Unless it's a superconducting electromagnet, it's probably not all that strong, especially in comparison to the NMR equipment that's likely being used elsewhere in the building.
The largest Cyclotron ever built has a main magnet with a field strength of 0.46 T.
The magnets in your speakers have a field strength of about 1T. Your hard drive probably contains a 1.5T magnet as well.
An NMR (MRI) machine will range from anywhere from 1.5T to 7T (although experimental setups can go a good bit higher).
The strongest continuous magnetic field produced in a laboratory is 45T.
The strongest pulsed magnetic field ever created was by the Russians at 2,800T (they cheated and used explosives).
The reason the magnet is so "huge" is that the field needs to cover a large area.
I'm not one of those weird conspiracy theorists out there, but man.. what else could they possibly be hiding that's so bad compared to what they've done thus far? You mean to say that Dick Cheney might have shot someone else in the face?!??!??
However, they're typically very poorly-matched to the level of the course, and frequently make (inconsistent) use of mathematical symbols and notation that fell out of fashion 50 years ago.
It's pretty common for those pages and pages of equations to be only tangentally related to the core topic at hand, and for proofs to be inadequately explained, or to leave out non-trivial steps. "Common" solutions to 2nd-order differential equations are not necessarily going to be all that obvious to an undergraduate.
Pictures/graphs/diagrams can also be fantastic visual aids. If you're studying crystal structures for Solid-State physics, I would expect a decent textbook to have at least a few color diagrams on every page. It's damn near impossible to learn about that sort of stuff without some sort of visual aid.
Mind you, not all old books are necessarily bad. The Landau/Lifshitz Physics series are bloody brilliant, especially considering that they weren't originally written in English. Conversely, I've had a few new-ish books that are absolutely terrible.
If it takes 50 pages of text and equations to adequately explain a topic, that's perfectly fine as long as it's understandable and coherent.
(If you can't already tell, I'm a Physics undergraduate, not Engineering. I imagine that we share quite a few woes between poorly-written textbooks and uninspiring lecturers, however)
With all due respect, what more damaging information could there possibly be?
The current administration declared an unjust war based on intelligence known to be faulty, illegally spied on its citizens, botched said war, tortured prisoners, sold out undercover operatives (almost, but not quite treason), and put the economy in the shitter.
What sort of magic bullet are we expecting to find on these hard drives?
The Bush administration has literally gotten away with murder. There should be more than enough hard evidence to put the lot of them in prison for a long, long time.
The fact that they haven't seems to indicate that no additional evidence will be able to make even the slightest difference.
For those of you who don't get the joke, JPEGs (standard ones, at least) use RGB color mixing, along with your monitor, so it won't look any different to you.
That said, this "discovery" is hardly a new one, as the professional lighting industry use CMY subtractive color mixing almost exclusively. When you're layering multiple gels on top of each other, only subtractive color models work properly.
However, since this guy is using additive mixing (eg. a discrete light source for each color), his choice of CMY color mixing is counterintuitive. If anything, his gamut is going to be *less* than an RGB array. Since art is subjective, I'm going to refrain from calling it wrong, but you'd never see a professional lighting designer mixing colors this way.
These fixtures are also hilariously commonplace these days, and cost a lot less than the $1500 quoted in the article. Things can get a bit or a good deal fancier, depending upon how much you want to spend. Lo and behold, LED PARs do indeed use RGB mixing, whilst others use CMYK mixing, which also conveniently eliminates the need for dimming hardware in some cases.
I don't want to knock the project in any way, because it's damn impressive that an undergrad designed and constructed it on his own. However, things might have gone a bit better if he'd taken a trip down to the theatre or art departments before taking on the project.
My issue is that Spitzer resigned as a result of an outcry from the media, and a very vocal segment of the public.
Had he been formally brought up on charges, and been dismissed (or suspended) from his position as a result, I wouldn't have many objections.
Of course, such a trial would have considerably distracted from his duties as governor, and would have turned into an absolute circus (again: Bill Clinton).
Once again, I'm emphasizing that what Spitzer did was most certainly wrong. However, politicians frequently get away with much, much worse. Immediately giving in to the mob is a very, very dangerous thing to do.
Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone.
What is happening on the iPhone is not DRM. DRM is about copy-protection.
There are many parallels between DRM and closed hardware platforms, but they are two very distinct issues.
