I'm waiting for a PC stuffed into a small form factor that I can keep in a backpack and interface with it via goggles and a virtual keyboard (motion tracking gloves with tactile feedback?).
That's why I specified large shells. Railgun is more along the lines of a 5" deck gun than a 12" battleship turret. In all cases it relies on kinetic energy for the kill. The projectiles vary wildly in design, but there are plans for a steerable one with internal guidance, and the general purpose one that breaks open near the end of its flight path to spread the impact out with multiple fragments rather than punching a clean hole in the target. In the case of both of those shells, a laser could either screw up the guidance/fusing, or break the shell open prematurely and cause the fragments to be spilled over a large area and/or lose enough energy (air resistance at mach8 is quite high) to lessen the damage.
You jest, but wouldn't a cloud of reflective/diffusive things (e.g. chaff, glass beads, smoke, dust, etc.) counteract this quite well.
They might diffuse the beam, but now the beam is ablating your anti laser chaff on the side pointing away from whatever you're trying to protect. As it ablates on one side, it'll be driven in the opposite direction by the jet of vaporized material. Now you have a a bunch of particles of superheated metallic gas flying at you at high speed, which may or may not be all that preferable to being hit by the laser.
It wouldn't do much against artillery shells or naval gunfire.
It would be somewhat effective against artillery shells. Most large shells travel slowly and rely on explosives for their damage. Heat one up enough and you'll either bork the fuse or set off the explosives prematurely. Now you've got non-aerodynamic shrapnel with a relatively low terminal velocity raining down rather than a high explosive shell.
The other thing about slow moving artillery shells is that they're slow, so there's time to effect the flight path. Heat the metal enough and you'll have superheated metal gas ablating from the surface of the shell. The force from that will be enough to alter the course of the projectile. With enough tracking/accuracy, you could theoretically divert the shell to land somewhere harmless (or at least less damaging).
If you're referring to the california proposition from last election, I don't think many people objected to the labeling so much as the fact that the law was written by a trial lawyer to be intentionally confusing and open to abuse. It basically paves the way for ADA style shakedown lawsuits against mom and pop food producers
I thoroughly test any new hdd I get for my desktop PC:
The first thing I do is format it and install windows. If that works, then we know the drive isn't DOA
From there I torture test it by copying several hundred gigabytes of software and movies, as well as installing some more programs.
After that, I let it run for a few months, using it normally. If it crashes during that time, then I know it was bad.
The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
Firstly, good on you for clarifying that (seriously, more discussions need to be that way).
Secondly, the efficiency of the transaction is going to be an extremely complex analysis, especially as you'll have analyze the 1000 small businesses that it's to be compared against (what kind of businesses? how saturated is their market? how interested are the business owners in their business?)
Speaking from my experience working R&D in a company that builds things that no one else has ever built before, I know that a project such as a spaceship isn't going to get completed without involving tons of small businesses. Even small R&D projects usually end up contracting tons of outside machine shop work (even though we have our own machine shop, a lot of places do it better/faster/cheaper, or do things we flat out can't do), and all sorts of obscure businesses that you'd never even think would have anything to do with the project (example: contracting one of a kind high pressure tanks for compressed gas from a 20 person company that manufactures rockets. It was part of a project to make a better high energy density battery).
While contracting those businesses to build something new doesn't necessarily increase wealth in the strict economic definition, it does several things that aren't going to be directly factored into any economic calculations:
- Provides an income stream to small businesses who rely on this sort of stuff in order to stay in business. They might in turn use that money to create wealth according to the definition used in economics.
- Creates innovations that other people/businesses can then leverage to produce wealth. e.g. once an awesome high energy battery hits the market, someone else can use it to found a new company that makes powered exoskeletons for paralyzed people.
- Keeps people employed. If those people don't have money to spend, the economy will tank no matter how much "wealth" you've created.
