Most big production companies like PDI and Pixar use their own tools. It gives them the capability of making the code do exactly what they need it to do without carrying overhead for things they don't need it to do.
Maya and other commercial packages are wonderful tools, but they are generic and a specialty tool that fills the need will always be a better choice. An Indy car is a marvel of engineering but it will never beat a dragster in a quarter mile. Likewise the dragster will never beat an Indy car if there is even a single lap to the race. It is simply a matter of the right tool for the right job.
How significant it that? At 24 frames a second an hour and a half of movie has around 130,000 frames. If code that is properly optimized for what is needed shaves a meager 5 seconds off each frame it will end up saving 180 computer hours of rendering time. When you factor in all the early test renders and visualizations that time increases much more, Using an educated guess I would have to assume it multiplies it by around a factor of three, so now you are talking about saving over 540 hours of rendering time throughout the project. In all likelihood of course your programmers will shave off considerably more than a mere 5 seconds a frame.
I had never considered it that way. I suppose technically you could consider a one time pad to be a Vigenere cipher with a tableau that consists of a 2x2 grid and a key that runs the length of the entire message.
Of course most cryptanalysts would think you were a bit of an idiot for doing that. A second requirement of a Vigenere cipher is that it has a keyword which is used to encipher the plaintext. Calling a one time pad a Vigenere cipher and claiming that it simply has a keyword the length of the entire message would be like calling a common cipher a Vigenere cipher with a one character key. Technically accurate but sort of missing the mark as to how the system really works.
For the record when I speak of cryptanalysts breaking Vigenere ciphers I am referring to the ability to break them when there is a repeating key.
Of course if I am incorrect and you can provide some sort of resource as to how to break a one time pad with a random key that is correctly employed I would like to hear it since nearly every book in cryptography that mentions them that I have read (and I assure you I have read quite a few in the past 25 years of reading on cryptography) seems quite conclusive that such a scheme is unbreakable. Perhaps you know more than these learned gentleman.
Perhaps you would also not post anonymously while you dazzle us with your extensive cryptographical knowledge.
I never said that France helped America for it's own altruistic reasons. It absolutely did help us because it wanted to piss of the British. However the fact is that after the war our relationship with France was an extremely strong and stable one, not like it is today.
I never said the French contribution to the Revolutionary war was omitted. I said it was downplayed. As an example you mention Lafayette but completely omit the fact that we also recieved large amounts of money from France to fight our war.
In general it is portrayed that France 'sent a few boats' rather than the massive assistance they really gave us. It is all part of the myth of the Revolutionary War that American children are brought up with and that includes such ideas as 'the British troops couldn't move through the woodlands like the American militia' (check and see who the Greencoats were) and 'British Generals were inept' (they seemed to do pretty good against the French prior to the American Revolution).
It was not unreasonable for them to have suspected so. The integrity of Enigma relied heavily on keeping the machines and codebooks out of allied hands - had the Germans known that the allies had managed to get ahold of those things, the impressive effort of Turing & co. to go the last bit would not have been inconceivable to his German counterparts.
One of the often overlooked parts of the English effort to break the Enigma code is that the Slavic researchers had broken Enigma about five years earlier. The broke it using pure cryptanalysis without ever capturing a machine from the Germans.
...when they hear about supposedly "unbreakable" quantum cryptography, this sounds like another case of someone mistaking it for some kind of panacea for eavesdropping.
...Also, I don't think people realize how strong cryptography is today. There are cryptographic methods available to the public at large (such as RC5 and PGP) that are proven to require more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe. Not just more computing power than is possible with current hardware, but the theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe.
