to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
How on earth did you reach that conclusion? His entire post made the argument that the societies with the highest happiness index are the ones that compromise between capitalism (newspeak: Goodthink [From your point of view]) and socialism (newspeak: Crimethink [From your point of view]). The nordic countries he cited, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland occupy half of the top ten lists in the 2014 world happiness report. The much more capitalist USA, many of whose inhabitants seem to consider the Nordic countries to be failed communist states, occupies place 17. If anybody here is guilty of political correctness group think (newspeak: bellyfeel) it's you.
Would you be jumping to the conclusion that this was a conspiracy to promote Dell products if this had been a Dell laptop? It's an article about a guy who did something nerdy in his kitchen to fix a broken laptop motherboard... end of story. This may not be news to you but it is to me and a number of other people who don't spend our spare time repairing broken motherboards so stop complaining and go find your tinfoil hat... you need it.
Actually in a larger sense, the "Bank" doesn't want to see the day that Apple launches "iBank."
Or maybe they are just worried that iBank may lead to Google to leverage it's near monopoly on the mobile OS market in order to set up 'BankDroid'? Google fell on it's face with Google-Wallet but they did pretty well at innovating with mobile OSes after Apple showed them how to do it so maybe they'll reuse the same strategy to revamp Google-Wallet into BankDroid. That certainly is a scary thought, I'd rather have a few wolves fighting over the pay portal market than have Google exterminate the competition and be the only player on the field.
... but then again, I don't really want to hang out with people who use Facebook anyway.
If you love to be an extremely social fool (and I don't, personally), then there are plenty of options besides Facebook, which I've already mentioned.
LOL what?
If you reject people with facebook and similar stuff and people don't share your principles, you've just rejected 99.9% of the human population. You must be a very lonely boy.
For those of us 'extremely social' people who you know actually have a few friends and get along with acquaintances, we can't go scorched earth on everyone.
It's not that we're not tempted, it's that the cost benefit analysis of a scorched earth policy sucks donkey balls. No matter how you slice it, being a shut-in is very sad.
Eh?? 99.9% of the human population?? In which parallel universe do you live where all but 0.01% of the population is a hopeless Facebook junky? I can't possibly be the only person outside of stone age communities in places like the deep Amazon jungle or the great Namib desert who manages to make friends without involving Facebook?!? You don't have to be a bitter bomb making, manifesto writing recluse to be irritated by the sort people who can't seem to interact with the rest of humanity unless they do it though E-mail, chat programs, SMS, Facebook, a Bluetooth headset, Twitter, Google+ or something similar...
"We haven’t received an official note from the Delhi High Court. However, our legal team is currently evaluating the situation based on the information we have. India is a very important market for Xiaomi and we will respond promptly as needed and in full compliance with India laws. Moreover, we are open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably."
Translation: Now that we have infringed all of your patents we are willing to come to an agreement with you but only because you have finally got us by the short and curlies after a long court battle and not because we feel bound by international treaties signed by the Peoples Republic of China since those are only binding for people infringing on our patents.
Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.
One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.
I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.
Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.
That may be part of the explanation but It's not quite that simple. Canada and Scandinavia for example are dotted with isolated mountain lakes that also have various fish species living in them but in this part of the world there has never been an intentional large scale stocking effort which has long puzzled biologists. The current theory is that the eggs of the fish or the larvae are carried between lakes in in the feathers of water birds.
The real risk to Sony Pictures is having the real books behind the Hollywood accounting revealed.
Yup, the exact details of how they promise authors percentages of profits for the movie rights to their works and then somehow manage to make a huge paper loss on enormously profitable films. At least the lawyers of those people are going to have a field day. Even if these Hollywood studios and the gagsters that run them generally deserve every bit of misfortune that hits them it is never enough.
Solve the problem of falling drones + shot-down drones, and then we'll see.
In comparison, route-finding and range of the drones are already solved theoretically. It's just a matter of cost/benefit.
So the air traffic control issues have all been solved?
