How much bandwidth is needed for a thousand people watching online streaming video? Ten thousand? A million? Provided the video is a live feed, the bandwidth needed is exactly the same in all cases and identical to that needed by one single viewer. Multicast was enabled across the entire Internet backbone in 1996 as a native protocol. Not tunneled, not virtualized, native. Your ISP has the feed coming in, as multicast is used for most routing protocols. Your ISP might not be bothered to forward it, but that's not a bandwidth problem or a technology problem. It's not even a cost problem as the feed already exists. It's a problem of the ISP trying to screw customers for more money by oversubscribing the service them charging more for the extra bandwidth you need to get the level of service you wanted originally.
The network goes crazy, you deprioritize bulk traffic. Spammers suffer, but I don't give a flying about their "needs" in an emergency.
Flashy flyers that don't deliver are a civil offence under consumer protection laws in many countries (such as the UK) and can be a criminal offence under some circumstances. I see no reason to pity the bloodsuckling leeches.
If the network was capable of serving the bandwidth that has been sold, 10% of the consumers would max out when using 10% of the bandwidth. Otherwise, you are selling a service that does not exist, you are only selling a random-sized portion of that service with no guarantees on typical service and no guarantees on overall service. If you never connected those customers up, you'd not be denying them anything that couldn't have been denied them even if everything was hooked up perfectly.
IMHO, selling something that does not exist is unethical and unacceptable. At the very least, consumers of the Internet should have solid guarantees for performance. If you buy, say, a 10 megabit link, then that could come with two guarantees - that your average speed will be 7 megabits and that your worst-case will be 5 megabits. That's acceptable. Getting a 10 megabit link in which your practical transfer rates will never exceed a tenth of that, where you will never be able to get recognition that a problem even exists, and where true bandwidth allocation is inequtable and bears no relationship to agreements made - THAT is a problem.
I've heard that is true, but I don't buy it. The Turing Halting Problem, on which such arguments rest, only proves that you cannot prove that a program will complete in finite time. Proof of completion is an NP-complete problem. However, we're not talking about completing - a relatively rare scenario for a program. We are talking about the case where the result of a function f() on some data d over the complete storage for the program is such that there is a data d where the results of function f() are logically inconsistent or impossible.
Assuming each function is written to minimize side-effects, has a well-defined entry point and a well-defined exit point, has definite and provable pre-conditions, and every function it in turn calls has definite and provable post-conditions, then it is possible to prove the program correct. These requirements are quite sufficient to bypass Turing's Halting Problem because we are no longer talking general cases but special cases, and special cases can be proven.
MPG ratings are notoriously inaccurate because it's a single figure derived from an unscientific selection of conditions that an unscientific selection of cars is exposed to, with all other variables and parameters extrapolated and/or ignored.
It would seem much more logical to expose a truly random selection of cars to exhaustive tests over a wider range of conditions for longer periods of time. Instead of averaging, you plot against a distribution and take the average of the distribution. This, however, is not the quoted figure for any car. It's merely the baseline for that model. Each car has to have some nominal testing - at least to see if the engine will start. Assuming that the distribution will be the same with merely the offsets being different, you then derive the effective MPG from the distribution and where that specific car is believed to be on it.
You now have an MPG per car, but it's still a single value and single values are useless. I'd therefore do the above with nine distributions, not one. One for 0-25 mph, one for 25-50, one for 50-75, and each of those for smooth traffic flow, heavy traffic and stop/go traffic.
Consumers tend to drown out lots of stats, though, and nine numbers - trivial to any geek - would be murderous on your average couch potato. On the other hand, colours tend to be workable. Simply do a rainbow spectrum, where violet is so far above average that driving round the planet uses less fuel than a typical hummvee uses to get out the parking lot, and where red is where you're escorted to the grocery store by an oil tanker. Nice and visual, though with hard data for those who actually want hard data to work with.
Worse than that. A lot of medical software, these days, is written specifically for Windows - both on the control and user sides. To be honest, it is one of the scariest things I've seen. About the only thing more terrifying was the article on SecurityFocus claiming that virtually all the US' infrastructure hinges on some Windows NT boxes that people installed for control operations and never replaced.
