...this has been required reading. I want to make 'em think about what works and what doesn't in conveying the needed information to the user in an appropriate and efficient manner.
And I like to use it as a trump-card example whenever I'm convincing the proj manager to let me design the interface. (Most PLs are smart enough to let a TW do work that lightens the coders' load anyhow, plus we TWs are typically less busy at the early phases of the project.)
...against the Iraqis during the Gulf conflict, hoping to disrupt their communications so radar sites couldn't be used in a coordinated manner. I don't think it succeeded, but it was a good first shot at offensive information-warfare operations.
Depends on where in the South China Sea we're talking about. PRC claims some islands, Vietnam claims some, Philippines claims some. Possibly Myanmar and Brunei each claim some. I think the Indonesians may claim a few too -- correct me there if not, guys -- and Singapore's pretty close, if that counts for anything.
A bunch of these islands are perpetually disputed, which is part of why the place is so lawless (the other being that it's a hell of a big area to patrol). Frankly, some are basically controlled by whomever's closest with the most ordnance.
Now that they've found oil in the Paracels and Spratlys, maybe our contestants could include a drilling-rig roughneck or two.
I'll take your word for it, since it's been a year or two since I read it. I could've sworn Sangamon was the guy fighting the SEAL. Maybe he was just there observing the fight and I'm conflating characters. Also, I thought that Stephenson has the SEAL dying because he gets knifed, not merely because he loses an air hose in a fight. Sheesh, what a wussy way to kill off a warrior.
But...again, the idea of a SEAL dying in a fight underwater just didn't ring true. If a "corporate diver" surprises SEAL, whom do you suppose is going to die in the ensuing fight? How likely do you think it is that a SEAL -- or anybody -- is going to swallow enough toxic water to kill him that quickly? Alternatively, that the water could be toxic enough in the first place that a mouthful could kill somebody within seconds? Or that a SEAL is even going to swallow seawater accidentally to start with? Remember, these guys spend more time training for CQB underwater than most infantry train for it on land. Hey, Neal, you reading this thread?
preferably an ex-SEAL with impulse control problems
Beg pardon to quibble, but if he has impulse control problems, there ain't no way he got to be an ex-SEAL, because he wouldn't have gotten to be a SEAL in the first place. People with impulse-control problems simply cannot make it through BUD/S. The need for self-discipline is too great. If you don't believe me, hit the navyseals.com site and see for yourself.
OTOH, SEALs are very, very good at following orders, taking initiative, and improvising along the way. If he's given the mission, I gaurantee all contestants etc. are gonna die. (In one of Neal Stephenson's novels where some civilian puke waxes an ex-SEAL -- underwater, yet! -- I just laughed like hell. Stephenson knows s**t about SEALs.)
BTW, here's what I just flashed on for a game show...make it through the BUD/S program as a civilian and $1+e6 is yours! CBS' money would be pretty safe, damn betcha...
Oh, for Chrissakes...Guess where the #1 spot in the world is for getting robbed, raped, kidnapped and/or murdered with a 360-degree view of the ocean? Yep. South China Sea. The US Navy and others patrol to try to keep the pirate situation down to a low boil, but there's only so many ships, plenty of bad guys, and unless CBS is going to have its own private flotilla and Marine det providing security, Very Bad Things are liable to happen.
You guys all read Snow Crash...you do remember those pirates, right?
Read the rules. This tribal-council nonsense is gonna turn into an exercise in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Gee, and I was only thinking of corporate liability when I posted that remark about lawsuits.
...there are gonna be some serious lawsuits. I don't care what kind of waivers people sign, somebody's next of kin is going to sue. The legal eagles will never let this thing happen.
Jeezus squeeze us, if this is about survival, leave the fscking guns outta this. 99% of people aren't trained and self-disciplined enough to handle a firearm without being more of a danger to themselves and their fellow marooneds than they are to their erstwhile game.
Issue everybody a K-Bar, though. Digging, skinning, whittling etc. with bare hands, teeth etc. gets old after awhile.
The problem's not the GPS' guts per se, but the antenna. There are lots of ways for subs to overcome this. For example, they come to "antenna depth" whereby they trail a floating wire of the requisite length that's optimal for the bandwidth they want to receive. Also, there are the ESM and other antenna masts at the top of the sail.
Normally the navigator wants to get a fresh fix on the GPS birds (or another, previous sat constellation put up precisely for the purpose -- acronym escapes me, damn Alzheimer's coming on) on a regular basis, but with all the depth-changing and gyrations required, sometimes it's better (read: quieter) to just stay at patrol depth, so the skipper will tell him the hell with the fix for the time being, there's nothing much to collide with beyond the thirty-fathom line on the charts anyway.
The only reason a sat fix is necessary at all is to periodically "tighten up" the sub's intertial-nav fix, which is good to within less than the width of the sub's attack center (control room) when it's dead on, but tends to spread out as the fix becomes less accurate over time.Believe it or not, with all this high-tech gee-whiz nav stuff, there aren't many QMs around who could competently use a sextant if everything else were out of commission. I think they're going to stop, or already have stopped, teaching sextants at Annapolis.
1200 bps....wow, it's more like spb (seconds per bit) for reliable ELF EAMs -- basically, it's a Morse signal that says "USS Ustafish, COMSUBEASTLANT sends, so wake the hell up and get your sorry keister to antenna depth toot sweet. We gotta SSIX message for you to suck down off the comm bird." Only it's done in far fewer bytes. And with an antenna you would not believe.
