If you want a good movie about WWII, Stalingrad is an excellent choice. Set on the Eastern front, and shot from the German perspective, it illuminates the barbaric pointless nature of war is a way that wussy Tom Hanks movie can only dream about.
The problem with this particular approach is that it will never go beyond the first person who downloads it. If he could come up with something that isn't immediately appearant but becomes increasingly more annoying, it would probably work a lot better.
I think it was Eli Whitney Jr. who was the pioneer in interchangeability. His factory was used by Colt to make a lot of Colt's most famous early pistols. The problem was that at the time metalurgy and casting techniques weren't good enough to make long lasting machine tools. So even though you could produce a lot of parts that were similar in order to get them to all fit together you needed specialized workers who were able to file down the parts until they fit together properly. It was quite a bit easier than hand making every single part, but it wasn't until the early 1900s that we had steel strong enough to stamp out exact replicas.
"I wish they would stop making racing cars faster. I mean, it's absurd adding more horsepower and speed, when 120MPH is fast enough for anyone
Actually, race cars have been hobbled for the past 10-15 years or so. When races got up in the 250 mile an hour area, the cars could significantly outperform human reaction time, so no one was willing to pass except under ideal conditions. As a result car races became (more) boring. So they slapped airflow restrictors on the engines to slow them down.
If we get fusion working, there is so much deuterium in the world's oceans, it would be equivelent to a ball of oil the size of the sun. We won't be making any trips to the moon to get fuel any time soon.
This is actually a myth. The force they would have hit the water with would have been more than enough to kill them even if they didn't die in the explosion.
Seriously, though, I can't imagine ever saying "are emm dash are eff asterisk" to make room, or "cursor right, cursor right, select, cut, damn it, undo, copy, cursor down . .."
How about a keyboard with formatting keys on it only, as well as a voice input system for the bulk of the work? It would have to be fairly lag free to take advantage, and would need some practice to get used to, but could be viable.
Maybe it's for the same reason the US (absolutely needlessly) dropped the bomb in Japan and not in Germany: the latter are white people!
Actually, FYI, the Atomic bomb was developed to be dropped on Germany, not Japan. The Germans were working on their own nuclear program, though they didn't have the reasources that Allied scientists did. The Japanese had a tiny program that would not have yeilded results in a timely manner. The reason we didn't drop the bomb on Germany was that VE day was here before we had the chance. If you doubt this, look at Desden. Allied bombers inflicted far more casualties in the one night firebombing raid than the atomic bomb did on Hiroshima.
I agree, SUVs (and any other tanks used on public roads) should have built-in mechanisms to kill the SUV-driver in the case of an accident. It's only fair. SUV's do have a mechanism in them to kill their drivers. The bigass american ones are built around truck frames (Cheaper to do it that way than to custom manufacture a custom frame). Their big size makes them safer in car to car collisions, but the far and away majority of fatalities happen when a car strikes a perminant object, and in these sorts of accidents, the stiff truck frame doesn't deform like a car frame so the passengers tend to bear most of the decelleration. If you want a car that's really safe, buy a new Ford Taurus. SUV really aren't all that great from a safety standpoint.
Notice the picture of the woman in the car. The windshield is at about head level. If there were an accident, the driver would be sent head first against the edge of the glass. It would likely decapitate the driver. How ironic that the is being used to promote child safety.
On the website, one of the listed features is a 5 point seatbelt, so IIRC, if you wrecked it you wouldn't go forward all that much if you kept the seatbelt nice and tight.
Which sort of metal actually burns instead of melts? NONE!
I've done a little blacksmithing, and Iron will burn quite nicely. That's one of the things that's hardest to learn when you're just starting out is how hot metal is, so you get it hot enough for it to be nice a malleable without it burning.
I think the retailers are the people who specify the package dimensions. Alot will only promote stuff with standard size boxes etc.
That is the truth, 2600 magazine has trouble getting sold anywhere outside of the monster stores because of it's digest size. None of the old sci-fi digests are in business any more, and that is supposed to be one of the reasons they went out. OTOH CDs used to be packaged in "LP" sized packaging because the distributers thought no one would be willing to stock CDs in smaller bins.
