the little flecks of paint, bolts, and general fragments of this and that zipping around at bulletesque velocities. "Bulletesque?" 17,000 miles per hour isn't "bulletesque" unless *railguns* are the norm.
Dissipating such energies with something make of small cross-section strands isn't going to be easy. Actually, I don't think it's going to be possible with normal matter.
The Space Colonization folks advocated huge ships in the shape of rings, trailing conical kevlar bags. (Mass catchers.) The Kevlar wasn't going to stop the incoming space-junk projectiles. (In this case, bags of lunar regolith launched into orbit from the Moon's surface.) Instead, the kevlar bags would rotate and hold a layer of Lunar regolith against its inner surface using centrifugal force. The incoming projectiles would be stopped the same way micrometeorites stop when they hit the moon.
The easiest way to dissipate highly concentrated energy, such as that possessed by projectiles at orbital velocity, is a lot of *mass*.
Maybe it could be sold with a couple of Lenovo|Mac stickers to bring to some of those very engaging meetings, presentations, etc...
I wonder why Sony doesn't do this, only packaged better? (Internal politics is usually the answer. Dilbert: "Before we defeat our competitors, we first have to defeat the other departments.") If they stick to legacy consoles, they can probably do a lot of this in emulation, with the emulator code running from a ROM.
Sony could probably boost their share of laptop sales by making their machines capable of playing legacy console games. In addition to bored meeting attendees, there are also game collectors who need a laptop other reasons. They would have a lock on that crowd. It would also play well in Japan, Europe and lots of urban centers in the US, where many people live in smaller apartments.
I've also thought that Apple and Nintendo should do something like this. In a few years, they could offer the option to put a Wii/Gameboy in every Macintosh. (To be enabled by plugging in a ROM. Wouldn't stop pirates, but there are plenty of customers who won't bother and just pay.) This would be a good fit for Nintendo. Manufacturing cost for them would be minimal, and they seem to be all about supporting legacy games and keeping/increasing mindshare. The two companies also seem to have compatible philosophies about design.
MS/Dell? Not sure this would work. The first XBox should be easy to do, however.
Would Intel have come as far as it did recently if Moore had never put his famous observation onto paper?
James Burke talked a lot about the phenomenon of the exponential explosion of technology in his Connections series. Many others have commented about this as well. (Toeffler, Vinge, Kuzweil, to name a few) Technology often makes other technology easier, so you have an exponential chain reaction. Moore's law is just a consequence of this acceleration of technological advance in a highly technical field.
I am also reminded of a chip industry quip: "Gallium Arsenide, the technology of the future! Always was, always will be!" I hope that finally becomes wrong!
NASA scientists develop the functional equivalent to Star Trek Inertial Dampeners. Slashdot's reaction -- upskirt jokes!? Where did all the Trekkers go!? What about any Sci-fi fans who understand the 2nd and 3rd order implications of stuff like this? This is actually pretty amazing! How about being able to launch manned spacecraft into orbit at really high accelerations? Could we get enough acceleration out of this thing to compensate for the g forces of firing a capsule out of a cannon? That would enable *really* cheap spaceflight. (Though perhaps only Elbonians would like to travel that way.)
Technology will continue to be a giant advantage for the next 30 years or so, at least.
I agree. 30 years is a historical eyeblink.
I question your understanding of military technology portfolios.
Then obviously you missed my point. It's not just the relative level of information and technical power that differing *militaries* have. It's the level of tech that *individuals* have access to.
World War I was a war of attrition. WWII, also, but to a lesser degree.
But there were numerous examples of technological asymmetry, even in WWII. Polish cavalry vs. the German Blitzkrieg. Bolt action rifles vs. submachine guns.
IT is not so predominant among the worlds' armies that it dominates.
There is still a lot of inequality. However, you're missing my point. My point is that IT has had a certain effect on the entire *world*.
Understanding a technology doesn't mean the ability to solve engineering/production challenges, weaponize it, train troops, and then operate the new capability.
