The missile, when fired in a swarm (group of 4-8) has a unique guidance mode. One of the weapons climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. The missile responsible for target designation climbs in short pop-ups, so as to be harder to intercept. The missiles are linked by data connections, forming a network. Missiles are able to differentiate targets, detect groups and prioritize targets automatically using information gathered during flight and types of ships and battle formations pre-programmed in an onboard computer. They will attack targets in order of priority, highest to lowest: after destroying the first target, remaining missiles will attack the next prioritized target.
Ghu, I would have hated to have had to model that behavior for the chaff launcher training software I wrote back around 1980 or so...
In comparison, lets consider an ancient ballistic missile...
Reading that gave me a vision of the ancient Greeks launching a Polaris missile at one another. Spar-taaaans! You will set 1-MQ to missile firing! Designate target package Athens! Spin up missiles I-VI and VII-XII! Commence hover maneuver and stand by to rain fire on our enemies! HA-OU! HA-OU! HA-OU!
Well, you do remember King Leonidas kicking the Persian emissary into the missile silo in "300", don't you?
According to the Wikipedia entry for the BrahMos, its payload capacity is 300kg, 1/10 the missile's mass, giving it about 3/5 of the Tomahawk's payload capacity while weighing twice as much. Its range is also only 290km, while the Tomahawk has a range of 2,500km. So not only do you have to carry around twice as much missile, but you have to get eight times as close to use it. I expect that the primary purpose of the BrahMos is similar to that of the P-270 Moskit (NATO SS-N-22 Sunburn), which is to have an extremely fast missile that passes through the engagement zone of a target too fast to allow effective engagement by hard- and soft-kill systems.
In many countries the police are obliged to protect you; and the name (and US motto) would suggest it.
The problem is that it's not practical to impose an obligation of protection on the police. Someone coshes you over the head, takes your wallet and watch, and runs off; if there isn't a police officer right there, there's nothing they can do to 'protect' you. And that's why self-defense must be an individual right and responsibility -- you are the only person you know is always going to be there to act in your defense.
What about an individual's right to defend him/herself? Call the cops. It works very well for us.
Which is a good and noble concept... except that the police are under no obligation to provide protection to any given individual. See Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981). Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers." The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen."
Or Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005). Jessica Gonzales had a restraining order against her estranged husband Simon limiting his access to their three children. He abducted them, and Gonzales repeatedly phoned the police for assistance. Officers visited the home. Believing Simon to be non-violent and, arguably, in compliance with the limited access granted by the restraining order, the police did nothing. She sued the Castle Rock police department and won a judgement of $30,000,000. By a vote of 7-to-2, the Supreme Court ruled that Gonzales has no right to sue her local police department for failing to protect her and her children from her estranged husband; the local officials had presented a history of court decisions that found the police to have no constitutional obligation to protect individuals from private individuals. In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court (South v. Maryland) found that law enforcement officers had no affirmative duty to provide such protection. In 1982 (Bowers v. DeVito), the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit held, "...there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen."
It works very well for you? Try suing the police for failing to protect you if you get robbed, assaulted, or burgled, and see just how much responsibility the courts say the police actually have to protect you.
I have gotten fuel efficiency of 53 miles per gallon driving a 1983 Honda Civic FE hatchback on segments of a trip from San Diego to Portland carrying two people and luggage; design of the engine, drivetrain, and vehicle plays a part, but so does your driving patterns -- look at what hypermiling can do, for example.
That font and type quality on the box is NOT Intel... too fuzzy, like a cheap screen printer was used. When you are making thousands of boxes at a time, you can use better printers..
Particularly telling is the fact that the 'art' for the 'Factory Sealed' tape is printed on the box; on genuine boxes, and even the demo ones, it's part of the tape, so you have to damage it peeling it off the box. Having it all printed on the box means that whoever faked this doesn't have to pay for a second production of the special tape; they can use ordinary plastic tape cut to fit. That alone, much less the typos that any proofreading by Intel would have caught before the masters were approved for printing, scream 'deliberate fake'.
The Constitution requires only two things: Just compensation and a taking for a public purpose. Your property can be taken and folded into a public park. The approaches to a bridge.