Not really, no. Obviously species will thrive if their dominant natural enemy is removed. What you might find fascinating (but I don't) is that there aren't just very low forms of life in a zone with elevated radiation. But that too is obvious, if you remember how nature works. It uses abundance and doesn't give a damn about the individuals that don't make it. Radiation in the exclusion zone isn't strong enough to kill in a short time or to prevent reproduction completely, so life keeps going and the damaged individuals don't matter. Humans don't quite see it that way though, so Chernobyl isn't an opportunity to us. Good news if you're a deer or a lynx though. Statistically your chance of making it has increased, not because radiation is healthy, which it is not, but because it removed the natural enemy.
Well if you are convinced that there is nothing worth studying in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone because everything that is happening there is obvious to you as you sit in your armchair thousands of miles away posting comments on slashdot then that is your opinion and you are welcome to it but it does not mean that other people can't find something worth studying there. What's going on in the exclusion zone is fascinating from all sorts of perspectives and not just because of the opportunity it presents to study the effects of radiation on an ecosystem or because it serves as an example of what happens if you construct nuclear power plants poorly and put reckless people in charge of them. The exclusion zone is for example also an opportunity to study the to the way nature is reclaiming the city of Pripyat and the mechanics of that process. To a biologist this is interesting to since it's not every day that a city of 50.000 and all of it's surrounding countryside is abandoned to gradually become a wilderness as if every human that lived there had been simultaneously teleported to away to another planet which is literally what Pripyat is like.
Problem with it is that it's not actually scary. People have been living in Exclusion Zone itself and right outside it for a long time. Mainly cleanup crews and their families.
So long as you don't go rolling in the hay of Red Forest, it appears you're going to be pretty much fine living there. Locals are even living off the land and eating local produce like fruit and mushrooms. Which apparently scared the pants off the BBC cuisine reporter who went into the region until they thawed him off with some good old moonshine. Which they told him afterwards, was made from the local produce.
I'll believe that when I have seen you move there and source all of the food and drink for your wife and kids from the immediate area around the Chernobyl plant for a few years. Wanna put your money where your mouth is?
And we should give it a different name so people don't get confused.
I vote for "rugby".
I generally hate football (both the American and the European variety) but I can have endless fun discussing the lack of logic in using the word 'football' to describe a game where the players spend most of the time carrying the ball and running into each other all over the field like deranged mountain goats. I prefer to call it 'American Rugby' which for some strange reason seems to piss off many 'football' obsessed Americans in the worst way. Interestingly enough Americans like to call football (the European variety where you actually propel the ball with your feet most of the time) 'soccer' which I don't really mind since it pisses off many of my British football crazed friends. Just remember, all you Americans out there, that calling 'football' 'soccer' also a good way to get the shit kicked out of you in a football pubs all over the UK and wearing the wrong kind of 'soccer' t-shirt in the wrong place can be as dangerous as wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit on a stroll through the heart of Crips territory in LA. Elsewhere in Europe people only care about this soccer vs. football debate because calling football 'soccer' is a good way to start a good, old-fashioned pre game punch-up with a bunch of Brits.
I can't be alone in not liking this film. It wasn't the science (there was obviously a lot of work done there) that bothered me, and besides which with Sci Fi you always get a 'gimme' or two (warp drive, transporters, technobabble etc) but I really didn't feel anything with the story. It didn't draw me in, it just dragged. This wasn't what I was expecting as I had been looking forward to this film since I saw the first teaser. I see so many people going on about who great this film was but I can't help but wonder what it was that I missed?
The first thing (of many) in that movie that I didn't get was why do they choose to land on (IIRC) a super-earth that orbits a black hole and where the time dilation is so severe that a hour long visit translates into, what was it? 8 earth years?... when they have two other promising prospects to check out that are approximately earth sized, time dilation free and not orbiting a black hole? Plus you'd think that scientists would be able to predict those massive tides. And having said that I'm for the moment willing to overlook the fact that to get that kind of time dilation you have to be practically skimming the surface/event-horizon of the black hole (poetic license, need to create drama, yada, yada, yada....). I would have skipped that first planet and gone for the other two (which they had the fuel to do) and then possibly, if I had enough fuel left, to whatever planet was option number four but that got dropped off their list.
The technology required for wormholes is so far removed from our current and plausible near-future capabilities that to throw lots of money at it would almost certainly be a total boondoggle.
So basically what he's saying is we might as well dump the money into a black hole. Sounds like most government programs.
Does that cover the government projects where they bail to private companies that are to big to fail?
