100ms would mean that xbox only polls the controller 10 times a second.
As a developer, that's not what happens no. I said the time to respond is about 100ms, in a good fps. The killzone guys did a good writeup on this a few years ago, they had something 133 ms and needed to get it down to 100.
"Lag" isn't just the RTT of the signal, first of all you have buffering, so the console can be 100ms behind and still *always* be 100ms behind for example, even polling every 1ms (or 1ns for all it matters). Think light or sound, no matter what you are always hearing/seeing the event some amount of time *after* it actually happened, because there is a finite propagation speed.
Secondly, I pointed out including the time to respond. Consoles controllers are significantly slower responses than PC mouse/keyboards, that's why XIM3 can even exist and have a business. But onlive was a PC business. You can play most PC games at 50-80ms of lag without any serious problems, and we know this because even single player gaming on a console you're playing with ~100 ms of lag due to the controller. PC players would be at a disadvantage against others without that lag, but that's well within the 'regular internet' lag tolerance you have to design for (which is still up around 200ms). Lag on onlive was, I'm sure, a problem they had to think a lot about, but they actually managed to solve it reasonably well. It is a bit like the difference between a console and a PC, and they're both manageable for gaming, but put them in the same room and the PC guys have a distinct advantage.
The big market for an outfit like onlive was to sell their technology to the big console guys or to Cisco/NDS (nds just bought by cisco) who make the set top cable boxes. For the big console guys especially it would give them the ability to run legacy games natively and stream them to users for example, or to offer a 'full' gaming experience to someone who knows nothing about their PC and can't be bothered/afford to build one themselves. Not exactly the/. crowd, but a big market. MS however can build their own cloud, Sony bought Gaiklai and it doesn't look like nintendo feels the need to pay big bucks for onlive, and their hardware might actually not need most of what onlive offers since they have working ways to natively run even NES games on the DS.
And with low enough latency for it to be worth a damn.
The lag between pushing a button a console controller and the console actually being able to respond to it is about 100ms btw. Lag with onlive isn't really the issue. They were looking to be bought out by Sony or MS or nintendo, to have their tech folded into their respective services. But those guys can all just build their own.
I think this is it. A house will have a computer the same way it has a furnace or a water heater or electrical box. Things will plug into that computer, and there will be technicians to maintain it. It should be reasonably reliable.
Now the different with computers is of course the flexible capacity requirement (you don't need 4 furnaces for 4 people) but probably homes with have a blade rack type setup where you plug in as many computers as you need, up to 8 or 16 or something, and any more will have a niche case market. You'll have a jack in your wall for monitors which bluetooth or usb or similar to your input devices if you need them. And your wireless devices will talk to your house server seamlessly.
You can't, at least, not that I know of. Mirrors are bidirectional, you can have 'one way mirrors' which rely on illumination on one side versus the other, and they only work one way because of material layering, but the inside of an aircraft an aircraft isn't going to be brighter than outside always (nor would that really have the desired effect).
As I say, the question is whether or not there are materials that have different bi-directional properties along the same axis. I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
By that argument filesharing is stealing the entire value of an album thousands of times.
I see where you're coming from, but obviously shining lasers at aircraft hasn't caused thousands of crashes, even though there have been thousands of incidents, so people don't see the cause-effect.
Every time someone says something like this, implying that the meat eaters among us are assisting in destroying the planet, it bothers me.
Everything in moderation. I'm not against meat in general, I just had 3 turkey dinners (from 3 turkeys) for the last 3 days, but that's not the point, but public policy is an exercise in statistics, if 'healthy' meat consumption is 300g a day, averaged over 350 million people and consumption is averaging 301 then no harm no foul, if it's averaging 900g/day then there's a serious public policy issue. If the harm from only eating 200g/day is outweighed by being able to feed 1/3rd more people then suddenly the tradeoff.
I didn't come out against meat, you read that yourself, I specifically added a bit about the benefits of meat because it's a balancing act in public policy.
Solid state lasers are are polarized, so polarizing filters could block everything, or nothing, from different types of lasers. I made this mistake building a quantum cryptography demo at one point a few years ago.
Sometimes, a lot of times, yes. Remember that story from a couple of days ago about people shooting lasers at aircraft? People don't always see the big picture or have time to focus on the details of the environmental/health/safety impacts of all of their choices, because they have shit to do. So they pay the government to make those decisions for them.
