FYI (and yes, I caught the double entendre), while there may be laws against sex stores in many southern states, they're not enforced.
I've lived in both Texas and Georgia, and both have anti-sex laws of various flavors. In Texas it was illegal to own more than 6 dildos. Didn't stop adult video stores from having a few hundred and selling them. In Georgia it is (or was) illegal to rent adult videos. And yet there are at least a half dozen chains that exist primarily through the sale and rental of them.
There are occasional busts in both states, which end up with tons of mostly bad publicity for the police chief that authorized it, but by and large the blue laws are ignored. And in recent years (in Georgia at least), every blue law that went to court has been struck down.
The problem is, even if your code is portable the compiler may not be. Or the linker. Not everyone is up to full ANSI compliance still.
Ever worked on AIX using xlC? And libtool? They're totally different from the rest of the known universe and so even if your code will happily compile on Linux, Solaris, etc. then the makefiles have to be absurdly complex to handle AIX's weirdness.
Of course, you may want to do dynamic linking since libtool and templates don't play well together. But, looky, xlC doesn't play well either so you have to have a separate.cpp that excercises all the templated functions you're going to use on a per-library basis. Don't need that for any other OS, but you damn well do for AIX.
Automake and autoconf save us from most of the nightmare here. Oh, and we're also linking against Oracle and MQSeries. More fun.
Yes, avoiding things like #!/bin/bash (or even ksh) is wise, but automake/conf have come into existence for a very good reason. Makefiles are godawful.
Well, the HUD could certainly show a false color for the laser path, and even persist it for longer than it actually fired if needed.
But, frankly, it wouldn't do you any good - if the laser is missing the target then your targeting computer is FUBAR and you aren't likely to be able to fix it. This is not a machine gun - it doesn't fire in a straight line. You identify a target and issue the fire command. The computer then does target acquisition and determination and aims the laser for you. Most likely it's going to try and hit a pre-determined vulnerable point, like a fuel tank or control surface.
The added advantage here is that you don't have to be pointing directly at the target - think of it more like the turret mounted vulcan on the Apache. The disadvantage is that you probably can't compensate for a misaligned lens like you can for a gun installed slightly off center.
Apparently you need a launch of over 40 simultaneous launches to break through a two aircraft ABL 'shield'
Well that or you just launch enough things -- the chemical batteries are only good for so long (I seem to recall an early prototype/design having 100 1 second burns, but I could be wrong).
Of course, if they're manned fighters then you're going to have an awfully hard time convincing those first 200 or so to launch.
Most mirrors are only about 95% reflective. The other 5% is transmitted through the mirror and absorbed (either by the mirror itself or the backing). Really good mirrors are about 99% reflective.
Now, let's assume that somehow you manage to "chrome" a missile such that it's 99% reflective (not bloody likely in real life, but we're talking theory here). Someone targets a 100 kW laser at you. The mirror reflects/scatters 99 kW of the energy, while 1 kW is absorbed by the missile itself.
It takes 216 kWs to heat 11 kg of steel by 10 deg C. Certainly you're not going to be able to keep the laser on the mirror for 216 seconds. But, that's ok, that's not the point. All you have to do is melt the mirror at contact point, degrading its reflectance so you can effect the missile itself. So how long does it take to boil the mirror into vapor? Probably a couple seconds. After which you have no effective defense and the 100 kW beam will boil off enough of the missile to render it ineffective. After all, you don't have to destroy it -- just alter the aerodynamics enough so it's incapable of targeting correctly.
You could spin the missile to reduce spot heating, but that's going to complicate guidance considerably. And, frankly, I doubt that you'll get more than 80% reflectance on this sucker, which changes the equation drastically. And, of course, your maintainance crew didn't leave any oil, grease, or fingerprints on the missile casing right? Uh huh.
The main stumbling block to SDI was tracking, targeting, and blasting a laser through several miles of atmosphere - all in about 10 seconds after launch. That or you wait until the ICBM is in space, in which case you now have to destroy (not merely damage) a dozen warheads and a couple dozen dummys. Which means you now have 20-30 targets to destroy in 30 seconds instead of 1 target in 10 seconds. Fun!
This is not a failure of the PC - it's a failure of the OS.
If XP still can't handle that it's rather sad. OS/2 could handle it over a decade ago. Linux should be capable of handling it as well.