To date there is only one form of encryption that can be said to be truly unbreakable, a properly built and employed one time pad. This system basically XORs the bits of the message with the bits of a random key whose length equals the length of the message. Because without the key it is impossible to tell if a 0 or a 1 was originally a 0 or a 1 it is unbreakable. This assumes of course that the key is truly random and that the key is used only once. If the key is not random (such as a computer's pseudo random number generator) then the method for generating the key can be attacked. If a key is used twice the two ciphertexts can be XORed together to produce results identical to XORing the two plaintext messages together at which point it is vulnerable to attack. The problem with one time pads is the generation and distribution of keys. Because a key can only be used once you are forced to generate a great deal of 'keyspace'. These keys then have to be distributed to the neccessary parties in a fashion where they cannot be intercepted (usually through a living courier).
History has long shown that any 'unbreakable' system other than a one time pad eventually succumbs to cryptanalysis. Vignere ciphers, considered unbreakable when they were devised back in I think around the 17th century offer almost no protection these days to a trained cryptanalyst with nothing more than a pad of paper and some pencils, computers need not be involved.
The reason is because any system eventually shows inherent weaknesses. Just because the weaknesses of RC5 or RSA (a critical part of PGP) have not been exposed there is no reason to assume they do not exist. The idea that it will require more computing power than the 'theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe' only assumes a brute force attack on the ciphertext, however practically nothing has ever been deciphered through brute force methods.
Finally, given that it is theoretically possible for any encipherment system to be broken when they are broken many, many times those who have broken the system do not publish it. After all, if it is made apparent that a system has been broken then people will stop using that system and you will be back to having to break their encipherment all over again. Assuming that the NSA has not successfully found weaknesses in PGP and other big encipherment systems just because they have not published this is not neccessary a safe assumption. However, it is unlikely that they will reveal that they have cracked these 'secure' systems just to tell the world the contents of your email to your girlfriend.
This is not to say that the NSA -has- successfully cracked these methods. Simply that people who feel they are completely secure and that their messages will stay safe forever may find themselves in for a rude shock one morning.
Well, you never know when your relationships may deteriorate. As an example look at Franco-American relationships. While I think we are a long way away from a shooting war our friendship with them is no where near as strong as it use to be back when they did favors for us, little things like helping us found our country (their role is largely downplayed in American History classes but it is arguable that America would have lost the Revolutionary War without the economic assistance of France and the help of it's navy).
In more recent years we were strong allies with the Russians before the end of World War II.
As other people have said, these were the Navajo code talkers, and for the most part it was encryption through obscurity. Navajo was a difficult language to learn (as I understand it) and naturally the Japanese did not really have a great deal of access to any Navajo speakers. Additionally the language had no written component so there were no books on the subject that someone in Japan might have happened to have had.
Additionally there was some encoding done. Partially this was because there were no Navajo words for 'Tanks', 'Fighter Planes', 'Bombers' and such and partially for enhanced protection. One article about the code talkers that I read about a year ago said that the Japanese did manage to capture at least one Navajo speaker. However the man was not a code talker and as a result even though he could tell them what was being said the Japanese were unable to make sense of the messages.
According to the story the Navajo was killed, most likely during interrogation because the Japanese did not realize he was not a code talker. If he had remained a prisoner the Japanese would probably have been able to start work on a 'dictionary' to attempt to crack the Navajo code.
Yeah, but I have felt for a few years that the multi-barrel Metalstorm 'guns' are really more of a battery of guns myself. The do all share the same trigger but each barrel has it's own firing mechanism.
The nature of how the gun works sort of muddies the issue but to my mind saying the gun has a cyclical rate of a million rounds a minute is like saying a double barrel shotgun has a cyclical rate of 200,000 rounds per minute just because when you pull both triggers 10 separate rounds come out of the two barrels.
Actually, these things have fewer moving parts than a Pez dispenser. A Pez dispenser still has all the little candies stacked up and spits them out one at a time. These are more like a pixie stick, I suppose.
Metalstorm does design the guns so that if a round fails to ignite the following rounds will clear it. That is one of the advertising points for the gun, in the case of a misfire the weapon will keep right on shooting and without a feed mechanism it is pretty much impossible to jam.
