Yup, and note in those photos how many stories the buildings have. That's the big difference between European and US towns. Many US suburban towns are just a tighter than average collection of 1-2 story houses and some shops. In Europe a town usually has 5+ story buildings with little in the way of yards besides a little decorative space in front, which makes for much higher population densities. In Europe half of your commute to the train station might be by elevator.
And if there wasn't all that traffic and pollution the parents would be afraid of the kids walking down streets without anybody around. And if they were out in the woods they'd be afraid of bears. And if they were in the middle of tall grassland they'd be afraid of velociraptor attacks.
The modern parent seems to live in a state of perpetual fear - it is a wonder that any allow their kids to go to school at all. I suspect the only thing that terrifies them more than their kids dying is that their friends might think of them as one of those weird home-schoolers.
Hardly, you just make anything that COULD cause serious harm a crime equivalent to actually causing the harm. That means punishing actual harm less, and potential harm more. So, if shooting a laser at a plane could cause 300 people to die, whether they actually die is unimportant.
This could be done in numerous areas of law. I don't see any value in distinguishing between attempted murder and murder itself - whether the victim was lucky shouldn't have any bearing on the appropriate punishment for the crime. I do see value in distinguishing intent - a dumb kid pointing a laser pointer at a plane and causing 300 people to die should be punished less harshly than a terrorist intentionally doing the same, even if in the terrorist's case the plane escapes unharmed.
By all means outlaw it, classify it as simple assault and prosecute those who do it but 3 years for an activity that has produced 4 eye exams seems silly.
So you propose waiting until a plane actually crashes and kills 300 people? Considering that the majority of the time these people aren't caught most likely the perpetrator of that incident will not be found.
Crimes need to be punished based on intent, and not on outcome. Yes, I realize this isn't how it is generally done.
Technical solution - laser detectors near airports that direct counterfire at the origin of the laser. All you need to do is aim a laser back at the source and give it enough energy to blind anybody in the immediate vicinity. You could do that with a very high degree of accuracy - laser guided weapons are already a solved problem and you can run the counter laser at low power until the beam is on the target and then send a bright pulse. It would be impossible to evade, and as long as you vary the wavelength basically impossible to defend against.
You can't really just clear the area of people - the range of lasers is rather long, and aircraft cover miles while on approach/departure.
However, I don't know that any of this is really that necessary - you just need some high profile captures and prosecutions and chances are most will fall into line.
Population density figures can be misleading. From my visit to a relatively rural area of the Netherlands I can tell you that the density isn't all that different from the US suburb I live in, but the distribution of homes is VERY different.
In a typical US suburb you really don't have much open land - it is just a sea of single houses with 50 yards in-between each.
In what I've seen of Europe there are cities (not unlike US cities), towns, and farmland. The towns are the big difference - when you ride the train you go through miles of farmland, and then you'll hit a town. That town will have 5 story buildings clustered around the train station, which then drops out to farmland pretty quickly. You can easily bike the length of the town, and walking isn't horrible (especially in the business areas near the train station). At the train station you might see about 1000 bicycles parked - I'm not kidding.
That just wouldn't work where I live. There are trains that go to the nearest city, but there really is nothing at all but maybe two stores within an easy walk of the train station. By bike you could hit a fair number of shops, but that's about it.
Both designs get the same number of people on average within a square mile. The difference is that almost all of them are near a train station in Europe, and almost none of them are in the US.
Major cities are the same in Europe and in the US, and in the best-served cities in the US trains are comparable.
It usually only works if there is a threat of violence. If you try to replace 4000 angry workers that is going to cause a big mess, which is what happened back when unions were being formed.
These days unions don't strike, because as much as they grip there isn't really that much at stake. Back in the heyday they'd have taken shots at the national guard.
Why not backup to the cloud? It is offsite storage - it doesn't get much more secure than that. The only way you lose out is if both the cloud and your local copy are lost at the same time, which seems a lot less likely than losing a local backup hard drive at the same time as your primary.
Cloud backup is also easier to automate, unless you leave your backup drive plugged in all the time which is risky.
Now, cloud backup does tend to be more expensive. I tend to be selective with it as a result.