Of course the floppy is pretty much a vestige of early PC days anyway. It's still needed for the rare occasions everything else goes haywire or some idiot manufacturer distributes drivers only on floppy (CD is cheaper you know), but that's it. I'm rather surprised more PC manufacturers haven't simply eliminated them as a standard component.
I believe the question is who actually owns the licenses.
If Bluelight owns the licenses then it's a non-issue - they own the license, they're being sold, and the computers are moving with them. There is no transferal of license.
If, however, K-Mart owns the licenses then it's a question of tranferrence - now K-Mart is selling a business unit and a bunch of computers which are not owned by the business unit. That's legally shaky, at least if you follow the EULA.
There may be a bigger question of whether or not the EULA is enforceable, but I suspect MS's lawyers will ensure that that question never comes up. If it does, expect them to drop the case suddenly.
In the top 10% that should be. Perhaps higher, but the UT2k3 stats page sucks so badly right now it's difficult to tell.
Of course, this is utterly meaningless in real life and to anyone that isn't a numbers weenie. And, trust me, there's a lot of people better than me at UT2k3. But I don't suck.
What FPS gamer want to run at 800x600 with the all of the options turned off?
Want? Nah. But the point is that it's capable of being played, and played well. It's freaking eye candy. Most of which is ignored if you're actually playing instead of standing around drooling.
Of course, who am I to say? After all, I'm only in the top 90%th percentile for UT2k3 CTF (currently in the top 100 weekly), and back when I played UT I ranked in the top 20 for Domination. Obviously I'm not an FPS gamer.
I love the anti-upgrade crowd on Slashdot
Wow you're an idiot. I even said that I was planning to upgrade - the OP, however, said that his computer couldn't play UT2k3. Eye candy has nothing to do with being able to play.
If you have to turn off everything why even bother playing the game
Because it's fun? Because I enjoy actually playing rather than staring? As many others have pointed out, it's about the game play stupid. Having to turn down the textures doesn't affect that in the least. Turning them up doesn't hurt either, as long as you have a system that can handle it.
If you want to be a gamer its costs money Period
Yes, but it doesn't mean that you have to upgrade every 6 months and waste tons of money in the process. Realistically, I should've upgraded 9 months ago. And I happily admit that my computer is at the bottom end of useful for game playing. All I objected to was the OP's statement that his computer couldn't play UT2k3.
Whoopie. Another EE student who has realized that the paper design of the PC architecture sucks wind and can't imagine that it works at all.
Don't worry folks. In a few years he'll graduate and get some real world experience. And then he'll probably realize that while the PC architecture does indeed suck on paper, in reality it's not all that bad. Could it be better? Sure. Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater? No way.
Compare the PC market to the rest of the computer market. Who's made more progress? Who has been rapidly pushing the niche markets into smaller and smaller niches as their "superior designs" find them running slower and more costly than the evil, horribly misdesigned PCs?
Coprocessors? Yeah... have you even bothered to look at a modern video card recently? The damn things are more complex and more powerful than the CPU. Modern audio boards are also powerful all by themselves. For the most part I/O is handled by separate chips as well.
The bus and memory interfaces on PCs could use some work. And that's happening, with 3GIO, PCI-X, and other buses being implemented in the next few years. There's some truely horrid cruft in the core too - the IRQs, DMA channels, etc. are still pretty godawful, but not nearly as godawful as they were back with the ISA bus. The issues haven't so much gone away as they've been hidden, but the performance limitations imposed really aren't all that absurd.
Design a better machine? Go for it. It'll die just like all the rest because while you may have a better electrical design, you've ignored the real world and the fact that people want to be able to make slow transitions from one architecture to another. Doing an all-at-once transition is not an option unless you control the entire market - which no PC manufacturer does (unlike Apple). Of course, the flip side of this is that the competition causes the current implementation to advance far more rapidly than would be otherwise possible. Which is why you can buy a $2000 PC that outperforms a $200,000 server.
I'm running UT2k3 on an Athlon 750 with a GF2. I run at 800x600 with low qual textures/models and most options turned off. Yes, it's much more pretty on a fast system, but it certainly didn't "kick my [...] machine in the nuts".
Yes, I'm planning to upgrade, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well this 2.75 year old machine handled UT2k3.
