Living creatures have an annoying flaw in that you can't switch them off and set them aside when you're not using them. Liquid fuel is already in the POL supply chain and is a highly concentrated energy source, while oats and alfalfa are neither. Needing to camp near grazing and water makes your movement that much more predictable. Machines can be switched on and used as soon as they're manufactured and require no training. A damaged machine can be repaired in the field by replacing parts and you can even take parts from two broken ones and make one working one when spares are unavailable. Not so with shot-up mules.
Didn't we cover all this a hundred years ago, when the automobile began to replace the horse?
At Defcon last year, I watched demos of every sort of lock being picked in under 15 seconds. Kwikset and the like were even quicker. Only two brands of lock managed to last longer then 30 seconds, and one of them is believed unpickable due to the precision methods used to produce the mechanism.
Undoubtedly what you saw was more showmanship than skill. I can pre-pin pretty much any lock to make it easily pickable. I can also choose a pin combination that will have the would-be picker cursing for several minutes, minimum. Also, no lock that claims "unpickability" claims so on the basis of precision. Variances in manufacture are absolutely unavoidable. What they do to make them unpickable is add additional dimensions of motion to the pins, such as requiring precise rotation as well as lift (medeco), or add add additional pins on different axes. Basically, anyone who claims to be able to pick a Medeco or similar lock with standard picking tools is a liar, and if they demonstrate, they're using a lock they've modified.
TIme consuming and tedious, what color is the sky in your world. anyone with any degree of skill using a set of picks can open the door as quick or quicker than you can with your key.
Bullshit. What brand are the locks in your world? If nothing but Kwikset (and knockoffs thereof), then only tedious. If anything of higher quality, add "time consuming" as well. I sincerely doubt you know as much about locks and lockpicking as I do. I've been a locksmith for twelve years.
With all the technological advancements we've seen in our lifetime, and preceding, why am I still walking around with precisely cut shards of metal tearing holes in my pocket just to make my way through my daily life? If I could carry only one that can be configured dynamically for each lock, that wouldn't be so bad.
The problem with this particular design is that the lock needs a power source.
The other problem with that design is that it would have to be an incredibly complex and delicate device to accurately duplicate the milling of a key, which is usually cut to.005 inch tolerances. A few reasons we still use key locks are A) they're simple machines that can last decades, B) neither the key nor the lock requires a batteries or power supplies, C) mechanical lock cylinders can be made verry small, i.e. the cylinder in a doorknob actually fits within the doorknob, whereas a prox card reader will not.
If I could carry only one that can be configured dynamically for each lock, that wouldn't be so bad.
You can. It's called a lock pick.
No, lock picks are used to exploit manufacturing variances in the lock. Picking a lock is time consuming and tedious. He wants a key that dynamically configures itself for each lock.
I have a padlock that's at least 20 years old, with no external holes, other than where the loop comes out of the main body. The key is a flat metal plate about an inch long, with a number of magnets built into it.
I have one of those too. I use it on occasion to demonstrate to clients (I'm a locksmith) why they don't make them anymore. A couple raps with a plastic or rawhide hammer with pressure on the shackle opens it right up without damaging it.
Relying on luck to weed out the good ideas from the bad is not a strategy.
It is sometimes called the "shotgun approach."
Google has an interesting approach, but it is not what anyone would call a strategy
It's not their entire strategy, it's only part of their strategy. You make it sound like everyone at google is just randomly trying stuff to see if it sticks. In reality, most of their time is is spent on planned development. They are encouraged, however, to spend some fraction of their work time on personal projects. In other words, they figuratively spend most of their day taking aimed shots at specific targets, but once or twice a day they shoot in a random direction with a shotgun.
Attempting to cast copyright infringement, an area of law which includes such vagaries as "fair use", as a simple "right and wrong" like property theft shows your ignorance of law.