1. The satellite photos may have been degraded intentionally so as to not reveal the capabilities of the satellite. 2. Google Maps uses aerial photos, while the satellites have to be pretty high up to not have their orbits degrade. Reading an eye chart from 20 feet and 200 feet are very different problems.
I wouldn't be surprised if a cheap predator drone with its tiny cameras takes better photos than a satellite. The difference is that nobody is going to shoot down the satellite due to how customs around airspace have evolved.
Well, according to wikipedia the cost of a KH11 is about half the hubble. They have economies of scale as well. I never understood with things like the Hubble why they don't make more than one. At almost any step of manufacture the cost to just stick one more whatever on the rig and do what you just did 5 minutes ago is pretty cheap compared to doing the first one.
It is like saying that StupidCo spent $50M building a single smartphone, but every teenager is running around with an iPhone it seems. Well, if Apple only made one of them it would cost $50M too. Once you build up the supply chain/etc cranking out a few is not that hard.
The mirror would clearly be the limiting factor for a telescope, but obviously the capacity exists to churn out a dozen Hubble mirrors. Those satellites aren't launched that often, so I'm sure NASA could have gotten on the polisher in-between them.
True - granted this can happen with any product, but it seems like people really go nuts over the Apple stuff.
At work on a discussion forum people were asking whether the iPhone 5 was officially supported for corporate stuff (expenses, email, etc). The response was that they had pre-ordered a phone and expected to have a quick decision made once it was tested. There must have been at least 4 more requests for updates before the phone was even released, and then several more the day it came out. I guess the guys in the IT department should have broken into an Apple warehouse to get their hands on one early, or at least camped out for a few days outside an Apple store to get one at midnight, with a testing team poised to strike in a van outside. In the end I think it was only two days post-release that people were told that they could use the new phones, but gosh, you'd think that people were told they'd have to work on Christmas day or something.
My take is that it is a legitimate gripe, but one that needs to be balanced with the fact that it is a phone, not a camera.
If I were Apple I'd just acknowledge that this is an imperfection, point out the advantages of the new camera, and state that if possible the next model will be even better.
When I buy a phone I read reviews, and sure I look at the camera reviews, but the fact is that I'm not going to make the camera quality the primary driver of the decision I make. Also, when I take photos with phones or cheap cameras I inevitably have to shade the lens anyway - anybody who knows much about photography is going to do this. Heck, I even have to do this sometimes on my DSLR since I'm too cheap to buy a hood or pro-level lenses (and even those aren't immune to flare).
Quality is a continuum. In my opinion the best cell phones struggle to complete with the better $120 cameras. The advantage of the phone is that it is the camera you always have. However, if I'm going somewhere that I want to capture pictures, chances are I'm bringing at least the compact point/shoot if not the DSLR. There are just way too many design compromises to make a camera that is only a few mm deep in total to make something that is going to handle anything well but shots at noon on an overcast day.
It's hard to become a productive member of society while in prison. I would thus advise not becoming a criminal.
Well, duh.
But the fact is that for whatever reason the guy decided to become a criminal. So now what do we do with him? We can spend a lot of money punishing him and turn him loose to repeat offend so that we can spend a lot more money punishing him some more. We could just shoot him, or leave him in prison forever (the first is theoretically cheap but for various reasons practically expensive, the latter is just expensive). Or, we could actually try to turn the guy into somebody who won't commit further crimes.
Should we have to babysit the guy? No. Is it worth our time or money, even if we're completely selfish? Yes.
I'd submit that dumb rules like don't use the internet just further alienate people like this from society and make them more likely to remain criminals.
Do you realize that I have no say in whether or not the government "mandates" health care coverage for me? This is a blanket excuse in which social programs can be used to justify literally any encroachment on personal choice.
Agreed 100%. The problem is that you can't have it both ways - if society wants cradle to grave then that comes along with all the strings. If you want every man for himself then if that means people dying in the streets because they can't afford to pay the ambulance to haul them away from the accident scene, too bad. There are some in-between positions, but not that many which make sense. The moment you ask me to pay for somebody else's care is the moment I get to have a say in what they do.
Even giving people a choice to opt-in or not isn't going to work well. In such a system only those who expect to get more out than they pay in would opt in, and obviously no system can work if that is really what happens.
