Re:could be safer than rolercoaster
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Robocoaster
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I was thinking this would be the ultimate in "Force Feedback" for games. A lot of types of games could be enhanced with this type of device, until your box crashed and it tries to plant you in the floor.
Raises 'blue screen of death' to a whole new level of meaning.
As an aside, though, I'm not sure how effective it will be at replacing rollercoasters for a number of reasons.
First, it takes up an 11x12m space for every two people on the ride at one time; a typical rollercoaster will have twenty to forty people on one train, often with more than one train running at one time. The experience of running the coaster with twenty other people is different from being on a ride with at most one other person, and I believe that the group experience is part of the attraction. Certainly the Robocoaster will be hard-put to simulate being thrown upward into a loop as another coaster train roars through the middle of the loop, or diving into a tunnel and popping back up. The experience of weaving around and through scenery and other parts of the coaster track is going to be almost impossible to duplicate.
Second, it does not look as if the Robocoaster will be able to simulate the sustained G forces that you can experience on a rollercoaster. I would expect that the design limits of an industrial robot would not permit swinging riders at speeds sufficient to produce the same G forces that can be attained with a rollercoaster, and the short moment arm of the robot would contribute significantly to disorientation and nausea compared to a standard coaster.
Third, from the design, it's clear that the Robocoaster will require continuous power delivery throughout the duration of the ride; a rollercoaster uses power in the lift, brakes, and thrust sections, with the train running on momentum after it departs the lift. I suspect that the power usage of the Robocoaster will exceed the power usage for running the same number of people through a conventional coaster, which would raise the operating costs. On the other hand, the Robocoaster would not have to worry that brake failure might allow two trains to collide.
Fourth, operating a group of Robocoasters to achieve a similar rider throughput as a conventional coaster will require many times the personnel. With a conventional coaster, a single dispatcher and one attendant per ten passengers is all that is required to man a coaster station, but with several Robocoasters, the ride's footprint is such that a single attendant would only be able to handle passengers at, at most, two units, and safety regulations would limit the number of units that a single dispatcher could supervise.
I don't think that the Robocoaster is necessarily going to be a failure, but there are enough aspects of a conventional coaster that it can't duplicate would appear to put the Robocoaster into a specialty niche in thrill rides, competing with but not directly against conventional coasters.
Yes, the founding fathers wanted to ensure citizens had access to "Muzzle loaded, smoothbore, single shot flintlocks" or in other words "the most advanced, deadly, military grade weapons the world had ever known". hell, you could own a cannon if you wanted. The 2nd amendment states "arms" after all not guns.
The British Army was equipped with smoothbore muskets, because they were easier to load than rifled weapons, and the massed infantry tactics of the period meant that the accuracy of individual soldiers was not important. The Minutemen were more likely to have rifled weapons, because a rifled weapon is more accurate, which is a primary consideration when you're using the weapon to hunt for food. The civilian soldiers of the Revolutionary Army often had weapons that were more advanced than the professional British Army.
So guns are there to ensure the army can call up the citizenry in time of war? Simple solution. If you own a gun, you can be drafted at will. If you don't own one, you can never be called up.
Let's see which way you rant about your right to own a gun when you're being shipped off to Iraq.
If you look at the law, the militia cannot legally be deployed outside the boundaries of the United States. This got argued up to the US Supreme Court back during Desert Storm, when National Guard units were deployed to the Middle East. Several state governments filed suit to stop the deployment, claiming that the National Guard was the militia, and could not be sent beyond our borders; the Court ruled that the National Guard was part of the standing military forces of the country, and could be deployed like any other part of the military. This also shot dead -- for those who bother to look at facts the argument that the 2nd Amendment allowed the formation of the National Guard, since the Guard isn't a militia.
The essence of great science fiction, to me anyways, is taking ordinary people as we know them in real life, then placing them in extraordinary (but still believable) situations. Of course, science and technology should be present, but it shouldn't dominate the story. If you let it upstage the rest of the story, you get garbage like Independence Day (which wasn't even very science-fictional, if you ask me).
It doesn't necessarily have to be ordinary people, nor even believable situations. The universe the characters exist in has to be consistent above all. Look at 'Doc' Smith's Skylark or Lensman series. In neither of them are the situations believable in the light of modern science, and in all of them the main characters are cast from the classic Heroic mold. Or David Drake's Hammer's Slammers universe -- Joachim Steuben, for example, is a seriously bent character, but the stories still work.
I don't think that it is so much whether the author creates believable situations, or that the characters are ordinary people, but that the universe and the characters are consistent -- and that is what makes the story believable. Not any ordinary or extraordinary quality of the characters or the situations they are in, but that the characters exist as consistent beings in a consistent universe. The moment an author starts pulling things out of their hat to either advance or obstruct the main characters, my enjoyment goes downhill fast.
Great science fiction sheds light on the inner workings of what people are like, by showing them in a different light. It serves as a warning about possible futures, examining implications of technologies both good and bad. And perhaps most of all, great science fiction has ideas and themes in it that can survive the test of time.
Science fiction authors are no better at predicting the future of technology than anyone else. Look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones for example -- massive computers that only performed mathematical calculations and needed to have input fed into them in binary, and huge books of conversion tables necessary to convert human-readable numbers back and forth to binary, then plotting by hand. Aside from an ongoing over-optimism about space exploration, I think that that is one of the most glaring examples of how badly the future of technology can be predicted. Other authors point out that technology is changing so fast, and the rate of change is changing so fast, that it will cause a 'phase change' in society, at which point all of our predictions break down (a la Vernor Vinge's 'Singularity').
