This is an interesting point, and much more insightful than the myriad "What if I put up a mirror?" nonce comments here. I don't quite know enough laser physics to answer your suggestion, but I think it would probably work - as long as you knew to deploy it before you got hit. It would probably not stop you from getting blinded and skin burns (would probably make those worse), but it could be enough to stop your truck being disabled. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented.
However, the effect of vaporisation/ionisation (conversion to a plasma) would need to be considered - most likely, the beam would clear its own path through the cloud in a fairly short time, so it would tend to be a "mitigation" not a "prevention" technique, unless the cloud also managed to "distract" whatever was maintaining the targeting lock long enough for you to move out of the way (e.g. a shallow gash down the whole side of the truck would be better than having no engine).
However, to answer the GP: think about the power requirements. This sort of laser is not something you would just carry around in your hand or conceal in a trenchcoat. It's the kind of thing you mount to a nuclear-powered ship, or on something like a 747. At best, you might be able to get it powered from a small truck, but effective anti-materiel laser weapons are still in the realm of "bigger than a tank".
Great idea, but it will never be able to be retro-fitted.:-( It is however, something we could (should?!) do for new formats in future - though realistically, most new file formats that I've seen are now zipped-XML, and unless you want to rewrite the ZIP format (we don't), it's not going to fly, although you do at least get to open it and have a decent look around inside (and get to content that you can usually decipher or extract). Ebook formats like EPUB have the first file in the ZIP required to be a plaintext "minetype" file, which I think is an excellent way to go about it.
Of course, what you are suggesting is that most people will know how to open a file in a text editor, which while standard par for the course for most of us on/., isn't something the usual user will think of. A better solution I think is to integrate something like the file command into the OS such that it, when asked to access an unknown file, it interrogates it to say "this is a xyz file, and these applications have registered that they can open this type of file, which would you like to use?"
Interestingly, back in the old Amiga days, you actually could identify a file like this - the first 4 bytes of something like an IFF ILBM picture file (IIRC, it was a long time ago) would be a recognisable 4-letter combination. It wasn't hard to learn some of the common ones. This was back on an OS that didn't seem to care at all about file extensions. It was such a useful skill that I still try it, though most modern formats don't seem to start with anything human-readable like that. I think it may have been done that way as it allowed the OS to only need to read the first word from disk to identify the file (though nowadays we would put that in the filesystem metadata, which means less seek time, though there's no reason why the filesystem metadata couldn't be informed from reading the file in that manner the first time it is created).
You forgot one: the Ribbon. Not only is it the only user interface change I have ever seen that caused multiple experienced power users of a product be unable to find basic functionality, even now that I have been forced to get used to it, I find it slows me down considerably, because most things take an extra click or two (usually at near-opposite ends of the ribbon, adding all the seek time as well) and (unlike a toolbar) there's no guarantee that a common button is going to be where you expect it. Yes, there are keyboard shortcut alternatives, but because they're not advertised until you hit the ALT key (and they're unlike anything from previous versions or other programs) I find I don't learn them. It's like someone read research on UI design and thought "how many of these things can we get away with ruining?", though I realise the more likely scenario is that some suit thought "hey, I personally don't like our current toolbar+menus layout, and this Ribbon is a pretty design, let's use it everywhere!" without actually reading any UI design research or checking with real users.
...they listen to the various commentators on what works and what doesn't, and create something that takes the working idea of the original and extends it further (so, things like cubic chunks that allow ~infinite height worlds, a proper modding API, tutorial for new players, ). Or, even better, they look to the gaming and modding community and get them to help steer it (I think one of the reasons why Minecraft became such a great winner was because the community was able to contribute to it from a very early stage - it was built around what real players wanted).
Personally, I think that a few neat ideas would be:
- Experiment with a "smoothed" landform system, so you get more realistic-shaped land; this could potentially start extending the appeal of the game to players who think it "looks ugly". Improving the performance would probably be needed though.
- A bigger "tech tree" - there is a point (after the first several weeks of sheer addiction;-) where the base game starts to get a bit tired. It would be truly awesome if could start with my bare hands and eventually be building steam engines, automobiles, rockets, space stations...
- A proper modding API, and other structures that encourage a real community (someone here mentioned a "mod store", where modders can actually get paid).