True, but you are limited to orbital velocity. That's awfully darn fast though. And the faster you fire the LONGER it takes to get to the target with an indirect shot. So, if you want those super-high kinetic energies then the weapon will always take minutes to get to the target no matter how close. It is only a matter of how many satellites it passes on the way up.
Unless a highly populated region happens to be on the other side of the missile targets.
Unless the missile is passing directly over such a region that isn't an issue. At those ranges the projectile has to be coming down at the target, so the only thing behind it is whatever is below it.
Unless the projectiles have guidance how are you going to hit a missile with what amounts to indirect artillery fire? The time to travel 110 miles is fairly long, so you have to REALLY lead the missle, and the projectile is basically coming straight down on the missile which means the doppler return on the missile will be minimized (if using radar) and the delta-v on the projectile to make corrections will be maximized. That really is as non-ideal an angle you can get for hitting something.
And your firing rate will be slow besides, so the interception rate has to be pretty high.
For the CIWS solution, the time for a round to travel isn't that much of an issue. You fire BEFORE the missile is in range, so that the round encounters it just as it comes into range. As long as you can track the missile far enough out you can get your rounds to the target while it is still at max range.
Tracking is also a big problem if you want to track farther out - these things are at sea level, so spotting them in the first place is not trivial. You're automatically limited to the horizon unless you can use data from other platforms.
So, if you're using air power, why do you need a railgun? You're either within range of land, or you're not. That is, unless you expect this railgun to have ranges way up in the thousands of miles. If you get that high then you don't need the boat - just launch the thing from the US.
And you're not going to get those kinds of energies with kinetic weapons alone unless you launch it in direct fire mode. That means being within the horizon, which is well within missile range unless you're firing from space. And if you shoot a shell from a spacecraft with the kinetic energy of 30KT of TNT, then you will need to expend an equivalent amount of energy in propellant to maintain your firing position so that you're not lofted out to Neptune. Actually, I can't imagine building a foundation to handle that kind of impulse on land, let alone in a ship. Your railgun barrel will go flying down through the deck with as much energy as your intended target is about to receive.
The best you're going to do with a rod is to have it impact with around orbital velocity. For that you might as well place your guns in the US, since you HAVE to fire it at long range (or have a trajectory so high that the travel time is equivalent to sending it halfway around the world anyway).
Yup, and you're limited to direct fire only up to the horizon. If you launch a shell at Mach 1093 and point it at the sky, then your only shot at hitting something on earth is to catch it in a few million years when the shell and the earth are back on the same side of the Milky Way. That's way over solar escape velocity, and nearly at galactic escape velocity so you could lob that thing pretty far out there.
Your maximum velocity on impact from any device launched from the ground is going to be fundamentally limited by orbital velocity. The further you aim the faster it will be going, until you aim at a point halfway around the world. If you fire any faster the trajectory of the projectile will be orbital - either eliptical or hyperbolic. If you shoot it with less than escape velocity the projectile travels around the Earth and wipes out some town near the gun. If you shoot it with greater than escape velocity then you can wipe out the bad guy's moon base, but that's about it.
Granted, orbital velocity is still pretty fast, but forget 30 kiloton energies - you're talking about things closer to traditional artillery.
Yup, every time I've been on jury duty the instructions given to jurors in general are VERY clear that during voir dire your job is basically to spill your guts of anything relevant to the questions at hand. As long as you tell the truth there is no such thing as a wrong answer. However, failing to disclose something material to the case is certainly grounds for misconduct.
I'm pretty sure that both times there were very general questions along the lines of "do you have any past history that might affect your ability to render an impartial verdict" or whether you had any kind of dealings with any of the participants in the case or whatever. Failing to disclose that you had been involved in a patent lawsuit when on the panel for a patent lawsuit would be a VERY obvious omission.
Yup. The real irony is that the cost to just roll out a single system across the entire country would not be that large. You're just talking about a fairly simple database with the ability to store transcripts and other attachments. Half the courts have already rolled out such systems, and picking the best one and extending it to other courts would likely be simple.
