Most nations have signed the Geneva Convention to regulate the conduct of war- amoung other things, this means that you can only attack people with weapons meant to kill them, but not infect, poison, or maim.
(A gentleman's agreement between the respective military-industrial-complexes, really. Dead soldier -> proud military funeral -> enhanced militarism and anticipation of future retaliation. Wounded soldier -> disabled veteran begging on sidewalk -> budget pressure for providing care, and public squeamishness about enrolling in future conflicts. Too much peace hurts our economic growth!)
This means no chemical weapons (tell that to Russia!), no hollowpoint or fragmentary bullets, few shotguns, and no lasers aimed at people. Because the easiest ways to hurt someone with a laser is to burn his eyes out, this is consistent with Geneva.
But, today's new, powerful anti-munition lasers will be an attractive option in the anti-aircraft role as well. Military planners must be thinking of this, but they don't want to talk about it for fear of striking taboo/war-crimes territory.
But I wonder what'll happen if a laser-defense battery suddenly finds themselves face to face with an enemy Hind who snuck up terrain-masked. Will they run for it and hope he's a slow shot, or light it up and watch the fireworks?
And, if the the ABL gets built and we get another hijacker repurposing an airliner into a weapon, the president will be hard pressed not to order him zapped, too.
(Of course, another reason planners might not talk much about targeting aircraft with lasers is that the US and Israel have no potential opponents whose aircraft can't be simply destroyed with Beyond-Visual-Range missiles. Won't stop me from speculating.)
This wasn't rigged. Everyone was told ahead of time that the target missle had a GPS receiver on the warhead as well as a C-band beacon.
Just because the unfairness was pre-published doesn't mean the test had scientific validity.
The purpose of the test was not in acquisition and tracking, but in the kill vehicle technology
That's plenty difficult, but easy compared to the target identification problem. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. There's still no plan for how the acquistion can work and not be defeated by simplistic countermeasures. Without that, the high speed missile impacts are worthless.
(Ok, not quite worthless- there is one EASY way to solve the detection problem: give up on kinetic kill, and just load the anti-missile missile with an atomic warhead. You don't need to worry about which fragment contains the enemy bomb if you can just liquify everything in a 10km radius. For some reason, the Pentagon hasn't wanted to take this plan to the American public...)
Honestly, peoples hostility to this program in current time has me baffled.
What's so odd about an fighting an expensive program that'll never work?
Regardless of if the TBM can work mechanically (kinetic kill) and tactically (satellite detection of launch), there's no way it will work strategically.
Scenario 0: Terrorists. A small, well funded group acquires an atomic warhead. Either they're supplied by an "axis of evil" state, or they loot one from a under-defended Russian bunker. Now they've got 600 lbs of pure destructive power- why bother attaching it to a missile, which is expensive, risky, error-prone, and open to detection- when they can simply carry it into their target city with an SUV / powerboat / Cessna? If they did launch a nuclear ICBM, a pair of Tridents would glaze the entire originating nation before the first mushroom cloud has faded.
Scenario 1: Nation. A large country developes nukes and strikes the US. For each warhead, they fly out 3 dummy missles and maybe mix in some MIRV technology as well. The dummies can be cheap, they don't even need real guidance. Remember, atomic weapons are NOT kinetic-kill. You can (conventionally) explode the rocket in midflight, or otherwise jink and be evasive, without reducing your destructive power. (Accuracy doesn't matter with a 50 megaton bomb). As long as the first bomb is detonated anywhere with line-of-sight to US defensive sensors/satellites, it will disrupt enough radar to make cover for the rest.
Any nation big enough to build & fire a few ICBMs is also big enough to make enough dummies to swamp any TBM defense system. (Our existing atomic warheads provide a strong deterrent protection, of course)
Scenario 2: A lone madman. Some lunatic gets hold of a Russian missile silo, and on the spur of the moment fires a warhead at NYC.
This is the only place where the TBM plan could concievably help, and its so unlikely compared to the other scenarios that its hard to argue that TBM is cost effective. (Unless you think the expenditure would help the economy, which is actually likely). But much better would be to solve scenario 0 & 2 at the same time, by reducing nuclear proliferation worldwide. I won't get into the steps to do that- there's two well-documented approaches, neither one attractive to the American mood.
Maybe so. I tried a day or two to increase its performance, then gave up and in an additional day re-wrote it in C++. It was immediately faster than we'd ever need. So you're correct, we don't spend time optimizing Swing, especially when I've seen no examples to suggest its even possible.
Look at Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio(tm) side by side. The widgets may look equivalent, but watch them redraw a buffer and you can tell which one is native.
I've seen a pair of large corporations use ACE with no success. I wasn't directly involved in the code, so maybe the individual implementors were idiots.
But ACE sure can produce some bloated messes of hyper-nested templates providing little real additional functionality beyond the POSIX standard library. It can get big, and it can get slow, and when you complain about the speed the developer will tell me "Oh, ACE takes care of all that. I can't touch it. Sure, its open source, but there's no way I could go in there and fix that! Just look at all the templates!".
Regarding ACE in multi-process applications, the last time I looked there was a serious bug (14 months ago, it might've been fixed since then). ACE's IPC has a race condition that can deadlock, freezing your big distributed application. Thousands of runs would succeed before this bug popped up, but it did happen (usually long after the product was deployed to customers)
One thing that blocks the use of Gtk for some projects is its internal use of CORBA. If your code also needs to use CORBA for some reason, then you can run into linking conflicts where each library tries to bring in its own version of the ORB.
(I've seen this specifically with Gtk vs ACE/TAO. But then again, ACE isn't something you should ever use if it can be avoided.)
The fullscreen API and 3D features don't help if you just want quick response in a traditional, windowed productivity app.
The performance of Swing still lags behind native code. We have some Java tools for in house use, I can't bear to make them greater than 30% of the screen size because the refresh rate is too painful.
Maybe there's some aggressive coding techniques that would accelerate things, but if you're not a game developer, your boss won't consider GUI optimization time well spent. The Qt or wx libraries (or even Microsoft Visual Basic(tm)) will give you a snappy feeling application after a few minutes of assisted layout.