As for firing that quickly for any length of time, I personally feel that the numbers are just flat out misleading since it is essentially only doing it for one shot. I mean I could load up a trebuchet with 3000 pounds of ball bearings that would do some pretty wicked damage to whomever they hit. Does that give my weapon a firing rate of 180,000 rounds per minute?
You are right though that the gun can be programmed to fire one bullet at a time. One of it's other main selling points is that it's rate of fire can be adjusted, not just to one bullet at a time or a burst but to 10 bullets at 6000 rounds per minute or 10 bullets at 600 rounds per minute, depending on the task at hand.
The stat isn't inaccurate, it's misleading. You need to understand the design of the Metalstorm system as well as the definition of what they are talking about when they say a million rounds per minute.
The design of the device is that each barrel holds multiple bullets which are triggered by coded electrical signals. The bullets can be fired one at a time, several at once or all at once depending on the instructions sent. Because of this you don't have to have a gap of 10 times the length of the bullet. Additionally the device uses multiple barrels which can fire simultaneously as opposed to current multi-barrel weapons such as gatling guns which fire one barrel after the other.
The electronic firing aspect of the Metalstorm system is not theoretical and has been fired under test conditions, so it definitely works.
Bullets do not feed into the barrel, however. When a barrel is empty you replace it with a new barrel (I assume the barrel can be reloaded at a later date, just not while in use).
The key to realize however is that the Metalstorm system does -not- fire 1 million rounds a minute. It has what's known as a cyclical -rate- of 1 million rounds per minute.
When talking about guns the cyclical rate is how rapidly a weapon will fire assuming it can sustain fire without the needs of reloading or cooling off.
The reason the Metalstorm system has such a high number is because they have one gun that has something on the order of 40 barrels. Each barrel holds 10 rounds (I'm approximating the numbers). When the trigger gets pulled the gun 'burps' out all 400 rounds at once. The time it takes from the trigger pull to the last bullet leaving the barrel is something on the order of.0004 seconds. Going by all the math that equates to a cyclical rate of 1 million rounds per minute, even though it was 'only' 400 rounds.
Of course after this you are left with a huge hunk of dead weight until you finish swapping out all 40 of those barrels.
In the end the number is more of a stunt than anything. It sure looks pretty and impressive but it is not truly an indicator of real performance. This isn't to say that the system itself is bad, merely that that one statistic isn't as impressive as it appears at first glance.
The Metalstorm gun doesn't really have any moving parts. The design of the device is that each barrel holds multiple bullets which are triggered by coded electrical signals. The bullets can be fired one at a time, several at once or all at once depending on the instructions sent.
This aspect of the Metalstorm system is not theoretical and has been fired under test conditions, so it definitely works.
Bullets do not feed into the barrel, however. When a barrel is empty you replace it with a new barrel (I assume the barrel can be reloaded at a later date, just not while in use). Because of this design you have no significant moving parts to jam.
The key to realize however is that the Metalstorm system does -not- fire 1 million rounds a minute. It has what's known as a cyclical -rate- of 1 million rounds per minute.
When talking about guns the cyclical rate is how rapidly a weapon will fire assuming it can sustain fire without the needs of reloading or cooling off.
The reason the Metalstorm system has such a high number is because they have one gun that has something on the order of 40 barrels. Each barrel holds 10 rounds (I'm approximating the numbers). When the trigger gets pulled the gun 'burps' out all 400 rounds at once. The time it takes from the trigger pull to the last bullet leaving the barrel is something on the order of.0004 seconds. Going by all the math that equates to a cyclical rate of 1 million rounds per minute, even though it was 'only' 400 rounds.
Remember that when the PS2 came out it was a game station with a DVD player that cost $400. This was at a time when a regular DVD player cost about $700. A lot of people thought they were going to disable the ability of the PS2 to play DVD-Video simply because it undercut the price of other players too much. Needless to say, they were wrong.
