What effect will any strategic missle defense system have against a multi-ton rock? They're only designed to disable relatively delicate and lightweight missles. Missles work based on explosive power - rocks work on mass x velocity (=momentum) alone. The only thing that could stop a launched rock is something to knock it off its' path or break it apart - which means another rock, a nuke, or a sophisticated attack booster rocket.
Which incidentally offers yet more evidence to show - the current missle defense system plans won't offer any sort of useful protection against modern and future threats.
True, if they have half a brain. China has long demonstrated it's desire to be a powerful force in the world (indeed believes it is their natural right as the empire of the middle to be on top) and its willingness to use any means to get there. In itself this is not so unusual (Americans have the same sorts of attitudes, as have several other nations) but considering the pervasively pragmatic amorality of the chinese government (and to some degree society), and their resources, they stand a good chance of getting it. A permanent Chinese moon base would definitely have severe offensive military capability, international treaties be damned. For the rest of the world to let them put one there without having countermeasures available (i.e. our own lunar presence) would be foolish in the extreme.
By all accounts nintendo consoles may be less sophisticated than those of MS or sony, but they no longer target the same market or game selection. Hardcore adult gamers have chosen the PS2 (and flirted with XBox), while the GameCube is primarily targeted to the kids market.
The competition between the PS1 and N64 is what sealed the deal. Because the PS1 used CDs that were less responsive but offered WAY more storage space than cartriges they could make games with far larger and more involved plots. This allowed them to target the more patient but more easily bored adult market more effectively - particularly solitary adventure gamers. Nintendo chose to use cartridges as they had before for the N64, and ended up catering to the less picky, short attention span, multiplaying kids. Despite it's better hardware. I can only think of two titles for the N64 solidly aimed at adults. (Meanwhile Sega trapped itself midway between the sony/nintendo upgrade cycles, putting the dreamcast in the shadow of the Next Big Thing and ultimately killing it when the PS2 arrived).
Lately price was also a factor, as the monstrously expensive PS2 and Xbox pushed parents towards the much cheaper gamecube for the kids. But these price drops could change that. It's odd that Nintendo may be going for the older market again with some of the newer titles, but it's going to have stiff competition with Sony's library.
Boy, if I bought these CDs I'd be pissed. Apple should write a driver to recognize, read, and rip these CDs, just to piss off the RIAA. Breaking the computer is unacceptable.
Seriously now... the tech industry has had to put up with a lot of shit from the (comparatively puny) content industry... if they wanted they could probably kill the music industry in short order by providing tools, lobbying, and anti-marketing. Show 'em who's boss.
If they're going to charge more for people who make more, they should charge less for groups that make less.
All this.whatever is BS anyway. It's become a scam to extract money out of people who don't want somebody else using their name (like whitehouse.com) and are willing to buy all the.whatevers to make it so. The day they started letting people "collect all three" - (and now much more than that) is the day the extensions lost all meaning. They should be done away with entirely. For that matter, so should the for-profit registries. They should introduce undotted domain names, hear arguments as to who deserves it most to settle the inevitable disputes, and move on.
Re:Nice to see X in full, but visit 9 sometime
on
Apple Drops Mac OS 9
·
· Score: 2
Well they (WMU, etc.) still have apps that suit their needs on 9 now, don't they? They'll just have to live with them 'til they upgrade their hardware - assuming they ever need to upgrade their software.
Superior in every way except interface speed, that is. And still to a certain degree, simplicity.
Tron - not as good as you remember
on
Tron 2.0 Game
·
· Score: 2
The original Tron wasn't even that good. I liked it as a kid. Then again, I also liked Airwolf and a lot of other shows that I realized were extremely crappy when I saw them as an adult. Tron was corny and predictable - Tron 2.0 will almost certainly be that, as well as sickeningly sanitized to suit the bland modern Disney.
Well I know I'm not the first person to have this idea. Surely the cable companies have thought of it before - and in fact I think the DirecTV is already starting to implement some aspects of this (they've partnered with TiVo, and I think may incorporate PVR into all their recievers starting this winter). In some ways it's a lot like Video On Demand, except less bandwidth intensive.
If the advertising-supported-broadcast business model is obsolete, good riddance, although I expect it to go down kicking and screaming. We're drowning in ads and crappy programming as it is, and paying for them in the process.
Who knows? If people actually had to pay directly for TV, they'd probably expect a lot more from it, and consume a lot less. Which could mean less programming in general, but much higher quality. With other changes in distribution (built around PVR time-shifting and satellite/digital cable bandwidth) the broadcast model could become nearly obsolete, replaced by something more akin to the magazine and video market.