Difference being that relativity was mathematically deduced from a simple set of hypotheses.
Are you saying that archeologists don't follow scientific method? Because that is not how I have experienced archeology. Archeologist have to construct hypotheses based on certain evidence and then set out to prove them like everybody else. Of course you can't obtain your proof sitting on your ass in an air conditioned office deducing mathematical formulae, you have to go out and dig around in the dirt to find you proof. If an archeologist finds marble sheets in Roman ruins around Europe and the the Middle East bearing clear saw marks he can go with conventional wisdom which for a long time would have had us believe these slabs were produced by slaves using bronze hand-saws in painstaking and wasteful manual labour. However, an archeologist, with a bit of imagination might note that the slabs are a bit too uniformly sawed to have been produced by hand and he might also recall from conversations with his colleagues in the department of history that there are plenty of accounts in ancient sources pointing to sophisticated machinery being used in ancient times even though these accounts are often dismissed as fantasy or written off as references to grain mills etc. So taking the risk of applying a bit of imagination to the scientific process the archeologist could perhaps hypothesise that the Romans weren't stupid and that it is likely they developed the process of sawing stone to a high degree of technological sophistication. He could then go and try to confirm that hypothesis by looking for remains of stone processing facilities like, say the stone saw mill at Gerasa in Jordan where large blocks of half sawed marble blocks have been found with several parallels saw marks in them. This site and others like it demonstrates conclusively that the stone was being mechanically sawed into sheets of marble using water wheels at least some 1300 years before the industrial revolution. While I'm sure that mathematics is more logical, rigorous and absolute than many other disciplines of science I'm pretty sure that Einstein in particular with his numerous and fascinating thought experiments found plenty of room for imagination in his work.
...And don't get me started on the sheer stupidity and uselessness of the crossguard on that Sith's lightsaber
UTTER IDIOCY!
Why? In a no holds barred sword fight with medieval weapons you learn pretty quickly that the blade is not the only part of a sword that can kill you. You can do some pretty nasty damage with the cross guard of a European bastard sword (which is presumably the inspiration of that new lightsaber) and you can crack a person's scull with the pommel if it is heavy enough and the right shape. The hand guard of a Scottish broadsword makes for the mother of all knuckle dusters, you can crush somebody's larynx with the edge of your shield and you can slide your spear through your hand as you thrust it to surprise an opponent or use a spear to slash his throat. Very few people think of a spear as a slashing or cutting weapon. In a fight against a person with a regular Katana type lightsaber where they seem to spend a lot of time with their lightsabers locked together you could for example use the cross guard to slice the other guy's hand off. You have to think out of the box. That being said I'd prefer to add a second cross guard below the light-guards to keep my hands out of the beams.
If I see a drone outside my second story window, I'd like to take it out.
Water gun?
Frequency jam?
Simple pellet gun?
It's perhaps not the best idea to do this from the second story of an apartment building but here in redneck country we use shotguns. For the bigger drones I'd recommend surface to air missiles but the gubermint won't let us have any...
Slashdot Mirror
to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought
Yes, so "capitalism worshippers" are doubleplus ungood? I guess nobody ought to be one then!
How on earth did you reach that conclusion? His entire post made the argument that the societies with the highest happiness index are the ones that compromise between capitalism (newspeak: Goodthink [From your point of view]) and socialism (newspeak: Crimethink [From your point of view]). The nordic countries he cited, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland occupy half of the top ten lists in the 2014 world happiness report. The much more capitalist USA, many of whose inhabitants seem to consider the Nordic countries to be failed communist states, occupies place 17. If anybody here is guilty of political correctness group think (newspeak: bellyfeel) it's you.
Is it news because it was a MacBook?
Would you be jumping to the conclusion that this was a conspiracy to promote Dell products if this had been a Dell laptop? It's an article about a guy who did something nerdy in his kitchen to fix a broken laptop motherboard... end of story. This may not be news to you but it is to me and a number of other people who don't spend our spare time repairing broken motherboards so stop complaining and go find your tinfoil hat... you need it.
Actually in a larger sense, the "Bank" doesn't want to see the day that Apple launches "iBank."
