Very soon after the US was dragged into WWII, we reached an agreement with our allies (Great Britain & the other Commonwealth nations then, the USSR soon after) that the war was only going to end with the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations. This policy arose because less drastic treatment of the Germans in 1918 worked out quite badly in the long run, and because it did not seem possible to negotiate a peace with the Nazi leadership that would allow trying them for war crimes and hanging them. (What they _deserved_ was something far more agonizing and drawn out than their execution of Rommel, but since we're civilized people we had to settle for hanging...) In hindsight, it's clear that this was a very good policy -- for Germany.
Unthinkingly extending it to Japan may have been a poor idea. I make no claims to expertise about Bushida, but it's obvious that Samurai didn't surrender unconditionally. One reason may be that the Bushido code allowed torturing captives, unless there was an agreement not to do that before surrender. On the other hand, once the war was clearly lost (possibly even in 1943), if we had offered a treaty that treated the Emperor and the Japanese people well but required death for the cabinet and high military command, Bushido would have required them to do what was best for their employers -- sign it, then slit their own bellies. I'm not sure they really had the courage to go through with that, but showing the leaders up as something less than true Samurai might have shortened the war also.
The trouble was, Japanese culture was a mystery to FDR and Churchill, and they didn't spend much time thinking about it anyhow. Nazi Germany was the big threat, and the Pacific war a side-show until Germany went down. Only a fraction of our force went to the Pacific, and much of that was hardware that was of little or no use against Germany; for example American submarines would have found no targets in the Atlantic, but devastated Japan's merchant fleet.
So with this lack of thought about Japan, when Truman assumed office he found himself bound by agreements with many nations to accept nothing but unconditional surrender, and with many pressures both political and practical to end it _fast_. Japan was the last hold-out. Politically, the American people wanted Japan finished off fast, and also there was the threat that Stalin would snatch some or all of Japan and keep it. Practically, the harbors were full of landing craft, and the great army that defeated Germany was waiting for either another job or discharge. If that army landed on a Japanese beach, over 100,000 Americans would have died, and it's unlikely that once it broke through the defenses it could have been restrained before millions of "Japs" were killed.
Truman had one alternative -- a weapon so frightful that it might change anyone's mind. But he only had two bombs, which actually could not inflict as much damage as thousands of B29's carrying conventional weapons already had. So a bluff was required, to not only blow up two smallish cities, but to give the impression that we were just going to keep on blowing up one or two cities a week until they surrendered...
Certainly there was racism: on the west coast, Japanese-Americans (even some citizens) were rounded up indiscriminately, even though there were NO incidents of spying or sabotage by any Japanese-American. On the other hand, Hitler had an organization in place to recruit spies and saboteurs from the German-Americans, and some actual traitors had been caught, but only a few thousand were ever detained. But this doesn't have much to do with the decision to drop the A-bombs. If they had been ready before victory in Europe, no doubt they'd have been used on German cities.
ido you realize how much even a single elephant EATS?! A lot. or how hard it is to dissuade him from eating something? Easy. Fly out in a helicopter and find a big gray object that isn't a boulder, and is off the reservation. Shoot it with a.50. Land and set up the barbie. Invite _lots_ of neighbors.
Seriously, small fast-breeding mammals such as rabbits are uncontrollable if they can out-compete the native wild-life. Big slow-breeding ones are easily controlled. They're quite conspicuous, and you've got a year or more to hunt them down before they can breed and raise their off-spring to live on their own.
I would be concerned that the imports be very thoroughly doese, purged, and checked to ensure that they aren't bringing in smaller passengers -- parasites, diseases, or even foreign plant seeds in the elephant plop could be trouble. This adds to the already considerable cost of this enterprise, and maybe there are only a few species that would work. Elephants are fine; we already know how to transport them all over the world without infecting other species, and they do just fine eating hay and grain from Iowa so I don't think native Aussie fodder would be a problem. Rhinos and hippos might be as easy. On the other hand, would whatever is in Aussie treetops be a decent substitute for a giraffe's natural food? Lions might be a quite bad idea, except on a permanently human-fed basis; I suspect that for lions to be truly wild, you'd have to import some of the smaller African prey animals, and the plants the prey eats, etc., and something would go out of control...
Pretty obviously, to make this go at all will require special permits for importing exotic animals. I hope the regulatory agency makes sure all the questions are answered, and that the importers live up to their commitments. The species finally allowed in should not be enough to make even the beginnings of an African savannah ecology, and the expected tourism might never materialize.
Personally, if I was going to give away that much cash to protect African endangered species, I'd be really tempted to use it to clean out the _real_ dangers from one piece of Africa -- wipe out the government and other bandits -- then set up a well-protected game reserve/tourist area.
If youre going to grow stuff in a 25km^2 greenhouse, thats going to need alot of irrigation. It's worse than that (assuming they're planning on placing it in desert regions) -- it's a 5km diameter (19.6 sq km, about 4,800 acres) greenhouse with a high velocity dry wind blowing through it continuously. Normal plant leaves lose a lot of water in those conditions. Cactus wouldn't, but why would Australia need greenhouses to grow cactus. You might recover part of the water from condensation near the top, but if the relative humidity was low to start with, 10 degrees C temperature drop isn't going to condense out nearly as much water as was put in to start with. If the intention is to modify the weather by injecting lots of moisture 1 km up, and the fresh waster is available, a row of these things would do it, besides growing veggies and generating power.
Or maybe it wouldn't work at all if plants were in it, since the evaporation would cool the input air, and thus you wouldn't get the heat differential driving the chimney. On the other hand, water vapor is lighter than air, so would that maybe offset the cooling effect and keep the chimney going? I don't know how to calculate this...
Finally, if evaporation is acceptable, you could make sea-coast green-house/towers double as desalinization plants. Run the seawater into ponds in the greenhouse to evaporate, capture part of the condensation in the tower...
This power generation system (the tower) has ZERO emissions, needs low maintenance and furthermore, the ecological impact (emissions) of its building will be recouped in 2-1/2 years.