Apple's reasons for clamping down on the iPhone are very likely to be quite numerous, not to mention whatever sort of contractual obligations they have to fulfill with AT&T. It's not pretty, but it's how the mobile phone industry works in the US.
I can understand people being disappointed that the iPhone is a closed and locked platform, but displaying outright anger over the issue is absurd. Nobody's forcing you to buy an iPhone, nor is anything preventing some bright entrepreneur from making something better.
The police want to do crazy things all the time. Mostly to make their jobs easier (and, to be fair... almost every profession is guilty of this to an extent).
Fortunately for us, most nations today heavily regulate their police force, and control their government through a voting parliamentary body, along with a system of checks and balances.
If this notion gained the support of a large portion of parliament or the population at large, it would be legitimate cause for concern. Fortunately for us, this is not the case.
Come on slashdot. Prove that you're better than some Left-Wing version of Fox news, and stop posting flamebaited articles that have little to no real significance.
How exactly would this work in remote locations..... like Tibet?
If this were possible, the government would crack down on it immediately, barring the sale of such phones. If worst came to worst, they could also simply "poison" the NNTP servers by providing their own, and flooding the network with nonsense data. (It should be pretty easy to find some spammers who have quite a bit of experience in the area)
Although the idealized technology-assisted civillian uprising is nice to imagine, the odds of it happening in China (if anywhere) are slim to none.
Also, the ones able to purchase 300mhz smartphones are almost certainly not going to be the discontents.
Although I don't think that it was a good idea to scrap Mir entirely, it was falling to pieces by the time the ISS was in orbit due to a lack of funding. Putting the two together would have been dangerous and irresponsible.
The core module of the ISS was actually born out of the Soviet government's plans for a Mir II, which, along with Mir I, would couple their Buran shuttle program. (To give an idea of the Russian government's state of finances, the only functional/completed Buran was destroyed when the building it was housed in collapsed during a mild thunderstorm)
If the Russian government wanted to participate in the ISS and get to use the shiny new space station, Mir had to be sacrificed.
Also, consider that Mir very likely used different electrical and guidance systems.
The biggest failure of the ISS is, in my opinion, that it was constructed in tiny pieces and launched on small rockets, over a ridiculous span of time. A Saturn V could have launched mass of the currently-completed portions of the station in two launches.
Well, his case is an argument for transparency, rather than against it... Really.... is it?
There's no doubt that what he did was wrong, and represented a massive conflict of interest. I have very little sympathy for him.
However, politicians have done much, much worse, kept their positions, and in some cases even been re-elected. (For crying out loud, the Valerie Plame incident could easily be construed as treason)
By all accounts, he actually was doing a fairly decent job governing the state compared to his predecessors. His own personal life had very little bearing on his actions while in office (ditto to Bill Clinton).
Do we want a President/Governor who steals candy from convenience stores? No. However, if he's doing an apt job of managing foreign affairs and the economy, it might do considerably less damage to ignore it, and turn your head the other way.
They make this sort of stuff for backpackers, deployed soldiers, and the like.
However, I believe that only the "government contract developed" versions contain precious metals.
This does also beg the question of how the russians, who would frequently stay on Mir for months on end managed to do things. I can't see a tiny washing machine being all that ridiculous of a thing to have on board.
Yes. In fact, I've lived there for most of my life.
By "tabloids", I was referring mostly to the sort one would expect to find at the grocery checkout. These are concerned mainly with celebrity gossip, and are generally treated as entertainment, rather than real news. Their circulation per-capita is also quite a bit lower than The Sun or Scottish Daily Mail.
Similarly, anybody who, even for a moment, takes the Weekly World News seriously needs his head examined. You'd be better off reading The Onion in terms of factual content.
British tabloids at least attempt to pass themselves off as being "real news". They would be more similar to (but perhaps not as bad as) The New York Post (also owned by Murdoch)
You're missing the point. I don't think this was ever intended to be a serious tool for political discourse, but rather an interesting exercise in applying some of the technologies being developed by Microsoft's research lab.
It's a cool technology demo, and perhaps does a nice job of gathering and visualizing a two-dimensional dataset. This was most likely thrown together in a few afternoons as a result of a conversation held over lunch one day that began with "Wouldn't it be neat if we...."
Similarly, OpenGL wasn't designed to display teapots, although they're quite frequently used to demonstrate its features.
Indeed. Local news has a frighteningly powerful impact upon local culture (at least for a certain.... and typically extremely vocal segment of the population).