So here's a question for you - if a solar sail is reflective on one side, and absorptive (black) on the other, shouldn't it be possible to sail on ambient light (including starlight, slowly) alone? If I'm not mistaken that's the same principle as those little whirling light bulb toys.
The magnetic bubble approach uses less mass, is possibly more energy efficient, has a more flexible design, has a much greater operating range, and offers the wonderful bonus of sheilding the craft from the solar wind. Although since it can't capture the energy from photons, only ionized particles, the motive force is fundamentally different.
You can park a submarine at the equator, which makes it easier to launch. It doesn't require a special facility, and it gives the Russian Navy something to do.
It saved many Japanese lives too, you know. Everyone in Japan was prepared to do their civic duty and die with honor, whether they wanted to or not. Fat Man and Little Boy did what no other method could do - shocked Emperor Hirohito into ending the war.
Despite the best efforts of the unamerican fuckheads at Cisco and Yahoo (and AOL, Sun, Netscape) even the great chinese firewall isn't impenetrable. Here's a good link on the subject. So why not do unto them as they do unto us - and hack and/or ddos sensitive chinese sites? Show 'em that Americans aren't as lazy and incompetent as they think we are, at least as far as hackers are concerned. Here's a link to get you started - the official state propoga^H^H^H^H^H^H^H paper The People's Daily, chinese edition.
IF what the author is suggesting were true (and that's a big if) than this is neither unusual nor bad. The US military knows better than to think they can surpress a powerful technology forever. Ultimately any such policy would fail, while developing it can lead to great boons. The key for the military is to stay several steps ahead of everyone else. That means conducting their own development and classifying it until somebody else figures it out, extensive espionage to make sure no one else gets ahead of them, and the occasional suppression of the commercial sector.
The author mentions what a chilling effect it would have been if the military had suppressed computers - handily ignoring the fact that computers were originally developed by and for the military almost exclusively. The situation today is that most computers are quite harmless and consequently allowed to do their own thing - but when software or hardware gets too powerful (strong crypto and supercomputers, for instance) the regulations kick in.
The catch is that some technologies are so powerful that simply being ahead in the game is not enough - you have to restrict it entirely. Nuclear is the classic example, since even a small bomb can devestate at an enormous scale. Biological and Nanotechnological are potentially even worse, due to the small resources required for the former and the extreme precision of the latter. For all the shortcomings and violence of the US military, they know their place - serving the US government, not running it. And the US government isn't interested in ruling the world, just keeping it under control so we can do our thing. I'd rather they had the upper hand than I would China, Microsoft, Israel, Greenpeace, Switzerland, or Pfizer.
Requiring sites to declare their objectionable material up front is good. I agree though, meta tags are definitely the more effective way to go.
Hell, if I were to go back in time and reinvent the net, I wouldn't have included the.whatever in the first place. Enforcing it is too hard, and it's not enforced now anyway. It's irrelevant and only serves to sell more domain names than people actually need (hmm... conspiracy). We should be typing in "http://slashdot" and that's it, with objectionable content declared in the response (both in page or page elements, namely pictures), with the option to not display certain types of easily and specifically defined content (NUDITY, PORNOGRAPHY, JONKATZ).
Hell, it would be worth it just to block the wak-a-mole game of porn ads redirecting you.
I think a perfect example would be the anime video Kite. Scenes of an the main character at an obviously younger age in sexual situations with an adult were removed for the American release, even though it was animated. There are other examples of child sexuality, and too many teen ones to count in Japanese Animation.
There are quite a few foreign films and shows on the list, too. I would still say that Lolita is the defining film/book on the list, though.
Not every country is bothered by child sexuality, and the vast majority of human cultures in history have regarded teens as adults. The hundreds of films in America where teens are sexually active makes the law way too broad in that regard alone. I'm not defending kiddy porn, I'm just trying to point out that however harshly we may oppose it, it is too poorly and subjectively defined to legislate against easily, particularly in a country as diverse as ours. The biggest problem would be defining what is permissible in the depiction of underaged sexuality and what is not.
All I can say, is I'm getting sick of these government officials being on the side of large businesses simply because they are large campaign contributers. I have a nice new law for you. If you accept money from a corporation or individual, you may not vote on any issues directly relating to that corporation or individual's well being. In other words, if the RIAA 'donates' $100k toward your campaign, and you accept it, you aren't allowed to vote on any bill, or push any legislation, that has to do with digital rights management, music copyright, or anything else the RIAA gets their fingers into. I guess you better stick to water purification and eco-system issues.