And you think a building that covers 20 square km and moves great quantities of air from ground level to 1 km up won't have continuing effects on the local weather and ecology? The air movement creates clouds in the desert!
An EEG trainer is basically a low-bandwith scope. The trick is getting a front end (analog amps and filters) which will separate out the very weak signals of interest from all the noise, and amplify signal without drowning it in amplified noise. A PC card would have a lot more noise to contend with (from the PC), so the circuits need to be in an external box...
I'd amend that statement a bit -- by the time you get decent results by building your own, you will have acquired valuable and rare skills in analog design and construction. And you will have had to buy or borrow a real oscilloscope in order to find out what's wrong with the one you built! I'm a test engineer. I make functional test fixtures that apply stimulus to a board and check the output signals from it. Getting DC analog signals from the board to the A/D converter accurately is harder than it looks. Audio frequencies are harder. Scopes should work at well above audio frequencies, and that gets very hairy -- every wire is also an antenna, capacitor, and inductor, all at the same time.
I might have plunged into a project like this when I was a kid and didn't know what I was getting into. I'd probably be a hell of a lot better analog designer if I had. But god, it's a big project. If you still want to go ahead, best of luck. If you actually get it working, you might as well go ahead and get the BSEE degree. Good analog designers are scarce and high-paid.
Some intermediate possibilities:
Scopes that use the PC as the display device, for instance this from JDR Micro. It's a box with the signal conditioning and A/D circuits of a low-end digital scope, but connects to a PC parallel port for displaying the signals captured. The advantages of this, compared to a standalone scope, are that you save a few hundred dollars for the scope display and control panel, and you've got the full power of the PC for analysis of the datapoints captured.
Scope card in the PC: I'm not aware of any low-end cards now on the market. The problem with this arrangement is that the PC is full of high frequency radiated signals, so shielding a scope card from that is quite an accomplishment. It can be done, but not by amateurs, or even by non-specialized EE's like me. It does have considerable advantages, as mentioned above, plus it can DMA to the PC's memory and so be able to record for longer.
Use a Data Acquisition (DAQ) card as a scope. I've done that at audio frequencies, using National Instruments MIO cards. I'd be dubious about higher frequencies, because the signal reaching the A/D converter would be quite different from the signal you were probing. (I used Labview to program it. It lets you set up a simple system fast, and there are library functions to capture data to an array, and then display it on a scope-like window. But for the test programs I was doing, after a long learning curve, I decided that for any complex program, graphical programming is inherently less efficient than typing the code as text. Labwindows/CVI is better: you create the user interface windows by plopping icons into the window, which is nice, then type in code sort of like Visual Basic. CVI is very expensive, as compared to Visual Basic and C++ development systems which work pretty much the same, except you've got to put some work into interfacing to the card. If a nice pre-written interface to the DAQ cards is worth several thousand $, then get CVI... Labview is a little less expensive; whether it is appropriate depends on how far you need to go beyond the library functions.)
Finally, whatever you do, spend about $100 for good probes. The best scope is only as good as the probe that brings in the signal.
Re:They already had a design like this
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It was an automated system that aimed for the eyes, but got cancelled due to bad press. Oh my. That would certainly upset those people that imagine war can be made more humane... But the reality is, to fight a war you either kill people or wound them. Wounding is more effective, because then their buddies have to stop fighting and take care of them. A laser in the eyes would be very, very effective in this way. I think, unlike most non-fatal gunfire wounds, laser blindness would be quite permanent. If we deployed this system, the next country to get crossways of us would wind up with their streets full of blind beggars afterwards -- a hell of a drag on a third world economy, and assurance that what happens when you p*ss off America would be remembered for a century, at least. Is that good or bad???
just because the beam moves fast from the laser doesn't make pointing the laser in the right direction less challenging. It does take out one part of the challenge. If you fire a bullet at a moving target, you have to calculate or guess where the target will be when the bullet gets there. This is still a challenge, because (1) it takes a while for a radar set to accumulate enough position measurements to give the speed and direction accurately, and (2) if the target is capable of changing direction (bullets don't, missiles do), then it's just guesswork anyhow. Since a laser beam moves about 500,000 times as fast as any military hardware does, at battlefield ranges you can just point and shoot. Other things you can ignore are deflection by gravity and Coriolis effects. "Windage" doesn't apply as a deflection to your aim, although optical effects of the air do have to be corrected for to get the beam focused enough to cut metal. On the other hand, hitting a 6 inch wide projectile at 1 mile range requires aiming to better than one part in 10,000 -- that's very precise. And if you are waiting for the artillery shells to come within one mile before shooting at them, you'd better get them on the first shot.
("Starwars" lasers would have to lead the target, since speeds and ranges are much greater. A "close" shot might be 3,000km; this takes 10ms for the beam to get to the target. Double that, at least, for the time from the last sight of the target to the beam reaching it. A satellite travelling at 3600km/hr = 1km/sec moves 20 meters in that time. It's probably only 2 or 3 meters wide.)
Re:There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...
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The fundamental problem with laser weapons is power density. A brass cartridge full of smokeless powder has very high power density, although it works just once. Nothing electrical that can generate power or store it for a few days comes within 100 times that power/weight ratio. (Capacitors might be within 10X, but they can only store power for a short time, so they'd have to be recharged from something else on the battlefield. And you really wouldn't want a long recharge time.)
The chemical laser is one way of getting around the power problem -- instead of chemical reactions to explode and push a slug, it uses a chemical reaction to directly put molecules into the "excited" state (charged with energy and ready to release it as light). So you get pretty high power density, not as good as with a gun, but maybe good enough considering that gunfire misses about 99.9% of the time in combat, and lasers probably won't.
Besides that, at present lasers are not very efficient -- that is, more than half of the energy put in winds up as heat in the laser system, so the laser system has to dispose of more unwanted heat than the target does. This is not too big of a problem if you are using a semi-truck sized laser to shoot 6-inch artillery shells and rockets, but it means that a hand-held laser would burn your hands before it burned through the enemy's uniform. The chemical laser systems might have an advantage here; they are more efficient than other high-power lasers, and maybe most of the waste heat can be exhausted as hot used chemicals.