One solution to this is to go to a local computer store and see if they will order you an OEM packed version of the software. The OEM version tends to be a bit cheaper for them to get, which they like, and it also tends come in more environmentally friendly/smaller packages.
I would have to say no. At least not hastily. The idea the government turning its system over to an electrical one, one that is designed by a bidder who put in the lowest bid most likely
Here's the thing, everything is built by the lowest bidder. That isn't to say that there are not qualifications for bidding. If I want a government contract I can't just say "I'll do it for $50" then run off with the cash, and do you think that the government doesn't use computers now? Do you think the government has some big filing cabinet where they keep all of your files? If so, do you think that this is more secure? Here in Va we had an incident a few years back where a county courthouse burned down, and they lost all their records for the last 150 years or so, and since it was all on paper, the backups were at best incomplete.
There is one thing that is classic public choice issue: Defense. The reason it can't be privatized is that it's a thing that produces group benefits, and there is no way to exclude non-payers. ie, I can't say "protect fred's house from the bombers, but don't protect bob's house". This leads to strategic free riding. Because my paying or not paying by myself won't bring down the whole system, it is to my advantage not to pay. This leads to no one paying, so in order to have a defense you need taxes.
These things fell seriously out of favor when they started to fry computers. Because of cables and what not PC's develop hot spots in differant places, and since the thermostat was typically on the power supply, the PC could be seriously overheating while the fan was running in "quiet" mode. Look in hardware manuals from that era and often as not there are specific warnings against using throttled fans.
Actually people _are_ picky about car-noise (well, at least in europe...).
Road noise is a significant factor here in the US too. Why do you think we like the big monstermobiles?;-) Seriously, though the level of noise that's tollerable in a car is appearantly much higher than what people are willing to tollerate here. I'm not really the best judge though, as I tend to both drive with the windows down, and leave all my computers running.
In the tank battles, you could move into a corner and wiggle your tank around to jump across the board. (Technically it was probably a bug rather than an Easter egg, but it was still fun, and surprising how long it took opponents to figure it out...)
In the football game, you could press the button and run backwards, and end at the opposite end of the football field. This was great for the "long bomb" play. "Where in the hell did that guy come from!?!?"
The active optics can probably be done with MEMS, and the measuring lights and receivers are probably semiconductor-based already. The whole system could be moved into technologies that are benefiting from Moore's Law, and once it's there the size and cost will drop exponentially. I think in the article the person was referring to the size of the detection gear rather than of the glasses themselves, IIRC I don't think the optomitrists invision us wearing adaptive lenses and shooting out lasers to correct for the refraction in the Air.;-)
Your points on correllation and causation are technically correct. But, come on, use Occam's razor. One of these things is not like the others (hint: the others are ridiculous)
You forgot one other important possiblity: 7. People with lifestyles that involve staying on the phone more than 2 hours a day may also be doing things that put you and higher risk to brain cancer. People who own surfboards probably have a somewhat higher skin cancer rate than the background, however it's not that the surfboards are beaming out cancer rays, it's that they're out in the sun a lot.
Oh, and talking on a mobile phone without a hands free kit in a car is illegal and has been for some time. When people obey laws such as that one, things actually are safer.. maybe some of you whinging yanks should try it sometime:)
Ah Australians, second only to New Zealanders in their self love.:-) IIRC the "hands free" kits don't make talking on a cellphone any safer according to studies. It's the fact that you're sitting there having a discussion that makes it dangerous to use a cell phone, not that you're only driving with one hand. I mean, how many of us seriously sit there with hands at 10 and 2 every single second we're behind the wheel? Or how about stickshifts? You have to take a hand off the wheel to operate the shifter, and I don't think there are many huge pile ups caused by shifting.
If these "e commerse" companies need 99.99999 uptime then they should do what hospitals and other critical places do.. build their own backup power system.
That was something the marketfluffer from whatever power company they were interviewing was saying, IIRC any server host worth a damn has battery backup/generators. I can't think of one person in the tech field complaining about the availability of power.
