My own tests show that they are partially polarised, planar. But not perfectly. Even in the orientation which blocks the greatest proportion of light, a significant amount gets through. It just dims a little, compared to the ninety-degree rotation of the filter. Still wouldn't be much use, as there is no way to determine in advance which way the pointer is being held. I haven't tried using a circular filter, but I don't imagine the laser has any circular polarisation.
But without the ability to attract impulse watches, such a business would be at a disadvantage.
There is a place to look for solutions. A group of users that have need to move video around the internet, and are famed for their rapid rate of technological improvement and adaptability. Pirates. In a world where caps are common... give them a couple of years to tinker with compression technology, and they'll be cramming blu-ray movies into two gigabytes with no perceptible loss of quality. Standard size for a 720p movie is already 4.4GB, and there's room for improvement yet.
Microsoft benefits from a positive feedback system. Windows is the most popular OS, and thus the one on which all software is available and throughly tested, every product designed to work on, every device supplied with drivers and almost all employees capable of using without too much trouble. This in turn means that it's in general the most convenient OS to use, and thus it remains the most popular. Had history gone differently, a few managers made different decisions, we may all be using a descendant of OS/2 today and grumbling about how IBM has taken over.
Sure you can. Just go look up 'natural monopoly.' It occurs when a single player has taken over, but economic conditions (Such as a very high capital cost to build infrastructure) or exclusive business arrangements prohibit anyone else from competing with them. Broadband is a case of both - the cost to enter is very high due to the great expense of laying cables, so no sensible investor would take the risk, and the big players are able to negotiate favorable transit arrangements amongst themselves that a newcomer would not benefit from.
What exactly are they doing? I can think of no way of 'simulating' a massive DDoS short of actually doing it. The only possibility I can see is that they are testing the protocols management put in place regarding who talks to who to make sure that the government advisors are kept informed - lots of phone calls along the lines of 'I'm attacking your mail server, pass it on.'
Planes already went fast. Supersonic passanger jet technology was introduced long ago. The difficult part is making it financially viable in the current economy - Concorde just cost too much to run.
The focus of civilian aviation now isn't on speed, but cost - finding new ways to make the planes ever more economical to operate, either by increasing fuel efficiency (Fuel being a major cost) or to cram more paying passangers onboard to reduce the per-passanger cost.
How hard can missile guidance be? The software is tricky, but it doesn't demand a great deal of computing power. You could probably run it on a few PICs, with a skilled coder.
It's a matter of efficiency. Suing even one percent of the general pirate population would not only be very expensive, but earn the ire of government as courts are clogged up for years with the flood of cases. So there are only two counters through the legal process: Either target the most important (Site operators, releasers) and hope that without them the community will fall apart, or lobby for a faster, easier way to take action against the common torrent user ('three strikes' laws and similar) which bypasses all the slow and complicated business of a full civil suit and the need to present and argue compelling evidence in favor of a quick accuse-and-punish system that makes mass enforcement practical.
The charge is usually translated 'rape' because there is no precise analog in either UK or US law. It could be rendered as 'sex by deception.' There is something very suspicious going on though, because the case was closed very soon after the initial complaint - but then reopened shortly after the US cable leaks, for reasons the Swedish police claim are coincidence. It's enough of a coincidence that it seems quite plausible some political pressure may have been applied to find any excuse to arrest him, such as reopening an old case. If this is indeed the case then nothing can be certain, as everyone involved - the women, the police, the government - has a strong incentive towards deception.
Opening a TCP connection requires, at the absolute minimum (using the right tricks), one packet each way. A DNS query needs one packet each way, assuming the server has the answer cached. The DNS server is usually going to be closer, so the DNS query should almost always take less time than opening a TCP session.
The particle accelerator ones can hold back one atmosphere of gas pressure. But those are very small. The power you need is proportional to radius to the fourth power (I think, I still only half-follow this myself), so scaling them up really doesn't scale well. There's also a hard limit: You can only make your plasma so hot before the density becomes too low to sustain current.
It'll be a couple of months before I even have a prototype of my design though. I'm in the process of moving home right now, and parts are expensive. It's not some revolutionary new science I'm working on, I just like this stuff as a hobby. Friend and I started off zapping stuff with a microwave oven transformer at 2KV, and worked up from there.
We should be calling it a volume-effect weapon, really. But those x-rays diminish with the distance squared, and remember that any crewed ship would have to have substantial radiation shielding anyway. We need a real physicist to calculate the effective radius, assuming a target with a realistic level of shielding.
You assume effective AI. It might not be practical to make tactical or strategic decisions by remote control from light-hours away. Even a fleet of drones might need a control ship with human commanders aboard. Possibly a very small one, to make it harder to detect or hit.