When I walk into a supermarket I *want* someone to have written a bunch of food safety standards so that I'm reasonably confident in the food I buy, and reasonably confident that if there is a recall (as we are going through in canada right now) there will be some press about it, rather than some local guy covering it up. If 'dependence on foreign oil' is a serious problem, which for Japan for example it was for a long time, and for Europe, who depend on Russia, it creates some very serious complications, that may trump my desire for cheap oil/methane/etc because if I'm depending on something that can be cut off or significantly inflated in price later I'm essentially like those people who got mortgages for double the value they could ever afford to pay off.
With each of your points:
Meat: People don't want irradiated meat, even though that would eliminate a lot of the food safety issues with it, but the 'intellectual superiors' have a solution, that's been rejected by the intellectually inferior masses due to the word 'irradiated'. Meat takes a lot of grain, and, in effect, is an inefficient system of distributing nutrition, except that there are health benefits to eating some meat. But in the case of serious drought or crop failure we'd be be better off to go vegetarian for a year than have a few million people starve to death so we can keep having steaks. Fortunately we haven't had a problem like that lately, but the drought in the US, locusts in Africa, pollution in china and india can make for some very bad things happening to the food supply.
Temperatures in the winter: Consumes energy/oil. As I said, there are serious strategic implications (and economic ones in terms of balance of trade and currency value). This is the argument japan is going through right now. Nuclear is expensive, but the VAST majority of that spending is local or to economies with robust trade and strong economies. Natural gas is popular because it's not nuclear, but means the Japanese are going to need to find someone to sell them natural gas. And remember they're still technically at war with Russia from WW2, who is the largest supplier of Natural gas. As a result of their power shortages they've needed to have government mandates about working times and so on. Yes yes, nanny state. But the choice was make people work strange inconvenient hours, or cut power to millions of people, and now Japan is going to expand its massive dependency on foreign everything. Not a good situation to be in when you're technically at war with one neighbour, and perpetually on the brink of war with 2 others.
TV: The government licences spectrum. The government has always licenced content in creative works to varying degrees. That's not new, and between that and the rules about content safe for children it doesn't seem like governments in civilized countries are going too much farther down any path here, so I guess I can continue to look at this video of your straw man as long as you'll let me? If anything the lack of regulation in the US, which allows things like faux news spewing lies as facts all the time (and early al jazeera being something similar) has actually make a portion of the US public less informed and creates a dangerous world of people believing that the president is actually a kenyan indonesian muslim communist fascist trying to take over. What could possibly go wrong with that?
The analogy was fining someone 600 grand to make an example of them. Not to equate p2p filesharing with shooting lasers at aircraft. Charging someone with attempted murder (for each passenger on the aircraft) for pointing a laser at an aircraft is, in general, probably overkill.
You're talking about finding who did it. I'm talking about protecting the aircraft so it doesn't matter if someone shines a laser on you.
Shooting lasers back at people is a monumentally stupid idea. You'll blind someone innocent. And yes, reflecting the beam away from the aircraft without scattering the beam could blind someone as well, which is part of what makes is undesirable.
We (the Allies) very much forced them to move and forced them to stay for quite some time. Now even the prisoners of war were generally happy to acknowledge that given the circumstances they were treated decently well in Canada and the US and given the opportunity of living in a bombed out crater of a country or one that was happy to have you the choice was easy, but one should be under no illusion. We occupied their country and told them where they were going to go, and what they were going to do.
Yes, that was after the war, but my point is the whole concept of the argument about these major projects is irrelevant obfuscation.
Reflective coating on the outside of an aircraft. Essentially this is the solution to directed energy weapons: durable mirrors.
That's about a million times easier to say than do, and do well, of course but that's basically the only technical solution.
When light hits a surface some combination of 3 things happens: Reflection, refraction, absorption. Refraction (where it goes through the material) isn't any good since that's the thing we're trying to avoid, and 'redirecting' light from the outside and inside just means you can't see anything looking out. So it's a matter of cranking up the other two. If you had a material that was optically dense in one direction but not another (that would absorb the energy, preferably without catching fire) that would be ideal, but off the top of my head, and admittedly, it's been a while since I was in an optics lab, I can't think of an easy way to accomplish that, or you reflect the energy away.
Materials can have different optical properties at 90 degrees to each other - it looks one way front on and another side on, but that doesn't really help any if you want to see out. And there are are things like 'one way mirrors' but they rely on a difference in luminosity between the two sides, not, afaik, some particularly unidirectional property.