Or maybe they are just worried that iBank may lead to Google to leverage it's near monopoly on the mobile OS market in order to set up 'BankDroid'? Google fell on it's face with Google-Wallet but they did pretty well at innovating with mobile OSes after Apple showed them how to do it so maybe they'll reuse the same strategy to revamp Google-Wallet into BankDroid. That certainly is a scary thought, I'd rather have a few wolves fighting over the pay portal market than have Google exterminate the competition and be the only player on the field.
... but then again, I don't really want to hang out with people who use Facebook anyway.
If you love to be an extremely social fool (and I don't, personally), then there are plenty of options besides Facebook, which I've already mentioned.
LOL what?
If you reject people with facebook and similar stuff and people don't share your principles, you've just rejected 99.9% of the human population. You must be a very lonely boy.
For those of us 'extremely social' people who you know actually have a few friends and get along with acquaintances, we can't go scorched earth on everyone.
It's not that we're not tempted, it's that the cost benefit analysis of a scorched earth policy sucks donkey balls. No matter how you slice it, being a shut-in is very sad.
Eh?? 99.9% of the human population?? In which parallel universe do you live where all but 0.01% of the population is a hopeless Facebook junky? I can't possibly be the only person outside of stone age communities in places like the deep Amazon jungle or the great Namib desert who manages to make friends without involving Facebook?!? You don't have to be a bitter bomb making, manifesto writing recluse to be irritated by the sort people who can't seem to interact with the rest of humanity unless they do it though E-mail, chat programs, SMS, Facebook, a Bluetooth headset, Twitter, Google+ or something similar...
The F-35 is already a resounding success at its primary mission. I refer, of course, to pork distribution.
They should rename it to F-35 "Turkey" or maybe F-35 "Porky"?
"We haven’t received an official note from the Delhi High Court. However, our legal team is currently evaluating the situation based on the information we have. India is a very important market for Xiaomi and we will respond promptly as needed and in full compliance with India laws. Moreover, we are open to working with Ericsson to resolve this matter amicably."
Translation: Now that we have infringed all of your patents we are willing to come to an agreement with you but only because you have finally got us by the short and curlies after a long court battle and not because we feel bound by international treaties signed by the Peoples Republic of China since those are only binding for people infringing on our patents.
Muslims are more likely to fly a bomb carrying drone into the part of an aircraft than stick a grenade up a duck's are.
Muslims? Try the Russians: KAL007, MH17 ... They seem to be making a habit of flying drones into airliners.
Meanwhile here in New England, the alewives' natural range, shad and alewives are so endangered it's illegal to take one except in a few larger rivers. The springtime herring run are largely gone, along with the massive influx of marine nutrients they brought to fresh waters.
One of the things that always mystified me growing up fishing here was the incredible uniformity of freshwater fish species across water bodies with very little geographic connection. New England is dotted with thousands of small ponds, and they all have more or less the same fish. Even tiny little ponds of a few acres with no major tributaries and only seasonal outlets will have bluegill, yellow perch, and probably a few black bass lurking somewhere and reportedly some pike or muskellenge. How did they get there? And why aren't fish like bluegill from different watersheds distinctive, the way the finches Darwin found in different Galapagos islands were different? Surely natural dispersion of these fish across the whole region would have taken thousands of years.
I was recently reading about the history of dams in the US, and got the answer. In the late 1800s inland fisheries across the country were collapsing because of dam building for powering mills, so the federal government set about restocking ponds and streams across the country. The scale must have been mind boggling, because you can find the same fish in tiny, isolated ponds that don't show up except on detailed topographical maps. Even the neighbors seem scarcely aware of these ponds, but at some point maybe a hundred years ago the federal government planted fish there.
Looked at one way it was an astonishingly successful effort. There's almost no body of water in New England larger than a persistent puddle where a competent angler will catch *nothing*. And there are ponds not ten miles from Boston I can be certain of catching a half dozen crappie in a day and one or two largemouth bass -- certainly not trophy size, but enough to put up a game fight. But I often wonder what was in these waters before we crashed and rebooted the fish populations.
That may be part of the explanation but It's not quite that simple. Canada and Scandinavia for example are dotted with isolated mountain lakes that also have various fish species living in them but in this part of the world there has never been an intentional large scale stocking effort which has long puzzled biologists. The current theory is that the eggs of the fish or the larvae are carried between lakes in in the feathers of water birds.