Finally, weak lasers are effective if you point it at their eyes! You certainly want most of your platoon armed with something with real stopping power (like guns), but give a couple of guys lasers to discourage the opposition from looking straight at you and you've got a big advantage in a firefight...
Paint on an outer coat that will simply boil away fast, exposing the reflective inner layer. It doesn't have to be shiny (reflecting all the light the same direction), but just has to reflect it somewhere. E.g., paint containing a high proportion of titanium dioxide particles might be optimum. No material is completely reflective, so some fraction of the laser beam will be deposited in the shell as heat and a big enough laser at close enough range will still burn through. What reflectivity does accomplish is to require a bigger laser, which is harder to move, and to keep fed with electricity or chemicals.
To form any laser beam, you've got to have mirrors that reflect the light sufficiently well as not to melt or become deformed. A metal-cutting laser handles this basically by using big mirrors to focus the beam onto a tiny spot -- the beam is spread out wide enough to not be destructive at the mirrors. War lasers have to accomplish the same thing, but with a point of focus that is far away and moving. That's tough to do in vacuum, and much harder when you've got air diffracting the beam, but adaptive optics helps by warping the mirror to approximately cancel the atmospheric effects.
This system is probably for defending small areas, so it's "kill" range need be only a few miles. That's a lot simpler case than the long-range kills desired for starwars systems. It's still quite an accomplishment if it works.
Finally, there is a very old technology that will defeat any possible mobile system: solid shot. Maybe the laser can vaporize 30 caliber bullets, but a 105mm gun can fire a solid slug 4 inches in diameter and weighing about 30 pounds at something like 2000mph -- no laser is going to melt enough of that to make much difference, and if it hits the kinetic energy is almost as destructive as a chemical explosive. It does have to hit, not just come close -- and without any homing technology in the shell, because lasers certainly can blind sensors and melt steering fins.
The "book license" has it's good points. And it's what we'd have already if the courts would just wake up and realize that they decided against EULA's 80 years ago in the case of books, and software's no different. Certainly the book license is good for things like games, that are never going to be mission-critical. That is, if it's a big problem for you when your favorite game is no longer sold or updated to run on newer hardware, you really ought to get a life.
But for software used by businesses, getting marooned without support from the vendor is a big, big problem, and it always happens unless you pick the right vendors, then spend a hell of a lot of time and money continually upgrading, porting your old data to new formats, and training people to work with "upgraded" software that quite often isn't worth the time it takes to learn it. You know all the vendors that have disappeared, but even when the vendor is still raking in the cash, they're apt to drop the product _you_ prefer to use. E.g., MS is setting schedules to drop support for each of it's old OS's, in order to force even those that think the newer software is a downgrade to buy it... MS's real ambition seems to be to sell at least two copies of Windows for every computer entering corporate service, and then to sell Windows over again for every computer lasting more than 18 months. Except they aren't "selling" Windows, or so they claim. With XP's product activation, when the cash flow gets a little low, they'll just close the service that hands out new XP activation codes, and as systems crash and have to be re-installed the latest OS will be purchased. (What will they call it? XXG(reedy)?)
With shareware+open source, support exists for as long as enough people use it, regardless of what the original vendor thinks is best for their business. And note that I did specify that the license say that if the vendor/creator disappears, the program becomes freeware...
One final note: as things become more web-connected, it becomes much more possible for shareware vendors to actually collect. Include a prominent warning that this program may "phone home" occasionally, and businesses using the software without paying will be sued. Offer guarantees that the information collected will be strictly limited. You can then choose to either embed the phone home code so deeply that normal people will pay rather than go through the hassles of removing it without damaging the functionality, or leaving it out and watching the pirates really go nuts trying to find it. 8-)
I think [disclaimer of warranty] is fine for free software (You get what you pay for), but as soon as someone charges you money for it, especially the big money they charge in enterprise solutions, I think that shield should go right out the window.
The real issue isn't even whether you pay for it or not. You'll pay for a used car as-is, no warranty. But you _know_ the deal in that case. If Bill's Used Cars is running TV ads 24 hours a day about how their cars are in perfect shape and will run forever without attention, Bill really ought to be liable somehow when actually the fan belt works its way loose once a dayy and has to be replaced. False advertising, certainly. Criminal fraud, probably.
You know those ads that I mean, where the NT servers are running unattended. (30 second spots, of course, wouldn't want the cameras to catch the administrators dashing back into the building to hit the re-boot button...) If fine print legalese in an "agreement" that you don't even see until after you've bought the product overrides repeated public assurances, then our court system is just punishing poor thieves and rewarding rich ones.
I have no incentive to make software I give away for free safe so long as I don't go around making guarantees that it's completely safe.
Given that, why would anyone ever switch to Linux or other free M$ alternatives?
1. The budget is more important than security. If a company will pay big bucks to MS for questionable security and no real warranty, paying nothing for the same terms ought to be better...
2. You know _you_ can make a Linux installation safe. And you don't have to reboot the servers when installing the weekly security patch! (You know what it costs a corporation to take the servers offline for 5 minutes?)
3. You contract with a Linux support company to set up the security, and guarantee it works. This gives you the same warranty as with a commercial product, and you'll probably get a lower price and better service. The support companies will be smaller and often more responsive to customers than companies like MS, but you still get software that has been studied by many programmers and run very widely...
Do programming classes still make you put a comment on each line of code? E.g.:
x = y + 3;/* set x to y plus offset of 3 */
Come out of that sort of training, and it takes a while to realize that comments aren't stupid, your teacher was. Comments should NOT say what a line of code does. Except in obfuscated code contests, if what one line does isn't obvious, either the writer or the reader is incompetent.
Every module and function should have a block of comments to say what the module or function does, what the function arguments are, and especially give the specs, and tell what assumptions are hidden in the interface If possible, go back after software testing is done and note the conditions in which the module was tested -- this is invaluable for re-use, since it avoids the assumption that "this part was thoroughly tested", when it wasn't actually tested for what is now being done with it. Every time someone has to update the program, it's a "code re-use" for the modules that weren't touched...