But understanding a technology is a prerequisite to all you just spoke of. And even if you can't match the tech and industrial infrastructure, you can understand it well enough to devise a countermeasure. (IEDs vs. armored Hummers, then used propane tanks full of explosive catapulted to the top of MRAPs.)
I think you've missed my point. Information technology is reaching the point where information flows too freely for technological asymmetries to last very long, and this is accelerating all the time. We will soon reach the point where any technological advantages is too short lived to be useful. It's the singularity for technological advantages.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so?
The US military always thinks about beating everyone else. But I think we're reaching a significant change in what determines the winner of a war. Technology now disseminates too swiftly to be a permanent advantage for one side.
First, we had the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture. This is an indirect effect of technology on warfare. Farmers aren't as fit and capable as the nomads at combat, but they have a much larger population, so they can still win. They also have the ability to stratify their society and create specialists, which eventually led to the second stage.
Second, we had technology directly affecting warfare. Through most of recorded history, the most significant advantages are due to technology. (Where one side has a 100X advantage over another.) In the ancient world, the Hittites had Steel, so they could dominate those with bronze weapons. In the age of exploration and colonization, Europeans with guns could outclass those with less technically advanced weapons. In World War I and II, technological advances came to include information technology, first through the breaking of codes, then through the development of surveillance and sensing technologies like RADAR and countermeasures like ECM.
I think we are entering a third stage in the history of warfare. Information technology has become so widespread and ubiquitous that its influence dominates. As a result technology no longer constitutes an overwhelming advantage. The other side will develop their own version very soon. Even if an opponent doesn't have access to the same level of technology, much of the rest of the world is now industrialized to the extent that small organizations have access to enough information and resources to improvise and confound even the technical and resource advantages of a superpower.
That's funny. Because right now I'm doing consulting work for a major bank. They know what port I'm on all the time. In fact, they have software that monitors my traffic and immediately cuts it off if something they don't like happens.
I just bring in my Macbook with an EVDO dongle if I want to surf.
Comcast is doing this for one reason: so it can continue to vastly oversell it's network. "Unlimited" = "Unlimited because we hope you're all grannies who check their email once in awhile."
The thing about Cruise ships, is that they are not a good place to keep valuable permanent assets, like your financial data. One Rogue Wave, and they are potentially toast, and all of your secrets are subject to salvage laws in international waters. Not good. But Spar Buoys of sufficient size are immune to all wave action, due to simple geometry -- the part in contact with the water sits vertically, and has a very small cross section to wave motion.
Weight is the main factor in the number of things that can go up in a rocket.
Nuclear is inherently a big win, in terms of Available Enthalpy (if scared, just read: Power) versus weight. Chemical reactions can yield 13 megajoules per kilogram. Nuclear fission can get you 82 million megajoules per kilogram. In terms of possible exhaust velocity, you can get 4.5 km/s out of chemical propellants, but a potential 12,800 km/s out of nuclear. Fusion is even better with 347 million MJ/kg of useful energy. But only using present day technology, beamed power sources can match anything out there in the theoretical realm. We'd only need to launch mirrors and reflectors and leave the heavy power generation on the ground. It wouldn't be easy, but the basic physics is very favorable -- tons of equipment could just sit on the ground instead of needing to be accelerated to high speed. (Sources, Zubrin's _Entering Space_)
It is the next logical step and I'm glad to see that companies are moving in that direction.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) had allusions to a new kind of economic system, partly based on Thermodynamics. The cost of everything was mostly determined by the energy input, including the energy advantage of using natural resources, like metal ores. (There's a whole heaping lot of metal in ordinary soil, but it takes a lot less energy per unit mass to get the stuff out of ores.)
I think you could morph the current economic system into one with a Thermodynamic/Information Theoretic one. Basically, the markets are such a system, but they also have various distortions built into them due to people's emotions, cultural inertia, and ignorance. Such an economic system would be inherently "green."
There are probably more efficient ways of wiping out life than pouring on the order of 10^30 joules into accelerating a gigantic impactor.
