I served in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1991. Do a Google search on that year, I think you will see what was happening during that time and where I was. Rolling unopposed into an abandoned Kuwait while we Army guys were hitting the fleeing Iraqi army with a left hook? Or do you mean Khafji?
Again, RTFS: "IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information."
If a NMEA lat-lon string gets spit out of the serial port of a GPS and there's nothing there to capture it, it is not part of their count. They're not counting bitrate on data generators and multiplying times bandwidth. They're counting discrete blocks of saved data. You cannot arrive at the latter from the former, just like you can't tell how much water is behind Hoover Dam on average during the year by measuring the average daily flow rate of the Colorado river and multiplying by 365.
typo above:
most radar sits in the range of 1-40 centimeters
Re:Possible uses for the military?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My God, please mod this insightful. Snide, yes, AC, yes, but a completely valid point. Valid? Sure-- about as valid as "if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their ass a-hoppin'"
He pointed out the obvious and then did nothing with it. Hardly insightful.
Re:Possible uses for the military?
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The Blackest Material
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· Score: 2, Informative
The interesting thing about light is that it's NOT radar.
Maybe not, but they're both electromagnetic waves (though with a very different wavelength). So the question may be relevant. It's not particularly relevant. The wavelength difference between radar and light is in the range of 20000 to one. You need two different antennas to pick up AM and FM, and they are only different by about two orders of magnitude (100:1). Dealing with electromagnetic radiation has everything to do with wavelength. A material "tuned" to absorb the maximum about of EM radiation between 400 and 700 nanometers wavelength is utterly unsuited to the task of absorbing radar at 1-4 centimeters. I'm not trying to be a troll here. I'm pointing out the science.
Re:Possible uses for the military?
on
The Blackest Material
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· Score: 2, Informative
Wavelength is pretty much the determining factor in hw EM radiation interacts with matter. Visible light is 400-700 nanometers, whereas radar is in the range of 1-40 centimeters.
Things to help you relax are available in liquid, pill, written, aural, visual, surgical and human forms, among others. Maybe give one of them some serious consideration. Venting my spleen on Slashdot is the second most relaxing thing I have available to me. The first is Vicodin, and they won't give me any more of that.
Re:Military Death Ray Applications?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, and (like) imagine if we all had flying guitars we could ride around on, and they'd (like) play themselves, and we'd be famous rock stars too!
Seriously, man, we're you actually going anywhere with that crowd control shield thing? Andwhy here?
You just duped a story from three days ago. Do you guys even read your own site? Of course not. They're not actually editors. They're not even nerds. They're a bunch of dumbfuck kids left in charge of what was once an interesting message board. It's not just the Slashvertisements, astroturf articles, and just plain un-nerdy, non-mattering stuff. Have you seen the idiotic poll questions lately? How about the current poll? What kind of true nerd asks "What is your favorite test" and fails to include two of the three grand-daddy nerd tests of all? They got Turing, but that's the obvious one. They missed Kobayashi Maru and Voight-Kampff, fer bog's sake! Obviously, they're simpleminded pretenders of the most detestable sort--- the kind that pretend for money.
Doesn't matter anyway. This place has been ruined by trolls and morons already.
I hate to be a warmonger here, but this stuff could probably be used in military applications as well, probably for night ops and the like. A modern day ninja outfit with this stuff comes to mind
Contrary to popular belief, the best color for urban night camoflage is not solid black. Depending on the environment, it's either charcoal grey (for general hard-to-see-ness), or irregularly-patterned greys (to break up the outline of your body). Indeed. This is because everything occurring in nature tends to reflect some light, even in the dark, when there isn't much to reflect. Solid black doesn't reflect enough, and subsequently actually stands out like a big empty void in a gray jumble of dimness.
It says that it reflects virtually no light. I wonder if that includes the frequencies that are used for radar. If it doesn't reflect any radar signals, that could radically change military aircraft. Currently, military aircraft use shape as well as radar absorbing materials to achieve their stealthy-ness. Imagine if you can coat an F-16 with this stuff, and bam, you have a pretty cheap stealth fighter. The interesting thing about light is that it's NOT radar.
So no, no instant stealth paint. Stealth aircraft already use about the best Radar Absorbing Materials they can devise for everything from structure, to skin, to paint.
particularly since this link in TFA, where it's specifically stated "The primary application is for homeland security"; you might want to try reading more deeply than just a light scan of the first few paragraphs. You might want to do the same. The people claiming that were numbnuts PR flacks for defense contractors who call everything "homeland security" because it's the latest buzzword. Tom Strat, the head of the CTS project for DARPA called it nonsense, saying "DARPA's mission is not to do homeland security." Although when badgered he did admit "there's a chance that some of this technology might work its way [into domestic surveillance programs]."
Besides, it's the Village freakin' Voice for god's sake. You think they're going to slant this any other way?
