I have to say that I read that site. I seem some interesting bias in it. I would have put the liar lair pants on fire one as half true and that was from read the description. The H1N1 comment was fear mongering but it is true. "You don't know if this (the H1N1 vaccine) is gonna cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s.". We don't know but in the world of risk assessment I would put not getting the vaccine as more dangerous than getting it. But vaccine fear is rampant on both sides these days.
Please take a look at the rabid Beck haters below. I don't know if they are right or wrong in what they are saying since I don't watch Glenn Beck and will not make the effort to study him. He is a freaking talking head folks. Anyway both sides are EXTREMELY polarized and live in fantasy land. I would say that a good 25% of the population think Obama is the second coming and another 25% think he is the Anti-Christ. And even if you are right do you think that this action did anything to make things less polarized? Did that website make anything better or change anybodies mind? I wish more people would start following one rule. "Do nothing that doesn't make things better." In this case the website was exactly as I described it. A way to rally both bases but not only changes nobodies mind but instead just reinforces what they already believe.
I don't think that you will save enough building a small dome over each building. It would be better to retrofit or replace. The befits of putting a dome over an entire city? Lower heating and cooling costs because of the massively reduced surface area. Better rain water management. Less run off from streets and lawns. The iffy one is better quality of living. You could have spring like temperatures all year long. A lot of people would love that. I am not so sure that I would. No need to plow the roads, shovel the walks... Less of a need for cars. If you live in town you can walk every where and never worry about the weather. I would hope that they cars would be left on the out skirts of the city and other transport used in the city. Bikes and walking would be the best with electric buses and trucks for moving people and material. You may hate it for cultural or aesthetic reasons but from a technical standpoint it has some very interesting benefits. In a way it provides a bigger disconnect between people and the environment but in a lot of ways it provides more protection to the environment from the activities of humans. It is sort of a flashback to the 50s and 60s but if you got rid of the suburbs and got people to move to dome covered villages you could free up a lot of land for parks and green space. Maybe they should do this with Flint, MI. I find it interesting that you make the statment that putting a dome over an entire city is out of the question. You do not have the right to make that call. The idea has some merit and I would love to see some detailed studies and maybe even a test case. It would be very cool.
Why do you bother? You are right but why make the effort? I swear that the people on Slashdot have pushed the art of bias to new extremes. To answer your question. No I am not furious that the decision was legal. And no I wouldn't be upset if the other URL was found legal. I an and would be furious that both exists and I am a little ticked that Slashdot puts it on the front page and NOT under politics which I have set to not show up on my front page of Slashdot. Yes it is good that it is legal it is bad that idiots create such crap and that other sites then give them free PR. BTW if you hate Glen Beck you do know this will only help him with his faithful don't you? Just so everybody can see the results of this action and understand just how STUPID it is I will explain it to you. Some Beck hater posts this website. People that HATE Beck will think it is funny. People that Love Beck will hate those that think it is funny, Beck takes them to court and doesn't get the site taken down. The people that HATE Beck still think it is funny. The people that LOVE Beck will see it as proof that the courts are biased and hate them. They will become more politically active and work harder for consertives to get elected.
The result is this is preaching to the base and will do nothing but amuse one base and rally the other. End result more polarization which is exactly what WE DON"T NEED. For people like me that don't love or hate Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, President Obama, or NPR. We get anoyed that we have to see this stupidity.
Of course why did I bother to make this effort since it will be unread or I will be modded down as a troll. PS. I bet Health Care will not pass. Both parties are expert at the art of active inactivity.
Domeing a building is useless. It is just putting a building in a building. I know you can not just scale to any size however the town in question was just one squire mile. There have been several studies of very large domes of around that size and they may be practical. Using the air supported structure makes this very interesting because it all the loads are in tension which allows for a very light strong structure. If the structure proves practical then I see no insurmountable problems with air quality or with rain water management. I can see some huge ecological benefits as well. Lower heating and cooling bills and better run off management. To water the lawns you just catch the rain water that falls on the dome and then use sprinklers in the dome. No rain water run off from roads carrying oil and no run off from lawns with nasty pesticides. I don't know if I would like living there. The lack of a real sky view and the lack of weather might get to me. No breeze or rain could just to to be too much. The thing is that it would be an interesting project to do a study on. I doubt that an air supported dome would survive a tornado or major hurricane but in the North East it could be a very interesting project.
