The Blackhawks were downed by RPG-7s. Unlike HEATs, and other anti-tank weapons, they are not shape charged devices. An RPG-7 cannot penetrate an M1 battle tank's armor, or any main battle tank with reactive armor (see tactics for details of Chechen method of firing two rockets to defeat such armor).
a) That's not what i'm implying either. You don't need an impenetrable fuselage to keep a helicopter airborne after a grenade hits it. Something as simple as reinforced rotor joints and housings, and redistributing armor to the bottom of the chopper (anti-personnel) instead of the sides would be appropriate.
b) I find your remarks are delivered somewhat offhand. Considering that modern tank armor is between 100-150mm in thickness (less than 6 inches), and designed to withstand artillery shelling, choosing "6 inches" as a measure of armour plate on a helicopter to withstand a grenade explosion is off-target. Also keep in mind that titanium and ceramic plating has come a long way since the development of the M1A1 Abrams in the early 80s.
No, that's not what i'm saying at all. It's more like saying "How about building a power plant that doesn't explode when the weather heats up." A heat-guided missile is one thing, even a Stinger is a menacing device. But a limp shoulder-mounted RPG? For the price you're paying surely you can build a chopper that can consistently stay airborne (if not effective) after an RPG hit.
a) I think it's a bad idea. Smells of big brother to me. Next, there'll be blood tests to start your car. b) That said, i don't see why dealerships and drivers should be paying. I'm sure insurance companies and governments could find an effective way to pay this off. Here, check out how much drunk driving costs. (ncpa.org)
The/.ter in me is offended that they're resorting to spam tactics. The Canadian in me wants to laugh. But the fact is, i WANT to see the ad at this point, just out of curiosity. I'll bet a lot of you do too, meaning this is a smart move for both representatives.
Scrolling through the high-modded comments, i've seen the same critiques over and over:
1) the sets are overpriced 2) the sets are too expensive to produce 3) the sets are overspecialized
The first point is subjective (i'd tend to agree). The second is iffy (it's mass-produced plastic. Even with custom pieces, it's *plastic*). The third is just plain wrong. Many are calling for a return of the good old days of imagination and simple pieces available by the bagful, because we all remember how much fun those days were. The problem is, that would bankrupt the company. First of all, Lego is an extremely durable product. Maybe you lose a couple, maybe the dog eats some, but how often does a brick snap outright? Second, there's only so much of it one kid needs to reach a saturation point...eventually the combination of bricks owned and imagination yields infinite buildables, for all intents. Third, by the time boys and girls are old enough to have their own kids, the vast majority of them won't be playing with their old Lego anymore. Who gets it? Their kids. Their nephews and nieces. Their neighbours. Suddenly the demand for old school Lego has vanished.
So no, overspecialization isn't the problem at all. It's their only solution.
His lenses must be working magic already. Eleftheriades was my professor for an electronics course @ UToronto, and i don't remember him having that much hair:)
Italy is predominantly Roman Catholic... check it out. [CIA] and the Roman Catholic lawbook is the Bible... and the Bible says all sin and blasphemy is forgivable, except blasphemy against God... check it out. [Bible]
So from that end, it makes perfect sense to block a website that carries blasphemy against God, instead of say, child porn.
First, Mario kills Luigi, who is unnecessary competition. Of course, he has nothing to fear from Bowser: his employer has proprietary rights to hellfire. Soon the Kuppas will be building Mario's.NET empire, while the courts are paid off with funding from Yoshi's magic mushroom factory.
Haha, watching all you people argue over whether or not there's a surplus and whether or not all these poor techies should get deported is amusing...keep at it with your pros and cons while the tide of talent flows out of the country, and a whack of it ends up in Toronto.
I for one think that this so-called surplus of coders doesn't exist, but no matter...up here in the Great White North, your fingers get cold in a hurry when you leave them on the keyboard for too long. The extra help should keep me warmer, without even having to go for a toque.
Are you listening, hapless H1B talents who got conned by Uncle Sam? Pay a visit to Silicon Valley North, i'm tired of coding after the hockey's started...
Hmm...well, computers changed the notion of natural resources, when suddenly it became possible to think outside of human minds. All we have to do is tell a computer how to think for us, and it does so merrily. Suddenly information became a resource itself, raw data had value as tangible as coal or land, because we gained the ability to refine vast amounts of it quickly.
This is a whole new avenue...taking the process we call evolution and mapping it into technology. If we can harness that ability, and more importantly accelerate it, then haven't we suddenly gained a new resource? Computational devices gave us the power to let something else think for us, but with rigid limits...the instructions must be fixed, so really only repetitive functions can be made autonomous. But this gives us a new power...or does it?