It changed the CPU clock frequency - generally you left the switch on since that was the faster mode of operation. If you had an application/game/whatever that didn't handle the higher clock rate nicely (and a lot didn't) then you clicked the switch and the CPU core dropped from 10 MHz down to around 5.
They eventually became disused because instead of dropping down to 4.77 MHz (the orginal XT speed) they'd just drop some fraction of the regular CPU speed - down to maybe 7 or 8 MHz, which was way too fast still. Plus applications stopped doing stupid things like presuming the CPU frequency and using it for timing loops.
Rather difficult to do when determining the teams for future rounds is dependant on the results from previous rounds.
The show has been filmed in both the US and the UK. Another poster on this subthread actually gave the proper listing for which seasons were filmed where and with which hosts.
If you can hit the tank with an electrical impulse strong enough to do that (and capable of breaking the crypto command chain on the paint), why didn't you just hit it with a missile and remove the threat?
By the time you can do the former then the latter is equally trivial.
Untrue. That or they're spending way too much money to do the testing in California the next day (which is where most, but not all, of the JYW episode testing occurs).
You're right. I mean, look at the other major industrial powers in the world today. I always boggle at exactly how much territory and resources Japan has... er... maybe Taiwan... no... England?
Oh... hold on... that's not true at all.
Yes, natural resources and territory help. But tell that to Russia or China. They have as just as many natural resources and more land area. But the governing bodies have totally failed to utilize it... or the individuals have. Or both. Probably both.
I'm not trying to go "hip hip hooray" here for the US, certainly there are things that could be better managed (of course, a lot of those things that the US gets poked about - like environmental waste - are actually managed even more poorly in Russia and China), but the whole Protestant work ethic and "can do" attitude has certainly been a key component in where the US has ended up since the early 1900s (before which the US was a 2nd tier country at best - something most US history books don't really bother noting).
and so it was able to cut 'deals' with Britain- loans that aren't yet repaid
Shall we start the litany of loans that the US has made to virtually every European government that have never been repaid? No... I don't think you want to go down that route.
Frankly, Russia (and/or USSR - take your pick) and China are better indicators of how much national attitude and direction matter compared to resources and territory. If you don't have the desire/incentive to do better then you won't, and no amount of riches can help that.
example the one about stocking the junkyard with needed parts
Why? It's been answered. Repeatedly. They do stock the junkyard. It's a fusion of a real scrapheap/junkyard and stocked parts. Witness the paintball challenge where there just happened to be a plumber's van full of plumbing parts. I mean, come on - what plumber who wants to stay in business would send a wrecked van away while leaving inventory in the truck?
Meanwhile, if you watch successive episodes you'll notice bits and pieces in the same places repeatedly.
Oh, and don't forget - this isn't a real junkyard. It's a set.
Most junkyards are located in areas you would not want to have high priced electronics equipment sitting around in. Hell, some of the machines that get built are more valuable than the average car in such areas.
It's always interesting to get a little behind-the-scenes on the Scrapheap
I'm guessing you're in the UK, so you may not have seen the behind-the-scenes Junkyard Wars episode that was on TLC at the end of last season (around May). See if you can find a copy - they talk about what goes on behind the scenes in some depth. You too can discover why they'll probably never do a gunpowder artillary challenge again (lots of licenses, huge freaking caravan transporting the built artillary from location to location, having to decommission the artillary after the test by pouring concrete in the barrells, etc).
The limit is 30 days. And it still won't record a dupe of something that you have on the hard drive, no matter how long ago you recorded it (this is assuming that it can tell that it's the same show of course).
You can also tell it not to record re-runs for a Season Pass, period. Assuming that they're appropriately marked in the guide data.
This makes me wounder when TV broadcasts will come with a signal saying that the show can only be seen once, then the recording will be deleted
The studios are trying to get exactly this. Actually, they don't feel that this is adequate either - they want to have time-limited recordings and remotely deletable recordings.
In the ongoing HDTV wars between the equipment manufacturers and the studios (with the broadcasters caught in the middle), about a year and a half or so ago the studios once again whined about there being insufficient copy protection on DTV broadcasts. They wanted all set top boxes and recording devices to comply to an as-of-yet-unspecified standard that would allow for them to set flags allowing maximum number of viewings, time durations, and remote delete capability.
The electronics manufacterers told them to go fuck themselves.
