I think the first time I saw this in action was in The Dead Pool (the Dirty Harry movie, not Deadpool). It was just an RC car with explosives, but the only difference here is that the "drones" are capable of flight. I'm sure it's been done in other works of fiction as well.
It was done in real life during WW2. The drones were four engine B24 or B17 bombers packed with high explosives and crashed into high value targets. Pilots would fly the aircraft for takeoff, bail out, and the drone would be radio controlled with the help of primitive TVs from another aircraft.
The Germans had remote controlled weapons in WW2, the 'Mistel' being the most famous. It was intended mainly as an anti-ship weapon to be used against Allied shipping mainly in the English Channel and North Sea.
The Mistel weapons that actually saw deployment and use consisted of either the Focke-Wulf FW-190 A-8 or F-8 model or Bf-109 F-4 model single-engine fighter (stripped of weapons and loaded with control equipment) attached by explosive bolts atop a twin-engine Junkers Ju-88 A-4 or G-1 model bomber modified for control-by-wire and loaded with a specially-designed, shaped-charge warhead weighing close to two tons.
Control inputs to the released Ju-88 by the pilot in the fighter aircraft were transmitted by a set of very thin and long wires. The weapon proved not to be very effective as accuracy was an issue. The pilot must simultaneously fly his own aircraft (usually under heavy AAA fire) and guide the Ju-88 visually from his aircraft while staying within the range the control wires allow, which would be an extremely difficult task even for a seasoned pilot who is not under fire.
I have to wonder if this story is being put out there as a part of government-directed PR/propaganda groundwork as a prelude to passing far more strict US consumer drone regulations in the near future.
However, the fun really started during WWI when the allies developed a primitive cruise missile and the Germans developed a wire guided gliding torpedo dropped from Zeppelin air ships and heavy bomber aircraft:
I have to wonder if this story is being put out there as a part of government-directed PR/propaganda groundwork as a prelude to passing far more strict US consumer drone regulations in the near future.
It looks more like the sort of inane nonsense daesh like to boast about: "Look how incredibly impressive and deadly we are, also, it's cool to fly a killer drone".
Is it? A few well placed drones rigged with a half a block of C4 and some nails flown into the enemies machine gun positions just before an attack sounds to me like a good way to ensure the success of a subsequent infantry attack. Welcome to the infantry warfare of the future where your chances of survival diminish rapidly without some form of automated air defence to take out enemy drone swarms.
Apple is a company who only builds overpriced shit. I bet I could find an Android smartphone with the iPhone 7 specs for $100. Also Steve Jobs is dead, therefore Apple is DOOMED.
No, but they tried a Mac out for all of three minutes at their local Best Buy store and that makes them experts.
this is precisely why many people buy macs, in three minutes you have it all figured out and you can get to work.
I used to work for a Telco and one of my tasks was to mind the systems in the call centre. The women who worked there liked Mac users for the simple reason that they could resolve their problem pretty quickly. Nothing was more than three or four clicks away. With Windows you always had to lead the user through 10-15 click odyssey to get to whatever configuration menu you were interested in and often the customer would often get lost along the way. Once that happened, and after letting out a deep frustrated sigh, you had to instruct the user to close all visible windows and then start all over again.
If you're spending the best part of £1000 on a phone, you can afford £25 for some bluetooth headphones. That's a fact, unless you have completely messed up priorities and are spending such a huge amount on a phone you can't afford.
Yup, that's a way of thinking that I don't understand you spend that kind of money on an iPhone, Samsung S7 or whatever and then you consider it an outrage if somebody suggests you to blow another $25 on a bumper and some armour glass or ****gasp***** a $25 Bluetooth headset.
It's rigged when you don't compare it to the 7 Plus. The other phones are larger with bigger batteries.
So yes, they rigged the test.
What the fuck is insightful about this post? Apple never made that claim. Slashshit really has hit a new low.
Apple deleted the analog headphone jack thus committing a crime against humanity.... eh sorry about that,... actually it's just the normal choir of Slashdot haters singing their whining song about some insignificant shit nobody else cares about or notices. If any iPhone 7 users do miss the analog jack the vast majority of them will either use the adaptor or just hit Amazon and buy a $25-$50 Bluetooth headset instead of screaming their heads off about how the world is ending because some mobile phone manufacturer deleted a connector.
