Hmm. Large gas-filled object, presumably with a not overly-thick skin to keep the weight down. Ground based laser of sufficient power to pop a hole in the giant balloon.
Yeah, this is gonna work real well.
You are aware that an airship's lift cells are pressurized to barely over atmospheric pressure, don't you? That the lift comes from the volume of gas being less dense than the atmosphere, not from pressure? Take a plastic shopping bag, shake it open, then squeeze the open end closed with your hand. Now poke the inflated bag with a needle. See how violently the bag ruptures? Oh, wait -- it doesn't do that at all; you just get a leak.
Go back and read how hard it was for Allied fighter pilots in WWI to take down German dirigibles and observation balloons; because they were filled with hydrogen, they would have to shoot holes in the balloon, then fly back and fire tracers or incendiary bullets through the plume of escaping hydrogen gas coming out the holes they'd shot. But airships lifted by helium don't have that weakness, so the problem would be limited to patching holes.
The Germans had a fairly limited range of ammunition that was used in WWII; while different types of weapons used different ammunition (at least partially an artifact of the way that weapon design was evolving -- the StG 44 being the ancestor of the modern military assault rifle, for example). In comparison, the Japanese army during WWII issued rifles firing, IIRC, seven different and incompatible cartridges (three different 7.7mm cartridges, for example: 7.6x56R, 7.7x58R (semi-rimless), and 7.7x58 (rimless)). Toward the end of the war there were quite a number of cases where Japanese units made banzai charges with bayonet and sword where the US troops found them to have had ample supplies of ammunition of the wrong type.
It's both fascinating and sad how technology and warfare has been intertwined from the very dawn of man.
Although it has in some ways stifled the range of innovation. The best case in point is to look at air races from the periods before and after WWII. Before WWII, aeronautical engineers produced aircraft of widely-varying designs chasing the goal of producing the fastest planes; after the war, and even up to the present, the vast majority of aircraft competing were either WWII fighters or relatively minor variations on a WWII fighter airframe (i.e., the modified F8F Bearcat that set the world air speed record in 1969).
Unless team facebook is a bunch of utter morons, they knew that changing the TOS was likely to cause a stir(and, even if it didn't, it would cost a few lawyer hours). So, clearly, they had some reason for wanting to make the change. I'm guessing that that reason, whatever it is, didn't just vanish.
If the reason for the change was to prevent them from having to do something manpower-intensive whenever a user leaves and closes their page, I can see the reason for it, but the TOS change was worded badly. For example, Facebook makes an advertising image that is a montage of user pages, one of which is User X's page. User X closes their Facebook page and deletes their content. Under the old TOS, Facebook would have to go through all of their promotional material every time a user left to make sure none of it contained any of that user's content. But a statement like "You grant Facebook the right to use your uploaded content for promotional purposes; if you remove your content, Facebook is not obligated to remove existing promotional material that incorporates the deleted content, but may not create new promotional materials with that content" is probably too clear for lawyers to be happy with; if the average person could understand all the material in a contract, we wouldn't need anywhere near as many lawyers, and they'd have to go find real jobs.
Part of the problem is entitlement programs, the problem being that, regardless of tax revenues, the government is required to spend fixed amounts for each person or other entity qualifying for the program. It doesn't matter whether those obligations exceed revenues; the recipient is 'entitled' to the money (hence the name). I remember reading some years ago how Ahh-nold, if he completely cut everything in the California budget that he could control funding for, would only reduce the state budget by 10%. And as long as a government is able to establish an obligation to pay out funds whether or not it has taken in enough funds to meet those obligations, we're going to get situations like this. But those entitlement programs are sacred cows, and few politicians are willing to face the backlash from making the truly hard choices, instead ignoring what the economic conditions are doing to the taxpayers and ratcheting up taxes to cover those entitlement programs, even though the citizenry they're increasing taxes on are, on the whole, earning less money, so the taxes have to be increased more to account for them being in a lower tax bracket, which drives their net economic situation even further down.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the problem of getting people to acknowledge the EULA before opening the door to enter the store. "Microsoft makes no warranty of the usability of this store for any purpose, express or implied, and assumes no liability thereof..." (completely covering the door, printed in Flyspeck 3)
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do. BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
In fact, as a terror weapon, you'd be better off taking the bomb's worth of uranium/plutonium, grinding it into a powder, and putting it in a sheath around a large conventional bomb that you detonate in an urban area, such as Manhattan. The actual radiation level isn't going to kill many people, but the knee-jerk fear of radiation is going to create a reaction out of all proportion to the actual threat.