The real risk to Sony Pictures is having the real books behind the Hollywood accounting revealed.
Yup, the exact details of how they promise authors percentages of profits for the movie rights to their works and then somehow manage to make a huge paper loss on enormously profitable films. At least the lawyers of those people are going to have a field day. Even if these Hollywood studios and the gagsters that run them generally deserve every bit of misfortune that hits them it is never enough.
Solve the problem of falling drones + shot-down drones, and then we'll see. In comparison, route-finding and range of the drones are already solved theoretically. It's just a matter of cost/benefit.
So the air traffic control issues have all been solved?
... Sony is about to declare war on North Korea. This should be interesting.
Not really, no. Obviously species will thrive if their dominant natural enemy is removed. What you might find fascinating (but I don't) is that there aren't just very low forms of life in a zone with elevated radiation. But that too is obvious, if you remember how nature works. It uses abundance and doesn't give a damn about the individuals that don't make it. Radiation in the exclusion zone isn't strong enough to kill in a short time or to prevent reproduction completely, so life keeps going and the damaged individuals don't matter. Humans don't quite see it that way though, so Chernobyl isn't an opportunity to us. Good news if you're a deer or a lynx though. Statistically your chance of making it has increased, not because radiation is healthy, which it is not, but because it removed the natural enemy.
Well if you are convinced that there is nothing worth studying in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone because everything that is happening there is obvious to you as you sit in your armchair thousands of miles away posting comments on slashdot then that is your opinion and you are welcome to it but it does not mean that other people can't find something worth studying there. What's going on in the exclusion zone is fascinating from all sorts of perspectives and not just because of the opportunity it presents to study the effects of radiation on an ecosystem or because it serves as an example of what happens if you construct nuclear power plants poorly and put reckless people in charge of them. The exclusion zone is for example also an opportunity to study the to the way nature is reclaiming the city of Pripyat and the mechanics of that process. To a biologist this is interesting to since it's not every day that a city of 50.000 and all of it's surrounding countryside is abandoned to gradually become a wilderness as if every human that lived there had been simultaneously teleported to away to another planet which is literally what Pripyat is like.
That's fascinating... if you're a deer or a lynx.
Or a scientifically minded person like... say... a Nerd?
Problem with it is that it's not actually scary. People have been living in Exclusion Zone itself and right outside it for a long time. Mainly cleanup crews and their families.
So long as you don't go rolling in the hay of Red Forest, it appears you're going to be pretty much fine living there. Locals are even living off the land and eating local produce like fruit and mushrooms. Which apparently scared the pants off the BBC cuisine reporter who went into the region until they thawed him off with some good old moonshine. Which they told him afterwards, was made from the local produce.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/feat...
I'll believe that when I have seen you move there and source all of the food and drink for your wife and kids from the immediate area around the Chernobyl plant for a few years. Wanna put your money where your mouth is?
And we should give it a different name so people don't get confused.
I vote for "rugby".
I generally hate football (both the American and the European variety) but I can have endless fun discussing the lack of logic in using the word 'football' to describe a game where the players spend most of the time carrying the ball and running into each other all over the field like deranged mountain goats. I prefer to call it 'American Rugby' which for some strange reason seems to piss off many 'football' obsessed Americans in the worst way. Interestingly enough Americans like to call football (the European variety where you actually propel the ball with your feet most of the time) 'soccer' which I don't really mind since it pisses off many of my British football crazed friends. Just remember, all you Americans out there, that calling 'football' 'soccer' also a good way to get the shit kicked out of you in a football pubs all over the UK and wearing the wrong kind of 'soccer' t-shirt in the wrong place can be as dangerous as wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit on a stroll through the heart of Crips territory in LA. Elsewhere in Europe people only care about this soccer vs. football debate because calling football 'soccer' is a good way to start a good, old-fashioned pre game punch-up with a bunch of Brits.
I can't be alone in not liking this film. It wasn't the science (there was obviously a lot of work done there) that bothered me, and besides which with Sci Fi you always get a 'gimme' or two (warp drive, transporters, technobabble etc) but I really didn't feel anything with the story. It didn't draw me in, it just dragged. This wasn't what I was expecting as I had been looking forward to this film since I saw the first teaser. I see so many people going on about who great this film was but I can't help but wonder what it was that I missed?