And there are a number of fundamental limitations in what can be done with science fiction. Take alien races and alien cultures. There is no way to portray a genuinely alien race because, lacking any common referent, neither the human characters nor the readers would have any way to understand them. Alien races and cultures exist as distinct entities to hold up a mirror to reflect certain human characteristics and explore them, or exist as people in rubber suits. For example, other than creating atmosphere, was there really any plot reason for Nien Nub, Admiral Ackbar, or Greedo in the Star Wars movies to be nonhuman? It is another mark of great science fiction that an author can create alien races and cultures that, while possessing enough cognates to human culture that they are not totally enigmatic, are not just humans with bugs on their foreheads. Too many authors confuse 'not looking human' with 'not being human'. An alien race can be a powerful tool to examine or illustrate humanity and human culture, but it has to have its own culture first to create that vantage point.
Naval academy (and the armed forces in general) do not have the same constutional rights while on gov't property / in their facilities as other citizens. They cannot make disparaging remarks about politicians, and other such things we take for granted.
Small point: Military personnel may not make disparaging remarks about politicians, the government, or superior officers in any situation where those remarks may become public knowledge. Bitching about the crap that's been dumped on you, the idiot ninety-day wonder in command of your unit (who couldn't pour piss out of his boot if the instructions were written on the heel), the circus at Fort Fumble (aka the Pentagon), and the rest of Dreamland-on-the-Potomac is a long-standing tradition in the military. But that's all private, inside the family, and stays outside the performance of your duty; they'll come down on you for letting it out in public, and God help you if you actually address your remarks to a member of the media...
Here's an idea: why don't the anal SOB's who want everyone to view their ads place a small "ads.txt" file similar to "robots.txt" which says to the browser or ad blocker "you must view the ads or you are not allowed to view this site". Then we could just tell our browser to not load sites with that file in place, thereby solving the silly "bandwidth theft" problem.
It would be entertaining to modify your User-Agent string to add something like "This user charges $5.00 per window for allowing a site to display pop-up advertising. The creation of pop-up windows shall be considered to constitute acceptance of contract". Since the User-Agent string is sent when your browser requests a web page from a server, the server clearly received notification that you will charge them for employing pop-up ads before the server sends you any content, they have the option of not sending you pop-up ads, sending you pop-up ads and allowing you to bill for displaying them, or declining to provide any content at all, and if they don't check the browser data that closely before they send content back, that's their problem, not yours.
Out of curiousity, how old are you? I'm asking because...
When I was ten or eleven, I hit a reading rate of one 300-400 page midweight (e.g. later Heinlein, Tolkien) book every 40 minutes, approximately. My reading rate increased slightly over the next few years, but when I was a freshman in high school, it began to decline slightly. I thought it might be simply that I spent more time chewing on the thoughts spawned by the words, but...
I'm 43. My absolute reading volume has diminished due to the other things that take up my time -- work, netnews, computer games, etc. -- but my reading speed is still about the same. For fiction, it varies depending on how good the writing is -- if the writing sucks me into the book, the time to finish can be cut almost in half unless I make a deliberate effort to break out of it by stopping to get a glass of water or something every now and then, but I normally don't try to push my reading speed. As an experiment back in high school, I checked out a dozen SF novels from the public library, and was able to return them all read the next day -- which came in useful during college for pre-midterm reviews -- but fine plot details don't stay with me when I push my reading speed up past three or four thousand words per minute, so I don't do it much any more.
Personally, I'm baffled as to why anyone waits for a book they may want to come out in paperback. For something along the lines of a $25 hard cover book, the paperback version may be, at best, $15.
Actually, more like $6-$7.
For me, though, it's a simple question of economics. I buy a 300-page novel, I'll have it finished in two hours, maybe three hours with distractions (yes, my reading speed is that high). After that, unless the author is very good, it's several months before I can reread it and get the same enjoyment from it -- and I do read books over and over again, simply because if I bought enough books to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke. If I have $30 to spend, I can spend it on one hardback and have two hours of entertainment, or spend it on four paperbacks and have eight hours of entertainment. And hardbacks take up more shelf space than paperback.
Right now, I have shelving in my living room that is six shelves high and 12' long filled with paperbacks two books deep -- with more in shelves downstairs and still more in boxes in the garage because I have no shelf space for them. Hardbacks would triple my shelving requirements. For books that I really enjoy, I will often pick up a hardback copy, because of the increased durability of a hardback, but for most fiction I buy, paperbacks are a much better value to me.
Growing up In Alaska, I found it frustrating to have the elections announced before I went to the poles, not just some news station's prediction, but the actual official announcement.
Went to the poles? I thought there was a federal law that set accessibility requirements for polling places; from anywhere in Alaska, visiting both poles is a 25,000 mile round trip minimum. Having to travel that far to vote should be actionable.
Nor do I see a problem with having to register if you own a rifle or handgun. I have to register when I buy a car. Both have the power to kill.
You don't have to register when you purchase a car. Registering a car, and obtaining a license for it, is the documentation of your having paid the tax for the privilege of operating that car on public roads. Any vehicle which is not operated on public thoroughfares does not need registration, does not have to pass smog certification, and requires no license to operate. You can build a race car in your garage, and as long as you tow it from garage to race track, and never actually operate it on a public road (or one that has been specifically designated as private for racing, as is done for various Grand Prix races), you don't have to register it. If you do drive it on a public road, you'll be cited for operating an unregistered vehicle, plus any additional equipment violations the police officer can think of, though.