Or, as has been thrashed out recently in court, in order to hand it over to a developer who will build a privately-owned and -funded mall or housing development, as long as it will bring in more taxes than what you're paying on your property.
It's more effective if you just take a hit from an Oxygen tank.
Why try to jam the O2 into your drink?
And, in response to this insightful observation, we will see drinking establishments combining with oxygen bars, with the added boost to income since, after Last Call, they will be able to continue to sell oxygen shots to the customers before they stagger out the door, the oxygen not being an intoxicating beverage.
Memories of Jar Jar sounds like a fragrance that George Lucas would put on the market.
If it's the aroma of a smoking pile of ash tinged with the roast-pork smell of burned flesh, it would probably sell strongly, if only for the humor value.
This is exactly what I think will happen with books: nobody wants to set out to deliberately kill paper books but in the future I would imagine that only very popular "classic" books will end up in physical, high quality bindings and that the cheap paperback novels of today will be replaced by electronic media simply because eBooks are cheaper to make and more convenient.
And it will revitalize the market for fiction by eliminating the compression of the midlist -- authors whose books sell consistently but not rapidly. Because e-books don't have to compete for physical rack space in stores against 'blockbusters' and have no inventory costs, e-books by authors can remain "in print" from their publication date until their copyright expires.
The same also applies for scholarly works, which generally have low print runs because of their slow sales and high inventory costs; e-books will allow a work to remain available indefinitely, and on-demand printing will be able to satisfy needs for an actual physical book.
Take an appropriately-shaped block of wood, screen-print a keyboard layout on it, put the film on top, and you have a keyboard with no moving parts.
More generally, since this is being described as something you can put over an existing display (and therefore must be transparent), you can make a programmable keypad device where the touch-surface film is on a transparent plate, under which can be slid a template laying out what the 'buttons' are; because you would be able to define the position and dimensions (and, with sufficient sophistication of the drivers, shape), you could make the keypad layout whatever you wanted, with buttons of different sizes and orientations. Look at the Steelseries Zboard gaming keyboard; you get a customized keyboard layout by replacing the top of the keyboard with a new key panel. Consider how much easier it would be for a company to be able to release a cardstock insert to go under the sensor surface (where it won't get grimed and worn in use) and a layout configuration file than to manufacture an entire custom keyboard face. Crank it up another notch, and put a display panel in place of the insert, and you get something that can compete with the Optimus Maximus keyboard for customizability at what I expect to be a much lower price point.
Have a look at this post. There's a nice PDF there that will break down costs for you. The short answer to your question is that printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with, and e-books have new costs associated with them. Also given that e-books don't gain us any market-share (rather, it displaces market share we already had), and that we still have to do all of the traditional production alongside the new stuff, e-books really cost us more to make, at least at the moment. Oh, and it should be reiterated-- Amazon takes a huge cut. That ads a lot of cost to a book. To make a $20 paper book into a $9.99 e-book isn't so simple as cutting out the printing and distribution part and then selling the book without those costs. Maybe if we had our own platform.
Looking at "printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with", the PDF linked to in the posting gives $0.321, the single biggest piece, as "all manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to distribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits." So basically the linked PDF tells us nothing about how much of the costs will go down by eliminating a) paper costs, b) printing, c) storage, and d) distribution; the only quantifiable reduction is the elimination of the $.013 shipping costs. We have no way to tell what the printing and distribution costs are, except for your unsupported assertion, and the documentation you cite provides no actual information to support your claim.
As for "we still have to do all the traditional production alongside the new stuff", consider that, unless you're still seriously mired in decades-old typesetting, the books you are publishing are edited electronically and sent to the printing machines electronically; the "new stuff" consists of a single conversion program that takes the electronic format you use for editing and proofing and converts it to the e-book format you're going to be distributing; dragging the file icon to copy the final edited version to the fileserver where a batch process will automatically read new files, convert them, and send them to whoever is responsible for emailing a single file per book to the end seller is, after all, such a massive investment of time and effort. But, looking at the trail from the finished electronic version to the end product, an e-book exists only as a data file, whereas a DTE book still has to be printed and bound, then boxed, and stored until shipped to a bookstore.
