My powerbook contains a 40GB drive removed from my friends Toshiba after she backed her car over it and before it was handed to the insurance company (removed from the half without tyre marks).
Where i work we have ~250 laptops, 2/3 of them being Macs, all of them used on the road (see above!). We have 2 or 3 laptops a month come in for 'data recovery' which usually involves HDD being extracted and mounted in an external case.
Dell, IBM Apple, Toshiba, ACER, Compaq, HP - Seen em all. I have NEVER seen a non standard 2.5" hdd. Period.
While the details remain unclear eight months after the fact, the only major battle in the Iraq war centered on U.S. attack helicopters ended in mission failure. The raid involved 40 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters that attacked Iraqi Republican Guard units south of Baghdad on March 24. One was shot down (the two crewmen taken prisoner) and 30 returned to base having sustained severe damage.The Washington Post subsequently reported:
"In attacking a formation of about 40 Apache Longbows on Monday, the Iraqis staged a classic helicopter ambush first perfected by the North Vietnamese in the 1960s. As the lethal, tank-killing aircraft approached on a mission to destroy the Medina Division's dispersed armor, troops dispersed throughout a palm-lined residential area and opened fire with antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades and a wall of fire from rifles and other small arms....
"The Iraqi fire was so intense that the Apaches had to break off their mission and return to base."
I'm not saying that the Osprey (or the combat Helo) is not a very neat thing, but 68 million dollars! (Blackhawks ain't cheap either.)
"Rugged and reliable" and "flying pork-barrel" are seldom used in the same sentence.
Apart from unintentionally dropping out of the sky, the Osprey has some very serious problems, from a tactical point of view.
In short, it can't land quick enough to avoid a 15 year-old kid with an RPG blowing a $68 million dollar hole in the taxpayer's wallet. Those who will have to ride in it view it as a death trap. The descent rate is slow enough to make even rifle fire a serious problem.
I heard that the osprey started out due to a delineation of service problem. That is, the Navy is not allowed fixed wing transport aircraft, as that is the sole domain of the Airforce. Any info on this?
Never mind that DRM is also about raising the cost of PARTICIPATING in the film/music industry.
A mac and an $800 audio interface (or an $800 camcorder and final cut) is equivalent to about $100000 of gear in 1990. Up that to millions in the mid 80s.
Right now, the same production facilities that studios use are falling into the hands of the masses. And, for the first time the means to distribute ones work to a widespread audience has never been easier or more apparent. Many (real) bands nowdays will actually buy their own studio setup for less than it costs to record for a few days in a professional studio. The movie production equivalent cannot be far off.
By locking down consumer machines so they can readily access only DRM media, the ball is kept in the studios court. Because you can bet that licensing DRM technology will not be cheap.
The motor would be all but solid state anyway. Just a series of coils, with ceramic magnets embedded in the wheels or something. The Japanese have been hot for this for a while. Most of the Japanese motorbike manufacturers have shown concept electric bikes with (2 wheel drive!!) motors in each wheel. _The_ bike in the Manga Akira was meant to be of this design.
Re:I don't know what subject to give this...
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 1
Ah, the land of the free.....
"In America, a man can buy his own _laws_ , Ahmed, even his own _government_...."
Why is HDTV even a hardware standard?
It not like we haven't been building cheap displays capable of multiple resolutions for years. And its not like tv manufacturers (sony, phillips etc.) will be losing out, because they make these displays...
Why is the MPAA not flogging a sofTV standard where such image decryption and display is handled by software. good updatable software.
Need HDTV? Then your tv will download HDTVapp when you sign up to your cable providers premium service. Using your sofTV somewhere that they have different broadcast standards (France) then your tv gets le HDTV app. Manufacturers dont have to retool for different markets, consumers don't get ripped off. Manufacturers can generate sales by selling us bigger, wider, better TVs rather than "the same old set, but now F.U.TV capable".
Best of all, we get all that neat "enriched content" that was promised to us for the past 12 years as TV approaches true convergance.
Anybody for TVML?
sure that you are a fool.