Meh. The likes of Schultz, Druncker and Verhofstad only dream of being Putin, and may strive to achieve some of the particular aspects of Putin's rule. Putin actually is Putin.
How the hell did this get modded 'Insightful'? Martin Schulz is a social democrat while Guy Verhofstadt and Jean-Claude Juncker are centre-right. Not exactly the kind of people who spend their days pining for an opportunity to crawl up Vlad Putin's ass. in Europe, an opportunity to crawl up Putin's ass is the wet dream of right wing xenophobes with either borderline or openly Fascist tendencies like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Frauke Petry and their ilk.
> Yes, the pilot claimed 200 feet - but that's past the effective 40 yard range of most shotguns.
Effective range depends on what effect you are trying to achieve. In hunting terms, effective range is the distance at which you can expect a humane kill of the creature you are hunting. Quadcopters are fragile things so I would expect the effective range to take one down to be much higher than the quoted range for hunting birds.
The effective range of a shotgun depends on what No. of shot yyou are using (shot density). the kind of choke you are using and what you are hunting. An American friend of mine took to shooting suirrels out of trees with a scoped Mossberg 500 using very fine bird shot and a special X-full choke at 50+ meters because of a shortage of 22 LR ammo in the states. With this combination of choke and shot you actually stand less chance of hitting something closer than ~30m because the pattern is still too tight and since you are shooting well beyond 40 meters you have to start accounting for drop and wind like with a rifle.
Tell that to all the Star Wars misfits around here. Grown men still obsessed with a plaything of their youth.
And how is that any more weird than grown people believing they must modify their behaviour according to the whims of some guy who's set himself up as a priest/prophet/grand-poobah and who says that if they don't obey his imaginary friend (whom only he can see and hear) will destroy them in a rain of fire and brimstone and then send them to spend eternity in an inferno for whose existence there isn't a shred of proof? Say what you will about Lucas hounds, making Jediism the fourth largest 'religion' in the UK was sheer genius and one of the best demonstrations of how nonsensical religion really is other than Pastafarianism which is also pretty cool. In the UK they've actually got prisoners suing the prison system for failing to recognise Jediism as a religion. Some 2.6% of the city of Bristol claimed to be Jedi in a census. In Germany a guy actually got his local council to allow him to hang out an official road sign directing people to his Pastafarian church. The sign also contains information about when Pastafarian services are held. The thing looks awesome next to the church signs: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/f...
I've only been subscribing to Netflix for their original content. I can get most of the unoriginal stuff on my Prime account already.
Many of their shows have been absolutely amazing. Game of Thrones level of awesome, in my humble opinion.
Stranger Things (1 season)
Daredevil (2 seasons)
Jessica Jones (1 season)
Narcos (2 seasons)
I've binged all of these shows because they were that good. The only other show I've ever binged before this was The Wire. That says, to me, they have something special going on. If they can keep the good content coming at a decent pace, I have no problem with them dumping the same stuff I can get anywhere else.
Bingo, their original content is available in every region where they operate without restrictions. In my region only about a third of the non-netflix stuff they stream in the US is not available because of existing distribution agreements the makers of that content previously made with local distributors. These are usually conventional cable TV companies, who charge exorbitant prices for the outmoded old TV system of showing one episode per week and where you have to subscribe to and pay for 100 crap channels to get the 12 you really want to watch. These guys aren't about to allow that content to be streamed by Netflix which offers all 12-24 or something episodes of a series for viewing in one batch on the same day. Outfits like Netflix making their own content and distributing it themselves without idiotic restrictions and without attaching a shit load of crap you don't want to watch to milk you for extra money like the conventional cable companies and TV network do and that is basically where the entertainment industry is going.
What made Netflix great was selection. That's why they're so widely subscribed. The only way the ratio is going to look like that is if they're no longer carrying so much of everyone else's content. That won't be good for subscribers, who will get less for their money.