Re:Remember the Klein-Fogleman!
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Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
After trying to find Klein-Fogleman wing references in Google, I realize that you will need an alternate reference if you can't remember.
It would probably work better if you searched just for 'Fogleman' and 'airfoil'; the inventors were Richard Kline and Floyd Fogleman (note spelling). Here is a link to the results for a Google search on "kline-fogleman". There's not a lot of hard and fast data on it, but there are a number of references.
Just gotta say that in anything that flies, boring is considered a good thing. Excitement can mean something is going very wrong.
What most people do not understand about light aircraft is that the propellor does not actually provide any thrust; it is there to cool the pilot. This is easy to prove -- just watch how much the pilot starts to sweat if it stops.
So the RIAA approves a few crippled download services and the MPAA approves a few crippled download services... so what? Its been done before... failures of Biblical proportions. Why didn't they report that?
Because if the MPAA and RIAA can hide the fact that they've tried it in the past, then they can watch it tank and point to the fact that their download services tanked as prima facie evidence that it's the widespread piracy is what caused it to tank, therefore stricter and more restrictive laws and policies need to be enacted to prevent this flagrant abuse of copyright.
Why does Gillette "need" this item? Am I missing something?
Look back at the post; the RFIDs are for their pallets and cases. From that, it appears that what Gillette is doing is addressing the problem of 'shrinkage' while the products are sitting in warehouses. With RFID tags in the pallets and cases, it means that anyone who wants to 'lose' a few pallets or cases is going to have to tear apart the cases and pallets in order to find and destroy the RFID tags before they can get the product out of the warehouse, or rip open the cases and transfer the product to new packaging, both of which make it hard to disguise that pilfering is going on, and the damaged or nonexistent corp case packages will make it harder to gray-market bulk product.
Sadly, Showscan never caught on as well as IMAX did and the Showscan corporation went into receivership. If you never got to see it, it was extremely impressive: I saw the Niagara Falls film and it's pretty amazing to see single individual drops of water in the Falls in 70mm at 60 fps!
Some years ago, I saw what was probably the only production of its kind -- a Showscan production in Imax at our domed Imax theatre. I had read about some of the problems that the theatre had in getting the system to work -- running an Imax film at 60fps really wrung the projection system out, and they had problems getting the projection system to handle moving the film through that fast.
But the film itself was amazing; the combination of Imax full wrap-around and the Showscan clarity made it something I will remember for a long time. And the fact that I had brought a friend with me who was getting his first exposure to Imax with that film made it even better. The movie started with a robot moving slowly across the screen talking about the film, and then cut to a camera mounted on the front of a locomotive running through the mountains; at the cut, I heard a metallic creaking next to me -- my friend had a white-knuckled grip with both hands on the armrests, and was using that grip to force himself back as hard as he could against the back of the chair. The movie had hit him that hard; it took him several minutes to relax and be able to watch the movie without feeling that he was looking through a window.
They can get paid for doing something worthwhile. Not charging for bits to a particular port because their old business model won't support them. Who comes up with this crap? There's no "right to profit" in the Constitution or any other law. Why do you think the dot-com bust happened? If one business model becomes unsustainable, you move or get trampled.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert A. Heinlein
The problem is the stuff that game companies have become convinced that the best route to a bestseller is to make it exactly like games that have been around for years. Yes, there are exceptions, but it's like Hollywood, where they figure with enough special effects they can really clean up, and making interesting movies is too big a gamble.
Add this to the fact that modern business management theory, for long-term planning, doesn't project out more than two years. If a project takes longer than that to turn a profit, it's not viable. So you wind up seeing one of two things happening -- either the company will license a rendering engine from another company, and use that to produce another derivative-looking game, as you describe, or they'll get about 60% through the game development before the suits realize that it's not going to be on the shelves in two years, and either panic and force the programmers to switch over to a rendering engine licensed from another company (reducing the game to the previous response, but delayed a year and a half when the programmers have to start over), or start a massive fingerpointing campaign to assign responsibility/blame for the fact that the programmers' projection of three years was accurate.
Multiply this by several games, for a large game company, or have the people funding a small game company get antsy about throwing more money on the fire, and you wind up with a company in financial trouble that can be acquired relatively cheaply by another game company -- who will look at the games under development, see that they're going to have to have more money thrown at them for a year or more to pay off, and cancel them because they can't immediately serve as a source of revenue to pay off on the acquisition.
I base this on the fact that NTSC television runs at only 30 fps, and nobody complains that NTSC video is too "jerky." I suspect you get fast-diminishing returns when you raise the frame rate above 30.
Based on the -- admittedly anecdotal -- evidence of several hundred of the people I game with in Aces High, a MMOACS (Massively Multiplayer Online Air Combat Simulation) put out by HiTech Creations, up to the point where your frame rate reaches the refresh rate of your monitor, increasing the frame rate directly contributes to your success; the smoother and faster your display refreshes, the better you are able to follow the maneuvers of the aircraft you are attacking. I know that I can tell the difference between the 57fps I get when flying around without anyone else visible and the ~40fps I get when I'm in a furball at low altitude over an airfield, with eight or nine other planes, ground clutter, structures, and the tracer trails from gunfire.