(arg, the super-slow WestCoast slashdot server has apparently eaten some of my post, and mis-formatted the rest.)
I was mainly referring to textual documents. The cases of diagrams, schematics, and maps are obvious examples of some layout control being necessary. However,
When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario.
In the majority of today's printed communication (going by quantity of paper here), there is an adverserial relationship between author and reader. The publishers of newspapers and junk mail are trying to get me to read and respond to advertising, while overlooking shortcomings in their articles/claims. They cannot be trusted to present information in the most suitable way.
Neither can electronic publishers- PDF writers behave the same way paper-users do, and HTML authors are in a constant battle with client-side reformatting software to stuff more and more advertising windows onto my screen.
Their main motive is advertising- which has expanded far beyond its roots of "informing potential customers of our services", into "subconciously training customers to prefer our product for reasons unrelated to its merits, often to their own detriment"
If, however, these publishers know that the information will be reformatted by my own software, and that they can't do anything about it, then we'll see an increase in communications honesty: they'll no longer be encouraged to trick you into paying attention to ads. And they'll be forced into a more straightforward "pay-to-read" business model, rather than the vague "this article brought to you by the fuzzy chance that you'll like it and form a more positive association with Pepsi than with Coca-Cola".
(I know, you don't have to tell me, the technology for effective nanopayments doesn't yet exist. I told you, I'm being idealist here! Advertising is obviously costing the consumers some money in the form of increased expenses, or else companies wouldn't be able to cover their ad costs, not to mention profit by them. It would be nicer all around if that money could go to be paid from the author to the reader, without an advertiser getting in the way.)
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait.
You think there's only 2 kinds of paper layout? My printer has 14 inch pages. So I guess I'm stuck at the author's whim for portrait, and can't print it all.
The example of a circuit diagram looking better in landscape or portait doesn't even make sense. (Its just whether or not the numbers on the transistors are rotated 90 degrees, the image has no necessary top or bottom).
A fallacy in your argument that "only the author knows the best format for his data" is that it begs the question that there even IS one best format. In the digital age, there should be multiple valid views of information, dynamically reformatted from moment-to-moment according to the needs of the viewer.
Publishing a diagram or schematic in a display language robs me of the potential benefits of reading it on my computer. If you'd given my a copy of the application-level data from your engineering program, I could print it out on my giant size plotter. I could aggregate complex sections into single block diagrams, I could link it with other related circuits. I could load it into SPICE to see how it actually runs. I could mouseover an IC and see highlights on the 18 other components it's linked to. All these cool possibilities of really exploiting the power of computers, held back because people cling to the old habits of paper-based publishing.
True, today its not likely that the application you used it widely enough distributed for that to be possible. But that can be circumvented- for instance, the application file format could contain a URL for some plugin viewers (including one in java) to convert the data to a printable form if I don't have the original program. This should be transparent to most people who just want to view the document (same way that Microsoft Mediaplayer(tm) downloads new codecs) Or if I do have that program, or a compatible one, then I can use its full power to explore the data from many viewpoints.
As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
If I got a bad printout because
I blindly apply an overbroad format, that's my fault. As my fault, and I can fix it and view it again (and, preferring to read from the screen, probably without wasting paper). But if the author made a mistake, I have no opportunity to correct it myself. In my own experience, however, PDF authors often send out unreadable messes because they LIKE distressed handwriting fonts and they LIKE 3 center justified columns of 6 point all-lowercase Arial. People get these elaborate text-formatting tools, and then feel a constant urge to use them, regardless of consequences.
The use of PDF or similar file-formats means that I don't have the freedom to correct the author's mistakes and oversights. (It is somewhat possible to extract the text from a PDF file, but Adobe discourages this, making the needed tools either expensive or laborious to operate).
Even though he might be a good writer, I'm stuck with his bad page-layout choices, and can't enjoy the work. Most people don't have the skill for good graphical design, lets not force their bad/non choices on everyone else.
Like Free Soft ware says, more power to the end-user! Separate content from presentation! Viva la libre!
I don't know where you get the idea that "capital L" Libertarians support the constitution. Maybe these "Libretarian"s you speak of are a subtle variant of Libertarians.
The lowercased word, as found in your dictionary, means "a supporter of personal freedom".
The names of political parties are mostly just branding- the dictionary definitions of "republican" and "democrat" have little to do with the partys' platforms- no moreso than products called "Zest", "Brawny", or "Coca-Cola" really describe what you're buying.
If you have some other definition of "Libertarian" beyond what is presented on those 2 websites, then I guess we're talking about something else, and you can stop reading here (but I suggest you stop using terms that others will misunderstand).
Now, Libertarian Party candidates might claim they support the Constitution- or rather that they will obey the Constitution, until such time (in a distant, imaginary future) when they have sufficient national majority to pass amendments to re-write it to their liking.
But if anything, they just support the first line of the Declaration of Independence, which is paraphrased on their statment of principles. Reading that page, you can find this line in principle #2:
we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain
This is in conflict with a number of parts of the consitution, such as "Congress shall regulate commerce with foreign nations", or Amendment V, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. which, by requiring it to be compensated, implicitly permits confiscation and eminent domain.
The copyright clause of the Constitution is also a form of "government interference with private property", and thus something Libertarians will oppose. If they consider "Intellectual Property" to be property, and covered under their principle, then the "for a limited time" statement amounts to a declaration of intent to eventually confiscated and nationalize said property. They won't support the Constition on that score.
Or, if a particular Libertarian decides "Intellectual Property is a fiction of the state, and my government will have no part of it", then there's principle #3:...we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form
and platform #10: We defend the rights of individuals to unrestricted freedom of speech,
That means they don't want the government telling you what you can't print. So then they don't want the government telling me that I can't reprint some author's works without his say-so.
Of course, "Libertarians" always support your right to abridge your own rights via contract. Which is why in a hypothetical Libertarian world, corporations would be able to write their own virtual-copyright law, in the form of a giant web of publisher-to-consumer contracts.