And don't forget returns. In a piece on NPR last year, Mr. Jed Lyons, President and Chief Operating Officer at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, part of the National Book Network, stated that roughly 25% of what they ship comes back as unsold. Now, this excludes paperbacks, which are stripped by the store and destroyed because they're not worth shipping back to be redistributed, but this whole flap with MacMillan is over new titles, which would presumably be hardback. All your costs for returns disappear for e-books; since the seller only gets one 'master', and that's electronic, there is nothing to return; the bigger the fraction of e-books a publisher sells, the smaller the number of employees they have to hire to handle returns; another cost that isn't broken out in the PDF you cite -- there is a cost on the part of the store for personnel costs for various functions, some of which (shelving, returns, pricing) go away or are severely reduced by e-books, but nothing broken out on the publisher's side.
'Moving into e-books is risky'. I think that you're greatly mistaken; e-books is perhaps the biggest opportunity for publishers that has come along in decades; adopting e-books means that the compression of the midlist, where authors whos
I think he's saying it's a step backwards because they are taking, what is essentially a tablet computer, and 100% locking it down to only do what Apple explicitly allows.
Don't forget that Apple is also locking down the carrier by introducing a SIM card with a new form factor -- GSM SIM cards are 15x25mm, but the SIM inside the iPad is 12x15mm -- which means that you can't just download a software hack and jailbreak your iPad to use another carrier; because the GSMA isn't pushing conversion to the new form-factor, you're hardware-locked into getting service from AT&T. "Here's this wonderful tool; you can use any application you want from the ones we've approved for you to use, and you can get your 3G service from any one of the single provider who offers SIM cards small enough to fit in its socket. But we're not trying to control how you use your iPad... honest."
The Google settlement sound remarkably reasonably actually.
If you don't like what Google is doing to "your property", then you send them a "Cease and Desist" letter.
Isn't this the literary equivalent of the same thing that the CRIA is being sued over -- the creation of the "pending list", where instead of having to get a license from the copyright holder before they used their music, they would go ahead and use the song without waiting for authorization or making payment, adding the song to a list of music that is 'pending authorization and payment'? "Yes, there's a valid copyright on this work, but it's too much trouble for us to find the copyright holder to get permission to use it, so we'll just go ahead and digitize it and put it up on the Net, and if the copyright holder objects, they can tell us to take it down, no harm, no foul, right?" is going to be about as much legal protection as tissue-paper body armor when it gets to the courts.
That was the aspect of the 3D presentation that I appreciated most about Cameron's use of the technology -- without the "See? This is 3-D!" throw-into-your-face schtick older 3D movies used, it made the movie feel as if I was looking through a window at Pandora.
That's right -the TSA has admitted that binary explosives are essentially impossible to pull off, and yet they still insist on on the totally pointless liquid restrictions.
That's likely because, as was demonstrated by this incompetent in miniature, even an improperly-mixed binary explosive, if in sufficient quantity, can cause a fire in the cabin that will compromise the safety of the passengers -- depressurization, fumes from the fire, fumes from upholstery, etc.
Shermans took on T-34's in Korea. It didn't turn out too well for the North.
M4A3E8 "Easy Eight", M4A4, and M4A6 Shermans took on T-34/85s in Korea. The availability of tungsten-core rounds swung the balance to the Sherman; the T-34/85 had a better gun and was lower, the Sherman was a little better armored and more comfortable to be in. Go back to WWII, and it tips to the Russians. The T-34/76c was superior all around to the M4 or M4A1 Sherman, except in comfort and communications; the Sherman's thinner armor and short 75mm gun were significant design flaws, especially in having gas-driven engines.
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We have social mobility, not a social lottery.
Unfortunately, all too often, equality of opportunity is measured by equality of results.
The missile, when fired in a swarm (group of 4-8) has a unique guidance mode. One of the weapons climbs to a higher altitude and designates targets while the others attack. The missile responsible for target designation climbs in short pop-ups, so as to be harder to intercept. The missiles are linked by data connections, forming a network. Missiles are able to differentiate targets, detect groups and prioritize targets automatically using information gathered during flight and types of ships and battle formations pre-programmed in an onboard computer. They will attack targets in order of priority, highest to lowest: after destroying the first target, remaining missiles will attack the next prioritized target.
