Heck, I'm passing on seeing a Star Wars movie in the theater, for crying out loud.
Me too. And the first movie (episode 4) was my first date with my wife. But what I've heard about AOTC doesn't fill me with desire to pay about 20 bucks to watch it in a large room full of strangers...
Someone please mod MGehm's post up, sounds like he knows what he's talking about with this system. The laser detonation is a low order explosion; that is, because you set the main explosive off by heating rather than by the built-in detonator, the explosive tends to burn fast rather than explode all at once - "It makes a pot hole instead of a crater."
So if someone strewed above-ground mines out in the open to slow an armored column, this laser on the lead tank could take out most of the mines (all but those that fell in a hole or behind a bush) very quickly. Maybe it can even do it without stopping. Other methods (gunfire at visible mines, launching a high-explosive "snake" ahead of the tanks, or the flail attachment) require either stopping for a few minutes or driving very slowly. And the mine explosions could leave craters big enough to require even heavy tanks to slow down and maneuver carefully, while with the laser you get "potholes" that tracked vehicles can drive right over and humvees can drive through or dodge.
But it's still a very limited system, in that it can only kill mines where you can see the mine body. It will take out most airdropped mines, but it doesn't clear 100% (some land out of sight), and does anyone but the US have this capability anyhow? It will get some claymores (mines placed above ground to fire sideways), but for obvious reasons these are usually hidden as much as possible. It does nothing at all for buried mines, since the explosive part is over six inches underground. (Lasing the trigger pan won't do any good, even if you know where it is.) And in any case, the main danger with buried mines is in FINDING them - if you can find it without setting it off, you can evacuate the area and set it off safely with a small charge and a long fuse, although you might not be popular with the natives if their house was too close to the mine...
So for most quick-and-dirty military mine-clearing, you are back to the methods that will detonate any buried mines that happen to lay in a particular lane - this used to done with flails pushed ahead of a tank (at some risk to the tank), now the main US method is to launch an explosive snake ahead of the tank, and then there is the Wattenberg proposal (the picture looks like a helicopter towing a harrow - like a big rake). All of these are "messy" techniques that explode the mines at full force, but they work fairly fast and you don't give the other side's snipers much of a target. And I think they are cheaper and less likely to break down than a laser.
These systems and the laser system just clear safe lanes for tanks or troops to pass through the minefield. If you want to make the ground safe for civilians to move back in, or for farming, someone's got to go over every square foot of ground with a good detector. (Even airdropped surface mines may sometimes go down a rabbit hole - and if you want to ensure no kid ever finds a claymore hidden in the bushes, you've got to clamber through the bushes yourself.) There are even ceramic mine casings now, so the traditional metal detector might miss something - maybe you need multi-channel detectors, like metal detection, sonar, and radar? And the guy walking around with this detector is in danger of being blown up if he steps wrong... It's a slow and ugly job even when no one is shooting at you.
How much would the combat effectiveness of the US military, the world's most powerful, most technologically advanced, fighting force be diminished if it didn't use anti-personnel landmines?
Study the history of the Korean War, and the 50 years of truce (not peace) since, then go to Korea, and look out across the DMZ. North Korean tanks could brush aside the much smaller South Korean and American forces and take Seoul (the capital and largest city) in a few hours, except for land-mines and other obstacles. Remember that it took six months for "the US military, the world's most powerful, most technologically advanced, fighting force" to get it's full strength to Saudi Arabia before Operation Desert Storm could start. Clearing the mines will only hold the attackers up for a few days, but at least that would let us fly half the USAF over there and airlift in more troops.
I do abhor the use of land mines in most military situations, such as short-term defensive positions - the army will move on soon, one way or the other, but the mines stay. But for a permanent defense, mines are a critical part.
When the battery goes out, the landmine doesn't work anymore.
That makes it safer for the clearing crew that comes by in a few months to collect the mines. It does not make them safe for farmers that hit the mine when they are plowing the field 10 years later. Explosives get unstable as they age - just because there's no electricity to fire the detonator doesn't mean an old mine won't explode when it's bumped.
If you want a really safe mine, make it physically dig itself out of the ground, beep for someone to come pick it up for a few days, then if no one responds explode after one hour of obvious warnings (sirens, flashing lights, a voice countdown in all local languages). But then, it would be so complex it would probably malfunction in some highly dangerous manner...
Cool indeed, but all it does is explode mines and dud ordnance that are laying on top of the ground, from a safe distance. There's a less expensive device that does the same thing. It doesn't require large power and cooling units, so instead of being mounted on a tank, it can be carried by a single operator. Every US Army combat unit used to include men carrying this device and expert in it's use. It's called a "rifle".
Wouldn't Superman crush Batman in about a milli-second?
That's always been a problem for the Superman scriptwriters - how to make _anything_ be a challenge, since over the years since the comic strip started (around 1930?) they've attributed so much strength and so many abilities to him that anything short of a galaxy-sized black hole ought to be easy. He's the irresistible force and the immovable object. And if he screws up and lets something bad happen without being there to stop it, he can just fly faster than light to reverse time. You'd think his only real problem would be keeping his personal organizer up to date (08:45 save Lois from bad guy 1, 08:50 save the world from bad guy 2, 08:55 pick up a mugger from the alley and drop him off at Sing Sing, 09:00 put in an appearance in civies as the mild mannered reporter who missed all the fun again, 09:05 save Lois again...)