Put the same energy into lots of small relativistic impactors. Craft the trajectory so that the acceleration phase is masked by nearby stars. Distribute the impactors so that all orbital installations and both sides of all inhabited bodies are blanketed with enough energy to raise the temperature to 500 degrees celsius for all biomes. Time them, so that they all arrive at the same time. The victims will have only minutes of advance warning, if any at all. (Idea from _The Killing Star_)
You'd need a separate memory to keep a table of pointers, just like an object table in some OO language implementations. This way, you wouldn't need Garbage Collection so much as just plain old compaction. The extra level of indirection wouldn't be so bad, because it's Flash -- random low-latency access is what it's good at.
(The separate memory would have a granularity of just 64 bits, so rewriting just one pointer will have less overhead.)
Assign all of he virtual servers a unique 256 bit ID. XOR that with 256 bits of input of any USB device that measures the real world, and send it through a hash algorithm. USB devices are easy for virtual servers to access.
Perhaps better, have a 256 bit seed for each server as above, but have the host server distribute 256 bits at startup time using a microphone run through a hash algorithm.
"Somebody described it as a thermonuclear diesel engine," Laberge says, perhaps undervaluing a potentially awesome marketing phrase. "We compress the fuel. It burns."
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel would be proud! Really, what human with a Y chomosome wouldn't want to drive a big-rig with a freakin Thermonuclear Diesel Engine!? Steampunk, but with 3 orders of magnitude more available enthalpy! We're talkin locomotive to the stars, here!
Microsoft has never been interested in anything other than its self. One must question its motives...
The GPL is about maintaining control. (Imagine Yoda reading that sentence.) The author maintains control over the source. Why wouldn't Microsoft like that? Microsoft is not against anything that lets it maintain control. What Microsoft doesn't like is what lets you keep control. Conclusion: Microsoft is likely to be fine with the GPL, so long as it's the only one who ever uses it. Granted, that's a long term goal...
Let's start a commercial space station. First, connect a module to the ISS. Then, when those idiots plan to burn it down in 2016 via re-entry, disconnect it and start a new space station with that single module.
The Space Shuttle external tanks are the close to the size of a 747 hull and have to make it to orbit with the Shuttle. (Otherwise it would run out of fuel!) Also, they contain hydrogen and O2, which evaporate completely, leaving an empty, non-toxic hull capable of supporting atmospheric pressures. Lots of people have proposed using them as the basis of really large space stations.
You have two near-monopolies here. It's not Mutual Assured Destruction. It's more like WWF. They're putting on a fake fight, with lots of noise, but little chance of either side making much headway over the other. They're not out to make any headway, just *headlines*.
It's a win-win situation. They both get to point to each other when the Justice Dept. comes around and say, "See! There's my competition right there!" Plus, they get tons of publicity out of it.
If this tool is used in specific conditions, it could have a huge benefit -- video evidence of crimes in progress and more accurate prosecution. I see no problem with the police focusing a camera on a specific location after someone has called 911 and a dispatch has been made. The camera can be pointed in a few seconds, whereas the officers would take minutes to get there.
Give the authorities as many facts as possible, so their activities are fact-based, and not "soft." DNA testing did this, making criminal justice more accurate as a result. I suspect that dashboard cameras have had the same effect. Also, the behavior of the police would have to improve if they knew they were possibly filmed from above on every call.
Of course, the problem is one of trust. How do we know that they are not recording all the time? This is what local political activism is all about. Limit the number of cameras. Pass local laws limiting the use to hot pursuit or locations of current dispatch. Remember -- lobbying the locals is relatively cheap and easy. (And if you'd rather not let the police have aerial cameras at all -- lobby for that. Participation is good.)
And he will laugh maniacally, when the change in nature's cycles creates huge storms that wipe out entire Europe and half of Africa.
If you've been paying attention to history, weather and climate have huge geopolitical and strategic consequences. North Atlantic storms stopped both the Spanish Armada and Nazi Germany from invading England. Weather almost stopped the D-Day invasions. Japan is still a nation because of such a storm: the Kamikaze.