Then in fifty years there can be a nostalgia movement to learn and use cursive, much as calligraphy died out and returned when enough time had passed that it became 'fashionable'.
And in related news, experts at the United States Center for Equestrian Activities have grown increasingly concerned that the automobile will cause a sharp reduction in the horse riding skills of the average American.
The problem is that you have to have some taxation. What else are you going to pay your standing military with? Donations? That's a great idea. Considering the American propensity to donate to worthy causes we might have an army strong enough to hold off an invasion by Paraguay.
Yes, taxes are evil, but they are often a necessary evil. I'm not going to go into whether this particular tax is necessary or not. There's plenty of people making arguments for it and there are some making arguments against.
As for your statement that getting conservatives into office would help reduce the tax burden, and at the risk of flame baiting, what color is the sky on your planet? Yes, conservatives can be expected to cut back on social services which would typically reduce tax burden, but they could also be expected to ramp up our military spending which had been drastically cut over the preceding 8 years. Where did you think the money to do that would be coming from?
Here, down in the darkness, a Balrog is coming. A shadowy shape A shadowy shape. Glamdring's my witness I never shall yield 'til the hobbits escape 'til the hobbits escape Frodo carries the ring through the dark mines he flees to Mount Doom's furnace he goes he's the fellowship's key and if he fails then the ring that he bears the Nazgul will seize
Go, follow Aragorn flee from the Balrog I'll guard your retreating on Khazad-dum's bridge I'll block the way now keeping you safe So you all can break free So you all can break free Here I make my last stand with my staff in my hand I'll challenge the sword and the whip of this creature of flame and though I fall to my death from this bridge you'll see me again
For this is my quest and this is my test so now fly and escape from here I will now stand here and guard your lives so have no fear.
I am a servant of secret fire Gandalf the Gray I'll never yield Get back, you dark flame YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
Using software bugs to gain access to a system you don't own is what hacking a system is all about.
Do you think we should let hackers off because it was a software bug that allowed them to gain access to Root? I can pretty much guarantee the OS wasn't designed to let them do that.
It's not the big companies that are providing their movies and music on a digital format that is being distributed. It's regular people who are taking camcorders into theatres and recording the movie, then downloading it onto their computer and sharing it.
Actually, that's not what big media is really worried about. Sure, they have some concern, but it's not their biggest concern.
The biggest concern that Big Media has is that without DRM someone can rent a DVD of X-Men, rip it, send it onto the internet, and anyone who wants to can download it and burn a perfect copy for about five bucks (five bucks that the media company never sees).
Right now there are two big things holding this in some form of check:
File sizes verses bandwidth. Even with a cable modem it takes a long time to download 5-8GB of data.
Availability of equipment. While it's not too expensive to pick up a single layer DVD burner most disks produced are dual layer. One reason for this is so that there's more space and you can get better video quality but the other reason is simply to make copying more difficult.
Even with these restrictions people just re-encode the movies to smaller sizes and pass around really good quality copies of the original DVD (at least the AV portion).
And this is just with DVD. What about Big Media's hopes of establishing media on demand? Someone wants to order a single track, pay for it and download it, that's great, but how do you keep him from then just placing it onto Kazaa?
Some form of DRM needs to exist. I know that's an unpopular notion around here but I've been involved with computers for 20+ years. I remember the school labs where unprotected software was passed around like the new fish in a maximum security prison.
Even today you look at all the pirated properties flooding networks like Kazaa, properties where people had to deliberately exert some form of effort to break copyright.
All that said, before you think I'm some ultra-right wing DRM monkey I also think the way a lot of Big Media is acting is shameful. I think a lot of their 'losses' sound seriously inflated. I think some of the things they want to do go way beyond what DRM needs to be able to do. I'm just acknowledging a legitimate need for DRM.
