They've got almost no gravity-induced features in the first place.
Well, they're only symmetrical about one of the three axes. The asymmetry about the Y axis can be attributed to the difference in entropy between eating and crapping. However, I believe the asymmetry about the Z axis (ears at one extreme, feet at the other) can only be explained as an adaptation to the effects of gravity.
I know that. I was ignoring the really short lived waste; these go away as the spent fuel cools for a few years at the plant. I was talking about the isotopes that decay in a few decades or centuries; we don't have time to just sit around waiting for that to decay. This component of the waste still accounts for many orders of magnitude more rate of radioactivity than the original ore.
Because, as I pointed out, it's not uranium any more. It's many orders of magnitude more radioactive, so putting it back doesn't make it just like how it was before it was mined.
Not to mention that before it was mined it was probably locked up in solid rock; mixing it into loose dirt isn't exactly a good way to immobilize it.
You need to understand the concept of half-life. The radioactive U-235 that we mine has a half-life of hundreds of millions of years. We put that in a reactor, and smash it up into bits that have half-lives of decades or centuries.
The amount of radiation emitted by a mole of material is inversely proportional to its half-life. Thus, the stuff you put in the ground is a million times more radioactive than what was pulled out.
The OP claimed that this technology had a "Constitutional basis" because the government is allowed to "punish counterfeiters". My point was that this is not a valid way to mete out punishment.
You assert that it's not punishment at all, but that's a different argument alltogether.
Anti-counterfeiting technology has a direct constitutional basis (congress has the power to provide currency and such and has the power to punish counterfeiting individuals).
The government is not suppposed to be punishing anyone until after both (a) the person has actually committed some crime, and (b) they have been duly convicted in a court of law.
An algorithmic pattern match is not sufficient evidence to prove that counterfeiting activity has taken place, and a machine is not a qualified jury.
MORE unless you somehow make the fuel on the moon, since otherwise you're paying the cost of lifting fuel off of earth and then using more to lift off of the moon later.
It's even worse than that because the only way to get supplies to the surface of the moon is to brake out of orbit with retro rockets. So you have use fuel to launch supplies from earth, use more fuel to land on the moon, and then use yet more fuel to launch from the moon.
If you compare scale diagrams of the puny lunar ascent module to the Saturn V, you get an idea of just how efficient it is to use the moon as a transit depot.
...Waffle Iron still hasn't taken the time to learn chess strategy; gets soundly beaten once again by a cluster of one Z80 running the chess cartridge on a 1992 vintage Gameboy.
Then you must not do a lot of assembly programming for it...
I have in the past, but with optimizing compilers there's no need to worry about that stuff any more. Who cares how ugly these VM-like bytecodes look? It's all getting translated to something else under the hood anyway.
All past attempts at exposing an "elegant" architecture to software have failed as the architecure assumptions shifted within a couple of CPU generations. The "elegant" interface ended up being kludged onto a different underlying architecure as technology changed anyway, nullifying any advantages that it provided vs. the ugly old x86.
The whole problem is that Intel is still using the x86 architecture (8 bit) with a bunch of kludges thrown in to make it support a lot of the new functions and ideas we've come up with since the 70s.
Do you know why? It's because that's what the customers want. Intel has tried to move away from the x86 a couple of times now, and each time they have failed (or in the latest case, are likely to fail soon). Dozens of rivals have come along with a wide variety of alternative architectures, and they have basically all failed with the exception of the Power PC. Even the vaunted PPC architecture commands single-digit market share despite its assorted technical advantages.
Now AMD, who lately seems to realize what customers want better than even Intel, has kludged yet another layer of compatiblity onto the x86, and by most accounts the customers love it. The latest 64-bit x86 CPUs are still assembly-source compatible with the first microprocessor design ever started, the 8008 (although the 4004 beat it to production). As customers demand compatiblity again and again and again, I expect that the x86 will never go away.
Personally, I think its cool that the x86 architecture is still at or near the top of the heap despite 30 years of complaints from ivory tower naysayers.