Climactic shifts sparked the movements of barbarian tribes and may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, prevented the early Nordic colonization of North America, and paved the way for the Renaissance.
The ability to prevent or to create a storm would have huge strategic implications. Nations with the resources to wield this sort of weapon could wreak economic devastation on their enemies and be immune to invasion. (And save on the huge cost incurred from such storms.)
I also suspect that global warming is actually desired by some strategic thinkers in the industrialized nations. (But not all. Not conspiracy. Just a part of the oligarchy pushing to exploit coincidence.) Some of the greatest suffering will be visited on up and coming economic powers (India) while the established ones will be able to cope more easily. I think this may be part of the reason why China is building the largest river dam system in the world -- to buffer themselves against shifts in water availability.
Bought my girlfriend an IBM USB keyboard with Ultranav, which is just the silly marketdroid name for the pointer stick. This is about the most effective way to avoid moving your hands off the keyboard, short of a head-mouse. I bought one for my girlfriend with RSI. She also has a SmartNav head mouse, but she uses the *keyboard*!
They do have that "Chicken Gun." I can imagine a test where they see what happens if you fire a chicken at 600 MPH into the 1st stage exhaust plume. Not that they'd ever have a good reason to do it, just that they could -- to have KSC Friend Chicken.
Maybe this is a one for the Mythbusters? How do we incorporate C4?
This is the company that left VisualBasic background processes running from their install, looking for all the world like VB script viruses or trojans! Soaking up an appreciable amount of memory and CPU, just so their functionality would pop-up quickly. Any company where the marketdroids can have their way and do something that most geeks would know is inadvisable -- they are too infested to salvage.
Slashdot Mirror
the little flecks of paint, bolts, and general fragments of this and that zipping around at bulletesque velocities.
"Bulletesque?" 17,000 miles per hour isn't "bulletesque" unless *railguns* are the norm.
Dissipating such energies with something make of small cross-section strands isn't going to be easy. Actually, I don't think it's going to be possible with normal matter.
The Space Colonization folks advocated huge ships in the shape of rings, trailing conical kevlar bags. (Mass catchers.) The Kevlar wasn't going to stop the incoming space-junk projectiles. (In this case, bags of lunar regolith launched into orbit from the Moon's surface.) Instead, the kevlar bags would rotate and hold a layer of Lunar regolith against its inner surface using centrifugal force. The incoming projectiles would be stopped the same way micrometeorites stop when they hit the moon.
The easiest way to dissipate highly concentrated energy, such as that possessed by projectiles at orbital velocity, is a lot of *mass*.
Maybe it could be sold with a couple of Lenovo|Mac stickers to bring to some of those very engaging meetings, presentations, etc...
I wonder why Sony doesn't do this, only packaged better? (Internal politics is usually the answer. Dilbert: "Before we defeat our competitors, we first have to defeat the other departments.") If they stick to legacy consoles, they can probably do a lot of this in emulation, with the emulator code running from a ROM.
Sony could probably boost their share of laptop sales by making their machines capable of playing legacy console games. In addition to bored meeting attendees, there are also game collectors who need a laptop other reasons. They would have a lock on that crowd. It would also play well in Japan, Europe and lots of urban centers in the US, where many people live in smaller apartments.
I've also thought that Apple and Nintendo should do something like this. In a few years, they could offer the option to put a Wii/Gameboy in every Macintosh. (To be enabled by plugging in a ROM. Wouldn't stop pirates, but there are plenty of customers who won't bother and just pay.) This would be a good fit for Nintendo. Manufacturing cost for them would be minimal, and they seem to be all about supporting legacy games and keeping/increasing mindshare. The two companies also seem to have compatible philosophies about design.
MS/Dell? Not sure this would work. The first XBox should be easy to do, however.
Would Intel have come as far as it did recently if Moore had never put his famous observation onto paper?
James Burke talked a lot about the phenomenon of the exponential explosion of technology in his Connections series. Many others have commented about this as well. (Toeffler, Vinge, Kuzweil, to name a few) Technology often makes other technology easier, so you have an exponential chain reaction. Moore's law is just a consequence of this acceleration of technological advance in a highly technical field.