What I would really like to see would be legislation aimed at Big Media's use of DRM. Mandate a system so that protected media can expire after a certain time? That's fine. You just have to offer the same media without the expiration at a reasonable price for people who wish to purchase it. Require protection to keep someone from sending their downloaded files to Kazaa? Sure. Just make sure the system allows a reasonable number of backups and the ability to access sections of the clips under Fair Use doctrine.
Slashdot Mirror
How much fun would GTA be if everybody was calling you an asshole and sinner throughout the whole game.
Well, considering the fact that after they do that you could beat them to death with a baseball bat....
Most big production companies like PDI and Pixar use their own tools. It gives them the capability of making the code do exactly what they need it to do without carrying overhead for things they don't need it to do.
Maya and other commercial packages are wonderful tools, but they are generic and a specialty tool that fills the need will always be a better choice. An Indy car is a marvel of engineering but it will never beat a dragster in a quarter mile. Likewise the dragster will never beat an Indy car if there is even a single lap to the race. It is simply a matter of the right tool for the right job.
How significant it that? At 24 frames a second an hour and a half of movie has around 130,000 frames. If code that is properly optimized for what is needed shaves a meager 5 seconds off each frame it will end up saving 180 computer hours of rendering time. When you factor in all the early test renders and visualizations that time increases much more, Using an educated guess I would have to assume it multiplies it by around a factor of three, so now you are talking about saving over 540 hours of rendering time throughout the project. In all likelihood of course your programmers will shave off considerably more than a mere 5 seconds a frame.
Wrong again. There is no bending of Space-time and there is no such thing as gravitational force.
The Earth simply sucks.
I had never considered it that way. I suppose technically you could consider a one time pad to be a Vigenere cipher with a tableau that consists of a 2x2 grid and a key that runs the length of the entire message.
Of course most cryptanalysts would think you were a bit of an idiot for doing that. A second requirement of a Vigenere cipher is that it has a keyword which is used to encipher the plaintext. Calling a one time pad a Vigenere cipher and claiming that it simply has a keyword the length of the entire message would be like calling a common cipher a Vigenere cipher with a one character key. Technically accurate but sort of missing the mark as to how the system really works.
For the record when I speak of cryptanalysts breaking Vigenere ciphers I am referring to the ability to break them when there is a repeating key.
Of course if I am incorrect and you can provide some sort of resource as to how to break a one time pad with a random key that is correctly employed I would like to hear it since nearly every book in cryptography that mentions them that I have read (and I assure you I have read quite a few in the past 25 years of reading on cryptography) seems quite conclusive that such a scheme is unbreakable. Perhaps you know more than these learned gentleman.
Perhaps you would also not post anonymously while you dazzle us with your extensive cryptographical knowledge.
I never said that France helped America for it's own altruistic reasons. It absolutely did help us because it wanted to piss of the British. However the fact is that after the war our relationship with France was an extremely strong and stable one, not like it is today.
I never said the French contribution to the Revolutionary war was omitted. I said it was downplayed. As an example you mention Lafayette but completely omit the fact that we also recieved large amounts of money from France to fight our war.
In general it is portrayed that France 'sent a few boats' rather than the massive assistance they really gave us. It is all part of the myth of the Revolutionary War that American children are brought up with and that includes such ideas as 'the British troops couldn't move through the woodlands like the American militia' (check and see who the Greencoats were) and 'British Generals were inept' (they seemed to do pretty good against the French prior to the American Revolution).
Yes, the Yahoos were bestial human slaves of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent talking horses.
One of the often overlooked parts of the English effort to break the Enigma code is that the Slavic researchers had broken Enigma about five years earlier. The broke it using pure cryptanalysis without ever capturing a machine from the Germans.
History has long shown that any 'unbreakable' system other than a one time pad eventually succumbs to cryptanalysis. Vignere ciphers, considered unbreakable when they were devised back in I think around the 17th century offer almost no protection these days to a trained cryptanalyst with nothing more than a pad of paper and some pencils, computers need not be involved.