Look to the history of Iran, for example. Regarded in the 1950s as an enlightened, prosperous country which had the misfortune to ELECT a president that nationalised their oil industry taking control from the American companies that were taking the oil and paying no tax or reparations for doing so apart from a one time 'prospecting license'. Cue the US funded overthrow of the govenment and the installation of a US friendly Shah who brutally repressed the freedoms you seem to hold so dear, growing fat and wealthy while the standard of living for the iranian on the street plummeted. leading to a popular but tragic overthrow of the regime by a clerical theocracy and... do you even know the rest of the story? The old US embassy in Tehran is now the 'Museum of Arrogance'. Which is what Americans _are_. The list of crimes committed so you can fill your Lincon Towncar up at the pump for less than the car cost is immeasurable.
Self rightiousness is easy when you are _right_.
Can you name one democratic regime that was put in place in any of the countries 15 that the US has attacked directly in the past 30 years?
Ignorance is bliss, until somebody flies a jetplane into your pretty little towers.....
Those of us in parts of the world with halfway credible media sources can _work it out_. The following tidbits have popped up on the BBC world service in the past week-
Cheney - President of Haliburton Oil.
Bush Snr - 'Consultant' for the Carlyle Group (Worlds largest defense contractor and largest private equity firm in America)
Bush Jnr - Ex oil, ex carlyle group subsudiary.
(as an aside, the Bin Laden family sold its stake in the carlyle group shortly after 9/11. Dubyas first (profitable!) company directorate was on on the board of a company whos principal stakeholder was Salaam bin Laden, a name that pops up all through his 'career')
Those that you have duly elected stand to profit massively if they can keep oil _supply_ price down, through military means.
Get that? - Bush and cronies are using your _money_ and _lives_ to make themselves very very very very very rich.
e.g.-
American taxpayer aid to the taliban was stopped in (the northern) spring due to an oil pipeline deal that was brokered, in part by Cheney, falling through. As a gesture of goodwill, the Taliban supplied the whereabouts of bin Laden at that time. What went wrong? - the contract was awarded to an Argentinian firm. Can you guess plan b?
Also, none of these companies seem to mind that their software gained a hedgemonic hold on its particular market (e.g. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator) due to widespread piracy by students and their ilk. "got any job skills after that ethnomusicology degree, son?".
Meanwhile, on the desktop, companies will only invest in 'industry standard' software i.e. "what do our competition/clients use?" In the case of the advertising industry Photoshop is endemic, yet not a single freelance designer has purchased a licence, some have even been _given_ copies by adobe. Adobe know well that if the designers use photoshop, then the agencies/clients/printers will all be buying copies so they can use these guys work. In fact, i don't know a designer that didn't spend their college years photoshopping minor cleb nudes and making them 'dance' in flash, all in flagrant violation of whatever intellectual property laws that were neccesary.
I have in the past _paid money_ for a version (3.0) of Microsoft Word, but have had to steal on the occasion of every subsequent release, as every damn fool still sends me contract.doc, order.doc, specifications.doc and i guess my primitive software does not have all the incredible new features that let the clients type and tab said documents. I can't say no 'send it in another format', because the clients are quite frankly too stupid to. Anyway that would be bad for business and whats bad for business is, well, illegal, isn't it?
if the software they are peddling is as essential/epochal/compelling/mandatory as they tell us it is, then surely they will gain so much more if the first hit is free. (esp if you hand it out outside the school gates, right?)
You want speed...
Some bench marks from when i put a Fu Tech ethernet card into an old (c. 1994) mac i found:-
About 60 seconds to crack the (no screw) case, install card, close case. 25 seconds to boot. 10 seconds to enter router address. No drivers. No reboot. No more network issues. ever.
Time spent this week installing name brand USB card/mouse on circa 1999 PC running 98 - 3 hours, countless reboots. mouse still intermittant. too scared to try HP burner on said card.
Really, what else can i say...