As I understand it from reading the various map-developers' forums, there can be only one enemy intelligence object at a time. However, it is possible to create a series of captures by setting up the action that occurs when the enemy intelligence is secured to respawn the intelligence at the 'next' flag point, with the game objective for captures being set to require a capture from each intel spawn in turn.
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
It's a pity that your handwave of the "Tesla looked at this a century ago" opinion falls so flat by proving that you, yourself, did not RTFA, or you would have seen the third paragraph of the article, which states "Intriguing as this might be, we have no plans to pursue intellectual property for this discovery. The concept of using resonant coils to wirelessly couple power was patented by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago." Shooting your argument in the foot by demonstrating that you are a member of the population you rail against does little for your credibility.
The value of this ability to link views is going to be pretty minimal at first unless they plan on pulling data from sites like www.archive.org, since an application like this relies on having the archived data to be able to show the changes over time, and without linking into or hoovering an existing internet archive, they'll never be able to take you back earlier than they first started saving websites. But over time it will get more valuable.
I thought lace cards were what you stuck in the decks of other people in the computer lab, not your own. Kind of like "How many med students does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
As I recall, the most entertainment with punchcards wasn't slipping lace cards into someone else's deck, but in taking blank cards, punching them as an 80-column 'DUP' field, and sticking them onto the program drums of the IBM 029 keypunch machines, then flipping the program mode switch to 'ON'. An unsuspecting user sitting down to punch out some cards for their FORTRAN program without noticing either the program card or the switch position would punch their first card normally, then as soon as it registered the card under the read station it would start duplicating the first card as fast as the punch would run -- and then feed the duplicate to the read station and repeat the process until the user either flipped off the program switch or pulled the blank cards out of the hopper.
More accurately, it is on a device that allows the restaurant to present one bill to the table, then have the individual patrons at the table enter payments by credit card against the bill total, rather than the restaurant breaking the bill up into individual bills for each patron, then (presumably) handling each bill by hand, which ties up server/cashier time. If I could go to a restaurant and then present a bill to the restaurant when I'm finished eating, I'd eat out a lot more often.
As an artist myself I've often wanted to draw on the computer too. I've never suceeded.
It sounds as if something like Wacom's Cintiq display tablets would be more useful to you, since you would be using the stylus to draw directly on the display and have the stroke appear to be coming from the point of the stylus.
Unfortunately, equality of opportunity is all too frequently measured by equality of results. If only 10% of the technical IT workforce are women, then there is, ipso facto, a barrier to the entry of women that has to be torn down.
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
Software publishers will never put the full EULA on the outside of the box. Most software, particularly game software, relies on catch-the-eye packaging to attract customers as it sits on the shelf, and having a box with no bright, colorful art on the front because, except for the product name, the entire front, back, top, bottom, and sides are covered with 6-point text to get the entire EULA on the outside of the box isn't going draw the eye.
The only problem with the Spore uninstall removing SecuROM is that other software installed on your computer may also incorporate SecuROM for its DRM -- other EA titles in particular. However, while looking for methods of manually uninstalling SecuROM, I found several references claiming that if you remove SecuROM from your computer without uninstalling the software that uses it, the software will automatically reinstall SecuROM the next time it is run. Which addresses the problem of a full Spore uninstall bricking other software by uninstalling SecuROM, but doesn't address the problem of having an unwanted rootkit on your system.
... and was wondering if the extra detail of hi-res would just provide lots of little details to remind me that I'm looking at a fake situation.
Do you think hi-res will force film-makers to increase their attention to detail?
From what I remember reading, the first industry to be hit by this was the porn producers; the increased definition from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray showed up every blemish and pimple on the performers, causing most of the production companies to stop releasing in the new formats until they started doing post-processing to digitally eliminate any 'defects' that could detract from the presentation. So now, if the porn actresses seem even more plastic and unnatural than in older videos, it may not be entirely due to the deft hands of plastic surgeons.