HDTV does have a "do not record" bit in the broadcast. But that's it. The attempts to get more invasive control have failed, and while the cable companies and studios are still pouting, the reality is that it's a dead issue now. There are too many HD receivers out there already and the US government has mandated that all TVs will be manufactured with decoders in the next few years - at that point the installed base is too big to change it. And the various companies will have the choice of selling their wares with "insufficient" copy control or not selling them at all.
Yes, and he has roughly 20 times or so the number of foes I do. Would've been ~30x, but you just became my 3rd freak. Shrug.
I enjoy wit. I enjoy satire. PG has a poor grasp of them.
If his posts were modded up as Funny (which they occasionally are) then that'd be one thing. But there's a whole lot of idiot mods out there that mod them up as insightful/informative.
Oh, he's trolling... just take a look at his posting history.
Regarding Szilard's patent application - according to this page it's likely that his first patent on accelerators was rejected due to "prior art". Of course, file the same thing today and I bet you get a patent.
From that page it's not clear if his cyclotron or betatron patents were granted or not.
As for moderation - I didn't expect to get modded up. PG just deserves to get modded into a -1 hole.
Moderators, realize this guy is a troll and nowhere close to a "Physics Genius".
The first cyclotron patent was awarded to Ernest Lawrence in 1934, after being prompted to file for the patent by investors and being told that another scientist at Raytheon was about to patent the same thing.
Search Google, you'll find that there is nothing that indicates a cyclotron patent was rejected for any such reason.
Since there was a patent granted on the cyclotron, the rest of your arguments fall apart. Not surprising since they're full of shit.
Moderators - feel free to mod me down. But mod down the idiot parent post first.
Re:This is Dilution of Distributed Compute Power!
on
ECCp-109 Solved
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· Score: 2
Yeah... it's a definite drawback to the geek crowd, which is also the crowd most likely to run distributed computing projects.
I dunno why either, since UD has some d.net developers working for them and some kind of technology cross-licensing going on. Go figure.
I'll run Folding@Home on Unix boxes and UD on Windows boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI (and yes, I caught the double entendre), while there may be laws against sex stores in many southern states, they're not enforced.
I've lived in both Texas and Georgia, and both have anti-sex laws of various flavors. In Texas it was illegal to own more than 6 dildos. Didn't stop adult video stores from having a few hundred and selling them. In Georgia it is (or was) illegal to rent adult videos. And yet there are at least a half dozen chains that exist primarily through the sale and rental of them.
There are occasional busts in both states, which end up with tons of mostly bad publicity for the police chief that authorized it, but by and large the blue laws are ignored. And in recent years (in Georgia at least), every blue law that went to court has been struck down.
The problem is, even if your code is portable the compiler may not be. Or the linker. Not everyone is up to full ANSI compliance still.
.cpp that excercises all the templated functions you're going to use on a per-library basis. Don't need that for any other OS, but you damn well do for AIX.
Ever worked on AIX using xlC? And libtool? They're totally different from the rest of the known universe and so even if your code will happily compile on Linux, Solaris, etc. then the makefiles have to be absurdly complex to handle AIX's weirdness.
Of course, you may want to do dynamic linking since libtool and templates don't play well together. But, looky, xlC doesn't play well either so you have to have a separate
Automake and autoconf save us from most of the nightmare here. Oh, and we're also linking against Oracle and MQSeries. More fun.
Yes, avoiding things like #!/bin/bash (or even ksh) is wise, but automake/conf have come into existence for a very good reason. Makefiles are godawful.
Well, the HUD could certainly show a false color for the laser path, and even persist it for longer than it actually fired if needed.
But, frankly, it wouldn't do you any good - if the laser is missing the target then your targeting computer is FUBAR and you aren't likely to be able to fix it. This is not a machine gun - it doesn't fire in a straight line. You identify a target and issue the fire command. The computer then does target acquisition and determination and aims the laser for you. Most likely it's going to try and hit a pre-determined vulnerable point, like a fuel tank or control surface.
The added advantage here is that you don't have to be pointing directly at the target - think of it more like the turret mounted vulcan on the Apache. The disadvantage is that you probably can't compensate for a misaligned lens like you can for a gun installed slightly off center.
Apparently you need a launch of over 40 simultaneous launches to break through a two aircraft ABL 'shield'
Well that or you just launch enough things -- the chemical batteries are only good for so long (I seem to recall an early prototype/design having 100 1 second burns, but I could be wrong).