Actually, there were satelites monitoring global ozone levels before the widespread introduction of CFCs. Thing is, the data was used to monitor _global_ ozone levels, thus any abnormally high or low readings were discarded. It took NASA about 6 years to be convinced that it was worthwile to go back over the data they had collected. When plotted there is a constant depletion of ozone from the late 60s when cfcs were widely adopted as both a propellant and a refrigerant.
Anybody else use their GPS units for Geocaching? (Sort of a treasure hunt using GPS). In practice, the 100 metre figure is a 'guaranteed' level of accuracy, as i have never been anything like that far off.
As it is a long weekend here, some friends and I have been using an old Garmin 45 to find all the geocaches within an hours drive of where we live. All caches so far have been within 10 metres of the waypoint, and the three we found today (one in the dark!) were within 3 metres of where the unit said the waypoint was.
It is also quite common for match racing yachts to have centimetre accuracy units (often one in the bow _and_ stern), although the expense of these units (~$25000) makes for a very steep price/performance curve.
I agree, sailing has some of the wildest tech going nowdays.
I have family members actively involved in various americas cup syndicates. The boats are more like formula 1 cars, with US$50,000 GPS units (4 inch accuracy anyone?) front and rear to plot position and velocity when rounding marks, some of the most advanced carbon fibre construction and sail vision technology that flexes the mast in response to a video signal to give the optimum sail shape for the conditions.
There is still a fair bit of intuition involved in design though. The American syndicates just can't understand how the New Zealanders get the boat speed that they do without the involvement of NASA and the use of supercomputers. (An uncle with a European syndicate said that they have had NASA engineers over critiquing their designs, but they were under a tight deadline due to the computers needing to be used for the National Missle Defence system!)
Or maybe they just don't understand anything that is not powered by petroleum.....
Each image, though representing scientific data, resembles a work by an old Dutch master who has met Jackson Pollock. The
swirling images are as crowded yet detailed as if every ear of corn on a 100-acre farm were caught in a single image by a camera
at 21,000 feet.
The images are expected to allow scientists a better view of complicated systems.
Seem like an intention to use the screen as a visualisation system to me.
40 bits/s is even regarded as optimistic! German neurophysioligists tend to go for a figure of 16 bits/s. The 40 bits/s value was arrived at by John Pierce, a Bell Labs engineer after examining countless (People transmitting information using flashing lights, pianos, tasting sugar concentrations) studies. I think his book on this is called 'Symbols, Signals and Noise', but any good information theory or neurology/psychology tome should cover this.
People making radio programmes use a rule of thumb that it takes 2.5 minutes to read a page aloud. A page contains 40 lines, each 60 characters long. That is 2400 charactes in 150 seconds or an average of 16 bit/s. On average, a character contains 2 bits of information so that is 32 bits/s. Reading aloud entails more than just characters, so if we round up the number of bits to account for rhythm, intonation, pitch etc., we arrive at a figure like Pierce's 40 bits/s.
It all comes down to the limits of conciousness, not human vision.
Every second the brain receives about 11 million bits of information, about 10 million of which is visual. Meanwhile, the throughput of conciousness is about 40 bits/s, and that is not even totally related to sensory input as ones unconcious 'feeds back' information and memories of stimuli received in the past into the mix.
However, it is accepted that we do use much of this 11 million bits - talk to an athlete or quake fiend about 'the zone' ('after playing for a few hours, my mind wanders onto many other things while i fuck shit up like i was on autopilot')
The point of this screen is to display an unprecedented amount of data, too much to be taken in at once even by the subconcious, thus flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data represented in new visual ways. Much like a graph lets you visualise a trend easily.
Dot pitch does not matter. The bits of information that can be displayed at once does.
> Third, you have to cross the US border. While I don't know for sure, I would bet there are hidden radiation detectors at all the border crossings.
Why cross a border?
Why pack a suitcase?
A Semi trailer (or 10) packed with high level nuclear waste and explosives detonated at rush hour in a major city sure would make a big and nasty mess. Sure you could decontaminate all that real estate eventually, but within a few generations all the locals will be horrible george bush type mutants.