No, YOU shut up, fucktard. My point is valid and relevant. The original poster attempted to cast a very nebulous matter of copyright infringement, an area of law with vast gray areas, as a crime of property theft, which is very black and white. He's a dumbass. i don't care if you're sick of hearing it, shit like this needs to be pointed out.
whatever happened to the idea of backup power being stored in giant underground flywheels
Nothing happened to the idea. It's been used for decades. My father worked for a defense contractor in the late 60's who had their computer rooms powered via a motor-driven generators with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete disks affixed to the shafts between the motors and generators. The inertia of the spinning disks easily kept the big iron powered up during brownouts, and during blackouts they provided enough interim power for the generators to come online.
If you specifically mean those super high-speed flywheels we hear about from time to time, well, those require such exacting construction that they're still too expensive to replace batteries or generators. Someday maybe, but not yet.
Some bits make sense, such as cameras in malls and apartment building corridors. They are reasonably public spaces
Actually, no, they're not. They are both private property. The public may have access to these places, but only with the permission of the property owner.
What was most disturbing was the lack of concern by the reporters in the article. It was written "overly objective" as if this was an acceptable idea that would not cause controversy.
I thought the whole idea of the press was to protect us from nuts like this Houston police chief trying to do things like this, legal or not.
Ideally, the job of the press is to present complete, factual information, which allows us to get ourselves riled up as necessary. Too many journalists already go into the field because they want to "change the world", when journalism is supposed to be about simply reporting unbiased fact. That's the ideal they always claim, anyway. And even if you do expect the press to be [cheerleaders/propagandists], I think this case is a perfect example where the best course of action is "stay out of the way and let the man make a fool of himself".
A tragedy is not astronauts getting killed in an explosion
It bloody well is for their family.
Look, if you're going to get nit picky and adjust the scale to fit the conclusion, we basically end up at the famous Mel Brooks quote: "tragedy is me cutting my finger, comedy is you falling down a manhole."
Now, if we dispense with the melodrama of "every death is a tragedy to someone" and go back to what everyone means when the use the word in reference to the Challenger explosion, I think it's pretty fair to say that calling it a "national" or "world" tragedy is, as the original poster said, throwing around the word a bit lightly. Space travel isn't safe. People dying doing dangerous things is just business as usual. Perhaps the real tragedy is that people forgot that.
AMD doesn't even have 65nm chips out, and Intel is already talking about their 45nm plans. It actually looks like, for 2006 at least, it's AMD that's behind.
How is Intel "seriously droping out?" They're already ahead.
All the die shrinkage in the world can't make up for design shortcomings. A 45nm Pentium M is still going to fall short of an Athlon 64 in memory access, because no matter how small you make it, it still doesn't have an on-die memory contoller. Die shrink just gives you room to maneuver. It remains to be seen if they actually do anything with it. Their track record so far has been uninspiring.
Your immature and compulse name-calling doesn't reflect too well on you, either. If you have convincing arguments to make, you can make them just as effectively without insults. If you don't have any good arguments to make, then you shouldn't post.
I don't care how it reflects on me.
My argument was pretty obvious:
The original poster did not say what you accused him of saying
-or-
Your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired
Trying to blame this on the Clinton administration alone, though, really, you should be ashamed - doing that makes you part of the problem right there.
He did no such thing, jackass. He merely noted that the NET Act was "signed into law by the Clinton Administration". He made no claim that it originated solely from democrats, or that republicans are totally innocent-- though it's worth noting that it passed both houses unanimously, so I'd so it neatly tars both parties quite equally. His point is summed up by his last sentence:
"selling out your rights to further rapacious corporate profits is not, and never has been, exclusively a Republican trait."
Your knee-jerk hissy fit false accusation frankly paints you as some sort of moonbat Democrat apologist.
If they submitted multi-layed photoshop files, most of them probably were not concerned with getting caught.
Yeah, and if the US gov't publicly released PDFs of documents with the "secret stuff" censored out by merely drawing an opaque black box over it, leaving the actual classified text still present in the PDF, then they probably were not actually concerned with security.
Never underestimate people's capacity for computer ignorance.
I wonder how much communications had to do with our perception of the number of geniuses at that time. Maybe Joe Smoe of the 9th century developed comparable work to that of Albert Einstein but just didn't get published.