The other option is enclose the cockpit and do everything with cameras.
So ya, a technical solution is not all that feasible. The problem with the law 'making an example' of some people is just that: it's unfairly treating some people for 'public benefit'. It's like a 600 000 dollar fine for sharing a CD on a P2P network, or at least it might come across like that. Now if you can prove that an aircraft can suffer catastrophic failure due to a laser then you charge anyone doing it with attempted murder and see what happens from there, but I think the argument that it's an awareness problem first and foremost is probably true.
The point being made I think was that it was a bizarre argument to rhetorically ask 'should the manhattan project have been put on hold for oppenheimers smoking', which somewhat discredited the entire/. post.
The actual rights issue is a whole other ball game. And even on that holding up the manhattan project (or the allies in general) is a goofy argument, since we essentially kidnapped a number of former nazi's and made them work for us, I somehow doubt their smoking status mattered much.
If it's a question of health insurance costs then what's next? Should we also exclude hiring people that are overweight, or have high blood pressure, or their lipid count is too high? Because surely they will consume health care dollars at some point too.
The latter already happens, even though it is, I think, illegal in the US. If you're trying to get promoted into a job that has health insurance at a company and have a morbidly obese spouse make sure your boss doesn't meet your spouse until you're hired. Seriously. Manager types are under orders to watch out for people who 'don't take individual responsibility' (translated: will be a burden to the health plan).
It is, I think, legal however for various employees who are valuable (celebrities usually) to have contract clauses prohibiting various behaviours. No motorcycles for example, even though they are perfectly legal. Outright forbidding motorcycle drivers from being hired would seem to be illegal and discriminatory though. An incentives based 'non smokers who take a test every week get a pay bonus' would probably be legal, but refusing to hire not. But I dunno, I could see legal problems with an incentives based approach here, but I'm not an american so they may have other issues.
Besides that, holding up Robert Oppenheimer, who died at 62 from a pulmonary embolism - something which can be brought on by smoking - isn't a great plan.
King George the VI from the same era died from lung cancer at 52. The UK wasn't about to put the war on hold because the King was needed to stop smoking, and nor should they, but a lot of people died early because they didn't appreciate the dangers of smoking until it was too late.
There are different kinds of growing. Centralization means that people concentrate into major centres (think Paris and London in Europe, both of which have nearly about a fifth of their countries populations in the greater metro area) - traffic congestion isn't a problem off in farmland, but trying to pack a million more people in London or Paris would pose serious problems if they were driving cars.
I live relatively near Toronto in canada, while the population in ontario (and canada in general) is, like the US and Europe not exploding, Toronto is creeping north of the lake, and sprawling. A fear years ago they built a major highway (to augment the existing major highway which couldn't be expanded easily) but that project was years in the making, and then some idiot in government sold it as a private toll highway so it's under utilized. That specific issue aside, the sprawl around toronto means that places need, or will need highways that didn't have them before. Even thought the net population isn't increasing a huge amount we still have 'urbanization' it's just 'metroization' to coin my own phrase, where 100 years ago people moved from farms to cities now people move from small cities to big ones.
Road use is also growing, at least here, or maybe it has finally plateau'd but the modern economy is wacky on travel and either way it's a lot more travel than most of our roads were designed for, and you can't double the average speed of a 100Km/h road to double capacity, and adding lanes may require tearing down a lot of businesses. When cars and highways were first being built it was primarily men who worked, so men who commuted to work (and young women). That meant you picked where you lived based on where one person worked, and the wife if (and inevitably when) they got cars were expected to putter around during off hours. But now women work, men work, the only affordable houses for us bottom 99% ers are on the periphery, so you could get stuck with a house on one side of a major city, and both people working on the other side or in different directions. This creates an odd problem of needing bypass highways rather than cut through highways, but then the sprawl sort of envelops the bypass and it becomes just an oddly shaped cut through.
Don't get me wrong, now is a good time to replace crumbling infrastructure, Toronto even has a highway (the Gardiner) that runs over another street and has had pieces of concrete fall off - that creates one hell of a traffic mess. And I can certainly see the legitimate argument for focusing on rebuilding the stuff that's falling apart as a priority over new capacity. But adding a couple of hundred thousand people onto a city does increase the population in that specific city. Unlike say Russia or China most of the relatively free countries don't have internal passport controls for where people can live, so we're seeing uncompetitive areas (in canada for a long time this was the atlantic provinces) - that in many cases are cities - lose a chunk of population to bigger cities in more competitive areas.