So how is Batman, who is just a human being with really nice toys, going to face Superman? Yawn, kryptonite again. Obviously that stuff deadens his brain long before he comes close enough to lose his strength, otherwise he'd have learned not to fall for it every time. And it's easy to find green kryptonite on earth, even for convicts on the run from the law, let alone billionaires.
IIRC, someone once calculated from the quantities of kryptonite that have turned up on Earth and the inverse square law, that Krypton must have been so massive it collapsed into a black hole.
True, tractors don't burn that much fuel, but there are other energy inputs required. Typical fertilizer production (primarily nitrates synthesized from air) is extremely energy-intensive. Pesticides take some energy. Hauling the fertilizer to the farm takes a little, hauling the corn away takes more. Fermentation and distillation take a considerable input of heat. Overall, using the methods most common in America for each step, you'd get more ethanol per barrel of oil by directly converting it in a factory rather than growing corn - and with less labor and capital investment. This is reflected in a lower price for synthesized ethanol...
OTOH, maybe the methods could change without cutting the yield too much. For example: synthetic fertilizer (nitrates made from air) requires a lot of energy - but (in the US at least) feedlot operators often have trouble disposing of their natural fertilizer byproduct. It takes labor, machinery, and some fuel to haul the manure to the farms, spread it, and clean up. And for some reason, it's hard to hire people for this work... So with the price of energy held down by government policies in the US, the synthetic nitrates are cheaper than picking up "free" manure a few hundred miles away.
Secure and reliable are two different things. (Someday I'm going to make and post a picture of how to secure a Windows system - it involves a wire cutters and the power cord.)
The issue with a completely private country-wide network is that it's unlikely to have all the redundant links needed to ensure everyone stays connected. OTOH, the internet has redundancy (except where the phone companies run too many trunk lines through the same building), but there's an unacceptably high risk that critical info (e.g., his routine traffic stop is a mad-dog killer) won't make it through the congestion in time. What is really needed when real-time performance is critical is a way to buy priority through the internet routers. (And I do mean a pay system, priced so that no one can afford to use it to keep the MPEG streaming in on time, but cop shops can afford to prioritize their much shorter messages.)
For instance, 4 nines says your system is up 99.99% of the time. That is, out of 365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes = 525,600 minutes a year, it can be down for only.01%, or 52 minutes a year. Five nines (99.999%) allows only 5 minuts a year downtime. This may actually be averaged over many servers and several years (that is, if you had 10 servers running for 3 years and just 1 died requiring one day to replace, you could figure your downtime as 100 * 1 day/(10*3*365) =.009%, so you've still got 4 nines).
There are questions about what gets counted when figuring reliability. For one thing, almost no one would count a slashdotting or a DOS attack against their uptime, but nevertheless from the user's viewpoint the server is down. Also, how do you count "scheduled downtime" such as rebooting NT servers after installing security patches, or unplugging the boxes to move them around when it's time to expand the system? A news server with a worldwide audience has no "penalty free" time slots. So either you settle for a lower uptime goal, or you need redundant servers configured so that even major upgrades can be put in by unplugging just one at a time while the others keep running. OTOH the company database server, downtime during working hours is far more serious than downtime for the web server, so if it's a big company you do need redundant servers with automatic switchover. But in most cases there are times late at night or on weekends when no one cares if you shut them _all_ down at once - which certainly makes the upgrades easier.
So anyway, one person's "5 nines" may look like a lot less to someone else. E.g. a server vendor may claim that because only one in a million of their servers is broken at any given time their reliability is 6 nines. Your single server may never break at all - but once a week you take it off-line for ten minutes to load the newest security patches, so to anyone who wanted to keep working for those ten minutes you are only at 3 nines.
I hope that LEIN database is on a network that has a better record for delivering the data within a few seconds than the public internet. It doesn't matter how good your server is if your IP traffic got crowded off the net by 3,000 nerds downloading pr0n...
It all depends on what is on the server. If it's stuff your own people use constantly on their job, through your own network, you need five nines, otherwise you will take the blame for critical jobs getting done late.
But when people are going to the server through the internet, they get used to interruptions - there are so many links between, some of which periodically become overwhelmed with traffic, that no one could tell the difference between two nines and five nines on your server itself. So sales & product information sites don't need more reliability than you can readily afford. They do need high capacity.
And if it's your blogs concerning your navel lint - no one's looking at your uptime but you...
That's a good explanation of how libertarian principles apply to lawmaking. About the bill of rights and businesses: the issue is not that corporations and citizens should be held by law to respect these rights, but that they should not be able to use the courts to violate them. For example, your employer should be able to require that you refrain from public speech embarassing to them, but a company should not be able to restrict the free speech of others by threatening lawsuits except in clear cases of slander and libel...
As for copyright & copy protection:
1) Copyright is not a natural property right; someone copying your work does not take anything away from you. It might reduce the market value of your creative work, but if you claim that violates a natural right, you must also claim that McDonalds can bar Burger King from building a restaurant across the street...
2) Copyright (and patents) are _artificial_ property rights, a monopoly granted for a limited time in exchange for putting your ideas out to the public. This exchange makes sense only if the ideas and creative works become public domain after a while.
