Proof that Americans can't remember what happened in the entertainment industry for very long.
No - you're confusing correlation with causality.
The studios hold all the oscar-possible films until the end of the year to make sure they are fresh in the minds of the people doing the nominations. As a result, the rest of the year doesn't see many oscar-worthy films. Can you name a film in the other 9 months of the year you think should have been nominated?
So it isn't that we don't remember, it is that studios don't trust us to remember and therefore they release all the good stuff in the end of the year.
One of the ways any ISP can keep track of its customers' browsing habits is to log DNS requests. IF your ISP pulls this baloney on you, try using some other ISP's DNS servers.
Alternately, use dnscache from the djbdns package. It will go straight to the root servers in order to resolve domains, and keep a local cache for good performance. It also protects you from cache poisoning.
Can someone explain why the Good Guys always have to keep the Bad Guy on the line for something like three minutes in order to trace the call...
I always figured that the database wasn't real time. Either it doesn't update until the call completes (at which point it logs "Start Time - Source - Dest - Duration" as one line) or it logs it on subsidiary (CO) equipment that isn't accessible to Ma Bell in real time.
Isn't tapping internet connections the same, legally, as a phone tap?
Probably, but this probably isn't "tapping internet connections." I'll bet you dollars to donuts that when Comcast gets called on this, they'll explain how they're only "capturing and keeping limited information" with "aggregate identification only" so that they can "optimize their network configuration" or something like that. The phone company doesn't tap converstations, but they sure as hell have a database of which line called which number, when, and for how long.
They might even be telling the truth. Not that we care - who wants to be the first to write an app that makes random requests to random domains constantly so as to screw up their database?
Well, sure - IANAL. This isn't a legal forum, either. Deal.
Trademarks do NOT have to be actively defended. They should be actively defended, especially if you have the resources. However they do NOT have to be actively defended.
Copyright does not have to be actively defended. Trademark does. Consider:
- Trademark law requires that the trademark owner police the use of the trademark (unlike, for example, copyright law, where the copyright owner is the copyright owner, always is, and always will be unless he willingly relinquishes ownership, and even THEN he ends up having rights).
This is nasty, because it means, for example, that a trademark owner has to be shown as caring about even small infringements, because
otherwise the really bad guys can use as their defense that "hey, we may have misused it, but look at those other cases that they didn't go
after, they obviously don't care.."
Go ask a lawyer, I did. In fact, I asked 3 of them on this exact topic.
Sorry. You probably asked the wrong question. Among other things, you're probably confusing prior art (a patent issue) with unopposed infringement (a trademark issue).
Can I do this legally? Patent something, hope someone else develops a similar technology, say nothing for 20 years until the patent is about to expire and economies depend on my product, then just raise my hand one day and say, "Excuse me! You have to pay me now".
Yes, they can do that - trademarks have to be actively defended, patents do not. Consider Unisys and the gif (lzw?) patent.
"NIS was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP) but the name Yellow Pages(tm) is a registered trademark in the United Kingdom of British Telecom plc and may not be used without permission."
What if a fetus could be transplated from a natural womb to an artificial one?
Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely. Implantation is a very touchy process that happens once, and once it happens the embryo is dependent on the steady flow of life support from the host. The embryo is designed to implant once. It isn't designed to implant twice. In real life, if the embryo detaches, that's a miscarriage.
I'm no expert, but I believe that POSIX compatibility only involves things like system calls and library interfaces. LSB includes things like filesystem layout and recommended locations, so that (for example) you don't have/usr/bin/sendmail on one distribution but/usr/sbin/sendmail on another distribution.
POSIX is an OS standard, LSB is a distribution standard.
Is it REALLY fair to charge a flat fee, which means divide total cost usage by total users and then charge that to each user (plus a markup -don't forget that this is NOT a charity, but a business-)? If so, then what happens is that those that hardly use it are heavily subsidizing the big users.
Of course it is fair. That's how the phone infrastructure works. That's how taxes work, and social security. I hate to tell you this - MANY things work by such subsidy, because it is cheaper and fairer to do it that way than to try and fairly and accurately account for individual contribution.