The fact that with all the complexity inherant to delivering power that it does work 99.9% of the time is a miricle of the modern day, right up there with the fact that my umpty umpt thousand part 20 year old car will start every time.
The imbalance threatens to grow even larger in coming months amid projections that electricity demand will grow 17 percent by 2007 as transmission capacity rises only 4 percent.
This looks like more hysteria to me, remember back in 96 or so when the internet was going to bring down the phone networks?
Has Anime taught us nothing?
on
Virtual War
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· Score: 2
On the other hand, if we could stop fighting altogether, we could use those machines for far better purposes.
It's a documented fact that the one purpose for giant robots is to fight, and if needed, kill other giant robots. Just look at the heroic deeds of Gigantor, Voltron, and Optimus Prime.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want a good movie about WWII, Stalingrad is an excellent choice. Set on the Eastern front, and shot from the German perspective, it illuminates the barbaric pointless nature of war is a way that wussy Tom Hanks movie can only dream about.
The problem with this particular approach is that it will never go beyond the first person who downloads it. If he could come up with something that isn't immediately appearant but becomes increasingly more annoying, it would probably work a lot better.
I think it was Eli Whitney Jr. who was the pioneer in interchangeability. His factory was used by Colt to make a lot of Colt's most famous early pistols. The problem was that at the time metalurgy and casting techniques weren't good enough to make long lasting machine tools. So even though you could produce a lot of parts that were similar in order to get them to all fit together you needed specialized workers who were able to file down the parts until they fit together properly. It was quite a bit easier than hand making every single part, but it wasn't until the early 1900s that we had steel strong enough to stamp out exact replicas.
Actually, race cars have been hobbled for the past 10-15 years or so. When races got up in the 250 mile an hour area, the cars could significantly outperform human reaction time, so no one was willing to pass except under ideal conditions. As a result car races became (more) boring. So they slapped airflow restrictors on the engines to slow them down.
If we get fusion working, there is so much deuterium in the world's oceans, it would be equivelent to a ball of oil the size of the sun. We won't be making any trips to the moon to get fuel any time soon.
This is actually a myth. The force they would have hit the water with would have been more than enough to kill them even if they didn't die in the explosion.
How about a keyboard with formatting keys on it only, as well as a voice input system for the bulk of the work? It would have to be fairly lag free to take advantage, and would need some practice to get used to, but could be viable.
Actually, FYI, the Atomic bomb was developed to be dropped on Germany, not Japan. The Germans were working on their own nuclear program, though they didn't have the reasources that Allied scientists did. The Japanese had a tiny program that would not have yeilded results in a timely manner. The reason we didn't drop the bomb on Germany was that VE day was here before we had the chance. If you doubt this, look at Desden. Allied bombers inflicted far more casualties in the one night firebombing raid than the atomic bomb did on Hiroshima.
I agree, SUVs (and any other tanks used on public roads) should have built-in mechanisms to kill the SUV-driver in the case of an accident. It's only fair. SUV's do have a mechanism in them to kill their drivers. The bigass american ones are built around truck frames (Cheaper to do it that way than to custom manufacture a custom frame). Their big size makes them safer in car to car collisions, but the far and away majority of fatalities happen when a car strikes a perminant object, and in these sorts of accidents, the stiff truck frame doesn't deform like a car frame so the passengers tend to bear most of the decelleration. If you want a car that's really safe, buy a new Ford Taurus. SUV really aren't all that great from a safety standpoint.
On the website, one of the listed features is a 5 point seatbelt, so IIRC, if you wrecked it you wouldn't go forward all that much if you kept the seatbelt nice and tight.
I've done a little blacksmithing, and Iron will burn quite nicely. That's one of the things that's hardest to learn when you're just starting out is how hot metal is, so you get it hot enough for it to be nice a malleable without it burning.
That is the truth, 2600 magazine has trouble getting sold anywhere outside of the monster stores because of it's digest size. None of the old sci-fi digests are in business any more, and that is supposed to be one of the reasons they went out. OTOH CDs used to be packaged in "LP" sized packaging because the distributers thought no one would be willing to stock CDs in smaller bins.