3) The expiration time should be no longer than the length of time in which future income is a significant factor in deciding whether to do work now. That is, no one at all decides to write the great American novel in hopes that 75 years after his death, his greatgrandchildren can retire on the royalties, so the present copyright length is utterly ridiculous. (It's also unconstitutional, but that's a separate issue.) I think that to determine the proper length, one should look at common business practices and see how businesses look at future income. Many corporations barely look past the next quarterly report and will not invest at all unless the payoff is within three years. OTOH, banks regularly sell 30 year mortgages - but mortgages are an exceptionally safe investment, while the future value of a book, movie, or song is highly speculative. I figure that for the average present-day best-seller, there is a less than 10% chance that it will be worth anything in 20 years, and a 10% chance at a dollar in 20 years is worth less than one cent today. Many authors are looking only for a quick sale so they can pay the rent, but some might also be hoping that someday Hollywood will pick up their work and make them rich, so if I was picking a single number for the length of copyrights, it would be 20 years.
However, a multistage system would make more sense: You get a 2-year automatic copyright just by publishing the work with a statement including first publication date and, "This is an original work, all rights reserved." By filing with the copyright office, paying a fee, and sending them the work in a permanent and copyable electronic form, you get 14 years from the date of publication; this fee covers the cost of running the copyright office, storing the work for 14 years, and posting it so anyone can copy it after the copyright expires. If you desire, you can pay 10 times as large a fee and extend the copyright another 14 years (28 total); this large fee is to discourage the maintenance of copyrights on out-of-print works.
4) If you copy-protect your published work in such a way as to restrict fair-use rights, you should give up copyright. No redundancy, right? And copy-protected works (if the protection is effective) are violating the implicit contract that you get a copyright in exchange for the work being be free to copy someday.
5) The DMCA should be repealed in entirety. If someone wishes to go the copy-protection route, they must rely on their own technical superiority, not the government restricting technological developments by others. (I think in practice this will mean no copy protection, but I don't see a problem with that - while another vague and poorly enforceable law is a bad thing, and restricting technology is a very bad thing.)
But if the MPAA get their legislation through, won't it be illegal to own a non-compliant device?
The "best Congress money can buy" may make it illegal to _sell_ non-compliant devices, but I very much doubt that the public would stand for the cops coming into people's houses to check their DVD players. As for manufacturing non-compliant devices, they haven't bought the legislatures in other countries yet - for instance, it's easy to get all-region DVD players in Australia and Europe. So at most, they might create another bootlegging business.
I almost hope that the **AA idiots do get some horribly intrusive laws passed - fscking up people's video players is about the only thing I can thing of that would wake up the American public and get all those corrupt, halfwitted, permanent Congressmen kicked out at last. They'll be replaced by other corrupt halfwits, but most of the new ones will see bigger opportunities in bashing the media than in taking their b^r^i^b^ campaign contributions - there are lots of other corporations handing out the payola. The new Congress would repeal that law ASAP (on the general grounds that if they broke that election promise, they might not _live_ until the next election), then when the next election approaches they'd need to do something further to garner the votes. Maybe rolling back copyright terms to a reasonable length, or even taking a look at EULA's, and at software & business method patents too...
Getting through snow is 80% the driver, 20% the vehicle. I learned to drive in northern Michigan, with 200 inches of snow a year. Then I joined the Air Force, and spent six years in New Mexico. Every now and then it would snow just a little, and it was really funny seeing those cowboys skidding their big 4x4's off the road, even somehow getting them stuck in just one inch of snow. I was driving a Pinto station wagon (cheap, tiny, underpowered, rear-wheel drive), and that wisp of snow was no problem at all to me.
However, when the snow gets a foot deep, cars and minivans are likely to get stuck no matter who's driving. There's too much drag on the bottom compared to the traction, and where snowplows throw up piles at intersections (or the end of the driveway), you're likely to get stuck with the wheels up in the air. So now that I can afford a 4x4, I've got one (Dodge Dakota pickup) and I drive it when the snow is getting deep - but the extra ground clearance makes a lot more difference than the 4wd.
Surely, if the jews had such a great democracy, the benefits of citizenship would be extended to all those palestinians living in the occupied territories, no? The palestiniants would be able to vote at elections and have a number of representatives at the Knesset, no? [snip] palestinians are denied citizenship by the fact that they aren't jewish.
No, Palestinians are denied citizenship by the fact that they (or their parents or grandparents) left Israel/Palestine in 1948 to join the arab armies that were going to push the jews into the sea and steal all their property. (Meaning for the most part, land the arabs had valued at virtually nothing until the jews bought it and built it up.) The arabs lost. The Israelis refused to let people who had intended to murder them back in. Sounds pretty sensible to me...
That these murderous losers and three generations of their descendants are still living in refugee camps on the fringes of Israel is quite unfortunate, but it's not the Israeli's fault - unless you blame them for surviving, or for still refusing to let a horde of would-be murderers cross the border. Note that even the name "palestinians" seems to be a relic of the camps - there never was a nation of Palestine, and no any arab or muslim nation ever had a capital within that area. So "Palestinian" is an artificial nationality conceived by the leaders of other arab nations who would rather keep them in festering camps than let them enter their countries. (Jordan and Lebanon were exceptions that did eventually let some Palestinians in - but they made so much trouble in Jordan that King Hussein's army eventually had to drive them out, and they contributed to the near destruction of Lebanon.)
