That freewifi one might be a guy who isn't even using wifi. If you've ever hung around airports looking for a wireless signal, there is always somebody broadcasting "Free Wireless Internet" or similar SSIDs in ad-hoc mode. Apparently this is a side effect of how some drivers deal with the situation where they can't find a usable access point. If they see an ad-hoc network, they'll "join" it as well, and then start broadcasting the ad-hoc ssid as their own. Thus, in crowded places where people are using Windows (like airport waiting areas), the Free Wifi bug will spread like a disease. It has been like this for years too.
Glazing is not the same thing as "completely burned through". I would have a tough time believing that they even overheated the pads, that would take a LOT of "unstoppable" acceleration.
I personally would not want to drive a car that did not have manual linkage to the steering. Anybody who has ever had a power steering pump fail on them will know what I'm talking about. Heavy steering is much better than no steering at all. I also would not want a car that had purely electronic brakes for the same reason.
Stuff breaks, and you want the failure condition to be as safe as possible.
Note, in NTSB reports - many of these cars have had the brake pads TOTALLY burned through, indicating that once these cars took off on people, they COULD NOT stop.
I'll have to see the report to believe this. Unless people were grossly negligent in servicing their brakes, this would be pretty much impossible. Were people really stuck with runaway acceleration over the course of 50 to 100 miles? Were the breaks really so grossly substandard that they couldn't even stop the engine? Pretty much all cars have something on the other of 10x more breaking power than accelerating power, although I could maybe see this happening on Priuses with their relatively torquey low end thanks to the electric motors. But even then, you're talking about "runaway acceleration" in the 5-15 mph range.
Do the machines even have printers or card readers on them? I guess someone could take a picture of the screen with a camera, but that's going to be rather obvious to his coworkers I'd think.
Also, if the example images I saw online were to be believed, they aren't going to get "highly detailed" anything. The scanners made everybody look like a putty from Power Rangers.
It costs the public more, but you also get a benefit: namely patent free technologies that can be incorporated into products far and wide. It is actually a public good to have more technology available to entrepreneurs who would make the best use of it, instead of just to large corporations who can afford the up-front costs of licensing the dozens of patents they need to tie together to make a new product.
Then again, I'm also one of those crazy people who thinks the Public Domain and Fair Use should be greatly expanded for the same reason. All of the great men of the world did their work standing on the shoulders of giants, and we have been letting the system stifle that for too long IMHO.
The weight still comes into play in the end. It's not 45:1 though, it's more like 2:1. The Tesla Roadster is heavy, but not unmanageably so. At least the mass is more or less centered on the vehicle which makes it impact the handling less than a heavy engine does in a front engined vehicle.
If we knew were to point them, and somebody was watching for exactly the right frequency at wherever we pointed it, for the absolutely microscopic amount of time (again in galactic sense) that we point it there.
The freespace loss from Earth to anywhere outside of the solar system is so incredible that fretting over a couple hundred dB out of literally trillions seems ridiculous, especially with the enormous noise source of the sun practically on top of us (in a galactic sense).
I've always thought the idea that an ET would detect our Radio/TV signals to be romantic at best. This is also why SETI is pretty much pointless.
This sort of thinking creates PC games that tell the player to hit the "X" button to do something, only it actually means the left mouse button because it was X on the console. It also results in FPS games with horrible console-like auto-aim on devices using a mouse and keyboard, and games that needlessly reuse keys because the original controller was too limited for all of the functions the devs wanted to do.
Console ports require more thought than "recompile with a different target".
Hell most of the "latest gen" games are just console ports anyway, and run quite well on PCs that are 5 years old. Sometimes the console port is of especially poor quality and requires a beefy CPU (Grand Theft Auto for example), but even old 2.4Ghz Core2Duos are well above what you need for most modern games.