As for small businesses, it really depends on the business. Years ago I worked for a small photography company. It was based out of the owners garage and employed maybe 30 high school students and 10 photographers part time on the weekends. Every single bit of cash that company earned went straight into increasing the wealth of the owner, while everyone else got minimum wage. If I ran the numbers right (we all knew what each other made, and we knew how much cash we took in during a weekend job), the profit margins were obscene. Yet we still were using broken equipment repaired with duct tape and beating up our own vehicles to transport equipment to/from the jobsites. The owner wouldn't even drop the ~5k it would have cost to switch everyone over to using digital cameras. Hardly the utopian ideal of a great small business working hard for the economy
And one parting thought:
From what I remember from macroeconomics, investing in infrastructure is a good way to increase wealth. So on paper, if we tax everyone who makes more than 150k/year at 90% and implement a 100% death tax for the next 20 years in order to invest it all in making a world class road system, 100mbps fiber to everyone's porch, and a powergrid so smart that it becomes self aware, it should do wonders for the economy right?
In reality, I suspect that it would create a new class of superrich, all of whom are nephews of politicians and/or working as power/phone/road company management.
They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.
Unless they can wave a magic wand and have the spaceship assemble itself out of the dollar bills that they keep in their swimming pool, it would be pretty hard to keep the money from spreading out everywhere. I'm pretty sure that the billions they spend on the rocket go to all sorts of useful things such as workers to build the rocket, the space to build it in, the engineering firms to design it, the small companies that make crazy one-off things that really only have use in a rocket (don't underestimate how much stuff that no one has ever built before is required), and the payroll taxes to hire all those people.
I'd be extremely curious to see if legal documents in Lojban end up being different than legalise english in terms of length and clarity.
Any Lojban speakers feel like translating a few?
It could work if it was written in a logical language. Unfortunately, most languages are so full of potential double meanings and/or implied meanings that even slight changes in context can completely turn around the implications of what was said. Coincidentally, that's also one of the main reasons why plain spoken english as a computer programming language is asking for trouble.
The other problem of course is that lawyers want to stay employed.
From what I've seen, it's not the rank and file workers who benefit, it's the higher up people who make six figure salaries for holding a fancy title for a pointless internal bureaucracy, then retire at age 55 while continuing to pull a pension equal to 95% of their salary. For every one of those people you could hire at least 4 of the rank and file workers at a decent wage and sane retirement plan.
The only trick for the management is to keep enough people at a crappy wage. That way the average stays down and they can wave it around as "proof" that salaries and over the top pensions aren't an issue.
There is no question: anyone who spends more than a few minutes/day reading will agree reading books on LCD is really tiring.
Wrong. I have a rooted NC that I use primarily as an e-reader and I actually find myself getting more tired reading physical books than reading on my NC.
The key is to keep the amount of light exiting the screen roughly balanced with the ambient levels so that your eyes aren't constantly trying to adjust between the screen and your environment. I changed my display to show light grey text on a black background and usually have it near fully dimmed when indoors. The only time I've found it mildly tiring to my eyes is when I read in complete darkness and forget to dim the screen all the way.
Most phones, especially Apple phones where there is no SD card slot, have limited space available so there must be some way to select which ones you want to sync. By default iTunes just tries to sync everything as soon as you add it to your library, filling your phone up immediately.
That's no justification for a delete function. The Apple userbase is expected to just buy a new iPhone when they run out of space.
Back when highspeed internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, I remember a friend on IRC who owned a computer shop telling me some stories of counter hacking. I have no idea how legit the following story is since I wasn't actually there for any of it, and I'm fuzzy on a lot of the details since it was related to me nearly 10 years ago. Despite all that, I think it has some relevance in that it's an easy target to pick specifics from and discuss them, rather than having to rely on sketchy car analogies
He had been doing a virus removal on a customers PC on a slow day, and decided to run some network monitoring tools on it first. He instantly noticed traffic to an IRC server, recorded the details, then attempted to connect to it. It wouldn't let him in at first, but eventually he got around that by changing the version string on his normal IRC client in order to mimic what the virused computer was replying to. He found some hundred or so zombie machines sitting in a channel, renamed himself to something similar to the naming convention of the rest of the zombie machines, then let it sit for a few days.