The ones that always surprise me, however, are the British tabloids. They're not quite (nearly( as bad as American tabloids, and are therefore taken quite seriously by some, which is troubling to say the least. The Sun, and The Scottish Daily Mail come to mind as being two such papers.
Move a step up to papers like The Guardian and The Times, and journalistic standards still aren't quite up to what you'd expect from a top-tier news organization. (The Times, however, is probably the least tainted of Rupert Murdoch's properties, especially in recent years)
Perhaps it's simply a reflection of my own views, but I have a bit more respect for papers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, who do a somewhat better job covering global events, and tend to do considerably less cherrypicking with their stories.
Oh, and of course, the BBC and NPR are both quite good, both being considerably less driven by ratings and sales than their commercial competitors.
Don't tell me that a country capable of delivering people to Moon and space probes to the outer Solar system can't manufacture even a single bloody reactor vessel. If you haven't noticed, we lost the capability to do one of those things many many years ago, and lack the resources to do the other in any meaningful quantity.
So, no. It's not even remotely surprising. The field of Engineering pretty much ground to a halt after the 1970s, and the US has been milking the "information economy" ever since.
XP *looked* different. As far as functionality was concerned, very little changed between 98, 2000, and XP.
Once you accepted the fact that it was blue, there wasn't a whole lot different, apart from the start menu (and both of those things could easily be disabled, and frequently were).
That said, I still maintain a Xenix (now SCO OpenServer) installation for a small business. For what they do, it suits them fine, and the cost of implementing a new Windows-based system would be quite high, and wouldn't provide any tangible benefits. A few years ago, we replaced their Amber-screeen serial terminals with XP machines running terminal-emulation software to improve ergonomics, and allow them to run other applications required for the business.
Nevertheless, the ancient Unix system continues to operate flawlessly. We try to keep the hardware relatively "fresh," although there's certainly not much point meddling with a system that works.
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them and if the government is refusing to take any preventative action, while over 7,000 rockets have fallen on the town, then suing the government seems a very reasonable action. Why not simply relocate? Given that no laser cannon is going be 100% effective (and may very well poison the village), and that the invention of such a device will simply result in the enemy switching to a different type of weapon, I'd want to get the heck out of there, governmental support be damned. Nothing is worth that, if you can at all avoid it.
And to be fair, the people firing those rockets were there first.
What exactly does this discussion have to do with the "Vista Capable" debacle?
Sure, Vista is a slow, bloated operating system that offers very few tangible improvements over its predecessor.
However, the "Vista Capable" debacle grew out of the fact that Microsoft's marketing droids decided to vastly overstate Vista's ability to run over slow hardware.
Had Microsoft been a bit more conservative with their estimates (subtly admitting that their operating system is a cow), there never would have been a legal issue. Vista on its own isn't a great product, although its faults do not constitute a breach of the law (had the product been absurdly unstable or insecure, that might have been the case, although by most accounts, Vista either holds the line or improves over XP in these regards).
TFA discusses the possible engineering & design decisions that are being put into Windows 7 as new features. Odds are that many of these features haven't even been coded. Likewise, given that the design document has *just* been finalized, I can't imagine that the marketing guys have had much (if any) time to figure out how to spin the new product.
Here's a hint: Look at the features that were dropped from Vista (some of them were actually quite innovative).
Personally, I hope that Windows 7 is a decent, solid operating system, and corrects for Vista's faults. Microsoft has had a tendency to appropriately compensate if one of their products flops. NT4 spawned into a beautiful desktop-ready os with the release of Win2k, and after destroying all evidence that Windows Me! ever existed, Microsoft launched XP, which is arguably the most successful desktop operating system to date.
Also, Apple needs a kick in the pants. They're getting complacent, and the Quality Control on the last few releases of OS X have been abysmal by their former standards.
You joke, but ignoring the technical impracticality of building airplanes out of heavy armor, a human would not be able to remotely survive the sort of stresses that the black boxes are designed to handle.
For starters, if you drop the black box out the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet, it'll survive more or less intact. It'd be a pretty neat trick for a human to be able to do that.
Moreover, the black boxes are designed to withstand acceleration forces of 3400g (33 kilometers/sec^2!) for 6.5 milliseconds. Would you want to place yourself between a 747, and an immovable object? Those are the magnitudes of the forces we're talking about.
Humans can survive 25-30g for brief periods of time. A force of over 100g will be lethal in all but the most exceptional of circumstances, even if it is only instantaneous.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless it's a superconducting electromagnet, it's probably not all that strong, especially in comparison to the NMR equipment that's likely being used elsewhere in the building.