My personal feeling is that the use of unstable software (no matter who it is by) should be outlawed from mission-critical systems where lives really are at stake. It's not like a comatose patient can ask to be moved to an intensive-care ward where the monitors run something sensible. I don't believe anyone has ever collected the stats for misuse of software in critical situations, but I would be willing to bet that the costs that would have been incurred if death through negligence could be proved in such cases would vastly exceed the cost of getting quality systems in the first place.
(I'll make an exception for imaging software that is intended more for off-line useage. If that fails, nobody is going to die - except maybe the software engineer who programmed it - and recovery from minor crashes can be very quick.)
My bad for not being clear. Besides, the Wiccans build far better crystals than the Swiss. But when it comes to chocolate and clockwork, the Swiss can't be beat.:) (However, chocolate clockwork that ran at 1 gigahertz would probably not last very long.)
The item does seem to matter. Corporate execs who buy each other hundreds of dollars of illegal substances and/or activities are rarely taxed or even questioned. The same amount in donated gas mileage expenses (IIRC, NY's comptroller got caught on this one) can cost the person their job.
IIRC, none landed. Very different thing. Plenty of hurricanes out to sea, this year, though the late El Nino screwed up the original forecast. The oceans are warming quite nicely - twice the originally forecast rate, I believe, with truly massive die-offs in the zooplankton globally and an extremely stable and rapidly-growing dead zone off the Oregon coast. Forecasts for global climate change have been revised sharply now-wards, as a result of more recent studies on ocean currents and ocean temperatures.
As for comparing a weather forecast with a stellar forecast, please bear in mind that the sun is ludicrously simple and trivial, compared to the complexities of weather. Remember our dear friend the Butterfly Effect? No? Pray, let me remind you of the consequences of living in a system that is sensitive to initial conditions, which is so variable between two points as to be essentially fractal, and where we can't even determine all the inputs and can barely measure the ones we know of. In comparison, a ball of hydrogen plasma that is collapsing in on itself and has very limited internal structure is a piece of cake to simulate. Astronomers have also been around a lot longer than Southern US meteorologists. True, only by a couple orders of magnitude, and I'm sure that the natives in Florida would have been happy to pass their observations on to the European colonists of the late 1700s, if anyone amongst them had thought the climate worth paying attention to. (Well, I can't expect things like that to change quickly.)
I would truly love it if someone could produce a Swiss timepiece that could operate in the gigahertz range, because I have absolutely no friggin' doubt it would be vastly more accurate than the normal clock chips in PCs. It would make life hell for the overclockers, though.
The new firehose section on Slashdot might help there. I, for one, won't e-mail an objection merely because of a business association (alleged or proven) but if others think it's a genuine problem then I would encourage them to object on that basis. However, I can say that I'm going to pay some attention to the stories listed for articles where I've good reason to believe the story is bogus, FUD, etc. What I hope is that Slashdot does NOT go down the path of entirely user-selecting, as I actually think the editors here do a far better job of picking the really meaty stuff and other sites that have tried that approach are plagued by story trolls. Slashdot isn't perfect, but there's a reason it has such an intense following AND has earned the respect and envy of even the "traditional" press at times.
...you can tick that joke off the list. It has clocked too many miles as it is, though I must hand it to you for chiming in with it, though to judge from the number of replies, it didn't wind up too many people. Mind you, with effort, we might yet get this thread to go round and round.
Yes, I can see that someone wishing to test out their dentistry skills on a Giant Squid would likely discover some severe disadvantages in being trapped inside a gigantic clamplike device.
They have a great deal of muscle power, but zero tensile strength. If they tried to pull a human arm off, I suspect you'd end up with them rendered mostly 'armless.