In large functions, you might want to put in comments for each major block of code, but first think about whether the function ought to be split up... Line by line comments are needed only when you are doing something that is unusual, not straightforward, or handling an issue not stated in the specs; say WHY you are doing it that way, or why you have to do it at all.
Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man Month, one of the best books on managing big projects (software or otherwise), after he managed what was probably the most f*d up commercial software (or other) project ever: 360 O/S -- started with 1,000 programmers, ended up with 2,000 programmers and several years late (several years when they were selling mainframes without an OS!), cost overruns that would make a defense contractor blush. Brooks learned a whole lot about what _not_ to do, and explains it very well.
However, this guy is no Fred Brooks. He doesn't even know his sofware is f*d up.
Seems like a good argument for open source. When there's nothing much to improve, move on to something else, for crissakes!
The problem with open source/free as-in-beer software is that, except for the few things that attract enough volunteer labor, it's difficult to make enough money to pay for programmers in the first place. (And even if you can attract volunteers, they may not understand or care about user interfaces, which is the biggest problem with getting Linux into desktops.)
How about open source/non-free software licensing? I'm thinking something like:
-Source must be included in any distribution.
-You can copy it and modify it freely, but for each copy, modified or not, you must send $X to the originator.
-The per copy license fee can never go up, but may be lowered at the option of the originator. If the originator goes out of business or otherwise stops distributing the program, it becomes public domain.
-One license fee covers one functioning copy (running on one computer at a time) of any version forever. (You write a program, then move on to something else. Bug fixes and simple upgrades may be handled by the users that need them.)
-There is also a fee set for someone to buy the right to make a major upgrade and sell it as a new program.
while MS improved their software, the other companies rewrote their software. Improved??? If you are talking about anything since DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1/Office 4.x, don't you mean "Fixed a _few_ of the old bugs, added many new bugs, added features no one uses, dumbed it down, and made it incompatible with the previous version so eventually people who know better will still have to downgrade to the new version to stay compatible with the idiots they have to work with."
Re:Personal mobile battle armor, anyone?
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· Score: 2
Throw a real engine into it, add some armor and weaponry, and you've pretty much got a mini-tank. Provided some helpful person will pave the entire battlefield so the wheels can work...
I've always expect the first really effective battlebots will be 6 legged and trot like a cockroach -- the front and rear legs on one side move together with the middle leg on the other side, so the body's always supported on a tripod. But with this balancing technology, biped legs could work if there is actually an advantage to them. (In battle, staying low to the ground is usually a better idea.) Or some combination of one or two wheels for speed on smooth ground and legs for bad ground. Even if the cockroach design proves best overall, being able to balance on two legs would help when it has to climb.
Re:It won't fall over?
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Sorry, if you want something that will take you home when you are too drunk to do more than climb aboard, you still need a horse. You slump forward on the handlebars and Ginger will take this as the full speed ahead command, never mind if you're pointed at a brick wall...
Re:Didn't I say this before?
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This is IT?
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· Score: 2
The third wheel in close, without gyros, gives you the approximate stability of a unicycle with training wheels. The center of gravity is 2-1/2 to 3 feet high. The support points are 6 to 12 inches out from the center. That's stable support when it doesn't move, but for stability in motion you need the wheels to be out from the center by more than the CG height. Bumps, turns, acceleration, and deceleration all require the rider to lean correctly or it will topple. If you can do that, you can probably ride a skateboard or one of the scooters that is basically a skateboard with a handle. The over-forty crowd generally avoids things like that -- I'm not sure how much is actual slower reflexes, and how much is just realizing that you aren't invulnerable... (I've known I'm vulnerable since I was five years old and p*ssed on a rattlesnake, but I have far less faith in my ability to _bounce_ than I used to.)
Ginger drives the wheels to match the rider's lean. This is like having a bicycle that automatically steers left when you lean left -- and Ginger also goes forward when you lean forward, and slows down or reverses when you lean back. If this is done well, (which takes lots of gyros and CPU's), it will be fairly hard to tip over, as long as you don't run off the sidewalk or into something. It's an exremely intuitive interface, since human walking also depends on leaning, then sticking out your foot before you fall.
However, you'd better be careful about leaning towards things that interest you but you don't actually want to run into... Humans can lean a bit in any direction on their feet before they have to start walking or fall, but the two-wheel Ginger has to react to the least little fore-and-aft lean. So a the third wheel would help here. But that still requires all the gyros and CPU's.
No, check any of the links posted about this guy, he's an alleged "cybersecurity" expert. He was responsible for the security of Microsoft's own networks when they were thoroughly hacked. I doubt that he had any input to the design decisions that make MS OS's so insecure, but he's put his name on plenty of public statements claiming that there's no problem. In itself, that proves either he's utterly clueless or he'll say anything for a paycheck. Either way, he'll fit right in at the White House. 8-(
Didn't I say this before?
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But a standing platform that is simply 6 inches longer to accomodate a shopping cart wheel would still be highly tippable.
1) A lot of people drive to work at an average speed hardly better than walking, and certainly slower than bike messengers. Add in the time you spend finding parking and the Segway is often going to come out the winner. The Segway top speed has been variously stated, 8 to 17 mph, so if you take it out of "CEO mode" it isn't much slower than a bike. On the other hand, it does handle perfectly at walking speeds, or even when stuck behind an old lady with a cane, which makes it easier to drive safely on the sidewalk.
5) If there's nobody on the sidewalk but you and the mugger, crank it up to 17mph...
It wouldn't do much for my own commute to work (10 miles in 12 minutes by car, rural, Northern Michigan, snow six months a year -- skidding makes it impossible to balance two-wheelers). I might like one for inside the plant; it's a long walk down to the other end, and I've considered bringing a bike (too hazardous in the walkways), skateboard or razor scooter (I'm too old to learn to stay on those).
On the other hand, $3,000!!! I remember when you could buy a new Chevrolet for that, or two VW's for $3,200.