Won't work. Bills are passed through the age old tactic of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". Every bill passed is chock-full of riders that have little or nothing to do with the original proposal. Even in states like Texas where the law explicitly states bills should address one issue only, voting favors are exchanged all the time. All any politician would have to do is take the perks from the lobbyists, lean on a few buddies in private to push the bill, and return the favor later. Real reform would rest on eliminating or restricting the money altogether, which is actually much harder than it sounds.
The question is not so much O2 or CO2 consumption and production as sequestration. Instead of being buried underground, now all that carbon has to be "buried" in living things for there not to be a net production of CO2, and in that process some O2 and/or H2O is buried as well.
Furthermore the ability to do this depends on the limiting factors - the other elements required for growth (useable nitrogen, phosporus, and trace elements) and especially room to grow.
The fact is an old-growth forest actually produces as much C02 and O2 as it consumes (rate of decay = rate of growth). It has nowhere else to grow and nothing left to grow with, although it will sequester a set amount of carbon. Only young, growing forests are producing more than they consume.
In the ocean, some carbon may end up sequestered when dead organisms end up buried deep in the mud on the sea floor, but there are questions as to whether it's actually buried or not.
I don't know how much of a threat this is, but I've not heard anyone address this. Of course it's true also for fossil fuels - every time you burn anything for energy, you're losing oxygen in the process.
If we just used renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal) we wouldn't have to worry about all this stuff.
Seriously, the absolute first thing I thought of turns out to be the one they don't address. How much energy does it take to run this thing? All that shuttling rock around and heating will eat up a few joules, that's for sure. In a worst case scenario it'll produce more waste than it captures.
The fundamental value for any energy source is not how much it costs in dollars, but how much it costs in energy. An energy "source" that requires as much or more energy to harvest and use as it produces is not a viable energy source at all. This is a common dodge, which is often hard to measure. For instance the energy it takes to mine uranium is huge - possibly more than you get from using it in your nuke, to say nothing of the plant construction and maintenance. More directly, many photovoltaic cells require 1/2 or more of the energy they capture in their lifetime to produce (however cheaper, newer thin film cells require considerably less, despite their lower conversion efficiencies).
I tried that trick (searching for "xenu.net scientology" in google). The link to xenu.net is up and there was no message about the DMCA. I guess that's good, 'though if it were me I'd keep the DMCA letters up with the relevant site links.
Anybody got any other blocked links to test this system out on?
Slashdot Mirror
What effect will any strategic missle defense system have against a multi-ton rock? They're only designed to disable relatively delicate and lightweight missles. Missles work based on explosive power - rocks work on mass x velocity (=momentum) alone. The only thing that could stop a launched rock is something to knock it off its' path or break it apart - which means another rock, a nuke, or a sophisticated attack booster rocket.
Which incidentally offers yet more evidence to show - the current missle defense system plans won't offer any sort of useful protection against modern and future threats.
True, if they have half a brain. China has long demonstrated it's desire to be a powerful force in the world (indeed believes it is their natural right as the empire of the middle to be on top) and its willingness to use any means to get there. In itself this is not so unusual (Americans have the same sorts of attitudes, as have several other nations) but considering the pervasively pragmatic amorality of the chinese government (and to some degree society), and their resources, they stand a good chance of getting it. A permanent Chinese moon base would definitely have severe offensive military capability, international treaties be damned. For the rest of the world to let them put one there without having countermeasures available (i.e. our own lunar presence) would be foolish in the extreme.
By all accounts nintendo consoles may be less sophisticated than those of MS or sony, but they no longer target the same market or game selection. Hardcore adult gamers have chosen the PS2 (and flirted with XBox), while the GameCube is primarily targeted to the kids market.
The competition between the PS1 and N64 is what sealed the deal. Because the PS1 used CDs that were less responsive but offered WAY more storage space than cartriges they could make games with far larger and more involved plots. This allowed them to target the more patient but more easily bored adult market more effectively - particularly solitary adventure gamers. Nintendo chose to use cartridges as they had before for the N64, and ended up catering to the less picky, short attention span, multiplaying kids. Despite it's better hardware. I can only think of two titles for the N64 solidly aimed at adults. (Meanwhile Sega trapped itself midway between the sony/nintendo upgrade cycles, putting the dreamcast in the shadow of the Next Big Thing and ultimately killing it when the PS2 arrived).