I could go on and on, and any of these principles and platforms could be argued either way, but the fundamental point is that just because something's in the US Constitution doesn't mean the Libertarian Party will support it. Whether that's good or bad is up to you.
Its not just the format I hate, but that whole category of use. "Good for what it does, but what it does isn't good"
A document is a presentation
That is the bad viewpoint that I wish PDF didn't promulgate. I know, I know, Adobe is just responding to demands of the market... so I really have to focus my ire against the unwashed masses who think they're graphics designers and that they actually need fancy layouts. Or at the even greater masses who allow themselves to be swayed by such trivalities.
The kind of publishing that needs formatting, fonts, and color is mainly about deception. With rare exceptions, text is the truth, and the window-dressing tries to hide it. From Madison Avenue advertising shills to corporate Annual Report polishers to the legions of "PowerPoint(tm) Engineers" infesting government contracting, its all about getting your words to be judged by something other than what they say.
Many authors aren't concious about doing this- they just want to fit in with everyone else- but that doesn't make it any more honest.
(Yes, there are people who prepare truely graphical data, and who need to lay it out precisely. They are in the minority)
(Yes, for content not delivered over computer- flattened wood pulp or something- carefully prepared alignment is an aid to comprehensibility. But there's no reason to carry this forward into the digital era).
In a more ideal future, all presentation issues will be decided on the client side. You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer. It won't happen for a while yet, but I can dream. And the continued use of PDF blocks this dream.
What part of PDF is an E? There's nothing editable about it. The non-editabilty of PDFs is a selling point, an advertised feature. They're normally hard to edit, and if the author specifies it, supposedly impossible.
Adobe went to court to stop people from cracking the PDF "encryption" (and they're winning, kinda. Except that their witness and their defendant are both barred from returning to the US)
On my desktop Linux box, OpenOffice/Kword/Abiword edit DOCs fairly well. Sometimes they fail and I have to just try to suck out the ASCII. Just like when PDF fails.
On my portable Linux box, with a 320x240 screen, I can read a DOC file, because the line widths will adjust to fit. I can see a tiny corner of a PDF file, but I can't read it. Portable indeed!
I hate them too, different reason. Even though all my computers can view (acrobat) the PDF format, I'd always prefer not to. It locks the text down to one paper layout format, destroying all of the advantages computers can bring to perusing text. Microsoft Word(tm) you can at least repaginate.
I wonder if PDF was somehow invented by the printer manufacturers to stave off the arrival of paperless office.
A Libertarian would never pass any law to stifle the Internet, and would never let the government pass protectionist laws for corporate lobbies. Nope, Libertarians wouldn't pass any laws at all. In fact they'd defer any but the most fundamental ("force 'n fraud") regulations to private-sector agreements.
That means corporations wouldn't have to lobby for restrictions and go through the motions of democratic involvement- they could just write the "laws" directly.
Seriously, government created copyright was only needed because it's a better alternative than corporate-copyright. Major publishing houses could enforce their own brand of IP by making you buy a "club membership" before purchasing any books. As you sign up, you contractually promise never to copy or resell (or maybe even share) anything they give you. Violation means a stiff fee, revocation of the license, and maybe a blacklisting from other publishers. And of course the cost of this enforcement is passed on to the customer.
Why should publishers make such contracts anything but indefinite? No expiration from copyright into the public domain- if the contract expires or is invalidated, you'll just have to destroy your copies (as they were now obtained by fraud).
Yes, there'd be some free-market pressure to keep the licenses tolerable. The same kind of pressure voters/consumers apply to congress/companies today.
Libertarians are no panacea. In practice, their solutions will wind up to be effectively identical to what a liberal democracy would do (with the same levels of resources and technology). There may be a +/- 5% margin of difference, but we can't predict if that small factor would be for good or ill.
(The "capital L" Libertarian movement is infeasible utopianism, nonetheless I've often supported them, because Congress deserves a reminder that we still value liberty)
The bulk of people (call them America's consumers, more than voters) are quite happy with the way things are. They like their creative needs to be fulfilled by professionals employed by a handful of corporations.
They want 90% of prime-time TV to be conflicted cops or wacky families. They want to pay for new movies about 20 year-old spaceships and 70 year-old superheros. They want pop music divided into exactly 3 genres (white men, white girls, and other).
Maybe you and I don't like what centralized monopoly control is doing to popular culture. But empirical tests show that the public (of the US, and most of the wealthy world) is just fine with it.
Yes, mobs of teens wish they could download mp3s and divxs for free, and cry when that's taken away. That's the biggest potential support source for anti-intellectual property agitation. But their support for file sharing will dry up if once they figure out that their favorite creators will alter or reduce their output with less financial incentives.
Their hearts may want to copy, but they won't be able to stand on the street corner and justify anything that stops the "performances" of their "artists".
When it comes time to vote on laws, they'll support DRM, "because its right for everyone to pay for Hollywood's work" (even though secretly they plan to go on "stealing" for a while- "but just me, no one else will do this, so I'm not hurting much"). In the same way, lawmakers once prohibited alcohol "because it's obvious, no one should drink", but the majority privately broke the law they'd supported in public.
Regardless of whether or not you believe alternative revenue models are feasible for the entertainment content business, they'd never support the same kinds of "creative products" being produced now. And the public, stuck on a treadmill of "more, bigger, flashier", can be convinced this is what they want.
Someday there'll be a painful period of "Prohibition", where an unlucky minority are punished for DMCA/DRM infractions that everyone does. If we're lucky, this will be a wakeup call leading to a rollback of IP's recent empowerments. If not, then those martyrs will just be the last gasp of freedom before we all get Nielsen chips implanted in our heads.
They've always done this- well, for the past 10 years at least. They've needed to break into the Mac & Unix world of academia, and have heavily succeeded. I was shocked the first time I saw a hardbound Operating Systems textbook using Windows NT(tm) as a case study.
Why, you should see some of the stuff (real, tenured) professors can get. If you teach CS or CE Microsoft will happily hand you a $4500 laptop full of their latest OS and development environment, just in the hope that you start to take Windows seriously in your teaching/research.