I think your math is off. 1. Skyscrapers are not the most efficiency shape for volume to surface area. The wall thickness will go up with height not with length. Skyscrapers tend to have a high aspect ratio which really pushes the strength requirements to the max. If took the same volume as is enclosed in the world trade center and made it a cube the wall thickness would go down massively. Just going up will cost you a lot. Lets do that math. A 100x100x1000 building has a volume of 10,000,000 cubic feet. That would be a 100 story building with an aspect ratio of 10 to 1. The surface area would be 420,000 ft2 If you made the same building a cube then it would only be around 220 feet on a side. You would only have to have a wall strong enough for a 22 story building so the thickness of the wall would be much smaller. Because the base of the building is so much bigger the wall thickness would be a much smaller percentage of the area of the building. So the area volume of the building would now be 10,648,000 and the surface area is only 290,400. A skyscraper isn't a good model when looking at mega structures. Plus you are looking at a large air supported dome the are loaded in tension. You can make a tension loaded structure a lot thinner than a compression loaded structure like a skyscraper wall. Here is a reference for you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-supported_structure#Advantages_and_disadvantages and this. You could build make the dome geodesic or monolithic but the construction costs would be much higher but you could get better insulation. You might also want to look at some other large domes like the Millennium Dome to get and idea to just how good the structure to volume ratio really is.
Solar gain? Sure. Solar electricity? Not a chance in Vermont in winter.
Put each building in a dome? No benefit of scale. Lets work with boxes since the math is easy. A two thousand squire foot (2025 sf) house is right around 45x45x10 and will contain 20250 cubic feet of space. The total surface area of that with a flat roof is 5850 sf or just under 4 cubic feet of living space per square foot of surface area. Now lets take a cube 450x450x100. Total living space is 20,250,000 cubic feet. Surface area of 585000 ft2. or just a bit over 34 cubic feet per each square foot of surface area or almost ten times as much living space for each square foot of surface area. When you make it a dome verses a bunch of little boxes the ratio gets even bigger. The bigger the dome the bigger the savings. Of course you will be enclosing a lot of dead air with a big dome but over all you would still bet a net savings.
Not really I would assume the dome would be also. Then you have to look at how many windows and doors and vents each building has. Then how many old buildings are not all that well insulated. All things equal a bigger building will have less surface area than a smaller building. Add in that a dome has a very high volume to surface area to start with and over all you should get a big net decrease in heat loss. Add in that you could also gain from larger more efficient heating and cooling systems instead of lots of small and ones and you get a bigger savings. In the winter if you are using anything but wind or hydro for power you could use the heat from the plant to heat the city. BTW yes I left out solar... Solar in Vermont in the winter? You have got to be kidding me. I am not saying that it is a problem free idea. Fire is still the big thing I would worry about but it really could be an interesting idea to try. Maybe on Antarctica? You could build a large research base and use geothermal power as a test sit if you want to push it to extremes.
Then what do you want to call it? Copyright infringement? I don't care what you want to call it but, by goodness if a health food store can sell organic salt and not go to jail the calling this piracy is ok.
Have you ever complained to a theater manager? I have gotten free tickets because of projection problems and sound problems. Just like the airline. That is the key. You have the right to complain and not to give that theater or studio your money in the future if they do not respond. You do not have the right to just not pay because you are unhappy. As to movies sucking or not. I have enjoyed some movies that other don't like. I didn't hate the second Transformers movie. I loved the comments about the lack of character development. THEY WHERE GIANT ROBOTS THAT TURN INTO CARS! There was a lot of explosions and sound and that is exactly what I expected. If you where expecting Hamlet then... I didn't like the Star Trek reboot. 1. Why would Spock carry a 55 gallon drum of that stuff when a drop will make a black hole? 2. Why did the Romulans that traveled back in time waste all that time destroying Vulcan? 3. Why didn't the Romulans that traveled back in time go to their home world and give them a 100 year boost in tech and a 100 year warning about their sun failing? By doing that they would have saved billions of Romulan lives and allowed the Romulan empire to defeat the Federation. In other words I expected more than big explosions and giant plot holes. However I seem to be the only person that didn't like that movie. Just because I didn't like doesn't mean that it sucks.