I disagree, I don't subscribe to Netflix because of the ability to wade through a legion of TV shows and movies from he 1980s, 90s and early 00s. I wade through that shit and see little that I haven't watched already and very little I'd like to watch again. Then there is more recent third party material like Falling Skies which I watched on Netflix and liked but they unfortunately only had the first two seasons for some reason that probably has to do with legalities and changes in the corporate policies of who ever made Falling Skies and their various regional distributor so I had to bit-tornent the rest of the Falling Skies seasons. Most of what I watch on Netflix, apart from catching up on Star Trek Enterprise, Deeps Space 9 and Starship Voyager episodes I missed back in the day and some newer third party TV series (usually incomplete for some stupid legal/marketing reasons) is Netflix's own original shows most of which are actually some of the best material on Netflix to begin with, Narco's for example stood out. The most glaring shortcoming I see with Netflix is that they aren't producing enough of their own original stuff for me to watch. I can only applaud their effort to make their own content and distribute it themselves because it cuts all the legal and marketing bullshit out of the equation and flushes it down the toilet.
Is there a printer vendor that doesn't play games with the consumables?
Is there anybody who makes significant use of hardcopies anymore? I used to have a cheap ass colour laser printer but it broke down and I haven't bought a new one. Whenever rarely I print something I do it at work. The last time I printed something it was a painting template for a crafts project I've been working on. I've spent most of my time converting hardcopies (a.k.a. my paper book library) to digital format so I can store them on my various gadgets. At the last count I had digitised about 20 Kg worth of paper books and some magazines that aren't available as e-documents from the publisher. If I also count the weight of the paper versions of the e-magazines I subscribe to and my Kindle collection it's probably well over 30 kilos. It's a bit surreal to reflect on the fact that I'm carrying 30+ kilos of books and magazines around with me on my iPhone.
Those were all technologies that were in some way vastly superseded in quality or functionality.
The standard audio jack is currently extremely high quality (yay push-pull transistors) and universally standard and will remain so, outside of the apple-verse, for decades to come.
And corded analogue headphones are not superseded by wireless ones? Of course you will reply by pointing out that the sound is better if you have corded analogue headphones but my point is that the corded headphones are not necessarily superseded sound-qualitatively but in terms of convenience of use. Most consumers are perfectly happy with headphones whose audio quality you would consider a personal insult and they don't really care about a slight drop in quality because of Bluetooth compression. The average consumer doesn't have the musical ear of a piano tuner and he/she cares more about the convenience of wirelessnes than getting concert quality audio. Nor does the average consumer think, that having spent between 4-800 bucks on a smartphone, that it will drive them into personal bankruptcy to spend another 25-50 bucks to get a half way decent set of Bluetooth plugs on Amazon. The same essentially goes for most users of Android phones. A new Galaxy S7 is in the same price range as the iPhones and as will the upcoming S8 which promises to be a really nice device and when you have shelled out that kind of money for an Android phone shelling out another few buck for a decent set of Bluetooth plugs isn't going to kill you. You can get pretty decent and highly reviewed Bluetooth plugs for an amount of money which is not that greater than what you are willing to pay out for a shock proof cover and armour glass for your extremely expensive new Galaxy phone. If they delete the audio jack from the MacBook lines I'll be mildly inconvenienced, then I will go buy a USB adaptor for the one set of corded headphones I still have, fix the the adaptor to the 3.5 mm jack with some heat shrink if it keeps falling off and not think about this issue again.
What are the chances that a single cell phone manufacturer will ship two devices that explode?
If Samsung has any kind of sense they are fairly slim. Heads will roll at Samsung and whatever subcontractors are responsible for this FUBAR and this mistake will not be made again. I think we are more likely to see the Galaxy 8 rushed to market followed by a fresh dose of bad publicity due to it being bug-ridden as a result of the rush to get it to market.
There would have been two 'bangs' perceived by people at the site of the rocket,... Having said all of this I think a sniper is the least likely suspect... Occam's razor...
There were no people at the site of there rocket.
But in any case, no, a rifle bullet wouldn't make a rocket explode. You slashdotters watch too many Hollywood action movies. It might poke a hole in a tank and make propellant gush out, but that wasn't the failure.