And of course, they want to get the students hooked yet. These undergrads don't have the dollars to buy full MS Devkits on their own, but when they get out and go to work, Microsoft wants that to be the ONLY product the new hires understand.
Oh, AOL "did" something important with their ICQ purchase:
They sat on it, and prevented the development of a competitor in a new application domain. ICQ was a rather new concept, and if Mirabilils had proceeded to improve & popularize it with venture capital, they could've undercut a lot of the popularity of network services like AOL (and now MSN). Instead, they sold out to AOL, who did nothing to encourage the future of the ICQ product.
I hope the guys at least got a nice big check out of it.
The ISP can and should put a stop to "excessive" bandwidth use in their own office. That is, by the time the user's packets reach the cable company's routers, the provider can tell who each packet belongs to. They can detect someone sending more packets than he should be, and can drop them there.
That would fix 95% of their problems from someone uncapping. Doesn't use any more of their upstream bandwidth, and the sneaky users aren't getting any additional throughput, so they'll probable give up on it.
However, if they don't give up on it, there are other customers who could be harmed in someway. The uncapped modem will be filling its neighborhood circuit with additional packets (to try to get more bandwidth, and then more to retransmit what got dropped at the ISP). Other users will have their own connectivity somewhat degraded if an uncapped modem is flooding the network.
Why, if I wanted to, I could use an uncapped modem to completely Denial-Of-Service myself and any other cable modem customers on my subnet. Or if I misconfigure my uncapped modem, the same could happen.
These problems are unlikely, but impossible to completely prevent, because the ISP can't attach a router to the telephone pole in front of every single customer's house. The best company response would be to terminate their service, with the option of reconnection after a $150 fine and a blood-oath never to repeat the offense.
Funny, cable modem license agreements never specify a number for the amount of bandwidth you can have.
In fact, if you listen to their marketing guys, you've got "Unlimited Internet Access". So uncapping your modem just brings you closer to getting the service that was advertised!
Also, ~50% of cable companies allow you to buy your own modem, rather than renting. So you're not damaging their hardware.
Didn't you watch "The Matrix"? That's exactly what happened- all those people were in there willingly, because the simulated world was so much pleasanter than their real lives (on a planet whose surface was no longer survivable).
Apparently the game designers focused more on realism than fantastic playability, though.
The fear isn't unfounded- as far as we know, our grandchildren could wipe themselves out in a Grey Goo scenario (either uncontrolled nanotech, or just rampant genetically engineered organisms).
Just because a superefficient self-replicating device doesn't already exist, doesn't mean it never will exist. There's the concept of irreducible complexity, which you most often hear of when "creation scientists" try to prove that "macro"-evolution is completely impossible.
Of course, they're wrong in claiming that current lifeforms couldn't have evolved, but we can't be sure that we'll never invent a useful cellular structures which is irreducibly complex: not useful enough in intermediate form to allow an organism to develope them gradually, but so powerful that it allows the creature to dominate its environment.
Or worse, eliminate the environment (something Darwinian organisms will never do)
Here's a simplified example of how a single evil geneticist could wipe out humanity with 2040s technology:
Existing disease organisms (including viruses) have evolved a tradeoff between their lethality and contagiousness. Nonlethal ones like "common cold" (and its million variants) are very contagious. Instantly fatal things like anthrax fungi don't spread very fast. Slow killers like HIV are in the middle. No disease could evolve to be both highly deadly and highly contagious, because it would immiedately consume its initial host population.
But, an artificially created virus would be free of the Darwinian pressures that stops a completely kamikaze organism from evolving. A labratory-bred infection could spread by casual contact and barely impair the host at all, but have a hardwired timer so that after exactly 200 days it pours out botulism toxin and drops the victim instantly. The entire planet could be infected before the first symptoms are shown.
That possibilities isn't as extreme as some Sci-Fi postulates, but they're all things to fear in the next century.
It's barely any better. There's 20 minutes of new animation, and a nice song under the credits- but still, the bulk of the 2nd half is just solarized camcorder shots the producers probably made walking the block around their HQ. It feels like a message to the obsessive fans who complained so much about the last 2 episodes that they forced a movie to be made- "You want a movie? Well screw you, here's you're movie. Now try going outside for once in your life!"
Hard to believe it was in theaters the same time as Mononoke Hime- that some people actually got gyped into paying Y2000
Sailor Moon will always be a kid's show. The uncensored version had some occasional bits that conventional American families found objectionable- their loss.
Nudity and sexuality aren't evil, twisting choice pieces of a religion into entertainment is commonplace, and large scale violence (99% consequence free!) is an accepted staple of Saturday morning cartoons. Adult fans like to cling to those elements as proof that they're not really watching 24 minutes of commericals for pink plastic jewlery, but they're in denial.
The only part of Sailor Moon that I would hesitate to show to American youngsters is something you didn't mention- because of drastically different firearms ownership laws in Japan and the US, portrayl of kids playing with a real-looking toy gun might be a safety-hazard in America. (Or an invitation for a lawsuit)
Too late to reemphasize that I was referring only to the list of shows (cancelled anime) in the article summary. The fact that CN's original comedy programming for Adult Swim is truely adult only proves my point that the aforementioned children's anime didn't belong there.
You call Noir a great show? Maybe you haven't seen enough to notice this, but its just a great soundtrack on top of some pathetic animation. You just can't make a battle exciting when 35 Hong Kong gangsters stand there firing at the stationary heroine for 90 seconds straight before she puts a bullet into each one. The animator could at least pretend she's dodging!
Many anime creators have fallen back on a toolkit of standardized ways to imply combat action without drawing too many original frames: speed lines, sketchy-camera-movement, the three-peat, stock footage, and abstact symbolism (like a Kenshin sword-strike). But Noir doesn't even have the decency to rely on any trusty shortcuts- its like they're not even trying.
If not for Yoko Kanno, it never would've got on the air. (Even Inu Yasha is better, and Berserk is out of its league)
Slashdot Mirror
Most nations have signed the Geneva Convention to regulate the conduct of war- amoung other things, this means that you can only attack people with weapons meant to kill them, but not infect, poison, or maim.