If the jews were half as murderously racist as the arabs, there would be no Palestinian problem - because there would be no more Palestinians. And if the other arab nations had been half as generous towards the displaced arabs as modern christians and jews often are towards even people of different appearance and religion, there would also be no Palestinians, since they would now be Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, etc.
Now, if you have a way in which the Israelis could welcome in thousands of people who want to murder them without comitting suicide, why don't you let the world know? It ought to be worth a Nobel Peace Prize.
By that defenition, the self bombing palestenians who are resisting the israeli occupation are NOT terrorists but freedom fighters.
One thing the palestinians certainly are NOT fighting for is "freedom". They are attacking the most free nation in the middle east, on behalf of a corrupt Palestinian would-be dictator. They are egged on by the various arab dictators and kings, who need a distraction from their own shortcomings. You can call them "revolutionaries", or even "resistance", but they are not freedom fighters.
And there is a very big difference between dumping tea in the harbor or hacking communication systems, on the one hand, and blowing up children on the other.
Disk mirroring DOES NOT save your arse when some nitwit MCSE lets a virus infect the server and all the data files. It will whack the mirrors too. If they'd been using the multi-generation tape backups like every _real_ backup plan has, we'd have been back and running in a couple of days, but as it was a lot of stuff simply had to be done over.
Now (a couple of years later), they do the multi-generation tapes religiously. And periodically they yell at everyone to pare their on-line files down so they can continue to backup 100G hard drives to a 40G tape! (In other words, we are limiting drive space _used_, not to what is available or affordable, but to what the backup system can handle. I do that by moving rarely used files to CD-R.)
I'm quite OK with using removable disk drives for a multiple-generation backup, as long as you actually have multiple copies, and some of them are off-site. I'm not sure how the costs compare, but this scheme ought to take care of the insufficient capacity and insufficient time excuses. And one of the worst problems with tape backups is ensuring that after a real disaster - like the computer with the tape drive burning up - you'll still be able to read the tapes. I assume that those removable disks could hook up for read-back to any SCSI equipped computer with a suitable cable?
The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!
I was in Malaysia a year ago. (This is one of the relatively successful third-world countries.) Of the half-dozen engineers I dealt with, only the chief engineer owned a car. None of them could afford to marry before 30. We were in a rural region, but the air was polluted enough to affect my sinuses - in particular, around meal-time the air fills up with smoke from all the cookfires. (I didn't ask what kind of solid fuel they were burning...)
Most of the steel infrastructure in Japan is much, much older than the dot-com era. But for obvious reasons it had to be totally rebuilt after WWII (much of this paid for by the same American taxpayers who had paid to demolish it in the first place), while the American steel industry is still running many pre-WWII plants. And I suspect that the Japanese have also replaced equipment faster since the war - there hasn't been much interest in this country in basic industries, or in anything with 20 year payoffs. And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.
By the way, one sort of steelmaking thrives in modern America - small mills producing high quality steels to order. These plants are modern. They don't make steel from ore, but purchase what they can't get by recycling. They get a fairly high price per pound, but quality and quick delivery make it worthwhile for many uses. It's no surprise that such a plant makes fewer tons per man-hour than a gigantic modern plant, which can only make a few kinds of product.
The West European nations all have far higher minimum wages without the ghettos we have, so that kinda blows a hole in your argument, doesn't it?
They've also got far higher unemployment, youth gangs, and soaring crime rates that really do endanger the middle class (vs. America where the gangbangers stay in their own neighborhoods and mostly shoot each other). I'm not fond of the results of the American "system", but if things seem to be better in Europe, it's just because their reporters don't play up the problems as much.
Most of the unemployed (and virtually unemployable) young Euro criminals are "white", because most of their population is, but where they have "colored" immigrants or guestworkers (Turks, Pakistanis, etc.) they have ghettos. I suspect that some of these are far worse than any American ghetto, and I'm not sure if white English working-class neighborhoods are much better than American ghettos by now - except that their gangbangers can walk over too a better neighborhood without drawing too much attention and find someone actually worth mugging...
Also, Europe has a lot more blatant racist violence - German skinheads burning Turks in their apartment houses, British skinheads hunting for "Pakis", christians and moslems both attacking jews... Sure we have such incidents in the USA - and every single one makes the news coast to coast, causing a reaction strong enough to scare the other racists, homophobes, and other sorts of creeps into staying home for a while. Seems like the Euro authorities try to sweep their incidents under the carpet.
I think that (1) It's an "on the average" relationship, not an exact relationship - that is, if it says there are 100 primes in a long interval it may be off by a few percent, but if it says there's 1 prime in a short interval it may be off by +/- 1. So it's no good for the bisection search.
(2) The Zeta function is not that easy to compute anyhow.
Re:Forget bigger numbers, how about smaller words?
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A) You can't predict prime numbers. B) That guy predicted prime numbers
Riemann discovered a function that reasonably well matches the number of primes found within long intervals of numbers. It can't find primes per se, it just predicts how many you'll find between 'm' and 'n'. And it's no help for factoring a product of two primes, so it won't crack codes.
Of course, winning the prize (by taking Riemann's work a few steps further) might happen to suggest a method for factoring a product of primes, but it's more likely it will be of interest only to those few mathematicians that can remember what Riemann's hypothesis was in the first place. (I used to know but no longer remember, and that d!@#d article didn't give an equation or otherwise say anything really useful.)
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Heck, I'm passing on seeing a Star Wars movie in the theater, for crying out loud.