Re:They just demoed it on ABC / Good Morning Ameri
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(Imagine the disaster if either of those newscasters had suffered an injury on live television on the very first demonstration!) Imagine the ratings!!! 8-)
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Very soon after the US was dragged into WWII, we reached an agreement with our allies (Great Britain & the other Commonwealth nations then, the USSR soon after) that the war was only going to end with the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations. This policy arose because less drastic treatment of the Germans in 1918 worked out quite badly in the long run, and because it did not seem possible to negotiate a peace with the Nazi leadership that would allow trying them for war crimes and hanging them. (What they _deserved_ was something far more agonizing and drawn out than their execution of Rommel, but since we're civilized people we had to settle for hanging...) In hindsight, it's clear that this was a very good policy -- for Germany.
Unthinkingly extending it to Japan may have been a poor idea. I make no claims to expertise about Bushida, but it's obvious that Samurai didn't surrender unconditionally. One reason may be that the Bushido code allowed torturing captives, unless there was an agreement not to do that before surrender. On the other hand, once the war was clearly lost (possibly even in 1943), if we had offered a treaty that treated the Emperor and the Japanese people well but required death for the cabinet and high military command, Bushido would have required them to do what was best for their employers -- sign it, then slit their own bellies. I'm not sure they really had the courage to go through with that, but showing the leaders up as something less than true Samurai might have shortened the war also.
The trouble was, Japanese culture was a mystery to FDR and Churchill, and they didn't spend much time thinking about it anyhow. Nazi Germany was the big threat, and the Pacific war a side-show until Germany went down. Only a fraction of our force went to the Pacific, and much of that was hardware that was of little or no use against Germany; for example American submarines would have found no targets in the Atlantic, but devastated Japan's merchant fleet.
So with this lack of thought about Japan, when Truman assumed office he found himself bound by agreements with many nations to accept nothing but unconditional surrender, and with many pressures both political and practical to end it _fast_. Japan was the last hold-out. Politically, the American people wanted Japan finished off fast, and also there was the threat that Stalin would snatch some or all of Japan and keep it. Practically, the harbors were full of landing craft, and the great army that defeated Germany was waiting for either another job or discharge. If that army landed on a Japanese beach, over 100,000 Americans would have died, and it's unlikely that once it broke through the defenses it could have been restrained before millions of "Japs" were killed.
Truman had one alternative -- a weapon so frightful that it might change anyone's mind. But he only had two bombs, which actually could not inflict as much damage as thousands of B29's carrying conventional weapons already had. So a bluff was required, to not only blow up two smallish cities, but to give the impression that we were just going to keep on blowing up one or two cities a week until they surrendered...
Certainly there was racism: on the west coast, Japanese-Americans (even some citizens) were rounded up indiscriminately, even though there were NO incidents of spying or sabotage by any Japanese-American. On the other hand, Hitler had an organization in place to recruit spies and saboteurs from the German-Americans, and some actual traitors had been caught, but only a few thousand were ever detained. But this doesn't have much to do with the decision to drop the A-bombs. If they had been ready before victory in Europe, no doubt they'd have been used on German cities.
ido you realize how much even a single elephant EATS?! A lot. or how hard it is to dissuade him from eating something? Easy. Fly out in a helicopter and find a big gray object that isn't a boulder, and is off the reservation. Shoot it with a .50. Land and set up the barbie. Invite _lots_ of neighbors.
Seriously, small fast-breeding mammals such as rabbits are uncontrollable if they can out-compete the native wild-life. Big slow-breeding ones are easily controlled. They're quite conspicuous, and you've got a year or more to hunt them down before they can breed and raise their off-spring to live on their own.
I would be concerned that the imports be very thoroughly doese, purged, and checked to ensure that they aren't bringing in smaller passengers -- parasites, diseases, or even foreign plant seeds in the elephant plop could be trouble. This adds to the already considerable cost of this enterprise, and maybe there are only a few species that would work. Elephants are fine; we already know how to transport them all over the world without infecting other species, and they do just fine eating hay and grain from Iowa so I don't think native Aussie fodder would be a problem. Rhinos and hippos might be as easy. On the other hand, would whatever is in Aussie treetops be a decent substitute for a giraffe's natural food? Lions might be a quite bad idea, except on a permanently human-fed basis; I suspect that for lions to be truly wild, you'd have to import some of the smaller African prey animals, and the plants the prey eats, etc., and something would go out of control...
Pretty obviously, to make this go at all will require special permits for importing exotic animals. I hope the regulatory agency makes sure all the questions are answered, and that the importers live up to their commitments. The species finally allowed in should not be enough to make even the beginnings of an African savannah ecology, and the expected tourism might never materialize.
Personally, if I was going to give away that much cash to protect African endangered species, I'd be really tempted to use it to clean out the _real_ dangers from one piece of Africa -- wipe out the government and other bandits -- then set up a well-protected game reserve/tourist area.
The Swedes in Minnesota are also very law-abiding.
If youre going to grow stuff in a 25km^2 greenhouse, thats going to need alot of irrigation. It's worse than that (assuming they're planning on placing it in desert regions) -- it's a 5km diameter (19.6 sq km, about 4,800 acres) greenhouse with a high velocity dry wind blowing through it continuously. Normal plant leaves lose a lot of water in those conditions. Cactus wouldn't, but why would Australia need greenhouses to grow cactus. You might recover part of the water from condensation near the top, but if the relative humidity was low to start with, 10 degrees C temperature drop isn't going to condense out nearly as much water as was put in to start with. If the intention is to modify the weather by injecting lots of moisture 1 km up, and the fresh waster is available, a row of these things would do it, besides growing veggies and generating power.
Or maybe it wouldn't work at all if plants were in it, since the evaporation would cool the input air, and thus you wouldn't get the heat differential driving the chimney. On the other hand, water vapor is lighter than air, so would that maybe offset the cooling effect and keep the chimney going? I don't know how to calculate this...
Finally, if evaporation is acceptable, you could make sea-coast green-house/towers double as desalinization plants. Run the seawater into ponds in the greenhouse to evaporate, capture part of the condensation in the tower...