Without more details on exactly what happened, it's a little impossible to attribute it to sabotage. What we know is that the site of the explosion wasn't where we would have expected a problem to start, but that's non-informative, since if they expected a failure, they would have fixed that problem; any failure is going to have something unexpected about it.
Don't quote me out of context, I did say that a sniper was the least likely suspect and then proceeded to invoke Occam's razor. What more do you want?
There was a bang right before the explosion. What are the chances the rocket was shot at?
A bullet from a sniper rifle typically travels in excess of 1000 m/s, or about 3 times the speed of sound. So the "bang" would have come after the explosion.
There would have been two 'bangs' perceived by people at the site of the rocket, the sound of the bullet smacking into the rocket followed by the report of the rifle which could have been over two kilometres away if he was firing a.50 cal. Against a target the size of that rocket and with a fair idea of what the wind is like along the path of the bullet a good sniper could have made a 2000 m shot, possibly even a longer one. However, At 2000 m there is no guarantee the muzzle report would have been noticed at the site of the rocket, especially if the shooter made efforts to suppress the muzzle report. Having said all of this I think a sniper is the least likely suspect... Occam's razor...
I see nothing wrong with seeding life on sterile planets. Planets which already have life should be off limits. There is something to be said in favour of Star Trek's prime directive although, knowing humans, we'll probably adopt a strategy that will resemble a blend of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and Klingon foreign policy.
Slashdot Mirror
The Germans had remote controlled weapons in WW2, the 'Mistel' being the most famous. It was intended mainly as an anti-ship weapon to be used against Allied shipping mainly in the English Channel and North Sea.
The Mistel weapons that actually saw deployment and use consisted of either the Focke-Wulf FW-190 A-8 or F-8 model or Bf-109 F-4 model single-engine fighter (stripped of weapons and loaded with control equipment) attached by explosive bolts atop a twin-engine Junkers Ju-88 A-4 or G-1 model bomber modified for control-by-wire and loaded with a specially-designed, shaped-charge warhead weighing close to two tons.
Control inputs to the released Ju-88 by the pilot in the fighter aircraft were transmitted by a set of very thin and long wires. The weapon proved not to be very effective as accuracy was an issue. The pilot must simultaneously fly his own aircraft (usually under heavy AAA fire) and guide the Ju-88 visually from his aircraft while staying within the range the control wires allow, which would be an extremely difficult task even for a seasoned pilot who is not under fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Germans also used the 'Goliath' wire-controlled mobile mine on a set of small tracks in both electric and gasoline-powered versions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I have to wonder if this story is being put out there as a part of government-directed PR/propaganda groundwork as a prelude to passing far more strict US consumer drone regulations in the near future.
Strat
The Nazi Germans also had glide bombs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some of the Henschel bombs hand TV guidance and there was a B&V model under development that was radar homing.
The Allies had Glide bombs too most prominent being the American 'Aeronca' GB series and the Azon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, the fun really started during WWI when the allies developed a primitive cruise missile and the Germans developed a wire guided gliding torpedo dropped from Zeppelin air ships and heavy bomber aircraft:
http://warnepieces.blogspot.co...
http://gizmodo.com/this-flying...
The cruise missile was a bit of a failure but the glide torpedo was tested and might have become a successful operational weapon.
I have to wonder if this story is being put out there as a part of government-directed PR/propaganda groundwork as a prelude to passing far more strict US consumer drone regulations in the near future.
It looks more like the sort of inane nonsense daesh like to boast about: "Look how incredibly impressive and deadly we are, also, it's cool to fly a killer drone".
Is it? A few well placed drones rigged with a half a block of C4 and some nails flown into the enemies machine gun positions just before an attack sounds to me like a good way to ensure the success of a subsequent infantry attack. Welcome to the infantry warfare of the future where your chances of survival diminish rapidly without some form of automated air defence to take out enemy drone swarms.
They could still try to stick to the current design but that would not sell well at all, and pretty much kill the note as a brand.
I think they are well on their way towards that goal already. If I had mod points I'd mod your post 'funny'.