Me too. And the first movie (episode 4) was my first date with my wife. But what I've heard about AOTC doesn't fill me with desire to pay about 20 bucks to watch it in a large room full of strangers...
Someone please mod MGehm's post up, sounds like he knows what he's talking about with this system. The laser detonation is a low order explosion; that is, because you set the main explosive off by heating rather than by the built-in detonator, the explosive tends to burn fast rather than explode all at once - "It makes a pot hole instead of a crater."
So if someone strewed above-ground mines out in the open to slow an armored column, this laser on the lead tank could take out most of the mines (all but those that fell in a hole or behind a bush) very quickly. Maybe it can even do it without stopping. Other methods (gunfire at visible mines, launching a high-explosive "snake" ahead of the tanks, or the flail attachment) require either stopping for a few minutes or driving very slowly. And the mine explosions could leave craters big enough to require even heavy tanks to slow down and maneuver carefully, while with the laser you get "potholes" that tracked vehicles can drive right over and humvees can drive through or dodge.
But it's still a very limited system, in that it can only kill mines where you can see the mine body. It will take out most airdropped mines, but it doesn't clear 100% (some land out of sight), and does anyone but the US have this capability anyhow? It will get some claymores (mines placed above ground to fire sideways), but for obvious reasons these are usually hidden as much as possible. It does nothing at all for buried mines, since the explosive part is over six inches underground. (Lasing the trigger pan won't do any good, even if you know where it is.) And in any case, the main danger with buried mines is in FINDING them - if you can find it without setting it off, you can evacuate the area and set it off safely with a small charge and a long fuse, although you might not be popular with the natives if their house was too close to the mine...
So for most quick-and-dirty military mine-clearing, you are back to the methods that will detonate any buried mines that happen to lay in a particular lane - this used to done with flails pushed ahead of a tank (at some risk to the tank), now the main US method is to launch an explosive snake ahead of the tank, and then there is the Wattenberg proposal (the picture looks like a helicopter towing a harrow - like a big rake). All of these are "messy" techniques that explode the mines at full force, but they work fairly fast and you don't give the other side's snipers much of a target. And I think they are cheaper and less likely to break down than a laser.
These systems and the laser system just clear safe lanes for tanks or troops to pass through the minefield. If you want to make the ground safe for civilians to move back in, or for farming, someone's got to go over every square foot of ground with a good detector. (Even airdropped surface mines may sometimes go down a rabbit hole - and if you want to ensure no kid ever finds a claymore hidden in the bushes, you've got to clamber through the bushes yourself.) There are even ceramic mine casings now, so the traditional metal detector might miss something - maybe you need multi-channel detectors, like metal detection, sonar, and radar? And the guy walking around with this detector is in danger of being blown up if he steps wrong... It's a slow and ugly job even when no one is shooting at you.
How much would the combat effectiveness of the US military, the world's most powerful, most technologically advanced, fighting force be diminished if it didn't use anti-personnel landmines?
Study the history of the Korean War, and the 50 years of truce (not peace) since, then go to Korea, and look out across the DMZ. North Korean tanks could brush aside the much smaller South Korean and American forces and take Seoul (the capital and largest city) in a few hours, except for land-mines and other obstacles. Remember that it took six months for "the US military, the world's most powerful, most technologically advanced, fighting force" to get it's full strength to Saudi Arabia before Operation Desert Storm could start. Clearing the mines will only hold the attackers up for a few days, but at least that would let us fly half the USAF over there and airlift in more troops.
I do abhor the use of land mines in most military situations, such as short-term defensive positions - the army will move on soon, one way or the other, but the mines stay. But for a permanent defense, mines are a critical part.
When the battery goes out, the landmine doesn't work anymore.
That makes it safer for the clearing crew that comes by in a few months to collect the mines. It does not make them safe for farmers that hit the mine when they are plowing the field 10 years later. Explosives get unstable as they age - just because there's no electricity to fire the detonator doesn't mean an old mine won't explode when it's bumped.
If you want a really safe mine, make it physically dig itself out of the ground, beep for someone to come pick it up for a few days, then if no one responds explode after one hour of obvious warnings (sirens, flashing lights, a voice countdown in all local languages). But then, it would be so complex it would probably malfunction in some highly dangerous manner...
Cool indeed, but all it does is explode mines and dud ordnance that are laying on top of the ground, from a safe distance. There's a less expensive device that does the same thing. It doesn't require large power and cooling units, so instead of being mounted on a tank, it can be carried by a single operator. Every US Army combat unit used to include men carrying this device and expert in it's use. It's called a "rifle".
Wouldn't Superman crush Batman in about a milli-second?
That's always been a problem for the Superman scriptwriters - how to make _anything_ be a challenge, since over the years since the comic strip started (around 1930?) they've attributed so much strength and so many abilities to him that anything short of a galaxy-sized black hole ought to be easy. He's the irresistible force and the immovable object. And if he screws up and lets something bad happen without being there to stop it, he can just fly faster than light to reverse time. You'd think his only real problem would be keeping his personal organizer up to date (08:45 save Lois from bad guy 1, 08:50 save the world from bad guy 2, 08:55 pick up a mugger from the alley and drop him off at Sing Sing, 09:00 put in an appearance in civies as the mild mannered reporter who missed all the fun again, 09:05 save Lois again...)
