How could would a nuke be in space, I wonder? There's no atmosphere to transmit a blast wave, so all you're looking at is a really nasty light-and-IR pulse and the remains of the bomb and shrapnel placed around it. The radiation diminishes with distance squared, and the shrapnel travels very slowly by space speeds. Obviously it'll do damage if you can get in close, but as an area-effect weapon?
I am in the process of building a functioning force field as a hobby. It's actually not that difficult, if you have ridiculous amounts of energy to hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window
I'm using a bank of lead-acids. Force fields in effect: If you lob an object at one, it'll bounce off. Unlike in star trek though, conductive objects are liable to cause the full force of the plasma generator to be focused upon them. Anyone who poked the field with a finger would lose it, along with a sizeable chunk of hand.
I made a ship in Garry's Mod that attacked like that. Drone fighter. It was banned from the server. Partly because it was unbeatable - everyone else used weapons that locked onto a pilot, so they couldn't hope to hit a drone - but mostly because the simplistic logic didn't respect the designated 'no combat' zone on the spawn planet. After a successful kill, the deceased would respawn back there and the drone would quickly fly over to their new location and unleash a slicey beam of death upon the build area.
It makes more sense in the novel. Spoilers, but...
The Monolith is a tool. It isn't sentient, and as such isn't very good at adapting. It's programmed to seek life or potential life, protect it and direct it's evolution towards intelligence. But, having done so, it is left with a problem: Lacking the adaptability of full sentience, it could not communicate with the new civilisation it created due to an unbridgeable cultural difference between them and it's own creators. Thus it's program has one final step: Capture a native. The first of the new species to reach it, all the way out there, which could only be done by a species advanced enough to be ready. Upon capturing this native, digitise their mind and incorporate them as a semi-independant aspect of it's own programming. An ambassador, of a sort - not a translator of words, but a way to express the decisions of the monolith in a manner that can be understood, and to allow the monolith in turn to assess the civilisation it created and act accordingly to protect them and protect others from them.
This didn't get put in the film very well, so all we got was Space Baby - actually the perception of the newly uploaded astronaut, newborn as part of the monolith, exploring the planet with his greatly expanded intellect and senses mankind could not even imagine.
The entertainingly implausible Net Force novels have something like that. Their version of the internet operates in a manner so interconnected that low-level analysis is far beyond human comprehension, so characters have to view it through an intermediate metaphorical layer. What started out as just a graphical interface became more customiseable over time, to the point that one character sees the internet as the wild west, with mail servers being represented by telegraph operators and large file transfers by men on horses. Occasionally two characters meet while using different metaphors - and as they like to stay in character while traveling the internet virtual reality, this can be a rather awkward experience.
Because if you're doing mass production, an engine strapped to a chunk of ballast could be done for a fraction of the cost of a crewed ship with life support, triple-redundant everything, advanced sensors, living space, weapons systems and so on in addition to that engine. Which would be better: Two crewed ships, or one crewed ship and ten decoys?
Probably a good thing too. I'm sure the psychology of the person willing to fight for their freedom isn't that far off from the psychology of the person willing to, for example, shoot a doctor for performing abortion. Strong loyalty to a cause can be a great and dangerous thing.
In full, it means 'right to work regardless of union membership.' It refers to laws which prohibit businesses from requiring union membership as a condition of employment, which many unions do otherwise demand as a means to secure their own influence. Advocates of such laws argue that they are needed to prevent a union from effectively taking control of a company by dictating hireing practices. Opponents argue that they serve only to undermine the power of unions by ensuring that if there is a strike, the employer can simply fire everyone and hire new workers.
The bill of rights limits the actions of government, not individuals or corporations. At the time of writing it didn't matter, because there were no national mega-corps of the type of all-controlling scope that we know today - government was the big threat to liberty. It could be argued though that in these times some corporations have so much power that they could be considered almost governmental in nature, and so should be subject to the same restrictions.
I think the point is that the Brilliant Jerk is predominantly brilliant in the early stages of the company, but predominantly jerk as the company grows. A startup can really use a few genius employees who can work miracles on a shoestring budget and a tenth the time anyone else would need, but with growth comes more of a need for established procedures and established domains of authority. The Brilliant Jerk does not thrive in such an environment. The writer is simply pointing out that just because someone provides a near-superhuman performance early on in a company does not mean the company owes them any loyalty: Once their usefulness has passed, kick them out the door.
Many of Azimov's stories were about the actions of robots in such a situation. They would behave erratically in order to avoid being forced to violate their laws, but if ever in a situation where it was impossible not to do so, a low-level failsafe caused them to shut down (And in a most untidy manner, usually destroying the positronic brain entirely: Not a clean shutdown). The theory being that if the laws have failed, the best action is inaction. Several of the robots met their end in this manner.