I am also reminded of a chip industry quip: "Gallium Arsenide, the technology of the future! Always was, always will be!" I hope that finally becomes wrong!
NASA scientists develop the functional equivalent to Star Trek Inertial Dampeners. Slashdot's reaction -- upskirt jokes!? Where did all the Trekkers go!? What about any Sci-fi fans who understand the 2nd and 3rd order implications of stuff like this? This is actually pretty amazing! How about being able to launch manned spacecraft into orbit at really high accelerations? Could we get enough acceleration out of this thing to compensate for the g forces of firing a capsule out of a cannon? That would enable *really* cheap spaceflight. (Though perhaps only Elbonians would like to travel that way.)
Technology will continue to be a giant advantage for the next 30 years or so, at least.
I agree. 30 years is a historical eyeblink.
I question your understanding of military technology portfolios.
Then obviously you missed my point. It's not just the relative level of information and technical power that differing *militaries* have. It's the level of tech that *individuals* have access to.
World War I was a war of attrition. WWII, also, but to a lesser degree.
But there were numerous examples of technological asymmetry, even in WWII. Polish cavalry vs. the German Blitzkrieg. Bolt action rifles vs. submachine guns.
IT is not so predominant among the worlds' armies that it dominates.
There is still a lot of inequality. However, you're missing my point. My point is that IT has had a certain effect on the entire *world*.
Understanding a technology doesn't mean the ability to solve engineering/production challenges, weaponize it, train troops, and then operate the new capability.
But understanding a technology is a prerequisite to all you just spoke of. And even if you can't match the tech and industrial infrastructure, you can understand it well enough to devise a countermeasure. (IEDs vs. armored Hummers, then used propane tanks full of explosive catapulted to the top of MRAPs.)
I think you've missed my point. Information technology is reaching the point where information flows too freely for technological asymmetries to last very long, and this is accelerating all the time. We will soon reach the point where any technological advantages is too short lived to be useful. It's the singularity for technological advantages.
Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so?
The US military always thinks about beating everyone else. But I think we're reaching a significant change in what determines the winner of a war. Technology now disseminates too swiftly to be a permanent advantage for one side.
First, we had the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture. This is an indirect effect of technology on warfare. Farmers aren't as fit and capable as the nomads at combat, but they have a much larger population, so they can still win. They also have the ability to stratify their society and create specialists, which eventually led to the second stage.
Second, we had technology directly affecting warfare. Through most of recorded history, the most significant advantages are due to technology. (Where one side has a 100X advantage over another.) In the ancient world, the Hittites had Steel, so they could dominate those with bronze weapons. In the age of exploration and colonization, Europeans with guns could outclass those with less technically advanced weapons. In World War I and II, technological advances came to include information technology, first through the breaking of codes, then through the development of surveillance and sensing technologies like RADAR and countermeasures like ECM.
I think we are entering a third stage in the history of warfare. Information technology has become so widespread and ubiquitous that its influence dominates. As a result technology no longer constitutes an overwhelming advantage. The other side will develop their own version very soon. Even if an opponent doesn't have access to the same level of technology, much of the rest of the world is now industrialized to the extent that small organizations have access to enough information and resources to improvise and confound even the technical and resource advantages of a superpower.
NO! NO! I DONT KNOW WHAT PORT YOUR DESK IS! NO!
That's funny. Because right now I'm doing consulting work for a major bank. They know what port I'm on all the time. In fact, they have software that monitors my traffic and immediately cuts it off if something they don't like happens.
I just bring in my Macbook with an EVDO dongle if I want to surf.
Comcast is doing this for one reason: so it can continue to vastly oversell it's network. "Unlimited" = "Unlimited because we hope you're all grannies who check their email once in awhile."