If there are no limits, what stops you from getting yourself a cable/DSL access and then wiring up your whole neighbourhood through you?
The trouble, expense, etc involved? Can you point to a single documented case of this happening? Or was that just a rhetorical question?
Please note, that links, routers, equipment, staff, electricity, etc... are NOT free.
This is true. Clearly, the solution is to go hire people, probably for decent $$, to find, persecute and drive away users who might want to be able to share a connection with, say, their wife.
(That was sarcasm, by the way.)
If an ISP has unlimited access which it is calculating on the basis of an average SINGLE user with a SINGLE machine...
Phew, I'm safe. I happen to be signed up with an ISP that has unlimited access at 1500k down, 300k up. I'm not great at math, but I've noticed that there's no real difference in how those caps behave when divided by multiple computers.
I suppose this means that my spiffy old.ne.mediaone.net (I have fought many times to keep it from changing to one of those ugly hXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses) will get changed into some ugly attbi.com address.
Since the hXXXXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses were machine-constant (X == MAC address, and therefore you always had the same name) I just pointed my www and MX records at that name for the first year. Then came the big DHCP/DNS "upgrade" a couple of months ago. DNS was screwed up for a week and a half. I went to DynDNS and haven't looked back. Free to host up to 5 DNS records; $30/lifetime to host 1 domain, and more reliable than AT&T will ever be.
anyone with @mediaone.com will have to get a new email address... AND anyone with @attbroadband.com will have to get a new address as well.
The sad thing is, they just went and deleted all the mediaone.* newsgroups and created a new attbroadband.* hierarchy to replace them. No doubt they'll want to move them to attbi.* now.
Without GPS you can't fire a single Cruise Missile
Not at all true - GPS is just more accurate than inertial guidance systems. When you're aiming at an airfield, power complex, or military base, the ability to hit the exact 15 feet you want is nice but not necessary. Cruise missiles did exist before GPS, you know.
Without GPS you'll find it hard to find your bombing targets / intercept enemy fighters
Not at all true - AWACS, Predator drones, and special forces on the ground with laser targeting provide that. Very few enemy fighters are intercepted at the appropriate GPS coordinates in any case. (Except the Iraqis, who could be reliably intercepted at Iranian air bases)
Take GPS from the picture and US-style "warfare" is a very different proposition.
I'm not up-to-date on the weaponry, but I strongly suspect that GPS is not the only targeting system available today - just the most commonly used, because it is the most accurate. Yes, collateral damage would go up, but the ability to wage war would not be severely impacted.
I suspect that if the GPS system was knocked out, there would be a few hours or days pause as the other guidance systems are pulled out, dusted off, and screwed on. Keep in mind, many of the bombs dropped on Afghanistan were built during the Vietnam war. Old military hardware never dies, it just sits on the shelf until it is needed.
Is there a military buff out there who is familiar with what the state-of-the-art is in non-GPS weapon guidance systems? Please chime in!
gee someone's a little too pro-american. Look past those photos and realise that the main reason Taliban have died is the Northern Alliance...
I doubt that - the Northern Alliance is who the Taliban surrendered to, and who held ground. I suspect american bombs killed more Taliban than Northern Alliance troops did.
A better example would be the 1993 Mogadishu battle. ~100 Rangers and Delta Force troops held out for around 18 hours against a whole city, losing <20 soldiers and killing 500+ Somalians in the process. And that was a clusterfuck on the U.S. side!
(Alternately, Desert Storm - hundreds of coalition forces lost, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost. Ludicrously asymmetric.)
We American's arent invincible you know.
No, but we are generally much better equipped and usually don't get into a fight where we don't already have air superiority. At least until the next time we screw it up - we have, we do, we will.
but wouldn't it make more sense just to give that soldier a jeep?
No, for several reasons. Want examples? Read Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden (warning, movie is reputed to have avoided anything involving insight or thought, but I highly recommend the book. It manages to balance readable action with reasonably objective insight).