So how is Batman, who is just a human being with really nice toys, going to face Superman? Yawn, kryptonite again. Obviously that stuff deadens his brain long before he comes close enough to lose his strength, otherwise he'd have learned not to fall for it every time. And it's easy to find green kryptonite on earth, even for convicts on the run from the law, let alone billionaires.
IIRC, someone once calculated from the quantities of kryptonite that have turned up on Earth and the inverse square law, that Krypton must have been so massive it collapsed into a black hole.
True, tractors don't burn that much fuel, but there are other energy inputs required. Typical fertilizer production (primarily nitrates synthesized from air) is extremely energy-intensive. Pesticides take some energy. Hauling the fertilizer to the farm takes a little, hauling the corn away takes more. Fermentation and distillation take a considerable input of heat. Overall, using the methods most common in America for each step, you'd get more ethanol per barrel of oil by directly converting it in a factory rather than growing corn - and with less labor and capital investment. This is reflected in a lower price for synthesized ethanol...
OTOH, maybe the methods could change without cutting the yield too much. For example: synthetic fertilizer (nitrates made from air) requires a lot of energy - but (in the US at least) feedlot operators often have trouble disposing of their natural fertilizer byproduct. It takes labor, machinery, and some fuel to haul the manure to the farms, spread it, and clean up. And for some reason, it's hard to hire people for this work... So with the price of energy held down by government policies in the US, the synthetic nitrates are cheaper than picking up "free" manure a few hundred miles away.
Secure and reliable are two different things. (Someday I'm going to make and post a picture of how to secure a Windows system - it involves a wire cutters and the power cord.)
The issue with a completely private country-wide network is that it's unlikely to have all the redundant links needed to ensure everyone stays connected. OTOH, the internet has redundancy (except where the phone companies run too many trunk lines through the same building), but there's an unacceptably high risk that critical info (e.g., his routine traffic stop is a mad-dog killer) won't make it through the congestion in time. What is really needed when real-time performance is critical is a way to buy priority through the internet routers. (And I do mean a pay system, priced so that no one can afford to use it to keep the MPEG streaming in on time, but cop shops can afford to prioritize their much shorter messages.)
The question is, do those people claiming 5 nines count "scheduled downtime" as downtime or not?
For instance, 4 nines says your system is up 99.99% of the time. That is, out of 365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes = 525,600 minutes a year, it can be down for only .01%, or 52 minutes a year. Five nines (99.999%) allows only 5 minuts a year downtime. This may actually be averaged over many servers and several years (that is, if you had 10 servers running for 3 years and just 1 died requiring one day to replace, you could figure your downtime as 100 * 1 day/(10*3*365) = .009%, so you've still got 4 nines).
There are questions about what gets counted when figuring reliability. For one thing, almost no one would count a slashdotting or a DOS attack against their uptime, but nevertheless from the user's viewpoint the server is down. Also, how do you count "scheduled downtime" such as rebooting NT servers after installing security patches, or unplugging the boxes to move them around when it's time to expand the system? A news server with a worldwide audience has no "penalty free" time slots. So either you settle for a lower uptime goal, or you need redundant servers configured so that even major upgrades can be put in by unplugging just one at a time while the others keep running. OTOH the company database server, downtime during working hours is far more serious than downtime for the web server, so if it's a big company you do need redundant servers with automatic switchover. But in most cases there are times late at night or on weekends when no one cares if you shut them _all_ down at once - which certainly makes the upgrades easier.
So anyway, one person's "5 nines" may look like a lot less to someone else. E.g. a server vendor may claim that because only one in a million of their servers is broken at any given time their reliability is 6 nines. Your single server may never break at all - but once a week you take it off-line for ten minutes to load the newest security patches, so to anyone who wanted to keep working for those ten minutes you are only at 3 nines.
I hope that LEIN database is on a network that has a better record for delivering the data within a few seconds than the public internet. It doesn't matter how good your server is if your IP traffic got crowded off the net by 3,000 nerds downloading pr0n...
It all depends on what is on the server. If it's stuff your own people use constantly on their job, through your own network, you need five nines, otherwise you will take the blame for critical jobs getting done late.
But when people are going to the server through the internet, they get used to interruptions - there are so many links between, some of which periodically become overwhelmed with traffic, that no one could tell the difference between two nines and five nines on your server itself. So sales & product information sites don't need more reliability than you can readily afford. They do need high capacity.
And if it's your blogs concerning your navel lint - no one's looking at your uptime but you...
That's a good explanation of how libertarian principles apply to lawmaking. About the bill of rights and businesses: the issue is not that corporations and citizens should be held by law to respect these rights, but that they should not be able to use the courts to violate them. For example, your employer should be able to require that you refrain from public speech embarassing to them, but a company should not be able to restrict the free speech of others by threatening lawsuits except in clear cases of slander and libel...
As for copyright & copy protection:
1) Copyright is not a natural property right; someone copying your work does not take anything away from you. It might reduce the market value of your creative work, but if you claim that violates a natural right, you must also claim that McDonalds can bar Burger King from building a restaurant across the street...
2) Copyright (and patents) are _artificial_ property rights, a monopoly granted for a limited time in exchange for putting your ideas out to the public. This exchange makes sense only if the ideas and creative works become public domain after a while.