Of course, if they're manned fighters then you're going to have an awfully hard time convincing those first 200 or so to launch.
Not really.
Most mirrors are only about 95% reflective. The other 5% is transmitted through the mirror and absorbed (either by the mirror itself or the backing). Really good mirrors are about 99% reflective.
Now, let's assume that somehow you manage to "chrome" a missile such that it's 99% reflective (not bloody likely in real life, but we're talking theory here). Someone targets a 100 kW laser at you. The mirror reflects/scatters 99 kW of the energy, while 1 kW is absorbed by the missile itself.
It takes 216 kWs to heat 11 kg of steel by 10 deg C. Certainly you're not going to be able to keep the laser on the mirror for 216 seconds. But, that's ok, that's not the point. All you have to do is melt the mirror at contact point, degrading its reflectance so you can effect the missile itself. So how long does it take to boil the mirror into vapor? Probably a couple seconds. After which you have no effective defense and the 100 kW beam will boil off enough of the missile to render it ineffective. After all, you don't have to destroy it -- just alter the aerodynamics enough so it's incapable of targeting correctly.
You could spin the missile to reduce spot heating, but that's going to complicate guidance considerably. And, frankly, I doubt that you'll get more than 80% reflectance on this sucker, which changes the equation drastically. And, of course, your maintainance crew didn't leave any oil, grease, or fingerprints on the missile casing right? Uh huh.
The main stumbling block to SDI was tracking, targeting, and blasting a laser through several miles of atmosphere - all in about 10 seconds after launch. That or you wait until the ICBM is in space, in which case you now have to destroy (not merely damage) a dozen warheads and a couple dozen dummys. Which means you now have 20-30 targets to destroy in 30 seconds instead of 1 target in 10 seconds. Fun!
This is not a failure of the PC - it's a failure of the OS.
If XP still can't handle that it's rather sad. OS/2 could handle it over a decade ago. Linux should be capable of handling it as well.
Of course the floppy is pretty much a vestige of early PC days anyway. It's still needed for the rare occasions everything else goes haywire or some idiot manufacturer distributes drivers only on floppy (CD is cheaper you know), but that's it. I'm rather surprised more PC manufacturers haven't simply eliminated them as a standard component.
I believe the question is who actually owns the licenses.
If Bluelight owns the licenses then it's a non-issue - they own the license, they're being sold, and the computers are moving with them. There is no transferal of license.
If, however, K-Mart owns the licenses then it's a question of tranferrence - now K-Mart is selling a business unit and a bunch of computers which are not owned by the business unit. That's legally shaky, at least if you follow the EULA.
There may be a bigger question of whether or not the EULA is enforceable, but I suspect MS's lawyers will ensure that that question never comes up. If it does, expect them to drop the case suddenly.
Er... oops.
In the top 10% that should be. Perhaps higher, but the UT2k3 stats page sucks so badly right now it's difficult to tell.
Of course, this is utterly meaningless in real life and to anyone that isn't a numbers weenie. And, trust me, there's a lot of people better than me at UT2k3. But I don't suck.
What FPS gamer want to run at 800x600 with the all of the options turned off?
Want? Nah. But the point is that it's capable of being played, and played well. It's freaking eye candy. Most of which is ignored if you're actually playing instead of standing around drooling.
Of course, who am I to say? After all, I'm only in the top 90%th percentile for UT2k3 CTF (currently in the top 100 weekly), and back when I played UT I ranked in the top 20 for Domination. Obviously I'm not an FPS gamer.
I love the anti-upgrade crowd on Slashdot
Wow you're an idiot. I even said that I was planning to upgrade - the OP, however, said that his computer couldn't play UT2k3. Eye candy has nothing to do with being able to play.
If you have to turn off everything why even bother playing the game
Because it's fun? Because I enjoy actually playing rather than staring? As many others have pointed out, it's about the game play stupid. Having to turn down the textures doesn't affect that in the least. Turning them up doesn't hurt either, as long as you have a system that can handle it.
If you want to be a gamer its costs money Period
Yes, but it doesn't mean that you have to upgrade every 6 months and waste tons of money in the process. Realistically, I should've upgraded 9 months ago. And I happily admit that my computer is at the bottom end of useful for game playing. All I objected to was the OP's statement that his computer couldn't play UT2k3.