Ghu, I would have hated to have had to model that behavior for the chaff launcher training software I wrote back around 1980 or so...
In comparison, lets consider an ancient ballistic missile...
Reading that gave me a vision of the ancient Greeks launching a Polaris missile at one another. Spar-taaaans! You will set 1-MQ to missile firing! Designate target package Athens! Spin up missiles I-VI and VII-XII! Commence hover maneuver and stand by to rain fire on our enemies! HA-OU! HA-OU! HA-OU!
Well, you do remember King Leonidas kicking the Persian emissary into the missile silo in "300", don't you?
According to the Wikipedia entry for the BrahMos, its payload capacity is 300kg, 1/10 the missile's mass, giving it about 3/5 of the Tomahawk's payload capacity while weighing twice as much. Its range is also only 290km, while the Tomahawk has a range of 2,500km. So not only do you have to carry around twice as much missile, but you have to get eight times as close to use it. I expect that the primary purpose of the BrahMos is similar to that of the P-270 Moskit (NATO SS-N-22 Sunburn), which is to have an extremely fast missile that passes through the engagement zone of a target too fast to allow effective engagement by hard- and soft-kill systems.
In many countries the police are obliged to protect you; and the name (and US motto) would suggest it.
The problem is that it's not practical to impose an obligation of protection on the police. Someone coshes you over the head, takes your wallet and watch, and runs off; if there isn't a police officer right there, there's nothing they can do to 'protect' you. And that's why self-defense must be an individual right and responsibility -- you are the only person you know is always going to be there to act in your defense.
What about an individual's right to defend him/herself? Call the cops. It works very well for us.
Which is a good and noble concept... except that the police are under no obligation to provide protection to any given individual. See Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap., 1981). Two women were upstairs in a townhouse when they heard their roommate, a third woman, being attacked downstairs by intruders. They phoned the police several times and were assured that officers were on the way. After about 30 minutes, when their roommate's screams had stopped, they assumed the police had finally arrived. When the two women went downstairs they saw that in fact the police never came, but the intruders were still there. As the Warren court graphically states in the opinion: "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers." The three women sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them, but D.C.'s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen."
Or Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005). Jessica Gonzales had a restraining order against her estranged husband Simon limiting his access to their three children. He abducted them, and Gonzales repeatedly phoned the police for assistance. Officers visited the home. Believing Simon to be non-violent and, arguably, in compliance with the limited access granted by the restraining order, the police did nothing. She sued the Castle Rock police department and won a judgement of $30,000,000. By a vote of 7-to-2, the Supreme Court ruled that Gonzales has no right to sue her local police department for failing to protect her and her children from her estranged husband; the local officials had presented a history of court decisions that found the police to have no constitutional obligation to protect individuals from private individuals. In 1856, the U.S. Supreme Court (South v. Maryland) found that law enforcement officers had no affirmative duty to provide such protection. In 1982 (Bowers v. DeVito), the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit held, "...there is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen."
It works very well for you? Try suing the police for failing to protect you if you get robbed, assaulted, or burgled, and see just how much responsibility the courts say the police actually have to protect you.
I have gotten fuel efficiency of 53 miles per gallon driving a 1983 Honda Civic FE hatchback on segments of a trip from San Diego to Portland carrying two people and luggage; design of the engine, drivetrain, and vehicle plays a part, but so does your driving patterns -- look at what hypermiling can do, for example.
That font and type quality on the box is NOT Intel ... too fuzzy, like a cheap screen printer was used. When you are making thousands of boxes at a time, you can use better printers..
Particularly telling is the fact that the 'art' for the 'Factory Sealed' tape is printed on the box; on genuine boxes, and even the demo ones, it's part of the tape, so you have to damage it peeling it off the box. Having it all printed on the box means that whoever faked this doesn't have to pay for a second production of the special tape; they can use ordinary plastic tape cut to fit. That alone, much less the typos that any proofreading by Intel would have caught before the masters were approved for printing, scream 'deliberate fake'.
The Constitution requires only two things: Just compensation and a taking for a public purpose. Your property can be taken and folded into a public park. The approaches to a bridge.
Or, as has been thrashed out recently in court, in order to hand it over to a developer who will build a privately-owned and -funded mall or housing development, as long as it will bring in more taxes than what you're paying on your property.
