who read the first words of the title and immediately thought "Free Aibo", as in "Free Willy"? I had horrific visions of liberated Aibos running wild thru the woods, attacking all manner of wildlife, then sneaking back into the city under the cover of darkness to steal a battery charge.
Uh, I think the point of the article is to destroy your enemy's nukes while they're not looking, not to destroy nukes as in 'decommissioning' them. This is more of a disarming first-strike thing than anti-nuke, flowers-in-your-hair weapon destruction party thing.
Concurrent Computer used to have disks that did this. They were called, HPT (Head Per Track). They were only 5 MB or so, but _fast_ compared to the regular drives.
As has been noted, 5-80 MB drives from the mid-late 80's were called washtubs for a reason - they looked and acted like an unbalanced washing machine on spin cycle.
I recently took a few of these puppies apart - giant electromagnets and motors, huge bipolar transistors to drive the magnetics. Youch!
I believe the system is designed to include wireless networking. Anyplace that would have sufficient people moving past to warrant advertising should definitely by the time this is implemented have WiFi in abundance.
Why use WiFi when the sign could have a simple cellular phone and modem in it? For that matter, use a digital phone and skip the modem. The bandwidth/latency required to download ads to a billboard are minimal - it can stream at 9600bps 24x7. If it takes a while, so what? The ads are purchased for weeks/months at a time, and you could preload them with start/stop dates.
A 30 x 15 foot sign with 0.5 inch pixels would be 260k pixels. 3 bytes/pixel * 8 bits/byte = 6.2Mbits. At 9600 bps, that's 648 sec = 10.8 min for an uncompressed image.
Use.25 inch pixels, and you're still under 45 min.
Use jpeg to compress a.25 inch pixel image 10:1, and you're looking at 5 min for a megapixel image or 20 min for a 4 megapixel image (0.125 inch pixels). I'd guess that's small enough for typical viewing distances for billboards.
Soon cars will have 48V batteries. This will allow for electronically controlled intake and exhaust valves. In engines that have valves that enter the area swept by the piston, you will snap a valve off if the timimg is off by that much (holds fingers 0.5mm apart).
By "that photon experiment" do you mean the one in the novel "Timeline" by the science fiction writer Michael Crighton? I thought it was a neat literary trick, but certainly not science fact.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but how can you get 6400 MPH from their numbers? They must be claiming an instantaneous velocity as opposed to an average over any of the segments they mention.
From the article:
The sled covered the "roughly 3 mile course" in 6 seconds. That's 3 / 6 * 3600 = 1800 mi/hr.
It covered the first 1.4 mi in 4.65 s. That's 1.4 / 4.65 * 3600 = 1084 mi/hr.
It covered the last 1.8 mi in 1.3 s. That's 1.8 / 1.3 * 3600 = 4985 mi/hr.
If you _add_ the speeds, you get 6069 mi/hr, but that's certainly not legit.
The average speed over the whole 3.2 mile course was (1.4 + 1.8) / (4.65 + 1.3) * 3600 = 1936 mi/hr, which is close to the speed referred to in bullet point 1. Hardly impressive, and hardly 6400 mi/hr! My guess it they meant that the sled hit 6400 mi/hr when the rocket cut in at 4.65 s, but quickly slowed since the average speed after 4.65 s was only 4985 mi/hr.
Don't you think having a salesperson reach into their own pocket (or even a pile of pennies by the register) to make change would've looked a little strange? It would at least elicit the question, "Aren't you going to put that money in the register?" This was back when customers would report theft to the manager. Remember, too, that not ringing up the sale meant no receipt for the customer.
People were conditioned to hear that "cha-ching" - actually, we still are. Digital registers still make a dinging noise when the cash drawer opens.
Way back when, if the price was $1, the employee could slip the cash in their pocket without 'ringing it up' (remember the old mechanical cash registers?) If an item wasn't rung up, there was no record of the sale. If the cashier had to open the register to get change, they had to ring the item up, since the register wouldn't open without a sale.
Doing the math, I get 1.68 million km2 of area. Approx 25.8% of that is land, making the land strike area something like 433440 km2. If the odds are 1 in 2000 of 'being hit', either each person is 216.72 km2 in area, or they expect to hit 216.72 people at once.
Just to pick a nit - the #2 fuel oil I burn for heat is dyed a shocking red. They look for the red dye in the truck diesel tanks to indicate use of non-taxed diesel. If the coloration were reversed as you suggested, it'd be much, much harder to tell that there was clear oil mixed with red than red mixed with clear. The dye they use visibly taints the oil at fairly high dilution rates.
Exactly my point. Since they've gotten away with using the ICC for everything, even unrelated stuff, you'd think they'd be all over applying it to this obvious no-brainer.
It is so abundantly clear that the ICC applies and trumps Michigan's law that there must be a reason that no one has challenged it on those grounds. It might be that the law is so young it hasn't had a chance to make it to the federal level. It also might be that the Michigan law is exactly what the Feds want, and aren't going to piddle with something they want but probably can't get for themselves.
congress would like to invoke the Interstate Commerce clause on this puppy? If there's one thing that's truly interstate, it's the internet! Geez, they even tried to regulate guns by invoking the ICC - "they must cross state boundaries, so we've got jurisdiction." This is such an obvious case where the ICC applies, you'd think they'd want to jump on it.
Re:AI, as a field, doesn't have a clue.