Actually, a much better trap for a giant squid would be to have a cylinder with closeable doors at each end and bait in the middle. When the squid enters, close the doors. The squid can't injure itself in such an enclosure, is kept at uniform pressure, is kept in water, and can readily be transferred to an enclosure such as an aquarium. Such devices are routinely used for catching live aquatic life that would not survive a net and also for taking water samples at pre-specified depths with no risk of contamination, and have been used very successfully in both fields for at least 30 years.
I figured out that you could build such a device for catching a giant squid at the full 6 mile depth that they usually live and keep them at that pressure. It would not be trivial - the walls would need to be fairly thick to withstand the pressure from the inside pushing out, once you got it to the surface - but it's well within the design specs of the larger oil pipes in use today, so is perfectly doable. Now, if you can catch giant squid much closer to the surface than that, then it's even better - you could easily construct a device that operated at a few thousand feet.
Dissecting frogs that were alive has produced nothing of significant value in science. Most of the research that has produced valuable results (the discovery that electricity can stimulate muscles, for example, and the anatomy of frogs) has not required the killing of animals to achieve.
In the case of giant squids, we already know the anatomy and physiology, from previous finds. We don't need mere case studies that reveal nothing new, we need new data on the stuff we CAN'T find out from the remains of giant squid that have been salvaged. A hundred near-identical remains adds no new information. (Well, not quite true - you can use DNA analysis to get an idea of genetic diversity, so in that case the additional cases would add something. But even there, it makes bugger all difference to the research if the subject is alive or dead. Killing the subject doesn't benefit you at all.)
Animal experimentation has produced mixed results - aspirin and caffeine are lethal to most animals, and many medicines tested successfully on animals were later rejected after human studies showed them unsuitable. At present, better alternatives are limited to non-existant, but that's just a matter of time to fix. The process is simply not producing data of nearly sufficient quality to justify continuing it once suitable alternatives of sufficient quality have been developed.
However, this is not in the same league at all. In animal experiments - however crappy the results - you are at least getting results that you can't get by other means. Mortally injuring giant squids and then examining the remains is telling you exactly NOTHING that you couldn't obtain by other means. Alive, you can learn much about the squid that is unknown today. Obtain a corpse, and you can study something about the lives and deaths of these animals and therefore learn something about their natural environment. Killing them tell you... that they're not monsters from a really bad sci-fi movie, but not a whole lot more.
But it requires a slight change to the definition of middle. The "middle way" (or "third position" as Zen Buddhists call it) is not the statistical mean or median of all views polled. Rather, it is better described as looking for what good the full spectrum of ideas has, minus the limitations imposed by being bound to a specific part of that spectrum and definitely minus the blindness created at the extremes.
(I would point out that none of this limits learning from those extremes - good ideas can be found THROUGHOUT the full spectrum - the objective is merely to avoid the error of thinking that a specific view is the only view.)
You will generally find that genuine "free thinkers" (by which I do not mean people who "freely" think what they're told, or who cease thinking once they've freely thought something, I mean people who explore the possibilities freely) tend to be divided into two loosely-defined camps. One camp would be the "middle way" group, who do not exist in the left/right spectrum per-se. Members of this camp probably have nothing else in common. The second camp encompasses a broad range of liberalism, socialism, left-wing-ism, collaborativism, intellectualism, etc. The distinction is that the second group has the notion of an orthodoxy, a set of core tenants that shape any ideas imported, whereas the first group does not and cannot. Neither group is "better" and plenty of engineers, geeks, nerds, technocrats, etc, can be found in either camp or even wander between them. The boundaries are fuzzy at times and do not require passports.
It is worth noting that whilst you will find people who hold some extreme views in both camps - extreme along any spectrum you care to name - you will NOT find genuine extremists in either. Extremism is the antethesis of thought and thus it is not possible to both freely think AND nail yourself to a single point.
I'm not convinced it was terribly accidental - attempts in New Zealand to catch baby giant squid failed because they were too fragile to be caught, and the previous attempt to film a giant squid resulted in a tentacle being ripped off. The Japanese aren't stupid and aren't ignorant, ergo they knew damn well that the approach they were using was likely to cause grievous and possibly fatal injuries.