Ok, high level nuclear waste is a bit tricky to get your hands on, but i am sure that there is a nuke utility company out there that would be willing to pay! you to take some of it off their hands, all hush hush.
The whole thing would qualify for some 'Made in USA' stickers thus taking the heat off your own naughty wee nation.
(please do not try this at home, kids. or in anybody elses home. Remember: WINNERS DON'T USE TERRORISM)
Assume (bear with me) that the missle defence system is, through some technological _miracle_, 90% effective in shooting down incoming ICBMs.
Compose yourself after resulting mirth and consider the following scenarios:
Classic MSD reasoning:
Nation X fires 100 missles, 90% shot down by Nation Ys missile defence system, kiss goodbye to 10 cities brim full of your loved ones. Nation X vapourised in retaliatory strike.
New MSD plus!!!!
Insane texan in charge of Nation Y nukes filthy commie 'rogue state', Nation X. From the ashes, Nation X gets off 10 of its missles, 90% shot down, 1 city of patriot martyrs sacrificed in the name of Nation Y imperialism.
The second scenario is why the ABM treaty was so important, is the reasoning behind many European states objecting to the missle defence system, and will be the logical basis for a new arms race.
Can Americans convince the world that they are to be entrusted with the power to erase any nation that they see fit to, with little or no concequences?
(Reagan was said to be in favour, if star wars episode 1 was feasable, of forcing the Russians into a 'limited nuclear confrontation' to be contained within Europe, thus ridding the world of godless commies once and for all.)
In practice, missle defence will be a lose/lose situation. 'Rogue Nations' will perceive the rennaisance of US militarism as an unwillingness to resolve conflicts by diplomatic or democratic means, and resort to terrorism and guerilla operations. All of which means that there is more terror coming to American citizens, at home and abroad. (Government Agents, Please Note: this is not to be mistaken in any way to be a threat against the good ol' USA. I am a peace loving citizen of a friendly, rapidly demilitarizing nation and I promise that I am not/will not be planning any terrorist action now or in the forseeable future. so don't come knocking my door down, okay.)
one, just one....
- 3 reactor technicians in idaho (one impaled on the ceiling by a control rod, all were buried in lead coffins, their upper torsos and hands disposed of as nuclear waste)
- everybody who visited the chernobyl site in the two weeks after the accident, including the helicopter pilots who flew over trying to get photos of the burning reactor core.
- karen silkwood.
just off the top of my head.
as for those killed/maimed by the ongoing effects of radiation? http://www.tmia.com/daisies.html - great pictures of mutated plant and animal life taken 10 - 15 years after three mile island.
>Mir had a cosmonaut that was up for several weeks and couldn't dock an unmanned satelite to Mir (the cause was most likely that he was just bored for so long he lost his focus)
There was an excellent BBC documentary on this incident with video footage of said cosmonauts face as he piloted the cargo module into Mir, as well as frank and open interviews with the crew back on earth.
The cosmonaut was under extreme pressure, as mission control made it clear that he would lose up to 2/3 of his pay for the 9 months or so that he had been in mir. He had to manually dock the cargo module the emergency manual system which consisted of a joystick, a small video monitor showing a camera aboard the module, and a range readout from which he could judge speed. The first attempt at a manual docking was aborted at the last second, resulting in a near miss due to severe inteference with the video link to the progress module by the radar rangefinder. Mission control ordered him to try again having switched off the rangefinder.
Other highlighs include:-
- Footage of crew abandoning a meal of caviar and vodka as smoke floods the station due to fire in the fuel and oxygen storage area.
- Footage of cosmonaut screaming ESCAPE! ESCAPE! in russian as mir is rocked by the cargo ship collision.
- An account of the two 12 hour total power failures (lights, computers, lifesupport) that occured as a result of the collision.
- Account of the discussion that occured after the fire when it was realised that there were 5 people on mir and one 3 seater soyuz.
- Space drama without Tom Hanks!
Slashdot Mirror
...bring on the Draft!