(A gentleman's agreement between the respective military-industrial-complexes, really. Dead soldier -> proud military funeral -> enhanced militarism and anticipation of future retaliation. Wounded soldier -> disabled veteran begging on sidewalk -> budget pressure for providing care, and public squeamishness about enrolling in future conflicts. Too much peace hurts our economic growth!)
This means no chemical weapons (tell that to Russia!), no hollowpoint or fragmentary bullets, few shotguns, and no lasers aimed at people. Because the easiest ways to hurt someone with a laser is to burn his eyes out, this is consistent with Geneva.
But, today's new, powerful anti-munition lasers will be an attractive option in the anti-aircraft role as well. Military planners must be thinking of this, but they don't want to talk about it for fear of striking taboo/war-crimes territory.
But I wonder what'll happen if a laser-defense battery suddenly finds themselves face to face with an enemy Hind who snuck up terrain-masked. Will they run for it and hope he's a slow shot, or light it up and watch the fireworks?
And, if the the ABL gets built and we get another hijacker repurposing an airliner into a weapon, the president will be hard pressed not to order him zapped, too.
(Of course, another reason planners might not talk much about targeting aircraft with lasers is that the US and Israel have no potential opponents whose aircraft can't be simply destroyed with Beyond-Visual-Range missiles. Won't stop me from speculating.)
This wasn't rigged. Everyone was told ahead of time that the target missle had a GPS receiver on the warhead as well as a C-band beacon.
Just because the unfairness was pre-published doesn't mean the test had scientific validity.
The purpose of the test was not in acquisition and tracking, but in the kill vehicle technology
That's plenty difficult, but easy compared to the target identification problem. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. There's still no plan for how the acquistion can work and not be defeated by simplistic countermeasures. Without that, the high speed missile impacts are worthless.
(Ok, not quite worthless- there is one EASY way to solve the detection problem: give up on kinetic kill, and just load the anti-missile missile with an atomic warhead. You don't need to worry about which fragment contains the enemy bomb if you can just liquify everything in a 10km radius. For some reason, the Pentagon hasn't wanted to take this plan to the American public...)
Honestly, peoples hostility to this program in current time has me baffled.
What's so odd about an fighting an expensive program that'll never work?
Regardless of if the TBM can work mechanically (kinetic kill) and tactically (satellite detection of launch), there's no way it will work strategically.
Scenario 0: Terrorists. A small, well funded group acquires an atomic warhead. Either they're supplied by an "axis of evil" state, or they loot one from a under-defended Russian bunker. Now they've got 600 lbs of pure destructive power- why bother attaching it to a missile, which is expensive, risky, error-prone, and open to detection- when they can simply carry it into their target city with an SUV / powerboat / Cessna? If they did launch a nuclear ICBM, a pair of Tridents would glaze the entire originating nation before the first mushroom cloud has faded.
Scenario 1: Nation. A large country developes nukes and strikes the US. For each warhead, they fly out 3 dummy missles and maybe mix in some MIRV technology as well. The dummies can be cheap, they don't even need real guidance. Remember, atomic weapons are NOT kinetic-kill. You can (conventionally) explode the rocket in midflight, or otherwise jink and be evasive, without reducing your destructive power. (Accuracy doesn't matter with a 50 megaton bomb). As long as the first bomb is detonated anywhere with line-of-sight to US defensive sensors/satellites, it will disrupt enough radar to make cover for the rest.
Any nation big enough to build & fire a few ICBMs is also big enough to make enough dummies to swamp any TBM defense system. (Our existing atomic warheads provide a strong deterrent protection, of course)
Scenario 2: A lone madman. Some lunatic gets hold of a Russian missile silo, and on the spur of the moment fires a warhead at NYC.
This is the only place where the TBM plan could concievably help, and its so unlikely compared to the other scenarios that its hard to argue that TBM is cost effective. (Unless you think the expenditure would help the economy, which is actually likely). But much better would be to solve scenario 0 & 2 at the same time, by reducing nuclear proliferation worldwide. I won't get into the steps to do that- there's two well-documented approaches, neither one attractive to the American mood.
Maybe so. I tried a day or two to increase its performance, then gave up and in an additional day re-wrote it in C++. It was immediately faster than we'd ever need. So you're correct, we don't spend time optimizing Swing, especially when I've seen no examples to suggest its even possible.
Look at Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio(tm) side by side. The widgets may look equivalent, but watch them redraw a buffer and you can tell which one is native.
I've seen a pair of large corporations use ACE with no success. I wasn't directly involved in the code, so maybe the individual implementors were idiots.
But ACE sure can produce some bloated messes of hyper-nested templates providing little real additional functionality beyond the POSIX standard library. It can get big, and it can get slow, and when you complain about the speed the developer will tell me "Oh, ACE takes care of all that. I can't touch it. Sure, its open source, but there's no way I could go in there and fix that! Just look at all the templates!".
Regarding ACE in multi-process applications, the last time I looked there was a serious bug (14 months ago, it might've been fixed since then). ACE's IPC has a race condition that can deadlock, freezing your big distributed application. Thousands of runs would succeed before this bug popped up, but it did happen (usually long after the product was deployed to customers)
One thing that blocks the use of Gtk for some projects is its internal use of CORBA. If your code also needs to use CORBA for some reason, then you can run into linking conflicts where each library tries to bring in its own version of the ORB.
(I've seen this specifically with Gtk vs ACE/TAO. But then again, ACE isn't something you should ever use if it can be avoided.)
Like he said , if i is declared previously, then there's nothing wrong. If you have
int i;
for(int i=0;in;i++); for(i=0;in;i++);
Then you're fine. The compile might warn you that the second declaration of i shadows an existing variable, but that's all.
(Me, I can't get over how ";in;" is supposed to be valid...)
The fullscreen API and 3D features don't help if you just want quick response in a traditional, windowed productivity app.
The performance of Swing still lags behind native code. We have some Java tools for in house use, I can't bear to make them greater than 30% of the screen size because the refresh rate is too painful.
Maybe there's some aggressive coding techniques that would accelerate things, but if you're not a game developer, your boss won't consider GUI optimization time well spent. The Qt or wx libraries (or even Microsoft Visual Basic(tm)) will give you a snappy feeling application after a few minutes of assisted layout.
