Use IR to control the defender instead of radio. The surveillance drone is more susceptible to being jammed since it has to use radio. In fact that's probably recommended to prevent the human from maneuvering it to evade interception. There are ways to make the radio link impossible to jam (spread spectrum), however if they do that then shooting it down is that much bigger of a prize just because of the expense involved. All you need to do is shoot down 1 or 2 of them and they'll have to quit because the things are so darn expensive.
It would be interesting to play with an RC rocket for this usage scenario. I once made a shoulder fired rocket launching box. It worked but even with a very large shield in front still made me cough from the exhaust gases.
Counter-strike shouldn't be played more effectively by a computer.
Here is one way to prevent it: Make IFF be based on human pattern recognition, make each avatar indistinguishable from each other, and kick players with too high friendly fire ratios.
Problems with this: > Server must spawn people at random places on the map. > Server must send down an image of what the player looks like in a machine-unrecognizable format. (Video Captcha is bandwith problem) > Server cannot broadcast to the client position of all players in the game.
If you could make a bot that would outperform humans under these circumstances then the US Army wants to talk to you.:)
The problem with that approach is the amount of money made before the bot is shut down can exceed the cost of new game licenses.
If they can ebay off enough in game stuff before they get banned to cover the costs of their copies of *, then it is not enough of a disincentive. That approach will discourage most causal bot uses, but the Chinese farmers won't be deterred.
Stronger authentification, such as tying it to some ID, or having bonding for game players would be a stronger prventative, but would be much more objectionable.
I think they should have 3 servers: A> Official. Only runs officially approved scrips/macros and add-ons. B> Unapproved: Runs registered but unapproved add-ons. C> Open: Everything else.
Default to playing on Unapproved. Require strong Authentication to upgrade to Official. Continually upgrade the bot/hack detection software and anyone caught on Official gets downgraded to Open (or just banned).
Having Unapproved is important because this allows people to create and test 3'rd party improvements. The game company can then incorporate those changes into the game directly or mark the the 3'rd party package as approved for Official. By registering the add-on, the game producer can get a copy of all of the available add-ons to improve the detection algorithms for Official. The game publisher could even require that the add-on be open source, provide them in-game as an add-on feature, and even sell them (with their own markup of course) on behalf of the original creators (think how CS went from being open source and its transition to Steam).
Why back in my day we used pencil and PAPER to move our characters around. And we rolled DICE to see if our characters could hit a monster. It's all you young whippersnappers and your compewters that screwed up the game with your bots that rolled the dice for you that are to blame for the short attention spans you all have.
(For those that can't see past the humor: Computer Games->DND as Bots/Macros->Computer Games, i.e. Blizzard is inherently being hypocritical)
They would show up on radar, so load up that shotgun with an explosive slug and slave it to radar prediction. For bonus points put enough smarts in the slug to receive its time delay from the radar.
With current electronics miniaturization, wouldn't this whole package fit in a backpack?
It'd be easy to test this: Just take it out during duck hunting season and come home with 100 birds hehe.
There are two ways to do this: you could project both an aim point onto a HUD, or you could use servos to aim the gun. The HUD is probably smaller and less weight, and useful for any weapon you can strap an aimpoint sensor on. The servo approach is heavier but more reliable and accurate.
Hmmm, I wonder if this would enable foot soldiers taking out stuff like hand grenades and mortars.
Oh yes, I was preaching against Apples evil monopolistic powers some 20 years ago.
It was a pain that their prices were so high during the clone wars that broke out right after IBM turned evil by attempting to force Microchannel down our throats. They could have scored big even though they were proprietary if they had some low priced models. But not for me, no way jose. They had everything locked up so tightly that no-one could build a clone.
They were also the ones that invented the army of lawyers approach to business. Every time someone made a clone or something that just looked like an apple product, the legion of Apple lawyers would descent and the startup business would immediately become unprofitable.
It used to be called the Wintel monopoly (thank goodness for AMD/Cyrix etc), but the monstrous shenanigans pulled by our evil Microsoft overlords have relegated Apple to the position of being the lesser of two evils.
DRY + KISS Learn them, Love them, or be condemned to maintenance hell.
The number one rule in any user interface is consistency. If the text files were all the same format and had the same types of options it wouldn't be so bad. His database idea enforces consistency, which is a good thing. One of the problems it shares with the windows registry is segmentation of preferences and error recovery. >We want to be able to easily copy everything about an application from one machine to another with one drag-drop and have it include all the information we've laboriously specified about how it should behave - or not, our choice. >If the entire DB gets trashed it shouldn't matter to any affected application, they should come up looking like it was a fresh install.