The game has a tone, pandas doesn't really fit with it. Certainly games can have a tone I disagree with or the like, but a bit like you say with star wars, taking a franchise from one tone to another is difficult, and I don't think blizzard pulled it off this time round, just as I think Lucas didn't quite get the balance right the second time round the way he did with the 3.
Without a doubt. I recommend 60 or 120 gig SSD's for all new office machines. 100 bucks in hardware makes employees much more productive because they aren't waiting for their computer and aren't looking for things to goof off to as much, and at home it makes my time on the computer feel like I'm actually using the computer, not waiting for the computer.
But in terms of system requirements, we're a ways out from anything being able to require it.
And as a joke they're perfectly fine, the Blizzard writers have always walked a fine line between serious 'holy shit the world is ending' to 'lol lol lol fat drunk panda'. Even having a race of panda's as a serious legitimate thing is not, in and of itself a disaster, but the bipolar presentation of pandas as cute badass fat chinese drunkards who know kung fu doesn't really fit with WoW. Goblins are crazy - blow up your own island crazy - gnomes irradiated their own capital city, and the Worgern face a very serious curse and walled themselves off. There's place for a serious race, there's place for jovial, but this inconsistent mix of the lot doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's juvenile trying to dress up as an adult and it shows, and admittedly, there are young people who play WoW that associate with that, but the major market for WoW is adults, who have jobs.
It's possible what she means is that each SKU is actually a different product internally. Like each regional HP 'buys' a particular internal HP printer and that each region can customize the base model designed at the main design centre. Especially if they aren't actually modifying much of anything this becomes a complete waste of money.
It's also possible HP is losing money like crazy because they really do have 2100 different models of laser printer which are largely overlapping products competing with themselves and that's just wasting money. Because big companies really can be that stupid.
NVIDIA has pushed immensely CUDA, to the point that people now think that GPGPU = CUDA
Well I wrote full working project in CUDA completed in 2008, OpenCl is not quite there yet....
But that was my point, it's a feature problem. In terms of performance for gaming, no, AMD isn't significantly better. They jockey for spots with releases but the 200 dollar ish cards are all about equally capable.
The AMD APU really gives them a leg up on intel for 'SoC' or just fusion type products. But Apple (who is the company in question) doesn't seem to mind intel integrated GPU's for their low end macbooks, and really, that segment of the market doesn't care about windows gaming performance, and the high end of the market (a 2000 dollar laptop) an intel cpu and an nVIDIA gpu or an intel CPU and AMD GPU is really a better setup than an AMD CPU + . Now my 700 dollar Windows 7 laptop with full AMD works quite well for what I want it to be, but it's not consistent with the apple experience.
No one 'needs' anything in gaming. But if you're buying a card why would you want one that doesn't support PhysX (if you play lots of games). If you only play WoW or the like then sure, but it sucks to pick up an awesome game and not be able to turn a feature on with a top of the line card.
Don't get me wrong, AMD parts are perfectly competitive in terms of total performance, but missing a common feature (PhysX) when OpenCl just isn't there yet hurts. But it is only a software problem and feature parity is possible.
Without a doubt mists of pandaria is more than just pandas. They've brought back world bosses, they added pokemon, I'm sorry, pet battles etc. But for the last 8-9 months we've known pandas were on the horizon and people have been desperately looking for *anything* that would be good enough that isn't kung fu panda. But systems wise, and in spite of Pandas WoW still blows the competition out of the water (moddable UI, better balance, and the technical instance stuff, group creation, raid finder etc. etc.).
Pandas has been enormously damaging to to the WoW brand, but it doesn't matter, because no one else has been able to pick up the slack, so fuck it, we're all back playing wow and cringing every time we see a panda bounce by. Are the bosses challenging? Is the 'core activity' of how I run around and kill/heal/tank stuff still entertaining? Pretty much. So we cope with one bad expansion. WoW has had missteps before, but not anything all that serious, Archeology (the in game profession) was amusing when it first came out due to the newness, and then everyone loathed it for example, but that's not going to cause people to quit necessarily.
Slashdot Mirror
100ms would mean that xbox only polls the controller 10 times a second.
As a developer, that's not what happens no. I said the time to respond is about 100ms, in a good fps. The killzone guys did a good writeup on this a few years ago, they had something 133 ms and needed to get it down to 100.