I am much more bothered by this attitude of "oh well, doesn't matter how many we kill", though, than with the incident itself. It is wholly unacceptable that ANY scientist would hold the attitude that brainlessness is acceptable, that extreme interference with what you are studying could even produce useful results even if it were acceptable (sorry, but that has not been accepted in any branch of science for nigh on 100 years), or that the level of endangerment can be measured by how many you destroy (sheer ignorance and a pathetic excuse for an intellect).
This is not the only area in which species otherwise classed as threatened or endangered have been labelled as free to plunder, and Japan is far from the only nation guilty of such abominable practices. Scientists with any kind of respect for their profession or for the world in which they live should make it clear that such attitudes are not professionally accepted and that researchers who would freely destroy the subjects of their research have no place in the modern scientific community.
From Beowulf to Bilbo, the protagonist in quality fantasy is rarely a super-human figure, but rather a very ordinary person who does and says all kinds of extraordinary things. You'll see it in "Weirdstone of Brisingamen" (Alan Garner is one of the greatest authors of all time, IMHO), you'll even see it in "The Colour Of Magic" (Rincewind is a cowardly failed wizard - hardly the stuff of superheros).
Superheroic fantasy is ancient too - much of the Celtic tradition in the "Book Of Invasions" is of the Superman kind. Literally. All superheros in that tradition have a weakness that can be (and eventually was) used to destroy them. They were truly powerful, but not all-powerful and not all-perfect.
The Ultrahero - someone who is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful, utterly beyond failure - that is a much more modern invention and is the only kind that can really be called "Politically Correct", albeit correct for medieval Europe as opposed to today. But, hey, what's a thousand years between friends?
Heh! No problems. Pythonesque humour can sometimes woosh over anyone's head.
Though, I would make one minor correction. The Romans got their alphabet from the Greeks, via the Etruscans, who also introduced the Greeks to alphabetic writing. Linear B appears to be an adaptation of Linear A for the purpose of writing extremely ancient Greek - pre-Homeric by a few hundred years. The letter "F" is the oldest letter in the alphabet and seems to predate the Romans, Greeks and Etruscans. It seems to have origins in Sumerian times, if I'm understanding the texts on ancient languages correctly. I am unclear as to why one single letter would be retained when the rest of the alphabet kept getting replaced or redesigned, especially as it's not so widely used and dominant that replacement would even be a problem.
Ultimately, though, the greatest contributors to the world learning the Romanized alphabet seem to be the Etruscans, who seem to have been some of the first people to trade abstract knowledge as a commodity between nations. In the same way that when Rome invaded Greece, it acquired some Greek thought patterns and philosophies, it is believable that Rome providing others with their proprietary language was somehow an idea developed from their "embracing and extending" the Etruscan peoples.
At one point, all of the episodes were available from download from fan sites. Sadly, that is no longer the case and as far as I know, there is no indication of when a "professional"/commercial version will appear. It was truly great stuff, and I wish the team would settle their differences and continue it.
You're absolutely right that energy can't just be created. As I mentioned, really the best you can do without actually adding energy from another source is to simply avoid wasting it. The human frame is a superb compromise for all possible extremes and moderations, but can't in all honesty be described as actually efficient in any of them. I can therefore see someone building an exoskeleton that handles limited special cases extremely well, giving you more results for the same human effort.
However, you are also right in saying that the sorts of things described by the BBC can't possibly qualify for this. We have no reason to assume the US military is ever going to be honest on their R&D programs. There are also known examples (the book "The Men Who Stare At Goats" documents a few) where their R&D has been scientifically questionable at best, so we can't even assume that the system would even work, no matter how accurate or inaccurate the description is. This makes it hard to make any real headway.
If we assume that the R&D is producing useful results and that they are subject to the same laws of physics, we should be able to reverse-engineer what techniques they could be employing. There simply aren't many options that would do anything remotely useful or in a sufficiently energy-efficient manner to be useful in a hostile environment. The advantage of this approach is we can completely ignore any errors in the details (no matter how they got there) and only bother with the practicalities of the mechanics. The disadvantage is that although such a method would give you a design that would actually work, you have zero idea if it has anything in common with what the DoD is up to.