Where i work we have ~250 laptops, 2/3 of them being Macs, all of them used on the road (see above!). We have 2 or 3 laptops a month come in for 'data recovery' which usually involves HDD being extracted and mounted in an external case.
Dell, IBM Apple, Toshiba, ACER, Compaq, HP - Seen em all. I have NEVER seen a non standard 2.5" hdd. Period.
Would you rather die of Cancer, Heart disease or while attempting a Manned Mission to Mars?
From the above link:
...
While the details remain unclear eight months after the fact, the only major battle in the Iraq war centered on U.S. attack helicopters ended in mission failure. The raid involved 40 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters that attacked Iraqi Republican Guard units south of Baghdad on March 24. One was shot down (the two crewmen taken prisoner) and 30 returned to base having sustained severe damage.The Washington Post subsequently reported:
"In attacking a formation of about 40 Apache Longbows on Monday, the Iraqis staged a classic helicopter ambush first perfected by the North Vietnamese in the 1960s. As the lethal, tank-killing aircraft approached on a mission to destroy the Medina Division's dispersed armor, troops dispersed throughout a palm-lined residential area and opened fire with antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades and a wall of fire from rifles and other small arms.
"The Iraqi fire was so intense that the Apaches had to break off their mission and return to base."
I'm not saying that the Osprey (or the combat Helo) is not a very neat thing, but 68 million dollars! (Blackhawks ain't cheap either.)
"Rugged and reliable" and "flying pork-barrel" are seldom used in the same sentence.
In short, it can't land quick enough to avoid a 15 year-old kid with an RPG blowing a $68 million dollar hole in the taxpayer's wallet. Those who will have to ride in it view it as a death trap. The descent rate is slow enough to make even rifle fire a serious problem.
I heard that the osprey started out due to a delineation of service problem. That is, the Navy is not allowed fixed wing transport aircraft, as that is the sole domain of the Airforce. Any info on this?
Never mind that DRM is also about raising the cost of PARTICIPATING in the film/music industry.
A mac and an $800 audio interface (or an $800 camcorder and final cut) is equivalent to about $100000 of gear in 1990. Up that to millions in the mid 80s.
Right now, the same production facilities that studios use are falling into the hands of the masses. And, for the first time the means to distribute ones work to a widespread audience has never been easier or more apparent. Many (real) bands nowdays will actually buy their own studio setup for less than it costs to record for a few days in a professional studio. The movie production equivalent cannot be far off.
By locking down consumer machines so they can readily access only DRM media, the ball is kept in the studios court. Because you can bet that licensing DRM technology will not be cheap.
The motor would be all but solid state anyway.
Just a series of coils, with ceramic magnets embedded in the wheels or something. The Japanese have been hot for this for a while. Most of the Japanese motorbike manufacturers have shown concept electric bikes with (2 wheel drive!!) motors in each wheel. _The_ bike in the Manga Akira was meant to be of this design.
Ah, the land of the free..... "In America, a man can buy his own _laws_ , Ahmed, even his own _government_...."
Unfortunately, in this current climate, a new amendment - "one dollar, one vote" is much more likely... http://web.archive.org/*/http://www.army.mil/leade rs/Secarmy/bio.htm
Why is HDTV even a hardware standard? It not like we haven't been building cheap displays capable of multiple resolutions for years. And its not like tv manufacturers (sony, phillips etc.) will be losing out, because they make these displays... Why is the MPAA not flogging a sofTV standard where such image decryption and display is handled by software. good updatable software. Need HDTV? Then your tv will download HDTVapp when you sign up to your cable providers premium service. Using your sofTV somewhere that they have different broadcast standards (France) then your tv gets le HDTV app. Manufacturers dont have to retool for different markets, consumers don't get ripped off. Manufacturers can generate sales by selling us bigger, wider, better TVs rather than "the same old set, but now F.U.TV capable". Best of all, we get all that neat "enriched content" that was promised to us for the past 12 years as TV approaches true convergance. Anybody for TVML?