The largest Cyclotron ever built has a main magnet with a field strength of 0.46 T.
The magnets in your speakers have a field strength of about 1T. Your hard drive probably contains a 1.5T magnet as well.
An NMR (MRI) machine will range from anywhere from 1.5T to 7T (although experimental setups can go a good bit higher).
The strongest continuous magnetic field produced in a laboratory is 45T.
The strongest pulsed magnetic field ever created was by the Russians at 2,800T (they cheated and used explosives).
The reason the magnet is so "huge" is that the field needs to cover a large area.
Here's the thing with the textbooks:
Long and boring isn't all that bothersome.
However, they're typically very poorly-matched to the level of the course, and frequently make (inconsistent) use of mathematical symbols and notation that fell out of fashion 50 years ago.
It's pretty common for those pages and pages of equations to be only tangentally related to the core topic at hand, and for proofs to be inadequately explained, or to leave out non-trivial steps. "Common" solutions to 2nd-order differential equations are not necessarily going to be all that obvious to an undergraduate.
Pictures/graphs/diagrams can also be fantastic visual aids. If you're studying crystal structures for Solid-State physics, I would expect a decent textbook to have at least a few color diagrams on every page. It's damn near impossible to learn about that sort of stuff without some sort of visual aid.
Mind you, not all old books are necessarily bad. The Landau/Lifshitz Physics series are bloody brilliant, especially considering that they weren't originally written in English. Conversely, I've had a few new-ish books that are absolutely terrible.
If it takes 50 pages of text and equations to adequately explain a topic, that's perfectly fine as long as it's understandable and coherent.
(If you can't already tell, I'm a Physics undergraduate, not Engineering. I imagine that we share quite a few woes between poorly-written textbooks and uninspiring lecturers, however)
My University has classes on Friday and Monday as well. Spring break isn't for another week now.
I might add here that Dick Cheney is the only vice president to have shot a man in the face while in office.
(And no. This isn't even remotely relevant to the discussion at hand, but sure is a fun thing to point out!)
With all due respect, what more damaging information could there possibly be?
The current administration declared an unjust war based on intelligence known to be faulty, illegally spied on its citizens, botched said war, tortured prisoners, sold out undercover operatives (almost, but not quite treason), and put the economy in the shitter.
What sort of magic bullet are we expecting to find on these hard drives?
The Bush administration has literally gotten away with murder. There should be more than enough hard evidence to put the lot of them in prison for a long, long time.
The fact that they haven't seems to indicate that no additional evidence will be able to make even the slightest difference.
One of the things that always amazes me the most is that nobody predicted transistors and solid-state electronics, or anything remotely similar.
I wonder if we'll see any technologies similarly emerge from nowhere in the next century....
For those of you who don't get the joke, JPEGs (standard ones, at least) use RGB color mixing, along with your monitor, so it won't look any different to you.
That said, this "discovery" is hardly a new one, as the professional lighting industry use CMY subtractive color mixing almost exclusively. When you're layering multiple gels on top of each other, only subtractive color models work properly.
However, since this guy is using additive mixing (eg. a discrete light source for each color), his choice of CMY color mixing is counterintuitive. If anything, his gamut is going to be *less* than an RGB array. Since art is subjective, I'm going to refrain from calling it wrong, but you'd never see a professional lighting designer mixing colors this way.
These fixtures are also hilariously commonplace these days, and cost a lot less than the $1500 quoted in the article. Things can get a bit or a good deal fancier, depending upon how much you want to spend. Lo and behold, LED PARs do indeed use RGB mixing, whilst others use CMYK mixing, which also conveniently eliminates the need for dimming hardware in some cases.
I don't want to knock the project in any way, because it's damn impressive that an undergrad designed and constructed it on his own. However, things might have gone a bit better if he'd taken a trip down to the theatre or art departments before taking on the project.
My issue is that Spitzer resigned as a result of an outcry from the media, and a very vocal segment of the public.
Had he been formally brought up on charges, and been dismissed (or suspended) from his position as a result, I wouldn't have many objections.
Of course, such a trial would have considerably distracted from his duties as governor, and would have turned into an absolute circus (again: Bill Clinton).
Once again, I'm emphasizing that what Spitzer did was most certainly wrong. However, politicians frequently get away with much, much worse. Immediately giving in to the mob is a very, very dangerous thing to do.