I second the idea of learning about databases in general, and SQL in particular. Spend some time reading the Comp.Database.Theory newsgroup and learn about the sins that programmers commit while writing code against databases.
If you're too lazy to do that, then at least watch this set of 3 videos on You-tube on how to make your database performance really suck:
The advantage is that the energy is transferred into the cable, and engines on the cable are very efficient because they can operate over a much longer time period than the transfer takes. Another approach is that the interaction with the earths magnetic field means you can use a conductive cable to increase or decrease your orbit by passing an electrical current through it.
The really hard part is keeping them all synchronized.
The cool part is that the materials requirements are much less than for the full 10-1 taper 6000 ton geosynch hook.
Also from:
An improvement over the simple rotating tether was invented by Brian Tillotson, here at Boeing, where a small tensile structure rotates at the tip of a larger cable, which is either hanging vertically under gravity gradient forces or rotating itself. Then I came up with the '3 stage tether', where a tower sticks up to the top of the atmosphere and has a rotating tether on top, with rocket attached to the tip. The rocket is slowly brung up to speed, then released, to fly up and rendezvous with the two stage tether described before. This sufficiently lowers the required materials strengths that existing materials are adequate to mostly eliminate the rocket propulsion requirement. I've been doing a little reading about space elevators, skyhooks, space fountains, earth to space cannons, etc. I just think that there are easier/cheaper ways (given some up front investment) to get mass into space than rockets. Once we have a delivery system that can push large amounts of fuel and materials into space for a decent price, travel to other planets, satellite deployment and space tourism all will get a huge boost.
The only things preventing a mass immigration to your country now are DVR, Bittorrent, and armpit hair. If the RIAA gets automatic copyright infringement enforcement and your chicks start shaving then I think we'd better give the Statue back to you: You'll need it to welcome all of us huddled masses. Oh, is it ok if we bring Linux over with us?
One of the problems with the microwave vehicle is that you need a fairly large horizontal collector area. I think that would preclude helicopters and spinup-assisted gyrocopters.
When I wrote the article I was thinking about the ducted fan type vehicles such as the Moller skycar or the twin ducted fan types. Since the fans are much smaller the large collecting plate surface wouldn't interfere with the rotor downwash. The big problem with the fans is that they're even more dangerous than a helicopter in the case of engine failure.
Something like an Osprey would be a lot safer, since you have a much larger area to pick your landing site from and you don't need any power while gliding from any altitude.
A winged ducted fan design something like the Harrier, except with larger and in flight folding wings would also work. You get both VTOL and a respectable glide ratio. The trick is to design both your takeoff run and landing flare to be survivable in the case of engine failure during any point.
The elevator sections can maintain their positions with very efficient ion thrusters. It would probably be most useful to ship fuel to a medium orbit, which can then be used by the space shuttle to ferry very large satellites from there to Geosynch.
Alternatively it could be used to resupply the space station. Make it spin to match with the incoming rocket, and an eccentric orbit that would synchronize up with the space station every once in a while and your supply rockets become tiny.
Don't run it on gas, run them on microwave power from balloon relays. In that scenario you only need enough locally stored energy to land safely. Heck, assuming a small amount of local energy storage for takeoff and landing, beam power needs to be only slightly more than the average cruising power usage. My bet is still on the flying car first.
Oh, and microwaves would work wonderfully with steam balloons.
How much licensing revenue do content producers get per user per month from all radio stations radio listened to by the upper 1/3 of listeners + amount of revenue from purchased CD's, discounting production costs?
Seems to me like they should be able to break down using surveys how much money they should charge.
Another possibility is that instead of p2p or CDs, ship hard drives back & forth to users. Update whats on the hard drive with related songs. This falls under the category of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
As an embedded systems engineer we used whatever is handy for the problem at hand. In one case it was Assembly, C++, and VB all at the same time for the same project. Assembly for the microcontroller which talked through a parallel port to a C++ dll communications handler that utilized a VB front-end. Alt-tabbing invoked a paging delay in my brain...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you probably can use it as a programming language.
The point is that if you are, then your code will SUCK.
Use IR to control the defender instead of radio.
The surveillance drone is more susceptible to being jammed since it has to use radio. In fact that's probably recommended to prevent the human from maneuvering it to evade interception. There are ways to make the radio link impossible to jam (spread spectrum), however if they do that then shooting it down is that much bigger of a prize just because of the expense involved. All you need to do is shoot down 1 or 2 of them and they'll have to quit because the things are so darn expensive.
It would be interesting to play with an RC rocket for this usage scenario. I once made a shoulder fired rocket launching box. It worked but even with a very large shield in front still made me cough from the exhaust gases.
Counter-strike shouldn't be played more effectively by a computer.