The first thing (of many) in that movie that I didn't get was why do they choose to land on (IIRC) a super-earth that orbits a black hole and where the time dilation is so severe that a hour long visit translates into, what was it? 8 earth years? ... when they have two other promising prospects to check out that are approximately earth sized, time dilation free and not orbiting a black hole? Plus you'd think that scientists would be able to predict those massive tides. And having said that I'm for the moment willing to overlook the fact that to get that kind of time dilation you have to be practically skimming the surface/event-horizon of the black hole (poetic license, need to create drama, yada, yada, yada....). I would have skipped that first planet and gone for the other two (which they had the fuel to do) and then possibly, if I had enough fuel left, to whatever planet was option number four but that got dropped off their list.
The technology required for wormholes is so far removed from our current and plausible near-future capabilities that to throw lots of money at it would almost certainly be a total boondoggle.
So basically what he's saying is we might as well dump the money into a black hole. Sounds like most government programs.
Does that cover the government projects where they bail to private companies that are to big to fail?
The skies are open, they are owned by nobody.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 takes issue.
As does the pair of F-22 Raptors that will politely greet you if you enter US airspace unannounced and blow you out of the sky if you don't answer.
Difference being that relativity was mathematically deduced from a simple set of hypotheses.
Are you saying that archeologists don't follow scientific method? Because that is not how I have experienced archeology. Archeologist have to construct hypotheses based on certain evidence and then set out to prove them like everybody else. Of course you can't obtain your proof sitting on your ass in an air conditioned office deducing mathematical formulae, you have to go out and dig around in the dirt to find you proof. If an archeologist finds marble sheets in Roman ruins around Europe and the the Middle East bearing clear saw marks he can go with conventional wisdom which for a long time would have had us believe these slabs were produced by slaves using bronze hand-saws in painstaking and wasteful manual labour. However, an archeologist, with a bit of imagination might note that the slabs are a bit too uniformly sawed to have been produced by hand and he might also recall from conversations with his colleagues in the department of history that there are plenty of accounts in ancient sources pointing to sophisticated machinery being used in ancient times even though these accounts are often dismissed as fantasy or written off as references to grain mills etc. So taking the risk of applying a bit of imagination to the scientific process the archeologist could perhaps hypothesise that the Romans weren't stupid and that it is likely they developed the process of sawing stone to a high degree of technological sophistication. He could then go and try to confirm that hypothesis by looking for remains of stone processing facilities like, say the stone saw mill at Gerasa in Jordan where large blocks of half sawed marble blocks have been found with several parallels saw marks in them. This site and others like it demonstrates conclusively that the stone was being mechanically sawed into sheets of marble using water wheels at least some 1300 years before the industrial revolution. While I'm sure that mathematics is more logical, rigorous and absolute than many other disciplines of science I'm pretty sure that Einstein in particular with his numerous and fascinating thought experiments found plenty of room for imagination in his work.
...And don't get me started on the sheer stupidity and uselessness of the crossguard on that Sith's lightsaber UTTER IDIOCY!
Why? In a no holds barred sword fight with medieval weapons you learn pretty quickly that the blade is not the only part of a sword that can kill you. You can do some pretty nasty damage with the cross guard of a European bastard sword (which is presumably the inspiration of that new lightsaber) and you can crack a person's scull with the pommel if it is heavy enough and the right shape. The hand guard of a Scottish broadsword makes for the mother of all knuckle dusters, you can crush somebody's larynx with the edge of your shield and you can slide your spear through your hand as you thrust it to surprise an opponent or use a spear to slash his throat. Very few people think of a spear as a slashing or cutting weapon. In a fight against a person with a regular Katana type lightsaber where they seem to spend a lot of time with their lightsabers locked together you could for example use the cross guard to slice the other guy's hand off. You have to think out of the box. That being said I'd prefer to add a second cross guard below the light-guards to keep my hands out of the beams.
Best way to disable a camera drone?
If I see a drone outside my second story window, I'd like to take it out. Water gun? Frequency jam? Simple pellet gun?
It's perhaps not the best idea to do this from the second story of an apartment building but here in redneck country we use shotguns. For the bigger drones I'd recommend surface to air missiles but the gubermint won't let us have any ...