I think that the main thing preventing it is all the companies that make a fortune off of building their own private databases of all this info.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and note in those photos how many stories the buildings have. That's the big difference between European and US towns. Many US suburban towns are just a tighter than average collection of 1-2 story houses and some shops. In Europe a town usually has 5+ story buildings with little in the way of yards besides a little decorative space in front, which makes for much higher population densities. In Europe half of your commute to the train station might be by elevator.
And if there wasn't all that traffic and pollution the parents would be afraid of the kids walking down streets without anybody around. And if they were out in the woods they'd be afraid of bears. And if they were in the middle of tall grassland they'd be afraid of velociraptor attacks.
The modern parent seems to live in a state of perpetual fear - it is a wonder that any allow their kids to go to school at all. I suspect the only thing that terrifies them more than their kids dying is that their friends might think of them as one of those weird home-schoolers.
Hardly, you just make anything that COULD cause serious harm a crime equivalent to actually causing the harm. That means punishing actual harm less, and potential harm more. So, if shooting a laser at a plane could cause 300 people to die, whether they actually die is unimportant.
This could be done in numerous areas of law. I don't see any value in distinguishing between attempted murder and murder itself - whether the victim was lucky shouldn't have any bearing on the appropriate punishment for the crime. I do see value in distinguishing intent - a dumb kid pointing a laser pointer at a plane and causing 300 people to die should be punished less harshly than a terrorist intentionally doing the same, even if in the terrorist's case the plane escapes unharmed.
How can a backup be a single point of failure? It is already redundant by definition? Unless double redundancy is your goal...
By all means outlaw it, classify it as simple assault and prosecute those who do it but 3 years for an activity that has produced 4 eye exams seems silly.
So you propose waiting until a plane actually crashes and kills 300 people? Considering that the majority of the time these people aren't caught most likely the perpetrator of that incident will not be found.
Crimes need to be punished based on intent, and not on outcome. Yes, I realize this isn't how it is generally done.
Technical solution - laser detectors near airports that direct counterfire at the origin of the laser. All you need to do is aim a laser back at the source and give it enough energy to blind anybody in the immediate vicinity. You could do that with a very high degree of accuracy - laser guided weapons are already a solved problem and you can run the counter laser at low power until the beam is on the target and then send a bright pulse. It would be impossible to evade, and as long as you vary the wavelength basically impossible to defend against.
You can't really just clear the area of people - the range of lasers is rather long, and aircraft cover miles while on approach/departure.
However, I don't know that any of this is really that necessary - you just need some high profile captures and prosecutions and chances are most will fall into line.
Population density figures can be misleading. From my visit to a relatively rural area of the Netherlands I can tell you that the density isn't all that different from the US suburb I live in, but the distribution of homes is VERY different.
In a typical US suburb you really don't have much open land - it is just a sea of single houses with 50 yards in-between each.
In what I've seen of Europe there are cities (not unlike US cities), towns, and farmland. The towns are the big difference - when you ride the train you go through miles of farmland, and then you'll hit a town. That town will have 5 story buildings clustered around the train station, which then drops out to farmland pretty quickly. You can easily bike the length of the town, and walking isn't horrible (especially in the business areas near the train station). At the train station you might see about 1000 bicycles parked - I'm not kidding.
That just wouldn't work where I live. There are trains that go to the nearest city, but there really is nothing at all but maybe two stores within an easy walk of the train station. By bike you could hit a fair number of shops, but that's about it.
Both designs get the same number of people on average within a square mile. The difference is that almost all of them are near a train station in Europe, and almost none of them are in the US.
Major cities are the same in Europe and in the US, and in the best-served cities in the US trains are comparable.
It usually only works if there is a threat of violence. If you try to replace 4000 angry workers that is going to cause a big mess, which is what happened back when unions were being formed.
These days unions don't strike, because as much as they grip there isn't really that much at stake. Back in the heyday they'd have taken shots at the national guard.
The funny thing is that articles have been popping up about the Chinese elite worried that there might be a communist revolution. Go figure...
Why not backup to the cloud? It is offsite storage - it doesn't get much more secure than that. The only way you lose out is if both the cloud and your local copy are lost at the same time, which seems a lot less likely than losing a local backup hard drive at the same time as your primary.
Cloud backup is also easier to automate, unless you leave your backup drive plugged in all the time which is risky.
Now, cloud backup does tend to be more expensive. I tend to be selective with it as a result.