(arg, the super-slow WestCoast slashdot server has apparently eaten some of my post, and mis-formatted the rest.)
I was mainly referring to textual documents. The cases of diagrams, schematics, and maps are obvious examples of some layout control being necessary. However,
When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario.
In the majority of today's printed communication (going by quantity of paper here), there is an adverserial relationship between author and reader. The publishers of newspapers and junk mail are trying to get me to read and respond to advertising, while overlooking shortcomings in their articles/claims. They cannot be trusted to present information in the most suitable way.
Neither can electronic publishers- PDF writers behave the same way paper-users do, and HTML authors are in a constant battle with client-side reformatting software to stuff more and more advertising windows onto my screen.
Their main motive is advertising- which has expanded far beyond its roots of "informing potential customers of our services", into "subconciously training customers to prefer our product for reasons unrelated to its merits, often to their own detriment"
If, however, these publishers know that the information will be reformatted by my own software, and that they can't do anything about it, then we'll see an increase in communications honesty: they'll no longer be encouraged to trick you into paying attention to ads. And they'll be forced into a more straightforward "pay-to-read" business model, rather than the vague "this article brought to you by the fuzzy chance that you'll like it and form a more positive association with Pepsi than with Coca-Cola".
(I know, you don't have to tell me, the technology for effective nanopayments doesn't yet exist. I told you, I'm being idealist here! Advertising is obviously costing the consumers some money in the form of increased expenses, or else companies wouldn't be able to cover their ad costs, not to mention profit by them. It would be nicer all around if that money could go to be paid from the author to the reader, without an advertiser getting in the way.)
An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait.
You think there's only 2 kinds of paper layout? My printer has 14 inch pages. So I guess I'm stuck at the author's whim for portrait, and can't print it all.
The example of a circuit diagram looking better in landscape or portait doesn't even make sense. (Its just whether or not the numbers on the transistors are rotated 90 degrees, the image has no necessary top or bottom).
A fallacy in your argument that "only the author knows the best format for his data" is that it begs the question that there even IS one best format. In the digital age, there should be multiple valid views of information, dynamically reformatted from moment-to-moment according to the needs of the viewer.
Publishing a diagram or schematic in a display language robs me of the potential benefits of reading it on my computer. If you'd given my a copy of the application-level data from your engineering program, I could print it out on my giant size plotter. I could aggregate complex sections into single block diagrams, I could link it with other related circuits. I could load it into SPICE to see how it actually runs. I could mouseover an IC and see highlights on the 18 other components it's linked to. All these cool possibilities of really exploiting the power of computers, held back because people cling to the old habits of paper-based publishing.
True, today its not likely that the application you used it widely enough distributed for that to be possible. But that can be circumvented- for instance, the application file format could contain a URL for some plugin viewers (including one in java) to convert the data to a printable form if I don't have the original program. This should be transparent to most people who just want to view the document (same way that Microsoft Mediaplayer(tm) downloads new codecs) Or if I do have that program, or a compatible one, then I can use its full power to explore the data from many viewpoints.
As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..
If I got a bad printout because
I blindly apply an overbroad format, that's my fault. As my fault, and I can fix it and view it again (and, preferring to read from the screen, probably without wasting paper). But if the author made a mistake, I have no opportunity to
correct it myself. In my own experience, however, PDF authors often send out unreadable messes because they LIKE distressed handwriting fonts and they LIKE 3 center justified columns of 6 point all-lowercase Arial. People get these elaborate text-formatting tools, and then feel a constant urge to use them, regardless of consequences.
The use of PDF or similar file-formats means that I don't have the freedom to correct the author's mistakes and oversights. (It is somewhat possible to extract the text from a PDF file, but Adobe discourages this,
making the needed tools either expensive or laborious to operate).
Even though he might be a good writer, I'm stuck with his bad page-layout choices, and can't enjoy the work. Most people don't have the skill for good graphical design, lets not force their bad/non choices on everyone else.
Like Free Soft
ware says, more power to the end-user! Separate content from presentation! Viva la libre!
I don't know where you get the idea that "capital L" Libertarians support the constitution. Maybe these "Libretarian"s you speak of are a subtle variant of Libertarians.
...we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form
The lowercased word, as found in your dictionary, means "a supporter of personal freedom".
The uppercased word means either a vague political movement or an American political party.
The names of political parties are mostly just branding- the dictionary definitions of "republican" and "democrat" have little to do with the partys' platforms- no moreso than products called "Zest", "Brawny", or "Coca-Cola" really describe what you're buying.
If you have some other definition of "Libertarian" beyond what is presented on those 2 websites, then I guess we're talking about something else, and you can stop reading here (but I suggest you stop using terms that others will misunderstand).
Now, Libertarian Party candidates might claim they support the Constitution- or rather that they will obey the Constitution, until such time (in a distant, imaginary future) when they have sufficient national majority to pass amendments to re-write it to their liking.
But if anything, they just support the first line of the Declaration of Independence, which is paraphrased on
their statment of principles. Reading that page, you can find this line in principle #2:
we oppose all government interference with private property, such as confiscation, nationalization, and eminent domain
This is in conflict with a number of parts of the consitution, such as "Congress shall regulate commerce with foreign nations", or Amendment V,
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
which, by requiring it to be compensated, implicitly permits confiscation and eminent domain.
The copyright clause of the Constitution is also a form of "government interference with private property", and thus something Libertarians will oppose. If they consider "Intellectual Property" to be property, and covered under their principle, then the "for a limited time" statement amounts to a declaration of intent to eventually confiscated and nationalize said property. They won't support the Constition on that score.
Or, if a particular Libertarian decides "Intellectual Property is a fiction of the state, and my government will have no part of it", then there's principle #3:
and platform #10:
We defend the rights of individuals to unrestricted freedom of speech,
That means they don't want the government telling you what you can't print. So then they don't want the government telling me that I can't reprint some author's works without his say-so.