This power generation system (the tower) has ZERO emissions, needs low maintenance and furthermore, the ecological impact (emissions) of its building will be recouped in 2-1/2 years.
And you think a building that covers 20 square km and moves great quantities of air from ground level to 1 km up won't have continuing effects on the local weather and ecology? The air movement creates clouds in the desert!
An EEG trainer is basically a low-bandwith scope. The trick is getting a front end (analog amps and filters) which will separate out the very weak signals of interest from all the noise, and amplify signal without drowning it in amplified noise. A PC card would have a lot more noise to contend with (from the PC), so the circuits need to be in an external box...
I'd amend that statement a bit -- by the time you get decent results by building your own, you will have acquired valuable and rare skills in analog design and construction. And you will have had to buy or borrow a real oscilloscope in order to find out what's wrong with the one you built! I'm a test engineer. I make functional test fixtures that apply stimulus to a board and check the output signals from it. Getting DC analog signals from the board to the A/D converter accurately is harder than it looks. Audio frequencies are harder. Scopes should work at well above audio frequencies, and that gets very hairy -- every wire is also an antenna, capacitor, and inductor, all at the same time.
I might have plunged into a project like this when I was a kid and didn't know what I was getting into. I'd probably be a hell of a lot better analog designer if I had. But god, it's a big project. If you still want to go ahead, best of luck. If you actually get it working, you might as well go ahead and get the BSEE degree. Good analog designers are scarce and high-paid.
Some intermediate possibilities:
Scopes that use the PC as the display device, for instance this from JDR Micro. It's a box with the signal conditioning and A/D circuits of a low-end digital scope, but connects to a PC parallel port for displaying the signals captured. The advantages of this, compared to a standalone scope, are that you save a few hundred dollars for the scope display and control panel, and you've got the full power of the PC for analysis of the datapoints captured.
Scope card in the PC: I'm not aware of any low-end cards now on the market. The problem with this arrangement is that the PC is full of high frequency radiated signals, so shielding a scope card from that is quite an accomplishment. It can be done, but not by amateurs, or even by non-specialized EE's like me. It does have considerable advantages, as mentioned above, plus it can DMA to the PC's memory and so be able to record for longer.
Use a Data Acquisition (DAQ) card as a scope. I've done that at audio frequencies, using National Instruments MIO cards. I'd be dubious about higher frequencies, because the signal reaching the A/D converter would be quite different from the signal you were probing. (I used Labview to program it. It lets you set up a simple system fast, and there are library functions to capture data to an array, and then display it on a scope-like window. But for the test programs I was doing, after a long learning curve, I decided that for any complex program, graphical programming is inherently less efficient than typing the code as text. Labwindows/CVI is better: you create the user interface windows by plopping icons into the window, which is nice, then type in code sort of like Visual Basic. CVI is very expensive, as compared to Visual Basic and C++ development systems which work pretty much the same, except you've got to put some work into interfacing to the card. If a nice pre-written interface to the DAQ cards is worth several thousand $, then get CVI... Labview is a little less expensive; whether it is appropriate depends on how far you need to go beyond the library functions.)
Finally, whatever you do, spend about $100 for good probes. The best scope is only as good as the probe that brings in the signal.
It was an automated system that aimed for the eyes, but got cancelled due to bad press. Oh my. That would certainly upset those people that imagine war can be made more humane... But the reality is, to fight a war you either kill people or wound them. Wounding is more effective, because then their buddies have to stop fighting and take care of them. A laser in the eyes would be very, very effective in this way. I think, unlike most non-fatal gunfire wounds, laser blindness would be quite permanent. If we deployed this system, the next country to get crossways of us would wind up with their streets full of blind beggars afterwards -- a hell of a drag on a third world economy, and assurance that what happens when you p*ss off America would be remembered for a century, at least. Is that good or bad???
just because the beam moves fast from the laser doesn't make pointing the laser in the right direction less challenging. It does take out one part of the challenge. If you fire a bullet at a moving target, you have to calculate or guess where the target will be when the bullet gets there. This is still a challenge, because (1) it takes a while for a radar set to accumulate enough position measurements to give the speed and direction accurately, and (2) if the target is capable of changing direction (bullets don't, missiles do), then it's just guesswork anyhow. Since a laser beam moves about 500,000 times as fast as any military hardware does, at battlefield ranges you can just point and shoot. Other things you can ignore are deflection by gravity and Coriolis effects. "Windage" doesn't apply as a deflection to your aim, although optical effects of the air do have to be corrected for to get the beam focused enough to cut metal. On the other hand, hitting a 6 inch wide projectile at 1 mile range requires aiming to better than one part in 10,000 -- that's very precise. And if you are waiting for the artillery shells to come within one mile before shooting at them, you'd better get them on the first shot.
("Starwars" lasers would have to lead the target, since speeds and ranges are much greater. A "close" shot might be 3,000km; this takes 10ms for the beam to get to the target. Double that, at least, for the time from the last sight of the target to the beam reaching it. A satellite travelling at 3600km/hr = 1km/sec moves 20 meters in that time. It's probably only 2 or 3 meters wide.)
The fundamental problem with laser weapons is power density. A brass cartridge full of smokeless powder has very high power density, although it works just once. Nothing electrical that can generate power or store it for a few days comes within 100 times that power/weight ratio. (Capacitors might be within 10X, but they can only store power for a short time, so they'd have to be recharged from something else on the battlefield. And you really wouldn't want a long recharge time.)
The chemical laser is one way of getting around the power problem -- instead of chemical reactions to explode and push a slug, it uses a chemical reaction to directly put molecules into the "excited" state (charged with energy and ready to release it as light). So you get pretty high power density, not as good as with a gun, but maybe good enough considering that gunfire misses about 99.9% of the time in combat, and lasers probably won't.
Besides that, at present lasers are not very efficient -- that is, more than half of the energy put in winds up as heat in the laser system, so the laser system has to dispose of more unwanted heat than the target does. This is not too big of a problem if you are using a semi-truck sized laser to shoot 6-inch artillery shells and rockets, but it means that a hand-held laser would burn your hands before it burned through the enemy's uniform. The chemical laser systems might have an advantage here; they are more efficient than other high-power lasers, and maybe most of the waste heat can be exhausted as hot used chemicals.