Eventually he checked his logs and saw the hacker logging in to the server and running various commands on the botnet. Upon closer inspection, he realized that the hackers IP address matched that of the IRC server. That made him think that the guy must have been dumb and was hosting it from his own connection (definitely a possibility in the early 2000s), so he scrolled through his logs some more and found instances of the hacker giving commands to ddos various targets. At that point my friend claims to have directed the botnet to ddos the IP of the IRC server they were connected to. It subsequently went down, leaving the hacker with no way to control the botnet anymore.
Again, I have no idea how much of that story is true, however it still makes a good example to pick at in regards to legality of counter hacking. I would argue that up until he ordered the botnet to attack its controller, everything was perfectly legal.
Until your scanning machine gets out of alignment, the people you hired to do hand counts get bribed, or someone loses the ballots on the way to be counted.
The centralized software database is great... until you need a program that's not in it.
Also, finding and downloading something with a search engine is done every day by pretty much anyone who uses a PC (regardless of OS), so it's not really accurate to include that when measuring complexity of installing software. Having to type a bunch of things into a command line (and then finding out TFM was out of date and everything you types was wrong) is definitely not something that non-linux PC users are familiar with.
oh, and have fun trying to actually find where the program is with the unity interface (though to be fair, that could just be because I'm not that familiar with it yet)
I work for a R&D company that has inefficiencies in a few departments that come close to what I hear alleged about government work. After thinking about it for a while, I've realized that all those departments have two things in common:
1) The department is "essential" such that it's been around for a long time and doesn't have any reason to not still be around for a long time to come (e.g. legal). They also tend to have their own niche culture, and little (if any) incoming flow of new people as others retire/move on.
2) The department has power to subtly make your life miserable if you piss them off by pointing out some flaw in their established process (e.g. IT), with very little recourse in the event they decide to do that.
This pretty much describes a typical unelected government bureaucracy (and even various elected offices in some cases, 6+ term incumbents anyone?) as well. The key to keeping it efficient is to make sure the threat of unelection/firing/bankruptcy/lack of pay raises/etc. remains constant and real enough to keep everyone from getting complacent
As someone who played eve many years as a scammer (of the variety that didn't spam local chat), I can tell you that both empathy and anger have the effect of making people dumber.
I went for empathy when I was trying to get someone to give me stuff. After they fell for the scam and realized they'd been had, I'd switch over and do everything I could to make them raging angry. Once they were sufficiently mad, I'd block them and then figure out a way to get them to to meet my other character in what appeared to them to be a chance encounter, then appeal to their sense of anger and convince them to take out a bounty hunter contract with me to "kill" my first scamming character.
While you're correct that the mouse wheel works in discrete amounts, it's not as if a touch screen is any better. The lack of precision (and also annoying tendency to interpret lifting your fingers off the screen as input) from a touch screen nullifies any advantage in theoretically finer gradients of input.
Also, it's not as if you can't use modifier keys on the keyboard to accomplish any any two fingered gesture. CAD software has been doing that for years. Holding combinations of ctrl, shift, and alt while clicking mouse buttons and dragging to induce zoom, rotation, or panning can become second nature to someone in the same amount of time that two-fingered touch gestures can.
I'm pretty sure that beer was just one of the many many different kinds of foods, clothes, bombshelters, vehicles, houses, and god knows what else they also placed around the test site to evaluate the effects of a nuke on them.
source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nop3tfseBqU
tbh if I had to pick between canceling a series early, or letting it run past its welcome, I'd pick canceling it early. I would rather be left with happy memories of it rather than standing there shaking my fist at the franchise (looking at you, stargate universe)
The ending of the firefly movie was quite depressing though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for a PC stuffed into a small form factor that I can keep in a backpack and interface with it via goggles and a virtual keyboard (motion tracking gloves with tactile feedback?).