It's more effective if you just take a hit from an Oxygen tank.
Why try to jam the O2 into your drink?
And, in response to this insightful observation, we will see drinking establishments combining with oxygen bars, with the added boost to income since, after Last Call, they will be able to continue to sell oxygen shots to the customers before they stagger out the door, the oxygen not being an intoxicating beverage.
I hope whomever it is has a lawyer who will rip their head off and shit in their neck.
Isn't that how they get more lawyers, though? That would seem to be counterproductive.
Memories of Jar Jar sounds like a fragrance that George Lucas would put on the market.
If it's the aroma of a smoking pile of ash tinged with the roast-pork smell of burned flesh, it would probably sell strongly, if only for the humor value.
This is exactly what I think will happen with books: nobody wants to set out to deliberately kill paper books but in the future I would imagine that only very popular "classic" books will end up in physical, high quality bindings and that the cheap paperback novels of today will be replaced by electronic media simply because eBooks are cheaper to make and more convenient.
And it will revitalize the market for fiction by eliminating the compression of the midlist -- authors whose books sell consistently but not rapidly. Because e-books don't have to compete for physical rack space in stores against 'blockbusters' and have no inventory costs, e-books by authors can remain "in print" from their publication date until their copyright expires.
The same also applies for scholarly works, which generally have low print runs because of their slow sales and high inventory costs; e-books will allow a work to remain available indefinitely, and on-demand printing will be able to satisfy needs for an actual physical book.
Take an appropriately-shaped block of wood, screen-print a keyboard layout on it, put the film on top, and you have a keyboard with no moving parts.
More generally, since this is being described as something you can put over an existing display (and therefore must be transparent), you can make a programmable keypad device where the touch-surface film is on a transparent plate, under which can be slid a template laying out what the 'buttons' are; because you would be able to define the position and dimensions (and, with sufficient sophistication of the drivers, shape), you could make the keypad layout whatever you wanted, with buttons of different sizes and orientations. Look at the Steelseries Zboard gaming keyboard; you get a customized keyboard layout by replacing the top of the keyboard with a new key panel. Consider how much easier it would be for a company to be able to release a cardstock insert to go under the sensor surface (where it won't get grimed and worn in use) and a layout configuration file than to manufacture an entire custom keyboard face. Crank it up another notch, and put a display panel in place of the insert, and you get something that can compete with the Optimus Maximus keyboard for customizability at what I expect to be a much lower price point.
Have a look at this post. There's a nice PDF there that will break down costs for you. The short answer to your question is that printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with, and e-books have new costs associated with them. Also given that e-books don't gain us any market-share (rather, it displaces market share we already had), and that we still have to do all of the traditional production alongside the new stuff, e-books really cost us more to make, at least at the moment. Oh, and it should be reiterated-- Amazon takes a huge cut. That ads a lot of cost to a book. To make a $20 paper book into a $9.99 e-book isn't so simple as cutting out the printing and distribution part and then selling the book without those costs. Maybe if we had our own platform.
Looking at "printing and distribution aren't a large part of the cost of a book to begin with", the PDF linked to in the posting gives $0.321, the single biggest piece, as "all manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to distribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits." So basically the linked PDF tells us nothing about how much of the costs will go down by eliminating a) paper costs, b) printing, c) storage, and d) distribution; the only quantifiable reduction is the elimination of the $.013 shipping costs. We have no way to tell what the printing and distribution costs are, except for your unsupported assertion, and the documentation you cite provides no actual information to support your claim.
As for "we still have to do all the traditional production alongside the new stuff", consider that, unless you're still seriously mired in decades-old typesetting, the books you are publishing are edited electronically and sent to the printing machines electronically; the "new stuff" consists of a single conversion program that takes the electronic format you use for editing and proofing and converts it to the e-book format you're going to be distributing; dragging the file icon to copy the final edited version to the fileserver where a batch process will automatically read new files, convert them, and send them to whoever is responsible for emailing a single file per book to the end seller is, after all, such a massive investment of time and effort. But, looking at the trail from the finished electronic version to the end product, an e-book exists only as a data file, whereas a DTE book still has to be printed and bound, then boxed, and stored until shipped to a bookstore.