:)
Here is one way to prevent it:
Make IFF be based on human pattern recognition, make each avatar indistinguishable from each other, and kick players with too high friendly fire ratios.
Problems with this:
> Server must spawn people at random places on the map.
> Server must send down an image of what the player looks like in a machine-unrecognizable format. (Video Captcha is bandwith problem)
> Server cannot broadcast to the client position of all players in the game.
If you could make a bot that would outperform humans under these circumstances then the US Army wants to talk to you.
The problem with that approach is the amount of money made before the bot is shut down can exceed the cost of new game licenses.
If they can ebay off enough in game stuff before they get banned to cover the costs of their copies of *, then it is not enough of a disincentive. That approach will discourage most causal bot uses, but the Chinese farmers won't be deterred.
Stronger authentification, such as tying it to some ID, or having bonding for game players would be a stronger prventative, but would be much more objectionable.
I think they should have 3 servers:
A> Official. Only runs officially approved scrips/macros and add-ons.
B> Unapproved: Runs registered but unapproved add-ons.
C> Open: Everything else.
Default to playing on Unapproved. Require strong Authentication to upgrade to Official. Continually upgrade the bot/hack detection software and anyone caught on Official gets downgraded to Open (or just banned).
Having Unapproved is important because this allows people to create and test 3'rd party improvements. The game company can then incorporate those changes into the game directly or mark the the 3'rd party package as approved for Official. By registering the add-on, the game producer can get a copy of all of the available add-ons to improve the detection algorithms for Official. The game publisher could even require that the add-on be open source, provide them in-game as an add-on feature, and even sell them (with their own markup of course) on behalf of the original creators (think how CS went from being open source and its transition to Steam).
Why back in my day we used pencil and PAPER to move our characters around. And we rolled DICE to see if our characters could hit a monster. It's all you young whippersnappers and your compewters that screwed up the game with your bots that rolled the dice for you that are to blame for the short attention spans you all have.
(For those that can't see past the humor: Computer Games->DND as Bots/Macros->Computer Games, i.e. Blizzard is inherently being hypocritical)
Blizzard has always been a royal hineypain. You can even get banned for using keyboard macros.
I just play on the free servers.
Play Anarchy Online: Free, better crafting, you can fly at level ~20 out of 220, you don't have to play tetris nearly so often as either HGL or WoW.
We need AAA for these things.
They would show up on radar, so load up that shotgun with an explosive slug and slave it to radar prediction.
For bonus points put enough smarts in the slug to receive its time delay from the radar.
With current electronics miniaturization, wouldn't this whole package fit in a backpack?
It'd be easy to test this: Just take it out during duck hunting season and come home with 100 birds hehe.
There are two ways to do this: you could project both an aim point onto a HUD, or you could use servos to aim the gun.
The HUD is probably smaller and less weight, and useful for any weapon you can strap an aimpoint sensor on. The servo approach is heavier but more reliable and accurate.
Hmmm, I wonder if this would enable foot soldiers taking out stuff like hand grenades and mortars.
Here's a review a guy did on upgrading to the best version of windows:
http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx
And just in case you didn't get your quota of funny today:
http://ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECoA8pi9Rmk
Oh yes, I was preaching against Apples evil monopolistic powers some 20 years ago.
It was a pain that their prices were so high during the clone wars that broke out right after IBM turned evil by attempting to force Microchannel down our throats. They could have scored big even though they were proprietary if they had some low priced models. But not for me, no way jose. They had everything locked up so tightly that no-one could build a clone.
They were also the ones that invented the army of lawyers approach to business. Every time someone made a clone or something that just looked like an apple product, the legion of Apple lawyers would descent and the startup business would immediately become unprofitable.
It used to be called the Wintel monopoly (thank goodness for AMD/Cyrix etc), but the monstrous shenanigans pulled by our evil Microsoft overlords have relegated Apple to the position of being the lesser of two evils.
Cooling?
Oh and how long are those vias? Will you be trying to get heat to flow through the memory wafer?
Priceless
DRY + KISS Learn them, Love them, or be condemned to maintenance hell.
The number one rule in any user interface is consistency. If the text files were all the same format and had the same types of options it wouldn't be so bad. His database idea enforces consistency, which is a good thing. One of the problems it shares with the windows registry is segmentation of preferences and error recovery.
>We want to be able to easily copy everything about an application from one machine to another with one drag-drop and have it include all the information we've laboriously specified about how it should behave - or not, our choice.
>If the entire DB gets trashed it shouldn't matter to any affected application, they should come up looking like it was a fresh install.
Thanks.
I was really starting to worry that I would have to read the article.
You mean his cousin?
Oh wait same person.
"Any idiot can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make something simple" - F.O. Stanley
Say It!