"Lag" isn't just the RTT of the signal, first of all you have buffering, so the console can be 100ms behind and still *always* be 100ms behind for example, even polling every 1ms (or 1ns for all it matters). Think light or sound, no matter what you are always hearing/seeing the event some amount of time *after* it actually happened, because there is a finite propagation speed.
Secondly, I pointed out including the time to respond. Consoles controllers are significantly slower responses than PC mouse/keyboards, that's why XIM3 can even exist and have a business. But onlive was a PC business. You can play most PC games at 50-80ms of lag without any serious problems, and we know this because even single player gaming on a console you're playing with ~100 ms of lag due to the controller. PC players would be at a disadvantage against others without that lag, but that's well within the 'regular internet' lag tolerance you have to design for (which is still up around 200ms). Lag on onlive was, I'm sure, a problem they had to think a lot about, but they actually managed to solve it reasonably well. It is a bit like the difference between a console and a PC, and they're both manageable for gaming, but put them in the same room and the PC guys have a distinct advantage.
The big market for an outfit like onlive was to sell their technology to the big console guys or to Cisco/NDS (nds just bought by cisco) who make the set top cable boxes. For the big console guys especially it would give them the ability to run legacy games natively and stream them to users for example, or to offer a 'full' gaming experience to someone who knows nothing about their PC and can't be bothered/afford to build one themselves. Not exactly the /. crowd, but a big market. MS however can build their own cloud, Sony bought Gaiklai and it doesn't look like nintendo feels the need to pay big bucks for onlive, and their hardware might actually not need most of what onlive offers since they have working ways to natively run even NES games on the DS.
And with low enough latency for it to be worth a damn.
The lag between pushing a button a console controller and the console actually being able to respond to it is about 100ms btw. Lag with onlive isn't really the issue. They were looking to be bought out by Sony or MS or nintendo, to have their tech folded into their respective services. But those guys can all just build their own.
I think this is it. A house will have a computer the same way it has a furnace or a water heater or electrical box. Things will plug into that computer, and there will be technicians to maintain it. It should be reasonably reliable.
Now the different with computers is of course the flexible capacity requirement (you don't need 4 furnaces for 4 people) but probably homes with have a blade rack type setup where you plug in as many computers as you need, up to 8 or 16 or something, and any more will have a niche case market. You'll have a jack in your wall for monitors which bluetooth or usb or similar to your input devices if you need them. And your wireless devices will talk to your house server seamlessly.
You can't, at least, not that I know of. Mirrors are bidirectional, you can have 'one way mirrors' which rely on illumination on one side versus the other, and they only work one way because of material layering, but the inside of an aircraft an aircraft isn't going to be brighter than outside always (nor would that really have the desired effect).
As I say, the question is whether or not there are materials that have different bi-directional properties along the same axis. I don't know of any, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
By that argument filesharing is stealing the entire value of an album thousands of times.
I see where you're coming from, but obviously shining lasers at aircraft hasn't caused thousands of crashes, even though there have been thousands of incidents, so people don't see the cause-effect.
Every time someone says something like this, implying that the meat eaters among us are assisting in destroying the planet, it bothers me.
Everything in moderation. I'm not against meat in general, I just had 3 turkey dinners (from 3 turkeys) for the last 3 days, but that's not the point, but public policy is an exercise in statistics, if 'healthy' meat consumption is 300g a day, averaged over 350 million people and consumption is averaging 301 then no harm no foul, if it's averaging 900g/day then there's a serious public policy issue. If the harm from only eating 200g/day is outweighed by being able to feed 1/3rd more people then suddenly the tradeoff.
I didn't come out against meat, you read that yourself, I specifically added a bit about the benefits of meat because it's a balancing act in public policy.
Solid state lasers are are polarized, so polarizing filters could block everything, or nothing, from different types of lasers. I made this mistake building a quantum cryptography demo at one point a few years ago.
intellectual superiors
Sometimes, a lot of times, yes. Remember that story from a couple of days ago about people shooting lasers at aircraft? People don't always see the big picture or have time to focus on the details of the environmental/health/safety impacts of all of their choices, because they have shit to do. So they pay the government to make those decisions for them.