And don't forget returns. In a piece on NPR last year, Mr. Jed Lyons, President and Chief Operating Officer at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, part of the National Book Network, stated that roughly 25% of what they ship comes back as unsold. Now, this excludes paperbacks, which are stripped by the store and destroyed because they're not worth shipping back to be redistributed, but this whole flap with MacMillan is over new titles, which would presumably be hardback. All your costs for returns disappear for e-books; since the seller only gets one 'master', and that's electronic, there is nothing to return; the bigger the fraction of e-books a publisher sells, the smaller the number of employees they have to hire to handle returns; another cost that isn't broken out in the PDF you cite -- there is a cost on the part of the store for personnel costs for various functions, some of which (shelving, returns, pricing) go away or are severely reduced by e-books, but nothing broken out on the publisher's side.
'Moving into e-books is risky'. I think that you're greatly mistaken; e-books is perhaps the biggest opportunity for publishers that has come along in decades; adopting e-books means that the compression of the midlist, where authors whos
I think he's saying it's a step backwards because they are taking, what is essentially a tablet computer, and 100% locking it down to only do what Apple explicitly allows.
Don't forget that Apple is also locking down the carrier by introducing a SIM card with a new form factor -- GSM SIM cards are 15x25mm, but the SIM inside the iPad is 12x15mm -- which means that you can't just download a software hack and jailbreak your iPad to use another carrier; because the GSMA isn't pushing conversion to the new form-factor, you're hardware-locked into getting service from AT&T. "Here's this wonderful tool; you can use any application you want from the ones we've approved for you to use, and you can get your 3G service from any one of the single provider who offers SIM cards small enough to fit in its socket. But we're not trying to control how you use your iPad... honest."
The Google settlement sound remarkably reasonably actually.
If you don't like what Google is doing to "your property", then you send them a "Cease and Desist" letter.
Isn't this the literary equivalent of the same thing that the CRIA is being sued over -- the creation of the "pending list", where instead of having to get a license from the copyright holder before they used their music, they would go ahead and use the song without waiting for authorization or making payment, adding the song to a list of music that is 'pending authorization and payment'? "Yes, there's a valid copyright on this work, but it's too much trouble for us to find the copyright holder to get permission to use it, so we'll just go ahead and digitize it and put it up on the Net, and if the copyright holder objects, they can tell us to take it down, no harm, no foul, right?" is going to be about as much legal protection as tissue-paper body armor when it gets to the courts.
NoScript will also block it, and if you configure it to block by default, Tynt's code will never execute unless you specifically permit it.
That was the aspect of the 3D presentation that I appreciated most about Cameron's use of the technology -- without the "See? This is 3-D!" throw-into-your-face schtick older 3D movies used, it made the movie feel as if I was looking through a window at Pandora.
The various plot elements -- such as they are -- have been used over and over again in fiction. Dark Roasted Blend had an entire "issue" devoted to ten possible sources for Avatar from Science Fiction.
That's right -the TSA has admitted that binary explosives are essentially impossible to pull off, and yet they still insist on on the totally pointless liquid restrictions.
That's likely because, as was demonstrated by this incompetent in miniature, even an improperly-mixed binary explosive, if in sufficient quantity, can cause a fire in the cabin that will compromise the safety of the passengers -- depressurization, fumes from the fire, fumes from upholstery, etc.
The thing I find most amusing is that scientists used to be branded as heretics. Now certain groups of them are going the branding.
"You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about global climate change."
"The proton absorbs a photon and emits two morons, a lepton, a boson, and a boson's mate." ... Why did I ever take high-energy physics?
I agree; that rendering is amazingly Gigeresque.
Shermans took on T-34's in Korea. It didn't turn out too well for the North.
M4A3E8 "Easy Eight", M4A4, and M4A6 Shermans took on T-34/85s in Korea. The availability of tungsten-core rounds swung the balance to the Sherman; the T-34/85 had a better gun and was lower, the Sherman was a little better armored and more comfortable to be in. Go back to WWII, and it tips to the Russians. The T-34/76c was superior all around to the M4 or M4A1 Sherman, except in comfort and communications; the Sherman's thinner armor and short 75mm gun were significant design flaws, especially in having gas-driven engines.