Bipeds (and quadrapeds) are capable of far greater mobility over rough terrain than wheeled vehicles. In the 1993 Mogadishu battle, a wheeled/armored column sent out to rescue the crew of a downed helicopter was unable to reach the helicopter because the section of the city the 'copter crashed in was unreachable by vehicle. Another column was unable to correctly move 3 blocks where troops on foot covered the distance on foot correctly, if not easily.
Also in that battle, every wheeled/armored column (there were 3, minimum) found itself hemmed in and redirected by obstacles thrown up by ragged irregulars with no heavy machinery.
As for trading up into helicopters, two of them were shot down in that battle by anti-tank RPGs which are theoretically incapable or impractical for ground-to-air shots. There's no cover in the air.
The trend is towards carrying more gear, and exoskeletons let you carry it without throwing away the mobility (as discussed above). Another lesson from Mogadishu: most of the elite Delta and Ranger forces left their night-vision goggles at base because 1) it was a day raid, 2) it was one more thing to carry and 3) they wanted to avoid breaking them unnecessarily. They ended up spending the night pinned down by a vastly numerically superior force, wishing they had that equipment. The ability to carry more gear more safely is vital for highly trained, well equipped "super soldiers."
An exoskeleton is basically a vehicle optimized to mimic human mobility ranges.
Exactly, and human mobility ranges are IDEAL for rough terrain and urban terrain. Pick a war:
Vietnam - dense jungle. Give me bipedal mobility. Helicopters were only useful for insertion/exit, and don't even mention jeeps. (Alternately, consider Hue, which was pure and dirty street fighting, also not good for tanks, jeeps, or helicopters.)
Afghanistan (Soviets, 1979-1989) - The Mujahadeen just LOVED it when the Soviets would run a convoy up a narrow canyon. Ready-made ambush.
Iraq (Desert Storm) - Exos wouldn't do it. Neither would jeeps. That was a ready-made tank war - but only because Sadaam wanted to rule the third-world roost with Cold War-era TOE and tactics. (hint for petty dictators: the US spent 40 years preparing for a major tank war with the Soviet Union. Soviet tanks may be great for oppressing your own villagers and scaring rich but non-martial oil nations, but don't even think about going up against the US with them.)
Basically, there are two kinds of wars: those which offer a maneuverable battlefield, and those that don't. In the former, air superiority and ground armor (read: tanks, not jeeps) are the decisive factor. In the latter, the amount of firepower, coordination, tactical information, and maneuverability of the foot soldier is the key, and exoskeletons will allow the foot soldier to have a serious advantage in those areas, and probably to gain some armor too eventually. Note also that opponents of the US will be trying to arrange non-maneuverable battlefields, because it's becoming clear that challenging the US on that field is suicidal, just as the Arab countries have stopped starting tank wars with Israel and instead moved to terrorism and popular uprising.
Another lesson from Black Hawk Down - the amount of tactical information available is now exceeding the ability of command elements to grasp it all. The old "fog of war" meant you couldn't see. The new "fog of war" means you can't see the forest because you've got more trees than you can take in. As information and communication equipment is pushed out to the foot soldier (remember, an exo lets you carry more) this problem will only get worse, which means that the challenge for today's (high-tech) military is to improve their information processing systems so they can keep up and use the right info to make good decisions.
(Almost made it through without an Appleseed reference!)
Is the way to finally break the main dilemma of the hydrogen economy? (That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it.)
No. In order to do that, you would have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics [ouc.bc.ca].
You're playing with the words. The dilemna of the hydrogen economy is that the inefficiencies of conversion cause more energy to be wasted (from the point of view of human users, natch) than is the case with other, less friendly (environmentally, renewability) fuels (like petroleum).
There's a reason the footage isn't in the original cut.
Yup - the moviegoing public has limited patience for 4 hour films.
...the distributor threw in an extra hour of crap that they tossed on the cutting room floor...
From the description, the extra bits will be sequences that got cut for time in a film that had to work especially hard to fit a large story into a smaller viewing slot. There's no evidence that these sequences are less well shot - just that G**** falling for G********* and thus changing his opinion of E**** didn't directly relate to FOTR as it did to the Trilogy as a whole, and thus it got cut.
All the other "extras" they claim are in them are just crap.