No, not likely. Such a work would require a great deal of information input as well. If such a work could not be communicated out successfully, likely the supporting works it would have been derived from wouldn't have been communicated in to this hypothetical 9th century Einstein. Einstein didn't just develop his theory of relativity out of a vacuum. He studied physics, and plenty of it. Leaps in knowledge like that are indeed profound, but they are always still within reasonable leaping distance of the current body of knowledge. That being said, there have doubtless been scores of potential Einstein's across the ages, lacking only the appropriate scientific environment to do what he did. And if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass a hoppin'.
Ah, okay. Could have sworn at one time or another, that they actually used explosives to counteract the impact. Maybe earlier models of Soyuz capsules?
Nah, explosives can really only impart one quick, violent, generally omnidirectional force. Kinda like trying to slow a car down by having people on the side of the road hit it with a sledgehammer.
... Russian capsules after reentry. They use high explosives to cushion the landings
They use solid-fueld braking rockets for last-second deceleration of a parachute landing. Rocket failure might result in some pretty nasty bumps and bruises, but that's all. It's a highly reliable system. The soviets even used it for para-dropping armored vehicles with the crew strapped inside. NASA opted for "splashdown" and naval recovery for simplicity's sake.
Exactly how long does one have when the bomb you are riding on goes off? Didnt the first one blow up almost immediately?
The Challenger crew compartment was essentially still one piece when it hit the ocean. Considering that part crew escape mechanism design involves engineering decisions like NOT putting the crew vehicle next to the "bomb" , like the space shuttle, but rather putting it on top, like [soyuz|apollo|other traditional] spacecraft; well, yeah, then there's plenty of time for a solid fuel rocket to separate them from the fireball.
Certainly you cant eject during reentry, if your ship is burning up, isnt that jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?!?
The space shuttle is a flimsy design, 30 years out of date. "Standard" spacecraft design is pretty darn reliable-- they basically don't burn up on reentry because they're not built out of ceramic foam blocks glued onto superlight carbon fiber frames, they have predictable non-flimly ablative heat shields. The only time you'd ever need to "bail out" with a standard design would be if the parachute failed, after actual reentry, and that is (in theory) possible.
So basically the two space shuttle accidents have shown that it is a highly vulnerable system. A fuel tank explosion on launch of (say) one of the Apollo/Saturn V launches would result in the crew module separating and being pulled away by the solid fuel rockets of the escape tower for a safe parachute landing. Damage to the reentry vehicle from an insulating foam chunk off the launch vehicle would be impossible, given that A) the former is above the latter, B) it's not built like french racing bicycle out of delicate materials, but more like a solid military aircraft.
(let me try that again without that monkey wrench...)
Yes, and doesn't that source automatically fall under copyright owned by the author of that piece of information?
No, copyright doesn't apply down to every last fractional bit. If it did, then "for(int i=0;i!=10;i++)" would be controlled by the first person to write it, which is absurd. No, just like other written works, plagiarism can apply far below the point of copyright violation. If you write a story about sentient robots built by "U.S.A. Robots" by a "Dr. Kalvin" where the robots are subject to "three rules of robots", you'd easily be outside Asimov's copyright, but if you don't cite him as inspiration (or, for such a blatant rip-off as the above, probably even if you did) you'd definitely be accused of plagiarism.
Basically, it comes down to this:
copyright violation - making exact or near-exact copies of original work plagiarism - copying whole concepts, ideas, or designs and passing them off as your own work after minimal "personalization"
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Didn't we cover all this a hundred years ago, when the automobile began to replace the horse?
Undoubtedly what you saw was more showmanship than skill. I can pre-pin pretty much any lock to make it easily pickable. I can also choose a pin combination that will have the would-be picker cursing for several minutes, minimum. Also, no lock that claims "unpickability" claims so on the basis of precision. Variances in manufacture are absolutely unavoidable. What they do to make them unpickable is add additional dimensions of motion to the pins, such as requiring precise rotation as well as lift (medeco), or add add additional pins on different axes. Basically, anyone who claims to be able to pick a Medeco or similar lock with standard picking tools is a liar, and if they demonstrate, they're using a lock they've modified.