The Holy Grail of game development is to keep the frame rate high enough that it stays above the eye's fusion rate at all times. Unfortunately, because of the wide variation in the hardware the game will run on (for PC games), this is functionally impossible to achieve. That's where console games have an advantage -- because the game designers know what hardware the game will be running on, they can optimize the hell out of the code for that hardware. That's why most console games look better than the same game on a PC -- the display code isn't as heavily optimized, so you need more power to get the same frame rate.
The only real advantage that the iMoD display is going to have over a standard CRT is being able to get a displayed frame rate that matches the generated frame rate without having to worry about vertical sync to prevent artifacting the display. Unless it's a quantum leap in display speed over CRTs, and doesn't suffer the 'dead pixel' manufacturing problem that keeps big LCD displays commercially unviable (yield problems, etc.), it's likely to wind up not getting the sales volume it needs to pull it up out of a niche market. On the other hand, if it is faster than CRTs, it's going to have a solid niche market to the high-end gaming community.
Now they don't seems to have any data on framerate you can achieve or power consumption when the complete screen is refreshed frequently.
Where an iMoD display wins isn't in framerate -- that's going to be driven by your graphics card, anyway -- but in the fact that it has no refresh per se, the way a CRT does. The problem with conventional CRTs is that the screen image is drawn in an essentially serial manner -- each pixel is displayed in scan line order, scan line by scan line. If you update the screen image data faster than the monitor can draw the whole image on the screen, you can wind up drawing the top part of the screen with data from frame X, the middle from frame X+1, and the bottom from frame X+2. If the screen image data is changing rapidly, the visible objects on the screen may not line up correctly across the whole frame; this is artifacting.
The iMoD display, because the pixels are addressable randomly, the same way that LCD displays are, can 'back up' to the top of the display for each frame. The pixel update time is short enough that, unlike LCD displays, you're not going to get 'trails' (and the pixels can be updated many more times per second than either an LCD or conventional monitor), and the addressing electronics can be designed to allow more than one pixel to be updated at a time, making a whole-screen update even faster, so that it's not impossible that it might be able to obtain an order-of-magnitude increase in screen redraw rate over a 60Hz (read: rock-bottom) CRT.
But the real advantage comes more from the fact that, without the screen redraw being tied to a fixed sweep rate, the actual display refresh rate can be exactly the same as the frame rate produced by your video card. With a CRT running at a refresh rate of 72Hz, no matter how many frames your video card can draw per second, you're only going to see 72 frames per second; having a video card that can draw 90 frames a second on the simple scenes only means that you can lose 18 fps due to scene complexity before you see any frame rate loss. With an iMoD display, if your video card can render 90 frames per second, you would be able to see all of them. On the other hand, since the display updates would be matched to the video card's frame rate, degradation of your frame rate due to scene complexity would be immediately visible (subject to the response of the human eye).
The mice are the M.A.P.P. product line, being produced by Elecom; their website has pictures of the two mice. The M-MAPP1SM is Shirow Masamune's design; the M-MAPP1KH is Katoki Hajime's design. You can find the page with the pictures of the mice here; unfortunately, the page is entirely in Japanese. The Babelfish translation of the page is not particularly helpful, with repeated references to 'chestnut thornback tar' (and talking about Katoki's work on 'movement soldier cancer/gun dam 0083', 'movement soldier V cancer/gun dam' and 'new movement game description cancer/gun dam W' -- automated Japanese-to-English translation has some way to go yet for more than the bare gist of a document), although you do discover that the mice are USB devices, but come with a USB-to-PS/2 convertor to allow them to be used as PS/2 mice, driver software on floppy and CD (WinXP/98/2000/ME as USB, WinXP/98/95/2000/ME/NT4SP3 as PS/2), and come in black, silver, and white.
No, the point of this article is that no one has done anything useful yet with nanotech on virtually any scale. This may be the first Real World(TM) application of nanotech on a large scale.
The sci-fi books have little bloodwork nanobots, star-trek-like replicators, and other, well, sci-fi uses. The only Real World application I've heard of before this was arrays of nanomirrors on microscopic rotors, and I don't know if that made it past the prototype stage.
I wonder just how many things we use in the Real World(tm) came about because someone was reading SF, thought 'That would be really useful to have' or something similar, and went out and found a way to do it. Let's see... water beds, waldoes, artificial satellites... William Keith's Warstrider series are the books I've read most recently that incorporate nanoflage on military vehicles. I think that perhaps this project depended more on the salesmanship of some SF reader seeing the potential to turn SF into reality than on the military command structure itself having the vision to come up with an idea like this on its own.
Good thing this is the Army and not the Navy, or else the old "If it moves, salute it, if it doesn't move, paint it gray" motto would be right out the window!
And for those of you who were curious, this does explain the occasional gray admiral...
Don't drive a car to take a few things over... Getting a vehicle that can take everything in 1 or two trips is best. Trips are extremely time inefficent
An additional consideration when packing a vehicle is destination. When you pack your vehicle to move things, you should be packing in reverse order of unload depth -- i.e., look at where you are moving into, and arrange your load so that the first things you take out of the vehicle go the furthest into your new place, filling back toward the entry as you go. This way, you don't wind up having to climb over furniture and boxes in the living room while you're trying to schlep a box spring back into the bedroom.
It also pays to sit down with a graphics editor, CAD program, or pieces of paper cut to scale and lay out the floorplan and all your furniture, then decide where you want all your furniture to go in the new place before you move, if possible. It's much easier to get furniture moved in if you can unload it into at least an approximation of its final position.