We'll see. In August. I am looking forward to it. The only big question is whether it'll be spliced into the story or if it'll be set aside.
all this means is the companies developing this stuff will have to improve their face-matching algorithm and then we'll all be back at square one.
It's worse than that:
There's no evidence that the face-matching algorithm is the problem. It is for false positives, but the lack of true positives is just as likely to be a lack of... positives.
If so, it isn't the facial recgnition that needs work - it's the facial database! We'll have to start requiring facial shots for all incoming student visa holders.
Heck, make that all visa holders.
Frankly, everybody belongs in the database but me and thee... and I'm not so sure about thee.
How long until these companies start lobbying the gov't for mandatory inclusion of, say, license photos in the pool of database data so that people can be picked up as soon as they do something?
If you want a timesheet program, write a timesheet program (web frontend, VB, C+Gnome, whatever).
The point is NOT what I want. The point is "What will the people in accounting, who are in no way beholden to me, accept?"
The answer is Excel. Maybe a good choice. Maybe a bad one. I don't know, because I'm not a spreadsheet user, just a guy trying to use Linux without shutting myself off from the rest of the company.
Although GNumeric is a great program, and I appreciate the effort, it is not Excel
No, but it is exactly what I (and, I suspect, various other people) need: a simple way for me to be able to do most of my work in Linux and still be able to submit a timesheet to the nice people in accounting.
90% of the spreadsheets out there use 10% of Excel's capability. Most people don't know how to use most of Excel except the simplest bits. So for my money, Gnumeric doesn't have to be Excel. I've got real work to do.
(Of course, those in the audience who count beans will want Excel. Have fun.)
All data centers are designed to impress customers, and the true level of security is never as high as the hype/promise.
The only true data center survivability lies in redundancy
I've been a customer at Exodus, and I've toured a number of other data center sites. The centers are generally designed to impress visitors - the "dead man zone" room being a perennial favorite - and to suggest a level of security that isn't truly there. There's a reason that the government doesn't build secure sites in the middle of an industrial park, yet that's often where you find colo/data centers. Also, the number of "sales prospects" triapsing through the data center should suggest that the true security level is lower than advertised.
As far as survivability goes, no matter how much work you put into the power, the redundant data lines, the physical security, there is no true survivability in a single site. (Look at 9/11 - how many WTC companies basically said "we'd have been dead if we didn't set up off-site disaster recovery after the '93 bomb"). Any single building can be disrupted by a determined attacker. You have to use multiple sites to be truly survivable (again, look at the Internet - the whole idea was a distributed, survivable network.
The problem is that when Visa and MC tell you that you have a chargeback all they give you is the Credit Card number, date, and amount.
I had been under the impression that it was more usual for credit card companies to use a subset of the number, usually the last four digits in conjunction with the expiration data. That was second-hand knowledge, though. I worked at a.com and recall the support people and the development people going back and forth because the developers initially didn't store/display the subset that support generally needed for dealing with credit card issues, and the support people had a hard time getting the appropriate engineer to 1) understand and 2) fix the problem.
Though there is no really good way to do it, the safest way to do it is to isolate credit card info onto a seperate box, limit the access to that box to the absolute minimum required to request a charge, and have that box then directly contact the credit card clearinghouse rather than return a CC# for use by the other half of your application.
Encryption (SSL minimum, preferably also encrypted in store with keys being supplied by the other half of the application) is necessary, the lockbox code needs to be as limited in capability as can be, and what remains must be thoroughly audited to limit the likelihood of breach. No other services should run on that box, and physical access must be tight. A shared cage at Exodus doesn't do it.
Whatever you do technically, I think the most important thing is... don't forget to let the customer decide. Any app that stores CC info should allow the customer to decide NOT to have their info stored. I rarely see sites that allow me to "opt out" of having them store my credit card info, and I'd rather retype it than trust them.
If you ask me, this is a superb idea, as long as the fish can survive in the waters you release them.
Basically, this isn't harming anyone or anything. The fish have been manipulated once, and have very little advantage over other fish in the water. In fact, they probably have no advantage, being that they aren't conscious enough to realize that they're changing color in a certain amount of pollutant.