sure that you are a fool. Look to the history of Iran, for example. Regarded in the 1950s as an enlightened, prosperous country which had the misfortune to ELECT a president that nationalised their oil industry taking control from the American companies that were taking the oil and paying no tax or reparations for doing so apart from a one time 'prospecting license'. Cue the US funded overthrow of the govenment and the installation of a US friendly Shah who brutally repressed the freedoms you seem to hold so dear, growing fat and wealthy while the standard of living for the iranian on the street plummeted. leading to a popular but tragic overthrow of the regime by a clerical theocracy and ... do you even know the rest of the story? The old US embassy in Tehran is now the 'Museum of Arrogance'. Which is what Americans _are_. The list of crimes committed so you can fill your Lincon Towncar up at the pump for less than the car cost is immeasurable.
Self rightiousness is easy when you are _right_.
Can you name one democratic regime that was put in place in any of the countries 15 that the US has attacked directly in the past 30 years?
Ignorance is bliss, until somebody flies a jetplane into your pretty little towers.....
Those of us in parts of the world with halfway credible media sources can _work it out_. The following tidbits have popped up on the BBC world service in the past week-
Cheney - President of Haliburton Oil.
Bush Snr - 'Consultant' for the Carlyle Group (Worlds largest defense contractor and largest private equity firm in America)
Bush Jnr - Ex oil, ex carlyle group subsudiary.
(as an aside, the Bin Laden family sold its stake in the carlyle group shortly after 9/11. Dubyas first (profitable!) company directorate was on on the board of a company whos principal stakeholder was Salaam bin Laden, a name that pops up all through his 'career')
Those that you have duly elected stand to profit massively if they can keep oil _supply_ price down, through military means.
Get that? - Bush and cronies are using your _money_ and _lives_ to make themselves very very very very very rich.
e.g.-
American taxpayer aid to the taliban was stopped in (the northern) spring due to an oil pipeline deal that was brokered, in part by Cheney, falling through. As a gesture of goodwill, the Taliban supplied the whereabouts of bin Laden at that time. What went wrong? - the contract was awarded to an Argentinian firm. Can you guess plan b?
Amen to that
Also, none of these companies seem to mind that their software gained a hedgemonic hold on its particular market (e.g. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator) due to widespread piracy by students and their ilk. "got any job skills after that ethnomusicology degree, son?".
Meanwhile, on the desktop, companies will only invest in 'industry standard' software i.e. "what do our competition/clients use?" In the case of the advertising industry Photoshop is endemic, yet not a single freelance designer has purchased a licence, some have even been _given_ copies by adobe. Adobe know well that if the designers use photoshop, then the agencies/clients/printers will all be buying copies so they can use these guys work. In fact, i don't know a designer that didn't spend their college years photoshopping minor cleb nudes and making them 'dance' in flash, all in flagrant violation of whatever intellectual property laws that were neccesary.
I have in the past _paid money_ for a version (3.0) of Microsoft Word, but have had to steal on the occasion of every subsequent release, as every damn fool still sends me contract.doc, order.doc, specifications.doc and i guess my primitive software does not have all the incredible new features that let the clients type and tab said documents. I can't say no 'send it in another format', because the clients are quite frankly too stupid to. Anyway that would be bad for business and whats bad for business is, well, illegal, isn't it?
if the software they are peddling is as essential/epochal/compelling/mandatory as they tell us it is, then surely they will gain so much more if the first hit is free. (esp if you hand it out outside the school gates, right?)
You want speed... Some bench marks from when i put a Fu Tech ethernet card into an old (c. 1994) mac i found:- About 60 seconds to crack the (no screw) case, install card, close case. 25 seconds to boot. 10 seconds to enter router address. No drivers. No reboot. No more network issues. ever. Time spent this week installing name brand USB card/mouse on circa 1999 PC running 98 - 3 hours, countless reboots. mouse still intermittant. too scared to try HP burner on said card. Really, what else can i say...