When I walk into a supermarket I *want* someone to have written a bunch of food safety standards so that I'm reasonably confident in the food I buy, and reasonably confident that if there is a recall (as we are going through in canada right now) there will be some press about it, rather than some local guy covering it up. If 'dependence on foreign oil' is a serious problem, which for Japan for example it was for a long time, and for Europe, who depend on Russia, it creates some very serious complications, that may trump my desire for cheap oil/methane/etc because if I'm depending on something that can be cut off or significantly inflated in price later I'm essentially like those people who got mortgages for double the value they could ever afford to pay off.
With each of your points:
Meat: People don't want irradiated meat, even though that would eliminate a lot of the food safety issues with it, but the 'intellectual superiors' have a solution, that's been rejected by the intellectually inferior masses due to the word 'irradiated'. Meat takes a lot of grain, and, in effect, is an inefficient system of distributing nutrition, except that there are health benefits to eating some meat. But in the case of serious drought or crop failure we'd be be better off to go vegetarian for a year than have a few million people starve to death so we can keep having steaks. Fortunately we haven't had a problem like that lately, but the drought in the US, locusts in Africa, pollution in china and india can make for some very bad things happening to the food supply.
Temperatures in the winter: Consumes energy/oil. As I said, there are serious strategic implications (and economic ones in terms of balance of trade and currency value). This is the argument japan is going through right now. Nuclear is expensive, but the VAST majority of that spending is local or to economies with robust trade and strong economies. Natural gas is popular because it's not nuclear, but means the Japanese are going to need to find someone to sell them natural gas. And remember they're still technically at war with Russia from WW2, who is the largest supplier of Natural gas. As a result of their power shortages they've needed to have government mandates about working times and so on. Yes yes, nanny state. But the choice was make people work strange inconvenient hours, or cut power to millions of people, and now Japan is going to expand its massive dependency on foreign everything. Not a good situation to be in when you're technically at war with one neighbour, and perpetually on the brink of war with 2 others.
TV: The government licences spectrum. The government has always licenced content in creative works to varying degrees. That's not new, and between that and the rules about content safe for children it doesn't seem like governments in civilized countries are going too much farther down any path here, so I guess I can continue to look at this video of your straw man as long as you'll let me? If anything the lack of regulation in the US, which allows things like faux news spewing lies as facts all the time (and early al jazeera being something similar) has actually make a portion of the US public less informed and creates a dangerous world of people believing that the president is actually a kenyan indonesian muslim communist fascist trying to take over. What could possibly go wrong with that?
The analogy was fining someone 600 grand to make an example of them. Not to equate p2p filesharing with shooting lasers at aircraft. Charging someone with attempted murder (for each passenger on the aircraft) for pointing a laser at an aircraft is, in general, probably overkill.
You're talking about finding who did it. I'm talking about protecting the aircraft so it doesn't matter if someone shines a laser on you.
Shooting lasers back at people is a monumentally stupid idea. You'll blind someone innocent. And yes, reflecting the beam away from the aircraft without scattering the beam could blind someone as well, which is part of what makes is undesirable.
Never. The fun of recreational flying is that you're piloting.
But I would think we're not too far off from big commercial aircraft going this route.
And none of them were "kidnapped"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Read the section titled "Capture and Detention".
We (the Allies) very much forced them to move and forced them to stay for quite some time. Now even the prisoners of war were generally happy to acknowledge that given the circumstances they were treated decently well in Canada and the US and given the opportunity of living in a bombed out crater of a country or one that was happy to have you the choice was easy, but one should be under no illusion. We occupied their country and told them where they were going to go, and what they were going to do.
Yes, that was after the war, but my point is the whole concept of the argument about these major projects is irrelevant obfuscation.
Reflective coating on the outside of an aircraft. Essentially this is the solution to directed energy weapons: durable mirrors.
That's about a million times easier to say than do, and do well, of course but that's basically the only technical solution.
When light hits a surface some combination of 3 things happens: Reflection, refraction, absorption. Refraction (where it goes through the material) isn't any good since that's the thing we're trying to avoid, and 'redirecting' light from the outside and inside just means you can't see anything looking out. So it's a matter of cranking up the other two. If you had a material that was optically dense in one direction but not another (that would absorb the energy, preferably without catching fire) that would be ideal, but off the top of my head, and admittedly, it's been a while since I was in an optics lab, I can't think of an easy way to accomplish that, or you reflect the energy away.
Materials can have different optical properties at 90 degrees to each other - it looks one way front on and another side on, but that doesn't really help any if you want to see out. And there are are things like 'one way mirrors' but they rely on a difference in luminosity between the two sides, not, afaik, some particularly unidirectional property.