What is happening on the iPhone is not DRM. DRM is about copy-protection.
There are many parallels between DRM and closed hardware platforms, but they are two very distinct issues.
Apple's reasons for clamping down on the iPhone are very likely to be quite numerous, not to mention whatever sort of contractual obligations they have to fulfill with AT&T. It's not pretty, but it's how the mobile phone industry works in the US.
I can understand people being disappointed that the iPhone is a closed and locked platform, but displaying outright anger over the issue is absurd. Nobody's forcing you to buy an iPhone, nor is anything preventing some bright entrepreneur from making something better.
The police want to do crazy things all the time. Mostly to make their jobs easier (and, to be fair... almost every profession is guilty of this to an extent).
Fortunately for us, most nations today heavily regulate their police force, and control their government through a voting parliamentary body, along with a system of checks and balances.
If this notion gained the support of a large portion of parliament or the population at large, it would be legitimate cause for concern. Fortunately for us, this is not the case.
Come on slashdot. Prove that you're better than some Left-Wing version of Fox news, and stop posting flamebaited articles that have little to no real significance.
How exactly would this work in remote locations..... like Tibet?
If this were possible, the government would crack down on it immediately, barring the sale of such phones. If worst came to worst, they could also simply "poison" the NNTP servers by providing their own, and flooding the network with nonsense data. (It should be pretty easy to find some spammers who have quite a bit of experience in the area)
Although the idealized technology-assisted civillian uprising is nice to imagine, the odds of it happening in China (if anywhere) are slim to none.
Also, the ones able to purchase 300mhz smartphones are almost certainly not going to be the discontents.
It doesn't help that the current incident was provoked by rioters in Tibet.
Overreaction? Possibly. However, China doesn't have all that many options that would reflect favorably upon them.
Small riots grow into big riots, and quenching a big riot will cause even more deaths.
It's not pretty, but it is very predictable. Unless China is willing to give up Tibet, this is how dissidents will be dealt with.
Do you think that the US would allow one of its states to secede?
Although I don't think that it was a good idea to scrap Mir entirely, it was falling to pieces by the time the ISS was in orbit due to a lack of funding. Putting the two together would have been dangerous and irresponsible.
The core module of the ISS was actually born out of the Soviet government's plans for a Mir II, which, along with Mir I, would couple their Buran shuttle program. (To give an idea of the Russian government's state of finances, the only functional/completed Buran was destroyed when the building it was housed in collapsed during a mild thunderstorm)
If the Russian government wanted to participate in the ISS and get to use the shiny new space station, Mir had to be sacrificed.
Also, consider that Mir very likely used different electrical and guidance systems.
The biggest failure of the ISS is, in my opinion, that it was constructed in tiny pieces and launched on small rockets, over a ridiculous span of time. A Saturn V could have launched mass of the currently-completed portions of the station in two launches.
There's no doubt that what he did was wrong, and represented a massive conflict of interest. I have very little sympathy for him.
However, politicians have done much, much worse, kept their positions, and in some cases even been re-elected. (For crying out loud, the Valerie Plame incident could easily be construed as treason)
By all accounts, he actually was doing a fairly decent job governing the state compared to his predecessors. His own personal life had very little bearing on his actions while in office (ditto to Bill Clinton).
Do we want a President/Governor who steals candy from convenience stores? No. However, if he's doing an apt job of managing foreign affairs and the economy, it might do considerably less damage to ignore it, and turn your head the other way.
They make this sort of stuff for backpackers, deployed soldiers, and the like.
However, I believe that only the "government contract developed" versions contain precious metals.
This does also beg the question of how the russians, who would frequently stay on Mir for months on end managed to do things. I can't see a tiny washing machine being all that ridiculous of a thing to have on board.
Exactly how tall were you as a kid?
Yes. In fact, I've lived there for most of my life.
By "tabloids", I was referring mostly to the sort one would expect to find at the grocery checkout. These are concerned mainly with celebrity gossip, and are generally treated as entertainment, rather than real news. Their circulation per-capita is also quite a bit lower than The Sun or Scottish Daily Mail.
Similarly, anybody who, even for a moment, takes the Weekly World News seriously needs his head examined. You'd be better off reading The Onion in terms of factual content.
British tabloids at least attempt to pass themselves off as being "real news". They would be more similar to (but perhaps not as bad as) The New York Post (also owned by Murdoch)
You're missing the point. I don't think this was ever intended to be a serious tool for political discourse, but rather an interesting exercise in applying some of the technologies being developed by Microsoft's research lab.