Depends on the state you live in. In certain lawyer friendly states this is probably true. Many other states have passed laws protecting home owners from frivolous lawsuits like this.
So what happens if your house catches on fire and a fireman dies because he got caught in your booby trap?
The reason that there are laws aginst booby traps is that it's not valid to presume that every person who simply enters an area is committing a crime.
What if I used this method to deter car theives? I could park a bunch of cars around the city rigged so that the brakes cut out as soon as the car hits 60 mph. The ensuing carnage would all be the theives' fault, wouldn't it?
I'm not sure what they mean by "delight to fly".. since the damn thing would literally fall out of the air in 80% of their tests.
It seems like you're confusing their respectable jet fighter with their silly plywood rocket planes (which I believe killed more of their own pilots than allied pilots).
I don't know for you, but I find manned high speed flights (X1, X15) much more exciting to witness from a human perspective than those remote-controlled ones.
The X-15 pilots were needed mainly because they didn't have good enough automatic control systems. Now that we have them, there's no reason to risk human lives just to tinker with high-speed rocket planes.
The X-15 had such favorable PR that most people forget that one pilot lost his life when his X-15 spun out of control and disintegrated. IIRC, another barely escaped an explosion of the rocket engine during a ground test, and a third was lucky to survive the last high-speed speed mach-6 test that melted off a good chunk of the plane's tail fins.
If the failed first X-43 test had been manned, we may have had yet another fallen hero in the quest for knowledge. Luckily, all the incident cost was some time and money. It's nice to have celebrity astronauts and pilots to cheer on, but for these bleeding edge tests it's just not worth the risk if we can accomplish the goals without a pilot.
IMHO, the bigger letdown is that the space budget is so sapped from needlessly sending people into orbit to float on their butts in a tin can that most other development has slowed to a crawl. For example, hasn't it literally taken them years to put together this second test? Back at the height of the cold war, they would have tried a new flight within a few weeks or months. The same goes for developing a shuttle replacement. 10 years? It didn't take that long from before we had even launched a satellite to having the perfectly capable manned Gemini capsules in orbit. Ironically, NASA's need to devote huge resources to keeping faces on the news today continues to delay the date that space travel will be commonplace.
So you really don't believe that anybody out there has driven their Ford Excursion several miles to return videos? Do you really believe that most trips to the video store in this country are done on foot?
A DVD weighs what, 10 grams? Even if it took 10 grams of petroleum to make every gram of plastic, that would only give you a budget of less than 4 ounces of gasoline to make returning the DVD more environemtally friendly than throwing it out. Even in a car that gets 30 MPG, that's only a 1 mile round trip.
Some examples that come to mind are cameras, silverware, mops (swiffer), batteries, pens, lighters - you get the idea. I haven't heard any complaints of being "ripped-off."
Yes, but those mostly get dirty or naturally run out of whatever they're full of, and then the consumer chooses to discard them. In the eyes of a consumer, that's very from a perfectly good durable item like a video disc being deliberately sabotaged.
You drive >= 15mi to rent movies? Where do you live?
Personally, I don't rent movies. However, I was assuming that a typical American movie renter is living in the suburbs driving a mid-sized SUV that gets ~16mpg city. That half gallon corresponds to about 4 miles to the rental store (8 miles round trip); not too much of a stretch. Maybe most suburban renters are more like 2 miles from the nearest store. That still involves a quarter-gallon of gas (and about $1.50 of vehicle operating costs, plus 15 minutes of driving and dropoff time).
Of course most people would tend to combine the trip with other errands when possible, but every so often you have to make an extra trip just because your rental time is expiring.
Both this and Divx didn't fail because of their self-destruct element as much as the fact they were priced higher than the already existing systems...
I think that there's also a big psychological element to the issue. If someone's going to rent something at home, it needs to be totally intangible, like a pay-per-view movie on cable or a rented tape. It comes and goes, and leaves nothing behind.