We still can't solve problems autonomously. The original set of instructions has to be fed to the device, and the methods for 'evolving' have to be written. To me, it looks like we've just taken a clue from nature, applied it to a computational device, and watched a faster form of problem solving take place. Genetic algorithms aren't exactly new...here's a short description, or if you like, an example of a massively distributed parallel geneticalgorithm from Carnegie Mellon University Robotics. (Also check out CMU computer science for all sorts of wild projects). For another comment on relating ecological systems to computing, see this string, from an article this week.
Who knows what else can be found in natural systems, that we can apply to computing to gain information resources. I remember hearing that, a few decades ago, biology was the hot interest of the world's greatest thinkers (mostly trade physicists) who were looking for profound answers...wouldn't it be interesting if we could one day mine progress.
It's SHARED man. Enough britney downloads, and even I2 is taking a dive...maybe they need to be full-length britney concert bootlegs, but there's limits to everything.
You're either karma whoring or trolling, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on the former.
Whoring...i think. Give the newbie some time (look at my big number). I'd prefer to be known as a karma pimp, now that i think about it.
Standardization bureaus are created all the time in the absence of official government intervention -- they normally go by the name "cartels".
Touché. Of course, no one who is aware of a cartel trusts it, (for those of you who haven't had enough coffee, i mean any sort of economic or political collusion, in the dirty sense of the word, not drug organizations. Necessarily.) and what i really meant to imply in my comment was that it was difficult to establish a legitimate organization with widespread influence on the web without a consensus (or close to it) among industry leaders. I really hope that when you say the GPL will keep developers from stabbing each other in the back, you're not insinuating that the GNU project is a cartel;)
Moreover, its purposes --regulating a scarce commodity (spectra) and preventing broadcasters from degrading each other's signals through collision-- make for no remarkable analogy in the software industry.
I knew someone would bust me for this...i meant that really large standards organization that brands all sorts of things in the US, but being Canadian i can't remember what it's called (ANSI?). In any case, our version is the CSA. Eveything from bike helmets to Barbie dolls get CSA stamped north of the border. If the point you're making is that commercial industry standards organizations have no relationship to software standards, then i would have to disagree. In both cases the enterprise fails without a general acceptance by industry, government, and consumers.
Occasionally a little kick in the pants is necessary to keep people from merely churning out yet another instant-messaging clone, but it's hardly the sort of heavy-handed operation your comment would seem to imply.
Honestly, you're probably right, and that's why i put in the brief disclaimer ("do we even need the standards?" to paraphrase myself). Evidence of the fact is that we're here, right now, and i'm perfectly happy on my linux box with un-certified software written by code monkeys like me to do all sorts of things without any sort of 'official' approval whatsoever.
Certifications, labs like this, and Official Stamps of Approval mean perhaps more than they ought (corporate decision making being what it is) but that's hard to get around. And it sounds like they'll get to play with cool toys!;)
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible? I mean, by its nature, open source holds no associations to any governing bodies that carry sway. There's the argument that accepted standards organizations for open source just don't exist, but that's not even true...it's more a case of public trust being a fickle thing.
Industries that market tangible products have no problems creating standardization bureaus and bodies, usually because these sorts of things can be governed in turn by governments, by qualified authorities, by laws. Could the FCC have been created without respected, universally trusted leadership? Doubtful. Who then will take on the challenge of developing an overseer for open-source?
It has been tried...there are any number of open-source websites that act as collectives for development. There have been attempts to create instituions of authority as well, notably the group led by Eric S. Raymond, the Open Source Initiative, which has had undetermined effectiveness, as far as i can tell. Still, i can't help but think that, currently, excellent open source becomes accepted by reputation, and reputation alone.
I wonder if this lab will have the power to start the responsible monitoring of open source...just an interesting idea. Really, do we even need such a system, or can the open Freshmeat bazaar and word of mouth serve as adequate testing grounds? Sometimes i think it would take an organization with direct influence over the net, like the IETF or ISOC to get the ball rolling...from innovators to watchdogs.
If anyone else knows of any other certitification programs for open source, i'd like to hear about them.
Oh please, don't make me out to be Amish, i'm posting aren't i? Take the semantics of the statement as you like it, but regardless, there is a huge difference between the judicial use of prgress and the wanton abuse of it.
And not enough coffee, by the way;p
-j dosen't backwash, but still won't give you his Coke. Diet.