Finally, weak lasers are effective if you point it at their eyes! You certainly want most of your platoon armed with something with real stopping power (like guns), but give a couple of guys lasers to discourage the opposition from looking straight at you and you've got a big advantage in a firefight...
Paint on an outer coat that will simply boil away fast, exposing the reflective inner layer. It doesn't have to be shiny (reflecting all the light the same direction), but just has to reflect it somewhere. E.g., paint containing a high proportion of titanium dioxide particles might be optimum. No material is completely reflective, so some fraction of the laser beam will be deposited in the shell as heat and a big enough laser at close enough range will still burn through. What reflectivity does accomplish is to require a bigger laser, which is harder to move, and to keep fed with electricity or chemicals.
To form any laser beam, you've got to have mirrors that reflect the light sufficiently well as not to melt or become deformed. A metal-cutting laser handles this basically by using big mirrors to focus the beam onto a tiny spot -- the beam is spread out wide enough to not be destructive at the mirrors. War lasers have to accomplish the same thing, but with a point of focus that is far away and moving. That's tough to do in vacuum, and much harder when you've got air diffracting the beam, but adaptive optics helps by warping the mirror to approximately cancel the atmospheric effects.
This system is probably for defending small areas, so it's "kill" range need be only a few miles. That's a lot simpler case than the long-range kills desired for starwars systems. It's still quite an accomplishment if it works.
Finally, there is a very old technology that will defeat any possible mobile system: solid shot. Maybe the laser can vaporize 30 caliber bullets, but a 105mm gun can fire a solid slug 4 inches in diameter and weighing about 30 pounds at something like 2000mph -- no laser is going to melt enough of that to make much difference, and if it hits the kinetic energy is almost as destructive as a chemical explosive. It does have to hit, not just come close -- and without any homing technology in the shell, because lasers certainly can blind sensors and melt steering fins.
The "book license" has it's good points. And it's what we'd have already if the courts would just wake up and realize that they decided against EULA's 80 years ago in the case of books, and software's no different. Certainly the book license is good for things like games, that are never going to be mission-critical. That is, if it's a big problem for you when your favorite game is no longer sold or updated to run on newer hardware, you really ought to get a life.
But for software used by businesses, getting marooned without support from the vendor is a big, big problem, and it always happens unless you pick the right vendors, then spend a hell of a lot of time and money continually upgrading, porting your old data to new formats, and training people to work with "upgraded" software that quite often isn't worth the time it takes to learn it. You know all the vendors that have disappeared, but even when the vendor is still raking in the cash, they're apt to drop the product _you_ prefer to use. E.g., MS is setting schedules to drop support for each of it's old OS's, in order to force even those that think the newer software is a downgrade to buy it... MS's real ambition seems to be to sell at least two copies of Windows for every computer entering corporate service, and then to sell Windows over again for every computer lasting more than 18 months. Except they aren't "selling" Windows, or so they claim. With XP's product activation, when the cash flow gets a little low, they'll just close the service that hands out new XP activation codes, and as systems crash and have to be re-installed the latest OS will be purchased. (What will they call it? XXG(reedy)?)
With shareware+open source, support exists for as long as enough people use it, regardless of what the original vendor thinks is best for their business. And note that I did specify that the license say that if the vendor/creator disappears, the program becomes freeware...
One final note: as things become more web-connected, it becomes much more possible for shareware vendors to actually collect. Include a prominent warning that this program may "phone home" occasionally, and businesses using the software without paying will be sued. Offer guarantees that the information collected will be strictly limited. You can then choose to either embed the phone home code so deeply that normal people will pay rather than go through the hassles of removing it without damaging the functionality, or leaving it out and watching the pirates really go nuts trying to find it. 8-)
I think [disclaimer of warranty] is fine for free software (You get what you pay for), but as soon as someone charges you money for it, especially the big money they charge in enterprise solutions, I think that shield should go right out the window.
The real issue isn't even whether you pay for it or not. You'll pay for a used car as-is, no warranty. But you _know_ the deal in that case. If Bill's Used Cars is running TV ads 24 hours a day about how their cars are in perfect shape and will run forever without attention, Bill really ought to be liable somehow when actually the fan belt works its way loose once a dayy and has to be replaced. False advertising, certainly. Criminal fraud, probably.
You know those ads that I mean, where the NT servers are running unattended. (30 second spots, of course, wouldn't want the cameras to catch the administrators dashing back into the building to hit the re-boot button...) If fine print legalese in an "agreement" that you don't even see until after you've bought the product overrides repeated public assurances, then our court system is just punishing poor thieves and rewarding rich ones.
I have no incentive to make software I give away for free safe so long as I don't go around making guarantees that it's completely safe.
Given that, why would anyone ever switch to Linux or other free M$ alternatives?
1. The budget is more important than security. If a company will pay big bucks to MS for questionable security and no real warranty, paying nothing for the same terms ought to be better...
2. You know _you_ can make a Linux installation safe. And you don't have to reboot the servers when installing the weekly security patch! (You know what it costs a corporation to take the servers offline for 5 minutes?)
3. You contract with a Linux support company to set up the security, and guarantee it works. This gives you the same warranty as with a commercial product, and you'll probably get a lower price and better service. The support companies will be smaller and often more responsive to customers than companies like MS, but you still get software that has been studied by many programmers and run very widely...
Do programming classes still make you put a comment on each line of code? E.g.: /* set x to y plus offset of 3 */
x = y + 3;
Come out of that sort of training, and it takes a while to realize that comments aren't stupid, your teacher was. Comments should NOT say what a line of code does. Except in obfuscated code contests, if what one line does isn't obvious, either the writer or the reader is incompetent.
Every module and function should have a block of comments to say what the module or function does, what the function arguments are, and especially give the specs, and tell what assumptions are hidden in the interface If possible, go back after software testing is done and note the conditions in which the module was tested -- this is invaluable for re-use, since it avoids the assumption that "this part was thoroughly tested", when it wasn't actually tested for what is now being done with it. Every time someone has to update the program, it's a "code re-use" for the modules that weren't touched...