- Independent NPC actors who can actually do things would be cool (e.g. villagers actually collect resources to expand their village, or you can build automatons of some kind to help you mine or build - take the drudgery out of some of the "grinding" required in MC). Some of this has already been done in mods I believe.
If they are smart, they will keep it cross-platform and encourage it's "hackability". The thing is a giant cash-cow now, but there are so many ways that they could screw that up with a sequel. But, I am hopeful they see that one of the biggest things that made it work was that the creators listened to the community while building it, and let them be involved. It's a development technique that is utterly, utterly opposite to how Microsoft have worked in the past (a rant I heard from an MS Project MVP was basically that the MS developers were off in their own world and had nothing to do with actual project management, and I see the same in a lot of other MS products - especially Office).
Are Microsoft going to be smart (and courageous) enough to try something that radically different to what they're used to? I don't know, but I hope so. Microsoft have started to change their ways recently in ways that those who saw the 90s/2000s era wouldn't really have believed they would ever do, so maybe there is hope. If they don't, and attempt "closed cathedral" development of a Minecraft sequel then my expectation is going to range from "Mediocre improvements in some areas but still not radically different to or better than the original" to a "turdburger clusterfail".
If they're smart enough to see why it worked - and jump in and do that - I have much more hope for the future of Microsoft both as a company and a software house.
This does beg an interesting question: what if someone actually used modern, advanced learning algorithms to develop truly smart game AI? e.g. do what they did with chess and get something to "watch" lots of games and learn from them. I saw a headline recently about Google setting a learning machine against a bunch of old-school arcade games - I wonder what would happen if you applied that sort of thing to an RTS? I also wonder which would be the cheaper to develop - a set of rules to watch lots of beta testers to learn from them and select the best strategies, or trying to build a fully-realised computer player by hand? The former might be unpredictable, but could be quite interesting to watch (due to the possibility that it does something you actually didn't expect.
Has this ever been done/attempted?
My biggest peeve with computer players was how they don't respond at all to unexpected limits on their environment - they just stall and cease developing. I used to play lots of C&C: Red Alert (the first one, so long in the tooth now), and quite liked creating my own maps. But, doing something that required creativity like starting the player with a tiny island where you had to carefully plan your base would just see computer players stop building after about the fourth structure - while even a noob human player would have been able to do something, and would have realised the need to build a shipyard earlier than usual and hit the seas (such as getting a mobile construction unit so you can start populating/harvesting resources from the next island). Actually, on that note, I am hard pressed to think of any RTS game where I've seen a computer player populate more than one island, or build a second base.
I think you're right about the "only AIs that are dangerous are the 'rush' types" - partly out of nostalgia for the above, I played OpenRA with my kids recently, and at first we tried a "Turtle AI" 3 human/1 AI (to get them used to it), and it was boringly easy, so next we tried a 3-vs-3 with the AIs set to "Turtle", "Normal", and "Rush" respectively - and the Rush AI had us all (including myself, by far the most veteran) pinned for ages; and even managed to wipe the Turtle AI out completely. Just as I was starting to get the upper hand though (spamming the last remaining ore deposit in the centre with tanks, while simultaneously sneaking a mere two missile subs around the back), my daughter quit the game, so we never quite got to see the ending - but it did look like "survive the first onslaught and you've won". I have never seen a computer player survive when a map approaches resource starvation, whereas human players adapt.
My first encounter with "stupid AI" was Dune 2, where you could work out which direction the attacks were coming from (usually, a straight line from their production facility to your most valuable structure), and build a "catcher's glove" of turrets or strong tanks and wipe out everything coming at you with minimal (or sometimes no) losses. That worked in a game as recent as C&C: Generals (where I could add something to repair units and actually achieve zero losses). I don't even bother trying a "catcher's glove" against human players, unless it's a really obvious choke-point (because after the first loss, they try something and somewhere different - even on a choke point, they'll just start using air units instead). I would applaud the first RTS game developer who had an AI do something as sneaky as "air drop an engineer to take over a structure in the back of your base, then immediately drop a ready-built powerful turret and start turret-walking through your base" or (in Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander) "grab the enemy's (or your own) commander with an air transport, so it goes nuclear when it gets shot down over their base". It's the unconventional that AIs never seem to achieve.