No, that's not it though...these are all the symptoms of a problem that can't be escaped. It's a trivial conclusion that traffic in a closed system doesn't grow past its peak, and will settle at equilibrium. The thing is, there's no such thing as a closed urban system...be default, a healthy community must grow.
The closest comparison of a system we can observe in relation to the internet is an ecosystem. In either case, it grows, it shrinks, it responds to change, it is populated (an ecosystem by organisms, the net by information), whereby only the fittest of beings/data survives progress, and it is abused by humans. The only difference is that we created it.
Here then are the things to keep in mind when making an analysis of the net: (excerpts taken from The Ecosphere, by Barry Commoner)
The First Law of Ecology: Everything is Connected to Something Else
No such thing as inside-outside influence in the internet. There is only one set of 'organisms', one collective of criteria that affect the net, and it's anything that is wired. Bloat or not, it will affect our network. "The dynamic behaviour of a cybernetic system-for example, the frequency of its natural ocsillations, the speed with which it responds to external changes, and its over-all rate of operation-depends on the relative rates of its constituent steps." Like Baka_Boy was saying, when you get off the freeway, if the local roads suck, you're still screwed.
The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must Go Somewhere This is where the principle fails. On the net, you find dead ends. On the net, you find concepts and organisms that are ephemeral in every sense of the word. On the net, the life or death of an idea is just a matter of energy.
The Third Law of Ecology: Nature knows Best The premise being that by whatever means possible, the course of nature has perfected the stability of organic chemicals to the point where anything man-made should be treated with caution at the very least (this is why every single one of you has minute amounts of ScotchGard in your bloodstream right now. So far, no ill effects have been found, but 3M has stopped making the stuff recently, despite the fact that the industry is worth several billion dollars. Food for thought: if they acknowledge the possibility of adverse effects now, they are not criminally responsible for them by US law. Makes you wonder how much damage is possible, that would make the loss of billions preferable to compensation. For a related comment, see this post of mine). Unfortunately, there isn't a lot we can use here, because the internet is a creation of man to begin with. The most we can do is look for ways to turn linear, destructive patterns of information into cyclical events. OOP anybody?
The Fourth Law of Ecology: There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch Appropriated from economics, and blatantly obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Here.
The Blackhawks were downed by RPG-7s. Unlike HEATs, and other anti-tank weapons, they are not shape charged devices. An RPG-7 cannot penetrate an M1 battle tank's armor, or any main battle tank with reactive armor (see tactics for details of Chechen method of firing two rockets to defeat such armor).
You're still off-target.
a) That's not what i'm implying either. You don't need an impenetrable fuselage to keep a helicopter airborne after a grenade hits it. Something as simple as reinforced rotor joints and housings, and redistributing armor to the bottom of the chopper (anti-personnel) instead of the sides would be appropriate.
b) I find your remarks are delivered somewhat offhand. Considering that modern tank armor is between 100-150mm in thickness (less than 6 inches), and designed to withstand artillery shelling, choosing "6 inches" as a measure of armour plate on a helicopter to withstand a grenade explosion is off-target. Also keep in mind that titanium and ceramic plating has come a long way since the development of the M1A1 Abrams in the early 80s.
No, that's not what i'm saying at all. It's more like saying "How about building a power plant that doesn't explode when the weather heats up." A heat-guided missile is one thing, even a Stinger is a menacing device. But a limp shoulder-mounted RPG? For the price you're paying surely you can build a chopper that can consistently stay airborne (if not effective) after an RPG hit.
Instead of countering Soviet air technology, maybe they should start building a chopper that doesn't get shot down [philly.com] by dirt-cheap disposable rocketry.
a) I think it's a bad idea. Smells of big brother to me. Next, there'll be blood tests to start your car.
b) That said, i don't see why dealerships and drivers should be paying. I'm sure insurance companies and governments could find an effective way to pay this off. Here, check out how much drunk driving costs. (ncpa.org)
"due to the fact that the station wasn't designed to operate with a crew as small as two or three people."
/., it seems like it wasn't designed to operate, period.
From all the articles i've read on
The /.ter in me is offended that they're resorting to spam tactics. The Canadian in me wants to laugh. But the fact is, i WANT to see the ad at this point, just out of curiosity. I'll bet a lot of you do too, meaning this is a smart move for both representatives.