Did you play the original in the Japanese? Apparently the US version was toned down a bit from the Japanese version because apparently Americans prefer their games to be fun. I played through 1 a few years ago and it was tough, but if you did a bit of grinding in the north before diving into the dungeon it wasn't too terrible.
OTOH, I wouldn't mind if they updated it so the racial traits on the weapons actually worked.
I don't suppose the $250/lb launch costs include the build cost amortized over the lifetime of the system? Or the maintenance costs for that matter. The cost per pound on rockets includes those factors, and far too many people only work up the cost of electricity or whatever when working out the "launch cost" of one of these schemes.
In the end, once you've figured up the total cost of the system it's often more than just using rockets, even though rockets are so terribly inefficient.
I'm still wondering who the heck is going to the trouble to pirate all of these iPhone apps. Most of them are 1 or 2 dollars. It's not like it's Autocad or Maya or something where the pricing is clearly out of the league of the dabbling hobbyist. The online store is ridiculously easy to use too. I have no desire at all to even consider pirating apps on my phone.
The thing that's really annoying is that Apple is using this as an excuse to crack down on jailbreaking on the iPhone, which is really annoying because I get a lot of use out of the terminal app on my phone.
It was also likely pointless, since chances are you would never see a killsat before it got its shot off. I've always assumed that gun was on there just because it was a military project and military guys want to put guns on everything.
...asking the Chinese government to explain itself
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing. Unless Secretary Clinton is willing to back up those words with some sort of action, they are just a waste of breath.
Of course this basically shuts Google out of China entirely, since the great firewall is going to block any access to google.com. It's not entirely good because it means the Chinese people will be forced to rely on state run search engines instead, which are manipulated to conform to the government's viewpoint. You can't combat propaganda by taking your ball and going home.
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That freewifi one might be a guy who isn't even using wifi. If you've ever hung around airports looking for a wireless signal, there is always somebody broadcasting "Free Wireless Internet" or similar SSIDs in ad-hoc mode. Apparently this is a side effect of how some drivers deal with the situation where they can't find a usable access point. If they see an ad-hoc network, they'll "join" it as well, and then start broadcasting the ad-hoc ssid as their own. Thus, in crowded places where people are using Windows (like airport waiting areas), the Free Wifi bug will spread like a disease. It has been like this for years too.
Glazing is not the same thing as "completely burned through". I would have a tough time believing that they even overheated the pads, that would take a LOT of "unstoppable" acceleration.
I personally would not want to drive a car that did not have manual linkage to the steering. Anybody who has ever had a power steering pump fail on them will know what I'm talking about. Heavy steering is much better than no steering at all. I also would not want a car that had purely electronic brakes for the same reason.
Stuff breaks, and you want the failure condition to be as safe as possible.
I'll have to see the report to believe this. Unless people were grossly negligent in servicing their brakes, this would be pretty much impossible. Were people really stuck with runaway acceleration over the course of 50 to 100 miles? Were the breaks really so grossly substandard that they couldn't even stop the engine? Pretty much all cars have something on the other of 10x more breaking power than accelerating power, although I could maybe see this happening on Priuses with their relatively torquey low end thanks to the electric motors. But even then, you're talking about "runaway acceleration" in the 5-15 mph range.
Yes, but just look at all of the times in history where 8 year olds have hijacked airplanes.
Do the machines even have printers or card readers on them? I guess someone could take a picture of the screen with a camera, but that's going to be rather obvious to his coworkers I'd think.
Also, if the example images I saw online were to be believed, they aren't going to get "highly detailed" anything. The scanners made everybody look like a putty from Power Rangers.
Would these things even work against a plastic explosive modeled in the shape of a beer gut?
It costs the public more, but you also get a benefit: namely patent free technologies that can be incorporated into products far and wide. It is actually a public good to have more technology available to entrepreneurs who would make the best use of it, instead of just to large corporations who can afford the up-front costs of licensing the dozens of patents they need to tie together to make a new product.