Keep in mind that:
1. The satellite photos may have been degraded intentionally so as to not reveal the capabilities of the satellite.
2. Google Maps uses aerial photos, while the satellites have to be pretty high up to not have their orbits degrade. Reading an eye chart from 20 feet and 200 feet are very different problems.
I wouldn't be surprised if a cheap predator drone with its tiny cameras takes better photos than a satellite. The difference is that nobody is going to shoot down the satellite due to how customs around airspace have evolved.
Well, according to wikipedia the cost of a KH11 is about half the hubble. They have economies of scale as well. I never understood with things like the Hubble why they don't make more than one. At almost any step of manufacture the cost to just stick one more whatever on the rig and do what you just did 5 minutes ago is pretty cheap compared to doing the first one.
It is like saying that StupidCo spent $50M building a single smartphone, but every teenager is running around with an iPhone it seems. Well, if Apple only made one of them it would cost $50M too. Once you build up the supply chain/etc cranking out a few is not that hard.
The mirror would clearly be the limiting factor for a telescope, but obviously the capacity exists to churn out a dozen Hubble mirrors. Those satellites aren't launched that often, so I'm sure NASA could have gotten on the polisher in-between them.
True - granted this can happen with any product, but it seems like people really go nuts over the Apple stuff.
At work on a discussion forum people were asking whether the iPhone 5 was officially supported for corporate stuff (expenses, email, etc). The response was that they had pre-ordered a phone and expected to have a quick decision made once it was tested. There must have been at least 4 more requests for updates before the phone was even released, and then several more the day it came out. I guess the guys in the IT department should have broken into an Apple warehouse to get their hands on one early, or at least camped out for a few days outside an Apple store to get one at midnight, with a testing team poised to strike in a van outside. In the end I think it was only two days post-release that people were told that they could use the new phones, but gosh, you'd think that people were told they'd have to work on Christmas day or something.
My take is that it is a legitimate gripe, but one that needs to be balanced with the fact that it is a phone, not a camera.
If I were Apple I'd just acknowledge that this is an imperfection, point out the advantages of the new camera, and state that if possible the next model will be even better.
When I buy a phone I read reviews, and sure I look at the camera reviews, but the fact is that I'm not going to make the camera quality the primary driver of the decision I make. Also, when I take photos with phones or cheap cameras I inevitably have to shade the lens anyway - anybody who knows much about photography is going to do this. Heck, I even have to do this sometimes on my DSLR since I'm too cheap to buy a hood or pro-level lenses (and even those aren't immune to flare).
Quality is a continuum. In my opinion the best cell phones struggle to complete with the better $120 cameras. The advantage of the phone is that it is the camera you always have. However, if I'm going somewhere that I want to capture pictures, chances are I'm bringing at least the compact point/shoot if not the DSLR. There are just way too many design compromises to make a camera that is only a few mm deep in total to make something that is going to handle anything well but shots at noon on an overcast day.
No.
It's hard to become a productive member of society while in prison. I would thus advise not becoming a criminal.
Well, duh.
But the fact is that for whatever reason the guy decided to become a criminal. So now what do we do with him? We can spend a lot of money punishing him and turn him loose to repeat offend so that we can spend a lot more money punishing him some more. We could just shoot him, or leave him in prison forever (the first is theoretically cheap but for various reasons practically expensive, the latter is just expensive). Or, we could actually try to turn the guy into somebody who won't commit further crimes.
Should we have to babysit the guy? No. Is it worth our time or money, even if we're completely selfish? Yes.
I'd submit that dumb rules like don't use the internet just further alienate people like this from society and make them more likely to remain criminals.
Do you realize that I have no say in whether or not the government "mandates" health care coverage for me? This is a blanket excuse in which social programs can be used to justify literally any encroachment on personal choice.
Agreed 100%. The problem is that you can't have it both ways - if society wants cradle to grave then that comes along with all the strings. If you want every man for himself then if that means people dying in the streets because they can't afford to pay the ambulance to haul them away from the accident scene, too bad. There are some in-between positions, but not that many which make sense. The moment you ask me to pay for somebody else's care is the moment I get to have a say in what they do.