In large functions, you might want to put in comments for each major block of code, but first think about whether the function ought to be split up... Line by line comments are needed only when you are doing something that is unusual, not straightforward, or handling an issue not stated in the specs; say WHY you are doing it that way, or why you have to do it at all.
Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man Month, one of the best books on managing big projects (software or otherwise), after he managed what was probably the most f*d up commercial software (or other) project ever: 360 O/S -- started with 1,000 programmers, ended up with 2,000 programmers and several years late (several years when they were selling mainframes without an OS!), cost overruns that would make a defense contractor blush. Brooks learned a whole lot about what _not_ to do, and explains it very well.
However, this guy is no Fred Brooks. He doesn't even know his sofware is f*d up.
Seems like a good argument for open source. When there's nothing much to improve, move on to something else, for crissakes!
The problem with open source/free as-in-beer software is that, except for the few things that attract enough volunteer labor, it's difficult to make enough money to pay for programmers in the first place. (And even if you can attract volunteers, they may not understand or care about user interfaces, which is the biggest problem with getting Linux into desktops.)
How about open source/non-free software licensing? I'm thinking something like:
-Source must be included in any distribution.
-You can copy it and modify it freely, but for each copy, modified or not, you must send $X to the originator.
-The per copy license fee can never go up, but may be lowered at the option of the originator. If the originator goes out of business or otherwise stops distributing the program, it becomes public domain.
-One license fee covers one functioning copy (running on one computer at a time) of any version forever. (You write a program, then move on to something else. Bug fixes and simple upgrades may be handled by the users that need them.)
-There is also a fee set for someone to buy the right to make a major upgrade and sell it as a new program.
while MS improved their software, the other companies rewrote their software. Improved??? If you are talking about anything since DOS 6.2/Windows 3.1/Office 4.x, don't you mean "Fixed a _few_ of the old bugs, added many new bugs, added features no one uses, dumbed it down, and made it incompatible with the previous version so eventually people who know better will still have to downgrade to the new version to stay compatible with the idiots they have to work with."
Throw a real engine into it, add some armor and weaponry, and you've pretty much got a mini-tank. Provided some helpful person will pave the entire battlefield so the wheels can work...
I've always expect the first really effective battlebots will be 6 legged and trot like a cockroach -- the front and rear legs on one side move together with the middle leg on the other side, so the body's always supported on a tripod. But with this balancing technology, biped legs could work if there is actually an advantage to them. (In battle, staying low to the ground is usually a better idea.) Or some combination of one or two wheels for speed on smooth ground and legs for bad ground. Even if the cockroach design proves best overall, being able to balance on two legs would help when it has to climb.
Sorry, if you want something that will take you home when you are too drunk to do more than climb aboard, you still need a horse. You slump forward on the handlebars and Ginger will take this as the full speed ahead command, never mind if you're pointed at a brick wall...
The third wheel in close, without gyros, gives you the approximate stability of a unicycle with training wheels. The center of gravity is 2-1/2 to 3 feet high. The support points are 6 to 12 inches out from the center. That's stable support when it doesn't move, but for stability in motion you need the wheels to be out from the center by more than the CG height. Bumps, turns, acceleration, and deceleration all require the rider to lean correctly or it will topple. If you can do that, you can probably ride a skateboard or one of the scooters that is basically a skateboard with a handle. The over-forty crowd generally avoids things like that -- I'm not sure how much is actual slower reflexes, and how much is just realizing that you aren't invulnerable... (I've known I'm vulnerable since I was five years old and p*ssed on a rattlesnake, but I have far less faith in my ability to _bounce_ than I used to.)
Ginger drives the wheels to match the rider's lean. This is like having a bicycle that automatically steers left when you lean left -- and Ginger also goes forward when you lean forward, and slows down or reverses when you lean back. If this is done well, (which takes lots of gyros and CPU's), it will be fairly hard to tip over, as long as you don't run off the sidewalk or into something. It's an exremely intuitive interface, since human walking also depends on leaning, then sticking out your foot before you fall.
However, you'd better be careful about leaning towards things that interest you but you don't actually want to run into... Humans can lean a bit in any direction on their feet before they have to start walking or fall, but the two-wheel Ginger has to react to the least little fore-and-aft lean. So a the third wheel would help here. But that still requires all the gyros and CPU's.
No, check any of the links posted about this guy, he's an alleged "cybersecurity" expert. He was responsible for the security of Microsoft's own networks when they were thoroughly hacked. I doubt that he had any input to the design decisions that make MS OS's so insecure, but he's put his name on plenty of public statements claiming that there's no problem. In itself, that proves either he's utterly clueless or he'll say anything for a paycheck. Either way, he'll fit right in at the White House. 8-(
But a standing platform that is simply 6 inches longer to accomodate a shopping cart wheel would still be highly tippable.
1) A lot of people drive to work at an average speed hardly better than walking, and certainly slower than bike messengers. Add in the time you spend finding parking and the Segway is often going to come out the winner. The Segway top speed has been variously stated, 8 to 17 mph, so if you take it out of "CEO mode" it isn't much slower than a bike. On the other hand, it does handle perfectly at walking speeds, or even when stuck behind an old lady with a cane, which makes it easier to drive safely on the sidewalk.
5) If there's nobody on the sidewalk but you and the mugger, crank it up to 17mph...
It wouldn't do much for my own commute to work (10 miles in 12 minutes by car, rural, Northern Michigan, snow six months a year -- skidding makes it impossible to balance two-wheelers). I might like one for inside the plant; it's a long walk down to the other end, and I've considered bringing a bike (too hazardous in the walkways), skateboard or razor scooter (I'm too old to learn to stay on those).
On the other hand, $3,000!!! I remember when you could buy a new Chevrolet for that, or two VW's for $3,200.
(Imagine the disaster if either of those newscasters had suffered an injury on live television on the very first demonstration!) Imagine the ratings!!! 8-)