Actually the dome would have less surface area than the town. Take all the surface area of all the buildings and add it up. You will find that at makes a pretty good heat exchanger compared to a nice smooth dome. Rain water? What a great resource. You would catch it falling all the dome and and use it. I could even be used for the drinking water. Same for the snow melt from the dome. If nothing else it could be used for irrigation. Air Quality? Yes you would should ban cars from inside the city as well as fire places. You might not need to but it would probably be for the best if you did. For the dome to work you would want to have some pretty powerful air blowers to keep it pumped up. That should provide enough airflow for the air quality to be as good as a none domed town. Us air to air heat exchangers to allow for even more air flow when needed.
The one huge danger I see is fire. What is a building catches on fire? Is the dome fire proof? That risk could be reduced but if you are doing to dome an existing town you would have a lot of older buildings that may not be as fire safe as you would like.
You are not paying for enjoyment. You are paying to watch a movie. You can not ensure that people will enjoy a movie. For example I really hated the last Star Trek movie. I HATE FREAKING TIME TRAVEL REBOOTS! Most people really seemed to enjoy it. I did not but that doesn't make it a bad movie. Just as you not liking a movie means it is bad. I suggest that you just stop watching movies unless you know that they are good and stop trying to force you views of right right and wrong on the media producers while ignoring their rights. Just don't consume it unless they offer you a money back promise. If enough people do that then things will change. If you keep breaking the law then they will just make stricter laws.
Yes you do. If you buy a plane ticket but don't like the flight do you not get to pay? Really people that try before you buy line is just silly. If you think you should get to try before you buy then ONLY use products that offer it. You do not have the right to force a content provider to do what you want by any other means than not consuming their content and then not paying for it. To use their content and not paying for it is piracy. Dude READ THE REVIEWS!
"My wife almost got in an accident several years ago because our old 1993 Ford Explorer had a sticky gas pedal. We've since gotten rid of that clunker (thank goodness), but when it was happened I told her it was important for her to train her "muscle memory" to put the car in neutral." Why not just fix the gas pedal? I mean if your car has a sticky gas pedal get it fixed don't live with it or train you "muscle memory" to deal with it.
Yea mechanical throttle cables never fail.... Actually drive by wire does make the care more responsive and smooths out throttle response. Using the a drive by wire you can create a linear power curve where there was none. That makes the car or motorcycle a lot easier to control. It all also allows traction control. A lot more people have died from and or gotten hurt from a car getting out of control than will or have gotten hurt from drive by wire. As it is your car is already using EFI so forget about KISS. Drive by wire and EFI beats the daylights out of a carb and gas pedal for safety any day.
Actually I had a friend that worked for NASA. A lot of the important software for experiments was written in Java. A lot of the experiments on the ISS are not high demand and in a lot of labs around the work there are a lot of PCs running a lot of VB code. So yes I think that there is a good chance that a good amount of it is also running on the ISS. VB is very popular as a control front end because it is so easy to write code in it. I personally hate it but a lot of people write a lot of very useful stuff in VB. Which is a real shame since it ties you to Windows.
Of course they may be using Matlab. It is a real shame that they are using Windows for everything on the ISS. I would love to see some of the stuff they use released as FOSS.
I think it is really funny that you separate Hollywood from big business. Hollywood/media companies in general are big business. I will admit that I am extremely disappointed in this. I didn't vote for Obama but I kept telling people to give him a chance. Well using national security as a reason to keep a copyright treaty secerate is just wrong. I really don't have a problem with going after file sharers since I think pirateing is wrong. What I will not be willing to over look is the destruction of due process.
Obama I am willing to give Obama a bit of pass on some national security policies. I would like to think that he is wise enough that when he got into office and found the world wasn't what he thought it was that he adapted. BTW I voted for McCain. I honestly think he was the better candidate picking Palin was stupid and I was hopping he would have picked Rudy for the VP but that is history.
Yes you are in bow range if the other guy has a bow. Same goes for drones. Yes the distance is growing but it really is the same thing. "I'm not saying that's not a logical progression from cruise missiles and smart weapon systems, I'm aying its a step in the wrong direction long term."