Actually, you probably wouldn't drop something into the sun, you'd just drop it on the planet directly, making use of its kinetic energy. Trying to trigger a solar flare big enough to matter would take a massive, massive amount of mass (puns not intended!) And then you still have to aim it, taking into account the randomness of the sun's activity. I think your "easiest" way to sterilise a planet (barring nanotech or biological means) would be a well-planned scattering of large, fast rocks dropped directly on to the planet's surface; though, if you're just wanting to wipe the current civilisation, then you probably don't need to hit much more than the main population centres, then wait for the ash and dust (akin to a nuclear winter) to finish them off.
It makes no sense to destroy a star or a whole solar system for a few inhabitants on one single rock. It doesn't even make sense to try and completely destroy that rock, either - it requires far too much energy. Mass genocide isn't so hard though.
As someone in New Zealand, I got confused for a moment on how tomorrow could be Monday night... (and still not quite sure what time this is expected to be happening without having to go and read TFA:-). I really wish more of the world (America is the worst) would use GMT/UTC, as that's easy to translate (and it means I don't need to look up the offset of the timezone someone refers to - which again is usually only given by name). We are not all in America.:-)
As well as the other camera sounds mentioned, there was the whine of the flash capacitor charging, which started high-pitched and quickly went up above audible. My best memory of that was being on the lighting crew of a stage production and accidentally holding the camera next to my headset microphone when the flash started charging - and the subsequent "Augh, don't do that!" in my ear. Not quite sure why (though I could guess), but the microphone picked up the whine so much more than you would normally.
It is kind of sad that my kids probably won't ever use (and therefore understand) film - or any kind of tape for that matter (except the sticky kind).
The relatives pulled out some old fan-fold dot-matrix printer paper at their beach house recently for the kids to draw on. My kid didn't get why I was laughing (but I think they liked how you could rip the edges off).
You do still hear the hour beeps in a large enough group (University lectures a couple of years back, if they went over time). Not as many as you used to get, but still enough to notice. And I always found it amusing how wide a range of times people had - there was always one who was several minutes later than everyone else.
DSLR? A decent compact will out-perform a phone camera by miles. We have a cheap-ish Canon Powershot, and the comparison between the shots it takes and any iDevice pictures I see people come up with? Not even close. Anyone with a basic understanding of optics could tell you why, too: lens size. Phone or tablet cameras will always be grainy, because of simple photon count (unless you extend your shutter time, but then you get blurry messes).
Yes, an iProduct is "good enough" for most people, but that's because most people have a bad eye for picture-taking or picture quality. Some of us have higher standards (and, I'm not even close to being a pro - I leave that to some very skilled friends of mine).
Maybe it's because I have kids: ergo, everything photgraphable is "live action", and often indoors.
The laser-equipped 747 brings up an interesting question: could the US have anti-missile tech that we don't know about? (e.g. say they mothballed it, but only because it worked too well, meanwhile building an upgraded version in a quiet corner somewhere). I know that if I was the US president, I'd task some very smart, very well resourced people with a plausibly-deniable mandate of: "Find a way to stop ICBMs, just don't tell anyone." Not doing something like that would seem insane. Now, of course the possible answer is that it's simply too hard, but if a missile really is just "ballistic", then it shouldn't be difficult to work out how to hit it (multiple entry vehicles etc obviously make this exponentially harder - after all, it's why they exist - but that suggests to me that maybe a simple ballistic missile shouldn't be too difficult to stop...?)
The next thing I would do after developing and testing said tech is make sure that nobody found out and keep playing the MAD-fear game with everyone else, saving the advantage for if it's really needed, and to avoid anyone trying to "limit test" it.
Also, smuggling a large object that is highly radioactive isn't actually as easy as smuggling most other things, as it sorta has a very obvious signature, and a lot of border controls have detectors for this (it's not hard). Having said that, the US has a lot of coastline...
Assuming you get a decent-sized nuke into place and detonated somewhere populous, you then have the choice of, (a) don't own up and quietly laugh at your own destructive power but still have no one take you seriously, (b) own up and wave as Uncle Sam sends a few precious birdies your way (no better than attempting your own missiles, except that you actually did score one hit).
Of course, one could argue that the "set the universal constants..." comment from the mouseover text on that would suggest that only God is the only real programmer...:-) It's a bit like the old "If you want to make a cake from scratch, start by creating the universe."
A good scientist (I think) is one who approaches every question from three angles: (a) What does the question look like if I'm right?, (b) What does the question look like if I'm wrong?, (c) What does the question look like if I make no assumptions whatsoever about the outcome? The latter is actually really hard to do (and probably can never be done truly on anything).