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AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
Raibert at MIT...
With all due apologies to Mr. Raibert, I read that as "RatBert" - I though there was a new Dilbert character!
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They're still in use in Hanover County, Va!
who read the first words of the title and immediately thought "Free Aibo", as in "Free Willy"? I had horrific visions of liberated Aibos running wild thru the woods, attacking all manner of wildlife, then sneaking back into the city under the cover of darkness to steal a battery charge.
That my religious affiliation was "Elbonian". Alternatively, you could say you're Izzian or Izbian.
Uh, I think the point of the article is to destroy your enemy's nukes while they're not looking, not to destroy nukes as in 'decommissioning' them. This is more of a disarming first-strike thing than anti-nuke, flowers-in-your-hair weapon destruction party thing.
Aargh!!! Hot button alert!
It's per se, not "per say"!!!!
That's Gnu/sticism, darn it!
Concurrent Computer used to have disks that did this. They were called, HPT (Head Per Track). They were only 5 MB or so, but _fast_ compared to the regular drives.
As has been noted, 5-80 MB drives from the mid-late 80's were called washtubs for a reason - they looked and acted like an unbalanced washing machine on spin cycle.
I recently took a few of these puppies apart - giant electromagnets and motors, huge bipolar transistors to drive the magnetics. Youch!
OMG! Rearrange the bits in the Swahili spelling of "Stephen Baxter" and you get "Nostradamus"!
I believe the system is designed to include wireless networking. Anyplace that would have sufficient people moving past to warrant advertising should definitely by the time this is implemented have WiFi in abundance.
Why use WiFi when the sign could have a simple cellular phone and modem in it? For that matter, use a digital phone and skip the modem. The bandwidth/latency required to download ads to a billboard are minimal - it can stream at 9600bps 24x7. If it takes a while, so what? The ads are purchased for weeks/months at a time, and you could preload them with start/stop dates.
A 30 x 15 foot sign with 0.5 inch pixels would be 260k pixels. 3 bytes/pixel * 8 bits/byte = 6.2Mbits. At 9600 bps, that's 648 sec = 10.8 min for an uncompressed image.
Use .25 inch pixels, and you're still under 45 min.
Use jpeg to compress a .25 inch pixel image 10:1, and you're looking at 5 min for a megapixel image or 20 min for a 4 megapixel image (0.125 inch pixels). I'd guess that's small enough for typical viewing distances for billboards.
Soon cars will have 48V batteries. This will allow for electronically controlled intake and exhaust valves. In engines that have valves that enter the area swept by the piston, you will snap a valve off if the timimg is off by that much (holds fingers 0.5mm apart).
s/Crighton/Crichton/g
Rats!
By "that photon experiment" do you mean the one in the novel "Timeline" by the science fiction writer Michael Crighton? I thought it was a neat literary trick, but certainly not science fact.
Can you make satellites that small?
Yes.
From the article:
- The sled covered the "roughly 3 mile course" in 6 seconds. That's 3 / 6 * 3600 = 1800 mi/hr.
- It covered the first 1.4 mi in 4.65 s. That's 1.4 / 4.65 * 3600 = 1084 mi/hr.
- It covered the last 1.8 mi in 1.3 s. That's 1.8 / 1.3 * 3600 = 4985 mi/hr.
If you _add_ the speeds, you get 6069 mi/hr, but that's certainly not legit.The average speed over the whole 3.2 mile course was (1.4 + 1.8) / (4.65 + 1.3) * 3600 = 1936 mi/hr, which is close to the speed referred to in bullet point 1. Hardly impressive, and hardly 6400 mi/hr! My guess it they meant that the sled hit 6400 mi/hr when the rocket cut in at 4.65 s, but quickly slowed since the average speed after 4.65 s was only 4985 mi/hr.
People were conditioned to hear that "cha-ching" - actually, we still are. Digital registers still make a dinging noise when the cash drawer opens.
:-) obligatory smiley :-)
Good Lord!! 12 cents/hour adds up to 20.16/week! That's 150.27/month!
What's that? Oh, they mean 12 cents/hour of recordable time on the disk...nevermind.
Just to pick a nit - the #2 fuel oil I burn for heat is dyed a shocking red. They look for the red dye in the truck diesel tanks to indicate use of non-taxed diesel. If the coloration were reversed as you suggested, it'd be much, much harder to tell that there was clear oil mixed with red than red mixed with clear. The dye they use visibly taints the oil at fairly high dilution rates.
Above 50km, it would be "SpaceForce 1".
It is so abundantly clear that the ICC applies and trumps Michigan's law that there must be a reason that no one has challenged it on those grounds. It might be that the law is so young it hasn't had a chance to make it to the federal level. It also might be that the Michigan law is exactly what the Feds want, and aren't going to piddle with something they want but probably can't get for themselves.
Must be an unjacketed 9mm. Cheap to shoot, except in guns with trapezoidal rifling. It's nearly impossible to get lead residue out of them. Yuck!
congress would like to invoke the Interstate Commerce clause on this puppy? If there's one thing that's truly interstate, it's the internet! Geez, they even tried to regulate guns by invoking the ICC - "they must cross state boundaries, so we've got jurisdiction." This is such an obvious case where the ICC applies, you'd think they'd want to jump on it.
With all due apologies to Mr. Raibert, I read that as "RatBert" - I though there was a new Dilbert character!