You should note that the 'right' of privacy is guarantied in the US Constitution. Most of the replies to this seem to think that this is a right, under the US Constitution, you only have a few rights (4) Four. In addition, they are, the right to Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and finally the right to Vote. This is it, in none of the Amendments to the US Constitution, i.e. the bill of rights, do they guaranty our right to privacy; unreasonable search, yes, but this does not give privacy.
You do realize that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is from the Declaration of Independence, and is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, don't you?
The Constitution does not give us rights; we have rights, and the Constitution explicitly forbids the government from infringing upon some of them. It also includes the statement, as the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The Tenth Amendment further circumscribes the federal government:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The Constitution does not grant the government broad, sweeping powers except for a narrow set of exclusions; it grants specific, narrowly-defined powers and prohibits it from acting outside the range of those powers. It is the actions of Congress and the Presidency that have turned that on its head, so that the government believes that it has the authority to control except under the narrowest possible interpretation of those things it is expressly forbidden to do.
That is it, not a lot, just those that are not willing to give up something that is unimportant for some thing that is.
Unimportant in your judgement -- but you automatically assume that your judgement is the only right one, and that anyone who disagrees must be mistaken. If we don't believe the way you do, we should get out of the country. *toss* So much for the principles you claim to be willing to defend.
Freedom is not free; it has to be paid for with the blood of the innocents. (Yes I know this is a quote, but I cannot find from whom right now)
How about this one, then?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-- Thomas Jefferson
When we are being asked to give up our liberties, we must look carefully at what our sacrifice is supposed to gain us. So far, all I've seen is the government creating more and more ways to shove its nose into citizens' lives, with no sign of the claimed increase in safety. Or abominations like the TIPS program, where the government wants to turn our population into informers to spy on their neighbors and turn them in to the feds if they see anything 'suspicious'.
Once we grant power to the government, even if it was supposed to be strictly limited in scope and for a limited time, the nose of the camel is in the tent. Go back and look at the claims (now proven to be bald-faced lies) that the supporters of the federal income tax and Social Security used to get those bills passed.
Every one of our freedoms that we 'sacrifice' brings us one step closer to doing ourselves what the Al-Qaeda terrorists tried to do -- destroy what makes America the country it is. Not everyone has the "my country, right or wrong" attitude necessary to drop to our backs and spread our legs every time the government tells us that it needs us to give up something; we want to see what we're being asked and what we will get for it, and decide whether the one is worth the other. And some of us will decide it isn't. We're not a monolithic culture, and if you want to live in one, you're going to have to look elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Raises 'blue screen of death' to a whole new level of meaning.
As an aside, though, I'm not sure how effective it will be at replacing rollercoasters for a number of reasons.
First, it takes up an 11x12m space for every two people on the ride at one time; a typical rollercoaster will have twenty to forty people on one train, often with more than one train running at one time. The experience of running the coaster with twenty other people is different from being on a ride with at most one other person, and I believe that the group experience is part of the attraction. Certainly the Robocoaster will be hard-put to simulate being thrown upward into a loop as another coaster train roars through the middle of the loop, or diving into a tunnel and popping back up. The experience of weaving around and through scenery and other parts of the coaster track is going to be almost impossible to duplicate.
Second, it does not look as if the Robocoaster will be able to simulate the sustained G forces that you can experience on a rollercoaster. I would expect that the design limits of an industrial robot would not permit swinging riders at speeds sufficient to produce the same G forces that can be attained with a rollercoaster, and the short moment arm of the robot would contribute significantly to disorientation and nausea compared to a standard coaster.
Third, from the design, it's clear that the Robocoaster will require continuous power delivery throughout the duration of the ride; a rollercoaster uses power in the lift, brakes, and thrust sections, with the train running on momentum after it departs the lift. I suspect that the power usage of the Robocoaster will exceed the power usage for running the same number of people through a conventional coaster, which would raise the operating costs. On the other hand, the Robocoaster would not have to worry that brake failure might allow two trains to collide.
Fourth, operating a group of Robocoasters to achieve a similar rider throughput as a conventional coaster will require many times the personnel. With a conventional coaster, a single dispatcher and one attendant per ten passengers is all that is required to man a coaster station, but with several Robocoasters, the ride's footprint is such that a single attendant would only be able to handle passengers at, at most, two units, and safety regulations would limit the number of units that a single dispatcher could supervise.
I don't think that the Robocoaster is necessarily going to be a failure, but there are enough aspects of a conventional coaster that it can't duplicate would appear to put the Robocoaster into a specialty niche in thrill rides, competing with but not directly against conventional coasters.
The British Army was equipped with smoothbore muskets, because they were easier to load than rifled weapons, and the massed infantry tactics of the period meant that the accuracy of individual soldiers was not important. The Minutemen were more likely to have rifled weapons, because a rifled weapon is more accurate, which is a primary consideration when you're using the weapon to hunt for food. The civilian soldiers of the Revolutionary Army often had weapons that were more advanced than the professional British Army.
If you look at the law, the militia cannot legally be deployed outside the boundaries of the United States. This got argued up to the US Supreme Court back during Desert Storm, when National Guard units were deployed to the Middle East. Several state governments filed suit to stop the deployment, claiming that the National Guard was the militia, and could not be sent beyond our borders; the Court ruled that the National Guard was part of the standing military forces of the country, and could be deployed like any other part of the military. This also shot dead -- for those who bother to look at facts the argument that the 2nd Amendment allowed the formation of the National Guard, since the Guard isn't a militia.