On the third hand, we're geeks and a practical DIY exoskeleton kit may actually be far more interesting and useful than a history we will never really know of a project we will likely never really see.
Often when you hear people talk about device X increasing the power of something, they are really not talking about power at all. Power (as in energy x time) is not something you'd really have a whole lot of control over unless you did have a horribly large, heavy, vulnerable, probably highly explosive power source strapped on.
More effective use of power for the purpose intended is something you see virtually everywhere - gears, levers, springs, virtually all mechanical devices that have ever existed are all simply ways of putting in the same amount but utilizing it better. I imagine the exoskeletal armor is no different - it might conserve energy that you'd otherwise lose, reducing the impact of varying speed or incline. If it's really good, it might be able to convert some of the energy it absorbs from impacts into energy available for you to use. It might eliminate variations in ground level, reducing the effort involved in moving over rough terrain. But really there's not much more it can do than that.
(Well, if the US military has got Tesla's theories to work, I guess they could power the suit remotely, so eliminating the need for portable power. On the other hand, if they were at that point, they really wouldn't need exoskeletal armor - or indeed soldiers. You'd just hook a Tesla coil to a microwave fillament and boil your opponents from long range.)
The USA nearly invaded the BBC studios when they started putting BBC-recorded concert recordings online for free. Sheesh, the legal wrangling and the threats were not insignificant, mostly on the grounds that the BBC was being "anticompetitive" by making stuff available for, well, people.
At the moment, there are major attempts to define P2P as ipso facto piracy in many countries, the US included. It will also seriously impact attempts by some US companies to cripple access to British programs in the US. As crippled and as limited as this is, I fully expect major lawsuits to follow. If the older, unprofitable material was made for free, the lawyers would be sending Polonium, not cease-and-desists.
I fully expect the BBC to migrate towards making all material below the margin of being worth selling available for free for everyone. At this time, however, there are enough media outlets abusing anti-competitive laws to guarantee their own little fiefdoms and monopolies that the BBC is probably more concerned with not getting blasted out of existence by intellectual property tyrants than it is with meeting what is likely their ultimate objective.
Slashdot Mirror
The network goes crazy, you deprioritize bulk traffic. Spammers suffer, but I don't give a flying about their "needs" in an emergency.
Flashy flyers that don't deliver are a civil offence under consumer protection laws in many countries (such as the UK) and can be a criminal offence under some circumstances. I see no reason to pity the bloodsuckling leeches.
IMHO, selling something that does not exist is unethical and unacceptable. At the very least, consumers of the Internet should have solid guarantees for performance. If you buy, say, a 10 megabit link, then that could come with two guarantees - that your average speed will be 7 megabits and that your worst-case will be 5 megabits. That's acceptable. Getting a 10 megabit link in which your practical transfer rates will never exceed a tenth of that, where you will never be able to get recognition that a problem even exists, and where true bandwidth allocation is inequtable and bears no relationship to agreements made - THAT is a problem.
Assuming each function is written to minimize side-effects, has a well-defined entry point and a well-defined exit point, has definite and provable pre-conditions, and every function it in turn calls has definite and provable post-conditions, then it is possible to prove the program correct. These requirements are quite sufficient to bypass Turing's Halting Problem because we are no longer talking general cases but special cases, and special cases can be proven.
It would seem much more logical to expose a truly random selection of cars to exhaustive tests over a wider range of conditions for longer periods of time. Instead of averaging, you plot against a distribution and take the average of the distribution. This, however, is not the quoted figure for any car. It's merely the baseline for that model. Each car has to have some nominal testing - at least to see if the engine will start. Assuming that the distribution will be the same with merely the offsets being different, you then derive the effective MPG from the distribution and where that specific car is believed to be on it.
You now have an MPG per car, but it's still a single value and single values are useless. I'd therefore do the above with nine distributions, not one. One for 0-25 mph, one for 25-50, one for 50-75, and each of those for smooth traffic flow, heavy traffic and stop/go traffic.