I would say that someone approaching the world with "I am a rational being, created by a rational god to live in a rational universe with the ability to learn about it" probably isn't a wholly bad way to approach science. It would certainly be better than "I will look for any answer, except one I don't like", which I see from a lot of atheists as well as a lot of Christians. But, having said that, a scientist needs to be "agnostic" about his work - general rule: never trust anyone's research if they're doing it with a point to prove (a lot of "funded by" research tends this way).
Also, I would say that to be a good believer, you should question your faith. IMHO, faith that hasn't been tested isn't really faith. It scares me the number of people (in all sorts of realms, and from all sorts of beliefs) who don't question their core beliefs. Though, I can understand it to a degree - big, "meaning of the universe" questions can be scary (as is "what if I'm wrong?"), but one should still ask them, and frequently. It's a good antidote to becoming a freaky religious weirdo (atheists can be this, too - and actually, so can agnostics even, though it's a lot rarer).:-)
I'm interested to hear how you reconcile Genesis with the fossil record - what view do you take on how what the Bible tells of creation, the Flood, etc fits in with the observable fossils and geological records (being that presumably you have belief in both the Bible and nature being sources of truth)? Additionally, do you think that young-earth creationism can fit with the fossil record?
P.S. I am a Christian myself - I am interested to hear what a real expert says on the topic, rather than second- or third-hand variations of the facts, or repetitions of uninformed bias (from various sides).
Agree. We have similarly stupid password rules at my work, along with forced password changes every couple of months or so. (And, forcing password changes on a regular basis of course simply results in people writing down the passwords, so please, IT admins, don't do it!) (Example reference here).
XKCD's excellent commentaries have already been covered to death, but I wonder that no one seems to have thought of having a password-checking routine that does away with idiot rules and simply checks against a periodically-updated list of the most common passwords (sort of like a rainbow table, but I'm stretching the definition somewhat). So, disallow "P@ssword1" (which is a dumb password, but passes almost every rule set I have ever seen), but let someone have "beagles twirl widdershins up my saxophone" (which was suggested in an article on passwords... oh, about a decade ago, and I still remember it because it's very hard to forget).
"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more."
"In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."
etc. (Quotes from the footnotes, emphasis mine).
The only people who seriously say "Jesus didn't exist" are either (a) ignorant of history, (b) lying, (c) were lied to and believed it (which is a sub-set of (a)). That there was someone significant by the name of "Jesus" (Iesous or Yeshua in the original languages) in first-century Judea is certain (well, as certain as anything that long ago, but apparently more certain than things we don't question, like that Napoleon fought at Waterloo...)
The real questions are when we get on to exactly who he was and what he did, but whenever you hear the "there was no real Jesus" line, you can know you're talking to someone who has little knowledge of the topic (or is selling something - usually atheism;-).
Also noting that I've got this far down the page and I'm seeing a lot of debate but not many actual questions for the Dr...
Just to make a link to another current/. story, what about what Lytro is doing with camera optics and processing? I think what they are doing is quite different thinking to anything else out there, and might (eventually) have the potential to change our very definition of a "photo"...
Maybe I worked in a television station Transmission room too long... I start topping out at about three standard video feeds (four if absolutely no other distractions, two if I'm doing something useful but reasonably mundane - like making up the next day's playlist).:-)
I guess the other thing I probably developed working at the TV station was being good at prioritising data from TV and filling in the gaps (which can be annoying as most of the time I predict what's going to happen... except in really well-written stuff, which is kinda rare).
And, as I said, because texting has low temporal demand, you do it in the gaps (establishing shots, slightly less cerebral scenes, etc). And, if I do miss something, I skip back and re-watch it.:-)
Depends on what you're watching. Older shows can easily be dropped in on every once in a while and still be followed, and even newer shows can afford to have you look away for a bit or even miss a snatch of dialogue occasionally (actually, you can follow most of a show with only the audio and no video - try it sometime). Most of us have grown so used to TV now that we could almost watch two shows simultaneously, though TV has upped its pacing to try and keep us interested (try watching something older like MacGuyver and note how ponderous it seems now). Most people I know would be able to text and watch without losing much on either (seeing as texting has low temporal priority - you don't have things that you need to get to with any immediacy like you would on a phonecall).