The reason is because any system eventually shows inherent weaknesses. Just because the weaknesses of RC5 or RSA (a critical part of PGP) have not been exposed there is no reason to assume they do not exist. The idea that it will require more computing power than the 'theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe' only assumes a brute force attack on the ciphertext, however practically nothing has ever been deciphered through brute force methods.
Finally, given that it is theoretically possible for any encipherment system to be broken when they are broken many, many times those who have broken the system do not publish it. After all, if it is made apparent that a system has been broken then people will stop using that system and you will be back to having to break their encipherment all over again. Assuming that the NSA has not successfully found weaknesses in PGP and other big encipherment systems just because they have not published this is not neccessary a safe assumption. However, it is unlikely that they will reveal that they have cracked these 'secure' systems just to tell the world the contents of your email to your girlfriend.
This is not to say that the NSA -has- successfully cracked these methods. Simply that people who feel they are completely secure and that their messages will stay safe forever may find themselves in for a rude shock one morning.
Well, you never know when your relationships may deteriorate. As an example look at Franco-American relationships. While I think we are a long way away from a shooting war our friendship with them is no where near as strong as it use to be back when they did favors for us, little things like helping us found our country (their role is largely downplayed in American History classes but it is arguable that America would have lost the Revolutionary War without the economic assistance of France and the help of it's navy).
In more recent years we were strong allies with the Russians before the end of World War II.
As other people have said, these were the Navajo code talkers, and for the most part it was encryption through obscurity. Navajo was a difficult language to learn (as I understand it) and naturally the Japanese did not really have a great deal of access to any Navajo speakers. Additionally the language had no written component so there were no books on the subject that someone in Japan might have happened to have had.
Additionally there was some encoding done. Partially this was because there were no Navajo words for 'Tanks', 'Fighter Planes', 'Bombers' and such and partially for enhanced protection. One article about the code talkers that I read about a year ago said that the Japanese did manage to capture at least one Navajo speaker. However the man was not a code talker and as a result even though he could tell them what was being said the Japanese were unable to make sense of the messages.
According to the story the Navajo was killed, most likely during interrogation because the Japanese did not realize he was not a code talker. If he had remained a prisoner the Japanese would probably have been able to start work on a 'dictionary' to attempt to crack the Navajo code.
Yeah, but I have felt for a few years that the multi-barrel Metalstorm 'guns' are really more of a battery of guns myself. The do all share the same trigger but each barrel has it's own firing mechanism.
The nature of how the gun works sort of muddies the issue but to my mind saying the gun has a cyclical rate of a million rounds a minute is like saying a double barrel shotgun has a cyclical rate of 200,000 rounds per minute just because when you pull both triggers 10 separate rounds come out of the two barrels.
Sorry, I meant 300 pounds of ball bearings, not 3000.
Actually, these things have fewer moving parts than a Pez dispenser. A Pez dispenser still has all the little candies stacked up and spits them out one at a time. These are more like a pixie stick, I suppose.
Metalstorm does design the guns so that if a round fails to ignite the following rounds will clear it. That is one of the advertising points for the gun, in the case of a misfire the weapon will keep right on shooting and without a feed mechanism it is pretty much impossible to jam.
As for firing that quickly for any length of time, I personally feel that the numbers are just flat out misleading since it is essentially only doing it for one shot. I mean I could load up a trebuchet with 3000 pounds of ball bearings that would do some pretty wicked damage to whomever they hit. Does that give my weapon a firing rate of 180,000 rounds per minute?
You are right though that the gun can be programmed to fire one bullet at a time. One of it's other main selling points is that it's rate of fire can be adjusted, not just to one bullet at a time or a burst but to 10 bullets at 6000 rounds per minute or 10 bullets at 600 rounds per minute, depending on the task at hand.
The stat isn't inaccurate, it's misleading. You need to understand the design of the Metalstorm system as well as the definition of what they are talking about when they say a million rounds per minute.