It is just another step that has been going on for a long time. There are pluses to it as well. You are more willing to loose a drone so you may be willing to take a bigger risk and not cause civilian or at least fewer civilian deaths. Take a look at the difference between air power as it was used in WWII and the war in Iraq. in WWII you took out a city to take out a target. In Iraq they took out a building to take out a target.
Not a prefect world but really not that different than it was. This is just a better bow or a sling.
I tend to agree but then I have not seen the patents yet. Hardware patents I feel are fine for the most part. It is stupid software patents that get to me. The question is what did they patent. I mean is a two screen device going to be patentable? Couldn't you claim the Nintendo DS as prior art since people have used it as a book reader? As I said I have not read the patents so I am not sure where I stand on this but yes it could be a good use for patent law.
Sounds like a job for Linux or Solaris.. I wonder how many visual basic applications are being run on the ISS. No I am not trolling. A lot of experimental control systems are written in VB because it is so easy to throw together an application.
Actually I am sure that the ISS is using TDRS or it's replacment for their link. I would bet that the ISS has at least one geosynchronous bounce at all times.
This ability isn't exactly new. Torpedoes at the end of WWII had seekers. A diving sub could fire one that would circle and hit any ship that it happened to find. We have had captor mines for years that sit on the seabed and wait for a sub to come buy and sinks them. Should we worry about the abuse of weapons? Well heck yes. Ever since we developed the bow we need to worry about people abusing the ability to kill at a distance but this drone tech isn't revolutionary.
Anti trust? Apple has what percentage of the PC market? 10% maybe? Apple blocking support for a chip that is used in none of their current OS. It maybe that they are going to come out with a new version of OS/X for say the AppleTV that will run on the Atom/ION platform and don't want people putting full OS/X on them. This is so far from anti trust that it isn't funny. Frankly if you don't like how Apple does business then don't buy from them.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say that I read that site. I seem some interesting bias in it. I would have put the liar lair pants on fire one as half true and that was from read the description.
The H1N1 comment was fear mongering but it is true. "You don't know if this (the H1N1 vaccine) is gonna cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s.".
We don't know but in the world of risk assessment I would put not getting the vaccine as more dangerous than getting it.
But vaccine fear is rampant on both sides these days.
Please take a look at the rabid Beck haters below.
I don't know if they are right or wrong in what they are saying since I don't watch Glenn Beck and will not make the effort to study him. He is a freaking talking head folks.
Anyway both sides are EXTREMELY polarized and live in fantasy land. I would say that a good 25% of the population think Obama is the second coming and another 25% think he is the Anti-Christ.
And even if you are right do you think that this action did anything to make things less polarized? Did that website make anything better or change anybodies mind?
I wish more people would start following one rule. "Do nothing that doesn't make things better."
In this case the website was exactly as I described it. A way to rally both bases but not only changes nobodies mind but instead just reinforces what they already believe.
I don't think that you will save enough building a small dome over each building. It would be better to retrofit or replace.
The befits of putting a dome over an entire city?
Lower heating and cooling costs because of the massively reduced surface area.
Better rain water management. Less run off from streets and lawns.
The iffy one is better quality of living. You could have spring like temperatures all year long. A lot of people would love that. I am not so sure that I would.
No need to plow the roads, shovel the walks...
Less of a need for cars. If you live in town you can walk every where and never worry about the weather. I would hope that they cars would be left on the out skirts of the city and other transport used in the city. Bikes and walking would be the best with electric buses and trucks for moving people and material.
You may hate it for cultural or aesthetic reasons but from a technical standpoint it has some very interesting benefits. In a way it provides a bigger disconnect between people and the environment but in a lot of ways it provides more protection to the environment from the activities of humans. It is sort of a flashback to the 50s and 60s but if you got rid of the suburbs and got people to move to dome covered villages you could free up a lot of land for parks and green space.
Maybe they should do this with Flint, MI.
I find it interesting that you make the statment that putting a dome over an entire city is out of the question.
You do not have the right to make that call. The idea has some merit and I would love to see some detailed studies and maybe even a test case. It would be very cool.
Why do you bother? You are right but why make the effort?
I swear that the people on Slashdot have pushed the art of bias to new extremes.