That's why I specified large shells. Railgun is more along the lines of a 5" deck gun than a 12" battleship turret. In all cases it relies on kinetic energy for the kill. The projectiles vary wildly in design, but there are plans for a steerable one with internal guidance, and the general purpose one that breaks open near the end of its flight path to spread the impact out with multiple fragments rather than punching a clean hole in the target. In the case of both of those shells, a laser could either screw up the guidance/fusing, or break the shell open prematurely and cause the fragments to be spilled over a large area and/or lose enough energy (air resistance at mach8 is quite high) to lessen the damage.
You jest, but wouldn't a cloud of reflective/diffusive things (e.g. chaff, glass beads, smoke, dust, etc.) counteract this quite well.
They might diffuse the beam, but now the beam is ablating your anti laser chaff on the side pointing away from whatever you're trying to protect. As it ablates on one side, it'll be driven in the opposite direction by the jet of vaporized material. Now you have a a bunch of particles of superheated metallic gas flying at you at high speed, which may or may not be all that preferable to being hit by the laser.
It wouldn't do much against artillery shells or naval gunfire.
It would be somewhat effective against artillery shells. Most large shells travel slowly and rely on explosives for their damage. Heat one up enough and you'll either bork the fuse or set off the explosives prematurely. Now you've got non-aerodynamic shrapnel with a relatively low terminal velocity raining down rather than a high explosive shell.
The other thing about slow moving artillery shells is that they're slow, so there's time to effect the flight path. Heat the metal enough and you'll have superheated metal gas ablating from the surface of the shell. The force from that will be enough to alter the course of the projectile. With enough tracking/accuracy, you could theoretically divert the shell to land somewhere harmless (or at least less damaging).
If you're referring to the california proposition from last election, I don't think many people objected to the labeling so much as the fact that the law was written by a trial lawyer to be intentionally confusing and open to abuse. It basically paves the way for ADA style shakedown lawsuits against mom and pop food producers
Gravity can be handled either via rotation or (in the future) via drugs.
Gravity inducing drugs: coming to a drugstore near you in 2014!~
Obligatory xkcd: http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
I thoroughly test any new hdd I get for my desktop PC:
The first thing I do is format it and install windows. If that works, then we know the drive isn't DOA
From there I torture test it by copying several hundred gigabytes of software and movies, as well as installing some more programs.
After that, I let it run for a few months, using it normally. If it crashes during that time, then I know it was bad.
The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")
Firstly, good on you for clarifying that (seriously, more discussions need to be that way).
Secondly, the efficiency of the transaction is going to be an extremely complex analysis, especially as you'll have analyze the 1000 small businesses that it's to be compared against (what kind of businesses? how saturated is their market? how interested are the business owners in their business?)
Speaking from my experience working R&D in a company that builds things that no one else has ever built before, I know that a project such as a spaceship isn't going to get completed without involving tons of small businesses. Even small R&D projects usually end up contracting tons of outside machine shop work (even though we have our own machine shop, a lot of places do it better/faster/cheaper, or do things we flat out can't do), and all sorts of obscure businesses that you'd never even think would have anything to do with the project (example: contracting one of a kind high pressure tanks for compressed gas from a 20 person company that manufactures rockets. It was part of a project to make a better high energy density battery).
While contracting those businesses to build something new doesn't necessarily increase wealth in the strict economic definition, it does several things that aren't going to be directly factored into any economic calculations:
- Provides an income stream to small businesses who rely on this sort of stuff in order to stay in business. They might in turn use that money to create wealth according to the definition used in economics.
- Creates innovations that other people/businesses can then leverage to produce wealth. e.g. once an awesome high energy battery hits the market, someone else can use it to found a new company that makes powered exoskeletons for paralyzed people.
- Keeps people employed. If those people don't have money to spend, the economy will tank no matter how much "wealth" you've created.