Of course, "Libertarians" always support your right to abridge your own rights via contract. Which is why in a hypothetical Libertarian world, corporations would be able to write their own virtual-copyright law, in the form of a giant web of publisher-to-consumer contracts.
I could go on and on, and any of these principles and platforms could be argued either way, but the fundamental point is that just because something's in the US Constitution doesn't mean the Libertarian Party will support it. Whether that's good or bad is up to you.
Its not just the format I hate, but that whole category of use. "Good for what it does, but what it does isn't good"
A document is a presentation
That is the bad viewpoint that I wish PDF didn't promulgate. I know, I know, Adobe is just responding to demands of the market...
so I really have to focus my ire against the unwashed masses who think they're graphics designers and that they actually need fancy layouts. Or at the even greater masses who allow themselves to be swayed by such trivalities.
The kind of publishing that needs formatting, fonts, and color is mainly about deception. With rare exceptions, text is the truth, and the window-dressing tries to hide it. From Madison Avenue advertising shills to corporate Annual Report polishers to the legions of "PowerPoint(tm)
Engineers" infesting government contracting, its all about getting your words to be judged by something other than what they say.
Many authors aren't concious about doing this- they just want to fit in with everyone else- but that doesn't make it any more honest.
(Yes, there are people who prepare truely graphical data, and who need to lay it out precisely. They are in the minority)
(Yes, for content not delivered over computer- flattened wood pulp or something- carefully prepared alignment is an aid to comprehensibility. But there's no reason to carry this forward into the digital era).
In a more ideal future, all presentation issues will be decided on the client side. You send me the data, and I've configured my software to present it the way I prefer. It won't happen for a while yet, but I can dream. And the continued use of PDF blocks this dream.
What part of PDF is an E? There's nothing editable about it. The non-editabilty of PDFs is a selling point, an advertised feature. They're normally hard to edit, and if the author specifies it, supposedly impossible.
Adobe went to court to stop people from cracking the PDF "encryption" (and they're winning, kinda. Except that their witness and their defendant are both barred from returning to the US)
On my desktop Linux box, OpenOffice/Kword/Abiword edit DOCs fairly well. Sometimes they fail and I have to just try to suck out the ASCII. Just like when PDF fails.
On my portable Linux box, with a 320x240 screen, I can read a DOC file, because the line widths will adjust to fit. I can see a tiny corner of a PDF file, but I can't read it. Portable indeed!
I hate them too, different reason. Even though all my computers can view (acrobat) the PDF format, I'd always prefer not to. It locks the text down to one paper layout format, destroying all of the advantages computers can bring to perusing text. Microsoft Word(tm) you can at least repaginate.
I wonder if PDF was somehow invented by the printer manufacturers to stave off the arrival of paperless office.
Don't call it sad! Look at it as your own chance to pick up bargain shares!
A Libertarian would never pass any law to stifle the Internet, and would never let the government pass protectionist laws for corporate lobbies.
Nope, Libertarians wouldn't pass any laws at all. In fact they'd defer any but the most fundamental ("force 'n fraud") regulations to private-sector agreements.
That means corporations wouldn't have to lobby for restrictions and go through the motions of democratic involvement- they could just write the "laws" directly.
Seriously, government created copyright was only needed because it's a better alternative than corporate-copyright. Major publishing houses could enforce their own brand of IP by making you buy a "club membership" before purchasing any books. As you sign up, you contractually promise never to copy or resell (or maybe even share) anything they give you. Violation means a stiff fee, revocation of the license, and maybe a blacklisting from other publishers. And of course the cost of this enforcement is passed on to the customer.
Why should publishers make such contracts anything but indefinite? No expiration from copyright into the public domain- if the contract expires or is invalidated, you'll just have to destroy your copies (as they were now obtained by fraud).
Yes, there'd be some free-market pressure to keep the licenses tolerable. The same kind of pressure voters/consumers apply to congress/companies today.
Libertarians are no panacea. In practice, their solutions will wind up to be effectively identical to what a liberal democracy would do (with the same levels of resources and technology). There may be a +/- 5% margin of difference, but we can't predict if that small factor would be for good or ill.
(The "capital L" Libertarian movement is infeasible utopianism, nonetheless I've often supported them, because Congress deserves a reminder that we still value liberty)
The bulk of people (call them America's consumers, more than voters) are quite happy with the way things are. They like their creative needs to be fulfilled by professionals employed by a handful of corporations.
They want 90% of prime-time TV to be conflicted cops or wacky families.
They want to pay for new movies about 20 year-old spaceships and 70 year-old superheros.
They want pop music divided into exactly 3 genres (white men, white girls, and other).
Maybe you and I don't like what centralized monopoly control is doing to popular culture. But empirical tests show that the public (of the US, and most of the wealthy world) is just fine with it.
Yes, mobs of teens wish they could download mp3s and divxs for free, and cry when that's taken away. That's the biggest potential support source for anti-intellectual property agitation. But their support for file sharing will dry up if once they figure out that their favorite creators will alter or reduce their output with less financial incentives.
Their hearts may want to copy, but they won't be able to stand on the street corner and justify anything that stops the "performances" of their "artists".
When it comes time to vote on laws, they'll support DRM, "because its right for everyone to pay for Hollywood's work" (even though secretly they plan to go on "stealing" for a while- "but just me, no one else will do this, so I'm not hurting much"). In the same way, lawmakers once prohibited alcohol "because it's obvious, no one should drink", but the majority privately broke the law they'd supported in public.
Regardless of whether or not you believe alternative revenue models are feasible for the entertainment content business, they'd never support the same kinds of "creative products" being produced now. And the public, stuck on a treadmill of "more, bigger, flashier", can be convinced this is what they want.
Someday there'll be a painful period of "Prohibition", where an unlucky minority are punished for DMCA/DRM infractions that everyone does. If we're lucky, this will be a wakeup call leading to a rollback of IP's recent empowerments. If not, then those martyrs will just be the last gasp of freedom before we all get Nielsen chips implanted in our heads.
They've always done this- well, for the past 10 years at least. They've needed to break into the Mac & Unix world of academia, and have heavily succeeded. I was shocked the first time I saw a hardbound Operating Systems textbook using Windows NT(tm) as a case study.