To answer your question. No I am not furious that the decision was legal. And no I wouldn't be upset if the other URL was found legal.
I an and would be furious that both exists and I am a little ticked that Slashdot puts it on the front page and NOT under politics which I have set to not show up on my front page of Slashdot.
Yes it is good that it is legal it is bad that idiots create such crap and that other sites then give them free PR.
BTW if you hate Glen Beck you do know this will only help him with his faithful don't you?
Just so everybody can see the results of this action and understand just how STUPID it is I will explain it to you.
Some Beck hater posts this website.
People that HATE Beck will think it is funny.
People that Love Beck will hate those that think it is funny,
Beck takes them to court and doesn't get the site taken down.
The people that HATE Beck still think it is funny.
The people that LOVE Beck will see it as proof that the courts are biased and hate them. They will become more politically active and work harder for consertives to get elected.
The result is this is preaching to the base and will do nothing but amuse one base and rally the other.
End result more polarization which is exactly what WE DON"T NEED.
For people like me that don't love or hate Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, President Obama, or NPR.
We get anoyed that we have to see this stupidity.
Of course why did I bother to make this effort since it will be unread or I will be modded down as a troll.
PS. I bet Health Care will not pass. Both parties are expert at the art of active inactivity.
Domeing a building is useless. It is just putting a building in a building. I know you can not just scale to any size however the town in question was just one squire mile. There have been several studies of very large domes of around that size and they may be practical. Using the air supported structure makes this very interesting because it all the loads are in tension which allows for a very light strong structure.
If the structure proves practical then I see no insurmountable problems with air quality or with rain water management. I can see some huge ecological benefits as well.
Lower heating and cooling bills and better run off management. To water the lawns you just catch the rain water that falls on the dome and then use sprinklers in the dome. No rain water run off from roads carrying oil and no run off from lawns with nasty pesticides.
I don't know if I would like living there. The lack of a real sky view and the lack of weather might get to me. No breeze or rain could just to to be too much.
The thing is that it would be an interesting project to do a study on. I doubt that an air supported dome would survive a tornado or major hurricane but in the North East it could be a very interesting project.
I think your math is off.
1. Skyscrapers are not the most efficiency shape for volume to surface area. The wall thickness will go up with height not with length. Skyscrapers tend to have a high aspect ratio which really pushes the strength requirements to the max.
If took the same volume as is enclosed in the world trade center and made it a cube the wall thickness would go down massively. Just going up will cost you a lot.
Lets do that math. A 100x100x1000 building has a volume of 10,000,000 cubic feet. That would be a 100 story building with an aspect ratio of 10 to 1.
The surface area would be 420,000 ft2
If you made the same building a cube then it would only be around 220 feet on a side.
You would only have to have a wall strong enough for a 22 story building so the thickness of the wall would be much smaller.
Because the base of the building is so much bigger the wall thickness would be a much smaller percentage of the area of the building. So the area volume of the building would now be 10,648,000 and the surface area is only 290,400.
A skyscraper isn't a good model when looking at mega structures. Plus you are looking at a large air supported dome the are loaded in tension. You can make a tension loaded structure a lot thinner than a compression loaded structure like a skyscraper wall.
Here is a reference for you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-supported_structure#Advantages_and_disadvantages
and this.
You could build make the dome geodesic or monolithic but the construction costs would be much higher but you could get better insulation.
You might also want to look at some other large domes like the Millennium Dome to get and idea to just how good the structure to volume ratio really is.
Solar gain? Sure. Solar electricity? Not a chance in Vermont in winter.
Put each building in a dome? No benefit of scale.
Lets work with boxes since the math is easy.
A two thousand squire foot (2025 sf) house is right around 45x45x10 and will contain 20250 cubic feet of space.
The total surface area of that with a flat roof is 5850 sf or just under 4 cubic feet of living space per square foot of surface area.
Now lets take a cube 450x450x100.
Total living space is 20,250,000 cubic feet.
Surface area of 585000 ft2. or just a bit over 34 cubic feet per each square foot of surface area or almost ten times as much living space for each square foot of surface area.
When you make it a dome verses a bunch of little boxes the ratio gets even bigger.
The bigger the dome the bigger the savings.