It doesn't necessarily have to be ordinary people, nor even believable situations. The universe the characters exist in has to be consistent above all. Look at 'Doc' Smith's Skylark or Lensman series. In neither of them are the situations believable in the light of modern science, and in all of them the main characters are cast from the classic Heroic mold. Or David Drake's Hammer's Slammers universe -- Joachim Steuben, for example, is a seriously bent character, but the stories still work.
I don't think that it is so much whether the author creates believable situations, or that the characters are ordinary people, but that the universe and the characters are consistent -- and that is what makes the story believable. Not any ordinary or extraordinary quality of the characters or the situations they are in, but that the characters exist as consistent beings in a consistent universe. The moment an author starts pulling things out of their hat to either advance or obstruct the main characters, my enjoyment goes downhill fast.
Science fiction authors are no better at predicting the future of technology than anyone else. Look at Heinlein's novel Starman Jones for example -- massive computers that only performed mathematical calculations and needed to have input fed into them in binary, and huge books of conversion tables necessary to convert human-readable numbers back and forth to binary, then plotting by hand. Aside from an ongoing over-optimism about space exploration, I think that that is one of the most glaring examples of how badly the future of technology can be predicted. Other authors point out that technology is changing so fast, and the rate of change is changing so fast, that it will cause a 'phase change' in society, at which point all of our predictions break down (a la Vernor Vinge's 'Singularity').
And there are a number of fundamental limitations in what can be done with science fiction. Take alien races and alien cultures. There is no way to portray a genuinely alien race because, lacking any common referent, neither the human characters nor the readers would have any way to understand them. Alien races and cultures exist as distinct entities to hold up a mirror to reflect certain human characteristics and explore them, or exist as people in rubber suits. For example, other than creating atmosphere, was there really any plot reason for Nien Nub, Admiral Ackbar, or Greedo in the Star Wars movies to be nonhuman? It is another mark of great science fiction that an author can create alien races and cultures that, while possessing enough cognates to human culture that they are not totally enigmatic, are not just humans with bugs on their foreheads. Too many authors confuse 'not looking human' with 'not being human'. An alien race can be a powerful tool to examine or illustrate humanity and human culture, but it has to have its own culture first to create that vantage point.
Small point: Military personnel may not make disparaging remarks about politicians, the government, or superior officers in any situation where those remarks may become public knowledge. Bitching about the crap that's been dumped on you, the idiot ninety-day wonder in command of your unit (who couldn't pour piss out of his boot if the instructions were written on the heel), the circus at Fort Fumble (aka the Pentagon), and the rest of Dreamland-on-the-Potomac is a long-standing tradition in the military. But that's all private, inside the family, and stays outside the performance of your duty; they'll come down on you for letting it out in public, and God help you if you actually address your remarks to a member of the media...
It would be entertaining to modify your User-Agent string to add something like "This user charges $5.00 per window for allowing a site to display pop-up advertising. The creation of pop-up windows shall be considered to constitute acceptance of contract". Since the User-Agent string is sent when your browser requests a web page from a server, the server clearly received notification that you will charge them for employing pop-up ads before the server sends you any content, they have the option of not sending you pop-up ads, sending you pop-up ads and allowing you to bill for displaying them, or declining to provide any content at all, and if they don't check the browser data that closely before they send content back, that's their problem, not yours.
I'm 43. My absolute reading volume has diminished due to the other things that take up my time -- work, netnews, computer games, etc. -- but my reading speed is still about the same. For fiction, it varies depending on how good the writing is -- if the writing sucks me into the book, the time to finish can be cut almost in half unless I make a deliberate effort to break out of it by stopping to get a glass of water or something every now and then, but I normally don't try to push my reading speed. As an experiment back in high school, I checked out a dozen SF novels from the public library, and was able to return them all read the next day -- which came in useful during college for pre-midterm reviews -- but fine plot details don't stay with me when I push my reading speed up past three or four thousand words per minute, so I don't do it much any more.
Actually, more like $6-$7.
For me, though, it's a simple question of economics. I buy a 300-page novel, I'll have it finished in two hours, maybe three hours with distractions (yes, my reading speed is that high). After that, unless the author is very good, it's several months before I can reread it and get the same enjoyment from it -- and I do read books over and over again, simply because if I bought enough books to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke. If I have $30 to spend, I can spend it on one hardback and have two hours of entertainment, or spend it on four paperbacks and have eight hours of entertainment. And hardbacks take up more shelf space than paperback.
Right now, I have shelving in my living room that is six shelves high and 12' long filled with paperbacks two books deep -- with more in shelves downstairs and still more in boxes in the garage because I have no shelf space for them. Hardbacks would triple my shelving requirements. For books that I really enjoy, I will often pick up a hardback copy, because of the increased durability of a hardback, but for most fiction I buy, paperbacks are a much better value to me.
Went to the poles? I thought there was a federal law that set accessibility requirements for polling places; from anywhere in Alaska, visiting both poles is a 25,000 mile round trip minimum. Having to travel that far to vote should be actionable.
You don't have to register when you purchase a car. Registering a car, and obtaining a license for it, is the documentation of your having paid the tax for the privilege of operating that car on public roads. Any vehicle which is not operated on public thoroughfares does not need registration, does not have to pass smog certification, and requires no license to operate. You can build a race car in your garage, and as long as you tow it from garage to race track, and never actually operate it on a public road (or one that has been specifically designated as private for racing, as is done for various Grand Prix races), you don't have to register it. If you do drive it on a public road, you'll be cited for operating an unregistered vehicle, plus any additional equipment violations the police officer can think of, though.