Whoopie. Another EE student who has realized that the paper design of the PC architecture sucks wind and can't imagine that it works at all.
Don't worry folks. In a few years he'll graduate and get some real world experience. And then he'll probably realize that while the PC architecture does indeed suck on paper, in reality it's not all that bad. Could it be better? Sure. Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater? No way.
Compare the PC market to the rest of the computer market. Who's made more progress? Who has been rapidly pushing the niche markets into smaller and smaller niches as their "superior designs" find them running slower and more costly than the evil, horribly misdesigned PCs?
Coprocessors? Yeah... have you even bothered to look at a modern video card recently? The damn things are more complex and more powerful than the CPU. Modern audio boards are also powerful all by themselves. For the most part I/O is handled by separate chips as well.
The bus and memory interfaces on PCs could use some work. And that's happening, with 3GIO, PCI-X, and other buses being implemented in the next few years. There's some truely horrid cruft in the core too - the IRQs, DMA channels, etc. are still pretty godawful, but not nearly as godawful as they were back with the ISA bus. The issues haven't so much gone away as they've been hidden, but the performance limitations imposed really aren't all that absurd.
Design a better machine? Go for it. It'll die just like all the rest because while you may have a better electrical design, you've ignored the real world and the fact that people want to be able to make slow transitions from one architecture to another. Doing an all-at-once transition is not an option unless you control the entire market - which no PC manufacturer does (unlike Apple). Of course, the flip side of this is that the competition causes the current implementation to advance far more rapidly than would be otherwise possible. Which is why you can buy a $2000 PC that outperforms a $200,000 server.
Uh... turn off a lot of the crap man.
I'm running UT2k3 on an Athlon 750 with a GF2. I run at 800x600 with low qual textures/models and most options turned off. Yes, it's much more pretty on a fast system, but it certainly didn't "kick my [...] machine in the nuts".
Yes, I'm planning to upgrade, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well this 2.75 year old machine handled UT2k3.
It changed the CPU clock frequency - generally you left the switch on since that was the faster mode of operation. If you had an application/game/whatever that didn't handle the higher clock rate nicely (and a lot didn't) then you clicked the switch and the CPU core dropped from 10 MHz down to around 5.
They eventually became disused because instead of dropping down to 4.77 MHz (the orginal XT speed) they'd just drop some fraction of the regular CPU speed - down to maybe 7 or 8 MHz, which was way too fast still. Plus applications stopped doing stupid things like presuming the CPU frequency and using it for timing loops.
Logitech makes the dual optical mice, but with a rather low sampling rate.
Microsoft makes single optical mice, but with a much higher sampling rate.
Rather difficult to do when determining the teams for future rounds is dependant on the results from previous rounds.
The show has been filmed in both the US and the UK. Another poster on this subthread actually gave the proper listing for which seasons were filmed where and with which hosts.
If you can hit the tank with an electrical impulse strong enough to do that (and capable of breaking the crypto command chain on the paint), why didn't you just hit it with a missile and remove the threat?
By the time you can do the former then the latter is equally trivial.
Untrue. That or they're spending way too much money to do the testing in California the next day (which is where most, but not all, of the JYW episode testing occurs).
You're right. I mean, look at the other major industrial powers in the world today. I always boggle at exactly how much territory and resources Japan has... er... maybe Taiwan... no... England?
Oh... hold on... that's not true at all.
Yes, natural resources and territory help. But tell that to Russia or China. They have as just as many natural resources and more land area. But the governing bodies have totally failed to utilize it... or the individuals have. Or both. Probably both.
I'm not trying to go "hip hip hooray" here for the US, certainly there are things that could be better managed (of course, a lot of those things that the US gets poked about - like environmental waste - are actually managed even more poorly in Russia and China), but the whole Protestant work ethic and "can do" attitude has certainly been a key component in where the US has ended up since the early 1900s (before which the US was a 2nd tier country at best - something most US history books don't really bother noting).
and so it was able to cut 'deals' with Britain- loans that aren't yet repaid
Shall we start the litany of loans that the US has made to virtually every European government that have never been repaid? No... I don't think you want to go down that route.