I can sense the Law of Unintended Consequences stepping in here.
Suppose that the color change makes the fish more noticeable to predators, and therefore the altered fish are more likely to become dinner (Most fish coloring is designed around either attracting dinner or avoiding being dinner). Then you've created a situation in which the food chain becomes more heavily focused in polluted areas. And encouraging fish to gather in polluted areas can have all sorts of negative affects, such as decreasing their fertility.
I guess I come down on the side of believing that some things don't have enough benefit to screw with...
Is anyone else out there dissapointed to see Glorfindel's role of chasing the riders into the river being replaced by [Arwen]?
I was not disappointed; in fact, I appreciated it. Here's why:
In the book, Glorfindel was essentially a throw-away character.
Throwing a random elf in for the chase of the Nazgul would have made the movie more confusing to those who haven't read the book
In the book, Arwen's relationship with Aragorn is described in more detail than is possible in the movie. Switching Arwen for Glorfindel allows the audience to see who this person is and keeps her from being a throwaway character - because we know she is more important when the King returns.
I saw the movie last night, and thought it was wonderful. There were only two changes/omissions that I felt had a negative bearing on the overall story, and I thought they did a great job of getting the salient points and the appropriate aura across for pretty much everything else while keeping it a viewable movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Proof that Americans can't remember what happened in the entertainment industry for very long.
No - you're confusing correlation with causality.
The studios hold all the oscar-possible films until the end of the year to make sure they are fresh in the minds of the people doing the nominations. As a result, the rest of the year doesn't see many oscar-worthy films. Can you name a film in the other 9 months of the year you think should have been nominated?
So it isn't that we don't remember, it is that studios don't trust us to remember and therefore they release all the good stuff in the end of the year.
One of the ways any ISP can keep track of its customers' browsing habits is to log DNS requests. IF your ISP pulls this baloney on you, try using some other ISP's DNS servers.
Alternately, use dnscache from the djbdns package. It will go straight to the root servers in order to resolve domains, and keep a local cache for good performance. It also protects you from cache poisoning.
Can someone explain why the Good Guys always have to keep the Bad Guy on the line for something like three minutes in order to trace the call...
I always figured that the database wasn't real time. Either it doesn't update until the call completes (at which point it logs "Start Time - Source - Dest - Duration" as one line) or it logs it on subsidiary (CO) equipment that isn't accessible to Ma Bell in real time.
Disclaimer: I pulled that theory out of my butt.
Isn't tapping internet connections the same, legally, as a phone tap?
Probably, but this probably isn't "tapping internet connections." I'll bet you dollars to donuts that when Comcast gets called on this, they'll explain how they're only "capturing and keeping limited information" with "aggregate identification only" so that they can "optimize their network configuration" or something like that. The phone company doesn't tap converstations, but they sure as hell have a database of which line called which number, when, and for how long.
They might even be telling the truth. Not that we care - who wants to be the first to write an app that makes random requests to random domains constantly so as to screw up their database?
I think you should add the IANAL eh?
Well, sure - IANAL. This isn't a legal forum, either. Deal.
Trademarks do NOT have to be actively defended. They should be actively defended, especially if you have the resources. However they do NOT have to be actively defended.
Copyright does not have to be actively defended. Trademark does. Consider:
- Trademark law requires that the trademark owner police the use of the trademark (unlike, for example, copyright law, where the copyright owner is the copyright owner, always is, and always will be unless he willingly relinquishes ownership, and even THEN he ends up having rights).
This is nasty, because it means, for example, that a trademark owner has to be shown as caring about even small infringements, because otherwise the really bad guys can use as their defense that "hey, we may have misused it, but look at those other cases that they didn't go after, they obviously don't care.."
(Linus Explains Linux Trademark Issues)Go ask a lawyer, I did. In fact, I asked 3 of them on this exact topic.
Sorry. You probably asked the wrong question. Among other things, you're probably confusing prior art (a patent issue) with unopposed infringement (a trademark issue).