If you "rent" them something -- even at the exact same price -- and it involves a physical object that "self destructs", people are going to feel ripped off. No matter what, part of you feels that you paid for the physical medium, not just the content, and having to throw it in the trash bin just feels wrong.
It doesn't matter that returning a movie might add significant cost to a movie rental in terms of time and vehicle costs, or that throwing away a thin plastic disc is probably less wasteful than burning an extra half gallon of gas driving to return a rental. Right or wrong, people just don't think like that.
In most markets being twice as expensive for 25% more performance just will not cut it...
The ironic thing is, that's the exact same principle that Intel has taken advantage of over the last 25 years to drive almost every other mainframe, minicomputer and microprocessor vendor out of the market. Now Intel themselves have fallen into the same rut as their former competitors.
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Well, they're only symmetrical about one of the three axes. The asymmetry about the Y axis can be attributed to the difference in entropy between eating and crapping. However, I believe the asymmetry about the Z axis (ears at one extreme, feet at the other) can only be explained as an adaptation to the effects of gravity.
I know that. I was ignoring the really short lived waste; these go away as the spent fuel cools for a few years at the plant. I was talking about the isotopes that decay in a few decades or centuries; we don't have time to just sit around waiting for that to decay. This component of the waste still accounts for many orders of magnitude more rate of radioactivity than the original ore.
Not to mention that before it was mined it was probably locked up in solid rock; mixing it into loose dirt isn't exactly a good way to immobilize it.
The amount of radiation emitted by a mole of material is inversely proportional to its half-life. Thus, the stuff you put in the ground is a million times more radioactive than what was pulled out.
The new figure is due to the effects of "Darl's Law", which states that on average the damage claims of a lawsuit doubles every 5 months.
You assert that it's not punishment at all, but that's a different argument alltogether.
The government is not suppposed to be punishing anyone until after both (a) the person has actually committed some crime, and (b) they have been duly convicted in a court of law.
An algorithmic pattern match is not sufficient evidence to prove that counterfeiting activity has taken place, and a machine is not a qualified jury.
It's even worse than that because the only way to get supplies to the surface of the moon is to brake out of orbit with retro rockets. So you have use fuel to launch supplies from earth, use more fuel to land on the moon, and then use yet more fuel to launch from the moon.
If you compare scale diagrams of the puny lunar ascent module to the Saturn V, you get an idea of just how efficient it is to use the moon as a transit depot.
...Waffle Iron still hasn't taken the time to learn chess strategy; gets soundly beaten once again by a cluster of one Z80 running the chess cartridge on a 1992 vintage Gameboy.
I have in the past, but with optimizing compilers there's no need to worry about that stuff any more. Who cares how ugly these VM-like bytecodes look? It's all getting translated to something else under the hood anyway.
All past attempts at exposing an "elegant" architecture to software have failed as the architecure assumptions shifted within a couple of CPU generations. The "elegant" interface ended up being kludged onto a different underlying architecure as technology changed anyway, nullifying any advantages that it provided vs. the ugly old x86.
Do you know why? It's because that's what the customers want. Intel has tried to move away from the x86 a couple of times now, and each time they have failed (or in the latest case, are likely to fail soon). Dozens of rivals have come along with a wide variety of alternative architectures, and they have basically all failed with the exception of the Power PC. Even the vaunted PPC architecture commands single-digit market share despite its assorted technical advantages.
Now AMD, who lately seems to realize what customers want better than even Intel, has kludged yet another layer of compatiblity onto the x86, and by most accounts the customers love it. The latest 64-bit x86 CPUs are still assembly-source compatible with the first microprocessor design ever started, the 8008 (although the 4004 beat it to production). As customers demand compatiblity again and again and again, I expect that the x86 will never go away.
Personally, I think its cool that the x86 architecture is still at or near the top of the heap despite 30 years of complaints from ivory tower naysayers.
So what happens if your house catches on fire and a fireman dies because he got caught in your booby trap?
The reason that there are laws aginst booby traps is that it's not valid to presume that every person who simply enters an area is committing a crime.