Consumers tend to drown out lots of stats, though, and nine numbers - trivial to any geek - would be murderous on your average couch potato. On the other hand, colours tend to be workable. Simply do a rainbow spectrum, where violet is so far above average that driving round the planet uses less fuel than a typical hummvee uses to get out the parking lot, and where red is where you're escorted to the grocery store by an oil tanker. Nice and visual, though with hard data for those who actually want hard data to work with.
My personal feeling is that the use of unstable software (no matter who it is by) should be outlawed from mission-critical systems where lives really are at stake. It's not like a comatose patient can ask to be moved to an intensive-care ward where the monitors run something sensible. I don't believe anyone has ever collected the stats for misuse of software in critical situations, but I would be willing to bet that the costs that would have been incurred if death through negligence could be proved in such cases would vastly exceed the cost of getting quality systems in the first place.
(I'll make an exception for imaging software that is intended more for off-line useage. If that fails, nobody is going to die - except maybe the software engineer who programmed it - and recovery from minor crashes can be very quick.)
My bad for not being clear. Besides, the Wiccans build far better crystals than the Swiss. But when it comes to chocolate and clockwork, the Swiss can't be beat. :) (However, chocolate clockwork that ran at 1 gigahertz would probably not last very long.)
The item does seem to matter. Corporate execs who buy each other hundreds of dollars of illegal substances and/or activities are rarely taxed or even questioned. The same amount in donated gas mileage expenses (IIRC, NY's comptroller got caught on this one) can cost the person their job.
As for comparing a weather forecast with a stellar forecast, please bear in mind that the sun is ludicrously simple and trivial, compared to the complexities of weather. Remember our dear friend the Butterfly Effect? No? Pray, let me remind you of the consequences of living in a system that is sensitive to initial conditions, which is so variable between two points as to be essentially fractal, and where we can't even determine all the inputs and can barely measure the ones we know of. In comparison, a ball of hydrogen plasma that is collapsing in on itself and has very limited internal structure is a piece of cake to simulate. Astronomers have also been around a lot longer than Southern US meteorologists. True, only by a couple orders of magnitude, and I'm sure that the natives in Florida would have been happy to pass their observations on to the European colonists of the late 1700s, if anyone amongst them had thought the climate worth paying attention to. (Well, I can't expect things like that to change quickly.)
I would truly love it if someone could produce a Swiss timepiece that could operate in the gigahertz range, because I have absolutely no friggin' doubt it would be vastly more accurate than the normal clock chips in PCs. It would make life hell for the overclockers, though.
The new firehose section on Slashdot might help there. I, for one, won't e-mail an objection merely because of a business association (alleged or proven) but if others think it's a genuine problem then I would encourage them to object on that basis. However, I can say that I'm going to pay some attention to the stories listed for articles where I've good reason to believe the story is bogus, FUD, etc. What I hope is that Slashdot does NOT go down the path of entirely user-selecting, as I actually think the editors here do a far better job of picking the really meaty stuff and other sites that have tried that approach are plagued by story trolls. Slashdot isn't perfect, but there's a reason it has such an intense following AND has earned the respect and envy of even the "traditional" press at times.
...you can tick that joke off the list. It has clocked too many miles as it is, though I must hand it to you for chiming in with it, though to judge from the number of replies, it didn't wind up too many people. Mind you, with effort, we might yet get this thread to go round and round.
Yes, I can see that someone wishing to test out their dentistry skills on a Giant Squid would likely discover some severe disadvantages in being trapped inside a gigantic clamplike device.
Actually, a much better trap for a giant squid would be to have a cylinder with closeable doors at each end and bait in the middle. When the squid enters, close the doors. The squid can't injure itself in such an enclosure, is kept at uniform pressure, is kept in water, and can readily be transferred to an enclosure such as an aquarium. Such devices are routinely used for catching live aquatic life that would not survive a net and also for taking water samples at pre-specified depths with no risk of contamination, and have been used very successfully in both fields for at least 30 years.