Sounds like the US government allowed the Stasi into the US and gave them control of the citizen monitoring project? Don't be daft. Let's just take three key words from the summary and see if we can figure out what's being developed:
Pentagon
battlespace
car bomb
Hey! This sounds like something the military wants to use in war zones! Oh yeah, a DVR and camera in every military vehicle in Iraq is a terrible intrusion on our privacy here at home.
In American school, even if you kid is "only" average or even below average (but not a retard) THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in the school program that can't be mastered at an A level with enough hard work. So the fuck what? "Average" is a narrow band right in the center, with the vast wasteland of "below average" stretching out behind it. Like I said, it would behoove him to keep in mind that there are actual people there, holding down that low end of the bell curve, and that yes, his kid might be one of 'em.
everyone had their share of the work that had to be done. Ironically, school was often a luxury- it was viable only when it didn't interfere with other activities, like bringing in the harvest. *This* was work.
Contrast that with today...kids have "social lives," they go to school, sit on their butts for six hours, "socialize," worrying about what new article of clothing so-and-so just bought, and then whine about homework. What a rough life they must have. Watching TV is a luxury. I challenge you to sit in front of the TV and watch 6 straight hours of TV a day, followed by 2 hours of TV at your convenience after your mandatory TV watching is done. See, the thing about hard physical labor is that we're optimized for it. Sitting on our asses for 1/3 of the day? not so much. Saying kids should, as a matter of logic, enjoy being made to eat 14 banana splits a day because our recent ancestors seemed to enjoy one is the same kind of absurd reasoning. Put simply, it does not scale.
I wouldn't punish my kids for getting a B, but I certainly wouldn't reward them for anything less than an A. If they got C I may punish them or I may just have a talk about being disappointed, I still have a couple of years to figure that one out. You know, everyone thinks their kids are above average, but simple mathematics requires that about half of them are wrong. Just something to remember when you're deciding below what grade constitutes a punishable offense.
The other thing is, when parents drive their kids into a success death march, they end up missing totally what the kids might or might not be good at. I for example did advanced studies in math, physics and CS. I hated every minute of it (apart CS) but I completed the studies because my parents would be "so disappointed considering my abilities" (so they said). In reality, I wanted to work with my hands, and I realized only very late in life that that's what I really wanted. Not "could do", but "wanted to do". The end result is, today I'm a metalworker because *I* chose to. I hear ya', man. I was 26, 2/3 of the way through an engineering degree, after 4 years as an intelligence analyst/linguist in the Army, preceded by a high school career "under the whip" to excel at all costs, before I figured out that I really wanted to be physically building stuff. Since then I've worked as an electrician, telecom/network technician, and now as a locksmith for a large school district, and I couldn't be happier. Sure, the education is handy sometimes, but I could've been doing what I wanted years sooner. Current irrational thought is that all children should be pushed to go to college so as to guarantee they get a good job after schooling. Problem is, that line of thinking makes as much sense as "hey, if the government would just PRINT MORE MONEY, we could ALL be millionaires and retire!" College degrees are growing increasingly worthless (shrinking decreasingly worthless? heh). College is becoming the new high school. It's absurd.
3. Too much too young. I think this one is a big problem. My mother teaches algebra to 8th graders. The school district bureaucracy has decided (from it's lofty perch in a 20-story highrise downtown) that all children will learn algebra in 8th grade. Coupled with the fact that they fervently believe in "mainstreaming"--- i.e. pretending retarded and otherwise developmentally disabled children will learn as fast as other children if you just ignore their handicap--- they've set the teachers up to fail. When half the classes don't pass, they blame the teachers and decree that all teachers will henceforth follow a dictated lesson plan assembled by a bureaucrat downtown. Madness. A certain percentage of 8th graders simply aren't ready for algebra, and tying them down in front of a canned lesson plan isn't going to change that.
General rule of thumb: add 5 to convert grade to age. Most kids enter kindergarten the first Fall after their 5th birthday. Numbered grades, starting at "1st", progress yearly thereafter.
So would a PE software engineer lose his license if he made software with numerous bugs? No, not so long as the bugs a) weren't serious in their consequences, and b) the system failed gracefully without seriously damaging any data. Just the same as a professional structural engineer. If (for example) the construction crew slightly screws up the sand mix in the concrete in one section, it is expected of the engineer to have spec'd the building such that it won't simply collapse as a result. Engineering is often about planning for bad things to happen and mitigating the effects by design.
The bottom line is the correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature is well known You should go look up the definition of the word correlation.
(This seems like a good time to plug one of my favorite The Onion articles of all time.) A libertarian calling the fire department because he has no alternative. Is that supposed to be some sort of irony? It's not. First, he had no option to hire a private fire fighting service, and second, his taxes (unwilling though they might have been) paid for the public fire service already. Why would anyone expect him to pay twice? Or not call on principle? I say he was a little nutty to delay calling, but it's hardly an abandonment of his ideals to finally call.