Lately price was also a factor, as the monstrously expensive PS2 and Xbox pushed parents towards the much cheaper gamecube for the kids. But these price drops could change that. It's odd that Nintendo may be going for the older market again with some of the newer titles, but it's going to have stiff competition with Sony's library.
I think it's safe to say that little practice has been around for a loooooong time.
Boy, if I bought these CDs I'd be pissed. Apple should write a driver to recognize, read, and rip these CDs, just to piss off the RIAA. Breaking the computer is unacceptable.
Seriously now... the tech industry has had to put up with a lot of shit from the (comparatively puny) content industry... if they wanted they could probably kill the music industry in short order by providing tools, lobbying, and anti-marketing. Show 'em who's boss.
If they're going to charge more for people who make more, they should charge less for groups that make less.
.whatever is BS anyway. It's become a scam to extract money out of people who don't want somebody else using their name (like whitehouse.com) and are willing to buy all the .whatevers to make it so. The day they started letting people "collect all three" - (and now much more than that) is the day the extensions lost all meaning. They should be done away with entirely. For that matter, so should the for-profit registries. They should introduce undotted domain names, hear arguments as to who deserves it most to settle the inevitable disputes, and move on.
All this
Well they (WMU, etc.) still have apps that suit their needs on 9 now, don't they? They'll just have to live with them 'til they upgrade their hardware - assuming they ever need to upgrade their software.
Superior in every way except interface speed, that is. And still to a certain degree, simplicity.
The original Tron wasn't even that good. I liked it as a kid. Then again, I also liked Airwolf and a lot of other shows that I realized were extremely crappy when I saw them as an adult. Tron was corny and predictable - Tron 2.0 will almost certainly be that, as well as sickeningly sanitized to suit the bland modern Disney.
Well I know I'm not the first person to have this idea. Surely the cable companies have thought of it before - and in fact I think the DirecTV is already starting to implement some aspects of this (they've partnered with TiVo, and I think may incorporate PVR into all their recievers starting this winter). In some ways it's a lot like Video On Demand, except less bandwidth intensive.
If the advertising-supported-broadcast business model is obsolete, good riddance, although I expect it to go down kicking and screaming. We're drowning in ads and crappy programming as it is, and paying for them in the process.
Who knows? If people actually had to pay directly for TV, they'd probably expect a lot more from it, and consume a lot less. Which could mean less programming in general, but much higher quality. With other changes in distribution (built around PVR time-shifting and satellite/digital cable bandwidth) the broadcast model could become nearly obsolete, replaced by something more akin to the magazine and video market.
So here's a question for you - if a solar sail is reflective on one side, and absorptive (black) on the other, shouldn't it be possible to sail on ambient light (including starlight, slowly) alone? If I'm not mistaken that's the same principle as those little whirling light bulb toys.
Does the russian design exploit this property?
The magnetic bubble approach uses less mass, is possibly more energy efficient, has a more flexible design, has a much greater operating range, and offers the wonderful bonus of sheilding the craft from the solar wind. Although since it can't capture the energy from photons, only ionized particles, the motive force is fundamentally different.
You can park a submarine at the equator, which makes it easier to launch. It doesn't require a special facility, and it gives the Russian Navy something to do.
It saved many Japanese lives too, you know. Everyone in Japan was prepared to do their civic duty and die with honor, whether they wanted to or not. Fat Man and Little Boy did what no other method could do - shocked Emperor Hirohito into ending the war.
It's perfectly relevant though. Energy = Mass x Speed-of-light squared is the essence of the awesome power of the nuclear bomb.
Despite the best efforts of the unamerican fuckheads at Cisco and Yahoo (and AOL, Sun, Netscape) even the great chinese firewall isn't impenetrable. Here's a good link on the subject. So why not do unto them as they do unto us - and hack and/or ddos sensitive chinese sites? Show 'em that Americans aren't as lazy and incompetent as they think we are, at least as far as hackers are concerned. Here's a link to get you started - the official state propoga^H^H^H^H^H^H^H paper The People's Daily, chinese edition.
IF what the author is suggesting were true (and that's a big if) than this is neither unusual nor bad. The US military knows better than to think they can surpress a powerful technology forever. Ultimately any such policy would fail, while developing it can lead to great boons. The key for the military is to stay several steps ahead of everyone else. That means conducting their own development and classifying it until somebody else figures it out, extensive espionage to make sure no one else gets ahead of them, and the occasional suppression of the commercial sector.
The author mentions what a chilling effect it would have been if the military had suppressed computers - handily ignoring the fact that computers were originally developed by and for the military almost exclusively. The situation today is that most computers are quite harmless and consequently allowed to do their own thing - but when software or hardware gets too powerful (strong crypto and supercomputers, for instance) the regulations kick in.