.0004 seconds. Going by all the math that equates to a cyclical rate of 1 million rounds per minute, even though it was 'only' 400 rounds.
The design of the device is that each barrel holds multiple bullets which are triggered by coded electrical signals. The bullets can be fired one at a time, several at once or all at once depending on the instructions sent. Because of this you don't have to have a gap of 10 times the length of the bullet. Additionally the device uses multiple barrels which can fire simultaneously as opposed to current multi-barrel weapons such as gatling guns which fire one barrel after the other.
The electronic firing aspect of the Metalstorm system is not theoretical and has been fired under test conditions, so it definitely works.
Bullets do not feed into the barrel, however. When a barrel is empty you replace it with a new barrel (I assume the barrel can be reloaded at a later date, just not while in use).
The key to realize however is that the Metalstorm system does -not- fire 1 million rounds a minute. It has what's known as a cyclical -rate- of 1 million rounds per minute.
When talking about guns the cyclical rate is how rapidly a weapon will fire assuming it can sustain fire without the needs of reloading or cooling off.
The reason the Metalstorm system has such a high number is because they have one gun that has something on the order of 40 barrels. Each barrel holds 10 rounds (I'm approximating the numbers). When the trigger gets pulled the gun 'burps' out all 400 rounds at once. The time it takes from the trigger pull to the last bullet leaving the barrel is something on the order of
Of course after this you are left with a huge hunk of dead weight until you finish swapping out all 40 of those barrels.
In the end the number is more of a stunt than anything. It sure looks pretty and impressive but it is not truly an indicator of real performance. This isn't to say that the system itself is bad, merely that that one statistic isn't as impressive as it appears at first glance.
The Metalstorm gun doesn't really have any moving parts. The design of the device is that each barrel holds multiple bullets which are triggered by coded electrical signals. The bullets can be fired one at a time, several at once or all at once depending on the instructions sent.
.0004 seconds. Going by all the math that equates to a cyclical rate of 1 million rounds per minute, even though it was 'only' 400 rounds.
This aspect of the Metalstorm system is not theoretical and has been fired under test conditions, so it definitely works.
Bullets do not feed into the barrel, however. When a barrel is empty you replace it with a new barrel (I assume the barrel can be reloaded at a later date, just not while in use). Because of this design you have no significant moving parts to jam.
The key to realize however is that the Metalstorm system does -not- fire 1 million rounds a minute. It has what's known as a cyclical -rate- of 1 million rounds per minute.
When talking about guns the cyclical rate is how rapidly a weapon will fire assuming it can sustain fire without the needs of reloading or cooling off.
The reason the Metalstorm system has such a high number is because they have one gun that has something on the order of 40 barrels. Each barrel holds 10 rounds (I'm approximating the numbers). When the trigger gets pulled the gun 'burps' out all 400 rounds at once. The time it takes from the trigger pull to the last bullet leaving the barrel is something on the order of
Remember that when the PS2 came out it was a game station with a DVD player that cost $400. This was at a time when a regular DVD player cost about $700. A lot of people thought they were going to disable the ability of the PS2 to play DVD-Video simply because it undercut the price of other players too much. Needless to say, they were wrong.
When flint knapping is outlawed, only outlaws will know how to flint knap.
Then in fifty years there can be a nostalgia movement to learn and use cursive, much as calligraphy died out and returned when enough time had passed that it became 'fashionable'.
We could call the new art form 'Recursive'.
And in related news, experts at the United States Center for Equestrian Activities have grown increasingly concerned that the automobile will cause a sharp reduction in the horse riding skills of the average American.
Sounds like the Libertarian party to me.
The problem is that you have to have some taxation. What else are you going to pay your standing military with? Donations? That's a great idea. Considering the American propensity to donate to worthy causes we might have an army strong enough to hold off an invasion by Paraguay.