As for small businesses, it really depends on the business. Years ago I worked for a small photography company. It was based out of the owners garage and employed maybe 30 high school students and 10 photographers part time on the weekends. Every single bit of cash that company earned went straight into increasing the wealth of the owner, while everyone else got minimum wage. If I ran the numbers right (we all knew what each other made, and we knew how much cash we took in during a weekend job), the profit margins were obscene. Yet we still were using broken equipment repaired with duct tape and beating up our own vehicles to transport equipment to/from the jobsites. The owner wouldn't even drop the ~5k it would have cost to switch everyone over to using digital cameras. Hardly the utopian ideal of a great small business working hard for the economy
And one parting thought: From what I remember from macroeconomics, investing in infrastructure is a good way to increase wealth. So on paper, if we tax everyone who makes more than 150k/year at 90% and implement a 100% death tax for the next 20 years in order to invest it all in making a world class road system, 100mbps fiber to everyone's porch, and a powergrid so smart that it becomes self aware, it should do wonders for the economy right?
In reality, I suspect that it would create a new class of superrich, all of whom are nephews of politicians and/or working as power/phone/road company management.
They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.
Unless they can wave a magic wand and have the spaceship assemble itself out of the dollar bills that they keep in their swimming pool, it would be pretty hard to keep the money from spreading out everywhere. I'm pretty sure that the billions they spend on the rocket go to all sorts of useful things such as workers to build the rocket, the space to build it in, the engineering firms to design it, the small companies that make crazy one-off things that really only have use in a rocket (don't underestimate how much stuff that no one has ever built before is required), and the payroll taxes to hire all those people.
I'd be extremely curious to see if legal documents in Lojban end up being different than legalise english in terms of length and clarity. Any Lojban speakers feel like translating a few?
It could work if it was written in a logical language. Unfortunately, most languages are so full of potential double meanings and/or implied meanings that even slight changes in context can completely turn around the implications of what was said. Coincidentally, that's also one of the main reasons why plain spoken english as a computer programming language is asking for trouble.
The other problem of course is that lawyers want to stay employed.
What's the point of innovating if some company like Samsung or Google just comes along and steals your ideas?
To make money for Google and Samsung of course.
From what I've seen, it's not the rank and file workers who benefit, it's the higher up people who make six figure salaries for holding a fancy title for a pointless internal bureaucracy, then retire at age 55 while continuing to pull a pension equal to 95% of their salary. For every one of those people you could hire at least 4 of the rank and file workers at a decent wage and sane retirement plan.
The only trick for the management is to keep enough people at a crappy wage. That way the average stays down and they can wave it around as "proof" that salaries and over the top pensions aren't an issue.
There is no question: anyone who spends more than a few minutes/day reading will agree reading books on LCD is really tiring.
Wrong. I have a rooted NC that I use primarily as an e-reader and I actually find myself getting more tired reading physical books than reading on my NC.
The key is to keep the amount of light exiting the screen roughly balanced with the ambient levels so that your eyes aren't constantly trying to adjust between the screen and your environment. I changed my display to show light grey text on a black background and usually have it near fully dimmed when indoors. The only time I've found it mildly tiring to my eyes is when I read in complete darkness and forget to dim the screen all the way.
Most phones, especially Apple phones where there is no SD card slot, have limited space available so there must be some way to select which ones you want to sync. By default iTunes just tries to sync everything as soon as you add it to your library, filling your phone up immediately.
That's no justification for a delete function. The Apple userbase is expected to just buy a new iPhone when they run out of space.
Obligatory XKCD: http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
Back when highspeed internet wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today, I remember a friend on IRC who owned a computer shop telling me some stories of counter hacking. I have no idea how legit the following story is since I wasn't actually there for any of it, and I'm fuzzy on a lot of the details since it was related to me nearly 10 years ago. Despite all that, I think it has some relevance in that it's an easy target to pick specifics from and discuss them, rather than having to rely on sketchy car analogies
He had been doing a virus removal on a customers PC on a slow day, and decided to run some network monitoring tools on it first. He instantly noticed traffic to an IRC server, recorded the details, then attempted to connect to it. It wouldn't let him in at first, but eventually he got around that by changing the version string on his normal IRC client in order to mimic what the virused computer was replying to. He found some hundred or so zombie machines sitting in a channel, renamed himself to something similar to the naming convention of the rest of the zombie machines, then let it sit for a few days.