Why, you should see some of the stuff (real, tenured) professors can get. If you teach CS or CE Microsoft will happily hand you a $4500 laptop full of their latest OS and development environment, just in the hope that you start to take Windows seriously in your teaching/research.
And of course, they want to get the students hooked yet. These undergrads don't have the dollars to buy full MS Devkits on their own, but when they get out and go to work, Microsoft wants that to be the ONLY product the new hires understand.
AOL did nothing with it, but now they will?
Oh, AOL "did" something important with their ICQ purchase:
They sat on it, and prevented the development of a competitor in a new application domain. ICQ was a rather new concept, and if Mirabilils had proceeded to improve & popularize it with venture capital, they could've undercut a lot of the popularity of network services like AOL (and now MSN). Instead, they sold out to AOL, who did nothing to encourage the future of the ICQ product.
I hope the guys at least got a nice big check out of it.
The ISP can and should put a stop to "excessive" bandwidth use in their own office. That is, by the time the user's packets reach the cable company's routers, the provider can tell who each packet belongs to. They can detect someone sending more packets than he should be, and can drop them there.
That would fix 95% of their problems from someone uncapping. Doesn't use any more of their upstream bandwidth, and the sneaky users aren't getting any additional throughput, so they'll probable give up on it.
However, if they don't give up on it, there are other customers who could be harmed in someway. The uncapped modem will be filling its neighborhood circuit with additional packets (to try to get more bandwidth, and then more to retransmit what got dropped at the ISP). Other users will have their own connectivity somewhat degraded if an uncapped modem is flooding the network.
Why, if I wanted to, I could use an uncapped modem to completely Denial-Of-Service myself and any other cable modem customers on my subnet. Or if I misconfigure my uncapped modem, the same could happen.
These problems are unlikely, but impossible to completely prevent, because the ISP can't attach a router to the telephone pole in front of every single customer's house. The best company response would be to terminate their service, with the option of reconnection after a $150 fine and a blood-oath never to repeat the offense.
Funny, cable modem license agreements never specify a number for the amount of bandwidth you can have.
In fact, if you listen to their marketing guys, you've got "Unlimited Internet Access". So uncapping your modem just brings you closer to getting the service that was advertised!
Also, ~50% of cable companies allow you to buy your own modem, rather than renting. So you're not damaging their hardware.
Didn't you watch "The Matrix"? That's exactly what happened- all those people were in there willingly, because the simulated world was so much pleasanter than their real lives (on a planet whose surface was no longer survivable).
Apparently the game designers focused more on realism than fantastic playability, though.
Just because a superefficient self-replicating device doesn't already exist, doesn't mean it never will exist. There's the concept of irreducible complexity, which you most often hear of when "creation scientists" try to prove that "macro"-evolution is completely impossible.
Of course, they're wrong in claiming that current lifeforms couldn't have evolved, but we can't be sure that we'll never invent a useful cellular structures which is irreducibly complex: not useful enough in intermediate form to allow an organism to develope them gradually, but so powerful that it allows the creature to dominate its environment.
Or worse, eliminate the environment (something Darwinian organisms will never do)
Here's a simplified example of how a single evil geneticist could wipe out humanity with 2040s technology:
Existing disease organisms (including viruses) have evolved a tradeoff between their lethality and contagiousness. Nonlethal ones like "common cold" (and its million variants) are very contagious. Instantly fatal things like anthrax fungi don't spread very fast. Slow killers like HIV are in the middle. No disease could evolve to be both highly deadly and highly contagious, because it would immiedately consume its initial host population.
But, an artificially created virus would be free of the Darwinian pressures that stops a completely kamikaze organism from evolving. A labratory-bred infection could spread by casual contact and barely impair the host at all, but have a hardwired timer so that after exactly 200 days it pours out botulism toxin and drops the victim instantly. The entire planet could be infected before the first symptoms are shown.
That possibilities isn't as extreme as some Sci-Fi postulates, but they're all things to fear in the next century.
It's barely any better. There's 20 minutes of new animation, and a nice song under the credits- but still, the bulk of the 2nd half is just solarized camcorder shots the producers probably made walking the block around their HQ. It feels like a message to the obsessive fans who complained so much about the last 2 episodes that they forced a movie to be made- "You want a movie? Well screw you, here's you're movie. Now try going outside for once in your life!"
Hard to believe it was in theaters the same time as Mononoke Hime- that some people actually got gyped into paying Y2000
(You forgot to mention transgenderism!)
Sailor Moon will always be a kid's show. The uncensored version had some occasional bits that conventional American families found objectionable- their loss.
Nudity and sexuality aren't evil, twisting choice pieces of a religion into entertainment is commonplace, and large scale violence (99% consequence free!) is an accepted staple of Saturday morning cartoons. Adult fans like to cling to those elements as proof that they're not really watching 24 minutes of commericals for pink plastic jewlery, but they're in denial.
The only part of Sailor Moon that I would hesitate to show to American youngsters is something you didn't mention- because of drastically different firearms ownership laws in Japan and the US, portrayl of kids playing with a real-looking toy gun might be a safety-hazard in America. (Or an invitation for a lawsuit)
Too late to reemphasize that I was referring only to the list of shows (cancelled anime) in the article summary. The fact that CN's original comedy programming for Adult Swim is truely adult only proves my point that the aforementioned children's anime didn't belong there.
You call Noir a great show? Maybe you haven't seen enough to notice this, but its just a great soundtrack on top of some pathetic animation. You just can't make a battle exciting when 35 Hong Kong gangsters stand there firing at the stationary heroine for 90 seconds straight before she puts a bullet into each one. The animator could at least pretend she's dodging!
Many anime creators have fallen back on a toolkit of standardized ways to imply combat action without drawing too many original frames: speed lines, sketchy-camera-movement, the three-peat, stock footage, and abstact symbolism (like a Kenshin sword-strike). But Noir doesn't even have the decency to rely on any trusty shortcuts- its like they're not even trying.
If not for Yoko Kanno, it never would've got on the air. (Even Inu Yasha is better, and Berserk is out of its league)