Can I do this legally? Patent something, hope someone else develops a similar technology, say nothing for 20 years until the patent is about to expire and economies depend on my product, then just raise my hand one day and say, "Excuse me! You have to pay me now".
Yes, they can do that - trademarks have to be actively defended, patents do not. Consider Unisys and the gif (lzw?) patent.
Who here remembers Sun's YP - excuse, me NIS?
"NIS was formerly known as Sun Yellow Pages (YP) but the name Yellow Pages(tm) is a registered trademark in the United Kingdom of British Telecom plc and may not be used without permission."
NIS HOWTOWhat if a fetus could be transplated from a natural womb to an artificial one?
Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely. Implantation is a very touchy process that happens once, and once it happens the embryo is dependent on the steady flow of life support from the host. The embryo is designed to implant once. It isn't designed to implant twice. In real life, if the embryo detaches, that's a miscarriage.
isn't this the whole idea of "posix compatible"?
I'm no expert, but I believe that POSIX compatibility only involves things like system calls and library interfaces. LSB includes things like filesystem layout and recommended locations, so that (for example) you don't have /usr/bin/sendmail on one distribution but /usr/sbin/sendmail on another distribution.
POSIX is an OS standard, LSB is a distribution standard.
Is it REALLY fair to charge a flat fee, which means divide total cost usage by total users and then charge that to each user (plus a markup -don't forget that this is NOT a charity, but a business-)? If so, then what happens is that those that hardly use it are heavily subsidizing the big users.
Of course it is fair. That's how the phone infrastructure works. That's how taxes work, and social security. I hate to tell you this - MANY things work by such subsidy, because it is cheaper and fairer to do it that way than to try and fairly and accurately account for individual contribution.
If there are no limits, what stops you from getting yourself a cable/DSL access and then wiring up your whole neighbourhood through you?
The trouble, expense, etc involved? Can you point to a single documented case of this happening? Or was that just a rhetorical question?
Please note, that links, routers, equipment, staff, electricity, etc... are NOT free.
This is true. Clearly, the solution is to go hire people, probably for decent $$, to find, persecute and drive away users who might want to be able to share a connection with, say, their wife.
(That was sarcasm, by the way.)
If an ISP has unlimited access which it is calculating on the basis of an average SINGLE user with a SINGLE machine...
Phew, I'm safe. I happen to be signed up with an ISP that has unlimited access at 1500k down, 300k up. I'm not great at math, but I've noticed that there's no real difference in how those caps behave when divided by multiple computers.
I suppose this means that my spiffy old .ne.mediaone.net (I have fought many times to keep it from changing to one of those ugly hXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses) will get changed into some ugly attbi.com address.
Since the hXXXXXXXXXXXX.ne.mediaone.net addresses were machine-constant (X == MAC address, and therefore you always had the same name) I just pointed my www and MX records at that name for the first year. Then came the big DHCP/DNS "upgrade" a couple of months ago. DNS was screwed up for a week and a half. I went to DynDNS and haven't looked back. Free to host up to 5 DNS records; $30/lifetime to host 1 domain, and more reliable than AT&T will ever be.anyone with @mediaone.com will have to get a new email address... AND anyone with @attbroadband.com will have to get a new address as well.
The sad thing is, they just went and deleted all the mediaone.* newsgroups and created a new attbroadband.* hierarchy to replace them. No doubt they'll want to move them to attbi.* now.Without GPS you can't fire a single Cruise Missile
Not at all true - GPS is just more accurate than inertial guidance systems. When you're aiming at an airfield, power complex, or military base, the ability to hit the exact 15 feet you want is nice but not necessary. Cruise missiles did exist before GPS, you know.
Without GPS you'll find it hard to find your bombing targets / intercept enemy fighters
Not at all true - AWACS, Predator drones, and special forces on the ground with laser targeting provide that. Very few enemy fighters are intercepted at the appropriate GPS coordinates in any case. (Except the Iraqis, who could be reliably intercepted at Iranian air bases)
Take GPS from the picture and US-style "warfare" is a very different proposition.
I'm not up-to-date on the weaponry, but I strongly suspect that GPS is not the only targeting system available today - just the most commonly used, because it is the most accurate. Yes, collateral damage would go up, but the ability to wage war would not be severely impacted.