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting point, and much more insightful than the myriad "What if I put up a mirror?" nonce comments here. I don't quite know enough laser physics to answer your suggestion, but I think it would probably work - as long as you knew to deploy it before you got hit. It would probably not stop you from getting blinded and skin burns (would probably make those worse), but it could be enough to stop your truck being disabled. I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented.
However, the effect of vaporisation/ionisation (conversion to a plasma) would need to be considered - most likely, the beam would clear its own path through the cloud in a fairly short time, so it would tend to be a "mitigation" not a "prevention" technique, unless the cloud also managed to "distract" whatever was maintaining the targeting lock long enough for you to move out of the way (e.g. a shallow gash down the whole side of the truck would be better than having no engine).
However, to answer the GP: think about the power requirements. This sort of laser is not something you would just carry around in your hand or conceal in a trenchcoat. It's the kind of thing you mount to a nuclear-powered ship, or on something like a 747. At best, you might be able to get it powered from a small truck, but effective anti-materiel laser weapons are still in the realm of "bigger than a tank".
Also, lasers don't tend to explode when say, hit by enemy fire. /. talked about this point recently - the navy want to get away from gunpowder.
Great idea, but it will never be able to be retro-fitted. :-( It is however, something we could (should?!) do for new formats in future - though realistically, most new file formats that I've seen are now zipped-XML, and unless you want to rewrite the ZIP format (we don't), it's not going to fly, although you do at least get to open it and have a decent look around inside (and get to content that you can usually decipher or extract). Ebook formats like EPUB have the first file in the ZIP required to be a plaintext "minetype" file, which I think is an excellent way to go about it.
Of course, what you are suggesting is that most people will know how to open a file in a text editor, which while standard par for the course for most of us on /., isn't something the usual user will think of. A better solution I think is to integrate something like the file command into the OS such that it, when asked to access an unknown file, it interrogates it to say "this is a xyz file, and these applications have registered that they can open this type of file, which would you like to use?"
Interestingly, back in the old Amiga days, you actually could identify a file like this - the first 4 bytes of something like an IFF ILBM picture file (IIRC, it was a long time ago) would be a recognisable 4-letter combination. It wasn't hard to learn some of the common ones. This was back on an OS that didn't seem to care at all about file extensions. It was such a useful skill that I still try it, though most modern formats don't seem to start with anything human-readable like that. I think it may have been done that way as it allowed the OS to only need to read the first word from disk to identify the file (though nowadays we would put that in the filesystem metadata, which means less seek time, though there's no reason why the filesystem metadata couldn't be informed from reading the file in that manner the first time it is created).
You forgot one: the Ribbon. Not only is it the only user interface change I have ever seen that caused multiple experienced power users of a product be unable to find basic functionality, even now that I have been forced to get used to it, I find it slows me down considerably, because most things take an extra click or two (usually at near-opposite ends of the ribbon, adding all the seek time as well) and (unlike a toolbar) there's no guarantee that a common button is going to be where you expect it. Yes, there are keyboard shortcut alternatives, but because they're not advertised until you hit the ALT key (and they're unlike anything from previous versions or other programs) I find I don't learn them. It's like someone read research on UI design and thought "how many of these things can we get away with ruining?", though I realise the more likely scenario is that some suit thought "hey, I personally don't like our current toolbar+menus layout, and this Ribbon is a pretty design, let's use it everywhere!" without actually reading any UI design research or checking with real users.
Also, Clippy. ;-)
...they listen to the various commentators on what works and what doesn't, and create something that takes the working idea of the original and extends it further (so, things like cubic chunks that allow ~infinite height worlds, a proper modding API, tutorial for new players, ). Or, even better, they look to the gaming and modding community and get them to help steer it (I think one of the reasons why Minecraft became such a great winner was because the community was able to contribute to it from a very early stage - it was built around what real players wanted).
Personally, I think that a few neat ideas would be:
If they are smart, they will keep it cross-platform and encourage it's "hackability". The thing is a giant cash-cow now, but there are so many ways that they could screw that up with a sequel. But, I am hopeful they see that one of the biggest things that made it work was that the creators listened to the community while building it, and let them be involved. It's a development technique that is utterly, utterly opposite to how Microsoft have worked in the past (a rant I heard from an MS Project MVP was basically that the MS developers were off in their own world and had nothing to do with actual project management, and I see the same in a lot of other MS products - especially Office).