Bullshit. What brand are the locks in your world? If nothing but Kwikset (and knockoffs thereof), then only tedious. If anything of higher quality, add "time consuming" as well. I sincerely doubt you know as much about locks and lockpicking as I do. I've been a locksmith for twelve years.
The other problem with that design is that it would have to be an incredibly complex and delicate device to accurately duplicate the milling of a key, which is usually cut to .005 inch tolerances. A few reasons we still use key locks are A) they're simple machines that can last decades, B) neither the key nor the lock requires a batteries or power supplies, C) mechanical lock cylinders can be made verry small, i.e. the cylinder in a doorknob actually fits within the doorknob, whereas a prox card reader will not.
You can. It's called a lock pick.
No, lock picks are used to exploit manufacturing variances in the lock. Picking a lock is time consuming and tedious. He wants a key that dynamically configures itself for each lock.
I have one of those too. I use it on occasion to demonstrate to clients (I'm a locksmith) why they don't make them anymore. A couple raps with a plastic or rawhide hammer with pressure on the shackle opens it right up without damaging it.
It's not their entire strategy, it's only part of their strategy. You make it sound like everyone at google is just randomly trying stuff to see if it sticks. In reality, most of their time is is spent on planned development. They are encouraged, however, to spend some fraction of their work time on personal projects. In other words, they figuratively spend most of their day taking aimed shots at specific targets, but once or twice a day they shoot in a random direction with a shotgun.
Attempting to cast copyright infringement, an area of law which includes such vagaries as "fair use", as a simple "right and wrong" like property theft shows your ignorance of law.
No, YOU shut up, fucktard. My point is valid and relevant. The original poster attempted to cast a very nebulous matter of copyright infringement, an area of law with vast gray areas, as a crime of property theft, which is very black and white. He's a dumbass. i don't care if you're sick of hearing it, shit like this needs to be pointed out.
Nothing happened to the idea. It's been used for decades. My father worked for a defense contractor in the late 60's who had their computer rooms powered via a motor-driven generators with a 6-foot diameter reinforced concrete disks affixed to the shafts between the motors and generators. The inertia of the spinning disks easily kept the big iron powered up during brownouts, and during blackouts they provided enough interim power for the generators to come online.
If you specifically mean those super high-speed flywheels we hear about from time to time, well, those require such exacting construction that they're still too expensive to replace batteries or generators. Someday maybe, but not yet.
Laziness. Speed is far easier to enforce. They do not yet make a radar gun that says when you're tailgating.
Actually, no, they're not. They are both private property. The public may have access to these places, but only with the permission of the property owner.
Ideally, the job of the press is to present complete, factual information, which allows us to get ourselves riled up as necessary. Too many journalists already go into the field because they want to "change the world", when journalism is supposed to be about simply reporting unbiased fact. That's the ideal they always claim, anyway. And even if you do expect the press to be [cheerleaders/propagandists], I think this case is a perfect example where the best course of action is "stay out of the way and let the man make a fool of himself".
As old and hackneyed as the joke is, I just gotta repeat it:
"You're new here, aren't you"
It bloody well is for their family.
Look, if you're going to get nit picky and adjust the scale to fit the conclusion, we basically end up at the famous Mel Brooks quote: "tragedy is me cutting my finger, comedy is you falling down a manhole."
Now, if we dispense with the melodrama of "every death is a tragedy to someone" and go back to what everyone means when the use the word in reference to the Challenger explosion, I think it's pretty fair to say that calling it a "national" or "world" tragedy is, as the original poster said, throwing around the word a bit lightly. Space travel isn't safe. People dying doing dangerous things is just business as usual. Perhaps the real tragedy is that people forgot that.
All the die shrinkage in the world can't make up for design shortcomings. A 45nm Pentium M is still going to fall short of an Athlon 64 in memory access, because no matter how small you make it, it still doesn't have an on-die memory contoller. Die shrink just gives you room to maneuver. It remains to be seen if they actually do anything with it. Their track record so far has been uninspiring.