Then again, I'm also one of those crazy people who thinks the Public Domain and Fair Use should be greatly expanded for the same reason. All of the great men of the world did their work standing on the shoulders of giants, and we have been letting the system stifle that for too long IMHO.
The weight still comes into play in the end. It's not 45:1 though, it's more like 2:1. The Tesla Roadster is heavy, but not unmanageably so. At least the mass is more or less centered on the vehicle which makes it impact the handling less than a heavy engine does in a front engined vehicle.
If we knew were to point them, and somebody was watching for exactly the right frequency at wherever we pointed it, for the absolutely microscopic amount of time (again in galactic sense) that we point it there.
The freespace loss from Earth to anywhere outside of the solar system is so incredible that fretting over a couple hundred dB out of literally trillions seems ridiculous, especially with the enormous noise source of the sun practically on top of us (in a galactic sense).
I've always thought the idea that an ET would detect our Radio/TV signals to be romantic at best. This is also why SETI is pretty much pointless.
I think the poster was saying "It's just WEP, crack it". Even 128 bit WEP is trivial to crack.
You've never dealt with phone companies before have you?
This sort of thinking creates PC games that tell the player to hit the "X" button to do something, only it actually means the left mouse button because it was X on the console. It also results in FPS games with horrible console-like auto-aim on devices using a mouse and keyboard, and games that needlessly reuse keys because the original controller was too limited for all of the functions the devs wanted to do.
Console ports require more thought than "recompile with a different target".
Hell most of the "latest gen" games are just console ports anyway, and run quite well on PCs that are 5 years old. Sometimes the console port is of especially poor quality and requires a beefy CPU (Grand Theft Auto for example), but even old 2.4Ghz Core2Duos are well above what you need for most modern games.
For those of you who are confused by these scary looking Terrorbytes, these tapes would hold about a third of a Library of Congress each.
Did you play the original in the Japanese? Apparently the US version was toned down a bit from the Japanese version because apparently Americans prefer their games to be fun. I played through 1 a few years ago and it was tough, but if you did a bit of grinding in the north before diving into the dungeon it wasn't too terrible. OTOH, I wouldn't mind if they updated it so the racial traits on the weapons actually worked.
Or more to the point: why not just get a moped?
I don't suppose the $250/lb launch costs include the build cost amortized over the lifetime of the system? Or the maintenance costs for that matter. The cost per pound on rockets includes those factors, and far too many people only work up the cost of electricity or whatever when working out the "launch cost" of one of these schemes.
In the end, once you've figured up the total cost of the system it's often more than just using rockets, even though rockets are so terribly inefficient.
Compared to multitap? Qwerty phones are loads faster, just by virtue of requiring far fewer button presses and fewer enforced delays.
I'm still wondering who the heck is going to the trouble to pirate all of these iPhone apps. Most of them are 1 or 2 dollars. It's not like it's Autocad or Maya or something where the pricing is clearly out of the league of the dabbling hobbyist. The online store is ridiculously easy to use too. I have no desire at all to even consider pirating apps on my phone.
The thing that's really annoying is that Apple is using this as an excuse to crack down on jailbreaking on the iPhone, which is really annoying because I get a lot of use out of the terminal app on my phone.
You failed to patent it first, that's what you missed. Just think of the licensing fees you could be raking in.
It was also likely pointless, since chances are you would never see a killsat before it got its shot off. I've always assumed that gun was on there just because it was a military project and military guys want to put guns on everything.
Why is the government wasting time with this? Everybody knows what the answer is going to be, the Chinese government is going to deny everything and change nothing. Unless Secretary Clinton is willing to back up those words with some sort of action, they are just a waste of breath.
Of course this basically shuts Google out of China entirely, since the great firewall is going to block any access to google.com. It's not entirely good because it means the Chinese people will be forced to rely on state run search engines instead, which are manipulated to conform to the government's viewpoint. You can't combat propaganda by taking your ball and going home.