Are Microsoft going to be smart (and courageous) enough to try something that radically different to what they're used to? I don't know, but I hope so. Microsoft have started to change their ways recently in ways that those who saw the 90s/2000s era wouldn't really have believed they would ever do, so maybe there is hope. If they don't, and attempt "closed cathedral" development of a Minecraft sequel then my expectation is going to range from "Mediocre improvements in some areas but still not radically different to or better than the original" to a "turdburger clusterfail".
If they're smart enough to see why it worked - and jump in and do that - I have much more hope for the future of Microsoft both as a company and a software house.
Hold on, doesn't Minecraft 2.0 already exist? ;-)
This does beg an interesting question: what if someone actually used modern, advanced learning algorithms to develop truly smart game AI? e.g. do what they did with chess and get something to "watch" lots of games and learn from them. I saw a headline recently about Google setting a learning machine against a bunch of old-school arcade games - I wonder what would happen if you applied that sort of thing to an RTS? I also wonder which would be the cheaper to develop - a set of rules to watch lots of beta testers to learn from them and select the best strategies, or trying to build a fully-realised computer player by hand? The former might be unpredictable, but could be quite interesting to watch (due to the possibility that it does something you actually didn't expect.
Has this ever been done/attempted?
My biggest peeve with computer players was how they don't respond at all to unexpected limits on their environment - they just stall and cease developing. I used to play lots of C&C: Red Alert (the first one, so long in the tooth now), and quite liked creating my own maps. But, doing something that required creativity like starting the player with a tiny island where you had to carefully plan your base would just see computer players stop building after about the fourth structure - while even a noob human player would have been able to do something, and would have realised the need to build a shipyard earlier than usual and hit the seas (such as getting a mobile construction unit so you can start populating/harvesting resources from the next island). Actually, on that note, I am hard pressed to think of any RTS game where I've seen a computer player populate more than one island, or build a second base.
I think you're right about the "only AIs that are dangerous are the 'rush' types" - partly out of nostalgia for the above, I played OpenRA with my kids recently, and at first we tried a "Turtle AI" 3 human/1 AI (to get them used to it), and it was boringly easy, so next we tried a 3-vs-3 with the AIs set to "Turtle", "Normal", and "Rush" respectively - and the Rush AI had us all (including myself, by far the most veteran) pinned for ages; and even managed to wipe the Turtle AI out completely. Just as I was starting to get the upper hand though (spamming the last remaining ore deposit in the centre with tanks, while simultaneously sneaking a mere two missile subs around the back), my daughter quit the game, so we never quite got to see the ending - but it did look like "survive the first onslaught and you've won". I have never seen a computer player survive when a map approaches resource starvation, whereas human players adapt.
My first encounter with "stupid AI" was Dune 2, where you could work out which direction the attacks were coming from (usually, a straight line from their production facility to your most valuable structure), and build a "catcher's glove" of turrets or strong tanks and wipe out everything coming at you with minimal (or sometimes no) losses. That worked in a game as recent as C&C: Generals (where I could add something to repair units and actually achieve zero losses). I don't even bother trying a "catcher's glove" against human players, unless it's a really obvious choke-point (because after the first loss, they try something and somewhere different - even on a choke point, they'll just start using air units instead). I would applaud the first RTS game developer who had an AI do something as sneaky as "air drop an engineer to take over a structure in the back of your base, then immediately drop a ready-built powerful turret and start turret-walking through your base" or (in Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander) "grab the enemy's (or your own) commander with an air transport, so it goes nuclear when it gets shot down over their base". It's the unconventional that AIs never seem to achieve.
Actually, you probably wouldn't drop something into the sun, you'd just drop it on the planet directly, making use of its kinetic energy. Trying to trigger a solar flare big enough to matter would take a massive, massive amount of mass (puns not intended!) And then you still have to aim it, taking into account the randomness of the sun's activity. I think your "easiest" way to sterilise a planet (barring nanotech or biological means) would be a well-planned scattering of large, fast rocks dropped directly on to the planet's surface; though, if you're just wanting to wipe the current civilisation, then you probably don't need to hit much more than the main population centres, then wait for the ash and dust (akin to a nuclear winter) to finish them off.