This technology is equivalent to having hundreds of thousands (millions) of officers watching the public highways and recording the every license plate. Included are also the clerks collecting the notes and able to search through them in seconds.
No society could afford this many policemen — the cameras and the computers are productivity tools, just as they are in the offices or at industrial facilities.
The old adage is, police can solve any crime, but not every crime — for lack of resources.
The real question is, do we want to increase the ratio of solved crimes (up to 100%) — as the technology may allow us to do? Or do we want to allow some transgressions unpunished to allow some "breathing room" for future fighters against some hypothetical tyranny?
This issue is examined in the first three stories in David Drake's 1986 anthology Lacey and His Friends -- a dystopian society where surveillance is omnipresent by law, and most crimes are solved by bringing up the surveillance video of the crime to identify the culprit, with the most sophisticated crimes requiring tracing through chains of surveillance by dedicated personnel. It's well worth reading if you can find a copy.
There are many better solutions than lugging around an iphone while you run. Not to mention the cost of it all.
Actually, the Nike+ site has it connecting to either their own sport bracelet or an iPod Nano, not an iPhone.
However, since, also from the Nike site, Nike is selling the accelerometer and iPod connector completely separate from the "Nike+" shoe line (i.e., you can buy the package without buying a pair of shoes for it to be fitted into), I think that if Apple is having any heartburn about people buying the package and using it with *gasp* non-Nike shoes, then they need to negotiate a better deal with Nike, because it's clear Nike's out to make a profit on the hardware, whether or not they're buying them for Nike's own shoe line.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Large gas-filled object, presumably with a not overly-thick skin to keep the weight down. Ground based laser of sufficient power to pop a hole in the giant balloon.
Yeah, this is gonna work real well.
You are aware that an airship's lift cells are pressurized to barely over atmospheric pressure, don't you? That the lift comes from the volume of gas being less dense than the atmosphere, not from pressure? Take a plastic shopping bag, shake it open, then squeeze the open end closed with your hand. Now poke the inflated bag with a needle. See how violently the bag ruptures? Oh, wait -- it doesn't do that at all; you just get a leak.
Go back and read how hard it was for Allied fighter pilots in WWI to take down German dirigibles and observation balloons; because they were filled with hydrogen, they would have to shoot holes in the balloon, then fly back and fire tracers or incendiary bullets through the plume of escaping hydrogen gas coming out the holes they'd shot. But airships lifted by helium don't have that weakness, so the problem would be limited to patching holes.
The Germans had a fairly limited range of ammunition that was used in WWII; while different types of weapons used different ammunition (at least partially an artifact of the way that weapon design was evolving -- the StG 44 being the ancestor of the modern military assault rifle, for example). In comparison, the Japanese army during WWII issued rifles firing, IIRC, seven different and incompatible cartridges (three different 7.7mm cartridges, for example: 7.6x56R, 7.7x58R (semi-rimless), and 7.7x58 (rimless)). Toward the end of the war there were quite a number of cases where Japanese units made banzai charges with bayonet and sword where the US troops found them to have had ample supplies of ammunition of the wrong type.
It's both fascinating and sad how technology and warfare has been intertwined from the very dawn of man.
Although it has in some ways stifled the range of innovation. The best case in point is to look at air races from the periods before and after WWII. Before WWII, aeronautical engineers produced aircraft of widely-varying designs chasing the goal of producing the fastest planes; after the war, and even up to the present, the vast majority of aircraft competing were either WWII fighters or relatively minor variations on a WWII fighter airframe (i.e., the modified F8F Bearcat that set the world air speed record in 1969).
Unless team facebook is a bunch of utter morons, they knew that changing the TOS was likely to cause a stir(and, even if it didn't, it would cost a few lawyer hours). So, clearly, they had some reason for wanting to make the change. I'm guessing that that reason, whatever it is, didn't just vanish.