Scrolling through the high-modded comments, i've seen the same critiques over and over:
1) the sets are overpriced
2) the sets are too expensive to produce
3) the sets are overspecialized
The first point is subjective (i'd tend to agree). The second is iffy (it's mass-produced plastic. Even with custom pieces, it's *plastic*). The third is just plain wrong. Many are calling for a return of the good old days of imagination and simple pieces available by the bagful, because we all remember how much fun those days were. The problem is, that would bankrupt the company. First of all, Lego is an extremely durable product. Maybe you lose a couple, maybe the dog eats some, but how often does a brick snap outright? Second, there's only so much of it one kid needs to reach a saturation point...eventually the combination of bricks owned and imagination yields infinite buildables, for all intents. Third, by the time boys and girls are old enough to have their own kids, the vast majority of them won't be playing with their old Lego anymore. Who gets it? Their kids. Their nephews and nieces. Their neighbours. Suddenly the demand for old school Lego has vanished.
So no, overspecialization isn't the problem at all. It's their only solution.
Logos brand entities. Products. Corporations. THINGS. Logos don't brand lifestyles alone...they can't.
Here, see for yourself: http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.htm l.
:)
His lenses must be working magic already. Eleftheriades was my professor for an electronics course @ UToronto, and i don't remember him having that much hair
OK, from the flip side of the coin.
Italy is predominantly Roman Catholic... check it out. [CIA]
and the Roman Catholic lawbook is the Bible...
and the Bible says all sin and blasphemy is forgivable, except blasphemy against God... check it out. [Bible]
So from that end, it makes perfect sense to block a website that carries blasphemy against God, instead of say, child porn.
Oh, for sure. Now we can't have that cocktail party, what with all the martian life sick and all.
...
Can you see it now?
.NET empire, while the courts are paid off with funding from Yoshi's magic mushroom factory.
First, Mario kills Luigi, who is unnecessary competition. Of course, he has nothing to fear from Bowser: his employer has proprietary rights to hellfire. Soon the Kuppas will be building Mario's
Does it comes with a little cloth to wipe your grubby fingerprints off it every (x) seconds?
Reading this makes me kind of ill...i keep substituting Attila the Hun or Alexander the Great's names for Gates'.
"But, he united a fragmented empire!"
As if anybody who reads slashdot has an average surf session of 83 minutes. Please. We're all still at 4+ hours. :p
1.) Why is everyone in the company selling out?
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/c/cfmd.html
2.) Why isn't c3d listed as an exhibitor at Comdex? (looong load, even with broadband)a nner/exhibitorsall.cfm
http://myplanner.key3media.com/comdex/fall2000/pl
I for one think that this so-called surplus of coders doesn't exist, but no matter...up here in the Great White North, your fingers get cold in a hurry when you leave them on the keyboard for too long. The extra help should keep me warmer, without even having to go for a toque.
Are you listening, hapless H1B talents who got conned by Uncle Sam? Pay a visit to Silicon Valley North, i'm tired of coding after the hockey's started...
j
This is a whole new avenue...taking the process we call evolution and mapping it into technology. If we can harness that ability, and more importantly accelerate it, then haven't we suddenly gained a new resource? Computational devices gave us the power to let something else think for us, but with rigid limits...the instructions must be fixed, so really only repetitive functions can be made autonomous. But this gives us a new power...or does it?
We still can't solve problems autonomously. The original set of instructions has to be fed to the device, and the methods for 'evolving' have to be written. To me, it looks like we've just taken a clue from nature, applied it to a computational device, and watched a faster form of problem solving take place. Genetic algorithms aren't exactly new...here's a short description, or if you like, an example of a massively distributed parallel geneticalgorithm from Carnegie Mellon University Robotics. (Also check out CMU computer science for all sorts of wild projects). For another comment on relating ecological systems to computing, see this string, from an article this week.
Who knows what else can be found in natural systems, that we can apply to computing to gain information resources. I remember hearing that, a few decades ago, biology was the hot interest of the world's greatest thinkers (mostly trade physicists) who were looking for profound answers...wouldn't it be interesting if we could one day mine progress.
-j
It's SHARED man. Enough britney downloads, and even I2 is taking a dive...maybe they need to be full-length britney concert bootlegs, but there's limits to everything.
-j
Whoring...i think. Give the newbie some time (look at my big number). I'd prefer to be known as a karma pimp, now that i think about it.
Standardization bureaus are created all the time in the absence of official government intervention -- they normally go by the name "cartels".
Touché. Of course, no one who is aware of a cartel trusts it, (for those of you who haven't had enough coffee, i mean any sort of economic or political collusion, in the dirty sense of the word, not drug organizations. Necessarily.) and what i really meant to imply in my comment was that it was difficult to establish a legitimate organization with widespread influence on the web without a consensus (or close to it) among industry leaders. I really hope that when you say the GPL will keep developers from stabbing each other in the back, you're not insinuating that the GNU project is a cartel ;)
Moreover, its purposes --regulating a scarce commodity (spectra) and preventing broadcasters from degrading each other's signals through collision-- make for no remarkable analogy in the software industry.