It makes no sense to destroy a star or a whole solar system for a few inhabitants on one single rock. It doesn't even make sense to try and completely destroy that rock, either - it requires far too much energy. Mass genocide isn't so hard though.
As someone in New Zealand, I got confused for a moment on how tomorrow could be Monday night... (and still not quite sure what time this is expected to be happening without having to go and read TFA :-). I really wish more of the world (America is the worst) would use GMT/UTC, as that's easy to translate (and it means I don't need to look up the offset of the timezone someone refers to - which again is usually only given by name). We are not all in America. :-)
As well as the other camera sounds mentioned, there was the whine of the flash capacitor charging, which started high-pitched and quickly went up above audible. My best memory of that was being on the lighting crew of a stage production and accidentally holding the camera next to my headset microphone when the flash started charging - and the subsequent "Augh, don't do that!" in my ear. Not quite sure why (though I could guess), but the microphone picked up the whine so much more than you would normally.
It is kind of sad that my kids probably won't ever use (and therefore understand) film - or any kind of tape for that matter (except the sticky kind).
The relatives pulled out some old fan-fold dot-matrix printer paper at their beach house recently for the kids to draw on. My kid didn't get why I was laughing (but I think they liked how you could rip the edges off).
You do still hear the hour beeps in a large enough group (University lectures a couple of years back, if they went over time). Not as many as you used to get, but still enough to notice. And I always found it amusing how wide a range of times people had - there was always one who was several minutes later than everyone else.
Most places I see this used, it's "photochop" or "photochopping" as a verb. Though, this is all somewhat off-topic...
ç :-)
ç
Amusingly, this is something that is fairly easily googled...! ("Cedilla in HTML")
Though having an international keyboard layout (or copying from an outside source) works too: ç
DSLR? A decent compact will out-perform a phone camera by miles. We have a cheap-ish Canon Powershot, and the comparison between the shots it takes and any iDevice pictures I see people come up with? Not even close. Anyone with a basic understanding of optics could tell you why, too: lens size. Phone or tablet cameras will always be grainy, because of simple photon count (unless you extend your shutter time, but then you get blurry messes).
Yes, an iProduct is "good enough" for most people, but that's because most people have a bad eye for picture-taking or picture quality. Some of us have higher standards (and, I'm not even close to being a pro - I leave that to some very skilled friends of mine).
Maybe it's because I have kids: ergo, everything photgraphable is "live action", and often indoors.
The laser-equipped 747 brings up an interesting question: could the US have anti-missile tech that we don't know about? (e.g. say they mothballed it, but only because it worked too well, meanwhile building an upgraded version in a quiet corner somewhere). I know that if I was the US president, I'd task some very smart, very well resourced people with a plausibly-deniable mandate of: "Find a way to stop ICBMs, just don't tell anyone." Not doing something like that would seem insane. Now, of course the possible answer is that it's simply too hard, but if a missile really is just "ballistic", then it shouldn't be difficult to work out how to hit it (multiple entry vehicles etc obviously make this exponentially harder - after all, it's why they exist - but that suggests to me that maybe a simple ballistic missile shouldn't be too difficult to stop...?)
The next thing I would do after developing and testing said tech is make sure that nobody found out and keep playing the MAD-fear game with everyone else, saving the advantage for if it's really needed, and to avoid anyone trying to "limit test" it.
Shh... Let's hope that NK isn't that smart. :-)
Also, smuggling a large object that is highly radioactive isn't actually as easy as smuggling most other things, as it sorta has a very obvious signature, and a lot of border controls have detectors for this (it's not hard). Having said that, the US has a lot of coastline...
Assuming you get a decent-sized nuke into place and detonated somewhere populous, you then have the choice of, (a) don't own up and quietly laugh at your own destructive power but still have no one take you seriously, (b) own up and wave as Uncle Sam sends a few precious birdies your way (no better than attempting your own missiles, except that you actually did score one hit).
It is a scary possibility though.
Of course, one could argue that the "set the universal constants..." comment from the mouseover text on that would suggest that only God is the only real programmer... :-) It's a bit like the old "If you want to make a cake from scratch, start by creating the universe."
A good scientist (I think) is one who approaches every question from three angles: (a) What does the question look like if I'm right?, (b) What does the question look like if I'm wrong?, (c) What does the question look like if I make no assumptions whatsoever about the outcome? The latter is actually really hard to do (and probably can never be done truly on anything).