What if I used this method to deter car theives? I could park a bunch of cars around the city rigged so that the brakes cut out as soon as the car hits 60 mph. The ensuing carnage would all be the theives' fault, wouldn't it?
It seems like you're confusing their respectable jet fighter with their silly plywood rocket planes (which I believe killed more of their own pilots than allied pilots).
It's used to dangle the expensive Pegasus conventional rocket that the X-43 uses for its first stage.
The X-15 pilots were needed mainly because they didn't have good enough automatic control systems. Now that we have them, there's no reason to risk human lives just to tinker with high-speed rocket planes.
The X-15 had such favorable PR that most people forget that one pilot lost his life when his X-15 spun out of control and disintegrated. IIRC, another barely escaped an explosion of the rocket engine during a ground test, and a third was lucky to survive the last high-speed speed mach-6 test that melted off a good chunk of the plane's tail fins.
If the failed first X-43 test had been manned, we may have had yet another fallen hero in the quest for knowledge. Luckily, all the incident cost was some time and money. It's nice to have celebrity astronauts and pilots to cheer on, but for these bleeding edge tests it's just not worth the risk if we can accomplish the goals without a pilot.
IMHO, the bigger letdown is that the space budget is so sapped from needlessly sending people into orbit to float on their butts in a tin can that most other development has slowed to a crawl. For example, hasn't it literally taken them years to put together this second test? Back at the height of the cold war, they would have tried a new flight within a few weeks or months. The same goes for developing a shuttle replacement. 10 years? It didn't take that long from before we had even launched a satellite to having the perfectly capable manned Gemini capsules in orbit. Ironically, NASA's need to devote huge resources to keeping faces on the news today continues to delay the date that space travel will be commonplace.
It must suck to have painted yourself into a corner like that.
Let me guess... your grandfather must have worked for Henry Ford painting model Ts.
So you really don't believe that anybody out there has driven their Ford Excursion several miles to return videos? Do you really believe that most trips to the video store in this country are done on foot?
A DVD weighs what, 10 grams? Even if it took 10 grams of petroleum to make every gram of plastic, that would only give you a budget of less than 4 ounces of gasoline to make returning the DVD more environemtally friendly than throwing it out. Even in a car that gets 30 MPG, that's only a 1 mile round trip.
rm -- -rf
Or just use your favorite GUI file manager.
Yes, but those mostly get dirty or naturally run out of whatever they're full of, and then the consumer chooses to discard them. In the eyes of a consumer, that's very from a perfectly good durable item like a video disc being deliberately sabotaged.
Personally, I don't rent movies. However, I was assuming that a typical American movie renter is living in the suburbs driving a mid-sized SUV that gets ~16mpg city. That half gallon corresponds to about 4 miles to the rental store (8 miles round trip); not too much of a stretch. Maybe most suburban renters are more like 2 miles from the nearest store. That still involves a quarter-gallon of gas (and about $1.50 of vehicle operating costs, plus 15 minutes of driving and dropoff time).
Of course most people would tend to combine the trip with other errands when possible, but every so often you have to make an extra trip just because your rental time is expiring.
I think that there's also a big psychological element to the issue. If someone's going to rent something at home, it needs to be totally intangible, like a pay-per-view movie on cable or a rented tape. It comes and goes, and leaves nothing behind.
If you "rent" them something -- even at the exact same price -- and it involves a physical object that "self destructs", people are going to feel ripped off. No matter what, part of you feels that you paid for the physical medium, not just the content, and having to throw it in the trash bin just feels wrong.
It doesn't matter that returning a movie might add significant cost to a movie rental in terms of time and vehicle costs, or that throwing away a thin plastic disc is probably less wasteful than burning an extra half gallon of gas driving to return a rental. Right or wrong, people just don't think like that.
Whhheww... All of my projects are already compliant!
The ironic thing is, that's the exact same principle that Intel has taken advantage of over the last 25 years to drive almost every other mainframe, minicomputer and microprocessor vendor out of the market. Now Intel themselves have fallen into the same rut as their former competitors.