Eventually he checked his logs and saw the hacker logging in to the server and running various commands on the botnet. Upon closer inspection, he realized that the hackers IP address matched that of the IRC server. That made him think that the guy must have been dumb and was hosting it from his own connection (definitely a possibility in the early 2000s), so he scrolled through his logs some more and found instances of the hacker giving commands to ddos various targets. At that point my friend claims to have directed the botnet to ddos the IP of the IRC server they were connected to. It subsequently went down, leaving the hacker with no way to control the botnet anymore.
Again, I have no idea how much of that story is true, however it still makes a good example to pick at in regards to legality of counter hacking. I would argue that up until he ordered the botnet to attack its controller, everything was perfectly legal.
Until your scanning machine gets out of alignment, the people you hired to do hand counts get bribed, or someone loses the ballots on the way to be counted.
The centralized software database is great... until you need a program that's not in it.
Also, finding and downloading something with a search engine is done every day by pretty much anyone who uses a PC (regardless of OS), so it's not really accurate to include that when measuring complexity of installing software. Having to type a bunch of things into a command line (and then finding out TFM was out of date and everything you types was wrong) is definitely not something that non-linux PC users are familiar with.
oh, and have fun trying to actually find where the program is with the unity interface (though to be fair, that could just be because I'm not that familiar with it yet)
I work for a R&D company that has inefficiencies in a few departments that come close to what I hear alleged about government work. After thinking about it for a while, I've realized that all those departments have two things in common: 1) The department is "essential" such that it's been around for a long time and doesn't have any reason to not still be around for a long time to come (e.g. legal). They also tend to have their own niche culture, and little (if any) incoming flow of new people as others retire/move on. 2) The department has power to subtly make your life miserable if you piss them off by pointing out some flaw in their established process (e.g. IT), with very little recourse in the event they decide to do that.
This pretty much describes a typical unelected government bureaucracy (and even various elected offices in some cases, 6+ term incumbents anyone?) as well. The key to keeping it efficient is to make sure the threat of unelection/firing/bankruptcy/lack of pay raises/etc. remains constant and real enough to keep everyone from getting complacent
As someone who played eve many years as a scammer (of the variety that didn't spam local chat), I can tell you that both empathy and anger have the effect of making people dumber. I went for empathy when I was trying to get someone to give me stuff. After they fell for the scam and realized they'd been had, I'd switch over and do everything I could to make them raging angry. Once they were sufficiently mad, I'd block them and then figure out a way to get them to to meet my other character in what appeared to them to be a chance encounter, then appeal to their sense of anger and convince them to take out a bounty hunter contract with me to "kill" my first scamming character.
While you're correct that the mouse wheel works in discrete amounts, it's not as if a touch screen is any better. The lack of precision (and also annoying tendency to interpret lifting your fingers off the screen as input) from a touch screen nullifies any advantage in theoretically finer gradients of input.
Also, it's not as if you can't use modifier keys on the keyboard to accomplish any any two fingered gesture. CAD software has been doing that for years. Holding combinations of ctrl, shift, and alt while clicking mouse buttons and dragging to induce zoom, rotation, or panning can become second nature to someone in the same amount of time that two-fingered touch gestures can.
I'm pretty sure that beer was just one of the many many different kinds of foods, clothes, bombshelters, vehicles, houses, and god knows what else they also placed around the test site to evaluate the effects of a nuke on them.
source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nop3tfseBqU
tbh if I had to pick between canceling a series early, or letting it run past its welcome, I'd pick canceling it early. I would rather be left with happy memories of it rather than standing there shaking my fist at the franchise (looking at you, stargate universe)
The ending of the firefly movie was quite depressing though.