It would probably work better if you searched just for 'Fogleman' and 'airfoil'; the inventors were Richard Kline and Floyd Fogleman (note spelling). Here is a link to the results for a Google search on "kline-fogleman". There's not a lot of hard and fast data on it, but there are a number of references.
What most people do not understand about light aircraft is that the propellor does not actually provide any thrust; it is there to cool the pilot. This is easy to prove -- just watch how much the pilot starts to sweat if it stops.
Slashdotted into oblivion; all that's there is a text banner and link to the hosting service, New Global Net Internet Services. We killed another one.
Because if the MPAA and RIAA can hide the fact that they've tried it in the past, then they can watch it tank and point to the fact that their download services tanked as prima facie evidence that it's the widespread piracy is what caused it to tank, therefore stricter and more restrictive laws and policies need to be enacted to prevent this flagrant abuse of copyright.
Look back at the post; the RFIDs are for their pallets and cases. From that, it appears that what Gillette is doing is addressing the problem of 'shrinkage' while the products are sitting in warehouses. With RFID tags in the pallets and cases, it means that anyone who wants to 'lose' a few pallets or cases is going to have to tear apart the cases and pallets in order to find and destroy the RFID tags before they can get the product out of the warehouse, or rip open the cases and transfer the product to new packaging, both of which make it hard to disguise that pilfering is going on, and the damaged or nonexistent corp case packages will make it harder to gray-market bulk product.
Some years ago, I saw what was probably the only production of its kind -- a Showscan production in Imax at our domed Imax theatre. I had read about some of the problems that the theatre had in getting the system to work -- running an Imax film at 60fps really wrung the projection system out, and they had problems getting the projection system to handle moving the film through that fast.
But the film itself was amazing; the combination of Imax full wrap-around and the Showscan clarity made it something I will remember for a long time. And the fact that I had brought a friend with me who was getting his first exposure to Imax with that film made it even better. The movie started with a robot moving slowly across the screen talking about the film, and then cut to a camera mounted on the front of a locomotive running through the mountains; at the cut, I heard a metallic creaking next to me -- my friend had a white-knuckled grip with both hands on the armrests, and was using that grip to force himself back as hard as he could against the back of the chair. The movie had hit him that hard; it took him several minutes to relax and be able to watch the movie without feeling that he was looking through a window.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Add this to the fact that modern business management theory, for long-term planning, doesn't project out more than two years. If a project takes longer than that to turn a profit, it's not viable. So you wind up seeing one of two things happening -- either the company will license a rendering engine from another company, and use that to produce another derivative-looking game, as you describe, or they'll get about 60% through the game development before the suits realize that it's not going to be on the shelves in two years, and either panic and force the programmers to switch over to a rendering engine licensed from another company (reducing the game to the previous response, but delayed a year and a half when the programmers have to start over), or start a massive fingerpointing campaign to assign responsibility/blame for the fact that the programmers' projection of three years was accurate.
Multiply this by several games, for a large game company, or have the people funding a small game company get antsy about throwing more money on the fire, and you wind up with a company in financial trouble that can be acquired relatively cheaply by another game company -- who will look at the games under development, see that they're going to have to have more money thrown at them for a year or more to pay off, and cancel them because they can't immediately serve as a source of revenue to pay off on the acquisition.
Based on the -- admittedly anecdotal -- evidence of several hundred of the people I game with in Aces High, a MMOACS (Massively Multiplayer Online Air Combat Simulation) put out by HiTech Creations, up to the point where your frame rate reaches the refresh rate of your monitor, increasing the frame rate directly contributes to your success; the smoother and faster your display refreshes, the better you are able to follow the maneuvers of the aircraft you are attacking. I know that I can tell the difference between the 57fps I get when flying around without anyone else visible and the ~40fps I get when I'm in a furball at low altitude over an airfield, with eight or nine other planes, ground clutter, structures, and the tracer trails from gunfire.
The Holy Grail of game development is to keep the frame rate high enough that it stays above the eye's fusion rate at all times. Unfortunately, because of the wide variation in the hardware the game will run on (for PC games), this is functionally impossible to achieve. That's where console games have an advantage -- because the game designers know what hardware the game will be running on, they can optimize the hell out of the code for that hardware. That's why most console games look better than the same game on a PC -- the display code isn't as heavily optimized, so you need more power to get the same frame rate.
The only real advantage that the iMoD display is going to have over a standard CRT is being able to get a displayed frame rate that matches the generated frame rate without having to worry about vertical sync to prevent artifacting the display. Unless it's a quantum leap in display speed over CRTs, and doesn't suffer the 'dead pixel' manufacturing problem that keeps big LCD displays commercially unviable (yield problems, etc.), it's likely to wind up not getting the sales volume it needs to pull it up out of a niche market. On the other hand, if it is faster than CRTs, it's going to have a solid niche market to the high-end gaming community.
Where an iMoD display wins isn't in framerate -- that's going to be driven by your graphics card, anyway -- but in the fact that it has no refresh per se, the way a CRT does. The problem with conventional CRTs is that the screen image is drawn in an essentially serial manner -- each pixel is displayed in scan line order, scan line by scan line. If you update the screen image data faster than the monitor can draw the whole image on the screen, you can wind up drawing the top part of the screen with data from frame X, the middle from frame X+1, and the bottom from frame X+2. If the screen image data is changing rapidly, the visible objects on the screen may not line up correctly across the whole frame; this is artifacting.