Not if one ship is stationary. Colonials are sitting there, not moving or moving only at sublight (ie, negligable) speed. Probably making repairs, or discussing their next action. Cylons jump in three light-minutes away and run their sensors. They pick up the colonials right away - or rather, where they were three minutes ago. But the colonials aren't moving at any significent speed, so where they were three minutes ago is almost right on top of where they are now. Jump accordingly to come out not just close by, but with your guns already facing in almost the right direction.
In every show except Stargate, this has been addressed in some manner.
Stargate didn't address it. Ever. Other species or cultures are often seen with a different form of script for their language, but the spoken form is always English, and no translation technology was ever mentioned.
At times the translation methods are stretched - Star Trek's universal translator can usually translate any language, even a pre-warp civilisation's which has never been contacted before, without even hearing a single word beforehand - but they are at least handwaved. Except Stargate.
Stargate made fun of that once. The crew of Atlantis base were hiding from an orbital Wraith attack fleet using their newly-activated experimental cloaking field. The scene was of everyone keeping as quiet as they could, watching the sensor displays to see if the Wraith had detected them. Someone whispers 'Did it work?' in a hushed voice. A few seconds later someone replies: 'Why are we whispering?' Everyone looks uncomfortable for a few seconds, realizing they had unconsciously started acting quietly and whispering even though there was no way an orbital attack fleet could detect any sound they might make.
Not caring is very realistic. Compare it to, say, mines. They can stay around for years or even decades after a war, continuing to kill and maim civilians. They cost a fortune to clear, and clearing is itsself a dangerous task. Do you think the army laying them thought about that? No. It was a war. The objective was to beat the enemy, whatever it took - even if that meant creating a new problem for the future.
A human has to deal with network time and reaction time, and cannot process all the sensor data at once. The algorithms might reach the point where no human pilot can hope to beat one in a fair fight.
Because the engine for a fighter has to be really big in relation to the size of the craft to get high acceleration. That means it has to be fixed, not vectored. The fighter can only accelerate forwards. As the fighters lack long-range weapons (That's why they are fighters), they need to close on their targets to have a chance of hitting. Which means they need to point towards the target, accelerating.
Slashdot Mirror
"The other option is enclose the cockpit and do everything with cameras."
How long before we can ditch the cockpit and fly large aircraft entirely on computer control? No pilot at all.
My own tests show that they are partially polarised, planar. But not perfectly. Even in the orientation which blocks the greatest proportion of light, a significant amount gets through. It just dims a little, compared to the ninety-degree rotation of the filter. Still wouldn't be much use, as there is no way to determine in advance which way the pointer is being held. I haven't tried using a circular filter, but I don't imagine the laser has any circular polarisation.
But without the ability to attract impulse watches, such a business would be at a disadvantage.
There is a place to look for solutions. A group of users that have need to move video around the internet, and are famed for their rapid rate of technological improvement and adaptability. Pirates. In a world where caps are common... give them a couple of years to tinker with compression technology, and they'll be cramming blu-ray movies into two gigabytes with no perceptible loss of quality. Standard size for a 720p movie is already 4.4GB, and there's room for improvement yet.
Microsoft benefits from a positive feedback system. Windows is the most popular OS, and thus the one on which all software is available and throughly tested, every product designed to work on, every device supplied with drivers and almost all employees capable of using without too much trouble. This in turn means that it's in general the most convenient OS to use, and thus it remains the most popular. Had history gone differently, a few managers made different decisions, we may all be using a descendant of OS/2 today and grumbling about how IBM has taken over.
Sure you can. Just go look up 'natural monopoly.' It occurs when a single player has taken over, but economic conditions (Such as a very high capital cost to build infrastructure) or exclusive business arrangements prohibit anyone else from competing with them. Broadband is a case of both - the cost to enter is very high due to the great expense of laying cables, so no sensible investor would take the risk, and the big players are able to negotiate favorable transit arrangements amongst themselves that a newcomer would not benefit from.
What exactly are they doing? I can think of no way of 'simulating' a massive DDoS short of actually doing it. The only possibility I can see is that they are testing the protocols management put in place regarding who talks to who to make sure that the government advisors are kept informed - lots of phone calls along the lines of 'I'm attacking your mail server, pass it on.'
'Cybersex' is a media-driven term with no clear definition. It means whatever a writer needs it to mean.
'Sexting' is just as bad.
Planes already went fast. Supersonic passanger jet technology was introduced long ago. The difficult part is making it financially viable in the current economy - Concorde just cost too much to run.
The focus of civilian aviation now isn't on speed, but cost - finding new ways to make the planes ever more economical to operate, either by increasing fuel efficiency (Fuel being a major cost) or to cram more paying passangers onboard to reduce the per-passanger cost.
How hard can missile guidance be? The software is tricky, but it doesn't demand a great deal of computing power. You could probably run it on a few PICs, with a skilled coder.