I figured out that you could build such a device for catching a giant squid at the full 6 mile depth that they usually live and keep them at that pressure. It would not be trivial - the walls would need to be fairly thick to withstand the pressure from the inside pushing out, once you got it to the surface - but it's well within the design specs of the larger oil pipes in use today, so is perfectly doable. Now, if you can catch giant squid much closer to the surface than that, then it's even better - you could easily construct a device that operated at a few thousand feet.
In the case of giant squids, we already know the anatomy and physiology, from previous finds. We don't need mere case studies that reveal nothing new, we need new data on the stuff we CAN'T find out from the remains of giant squid that have been salvaged. A hundred near-identical remains adds no new information. (Well, not quite true - you can use DNA analysis to get an idea of genetic diversity, so in that case the additional cases would add something. But even there, it makes bugger all difference to the research if the subject is alive or dead. Killing the subject doesn't benefit you at all.)
Animal experimentation has produced mixed results - aspirin and caffeine are lethal to most animals, and many medicines tested successfully on animals were later rejected after human studies showed them unsuitable. At present, better alternatives are limited to non-existant, but that's just a matter of time to fix. The process is simply not producing data of nearly sufficient quality to justify continuing it once suitable alternatives of sufficient quality have been developed.
However, this is not in the same league at all. In animal experiments - however crappy the results - you are at least getting results that you can't get by other means. Mortally injuring giant squids and then examining the remains is telling you exactly NOTHING that you couldn't obtain by other means. Alive, you can learn much about the squid that is unknown today. Obtain a corpse, and you can study something about the lives and deaths of these animals and therefore learn something about their natural environment. Killing them tell you... that they're not monsters from a really bad sci-fi movie, but not a whole lot more.
(I would point out that none of this limits learning from those extremes - good ideas can be found THROUGHOUT the full spectrum - the objective is merely to avoid the error of thinking that a specific view is the only view.)
You will generally find that genuine "free thinkers" (by which I do not mean people who "freely" think what they're told, or who cease thinking once they've freely thought something, I mean people who explore the possibilities freely) tend to be divided into two loosely-defined camps. One camp would be the "middle way" group, who do not exist in the left/right spectrum per-se. Members of this camp probably have nothing else in common. The second camp encompasses a broad range of liberalism, socialism, left-wing-ism, collaborativism, intellectualism, etc. The distinction is that the second group has the notion of an orthodoxy, a set of core tenants that shape any ideas imported, whereas the first group does not and cannot. Neither group is "better" and plenty of engineers, geeks, nerds, technocrats, etc, can be found in either camp or even wander between them. The boundaries are fuzzy at times and do not require passports.
It is worth noting that whilst you will find people who hold some extreme views in both camps - extreme along any spectrum you care to name - you will NOT find genuine extremists in either. Extremism is the antethesis of thought and thus it is not possible to both freely think AND nail yourself to a single point.
I am much more bothered by this attitude of "oh well, doesn't matter how many we kill", though, than with the incident itself. It is wholly unacceptable that ANY scientist would hold the attitude that brainlessness is acceptable, that extreme interference with what you are studying could even produce useful results even if it were acceptable (sorry, but that has not been accepted in any branch of science for nigh on 100 years), or that the level of endangerment can be measured by how many you destroy (sheer ignorance and a pathetic excuse for an intellect).
This is not the only area in which species otherwise classed as threatened or endangered have been labelled as free to plunder, and Japan is far from the only nation guilty of such abominable practices. Scientists with any kind of respect for their profession or for the world in which they live should make it clear that such attitudes are not professionally accepted and that researchers who would freely destroy the subjects of their research have no place in the modern scientific community.
Superheroic fantasy is ancient too - much of the Celtic tradition in the "Book Of Invasions" is of the Superman kind. Literally. All superheros in that tradition have a weakness that can be (and eventually was) used to destroy them. They were truly powerful, but not all-powerful and not all-perfect.