Frankly, Russia (and/or USSR - take your pick) and China are better indicators of how much national attitude and direction matter compared to resources and territory. If you don't have the desire/incentive to do better then you won't, and no amount of riches can help that.
example the one about stocking the junkyard with needed parts
Why? It's been answered. Repeatedly. They do stock the junkyard. It's a fusion of a real scrapheap/junkyard and stocked parts. Witness the paintball challenge where there just happened to be a plumber's van full of plumbing parts. I mean, come on - what plumber who wants to stay in business would send a wrecked van away while leaving inventory in the truck?
Meanwhile, if you watch successive episodes you'll notice bits and pieces in the same places repeatedly.
Oh, and don't forget - this isn't a real junkyard. It's a set.
Most junkyards are located in areas you would not want to have high priced electronics equipment sitting around in. Hell, some of the machines that get built are more valuable than the average car in such areas.
It's always interesting to get a little behind-the-scenes on the Scrapheap
I'm guessing you're in the UK, so you may not have seen the behind-the-scenes Junkyard Wars episode that was on TLC at the end of last season (around May). See if you can find a copy - they talk about what goes on behind the scenes in some depth. You too can discover why they'll probably never do a gunpowder artillary challenge again (lots of licenses, huge freaking caravan transporting the built artillary from location to location, having to decommission the artillary after the test by pouring concrete in the barrells, etc).
The limit is 30 days. And it still won't record a dupe of something that you have on the hard drive, no matter how long ago you recorded it (this is assuming that it can tell that it's the same show of course).
You can also tell it not to record re-runs for a Season Pass, period. Assuming that they're appropriately marked in the guide data.
This makes me wounder when TV broadcasts will come with a signal saying that the show can only be seen once, then the recording will be deleted
The studios are trying to get exactly this. Actually, they don't feel that this is adequate either - they want to have time-limited recordings and remotely deletable recordings.
In the ongoing HDTV wars between the equipment manufacturers and the studios (with the broadcasters caught in the middle), about a year and a half or so ago the studios once again whined about there being insufficient copy protection on DTV broadcasts. They wanted all set top boxes and recording devices to comply to an as-of-yet-unspecified standard that would allow for them to set flags allowing maximum number of viewings, time durations, and remote delete capability.
The electronics manufacterers told them to go fuck themselves.
HDTV does have a "do not record" bit in the broadcast. But that's it. The attempts to get more invasive control have failed, and while the cable companies and studios are still pouting, the reality is that it's a dead issue now. There are too many HD receivers out there already and the US government has mandated that all TVs will be manufactured with decoders in the next few years - at that point the installed base is too big to change it. And the various companies will have the choice of selling their wares with "insufficient" copy control or not selling them at all.
Darn.
10/14/2002: HITLER INVADES CZECHOSLOVAKIA!
Great. Now we're going to have to invoke Godwin's Law on this thread too.
Yes, and he has roughly 20 times or so the number of foes I do. Would've been ~30x, but you just became my 3rd freak. Shrug.
I enjoy wit. I enjoy satire. PG has a poor grasp of them.
If his posts were modded up as Funny (which they occasionally are) then that'd be one thing. But there's a whole lot of idiot mods out there that mod them up as insightful/informative.
Oh, he's trolling... just take a look at his posting history.
Regarding Szilard's patent application - according to this page it's likely that his first patent on accelerators was rejected due to "prior art". Of course, file the same thing today and I bet you get a patent.
From that page it's not clear if his cyclotron or betatron patents were granted or not.
As for moderation - I didn't expect to get modded up. PG just deserves to get modded into a -1 hole.
Moderators, realize this guy is a troll and nowhere close to a "Physics Genius".
The first cyclotron patent was awarded to Ernest Lawrence in 1934, after being prompted to file for the patent by investors and being told that another scientist at Raytheon was about to patent the same thing.
Search Google, you'll find that there is nothing that indicates a cyclotron patent was rejected for any such reason.
Since there was a patent granted on the cyclotron, the rest of your arguments fall apart. Not surprising since they're full of shit.
Moderators - feel free to mod me down. But mod down the idiot parent post first.
Yeah... it's a definite drawback to the geek crowd, which is also the crowd most likely to run distributed computing projects.
I dunno why either, since UD has some d.net developers working for them and some kind of technology cross-licensing going on. Go figure.
I'll run Folding@Home on Unix boxes and UD on Windows boxes.