Of course you will be enclosing a lot of dead air with a big dome but over all you would still bet a net savings.
Not really I would assume the dome would be also. Then you have to look at how many windows and doors and vents each building has. Then how many old buildings are not all that well insulated.
All things equal a bigger building will have less surface area than a smaller building. Add in that a dome has a very high volume to surface area to start with and over all you should get a big net decrease in heat loss. Add in that you could also gain from larger more efficient heating and cooling systems instead of lots of small and ones and you get a bigger savings.
In the winter if you are using anything but wind or hydro for power you could use the heat from the plant to heat the city.
BTW yes I left out solar... Solar in Vermont in the winter? You have got to be kidding me.
I am not saying that it is a problem free idea. Fire is still the big thing I would worry about but it really could be an interesting idea to try. Maybe on Antarctica? You could build a large research base and use geothermal power as a test sit if you want to push it to extremes.
Then what do you want to call it? Copyright infringement? I don't care what you want to call it but, by goodness if a health food store can sell organic salt and not go to jail the calling this piracy is ok.
Have you ever complained to a theater manager? I have gotten free tickets because of projection problems and sound problems. Just like the airline. That is the key. You have the right to complain and not to give that theater or studio your money in the future if they do not respond. You do not have the right to just not pay because you are unhappy.
As to movies sucking or not. I have enjoyed some movies that other don't like. I didn't hate the second Transformers movie. I loved the comments about the lack of character development. THEY WHERE GIANT ROBOTS THAT TURN INTO CARS! There was a lot of explosions and sound and that is exactly what I expected. If you where expecting Hamlet then...
I didn't like the Star Trek reboot.
1. Why would Spock carry a 55 gallon drum of that stuff when a drop will make a black hole?
2. Why did the Romulans that traveled back in time waste all that time destroying Vulcan?
3. Why didn't the Romulans that traveled back in time go to their home world and give them a 100 year boost in tech and a 100 year warning about their sun failing? By doing that they would have saved billions of Romulan lives and allowed the Romulan empire to defeat the Federation.
In other words I expected more than big explosions and giant plot holes.
However I seem to be the only person that didn't like that movie. Just because I didn't like doesn't mean that it sucks.
Actually the dome would have less surface area than the town. Take all the surface area of all the buildings and add it up. You will find that at makes a pretty good heat exchanger compared to a nice smooth dome.
Rain water? What a great resource. You would catch it falling all the dome and and use it. I could even be used for the drinking water. Same for the snow melt from the dome. If nothing else it could be used for irrigation.
Air Quality? Yes you would should ban cars from inside the city as well as fire places. You might not need to but it would probably be for the best if you did. For the dome to work you would want to have some pretty powerful air blowers to keep it pumped up. That should provide enough airflow for the air quality to be as good as a none domed town. Us air to air heat exchangers to allow for even more air flow when needed.
The one huge danger I see is fire. What is a building catches on fire? Is the dome fire proof? That risk could be reduced but if you are doing to dome an existing town you would have a lot of older buildings that may not be as fire safe as you would like.
You are not paying for enjoyment. You are paying to watch a movie. You can not ensure that people will enjoy a movie. For example I really hated the last Star Trek movie. I HATE FREAKING TIME TRAVEL REBOOTS!
Most people really seemed to enjoy it. I did not but that doesn't make it a bad movie. Just as you not liking a movie means it is bad. I suggest that you just stop watching movies unless you know that they are good and stop trying to force you views of right right and wrong on the media producers while ignoring their rights. Just don't consume it unless they offer you a money back promise. If enough people do that then things will change. If you keep breaking the law then they will just make stricter laws.
You pay to see a movie. Just because you didn't enjoy the movie doesn't mean that it was a bad movie. You saw the movie and that is what you pay for.
Yes you do. If you buy a plane ticket but don't like the flight do you not get to pay? Really people that try before you buy line is just silly. If you think you should get to try before you buy then ONLY use products that offer it. You do not have the right to force a content provider to do what you want by any other means than not consuming their content and then not paying for it.
To use their content and not paying for it is piracy.
Dude READ THE REVIEWS!