I picture cruse ships in international waters for online porn and gambling eventually
These guys have a better architecture for what you propose:
http://seasteading.org/
The thing about Cruise ships, is that they are not a good place to keep valuable permanent assets, like your financial data. One Rogue Wave, and they are potentially toast, and all of your secrets are subject to salvage laws in international waters. Not good. But Spar Buoys of sufficient size are immune to all wave action, due to simple geometry -- the part in contact with the water sits vertically, and has a very small cross section to wave motion.
Weight is the main factor in the number of things that can go up in a rocket.
Nuclear is inherently a big win, in terms of Available Enthalpy (if scared, just read: Power) versus weight. Chemical reactions can yield 13 megajoules per kilogram. Nuclear fission can get you 82 million megajoules per kilogram. In terms of possible exhaust velocity, you can get 4.5 km/s out of chemical propellants, but a potential 12,800 km/s out of nuclear. Fusion is even better with 347 million MJ/kg of useful energy. But only using present day technology, beamed power sources can match anything out there in the theoretical realm. We'd only need to launch mirrors and reflectors and leave the heavy power generation on the ground. It wouldn't be easy, but the basic physics is very favorable -- tons of equipment could just sit on the ground instead of needing to be accelerated to high speed. (Sources, Zubrin's _Entering Space_)
It is the next logical step and I'm glad to see that companies are moving in that direction.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) had allusions to a new kind of economic system, partly based on Thermodynamics. The cost of everything was mostly determined by the energy input, including the energy advantage of using natural resources, like metal ores. (There's a whole heaping lot of metal in ordinary soil, but it takes a lot less energy per unit mass to get the stuff out of ores.)
I think you could morph the current economic system into one with a Thermodynamic/Information Theoretic one. Basically, the markets are such a system, but they also have various distortions built into them due to people's emotions, cultural inertia, and ignorance. Such an economic system would be inherently "green."
There are probably more efficient ways of wiping out life than pouring on the order of 10^30 joules into accelerating a gigantic impactor.
Put the same energy into lots of small relativistic impactors. Craft the trajectory so that the acceleration phase is masked by nearby stars. Distribute the impactors so that all orbital installations and both sides of all inhabited bodies are blanketed with enough energy to raise the temperature to 500 degrees celsius for all biomes. Time them, so that they all arrive at the same time. The victims will have only minutes of advance warning, if any at all. (Idea from _The Killing Star_)
You'd need a separate memory to keep a table of pointers, just like an object table in some OO language implementations. This way, you wouldn't need Garbage Collection so much as just plain old compaction. The extra level of indirection wouldn't be so bad, because it's Flash -- random low-latency access is what it's good at.
(The separate memory would have a granularity of just 64 bits, so rewriting just one pointer will have less overhead.)
Or you could plug in a microphone.
Assign all of he virtual servers a unique 256 bit ID. XOR that with 256 bits of input of any USB device that measures the real world, and send it through a hash algorithm. USB devices are easy for virtual servers to access.
Perhaps better, have a 256 bit seed for each server as above, but have the host server distribute 256 bits at startup time using a microphone run through a hash algorithm.
"Somebody described it as a thermonuclear diesel engine," Laberge says, perhaps undervaluing a potentially awesome marketing phrase. "We compress the fuel. It burns."
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel would be proud! Really, what human with a Y chomosome wouldn't want to drive a big-rig with a freakin Thermonuclear Diesel Engine!? Steampunk, but with 3 orders of magnitude more available enthalpy! We're talkin locomotive to the stars, here!
Microsoft has never been interested in anything other than its self. One must question its motives...
The GPL is about maintaining control. (Imagine Yoda reading that sentence.) The author maintains control over the source. Why wouldn't Microsoft like that? Microsoft is not against anything that lets it maintain control. What Microsoft doesn't like is what lets you keep control. Conclusion: Microsoft is likely to be fine with the GPL, so long as it's the only one who ever uses it. Granted, that's a long term goal...
Conclusion: Robots will not feed on the dead. They will much prefer the Living!
The machines will enforce the conventions.
Vote for ED-209!
"ED-209. Not the brightest. But hard working, and Very Sincere!"
--Frank Miller
Sounds like he's a shoo-in for the red states!