The other option is enclose the cockpit and do everything with cameras.
So ya, a technical solution is not all that feasible. The problem with the law 'making an example' of some people is just that: it's unfairly treating some people for 'public benefit'. It's like a 600 000 dollar fine for sharing a CD on a P2P network, or at least it might come across like that. Now if you can prove that an aircraft can suffer catastrophic failure due to a laser then you charge anyone doing it with attempted murder and see what happens from there, but I think the argument that it's an awareness problem first and foremost is probably true.
Sure.
The point being made I think was that it was a bizarre argument to rhetorically ask 'should the manhattan project have been put on hold for oppenheimers smoking', which somewhat discredited the entire /. post.
The actual rights issue is a whole other ball game. And even on that holding up the manhattan project (or the allies in general) is a goofy argument, since we essentially kidnapped a number of former nazi's and made them work for us, I somehow doubt their smoking status mattered much.
If it's a question of health insurance costs then what's next? Should we also exclude hiring people that are overweight, or have high blood pressure, or their lipid count is too high? Because surely they will consume health care dollars at some point too.
The latter already happens, even though it is, I think, illegal in the US. If you're trying to get promoted into a job that has health insurance at a company and have a morbidly obese spouse make sure your boss doesn't meet your spouse until you're hired. Seriously. Manager types are under orders to watch out for people who 'don't take individual responsibility' (translated: will be a burden to the health plan).
It is, I think, legal however for various employees who are valuable (celebrities usually) to have contract clauses prohibiting various behaviours. No motorcycles for example, even though they are perfectly legal. Outright forbidding motorcycle drivers from being hired would seem to be illegal and discriminatory though. An incentives based 'non smokers who take a test every week get a pay bonus' would probably be legal, but refusing to hire not. But I dunno, I could see legal problems with an incentives based approach here, but I'm not an american so they may have other issues.
Besides that, holding up Robert Oppenheimer, who died at 62 from a pulmonary embolism - something which can be brought on by smoking - isn't a great plan.
King George the VI from the same era died from lung cancer at 52. The UK wasn't about to put the war on hold because the King was needed to stop smoking, and nor should they, but a lot of people died early because they didn't appreciate the dangers of smoking until it was too late.
There are different kinds of growing. Centralization means that people concentrate into major centres (think Paris and London in Europe, both of which have nearly about a fifth of their countries populations in the greater metro area) - traffic congestion isn't a problem off in farmland, but trying to pack a million more people in London or Paris would pose serious problems if they were driving cars.
I live relatively near Toronto in canada, while the population in ontario (and canada in general) is, like the US and Europe not exploding, Toronto is creeping north of the lake, and sprawling. A fear years ago they built a major highway (to augment the existing major highway which couldn't be expanded easily) but that project was years in the making, and then some idiot in government sold it as a private toll highway so it's under utilized. That specific issue aside, the sprawl around toronto means that places need, or will need highways that didn't have them before. Even thought the net population isn't increasing a huge amount we still have 'urbanization' it's just 'metroization' to coin my own phrase, where 100 years ago people moved from farms to cities now people move from small cities to big ones.
Road use is also growing, at least here, or maybe it has finally plateau'd but the modern economy is wacky on travel and either way it's a lot more travel than most of our roads were designed for, and you can't double the average speed of a 100Km/h road to double capacity, and adding lanes may require tearing down a lot of businesses. When cars and highways were first being built it was primarily men who worked, so men who commuted to work (and young women). That meant you picked where you lived based on where one person worked, and the wife if (and inevitably when) they got cars were expected to putter around during off hours. But now women work, men work, the only affordable houses for us bottom 99% ers are on the periphery, so you could get stuck with a house on one side of a major city, and both people working on the other side or in different directions. This creates an odd problem of needing bypass highways rather than cut through highways, but then the sprawl sort of envelops the bypass and it becomes just an oddly shaped cut through.
Don't get me wrong, now is a good time to replace crumbling infrastructure, Toronto even has a highway (the Gardiner) that runs over another street and has had pieces of concrete fall off - that creates one hell of a traffic mess. And I can certainly see the legitimate argument for focusing on rebuilding the stuff that's falling apart as a priority over new capacity. But adding a couple of hundred thousand people onto a city does increase the population in that specific city. Unlike say Russia or China most of the relatively free countries don't have internal passport controls for where people can live, so we're seeing uncompetitive areas (in canada for a long time this was the atlantic provinces) - that in many cases are cities - lose a chunk of population to bigger cities in more competitive areas.