You could make a script that runs every week and updates the hosts list.
It's a matter of efficiency. Suing even one percent of the general pirate population would not only be very expensive, but earn the ire of government as courts are clogged up for years with the flood of cases. So there are only two counters through the legal process: Either target the most important (Site operators, releasers) and hope that without them the community will fall apart, or lobby for a faster, easier way to take action against the common torrent user ('three strikes' laws and similar) which bypasses all the slow and complicated business of a full civil suit and the need to present and argue compelling evidence in favor of a quick accuse-and-punish system that makes mass enforcement practical.
The charge is usually translated 'rape' because there is no precise analog in either UK or US law. It could be rendered as 'sex by deception.' There is something very suspicious going on though, because the case was closed very soon after the initial complaint - but then reopened shortly after the US cable leaks, for reasons the Swedish police claim are coincidence. It's enough of a coincidence that it seems quite plausible some political pressure may have been applied to find any excuse to arrest him, such as reopening an old case. If this is indeed the case then nothing can be certain, as everyone involved - the women, the police, the government - has a strong incentive towards deception.
Opening a TCP connection requires, at the absolute minimum (using the right tricks), one packet each way. A DNS query needs one packet each way, assuming the server has the answer cached. The DNS server is usually going to be closer, so the DNS query should almost always take less time than opening a TCP session.
In this particular case, the two are indistinguishable.
I was taught in English class to write my answers as long as I could, because the more text I write the more potential places there are to earn marks.
The particle accelerator ones can hold back one atmosphere of gas pressure. But those are very small. The power you need is proportional to radius to the fourth power (I think, I still only half-follow this myself), so scaling them up really doesn't scale well. There's also a hard limit: You can only make your plasma so hot before the density becomes too low to sustain current.
It'll be a couple of months before I even have a prototype of my design though. I'm in the process of moving home right now, and parts are expensive. It's not some revolutionary new science I'm working on, I just like this stuff as a hobby. Friend and I started off zapping stuff with a microwave oven transformer at 2KV, and worked up from there.
We should be calling it a volume-effect weapon, really. But those x-rays diminish with the distance squared, and remember that any crewed ship would have to have substantial radiation shielding anyway. We need a real physicist to calculate the effective radius, assuming a target with a realistic level of shielding.
You assume effective AI. It might not be practical to make tactical or strategic decisions by remote control from light-hours away. Even a fleet of drones might need a control ship with human commanders aboard. Possibly a very small one, to make it harder to detect or hit.
Not if one ship is stationary.
Colonials are sitting there, not moving or moving only at sublight (ie, negligable) speed. Probably making repairs, or discussing their next action. Cylons jump in three light-minutes away and run their sensors. They pick up the colonials right away - or rather, where they were three minutes ago. But the colonials aren't moving at any significent speed, so where they were three minutes ago is almost right on top of where they are now. Jump accordingly to come out not just close by, but with your guns already facing in almost the right direction.
In every show except Stargate, this has been addressed in some manner.
Stargate didn't address it. Ever. Other species or cultures are often seen with a different form of script for their language, but the spoken form is always English, and no translation technology was ever mentioned.
At times the translation methods are stretched - Star Trek's universal translator can usually translate any language, even a pre-warp civilisation's which has never been contacted before, without even hearing a single word beforehand - but they are at least handwaved. Except Stargate.
Stargate made fun of that once. The crew of Atlantis base were hiding from an orbital Wraith attack fleet using their newly-activated experimental cloaking field. The scene was of everyone keeping as quiet as they could, watching the sensor displays to see if the Wraith had detected them. Someone whispers 'Did it work?' in a hushed voice. A few seconds later someone replies: 'Why are we whispering?' Everyone looks uncomfortable for a few seconds, realizing they had unconsciously started acting quietly and whispering even though there was no way an orbital attack fleet could detect any sound they might make.
Aside from the 'space is full of water' thing. But this is an acceptable break from real physics, because the game wouldn't work otherwise.
Not caring is very realistic. Compare it to, say, mines. They can stay around for years or even decades after a war, continuing to kill and maim civilians. They cost a fortune to clear, and clearing is itsself a dangerous task. Do you think the army laying them thought about that? No. It was a war. The objective was to beat the enemy, whatever it took - even if that meant creating a new problem for the future.
A human has to deal with network time and reaction time, and cannot process all the sensor data at once. The algorithms might reach the point where no human pilot can hope to beat one in a fair fight.
Because the engine for a fighter has to be really big in relation to the size of the craft to get high acceleration. That means it has to be fixed, not vectored. The fighter can only accelerate forwards. As the fighters lack long-range weapons (That's why they are fighters), they need to close on their targets to have a chance of hitting. Which means they need to point towards the target, accelerating.