It might interest you to know that there indeed are areas that use private fire service. My father lives on the outskirts of Tucson, AZ. He pays a small but entirely voluntary fee for fire fighting service provided by a private company. Last year some guy's detached garage caught fire and he called the fire department. They showed up, verified his address did not show up in their list of customers, and calmy kept his (paying) neighbors houses, from catching fire while his garage burned down. He offered to pay them on the spot, but (as you can imagine) it just doesn't work that way. The guy now pays his fire department bill. The system works great, and keeps taxes low. If you don't have anything flammable, you don't have to pay for fire protection.
At which point the federal government will respond with force and, having a larger army at its disposal, win. The same way it happened the last time. Yeah, not likely. There was a specific divide between the north and the south that made for a "perfect storm" of civil war. There is no such clearly delineated divide when it comes to federal overreach. If it ever gets to the point where the feds have to call out the Regular Army to put down a revolt, you can bet that the Regular Army will more likely than not be in against the feds. Thing is, the military is trained to fight foreigners, not shoot fellow civilians. Only the cops are instilled with that particular distasteful trait. The cops and feds are screwed if they try to fight the military, even if bolstered by MPs from the Nat'l Guard*. Personally, I don't see it escalating to that any time soon. Someday maybe.
* army cops, sadly, are very much like civilian cops--- instilled with an adversarial attitude towards their fellows.
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Again, RTFS: "IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information."
If a NMEA lat-lon string gets spit out of the serial port of a GPS and there's nothing there to capture it, it is not part of their count. They're not counting bitrate on data generators and multiplying times bandwidth. They're counting discrete blocks of saved data. You cannot arrive at the latter from the former, just like you can't tell how much water is behind Hoover Dam on average during the year by measuring the average daily flow rate of the Colorado river and multiplying by 365.
typo above: most radar sits in the range of 1-40 centimeters
He pointed out the obvious and then did nothing with it. Hardly insightful.
Maybe not, but they're both electromagnetic waves (though with a very different wavelength). So the question may be relevant. It's not particularly relevant. The wavelength difference between radar and light is in the range of 20000 to one. You need two different antennas to pick up AM and FM, and they are only different by about two orders of magnitude (100:1). Dealing with electromagnetic radiation has everything to do with wavelength. A material "tuned" to absorb the maximum about of EM radiation between 400 and 700 nanometers wavelength is utterly unsuited to the task of absorbing radar at 1-4 centimeters. I'm not trying to be a troll here. I'm pointing out the science.
Wavelength is pretty much the determining factor in hw EM radiation interacts with matter. Visible light is 400-700 nanometers, whereas radar is in the range of 1-40 centimeters.
Yeah, and (like) imagine if we all had flying guitars we could ride around on, and they'd (like) play themselves, and we'd be famous rock stars too!
Seriously, man, we're you actually going anywhere with that crowd control shield thing? Andwhy here?
Doesn't matter anyway. This place has been ruined by trolls and morons already.
Contrary to popular belief, the best color for urban night camoflage is not solid black. Depending on the environment, it's either charcoal grey (for general hard-to-see-ness), or irregularly-patterned greys (to break up the outline of your body).
Indeed. This is because everything occurring in nature tends to reflect some light, even in the dark, when there isn't much to reflect. Solid black doesn't reflect enough, and subsequently actually stands out like a big empty void in a gray jumble of dimness.
So no, no instant stealth paint. Stealth aircraft already use about the best Radar Absorbing Materials they can devise for everything from structure, to skin, to paint.
Besides, it's the Village freakin' Voice for god's sake. You think they're going to slant this any other way?
Pentagon
battlespace
car bomb
Hey! This sounds like something the military wants to use in war zones! Oh yeah, a DVR and camera in every military vehicle in Iraq is a terrible intrusion on our privacy here at home.
Stasi indeed.
General rule of thumb: add 5 to convert grade to age. Most kids enter kindergarten the first Fall after their 5th birthday. Numbered grades, starting at "1st", progress yearly thereafter.
Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now.
VIZZINI: "Probably some local fisherman out for a pleasure cruise at night through eel-infested waters."It might interest you to know that there indeed are areas that use private fire service. My father lives on the outskirts of Tucson, AZ. He pays a small but entirely voluntary fee for fire fighting service provided by a private company. Last year some guy's detached garage caught fire and he called the fire department. They showed up, verified his address did not show up in their list of customers, and calmy kept his (paying) neighbors houses, from catching fire while his garage burned down. He offered to pay them on the spot, but (as you can imagine) it just doesn't work that way. The guy now pays his fire department bill. The system works great, and keeps taxes low. If you don't have anything flammable, you don't have to pay for fire protection.
wow! stunning rebuttal! brilliant!
* army cops, sadly, are very much like civilian cops--- instilled with an adversarial attitude towards their fellows.