Even giving people a choice to opt-in or not isn't going to work well. In such a system only those who expect to get more out than they pay in would opt in, and obviously no system can work if that is really what happens.
True, but you are limited to orbital velocity. That's awfully darn fast though. And the faster you fire the LONGER it takes to get to the target with an indirect shot. So, if you want those super-high kinetic energies then the weapon will always take minutes to get to the target no matter how close. It is only a matter of how many satellites it passes on the way up.
Unless a highly populated region happens to be on the other side of the missile targets.
Unless the missile is passing directly over such a region that isn't an issue. At those ranges the projectile has to be coming down at the target, so the only thing behind it is whatever is below it.
Unless the projectiles have guidance how are you going to hit a missile with what amounts to indirect artillery fire? The time to travel 110 miles is fairly long, so you have to REALLY lead the missle, and the projectile is basically coming straight down on the missile which means the doppler return on the missile will be minimized (if using radar) and the delta-v on the projectile to make corrections will be maximized. That really is as non-ideal an angle you can get for hitting something.
And your firing rate will be slow besides, so the interception rate has to be pretty high.
For the CIWS solution, the time for a round to travel isn't that much of an issue. You fire BEFORE the missile is in range, so that the round encounters it just as it comes into range. As long as you can track the missile far enough out you can get your rounds to the target while it is still at max range.
Tracking is also a big problem if you want to track farther out - these things are at sea level, so spotting them in the first place is not trivial. You're automatically limited to the horizon unless you can use data from other platforms.
So, if you're using air power, why do you need a railgun? You're either within range of land, or you're not. That is, unless you expect this railgun to have ranges way up in the thousands of miles. If you get that high then you don't need the boat - just launch the thing from the US.
And you're not going to get those kinds of energies with kinetic weapons alone unless you launch it in direct fire mode. That means being within the horizon, which is well within missile range unless you're firing from space. And if you shoot a shell from a spacecraft with the kinetic energy of 30KT of TNT, then you will need to expend an equivalent amount of energy in propellant to maintain your firing position so that you're not lofted out to Neptune. Actually, I can't imagine building a foundation to handle that kind of impulse on land, let alone in a ship. Your railgun barrel will go flying down through the deck with as much energy as your intended target is about to receive.
The best you're going to do with a rod is to have it impact with around orbital velocity. For that you might as well place your guns in the US, since you HAVE to fire it at long range (or have a trajectory so high that the travel time is equivalent to sending it halfway around the world anyway).
Yup, and you're limited to direct fire only up to the horizon. If you launch a shell at Mach 1093 and point it at the sky, then your only shot at hitting something on earth is to catch it in a few million years when the shell and the earth are back on the same side of the Milky Way. That's way over solar escape velocity, and nearly at galactic escape velocity so you could lob that thing pretty far out there.
Your maximum velocity on impact from any device launched from the ground is going to be fundamentally limited by orbital velocity. The further you aim the faster it will be going, until you aim at a point halfway around the world. If you fire any faster the trajectory of the projectile will be orbital - either eliptical or hyperbolic. If you shoot it with less than escape velocity the projectile travels around the Earth and wipes out some town near the gun. If you shoot it with greater than escape velocity then you can wipe out the bad guy's moon base, but that's about it.
Granted, orbital velocity is still pretty fast, but forget 30 kiloton energies - you're talking about things closer to traditional artillery.
Yup, every time I've been on jury duty the instructions given to jurors in general are VERY clear that during voir dire your job is basically to spill your guts of anything relevant to the questions at hand. As long as you tell the truth there is no such thing as a wrong answer. However, failing to disclose something material to the case is certainly grounds for misconduct.
I'm pretty sure that both times there were very general questions along the lines of "do you have any past history that might affect your ability to render an impartial verdict" or whether you had any kind of dealings with any of the participants in the case or whatever. Failing to disclose that you had been involved in a patent lawsuit when on the panel for a patent lawsuit would be a VERY obvious omission.
Yup. The real irony is that the cost to just roll out a single system across the entire country would not be that large. You're just talking about a fairly simple database with the ability to store transcripts and other attachments. Half the courts have already rolled out such systems, and picking the best one and extending it to other courts would likely be simple.
I think that the main thing preventing it is all the companies that make a fortune off of building their own private databases of all this info.