The iMoD display, because the pixels are addressable randomly, the same way that LCD displays are, can 'back up' to the top of the display for each frame. The pixel update time is short enough that, unlike LCD displays, you're not going to get 'trails' (and the pixels can be updated many more times per second than either an LCD or conventional monitor), and the addressing electronics can be designed to allow more than one pixel to be updated at a time, making a whole-screen update even faster, so that it's not impossible that it might be able to obtain an order-of-magnitude increase in screen redraw rate over a 60Hz (read: rock-bottom) CRT.
But the real advantage comes more from the fact that, without the screen redraw being tied to a fixed sweep rate, the actual display refresh rate can be exactly the same as the frame rate produced by your video card. With a CRT running at a refresh rate of 72Hz, no matter how many frames your video card can draw per second, you're only going to see 72 frames per second; having a video card that can draw 90 frames a second on the simple scenes only means that you can lose 18 fps due to scene complexity before you see any frame rate loss. With an iMoD display, if your video card can render 90 frames per second, you would be able to see all of them. On the other hand, since the display updates would be matched to the video card's frame rate, degradation of your frame rate due to scene complexity would be immediately visible (subject to the response of the human eye).
The mice are the M.A.P.P. product line, being produced by Elecom; their website has pictures of the two mice. The M-MAPP1SM is Shirow Masamune's design; the M-MAPP1KH is Katoki Hajime's design. You can find the page with the pictures of the mice here; unfortunately, the page is entirely in Japanese. The Babelfish translation of the page is not particularly helpful, with repeated references to 'chestnut thornback tar' (and talking about Katoki's work on 'movement soldier cancer/gun dam 0083', 'movement soldier V cancer/gun dam' and 'new movement game description cancer/gun dam W' -- automated Japanese-to-English translation has some way to go yet for more than the bare gist of a document), although you do discover that the mice are USB devices, but come with a USB-to-PS/2 convertor to allow them to be used as PS/2 mice, driver software on floppy and CD (WinXP/98/2000/ME as USB, WinXP/98/95/2000/ME/NT4SP3 as PS/2), and come in black, silver, and white.
I wonder just how many things we use in the Real World(tm) came about because someone was reading SF, thought 'That would be really useful to have' or something similar, and went out and found a way to do it. Let's see... water beds, waldoes, artificial satellites... William Keith's Warstrider series are the books I've read most recently that incorporate nanoflage on military vehicles. I think that perhaps this project depended more on the salesmanship of some SF reader seeing the potential to turn SF into reality than on the military command structure itself having the vision to come up with an idea like this on its own.
And for those of you who were curious, this does explain the occasional gray admiral...
An additional consideration when packing a vehicle is destination. When you pack your vehicle to move things, you should be packing in reverse order of unload depth -- i.e., look at where you are moving into, and arrange your load so that the first things you take out of the vehicle go the furthest into your new place, filling back toward the entry as you go. This way, you don't wind up having to climb over furniture and boxes in the living room while you're trying to schlep a box spring back into the bedroom.
It also pays to sit down with a graphics editor, CAD program, or pieces of paper cut to scale and lay out the floorplan and all your furniture, then decide where you want all your furniture to go in the new place before you move, if possible. It's much easier to get furniture moved in if you can unload it into at least an approximation of its final position.
You do realize that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is from the Declaration of Independence, and is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, don't you?
The Constitution does not give us rights; we have rights, and the Constitution explicitly forbids the government from infringing upon some of them. It also includes the statement, as the Ninth Amendment:
The Tenth Amendment further circumscribes the federal government:
The Constitution does not grant the government broad, sweeping powers except for a narrow set of exclusions; it grants specific, narrowly-defined powers and prohibits it from acting outside the range of those powers. It is the actions of Congress and the Presidency that have turned that on its head, so that the government believes that it has the authority to control except under the narrowest possible interpretation of those things it is expressly forbidden to do.
Unimportant in your judgement -- but you automatically assume that your judgement is the only right one, and that anyone who disagrees must be mistaken. If we don't believe the way you do, we should get out of the country. *toss* So much for the principles you claim to be willing to defend.
How about this one, then?
When we are being asked to give up our liberties, we must look carefully at what our sacrifice is supposed to gain us. So far, all I've seen is the government creating more and more ways to shove its nose into citizens' lives, with no sign of the claimed increase in safety. Or abominations like the TIPS program, where the government wants to turn our population into informers to spy on their neighbors and turn them in to the feds if they see anything 'suspicious'.
Once we grant power to the government, even if it was supposed to be strictly limited in scope and for a limited time, the nose of the camel is in the tent. Go back and look at the claims (now proven to be bald-faced lies) that the supporters of the federal income tax and Social Security used to get those bills passed.
Every one of our freedoms that we 'sacrifice' brings us one step closer to doing ourselves what the Al-Qaeda terrorists tried to do -- destroy what makes America the country it is. Not everyone has the "my country, right or wrong" attitude necessary to drop to our backs and spread our legs every time the government tells us that it needs us to give up something; we want to see what we're being asked and what we will get for it, and decide whether the one is worth the other. And some of us will decide it isn't. We're not a monolithic culture, and if you want to live in one, you're going to have to look elsewhere.