I don't care how it reflects on me.
My argument was pretty obvious:
The original poster did not say what you accused him of saying
-or-
Your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired
He did no such thing, jackass. He merely noted that the NET Act was "signed into law by the Clinton Administration". He made no claim that it originated solely from democrats, or that republicans are totally innocent-- though it's worth noting that it passed both houses unanimously, so I'd so it neatly tars both parties quite equally. His point is summed up by his last sentence:
Your knee-jerk hissy fit false accusation frankly paints you as some sort of moonbat Democrat apologist.Yeah, and if the US gov't publicly released PDFs of documents with the "secret stuff" censored out by merely drawing an opaque black box over it, leaving the actual classified text still present in the PDF, then they probably were not actually concerned with security.
Never underestimate people's capacity for computer ignorance.
No, not likely. Such a work would require a great deal of information input as well. If such a work could not be communicated out successfully, likely the supporting works it would have been derived from wouldn't have been communicated in to this hypothetical 9th century Einstein. Einstein didn't just develop his theory of relativity out of a vacuum. He studied physics, and plenty of it. Leaps in knowledge like that are indeed profound, but they are always still within reasonable leaping distance of the current body of knowledge. That being said, there have doubtless been scores of potential Einstein's across the ages, lacking only the appropriate scientific environment to do what he did. And if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass a hoppin'.
Nah, explosives can really only impart one quick, violent, generally omnidirectional force. Kinda like trying to slow a car down by having people on the side of the road hit it with a sledgehammer.
Kind of a tangent here, but I think the first thing they ask when checking if you are one, is whether you know how to spell the word genius.
They use solid-fueld braking rockets for last-second deceleration of a parachute landing. Rocket failure might result in some pretty nasty bumps and bruises, but that's all. It's a highly reliable system. The soviets even used it for para-dropping armored vehicles with the crew strapped inside. NASA opted for "splashdown" and naval recovery for simplicity's sake.
The Challenger crew compartment was essentially still one piece when it hit the ocean. Considering that part crew escape mechanism design involves engineering decisions like NOT putting the crew vehicle next to the "bomb" , like the space shuttle, but rather putting it on top, like [soyuz|apollo|other traditional] spacecraft; well, yeah, then there's plenty of time for a solid fuel rocket to separate them from the fireball.
Certainly you cant eject during reentry, if your ship is burning up, isnt that jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?!?
The space shuttle is a flimsy design, 30 years out of date. "Standard" spacecraft design is pretty darn reliable-- they basically don't burn up on reentry because they're not built out of ceramic foam blocks glued onto superlight carbon fiber frames, they have predictable non-flimly ablative heat shields. The only time you'd ever need to "bail out" with a standard design would be if the parachute failed, after actual reentry, and that is (in theory) possible.
So basically the two space shuttle accidents have shown that it is a highly vulnerable system. A fuel tank explosion on launch of (say) one of the Apollo/Saturn V launches would result in the crew module separating and being pulled away by the solid fuel rockets of the escape tower for a safe parachute landing. Damage to the reentry vehicle from an insulating foam chunk off the launch vehicle would be impossible, given that A) the former is above the latter, B) it's not built like french racing bicycle out of delicate materials, but more like a solid military aircraft.
Yes, and doesn't that source automatically fall under copyright owned by the author of that piece of information?
No, copyright doesn't apply down to every last fractional bit. If it did, then "for(int i=0;i!=10;i++)" would be controlled by the first person to write it, which is absurd. No, just like other written works, plagiarism can apply far below the point of copyright violation. If you write a story about sentient robots built by "U.S.A. Robots" by a "Dr. Kalvin" where the robots are subject to "three rules of robots", you'd easily be outside Asimov's copyright, but if you don't cite him as inspiration (or, for such a blatant rip-off as the above, probably even if you did) you'd definitely be accused of plagiarism.
Basically, it comes down to this:
copyright violation - making exact or near-exact copies of original work
plagiarism - copying whole concepts, ideas, or designs and passing them off as your own work after minimal "personalization"