The Ford Pinto of mobile phones.
You are charging it wrong.
Apple is a company who only builds overpriced shit. I bet I could find an Android smartphone with the iPhone 7 specs for $100. Also Steve Jobs is dead, therefore Apple is DOOMED.
I'll take that bet now get to work...
SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 7
Guaranteed to give you more bang for your buck.
.... a supernova in your pocket.
No, but they tried a Mac out for all of three minutes at their local Best Buy store and that makes them experts.
this is precisely why many people buy macs, in three minutes you have it all figured out and you can get to work.
I used to work for a Telco and one of my tasks was to mind the systems in the call centre. The women who worked there liked Mac users for the simple reason that they could resolve their problem pretty quickly. Nothing was more than three or four clicks away. With Windows you always had to lead the user through 10-15 click odyssey to get to whatever configuration menu you were interested in and often the customer would often get lost along the way. Once that happened, and after letting out a deep frustrated sigh, you had to instruct the user to close all visible windows and then start all over again.
Most of the haters here don't actually own a Mac to actually understand ...
No, but they tried a Mac out for all of three minutes at their local Best Buy store and that makes them experts.
If you're spending the best part of £1000 on a phone, you can afford £25 for some bluetooth headphones. That's a fact, unless you have completely messed up priorities and are spending such a huge amount on a phone you can't afford.
Yup, that's a way of thinking that I don't understand you spend that kind of money on an iPhone, Samsung S7 or whatever and then you consider it an outrage if somebody suggests you to blow another $25 on a bumper and some armour glass or ****gasp***** a $25 Bluetooth headset.
It's rigged when you don't compare it to the 7 Plus. The other phones are larger with bigger batteries.
So yes, they rigged the test.
What the fuck is insightful about this post? Apple never made that claim. Slashshit really has hit a new low.
Apple deleted the analog headphone jack thus committing a crime against humanity .... eh sorry about that, ... actually it's just the normal choir of Slashdot haters singing their whining song about some insignificant shit nobody else cares about or notices. If any iPhone 7 users do miss the analog jack the vast majority of them will either use the adaptor or just hit Amazon and buy a $25-$50 Bluetooth headset instead of screaming their heads off about how the world is ending because some mobile phone manufacturer deleted a connector.
Let it be called KremLinux and all is forgiven!
KremLinux is for losers. I'm going with KGBSD.
So let me get this straight ... In Putin's Russia, is it KremLinux or KGBSD that watches YOU? ... or is it both? ... I'm confused now ...
Meh. The likes of Schultz, Druncker and Verhofstad only dream of being Putin, and may strive to achieve some of the particular aspects of Putin's rule. Putin actually is Putin.
How the hell did this get modded 'Insightful'? Martin Schulz is a social democrat while Guy Verhofstadt and Jean-Claude Juncker are centre-right. Not exactly the kind of people who spend their days pining for an opportunity to crawl up Vlad Putin's ass. in Europe, an opportunity to crawl up Putin's ass is the wet dream of right wing xenophobes with either borderline or openly Fascist tendencies like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Frauke Petry and their ilk.
> Yes, the pilot claimed 200 feet - but that's past the effective 40 yard range of most shotguns.
Effective range depends on what effect you are trying to achieve. In hunting terms, effective range is the distance at which you can expect a humane kill of the creature you are hunting. Quadcopters are fragile things so I would expect the effective range to take one down to be much higher than the quoted range for hunting birds.
The effective range of a shotgun depends on what No. of shot yyou are using (shot density). the kind of choke you are using and what you are hunting. An American friend of mine took to shooting suirrels out of trees with a scoped Mossberg 500 using very fine bird shot and a special X-full choke at 50+ meters because of a shortage of 22 LR ammo in the states. With this combination of choke and shot you actually stand less chance of hitting something closer than ~30m because the pattern is still too tight and since you are shooting well beyond 40 meters you have to start accounting for drop and wind like with a rifle.
Tell that to all the Star Wars misfits around here. Grown men still obsessed with a plaything of their youth.