Actually, there were satelites monitoring global ozone levels before the widespread introduction of CFCs. Thing is, the data was used to monitor _global_ ozone levels, thus any abnormally high or low readings were discarded. It took NASA about 6 years to be convinced that it was worthwile to go back over the data they had collected. When plotted there is a constant depletion of ozone from the late 60s when cfcs were widely adopted as both a propellant and a refrigerant.
They must be using an etrex ... ;)
Anybody else use their GPS units for Geocaching? (Sort of a treasure hunt using GPS). In practice, the 100 metre figure is a 'guaranteed' level of accuracy, as i have never been anything like that far off. As it is a long weekend here, some friends and I have been using an old Garmin 45 to find all the geocaches within an hours drive of where we live. All caches so far have been within 10 metres of the waypoint, and the three we found today (one in the dark!) were within 3 metres of where the unit said the waypoint was. It is also quite common for match racing yachts to have centimetre accuracy units (often one in the bow _and_ stern), although the expense of these units (~$25000) makes for a very steep price/performance curve.
I agree, sailing has some of the wildest tech going nowdays.
I have family members actively involved in various americas cup syndicates. The boats are more like formula 1 cars, with US$50,000 GPS units (4 inch accuracy anyone?) front and rear to plot position and velocity when rounding marks, some of the most advanced carbon fibre construction and sail vision technology that flexes the mast in response to a video signal to give the optimum sail shape for the conditions.
There is still a fair bit of intuition involved in design though. The American syndicates just can't understand how the New Zealanders get the boat speed that they do without the involvement of NASA and the use of supercomputers. (An uncle with a European syndicate said that they have had NASA engineers over critiquing their designs, but they were under a tight deadline due to the computers needing to be used for the National Missle Defence system!)
Or maybe they just don't understand anything that is not powered by petroleum.....
Each image, though representing scientific data, resembles a work by an old Dutch master who has met Jackson Pollock. The swirling images are as crowded yet detailed as if every ear of corn on a 100-acre farm were caught in a single image by a camera at 21,000 feet.
The images are expected to allow scientists a better view of complicated systems.
Seem like an intention to use the screen as a visualisation system to me.
40 bits/s is even regarded as optimistic! German neurophysioligists tend to go for a figure of 16 bits/s. The 40 bits/s value was arrived at by John Pierce, a Bell Labs engineer after examining countless (People transmitting information using flashing lights, pianos, tasting sugar concentrations) studies. I think his book on this is called 'Symbols, Signals and Noise', but any good information theory or neurology/psychology tome should cover this.
People making radio programmes use a rule of thumb that it takes 2.5 minutes to read a page aloud. A page contains 40 lines, each 60 characters long. That is 2400 charactes in 150 seconds or an average of 16 bit/s. On average, a character contains 2 bits of information so that is 32 bits/s. Reading aloud entails more than just characters, so if we round up the number of bits to account for rhythm, intonation, pitch etc., we arrive at a figure like Pierce's 40 bits/s.
- Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion.
It all comes down to the limits of conciousness, not human vision.
Every second the brain receives about 11 million bits of information, about 10 million of which is visual. Meanwhile, the throughput of conciousness is about 40 bits/s, and that is not even totally related to sensory input as ones unconcious 'feeds back' information and memories of stimuli received in the past into the mix.
However, it is accepted that we do use much of this 11 million bits - talk to an athlete or quake fiend about 'the zone' ('after playing for a few hours, my mind wanders onto many other things while i fuck shit up like i was on autopilot')
The point of this screen is to display an unprecedented amount of data, too much to be taken in at once even by the subconcious, thus flooding our sensory input leaving our brains free to do what they do best - recognise patterns, holes and anomalies in the massive amount of data represented in new visual ways. Much like a graph lets you visualise a trend easily.
Dot pitch does not matter. The bits of information that can be displayed at once does.
The death of text anyone?
> Third, you have to cross the US border. While I don't know for sure, I would bet there are hidden radiation detectors at all the border crossings.
Why cross a border?
Why pack a suitcase?
A Semi trailer (or 10) packed with high level nuclear waste and explosives detonated at rush hour in a major city sure would make a big and nasty mess. Sure you could decontaminate all that real estate eventually, but within a few generations all the locals will be horrible george bush type mutants.