3) The expiration time should be no longer than the length of time in which future income is a significant factor in deciding whether to do work now. That is, no one at all decides to write the great American novel in hopes that 75 years after his death, his greatgrandchildren can retire on the royalties, so the present copyright length is utterly ridiculous. (It's also unconstitutional, but that's a separate issue.) I think that to determine the proper length, one should look at common business practices and see how businesses look at future income. Many corporations barely look past the next quarterly report and will not invest at all unless the payoff is within three years. OTOH, banks regularly sell 30 year mortgages - but mortgages are an exceptionally safe investment, while the future value of a book, movie, or song is highly speculative. I figure that for the average present-day best-seller, there is a less than 10% chance that it will be worth anything in 20 years, and a 10% chance at a dollar in 20 years is worth less than one cent today. Many authors are looking only for a quick sale so they can pay the rent, but some might also be hoping that someday Hollywood will pick up their work and make them rich, so if I was picking a single number for the length of copyrights, it would be 20 years.
However, a multistage system would make more sense: You get a 2-year automatic copyright just by publishing the work with a statement including first publication date and, "This is an original work, all rights reserved." By filing with the copyright office, paying a fee, and sending them the work in a permanent and copyable electronic form, you get 14 years from the date of publication; this fee covers the cost of running the copyright office, storing the work for 14 years, and posting it so anyone can copy it after the copyright expires. If you desire, you can pay 10 times as large a fee and extend the copyright another 14 years (28 total); this large fee is to discourage the maintenance of copyrights on out-of-print works.
4) If you copy-protect your published work in such a way as to restrict fair-use rights, you should give up copyright. No redundancy, right? And copy-protected works (if the protection is effective) are violating the implicit contract that you get a copyright in exchange for the work being be free to copy someday.
5) The DMCA should be repealed in entirety. If someone wishes to go the copy-protection route, they must rely on their own technical superiority, not the government restricting technological developments by others. (I think in practice this will mean no copy protection, but I don't see a problem with that - while another vague and poorly enforceable law is a bad thing, and restricting technology is a very bad thing.)
Thank you for demonstrating your lucid thought processes and love for mankind...
But if the MPAA get their legislation through, won't it be illegal to own a non-compliant device?
The "best Congress money can buy" may make it illegal to _sell_ non-compliant devices, but I very much doubt that the public would stand for the cops coming into people's houses to check their DVD players. As for manufacturing non-compliant devices, they haven't bought the legislatures in other countries yet - for instance, it's easy to get all-region DVD players in Australia and Europe. So at most, they might create another bootlegging business.
I almost hope that the **AA idiots do get some horribly intrusive laws passed - fscking up people's video players is about the only thing I can thing of that would wake up the American public and get all those corrupt, halfwitted, permanent Congressmen kicked out at last. They'll be replaced by other corrupt halfwits, but most of the new ones will see bigger opportunities in bashing the media than in taking their b^r^i^b^ campaign contributions - there are lots of other corporations handing out the payola. The new Congress would repeal that law ASAP (on the general grounds that if they broke that election promise, they might not _live_ until the next election), then when the next election approaches they'd need to do something further to garner the votes. Maybe rolling back copyright terms to a reasonable length, or even taking a look at EULA's, and at software & business method patents too...
Getting through snow is 80% the driver, 20% the vehicle. I learned to drive in northern Michigan, with 200 inches of snow a year. Then I joined the Air Force, and spent six years in New Mexico. Every now and then it would snow just a little, and it was really funny seeing those cowboys skidding their big 4x4's off the road, even somehow getting them stuck in just one inch of snow. I was driving a Pinto station wagon (cheap, tiny, underpowered, rear-wheel drive), and that wisp of snow was no problem at all to me.
However, when the snow gets a foot deep, cars and minivans are likely to get stuck no matter who's driving. There's too much drag on the bottom compared to the traction, and where snowplows throw up piles at intersections (or the end of the driveway), you're likely to get stuck with the wheels up in the air. So now that I can afford a 4x4, I've got one (Dodge Dakota pickup) and I drive it when the snow is getting deep - but the extra ground clearance makes a lot more difference than the 4wd.
Surely, if the jews had such a great democracy, the benefits of citizenship would be extended to all those palestinians living in the occupied territories, no? The palestiniants would be able to vote at elections and have a number of representatives at the Knesset, no? [snip] palestinians are denied citizenship by the fact that they aren't jewish.
No, Palestinians are denied citizenship by the fact that they (or their parents or grandparents) left Israel/Palestine in 1948 to join the arab armies that were going to push the jews into the sea and steal all their property. (Meaning for the most part, land the arabs had valued at virtually nothing until the jews bought it and built it up.) The arabs lost. The Israelis refused to let people who had intended to murder them back in. Sounds pretty sensible to me...
That these murderous losers and three generations of their descendants are still living in refugee camps on the fringes of Israel is quite unfortunate, but it's not the Israeli's fault - unless you blame them for surviving, or for still refusing to let a horde of would-be murderers cross the border. Note that even the name "palestinians" seems to be a relic of the camps - there never was a nation of Palestine, and no any arab or muslim nation ever had a capital within that area. So "Palestinian" is an artificial nationality conceived by the leaders of other arab nations who would rather keep them in festering camps than let them enter their countries. (Jordan and Lebanon were exceptions that did eventually let some Palestinians in - but they made so much trouble in Jordan that King Hussein's army eventually had to drive them out, and they contributed to the near destruction of Lebanon.)