And how is that any more weird than grown people believing they must modify their behaviour according to the whims of some guy who's set himself up as a priest/prophet/grand-poobah and who says that if they don't obey his imaginary friend (whom only he can see and hear) will destroy them in a rain of fire and brimstone and then send them to spend eternity in an inferno for whose existence there isn't a shred of proof? Say what you will about Lucas hounds, making Jediism the fourth largest 'religion' in the UK was sheer genius and one of the best demonstrations of how nonsensical religion really is other than Pastafarianism which is also pretty cool. In the UK they've actually got prisoners suing the prison system for failing to recognise Jediism as a religion. Some 2.6% of the city of Bristol claimed to be Jedi in a census. In Germany a guy actually got his local council to allow him to hang out an official road sign directing people to his Pastafarian church. The sign also contains information about when Pastafarian services are held. The thing looks awesome next to the church signs: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/f...
I've only been subscribing to Netflix for their original content. I can get most of the unoriginal stuff on my Prime account already.
Many of their shows have been absolutely amazing. Game of Thrones level of awesome, in my humble opinion.
Stranger Things (1 season) Daredevil (2 seasons) Jessica Jones (1 season) Narcos (2 seasons)
I've binged all of these shows because they were that good. The only other show I've ever binged before this was The Wire. That says, to me, they have something special going on. If they can keep the good content coming at a decent pace, I have no problem with them dumping the same stuff I can get anywhere else.
Bingo, their original content is available in every region where they operate without restrictions. In my region only about a third of the non-netflix stuff they stream in the US is not available because of existing distribution agreements the makers of that content previously made with local distributors. These are usually conventional cable TV companies, who charge exorbitant prices for the outmoded old TV system of showing one episode per week and where you have to subscribe to and pay for 100 crap channels to get the 12 you really want to watch. These guys aren't about to allow that content to be streamed by Netflix which offers all 12-24 or something episodes of a series for viewing in one batch on the same day. Outfits like Netflix making their own content and distributing it themselves without idiotic restrictions and without attaching a shit load of crap you don't want to watch to milk you for extra money like the conventional cable companies and TV network do and that is basically where the entertainment industry is going.
What made Netflix great was selection. That's why they're so widely subscribed. The only way the ratio is going to look like that is if they're no longer carrying so much of everyone else's content. That won't be good for subscribers, who will get less for their money.
I disagree, I don't subscribe to Netflix because of the ability to wade through a legion of TV shows and movies from he 1980s, 90s and early 00s. I wade through that shit and see little that I haven't watched already and very little I'd like to watch again. Then there is more recent third party material like Falling Skies which I watched on Netflix and liked but they unfortunately only had the first two seasons for some reason that probably has to do with legalities and changes in the corporate policies of who ever made Falling Skies and their various regional distributor so I had to bit-tornent the rest of the Falling Skies seasons. Most of what I watch on Netflix, apart from catching up on Star Trek Enterprise, Deeps Space 9 and Starship Voyager episodes I missed back in the day and some newer third party TV series (usually incomplete for some stupid legal/marketing reasons) is Netflix's own original shows most of which are actually some of the best material on Netflix to begin with, Narco's for example stood out. The most glaring shortcoming I see with Netflix is that they aren't producing enough of their own original stuff for me to watch. I can only applaud their effort to make their own content and distribute it themselves because it cuts all the legal and marketing bullshit out of the equation and flushes it down the toilet.
Nobody gets raises for being a cunt.
Then how do the higher ups get their jobs?
They ingratiate themselves to the cunts by being dildos.
Is there a printer vendor that doesn't play games with the consumables?
Is there anybody who makes significant use of hardcopies anymore? I used to have a cheap ass colour laser printer but it broke down and I haven't bought a new one. Whenever rarely I print something I do it at work. The last time I printed something it was a painting template for a crafts project I've been working on. I've spent most of my time converting hardcopies (a.k.a. my paper book library) to digital format so I can store them on my various gadgets. At the last count I had digitised about 20 Kg worth of paper books and some magazines that aren't available as e-documents from the publisher. If I also count the weight of the paper versions of the e-magazines I subscribe to and my Kindle collection it's probably well over 30 kilos. It's a bit surreal to reflect on the fact that I'm carrying 30+ kilos of books and magazines around with me on my iPhone.