Let's start a commercial space station. First, connect a module to the ISS. Then, when those idiots plan to burn it down in 2016 via re-entry, disconnect it and start a new space station with that single module.
The Space Shuttle external tanks are the close to the size of a 747 hull and have to make it to orbit with the Shuttle. (Otherwise it would run out of fuel!) Also, they contain hydrogen and O2, which evaporate completely, leaving an empty, non-toxic hull capable of supporting atmospheric pressures. Lots of people have proposed using them as the basis of really large space stations.
http://www.freemars.org/studies/torus/ettoru2.html
You have two near-monopolies here. It's not Mutual Assured Destruction. It's more like WWF. They're putting on a fake fight, with lots of noise, but little chance of either side making much headway over the other. They're not out to make any headway, just *headlines*.
It's a win-win situation. They both get to point to each other when the Justice Dept. comes around and say, "See! There's my competition right there!" Plus, they get tons of publicity out of it.
If this tool is used in specific conditions, it could have a huge benefit -- video evidence of crimes in progress and more accurate prosecution. I see no problem with the police focusing a camera on a specific location after someone has called 911 and a dispatch has been made. The camera can be pointed in a few seconds, whereas the officers would take minutes to get there.
Give the authorities as many facts as possible, so their activities are fact-based, and not "soft." DNA testing did this, making criminal justice more accurate as a result. I suspect that dashboard cameras have had the same effect. Also, the behavior of the police would have to improve if they knew they were possibly filmed from above on every call.
Of course, the problem is one of trust. How do we know that they are not recording all the time? This is what local political activism is all about. Limit the number of cameras. Pass local laws limiting the use to hot pursuit or locations of current dispatch. Remember -- lobbying the locals is relatively cheap and easy. (And if you'd rather not let the police have aerial cameras at all -- lobby for that. Participation is good.)
And he will laugh maniacally, when the change in nature's cycles creates huge storms that wipe out entire Europe and half of Africa.
If you've been paying attention to history, weather and climate have huge geopolitical and strategic consequences. North Atlantic storms stopped both the Spanish Armada and Nazi Germany from invading England. Weather almost stopped the D-Day invasions. Japan is still a nation because of such a storm: the Kamikaze.
Climactic shifts sparked the movements of barbarian tribes and may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, prevented the early Nordic colonization of North America, and paved the way for the Renaissance.
The ability to prevent or to create a storm would have huge strategic implications. Nations with the resources to wield this sort of weapon could wreak economic devastation on their enemies and be immune to invasion. (And save on the huge cost incurred from such storms.)
I also suspect that global warming is actually desired by some strategic thinkers in the industrialized nations. (But not all. Not conspiracy. Just a part of the oligarchy pushing to exploit coincidence.) Some of the greatest suffering will be visited on up and coming economic powers (India) while the established ones will be able to cope more easily. I think this may be part of the reason why China is building the largest river dam system in the world -- to buffer themselves against shifts in water availability.
Bought my girlfriend an IBM USB keyboard with Ultranav, which is just the silly marketdroid name for the pointer stick. This is about the most effective way to avoid moving your hands off the keyboard, short of a head-mouse. I bought one for my girlfriend with RSI. She also has a SmartNav head mouse, but she uses the *keyboard*!
http://amzn.com/B00009APTK
You'll probably reduce your movement of hands off the keyboard by a factor of 3, at least!
They do have that "Chicken Gun." I can imagine a test where they see what happens if you fire a chicken at 600 MPH into the 1st stage exhaust plume. Not that they'd ever have a good reason to do it, just that they could -- to have KSC Friend Chicken.
Maybe this is a one for the Mythbusters? How do we incorporate C4?
This is the company that left VisualBasic background processes running from their install, looking for all the world like VB script viruses or trojans! Soaking up an appreciable amount of memory and CPU, just so their functionality would pop-up quickly. Any company where the marketdroids can have their way and do something that most geeks would know is inadvisable -- they are too infested to salvage.
Try Foxit or Sumatra readers for PDFs!
(Not associated with either company!)