I suspect that if the GPS system was knocked out, there would be a few hours or days pause as the other guidance systems are pulled out, dusted off, and screwed on. Keep in mind, many of the bombs dropped on Afghanistan were built during the Vietnam war. Old military hardware never dies, it just sits on the shelf until it is needed.
Is there a military buff out there who is familiar with what the state-of-the-art is in non-GPS weapon guidance systems? Please chime in!
gee someone's a little too pro-american. Look past those photos and realise that the main reason Taliban have died is the Northern Alliance...
I doubt that - the Northern Alliance is who the Taliban surrendered to, and who held ground. I suspect american bombs killed more Taliban than Northern Alliance troops did.
A better example would be the 1993 Mogadishu battle. ~100 Rangers and Delta Force troops held out for around 18 hours against a whole city, losing <20 soldiers and killing 500+ Somalians in the process. And that was a clusterfuck on the U.S. side!
(Alternately, Desert Storm - hundreds of coalition forces lost, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost. Ludicrously asymmetric.)
We American's arent invincible you know.
No, but we are generally much better equipped and usually don't get into a fight where we don't already have air superiority. At least until the next time we screw it up - we have, we do, we will.
but wouldn't it make more sense just to give that soldier a jeep?
No, for several reasons. Want examples? Read Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden (warning, movie is reputed to have avoided anything involving insight or thought, but I highly recommend the book. It manages to balance readable action with reasonably objective insight).
An exoskeleton is basically a vehicle optimized to mimic human mobility ranges.
Exactly, and human mobility ranges are IDEAL for rough terrain and urban terrain. Pick a war:
Basically, there are two kinds of wars: those which offer a maneuverable battlefield, and those that don't. In the former, air superiority and ground armor (read: tanks, not jeeps) are the decisive factor. In the latter, the amount of firepower, coordination, tactical information, and maneuverability of the foot soldier is the key, and exoskeletons will allow the foot soldier to have a serious advantage in those areas, and probably to gain some armor too eventually. Note also that opponents of the US will be trying to arrange non-maneuverable battlefields, because it's becoming clear that challenging the US on that field is suicidal, just as the Arab countries have stopped starting tank wars with Israel and instead moved to terrorism and popular uprising.
Another lesson from Black Hawk Down - the amount of tactical information available is now exceeding the ability of command elements to grasp it all. The old "fog of war" meant you couldn't see. The new "fog of war" means you can't see the forest because you've got more trees than you can take in. As information and communication equipment is pushed out to the foot soldier (remember, an exo lets you carry more) this problem will only get worse, which means that the challenge for today's (high-tech) military is to improve their information processing systems so they can keep up and use the right info to make good decisions.
(Almost made it through without an Appleseed reference!)
Is the way to finally break the main dilemma of the hydrogen economy? (That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it.)
No. In order to do that, you would have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics [ouc.bc.ca].
You're playing with the words. The dilemna of the hydrogen economy is that the inefficiencies of conversion cause more energy to be wasted (from the point of view of human users, natch) than is the case with other, less friendly (environmentally, renewability) fuels (like petroleum).
There's a reason the footage isn't in the original cut.
Yup - the moviegoing public has limited patience for 4 hour films.
From the description, the extra bits will be sequences that got cut for time in a film that had to work especially hard to fit a large story into a smaller viewing slot. There's no evidence that these sequences are less well shot - just that G**** falling for G********* and thus changing his opinion of E**** didn't directly relate to FOTR as it did to the Trilogy as a whole, and thus it got cut.
All the other "extras" they claim are in them are just crap.
We'll see. In August. I am looking forward to it. The only big question is whether it'll be spliced into the story or if it'll be set aside.
all this means is the companies developing this stuff will have to improve their face-matching algorithm and then we'll all be back at square one.
It's worse than that:
How long until these companies start lobbying the gov't for mandatory inclusion of, say, license photos in the pool of database data so that people can be picked up as soon as they do something?
If you want a timesheet program, write a timesheet program (web frontend, VB, C+Gnome, whatever).