The game has a tone, pandas doesn't really fit with it. Certainly games can have a tone I disagree with or the like, but a bit like you say with star wars, taking a franchise from one tone to another is difficult, and I don't think blizzard pulled it off this time round, just as I think Lucas didn't quite get the balance right the second time round the way he did with the 3.
Without a doubt. I recommend 60 or 120 gig SSD's for all new office machines. 100 bucks in hardware makes employees much more productive because they aren't waiting for their computer and aren't looking for things to goof off to as much, and at home it makes my time on the computer feel like I'm actually using the computer, not waiting for the computer.
But in terms of system requirements, we're a ways out from anything being able to require it.
As a joke.
And as a joke they're perfectly fine, the Blizzard writers have always walked a fine line between serious 'holy shit the world is ending' to 'lol lol lol fat drunk panda'. Even having a race of panda's as a serious legitimate thing is not, in and of itself a disaster, but the bipolar presentation of pandas as cute badass fat chinese drunkards who know kung fu doesn't really fit with WoW. Goblins are crazy - blow up your own island crazy - gnomes irradiated their own capital city, and the Worgern face a very serious curse and walled themselves off. There's place for a serious race, there's place for jovial, but this inconsistent mix of the lot doesn't really make a lot of sense. It's juvenile trying to dress up as an adult and it shows, and admittedly, there are young people who play WoW that associate with that, but the major market for WoW is adults, who have jobs.
It's possible what she means is that each SKU is actually a different product internally. Like each regional HP 'buys' a particular internal HP printer and that each region can customize the base model designed at the main design centre. Especially if they aren't actually modifying much of anything this becomes a complete waste of money.
It's also possible HP is losing money like crazy because they really do have 2100 different models of laser printer which are largely overlapping products competing with themselves and that's just wasting money. Because big companies really can be that stupid.
NVIDIA has pushed immensely CUDA, to the point that people now think that GPGPU = CUDA
Well I wrote full working project in CUDA completed in 2008, OpenCl is not quite there yet....
But that was my point, it's a feature problem. In terms of performance for gaming, no, AMD isn't significantly better. They jockey for spots with releases but the 200 dollar ish cards are all about equally capable.
The AMD APU really gives them a leg up on intel for 'SoC' or just fusion type products. But Apple (who is the company in question) doesn't seem to mind intel integrated GPU's for their low end macbooks, and really, that segment of the market doesn't care about windows gaming performance, and the high end of the market (a 2000 dollar laptop) an intel cpu and an nVIDIA gpu or an intel CPU and AMD GPU is really a better setup than an AMD CPU + .
Now my 700 dollar Windows 7 laptop with full AMD works quite well for what I want it to be, but it's not consistent with the apple experience.
No one 'needs' anything in gaming. But if you're buying a card why would you want one that doesn't support PhysX (if you play lots of games). If you only play WoW or the like then sure, but it sucks to pick up an awesome game and not be able to turn a feature on with a top of the line card.
Don't get me wrong, AMD parts are perfectly competitive in terms of total performance, but missing a common feature (PhysX) when OpenCl just isn't there yet hurts. But it is only a software problem and feature parity is possible.
Well that's the trick isn't it. You have to have the right product and be able to get press at the right time.
Are you certain about that?
100%.
Without a doubt mists of pandaria is more than just pandas. They've brought back world bosses, they added pokemon, I'm sorry, pet battles etc. But for the last 8-9 months we've known pandas were on the horizon and people have been desperately looking for *anything* that would be good enough that isn't kung fu panda. But systems wise, and in spite of Pandas WoW still blows the competition out of the water (moddable UI, better balance, and the technical instance stuff, group creation, raid finder etc. etc.).
Pandas has been enormously damaging to to the WoW brand, but it doesn't matter, because no one else has been able to pick up the slack, so fuck it, we're all back playing wow and cringing every time we see a panda bounce by. Are the bosses challenging? Is the 'core activity' of how I run around and kill/heal/tank stuff still entertaining? Pretty much. So we cope with one bad expansion. WoW has had missteps before, but not anything all that serious, Archeology (the in game profession) was amusing when it first came out due to the newness, and then everyone loathed it for example, but that's not going to cause people to quit necessarily.