I second the idea of learning about databases in general, and SQL in particular.
Spend some time reading the Comp.Database.Theory newsgroup and learn about the sins that programmers commit while writing code against databases.
If you're too lazy to do that, then at least watch this set of 3 videos on You-tube on how to make your database performance really suck:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40Lnoyv-sXg
The advantage is that the energy is transferred into the cable, and engines on the cable are very efficient because they can operate over a much longer time period than the transfer takes. Another approach is that the interaction with the earths magnetic field means you can use a conductive cable to increase or decrease your orbit by passing an electrical current through it.
The really hard part is keeping them all synchronized.
The cool part is that the materials requirements are much less than for the full 10-1 taper 6000 ton geosynch hook.
Other interesting space elevator concepts.
Also from
where a small tensile structure rotates at the tip of a larger cable, which is either hanging vertically under gravity gradient forces or rotating itself. Then I came up with the '3 stage tether', where a tower sticks up to the top of the atmosphere and has a rotating tether on top, with rocket attached to the tip. The rocket is slowly brung up to speed, then released, to fly up and rendezvous with the two stage tether described before. This sufficiently lowers the required
materials strengths that existing materials are adequate to mostly eliminate the rocket propulsion requirement. I've been doing a little reading about space elevators, skyhooks, space fountains, earth to space cannons, etc. I just think that there are easier/cheaper ways (given some up front investment) to get mass into space than rockets. Once we have a delivery system that can push large amounts of fuel and materials into space for a decent price, travel to other planets, satellite deployment and space tourism all will get a huge boost.
or did anyone else immediately think "They're not doing that because the fobs are insecure, they're looking for child porn."
Have them set up a Freenet Node.
Problem solved. (Hint: plausible deniability.)
All is forgiven.
The only things preventing a mass immigration to your country now are DVR, Bittorrent, and armpit hair.
If the RIAA gets automatic copyright infringement enforcement and your chicks start shaving then I think we'd better give the Statue back to you: You'll need it to welcome all of us huddled masses. Oh, is it ok if we bring Linux over with us?
One of the problems with the microwave vehicle is that you need a fairly large horizontal collector area. I think that would preclude helicopters and spinup-assisted gyrocopters.
When I wrote the article I was thinking about the ducted fan type vehicles such as the Moller skycar or the twin ducted fan types. Since the fans are much smaller the large collecting plate surface wouldn't interfere with the rotor downwash.
The big problem with the fans is that they're even more dangerous than a helicopter in the case of engine failure.
Something like an Osprey would be a lot safer, since you have a much larger area to pick your landing site from and you don't need any power while gliding from any altitude.
A winged ducted fan design something like the Harrier, except with larger and in flight folding wings would also work. You get both VTOL and a respectable glide ratio. The trick is to design both your takeoff run and landing flare to be survivable in the case of engine failure during any point.
You could build the space elevator in stages.
The elevator sections can maintain their positions with very efficient ion thrusters.
It would probably be most useful to ship fuel to a medium orbit, which can then be used by the space shuttle to ferry very large satellites from there to Geosynch.
Alternatively it could be used to resupply the space station. Make it spin to match with the incoming rocket, and an eccentric orbit that would synchronize up with the space station every once in a while and your supply rockets become tiny.
Don't run it on gas, run them on microwave power from balloon relays.
In that scenario you only need enough locally stored energy to land safely. Heck, assuming a small amount of local energy storage for takeoff and landing, beam power needs to be only slightly more than the average cruising power usage.
My bet is still on the flying car first.
Oh, and microwaves would work wonderfully with steam balloons.
Steam Balloon links:
http://www.ilr.tu-berlin.de/LB/heidas/HeiDAS_AIAA20032.pdf
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Steam_20balloon
http://www.flyingkettle.com/
Don't forget the internet/radio/tv relay capabilities of a stationary balloon (more like dirigible though).
How much licensing revenue do content producers get per user per month from all radio stations radio listened to by the upper 1/3 of listeners + amount of revenue from purchased CD's, discounting production costs?
Seems to me like they should be able to break down using surveys how much money they should charge.
Another possibility is that instead of p2p or CDs, ship hard drives back & forth to users. Update whats on the hard drive with related songs. This falls under the category of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway"
See the hilarious Mad Max version at the bottom of http://www.bpfh.net/sysadmin/never-underestimate-bandwidth.html
As an embedded systems engineer we used whatever is handy for the problem at hand.
In one case it was Assembly, C++, and VB all at the same time for the same project.
Assembly for the microcontroller which talked through a parallel port to a C++ dll communications handler that utilized a VB front-end.
Alt-tabbing invoked a paging delay in my brain...
Isn't the term "God-like!" ?