The Ultrahero - someone who is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful, utterly beyond failure - that is a much more modern invention and is the only kind that can really be called "Politically Correct", albeit correct for medieval Europe as opposed to today. But, hey, what's a thousand years between friends?
Though, I would make one minor correction. The Romans got their alphabet from the Greeks, via the Etruscans, who also introduced the Greeks to alphabetic writing. Linear B appears to be an adaptation of Linear A for the purpose of writing extremely ancient Greek - pre-Homeric by a few hundred years. The letter "F" is the oldest letter in the alphabet and seems to predate the Romans, Greeks and Etruscans. It seems to have origins in Sumerian times, if I'm understanding the texts on ancient languages correctly. I am unclear as to why one single letter would be retained when the rest of the alphabet kept getting replaced or redesigned, especially as it's not so widely used and dominant that replacement would even be a problem.
Ultimately, though, the greatest contributors to the world learning the Romanized alphabet seem to be the Etruscans, who seem to have been some of the first people to trade abstract knowledge as a commodity between nations. In the same way that when Rome invaded Greece, it acquired some Greek thought patterns and philosophies, it is believable that Rome providing others with their proprietary language was somehow an idea developed from their "embracing and extending" the Etruscan peoples.
At one point, all of the episodes were available from download from fan sites. Sadly, that is no longer the case and as far as I know, there is no indication of when a "professional"/commercial version will appear. It was truly great stuff, and I wish the team would settle their differences and continue it.
However, you are also right in saying that the sorts of things described by the BBC can't possibly qualify for this. We have no reason to assume the US military is ever going to be honest on their R&D programs. There are also known examples (the book "The Men Who Stare At Goats" documents a few) where their R&D has been scientifically questionable at best, so we can't even assume that the system would even work, no matter how accurate or inaccurate the description is. This makes it hard to make any real headway.
If we assume that the R&D is producing useful results and that they are subject to the same laws of physics, we should be able to reverse-engineer what techniques they could be employing. There simply aren't many options that would do anything remotely useful or in a sufficiently energy-efficient manner to be useful in a hostile environment. The advantage of this approach is we can completely ignore any errors in the details (no matter how they got there) and only bother with the practicalities of the mechanics. The disadvantage is that although such a method would give you a design that would actually work, you have zero idea if it has anything in common with what the DoD is up to.
On the third hand, we're geeks and a practical DIY exoskeleton kit may actually be far more interesting and useful than a history we will never really know of a project we will likely never really see.
More effective use of power for the purpose intended is something you see virtually everywhere - gears, levers, springs, virtually all mechanical devices that have ever existed are all simply ways of putting in the same amount but utilizing it better. I imagine the exoskeletal armor is no different - it might conserve energy that you'd otherwise lose, reducing the impact of varying speed or incline. If it's really good, it might be able to convert some of the energy it absorbs from impacts into energy available for you to use. It might eliminate variations in ground level, reducing the effort involved in moving over rough terrain. But really there's not much more it can do than that.
(Well, if the US military has got Tesla's theories to work, I guess they could power the suit remotely, so eliminating the need for portable power. On the other hand, if they were at that point, they really wouldn't need exoskeletal armor - or indeed soldiers. You'd just hook a Tesla coil to a microwave fillament and boil your opponents from long range.)
Yes yes yes, but what have the Romans ever done for us?
I am truly out-geeked. (That doesn't happen often.) Thanks for the additional links!
At the moment, there are major attempts to define P2P as ipso facto piracy in many countries, the US included. It will also seriously impact attempts by some US companies to cripple access to British programs in the US. As crippled and as limited as this is, I fully expect major lawsuits to follow. If the older, unprofitable material was made for free, the lawyers would be sending Polonium, not cease-and-desists.
I fully expect the BBC to migrate towards making all material below the margin of being worth selling available for free for everyone. At this time, however, there are enough media outlets abusing anti-competitive laws to guarantee their own little fiefdoms and monopolies that the BBC is probably more concerned with not getting blasted out of existence by intellectual property tyrants than it is with meeting what is likely their ultimate objective.