What's the point? Really!
Well Duh! To leave no stone unturned in the ongoing quest to make Linux's year on the desktop a reality.
Those were all technologies that were in some way vastly superseded in quality or functionality. The standard audio jack is currently extremely high quality (yay push-pull transistors) and universally standard and will remain so, outside of the apple-verse, for decades to come.
And corded analogue headphones are not superseded by wireless ones? Of course you will reply by pointing out that the sound is better if you have corded analogue headphones but my point is that the corded headphones are not necessarily superseded sound-qualitatively but in terms of convenience of use. Most consumers are perfectly happy with headphones whose audio quality you would consider a personal insult and they don't really care about a slight drop in quality because of Bluetooth compression. The average consumer doesn't have the musical ear of a piano tuner and he/she cares more about the convenience of wirelessnes than getting concert quality audio. Nor does the average consumer think, that having spent between 4-800 bucks on a smartphone, that it will drive them into personal bankruptcy to spend another 25-50 bucks to get a half way decent set of Bluetooth plugs on Amazon. The same essentially goes for most users of Android phones. A new Galaxy S7 is in the same price range as the iPhones and as will the upcoming S8 which promises to be a really nice device and when you have shelled out that kind of money for an Android phone shelling out another few buck for a decent set of Bluetooth plugs isn't going to kill you. You can get pretty decent and highly reviewed Bluetooth plugs for an amount of money which is not that greater than what you are willing to pay out for a shock proof cover and armour glass for your extremely expensive new Galaxy phone. If they delete the audio jack from the MacBook lines I'll be mildly inconvenienced, then I will go buy a USB adaptor for the one set of corded headphones I still have, fix the the adaptor to the 3.5 mm jack with some heat shrink if it keeps falling off and not think about this issue again.
What are the chances that a single cell phone manufacturer will ship two devices that explode?
If Samsung has any kind of sense they are fairly slim. Heads will roll at Samsung and whatever subcontractors are responsible for this FUBAR and this mistake will not be made again. I think we are more likely to see the Galaxy 8 rushed to market followed by a fresh dose of bad publicity due to it being bug-ridden as a result of the rush to get it to market.
There would have been two 'bangs' perceived by people at the site of the rocket, ... Having said all of this I think a sniper is the least likely suspect... Occam's razor...
There were no people at the site of there rocket.
But in any case, no, a rifle bullet wouldn't make a rocket explode. You slashdotters watch too many Hollywood action movies. It might poke a hole in a tank and make propellant gush out, but that wasn't the failure.
Without more details on exactly what happened, it's a little impossible to attribute it to sabotage. What we know is that the site of the explosion wasn't where we would have expected a problem to start, but that's non-informative, since if they expected a failure, they would have fixed that problem; any failure is going to have something unexpected about it.
Don't quote me out of context, I did say that a sniper was the least likely suspect and then proceeded to invoke Occam's razor. What more do you want?
There was a bang right before the explosion. What are the chances the rocket was shot at?
A bullet from a sniper rifle typically travels in excess of 1000 m/s, or about 3 times the speed of sound. So the "bang" would have come after the explosion.
There would have been two 'bangs' perceived by people at the site of the rocket, the sound of the bullet smacking into the rocket followed by the report of the rifle which could have been over two kilometres away if he was firing a .50 cal. Against a target the size of that rocket and with a fair idea of what the wind is like along the path of the bullet a good sniper could have made a 2000 m shot, possibly even a longer one. However, At 2000 m there is no guarantee the muzzle report would have been noticed at the site of the rocket, especially if the shooter made efforts to suppress the muzzle report. Having said all of this I think a sniper is the least likely suspect... Occam's razor...
Zero.
You seem awfully sure about that, there are .50 cal sniper rifles in civilian hands that can shoot through a window at 2500 meters.
Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds?
I see nothing wrong with seeding life on sterile planets. Planets which already have life should be off limits. There is something to be said in favour of Star Trek's prime directive although, knowing humans, we'll probably adopt a strategy that will resemble a blend of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and Klingon foreign policy.