These is but one question that any administrator is going to ask about the Pi: "Does this thing improve the school exam results?"
The answer is no. It isn't on the curriculum. The skills the Pi teaches aren't graded, so a better exam improvement would be had by just spending the time revising basic Word document formatting, which is. The Pi is a technical solution for a non-technical problem: A dumbed-down IT curriculum that long ago abandoned any real computer science or technology in favor of basic Office skills, because those are the skills demanded by most employers. Improve the curriculum first, and the Pi will be the tool to serve it.
I run an after school electronics club. In six days, I will be talking the group through installing a dual H-bridge into their robot. In thirteen days, I'm going to have to teach them to program the chip that will drive it. A PIC16F628A. In ASM. I have a policy against using any black-box in this design: They need a microcontroller, and they *will* understand and write every last instruction to make it go if it takes all year. So I really, really wish they had been taught something about the fundamentals of computer science already, and I didn't have to start from the foundations for this project. They really want to drive their robot around, and that's not happening without programming.
Fortunatly it is a very simple program they must write, probably only about twenty instructions at the most.
The surviving books have to be handled with protective gloves and stored in environmentally controlled conditions. Today's books wouldn't hold up nearly so well, as our modern paper contains whitening agents that slowly degrade the fibers. It wouldn't be difficult to make a book today that would remain readable in thousands of years, but it would have to be done intentionally, using appropriate materials.
I have visions of these devices being used to store archival tax records, or perhaps the hundred-year mandatory retention of internet traffic a near-future government will require of ISPs.
How about making a microscope too? A microscope only needs two materials to construct: A body and a lens. Both of those can be materials that will last a million years without difficulty, along with a storage case.
1x4x9x16, continuing to an unspecified but finite number, according to the book. The 1x4x9 cuboid is just the part that intersects with the three ordinary spatial dimensions.
A CD-like patterning could result in the familiar interference effect. A spectrum. In the event of a collapse of civilisation, that type of effect would likely make the material a highly treasured gem. That will ensure it is preserved for a very long time (Though possibly broken into smaller pieces). The strange pattern will also attract the interest of future scientists, who will probe at it with reinvented microscopes until they figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
How could would a nuke be in space, I wonder? There's no atmosphere to transmit a blast wave, so all you're looking at is a really nasty light-and-IR pulse and the remains of the bomb and shrapnel placed around it. The radiation diminishes with distance squared, and the shrapnel travels very slowly by space speeds. Obviously it'll do damage if you can get in close, but as an area-effect weapon?
I am in the process of building a functioning force field as a hobby. It's actually not that difficult, if you have ridiculous amounts of energy to hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_window
I'm using a bank of lead-acids. Force fields in effect: If you lob an object at one, it'll bounce off. Unlike in star trek though, conductive objects are liable to cause the full force of the plasma generator to be focused upon them. Anyone who poked the field with a finger would lose it, along with a sizeable chunk of hand.
I made a ship in Garry's Mod that attacked like that. Drone fighter. It was banned from the server. Partly because it was unbeatable - everyone else used weapons that locked onto a pilot, so they couldn't hope to hit a drone - but mostly because the simplistic logic didn't respect the designated 'no combat' zone on the spawn planet. After a successful kill, the deceased would respawn back there and the drone would quickly fly over to their new location and unleash a slicey beam of death upon the build area.
It makes more sense in the novel. Spoilers, but...
The Monolith is a tool. It isn't sentient, and as such isn't very good at adapting. It's programmed to seek life or potential life, protect it and direct it's evolution towards intelligence. But, having done so, it is left with a problem: Lacking the adaptability of full sentience, it could not communicate with the new civilisation it created due to an unbridgeable cultural difference between them and it's own creators. Thus it's program has one final step: Capture a native. The first of the new species to reach it, all the way out there, which could only be done by a species advanced enough to be ready. Upon capturing this native, digitise their mind and incorporate them as a semi-independant aspect of it's own programming. An ambassador, of a sort - not a translator of words, but a way to express the decisions of the monolith in a manner that can be understood, and to allow the monolith in turn to assess the civilisation it created and act accordingly to protect them and protect others from them.
This didn't get put in the film very well, so all we got was Space Baby - actually the perception of the newly uploaded astronaut, newborn as part of the monolith, exploring the planet with his greatly expanded intellect and senses mankind could not even imagine.
The entertainingly implausible Net Force novels have something like that. Their version of the internet operates in a manner so interconnected that low-level analysis is far beyond human comprehension, so characters have to view it through an intermediate metaphorical layer. What started out as just a graphical interface became more customiseable over time, to the point that one character sees the internet as the wild west, with mail servers being represented by telegraph operators and large file transfers by men on horses. Occasionally two characters meet while using different metaphors - and as they like to stay in character while traveling the internet virtual reality, this can be a rather awkward experience.