If the jews were half as murderously racist as the arabs, there would be no Palestinian problem - because there would be no more Palestinians. And if the other arab nations had been half as generous towards the displaced arabs as modern christians and jews often are towards even people of different appearance and religion, there would also be no Palestinians, since they would now be Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, Saudis, etc.
Now, if you have a way in which the Israelis could welcome in thousands of people who want to murder them without comitting suicide, why don't you let the world know? It ought to be worth a Nobel Peace Prize.
Or send a few bucks to the next of kin. To cover the bill they are going to receive for one bullet.
By that defenition, the self bombing palestenians who are resisting the
israeli occupation are NOT terrorists but freedom fighters.
One thing the palestinians certainly are NOT fighting for is "freedom". They are attacking the most free nation in the middle east, on behalf of a corrupt Palestinian would-be dictator. They are egged on by the various arab dictators and kings, who need a distraction from their own shortcomings. You can call them "revolutionaries", or even "resistance", but they are not freedom fighters.
And there is a very big difference between dumping tea in the harbor or hacking communication systems, on the one hand, and blowing up children on the other.
Disk mirroring DOES NOT save your arse when some nitwit MCSE lets a virus infect the server and all the data files. It will whack the mirrors too. If they'd been using the multi-generation tape backups like every _real_ backup plan has, we'd have been back and running in a couple of days, but as it was a lot of stuff simply had to be done over.
Now (a couple of years later), they do the multi-generation tapes religiously. And periodically they yell at everyone to pare their on-line files down so they can continue to backup 100G hard drives to a 40G tape! (In other words, we are limiting drive space _used_, not to what is available or affordable, but to what the backup system can handle. I do that by moving rarely used files to CD-R.)
I'm quite OK with using removable disk drives for a multiple-generation backup, as long as you actually have multiple copies, and some of them are off-site. I'm not sure how the costs compare, but this scheme ought to take care of the insufficient capacity and insufficient time excuses. And one of the worst problems with tape backups is ensuring that after a real disaster - like the computer with the tape drive burning up - you'll still be able to read the tapes. I assume that those removable disks could hook up for read-back to any SCSI equipped computer with a suitable cable?
The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!
I was in Malaysia a year ago. (This is one of the relatively successful third-world countries.) Of the half-dozen engineers I dealt with, only the chief engineer owned a car. None of them could afford to marry before 30. We were in a rural region, but the air was polluted enough to affect my sinuses - in particular, around meal-time the air fills up with smoke from all the cookfires. (I didn't ask what kind of solid fuel they were burning...)
Most of the steel infrastructure in Japan is much, much older than the dot-com era. But for obvious reasons it had to be totally rebuilt after WWII (much of this paid for by the same American taxpayers who had paid to demolish it in the first place), while the American steel industry is still running many pre-WWII plants. And I suspect that the Japanese have also replaced equipment faster since the war - there hasn't been much interest in this country in basic industries, or in anything with 20 year payoffs. And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.
By the way, one sort of steelmaking thrives in modern America - small mills producing high quality steels to order. These plants are modern. They don't make steel from ore, but purchase what they can't get by recycling. They get a fairly high price per pound, but quality and quick delivery make it worthwhile for many uses. It's no surprise that such a plant makes fewer tons per man-hour than a gigantic modern plant, which can only make a few kinds of product.
The West European nations all have far higher minimum wages without the ghettos we have, so that kinda blows a hole in your argument, doesn't it?
They've also got far higher unemployment, youth gangs, and soaring crime rates that really do endanger the middle class (vs. America where the gangbangers stay in their own neighborhoods and mostly shoot each other). I'm not fond of the results of the American "system", but if things seem to be better in Europe, it's just because their reporters don't play up the problems as much.
Most of the unemployed (and virtually unemployable) young Euro criminals are "white", because most of their population is, but where they have "colored" immigrants or guestworkers (Turks, Pakistanis, etc.) they have ghettos. I suspect that some of these are far worse than any American ghetto, and I'm not sure if white English working-class neighborhoods are much better than American ghettos by now - except that their gangbangers can walk over too a better neighborhood without drawing too much attention and find someone actually worth mugging...
Also, Europe has a lot more blatant racist violence - German skinheads burning Turks in their apartment houses, British skinheads hunting for "Pakis", christians and moslems both attacking jews... Sure we have such incidents in the USA - and every single one makes the news coast to coast, causing a reaction strong enough to scare the other racists, homophobes, and other sorts of creeps into staying home for a while. Seems like the Euro authorities try to sweep their incidents under the carpet.
I think that
(1) It's an "on the average" relationship, not an exact relationship - that is, if it says there are 100 primes in a long interval it may be off by a few percent, but if it says there's 1 prime in a short interval it may be off by +/- 1. So it's no good for the bisection search.
(2) The Zeta function is not that easy to compute anyhow.
A) You can't predict prime numbers.
B) That guy predicted prime numbers
Riemann discovered a function that reasonably well matches the number of primes found within long intervals of numbers. It can't find primes per se, it just predicts how many you'll find between 'm' and 'n'. And it's no help for factoring a product of two primes, so it won't crack codes.
Of course, winning the prize (by taking Riemann's work a few steps further) might happen to suggest a method for factoring a product of primes, but it's more likely it will be of interest only to those few mathematicians that can remember what Riemann's hypothesis was in the first place. (I used to know but no longer remember, and that d!@#d article didn't give an equation or otherwise say anything really useful.)