If the reason for the change was to prevent them from having to do something manpower-intensive whenever a user leaves and closes their page, I can see the reason for it, but the TOS change was worded badly. For example, Facebook makes an advertising image that is a montage of user pages, one of which is User X's page. User X closes their Facebook page and deletes their content. Under the old TOS, Facebook would have to go through all of their promotional material every time a user left to make sure none of it contained any of that user's content. But a statement like "You grant Facebook the right to use your uploaded content for promotional purposes; if you remove your content, Facebook is not obligated to remove existing promotional material that incorporates the deleted content, but may not create new promotional materials with that content" is probably too clear for lawyers to be happy with; if the average person could understand all the material in a contract, we wouldn't need anywhere near as many lawyers, and they'd have to go find real jobs.
Part of the problem is entitlement programs, the problem being that, regardless of tax revenues, the government is required to spend fixed amounts for each person or other entity qualifying for the program. It doesn't matter whether those obligations exceed revenues; the recipient is 'entitled' to the money (hence the name). I remember reading some years ago how Ahh-nold, if he completely cut everything in the California budget that he could control funding for, would only reduce the state budget by 10%. And as long as a government is able to establish an obligation to pay out funds whether or not it has taken in enough funds to meet those obligations, we're going to get situations like this. But those entitlement programs are sacred cows, and few politicians are willing to face the backlash from making the truly hard choices, instead ignoring what the economic conditions are doing to the taxpayers and ratcheting up taxes to cover those entitlement programs, even though the citizenry they're increasing taxes on are, on the whole, earning less money, so the taxes have to be increased more to account for them being in a lower tax bracket, which drives their net economic situation even further down.
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the problem of getting people to acknowledge the EULA before opening the door to enter the store. "Microsoft makes no warranty of the usability of this store for any purpose, express or implied, and assumes no liability thereof..." (completely covering the door, printed in Flyspeck 3)
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do.
BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
In fact, as a terror weapon, you'd be better off taking the bomb's worth of uranium/plutonium, grinding it into a powder, and putting it in a sheath around a large conventional bomb that you detonate in an urban area, such as Manhattan. The actual radiation level isn't going to kill many people, but the knee-jerk fear of radiation is going to create a reaction out of all proportion to the actual threat.
As I understand it from reading the various map-developers' forums, there can be only one enemy intelligence object at a time. However, it is possible to create a series of captures by setting up the action that occurs when the enemy intelligence is secured to respawn the intelligence at the 'next' flag point, with the game objective for captures being set to require a capture from each intel spawn in turn.
And it's not really a sector not found error, it's just your hard drive being cleared...
Of course, this being Slashdot, it's not surprising that most posters never RTFAed and post nonsense "it's just like an inductive transformer" (nope, those don't use resonance) or "it's just like an antenna" (nope, that is radiative transfer) or "Tesla looked at this a century ago" (nope, people like Tesla were concerned with power transfer over long distances, which necessitates radiative mechanisms and hence low efficiency).
It's a pity that your handwave of the "Tesla looked at this a century ago" opinion falls so flat by proving that you, yourself, did not RTFA, or you would have seen the third paragraph of the article, which states "Intriguing as this might be, we have no plans to pursue intellectual property for this discovery. The concept of using resonant coils to wirelessly couple power was patented by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago." Shooting your argument in the foot by demonstrating that you are a member of the population you rail against does little for your credibility.
And the "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" fallacy.
The value of this ability to link views is going to be pretty minimal at first unless they plan on pulling data from sites like www.archive.org, since an application like this relies on having the archived data to be able to show the changes over time, and without linking into or hoovering an existing internet archive, they'll never be able to take you back earlier than they first started saving websites. But over time it will get more valuable.
I thought lace cards were what you stuck in the decks of other people in the computer lab, not your own. Kind of like "How many med students does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
As I recall, the most entertainment with punchcards wasn't slipping lace cards into someone else's deck, but in taking blank cards, punching them as an 80-column 'DUP' field, and sticking them onto the program drums of the IBM 029 keypunch machines, then flipping the program mode switch to 'ON'. An unsuspecting user sitting down to punch out some cards for their FORTRAN program without noticing either the program card or the switch position would punch their first card normally, then as soon as it registered the card under the read station it would start duplicating the first card as fast as the punch would run -- and then feed the duplicate to the read station and repeat the process until the user either flipped off the program switch or pulled the blank cards out of the hopper.