Because if you're doing mass production, an engine strapped to a chunk of ballast could be done for a fraction of the cost of a crewed ship with life support, triple-redundant everything, advanced sensors, living space, weapons systems and so on in addition to that engine. Which would be better: Two crewed ships, or one crewed ship and ten decoys?
Probably a good thing too. I'm sure the psychology of the person willing to fight for their freedom isn't that far off from the psychology of the person willing to, for example, shoot a doctor for performing abortion. Strong loyalty to a cause can be a great and dangerous thing.
In full, it means 'right to work regardless of union membership.' It refers to laws which prohibit businesses from requiring union membership as a condition of employment, which many unions do otherwise demand as a means to secure their own influence. Advocates of such laws argue that they are needed to prevent a union from effectively taking control of a company by dictating hireing practices. Opponents argue that they serve only to undermine the power of unions by ensuring that if there is a strike, the employer can simply fire everyone and hire new workers.
The bill of rights limits the actions of government, not individuals or corporations. At the time of writing it didn't matter, because there were no national mega-corps of the type of all-controlling scope that we know today - government was the big threat to liberty. It could be argued though that in these times some corporations have so much power that they could be considered almost governmental in nature, and so should be subject to the same restrictions.
It's a tool. It can be used by the owner, or against the owner.
If the fine is the same size, then $1.28B is a small price to pay for the type of money and power that controlling Windows software sales will bring.
The US government has also taken action against Microsoft for abuse of their monopoly status. Independantly.
Aww, you still have your empathy intact. How quaint. But in the world of business, there is no place for such a weakness.
I think the point is that the Brilliant Jerk is predominantly brilliant in the early stages of the company, but predominantly jerk as the company grows. A startup can really use a few genius employees who can work miracles on a shoestring budget and a tenth the time anyone else would need, but with growth comes more of a need for established procedures and established domains of authority. The Brilliant Jerk does not thrive in such an environment. The writer is simply pointing out that just because someone provides a near-superhuman performance early on in a company does not mean the company owes them any loyalty: Once their usefulness has passed, kick them out the door.
A very long flexible hose.
One of these:
http://birds-are-nice.me/programming/glowydie2.jpg
Many of Azimov's stories were about the actions of robots in such a situation. They would behave erratically in order to avoid being forced to violate their laws, but if ever in a situation where it was impossible not to do so, a low-level failsafe caused them to shut down (And in a most untidy manner, usually destroying the positronic brain entirely: Not a clean shutdown). The theory being that if the laws have failed, the best action is inaction. Several of the robots met their end in this manner.
Along with "Stop assuming it's all ASCII!"
These is but one question that any administrator is going to ask about the Pi: "Does this thing improve the school exam results?"
The answer is no. It isn't on the curriculum. The skills the Pi teaches aren't graded, so a better exam improvement would be had by just spending the time revising basic Word document formatting, which is. The Pi is a technical solution for a non-technical problem: A dumbed-down IT curriculum that long ago abandoned any real computer science or technology in favor of basic Office skills, because those are the skills demanded by most employers. Improve the curriculum first, and the Pi will be the tool to serve it.
I run an after school electronics club. In six days, I will be talking the group through installing a dual H-bridge into their robot. In thirteen days, I'm going to have to teach them to program the chip that will drive it. A PIC16F628A. In ASM. I have a policy against using any black-box in this design: They need a microcontroller, and they *will* understand and write every last instruction to make it go if it takes all year. So I really, really wish they had been taught something about the fundamentals of computer science already, and I didn't have to start from the foundations for this project. They really want to drive their robot around, and that's not happening without programming.
Fortunatly it is a very simple program they must write, probably only about twenty instructions at the most.
The surviving books have to be handled with protective gloves and stored in environmentally controlled conditions. Today's books wouldn't hold up nearly so well, as our modern paper contains whitening agents that slowly degrade the fibers. It wouldn't be difficult to make a book today that would remain readable in thousands of years, but it would have to be done intentionally, using appropriate materials.
I have visions of these devices being used to store archival tax records, or perhaps the hundred-year mandatory retention of internet traffic a near-future government will require of ISPs.
How about making a microscope too? A microscope only needs two materials to construct: A body and a lens. Both of those can be materials that will last a million years without difficulty, along with a storage case.
1x4x9x16, continuing to an unspecified but finite number, according to the book. The 1x4x9 cuboid is just the part that intersects with the three ordinary spatial dimensions.
A CD-like patterning could result in the familiar interference effect. A spectrum. In the event of a collapse of civilisation, that type of effect would likely make the material a highly treasured gem. That will ensure it is preserved for a very long time (Though possibly broken into smaller pieces). The strange pattern will also attract the interest of future scientists, who will probe at it with reinvented microscopes until they figure it out.
230KG spread amongst the entire annual landfill volume? That must be very dilute.