It's a cool technology demo, and perhaps does a nice job of gathering and visualizing a two-dimensional dataset. This was most likely thrown together in a few afternoons as a result of a conversation held over lunch one day that began with "Wouldn't it be neat if we...."
Similarly, OpenGL wasn't designed to display teapots, although they're quite frequently used to demonstrate its features.
Indeed. Local news has a frighteningly powerful impact upon local culture (at least for a certain.... and typically extremely vocal segment of the population).
The ones that always surprise me, however, are the British tabloids. They're not quite (nearly( as bad as American tabloids, and are therefore taken quite seriously by some, which is troubling to say the least. The Sun, and The Scottish Daily Mail come to mind as being two such papers.
Move a step up to papers like The Guardian and The Times, and journalistic standards still aren't quite up to what you'd expect from a top-tier news organization. (The Times, however, is probably the least tainted of Rupert Murdoch's properties, especially in recent years)
Perhaps it's simply a reflection of my own views, but I have a bit more respect for papers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, who do a somewhat better job covering global events, and tend to do considerably less cherrypicking with their stories.
Oh, and of course, the BBC and NPR are both quite good, both being considerably less driven by ratings and sales than their commercial competitors.
So, no. It's not even remotely surprising. The field of Engineering pretty much ground to a halt after the 1970s, and the US has been milking the "information economy" ever since.
XP *looked* different. As far as functionality was concerned, very little changed between 98, 2000, and XP.
Once you accepted the fact that it was blue, there wasn't a whole lot different, apart from the start menu (and both of those things could easily be disabled, and frequently were).
That said, I still maintain a Xenix (now SCO OpenServer) installation for a small business. For what they do, it suits them fine, and the cost of implementing a new Windows-based system would be quite high, and wouldn't provide any tangible benefits. A few years ago, we replaced their Amber-screeen serial terminals with XP machines running terminal-emulation software to improve ergonomics, and allow them to run other applications required for the business.
Nevertheless, the ancient Unix system continues to operate flawlessly. We try to keep the hardware relatively "fresh," although there's certainly not much point meddling with a system that works.
And to be fair, the people firing those rockets were there first.
What exactly does this discussion have to do with the "Vista Capable" debacle?
Sure, Vista is a slow, bloated operating system that offers very few tangible improvements over its predecessor.
However, the "Vista Capable" debacle grew out of the fact that Microsoft's marketing droids decided to vastly overstate Vista's ability to run over slow hardware.
Had Microsoft been a bit more conservative with their estimates (subtly admitting that their operating system is a cow), there never would have been a legal issue. Vista on its own isn't a great product, although its faults do not constitute a breach of the law (had the product been absurdly unstable or insecure, that might have been the case, although by most accounts, Vista either holds the line or improves over XP in these regards).
TFA discusses the possible engineering & design decisions that are being put into Windows 7 as new features. Odds are that many of these features haven't even been coded. Likewise, given that the design document has *just* been finalized, I can't imagine that the marketing guys have had much (if any) time to figure out how to spin the new product.
Here's a hint: Look at the features that were dropped from Vista (some of them were actually quite innovative).
Personally, I hope that Windows 7 is a decent, solid operating system, and corrects for Vista's faults. Microsoft has had a tendency to appropriately compensate if one of their products flops. NT4 spawned into a beautiful desktop-ready os with the release of Win2k, and after destroying all evidence that Windows Me! ever existed, Microsoft launched XP, which is arguably the most successful desktop operating system to date.
Also, Apple needs a kick in the pants. They're getting complacent, and the Quality Control on the last few releases of OS X have been abysmal by their former standards.
You joke, but ignoring the technical impracticality of building airplanes out of heavy armor, a human would not be able to remotely survive the sort of stresses that the black boxes are designed to handle.
For starters, if you drop the black box out the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet, it'll survive more or less intact. It'd be a pretty neat trick for a human to be able to do that.
Moreover, the black boxes are designed to withstand acceleration forces of 3400g (33 kilometers/sec^2!) for 6.5 milliseconds. Would you want to place yourself between a 747, and an immovable object? Those are the magnitudes of the forces we're talking about.
Humans can survive 25-30g for brief periods of time. A force of over 100g will be lethal in all but the most exceptional of circumstances, even if it is only instantaneous.