The catch is that some technologies are so powerful that simply being ahead in the game is not enough - you have to restrict it entirely. Nuclear is the classic example, since even a small bomb can devestate at an enormous scale. Biological and Nanotechnological are potentially even worse, due to the small resources required for the former and the extreme precision of the latter. For all the shortcomings and violence of the US military, they know their place - serving the US government, not running it. And the US government isn't interested in ruling the world, just keeping it under control so we can do our thing. I'd rather they had the upper hand than I would China, Microsoft, Israel, Greenpeace, Switzerland, or Pfizer.
Requiring sites to declare their objectionable material up front is good. I agree though, meta tags are definitely the more effective way to go.
.whatever in the first place. Enforcing it is too hard, and it's not enforced now anyway. It's irrelevant and only serves to sell more domain names than people actually need (hmm... conspiracy). We should be typing in "http://slashdot" and that's it, with objectionable content declared in the response (both in page or page elements, namely pictures), with the option to not display certain types of easily and specifically defined content (NUDITY, PORNOGRAPHY, JONKATZ).
Hell, if I were to go back in time and reinvent the net, I wouldn't have included the
Hell, it would be worth it just to block the wak-a-mole game of porn ads redirecting you.
I think a perfect example would be the anime video Kite. Scenes of an the main character at an obviously younger age in sexual situations with an adult were removed for the American release, even though it was animated. There are other examples of child sexuality, and too many teen ones to count in Japanese Animation.
There are quite a few foreign films and shows on the list, too. I would still say that Lolita is the defining film/book on the list, though.
Not every country is bothered by child sexuality, and the vast majority of human cultures in history have regarded teens as adults. The hundreds of films in America where teens are sexually active makes the law way too broad in that regard alone. I'm not defending kiddy porn, I'm just trying to point out that however harshly we may oppose it, it is too poorly and subjectively defined to legislate against easily, particularly in a country as diverse as ours. The biggest problem would be defining what is permissible in the depiction of underaged sexuality and what is not.
Won't work. Bills are passed through the age old tactic of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". Every bill passed is chock-full of riders that have little or nothing to do with the original proposal. Even in states like Texas where the law explicitly states bills should address one issue only, voting favors are exchanged all the time. All any politician would have to do is take the perks from the lobbyists, lean on a few buddies in private to push the bill, and return the favor later. Real reform would rest on eliminating or restricting the money altogether, which is actually much harder than it sounds.
The question is not so much O2 or CO2 consumption and production as sequestration. Instead of being buried underground, now all that carbon has to be "buried" in living things for there not to be a net production of CO2, and in that process some O2 and/or H2O is buried as well.
Furthermore the ability to do this depends on the limiting factors - the other elements required for growth (useable nitrogen, phosporus, and trace elements) and especially room to grow.
The fact is an old-growth forest actually produces as much C02 and O2 as it consumes (rate of decay = rate of growth). It has nowhere else to grow and nothing left to grow with, although it will sequester a set amount of carbon. Only young, growing forests are producing more than they consume.
In the ocean, some carbon may end up sequestered when dead organisms end up buried deep in the mud on the sea floor, but there are questions as to whether it's actually buried or not.
I don't know how much of a threat this is, but I've not heard anyone address this. Of course it's true also for fossil fuels - every time you burn anything for energy, you're losing oxygen in the process.
If we just used renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal) we wouldn't have to worry about all this stuff.
Seriously, the absolute first thing I thought of turns out to be the one they don't address. How much energy does it take to run this thing? All that shuttling rock around and heating will eat up a few joules, that's for sure. In a worst case scenario it'll produce more waste than it captures.
The fundamental value for any energy source is not how much it costs in dollars, but how much it costs in energy. An energy "source" that requires as much or more energy to harvest and use as it produces is not a viable energy source at all. This is a common dodge, which is often hard to measure. For instance the energy it takes to mine uranium is huge - possibly more than you get from using it in your nuke, to say nothing of the plant construction and maintenance. More directly, many photovoltaic cells require 1/2 or more of the energy they capture in their lifetime to produce (however cheaper, newer thin film cells require considerably less, despite their lower conversion efficiencies).
I tried that trick (searching for "xenu.net scientology" in google). The link to xenu.net is up and there was no message about the DMCA. I guess that's good, 'though if it were me I'd keep the DMCA letters up with the relevant site links.
Anybody got any other blocked links to test this system out on?