I would say that someone approaching the world with "I am a rational being, created by a rational god to live in a rational universe with the ability to learn about it" probably isn't a wholly bad way to approach science. It would certainly be better than "I will look for any answer, except one I don't like", which I see from a lot of atheists as well as a lot of Christians. But, having said that, a scientist needs to be "agnostic" about his work - general rule: never trust anyone's research if they're doing it with a point to prove (a lot of "funded by" research tends this way).
Also, I would say that to be a good believer, you should question your faith. IMHO, faith that hasn't been tested isn't really faith. It scares me the number of people (in all sorts of realms, and from all sorts of beliefs) who don't question their core beliefs. Though, I can understand it to a degree - big, "meaning of the universe" questions can be scary (as is "what if I'm wrong?"), but one should still ask them, and frequently. It's a good antidote to becoming a freaky religious weirdo (atheists can be this, too - and actually, so can agnostics even, though it's a lot rarer). :-)
I'm interested to hear how you reconcile Genesis with the fossil record - what view do you take on how what the Bible tells of creation, the Flood, etc fits in with the observable fossils and geological records (being that presumably you have belief in both the Bible and nature being sources of truth)? Additionally, do you think that young-earth creationism can fit with the fossil record?
P.S. I am a Christian myself - I am interested to hear what a real expert says on the topic, rather than second- or third-hand variations of the facts, or repetitions of uninformed bias (from various sides).
Agree. We have similarly stupid password rules at my work, along with forced password changes every couple of months or so. (And, forcing password changes on a regular basis of course simply results in people writing down the passwords, so please, IT admins, don't do it!) (Example reference here).
XKCD's excellent commentaries have already been covered to death, but I wonder that no one seems to have thought of having a password-checking routine that does away with idiot rules and simply checks against a periodically-updated list of the most common passwords (sort of like a rainbow table, but I'm stretching the definition somewhat). So, disallow "P@ssword1" (which is a dumb password, but passes almost every rule set I have ever seen), but let someone have "beagles twirl widdershins up my saxophone" (which was suggested in an article on passwords... oh, about a decade ago, and I still remember it because it's very hard to forget).
Why do people actually believe the whole "Jesus didn't really exist" line? Oh wait, I think I can guess.
Try starting here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more."
"In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."
etc. (Quotes from the footnotes, emphasis mine).
The only people who seriously say "Jesus didn't exist" are either (a) ignorant of history, (b) lying, (c) were lied to and believed it (which is a sub-set of (a)). That there was someone significant by the name of "Jesus" (Iesous or Yeshua in the original languages) in first-century Judea is certain (well, as certain as anything that long ago, but apparently more certain than things we don't question, like that Napoleon fought at Waterloo...)
The real questions are when we get on to exactly who he was and what he did, but whenever you hear the "there was no real Jesus" line, you can know you're talking to someone who has little knowledge of the topic (or is selling something - usually atheism ;-).
Also noting that I've got this far down the page and I'm seeing a lot of debate but not many actual questions for the Dr...
Just to make a link to another current /. story, what about what Lytro is doing with camera optics and processing? I think what they are doing is quite different thinking to anything else out there, and might (eventually) have the potential to change our very definition of a "photo"...
Maybe I worked in a television station Transmission room too long... I start topping out at about three standard video feeds (four if absolutely no other distractions, two if I'm doing something useful but reasonably mundane - like making up the next day's playlist). :-)
I guess the other thing I probably developed working at the TV station was being good at prioritising data from TV and filling in the gaps (which can be annoying as most of the time I predict what's going to happen... except in really well-written stuff, which is kinda rare).
And, as I said, because texting has low temporal demand, you do it in the gaps (establishing shots, slightly less cerebral scenes, etc). And, if I do miss something, I skip back and re-watch it. :-)
Depends on what you're watching. Older shows can easily be dropped in on every once in a while and still be followed, and even newer shows can afford to have you look away for a bit or even miss a snatch of dialogue occasionally (actually, you can follow most of a show with only the audio and no video - try it sometime). Most of us have grown so used to TV now that we could almost watch two shows simultaneously, though TV has upped its pacing to try and keep us interested (try watching something older like MacGuyver and note how ponderous it seems now). Most people I know would be able to text and watch without losing much on either (seeing as texting has low temporal priority - you don't have things that you need to get to with any immediacy like you would on a phonecall).