Ok, high level nuclear waste is a bit tricky to get your hands on, but i am sure that there is a nuke utility company out there that would be willing to pay! you to take some of it off their hands, all hush hush.
The whole thing would qualify for some 'Made in USA' stickers thus taking the heat off your own naughty wee nation.
(please do not try this at home, kids. or in anybody elses home. Remember: WINNERS DON'T USE TERRORISM)
Assume (bear with me) that the missle defence system is, through some technological _miracle_, 90% effective in shooting down incoming ICBMs.
Compose yourself after resulting mirth and consider the following scenarios:
Classic MSD reasoning:
Nation X fires 100 missles, 90% shot down by Nation Ys missile defence system, kiss goodbye to 10 cities brim full of your loved ones. Nation X vapourised in retaliatory strike.
New MSD plus!!!!
Insane texan in charge of Nation Y nukes filthy commie 'rogue state', Nation X. From the ashes, Nation X gets off 10 of its missles, 90% shot down, 1 city of patriot martyrs sacrificed in the name of Nation Y imperialism.
The second scenario is why the ABM treaty was so important, is the reasoning behind many European states objecting to the missle defence system, and will be the logical basis for a new arms race.
Can Americans convince the world that they are to be entrusted with the power to erase any nation that they see fit to, with little or no concequences?
(Reagan was said to be in favour, if star wars episode 1 was feasable, of forcing the Russians into a 'limited nuclear confrontation' to be contained within Europe, thus ridding the world of godless commies once and for all.)
In practice, missle defence will be a lose/lose situation. 'Rogue Nations' will perceive the rennaisance of US militarism as an unwillingness to resolve conflicts by diplomatic or democratic means, and resort to terrorism and guerilla operations. All of which means that there is more terror coming to American citizens, at home and abroad. (Government Agents, Please Note: this is not to be mistaken in any way to be a threat against the good ol' USA. I am a peace loving citizen of a friendly, rapidly demilitarizing nation and I promise that I am not/will not be planning any terrorist action now or in the forseeable future. so don't come knocking my door down, okay.)
one, just one....
- 3 reactor technicians in idaho (one impaled on the ceiling by a control rod, all were buried in lead coffins, their upper torsos and hands disposed of as nuclear waste)
- everybody who visited the chernobyl site in the two weeks after the accident, including the helicopter pilots who flew over trying to get photos of the burning reactor core.
- karen silkwood.
just off the top of my head.
as for those killed/maimed by the ongoing effects of radiation? http://www.tmia.com/daisies.html - great pictures of mutated plant and animal life taken 10 - 15 years after three mile island.
>Mir had a cosmonaut that was up for several weeks and couldn't dock an unmanned satelite to Mir (the cause was most likely that he was just bored for so long he lost his focus)
There was an excellent BBC documentary on this incident with video footage of said cosmonauts face as he piloted the cargo module into Mir, as well as frank and open interviews with the crew back on earth.
The cosmonaut was under extreme pressure, as mission control made it clear that he would lose up to 2/3 of his pay for the 9 months or so that he had been in mir. He had to manually dock the cargo module the emergency manual system which consisted of a joystick, a small video monitor showing a camera aboard the module, and a range readout from which he could judge speed. The first attempt at a manual docking was aborted at the last second, resulting in a near miss due to severe inteference with the video link to the progress module by the radar rangefinder. Mission control ordered him to try again having switched off the rangefinder.
Other highlighs include:-
- Footage of crew abandoning a meal of caviar and vodka as smoke floods the station due to fire in the fuel and oxygen storage area.
- Footage of cosmonaut screaming ESCAPE! ESCAPE! in russian as mir is rocked by the cargo ship collision.
- An account of the two 12 hour total power failures (lights, computers, lifesupport) that occured as a result of the collision.
- Account of the discussion that occured after the fire when it was realised that there were 5 people on mir and one 3 seater soyuz.
- Space drama without Tom Hanks!