One solution to this is to go to a local computer store and see if they will order you an OEM packed version of the software. The OEM version tends to be a bit cheaper for them to get, which they like, and it also tends come in more environmentally friendly/smaller packages.
Here's the thing, everything is built by the lowest bidder. That isn't to say that there are not qualifications for bidding. If I want a government contract I can't just say "I'll do it for $50" then run off with the cash, and do you think that the government doesn't use computers now? Do you think the government has some big filing cabinet where they keep all of your files? If so, do you think that this is more secure? Here in Va we had an incident a few years back where a county courthouse burned down, and they lost all their records for the last 150 years or so, and since it was all on paper, the backups were at best incomplete.
There is one thing that is classic public choice issue: Defense. The reason it can't be privatized is that it's a thing that produces group benefits, and there is no way to exclude non-payers. ie, I can't say "protect fred's house from the bombers, but don't protect bob's house". This leads to strategic free riding. Because my paying or not paying by myself won't bring down the whole system, it is to my advantage not to pay. This leads to no one paying, so in order to have a defense you need taxes.
These things fell seriously out of favor when they started to fry computers. Because of cables and what not PC's develop hot spots in differant places, and since the thermostat was typically on the power supply, the PC could be seriously overheating while the fan was running in "quiet" mode. Look in hardware manuals from that era and often as not there are specific warnings against using throttled fans.
Road noise is a significant factor here in the US too. Why do you think we like the big monstermobiles? ;-) Seriously, though the level of noise that's tollerable in a car is appearantly much higher than what people are willing to tollerate here. I'm not really the best judge though, as I tend to both drive with the windows down, and leave all my computers running.
Find it Fast
Be Prepared for Anything
Fit in, Standout
See it all Clearly
Touch it, Feel it, Believe it
Take it Easy
Does any of that actually make sense? I especially like "Touch it, Feel it, Believe it". Reminds me of the fake commercials in the robocop movies.
In the football game, you could press the button and run backwards, and end at the opposite end of the football field. This was great for the "long bomb" play. "Where in the hell did that guy come from!?!?"
Go to www.askjeeves.com and type in "Is Jeeves Gay?" in the ask question box.
The active optics can probably be done with MEMS, and the measuring lights and receivers are probably semiconductor-based already. The whole system could be moved into technologies that are benefiting from Moore's Law, and once it's there the size and cost will drop exponentially. I think in the article the person was referring to the size of the detection gear rather than of the glasses themselves, IIRC I don't think the optomitrists invision us wearing adaptive lenses and shooting out lasers to correct for the refraction in the Air. ;-)
You forgot one other important possiblity: 7. People with lifestyles that involve staying on the phone more than 2 hours a day may also be doing things that put you and higher risk to brain cancer. People who own surfboards probably have a somewhat higher skin cancer rate than the background, however it's not that the surfboards are beaming out cancer rays, it's that they're out in the sun a lot.
Ah Australians, second only to New Zealanders in their self love. :-) IIRC the "hands free" kits don't make talking on a cellphone any safer according to studies. It's the fact that you're sitting there having a discussion that makes it dangerous to use a cell phone, not that you're only driving with one hand. I mean, how many of us seriously sit there with hands at 10 and 2 every single second we're behind the wheel? Or how about stickshifts? You have to take a hand off the wheel to operate the shifter, and I don't think there are many huge pile ups caused by shifting.
That was something the marketfluffer from whatever power company they were interviewing was saying, IIRC any server host worth a damn has battery backup/generators. I can't think of one person in the tech field complaining about the availability of power.
The fact that with all the complexity inherant to delivering power that it does work 99.9% of the time is a miricle of the modern day, right up there with the fact that my umpty umpt thousand part 20 year old car will start every time.
This looks like more hysteria to me, remember back in 96 or so when the internet was going to bring down the phone networks?
On the other hand, if we could stop fighting altogether, we could use those machines for far better purposes.
It's a documented fact that the one purpose for giant robots is to fight, and if needed, kill other giant robots. Just look at the heroic deeds of Gigantor, Voltron, and Optimus Prime.