I knew someone would bust me for this...i meant that really large standards organization that brands all sorts of things in the US, but being Canadian i can't remember what it's called (ANSI?). In any case, our version is the CSA. Eveything from bike helmets to Barbie dolls get CSA stamped north of the border. If the point you're making is that commercial industry standards organizations have no relationship to software standards, then i would have to disagree. In both cases the enterprise fails without a general acceptance by industry, government, and consumers.
Occasionally a little kick in the pants is necessary to keep people from merely churning out yet another instant-messaging clone, but it's hardly the sort of heavy-handed operation your comment would seem to imply.
Honestly, you're probably right, and that's why i put in the brief disclaimer ("do we even need the standards?" to paraphrase myself). Evidence of the fact is that we're here, right now, and i'm perfectly happy on my linux box with un-certified software written by code monkeys like me to do all sorts of things without any sort of 'official' approval whatsoever.
-j
Is it just me, or is assuring the quality of open source projects (both in terms of openness and functionality) more or less impossible? I mean, by its nature, open source holds no associations to any governing bodies that carry sway. There's the argument that accepted standards organizations for open source just don't exist, but that's not even true...it's more a case of public trust being a fickle thing.
Industries that market tangible products have no problems creating standardization bureaus and bodies, usually because these sorts of things can be governed in turn by governments, by qualified authorities, by laws. Could the FCC have been created without respected, universally trusted leadership? Doubtful. Who then will take on the challenge of developing an overseer for open-source?
It has been tried...there are any number of open-source websites that act as collectives for development. There have been attempts to create instituions of authority as well, notably the group led by Eric S. Raymond, the Open Source Initiative, which has had undetermined effectiveness, as far as i can tell. Still, i can't help but think that, currently, excellent open source becomes accepted by reputation, and reputation alone.
I wonder if this lab will have the power to start the responsible monitoring of open source...just an interesting idea. Really, do we even need such a system, or can the open Freshmeat bazaar and word of mouth serve as adequate testing grounds? Sometimes i think it would take an organization with direct influence over the net, like the IETF or ISOC to get the ball rolling...from innovators to watchdogs.
If anyone else knows of any other certitification programs for open source, i'd like to hear about them.
-j
-j
And not enough coffee, by the way ;p
-j dosen't backwash, but still won't give you his Coke. Diet.
The closest comparison of a system we can observe in relation to the internet is an ecosystem. In either case, it grows, it shrinks, it responds to change, it is populated (an ecosystem by organisms, the net by information), whereby only the fittest of beings/data survives progress, and it is abused by humans. The only difference is that we created it.
Here then are the things to keep in mind when making an analysis of the net: (excerpts taken from The Ecosphere, by Barry Commoner)
The First Law of Ecology: Everything is Connected to Something Else
No such thing as inside-outside influence in the internet. There is only one set of 'organisms', one collective of criteria that affect the net, and it's anything that is wired. Bloat or not, it will affect our network. "The dynamic behaviour of a cybernetic system-for example, the frequency of its natural ocsillations, the speed with which it responds to external changes, and its over-all rate of operation-depends on the relative rates of its constituent steps." Like Baka_Boy was saying, when you get off the freeway, if the local roads suck, you're still screwed.
The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must Go Somewhere
This is where the principle fails. On the net, you find dead ends. On the net, you find concepts and organisms that are ephemeral in every sense of the word. On the net, the life or death of an idea is just a matter of energy.
The Third Law of Ecology: Nature knows Best
The premise being that by whatever means possible, the course of nature has perfected the stability of organic chemicals to the point where anything man-made should be treated with caution at the very least (this is why every single one of you has minute amounts of ScotchGard in your bloodstream right now. So far, no ill effects have been found, but 3M has stopped making the stuff recently, despite the fact that the industry is worth several billion dollars. Food for thought: if they acknowledge the possibility of adverse effects now, they are not criminally responsible for them by US law. Makes you wonder how much damage is possible, that would make the loss of billions preferable to compensation. For a related comment, see this post of mine). Unfortunately, there isn't a lot we can use here, because the internet is a creation of man to begin with. The most we can do is look for ways to turn linear, destructive patterns of information into cyclical events. OOP anybody?
The Fourth Law of Ecology: There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Appropriated from economics, and blatantly obvious.
-j