.
It's 1024 individual CPU machines: think large cluster.
Trust me, those guys who hit the Cole would have been pizza stains in the harbor, except Phalanx was off because they were close in to a dock. Usually you don't want a 20mm chaingun going off while you're that close in to friendlies (although Phalax is pretty good and likely would only have splashed the boat). So either (a) you take the chance on greasing friendlies who get too close (b) you park farther out and carry the supplies out on boats.
Not exactly out in the wild, but not exactly purely for an industry, are mathematical routines and the like.
For instance, a lot of aerodynamics code I've seen is written in Fortran IV or Fortan 77. It's often not the nicest formatting and stuff, but Fortran compiles cleanly, and the code still does it's job, so people still use it: it's also easy to interface Fortran and C/C++, which is a bonus. So you build on the core of this hard mathematical stuff that was written long ago.
Of course, part of that's bad, because there's a chance there're some gotchas still in there that wouldn't be understood anymore, but thankfully a career in my industry is quite long typically, so there's often a gray-haired sage that you can consult.
I think things that do math (even financial calculations) are more likely to last, because those kinds of operations endure.
Oh bullshit. I realize this is well after the fact, but I want this in here for posterity.
No likes F1 because it's a parade: it isn't racing anymore. No ones comes from the back of the field, pit stops are usually the defining moment in the race, and the obsessive use of technology (plus Bernie's crushing ego) have made the racing dull dull dull. It's largely point and squirt now, with the automated launches, the shift patterns in the corners, etc.
An example of how stupid F1 is: they wanted to reduce grip. Could they do the obvious and make the rear wings smaller: hell no, because that's where advertising goes. Instead they put the cars on the grooved tires, which is fucking stupid because now when the cars slow down for corners, they have no adhesion. Boooorrrriiiinnnnnng! Whee, that'll lead to a lot of fun passing.
Plus Michael Shumacher is a goddamn thug who's crashed into I don't know how many other competitors to win his driver's championships.
Mika Hakkinen (sp?) had it right when he left. All the good racing is in WRC, to my mind. Nothing beats watching Colin McRae throw away championship after championship.
Er, how many potential enemies do we have who live in desert countries? I mean, are you complaining that the non-desert guys are European-looking?
"Hey, goddamn it, I'm playing an arctic mission and no one is wearing a turban! How racist to assume that all combatants in an arctic environment would be European!"
Seriously, dude, get a grip. If we're killing people in a desert, it's likely to be desert-dwelling people, and these people are usually of a certain coloration and style of clothing.
Also, feel free to make your own game where you fight only Whitey in every single environment you could encounter. Good luck.
What if you have $100 million dollars? What if you have $500 million? I think being able to quickly crack long keys is sufficiently important to certain national governments that they would spend a significant amount of money on a device that made pretty much all communications transparent.
Going through the paper, section 4 seems to indicate that you can get a reasonably linear speed-up for more money. So figure that your $100 million could get you a 1024-bit key in a month or so: that would be usefully fast enough for a lot of investigations.
However, I note from section 4.1 that their device is 1423mm^2, which is absolutely ferociously large, and in .13 micron silicon, a pretty new process. I think their yield would suck.
Going over the paper makes my brain hurt, but I have to say that it seems like keys that were safe yesterday are not safe today. However, I don't know how large the sieving step (all this device performs) is in the total process of cracking a key. Time to hit up those truly enormous keys now.
And though EMP would degrade at 1/R^2, you would probably have a massive burst (because you'd assume rad-hardening on the incoming missile), which might prove worrisome to any nearby communications or other satellites/orbiting vehicles (Iridium, etc.).
Yeah, cuz they obviously have to know the exact RFID of your tire to know it's got an outstanding recall, right? God forbid they have to read the label that says "Pirelli P-Zero Asymmetrico 225/35R18 Y".
That'd be too much to ask. No, instead of reading a label, let's create an entirely new system of radio tags, radio tag readers, software to run the reader and communicate stuff, and then training the lube monkeys (with 400% turnover a year) in how to use these things.
Wee, technology solves everything! Rah rah rah!
Jesus H. Christ, you're on the Internet. Why don't you looks this shit up:
A lot of this money is salary and benefits for our volunteer military: about $200 billion (see my comment). You could call that warmongering I guess.
You should feel free to whine, but at least try to use the occasional fact. Fuckwit.