The point is NOT what I want. The point is "What will the people in accounting, who are in no way beholden to me, accept?"
The answer is Excel. Maybe a good choice. Maybe a bad one. I don't know, because I'm not a spreadsheet user, just a guy trying to use Linux without shutting myself off from the rest of the company.
Although GNumeric is a great program, and I appreciate the effort, it is not Excel
No, but it is exactly what I (and, I suspect, various other people) need: a simple way for me to be able to do most of my work in Linux and still be able to submit a timesheet to the nice people in accounting.
90% of the spreadsheets out there use 10% of Excel's capability. Most people don't know how to use most of Excel except the simplest bits. So for my money, Gnumeric doesn't have to be Excel. I've got real work to do.
(Of course, those in the audience who count beans will want Excel. Have fun.)
I've been a customer at Exodus, and I've toured a number of other data center sites. The centers are generally designed to impress visitors - the "dead man zone" room being a perennial favorite - and to suggest a level of security that isn't truly there. There's a reason that the government doesn't build secure sites in the middle of an industrial park, yet that's often where you find colo/data centers. Also, the number of "sales prospects" triapsing through the data center should suggest that the true security level is lower than advertised.
As far as survivability goes, no matter how much work you put into the power, the redundant data lines, the physical security, there is no true survivability in a single site. (Look at 9/11 - how many WTC companies basically said "we'd have been dead if we didn't set up off-site disaster recovery after the '93 bomb"). Any single building can be disrupted by a determined attacker. You have to use multiple sites to be truly survivable (again, look at the Internet - the whole idea was a distributed, survivable network.
The problem is that when Visa and MC tell you that you have a chargeback all they give you is the Credit Card number, date, and amount.
I had been under the impression that it was more usual for credit card companies to use a subset of the number, usually the last four digits in conjunction with the expiration data. That was second-hand knowledge, though. I worked at a .com and recall the support people and the development people going back and forth because the developers initially didn't store/display the subset that support generally needed for dealing with credit card issues, and the support people had a hard time getting the appropriate engineer to 1) understand and 2) fix the problem.
Though there is no really good way to do it, the safest way to do it is to isolate credit card info onto a seperate box, limit the access to that box to the absolute minimum required to request a charge, and have that box then directly contact the credit card clearinghouse rather than return a CC# for use by the other half of your application.
Encryption (SSL minimum, preferably also encrypted in store with keys being supplied by the other half of the application) is necessary, the lockbox code needs to be as limited in capability as can be, and what remains must be thoroughly audited to limit the likelihood of breach. No other services should run on that box, and physical access must be tight. A shared cage at Exodus doesn't do it.
Whatever you do technically, I think the most important thing is... don't forget to let the customer decide. Any app that stores CC info should allow the customer to decide NOT to have their info stored. I rarely see sites that allow me to "opt out" of having them store my credit card info, and I'd rather retype it than trust them.
If you ask me, this is a superb idea, as long as the fish can survive in the waters you release them.
Basically, this isn't harming anyone or anything. The fish have been manipulated once, and have very little advantage over other fish in the water. In fact, they probably have no advantage, being that they aren't conscious enough to realize that they're changing color in a certain amount of pollutant.
I can sense the Law of Unintended Consequences stepping in here.
Suppose that the color change makes the fish more noticeable to predators, and therefore the altered fish are more likely to become dinner (Most fish coloring is designed around either attracting dinner or avoiding being dinner). Then you've created a situation in which the food chain becomes more heavily focused in polluted areas. And encouraging fish to gather in polluted areas can have all sorts of negative affects, such as decreasing their fertility.
I guess I come down on the side of believing that some things don't have enough benefit to screw with...
Is anyone else out there dissapointed to see Glorfindel's role of chasing the riders into the river being replaced by [Arwen]?
I was not disappointed; in fact, I appreciated it. Here's why:
I saw the movie last night, and thought it was wonderful. There were only two changes/omissions that I felt had a negative bearing on the overall story, and I thought they did a great job of getting the salient points and the appropriate aura across for pretty much everything else while keeping it a viewable movie.