Yes, taxes are evil, but they are often a necessary evil. I'm not going to go into whether this particular tax is necessary or not. There's plenty of people making arguments for it and there are some making arguments against.
As for your statement that getting conservatives into office would help reduce the tax burden, and at the risk of flame baiting, what color is the sky on your planet? Yes, conservatives can be expected to cut back on social services which would typically reduce tax burden, but they could also be expected to ramp up our military spending which had been drastically cut over the preceding 8 years. Where did you think the money to do that would be coming from?
(to the tune of 'Stars' from Les Miserables)
Here,
down in the darkness,
a Balrog is coming.
A shadowy shape
A shadowy shape.
Glamdring's my witness
I never shall yield
'til the hobbits escape
'til the hobbits escape
Frodo carries the ring
through the dark mines he flees
to Mount Doom's furnace he goes
he's the fellowship's key
and if he fails then the ring that he bears
the Nazgul will seize
Go,
follow Aragorn
flee from the Balrog
I'll guard your retreating
on Khazad-dum's bridge
I'll block the way now
keeping you safe
So you all can break free
So you all can break free
Here I make my last stand
with my staff in my hand
I'll challenge the sword and the whip
of this creature of flame
and though I fall to my death from this bridge
you'll see me again
For this is my quest
and this is my test
so now fly and escape from here
I will now stand here and guard your lives
so have no fear.
I am a servant
of secret fire
Gandalf the Gray
I'll never yield
Get back, you dark flame
YOU SHALL NOT PASS!
Using software bugs to gain access to a system you don't own is what hacking a system is all about.
Do you think we should let hackers off because it was a software bug that allowed them to gain access to Root? I can pretty much guarantee the OS wasn't designed to let them do that.
I agree. To paraphrase something I was once told about comment statements:
A simulator only tells you what a thing should do, not what it actually does.
It's not the big companies that are providing their movies and music on a digital format that is being distributed. It's regular people who are taking camcorders into theatres and recording the movie, then downloading it onto their computer and sharing it.
Actually, that's not what big media is really worried about. Sure, they have some concern, but it's not their biggest concern.
The biggest concern that Big Media has is that without DRM someone can rent a DVD of X-Men, rip it, send it onto the internet, and anyone who wants to can download it and burn a perfect copy for about five bucks (five bucks that the media company never sees).
Right now there are two big things holding this in some form of check:
File sizes verses bandwidth. Even with a cable modem it takes a long time to download 5-8GB of data.
Availability of equipment. While it's not too expensive to pick up a single layer DVD burner most disks produced are dual layer. One reason for this is so that there's more space and you can get better video quality but the other reason is simply to make copying more difficult.
Even with these restrictions people just re-encode the movies to smaller sizes and pass around really good quality copies of the original DVD (at least the AV portion).
And this is just with DVD. What about Big Media's hopes of establishing media on demand? Someone wants to order a single track, pay for it and download it, that's great, but how do you keep him from then just placing it onto Kazaa?
Some form of DRM needs to exist. I know that's an unpopular notion around here but I've been involved with computers for 20+ years. I remember the school labs where unprotected software was passed around like the new fish in a maximum security prison.
Even today you look at all the pirated properties flooding networks like Kazaa, properties where people had to deliberately exert some form of effort to break copyright.
All that said, before you think I'm some ultra-right wing DRM monkey I also think the way a lot of Big Media is acting is shameful. I think a lot of their 'losses' sound seriously inflated. I think some of the things they want to do go way beyond what DRM needs to be able to do. I'm just acknowledging a legitimate need for DRM.
What I would really like to see would be legislation aimed at Big Media's use of DRM. Mandate a system so that protected media can expire after a certain time? That's fine. You just have to offer the same media without the expiration at a reasonable price for people who wish to purchase it. Require protection to keep someone from sending their downloaded files to Kazaa? Sure. Just make sure the system allows a reasonable number of backups and the ability to access sections of the clips under Fair Use doctrine.