"My wife almost got in an accident several years ago because our old 1993 Ford Explorer had a sticky gas pedal. We've since gotten rid of that clunker (thank goodness), but when it was happened I told her it was important for her to train her "muscle memory" to put the car in neutral."
Why not just fix the gas pedal?
I mean if your car has a sticky gas pedal get it fixed don't live with it or train you "muscle memory" to deal with it.
Yea mechanical throttle cables never fail....
Actually drive by wire does make the care more responsive and smooths out throttle response. Using the a drive by wire you can create a linear power curve where there was none. That makes the car or motorcycle a lot easier to control. It all also allows traction control. A lot more people have died from and or gotten hurt from a car getting out of control than will or have gotten hurt from drive by wire.
As it is your car is already using EFI so forget about KISS. Drive by wire and EFI beats the daylights out of a carb and gas pedal for safety any day.
Actually I had a friend that worked for NASA. A lot of the important software for experiments was written in Java. A lot of the experiments on the ISS are not high demand and in a lot of labs around the work there are a lot of PCs running a lot of VB code. So yes I think that there is a good chance that a good amount of it is also running on the ISS.
VB is very popular as a control front end because it is so easy to write code in it. I personally hate it but a lot of people write a lot of very useful stuff in VB. Which is a real shame since it ties you to Windows.
Of course they may be using Matlab. It is a real shame that they are using Windows for everything on the ISS. I would love to see some of the stuff they use released as FOSS.
I think it is really funny that you separate Hollywood from big business. Hollywood/media companies in general are big business. I will admit that I am extremely disappointed in this. I didn't vote for Obama but I kept telling people to give him a chance. Well using national security as a reason to keep a copyright treaty secerate is just wrong. I really don't have a problem with going after file sharers since I think pirateing is wrong. What I will not be willing to over look is the destruction of due process.
Obama I am willing to give Obama a bit of pass on some national security policies. I would like to think that he is wise enough that when he got into office and found the world wasn't what he thought it was that he adapted. BTW I voted for McCain. I honestly think he was the better candidate picking Palin was stupid and I was hopping he would have picked Rudy for the VP but that is history.
Yes you are in bow range if the other guy has a bow. Same goes for drones. Yes the distance is growing but it really is the same thing.
"I'm not saying that's not a logical progression from cruise missiles and smart weapon systems, I'm aying its a step in the wrong direction long term."
It is just another step that has been going on for a long time. There are pluses to it as well. You are more willing to loose a drone so you may be willing to take a bigger risk and not cause civilian or at least fewer civilian deaths.
Take a look at the difference between air power as it was used in WWII and the war in Iraq. in WWII you took out a city to take out a target. In Iraq they took out a building to take out a target.
Not a prefect world but really not that different than it was. This is just a better bow or a sling.
I bet you would be shocked. I am not talking about life support or navigation but just the code monitors the experiments.
I tend to agree but then I have not seen the patents yet. Hardware patents I feel are fine for the most part. It is stupid software patents that get to me.
The question is what did they patent. I mean is a two screen device going to be patentable? Couldn't you claim the Nintendo DS as prior art since people have used it as a book reader?
As I said I have not read the patents so I am not sure where I stand on this but yes it could be a good use for patent law.
Sounds like a job for Linux or Solaris..
I wonder how many visual basic applications are being run on the ISS. No I am not trolling. A lot of experimental control systems are written in VB because it is so easy to throw together an application.
Actually I am sure that the ISS is using TDRS or it's replacment for their link. I would bet that the ISS has at least one geosynchronous bounce at all times.
This ability isn't exactly new.
Torpedoes at the end of WWII had seekers. A diving sub could fire one that would circle and hit any ship that it happened to find. We have had captor mines for years that sit on the seabed and wait for a sub to come buy and sinks them. Should we worry about the abuse of weapons?
Well heck yes. Ever since we developed the bow we need to worry about people abusing the ability to kill at a distance but this drone tech isn't revolutionary.
Anti trust? Apple has what percentage of the PC market? 10% maybe? Apple blocking support for a chip that is used in none of their current OS. It maybe that they are going to come out with a new version of OS/X for say the AppleTV that will run on the Atom/ION platform and don't want people putting full OS/X on them.
This is so far from anti trust that it isn't funny. Frankly if you don't like how Apple does business then don't buy from them.