More accurately, it is on a device that allows the restaurant to present one bill to the table, then have the individual patrons at the table enter payments by credit card against the bill total, rather than the restaurant breaking the bill up into individual bills for each patron, then (presumably) handling each bill by hand, which ties up server/cashier time. If I could go to a restaurant and then present a bill to the restaurant when I'm finished eating, I'd eat out a lot more often.
As an artist myself I've often wanted to draw on the computer too. I've never suceeded.
It sounds as if something like Wacom's Cintiq display tablets would be more useful to you, since you would be using the stylus to draw directly on the display and have the stroke appear to be coming from the point of the stylus.
Unfortunately, equality of opportunity is all too frequently measured by equality of results. If only 10% of the technical IT workforce are women, then there is, ipso facto, a barrier to the entry of women that has to be torn down.
Given that the effective useful life for flash memory in thumbdrives seems to vary between 10,000 and 100,000 write cycles, what does this bode for the long-term performance of SSDs as the primary mass storage device, particularly for, say, the dedicated swap space for the OS? Any computing that hits the swap space heavily is going to be thrashing the lifespan of the drive. SSDs can be faster and have lower power consumption, but if you have to replace them more often, they're going to have to be cheaper than platter drives to make them better.
...and when you got home each night, your dad would kill you and dance about on your grave singing "Hallelujah!"...
Entertainment Weekly has an eight-page article with pictures about the movie, as well.
Software publishers will never put the full EULA on the outside of the box. Most software, particularly game software, relies on catch-the-eye packaging to attract customers as it sits on the shelf, and having a box with no bright, colorful art on the front because, except for the product name, the entire front, back, top, bottom, and sides are covered with 6-point text to get the entire EULA on the outside of the box isn't going draw the eye.
The only problem with the Spore uninstall removing SecuROM is that other software installed on your computer may also incorporate SecuROM for its DRM -- other EA titles in particular. However, while looking for methods of manually uninstalling SecuROM, I found several references claiming that if you remove SecuROM from your computer without uninstalling the software that uses it, the software will automatically reinstall SecuROM the next time it is run. Which addresses the problem of a full Spore uninstall bricking other software by uninstalling SecuROM, but doesn't address the problem of having an unwanted rootkit on your system.
The first rule about Apps Store is, you do not talk about Apps Store.
... and was wondering if the extra detail of hi-res would just provide lots of little details to remind me that I'm looking at a fake situation.
Do you think hi-res will force film-makers to increase their attention to detail?
From what I remember reading, the first industry to be hit by this was the porn producers; the increased definition from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray showed up every blemish and pimple on the performers, causing most of the production companies to stop releasing in the new formats until they started doing post-processing to digitally eliminate any 'defects' that could detract from the presentation. So now, if the porn actresses seem even more plastic and unnatural than in older videos, it may not be entirely due to the deft hands of plastic surgeons.
This technology is equivalent to having hundreds of thousands (millions) of officers watching the public highways and recording the every license plate. Included are also the clerks collecting the notes and able to search through them in seconds.
No society could afford this many policemen — the cameras and the computers are productivity tools, just as they are in the offices or at industrial facilities.
The old adage is, police can solve any crime, but not every crime — for lack of resources.
The real question is, do we want to increase the ratio of solved crimes (up to 100%) — as the technology may allow us to do? Or do we want to allow some transgressions unpunished to allow some "breathing room" for future fighters against some hypothetical tyranny?
This issue is examined in the first three stories in David Drake's 1986 anthology Lacey and His Friends -- a dystopian society where surveillance is omnipresent by law, and most crimes are solved by bringing up the surveillance video of the crime to identify the culprit, with the most sophisticated crimes requiring tracing through chains of surveillance by dedicated personnel. It's well worth reading if you can find a copy.
There are many better solutions than lugging around an iphone while you run. Not to mention the cost of it all.
Actually, the Nike+ site has it connecting to either their own sport bracelet or an iPod Nano, not an iPhone.
However, since, also from the Nike site, Nike is selling the accelerometer and iPod connector completely separate from the "Nike+" shoe line (i.e., you can buy the package without buying a pair of shoes for it to be fitted into), I think that if Apple is having any heartburn about people buying the package and using it with *gasp* non-Nike shoes, then they need to negotiate a better deal with Nike, because it's clear Nike's out to make a profit on the hardware, whether or not they're buying them for Nike's own shoe line.
"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?"