Due to a congenital cataract in my right eye -- a birth defect that went undetected until I was two -- I never developed stereooptic vision. I've always wondered what I've been missing, from those weird-looking cross-your-eyes 3-D pictures to enjoying the spectacle of the opposite sex.:)
I doubt that in my lifetime there will be the means to correct the lack of development in the optical center of my brain, but if I'm wrong, I sense that this kind of research will have a lot to do with how I overcome this partial handicap.
Re:No need to be out of print
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 1
When I think back on the crap I went thru to find a copy of Pig Boats, I really wish this technology would be available at Kinko's or something; just pay a two-dollar royalty fee plus twenty for binding, or whatever.
Maybe we should mail this thread to ppbk publisher
on
The Big U
·
· Score: 1
Fawcett Crest or somebody (hey, I know: Penguin Editions!) should see the anecdotal evidence for the pent-up consumer demand. And if Stephenson doesn't want it republished, maybe it's time to coax him down out of his tree. Early novels are nothing to be ashamed of.
The Nazis certainly had a similar set of principles that told them why it was sensible, from a eugenics point of view, to eliminate the handicapped, homosexuals, Jews and Gypsies. Their science said that they were inferior, after all.
In fact, a decade before Hitler came to power, euthanizing mentally handicapped and severely physically disabled and deformed people was already a "scientifically principled" norm. The Nazis rightly get the blame for further institutionalizing this in the name of racial purity, but they were continuing an already well-established practice.
The DOJ never tells Bill G what the end result of his guilt is supposed to be.
Then, at some point well after the case has ended, his head disappears suddenly -- splut! -- in a wet pink cloud. Nine hundred meters away, the ex-SEAL sniper ejects the spent.50 cal brass from his Barrett M-82A1, removes the custom-made supressor, breaks down the weapon, loads it back into the back of his stolen van, and drives away whistling.
Sorry. I forgot my Prozac this morning, and a long-gone laid-off programmer left me toxic waste to clean up for a system reference manual.
As for farmers, while "save the family farm!" is occaisionally heard from the lips of politicians and celebrities, it's nearly too late. The U.S. Census Bureau has stopped counting farming as an occupation, because there aren't enough farmers left to be statistically significant. Of those who are left, the traditional "family farm" has become nearly extinct.
Why the hell do Willie and John Cougar keep doing Farm Aid, anyway?
After reading Shaheen's and Zach Frey's posts ("We're There Already"), I can easily see how we'd wind up with The Corporation:
Let's add a little Nano to the mix and watch as everybody sucks from the high-tech teat. All your groceries, all your power, all your data, comin' down that Feed. The only drawback to putting Nano in everybody's kitchen is that the knowledge and infrastructural ramp-ups are gonna be huge. It's going to be a bitch to leverage that much technological know-how into a whole new category of "public" (investor-owned) utility.
Companies already understand how to vertically integrate out the wazoo and mergers/leveraged buyouts are getting too attractive to resist. I still wonder why it is that competition doesn't generate enough more efficiency than economy of scale to encourage companies to resist the siren song of Fewer But Bigger.
Does anyone besides me find it ironic that Microsoft has chosen the home site of GNU and the FSF?
What you call ironic, I call strategic. Being a conspiracy buff where M$ is concerned, it's the camel's gold-plated nose in the tent. Whatever Godawful crap they come up with to foist on an unsuspecting, least-path-of-resistance educational community will bear the imprimatur of MIT -- woohoo! Not to mention the slave labor^H^H^H^H^Hgrad students they can get to help develop and test all this crud.
Sure, Office is 'openly available' -- lay down your money.
If the above comes to pass, at least that $25 I spent on Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 5 in 21 Days will become a worthwhile career resource after all.:P
Slashdot Mirror
...this has been required reading. I want to make 'em think about what works and what doesn't in conveying the needed information to the user in an appropriate and efficient manner.
And I like to use it as a trump-card example whenever I'm convincing the proj manager to let me design the interface. (Most PLs are smart enough to let a TW do work that lightens the coders' load anyhow, plus we TWs are typically less busy at the early phases of the project.)
...against the Iraqis during the Gulf conflict, hoping to disrupt their communications so radar sites couldn't be used in a coordinated manner. I don't think it succeeded, but it was a good first shot at offensive information-warfare operations.
A bunch of these islands are perpetually disputed, which is part of why the place is so lawless (the other being that it's a hell of a big area to patrol). Frankly, some are basically controlled by whomever's closest with the most ordnance.
Now that they've found oil in the Paracels and Spratlys, maybe our contestants could include a drilling-rig roughneck or two.
But...again, the idea of a SEAL dying in a fight underwater just didn't ring true. If a "corporate diver" surprises SEAL, whom do you suppose is going to die in the ensuing fight? How likely do you think it is that a SEAL -- or anybody -- is going to swallow enough toxic water to kill him that quickly? Alternatively, that the water could be toxic enough in the first place that a mouthful could kill somebody within seconds? Or that a SEAL is even going to swallow seawater accidentally to start with? Remember, these guys spend more time training for CQB underwater than most infantry train for it on land. Hey, Neal, you reading this thread?
preferably an ex-SEAL with impulse control problems
Beg pardon to quibble, but if he has impulse control problems, there ain't no way he got to be an ex-SEAL, because he wouldn't have gotten to be a SEAL in the first place. People with impulse-control problems simply cannot make it through BUD/S. The need for self-discipline is too great. If you don't believe me, hit the navyseals.com site and see for yourself.
OTOH, SEALs are very, very good at following orders, taking initiative, and improvising along the way. If he's given the mission, I gaurantee all contestants etc. are gonna die. (In one of Neal Stephenson's novels where some civilian puke waxes an ex-SEAL -- underwater, yet! -- I just laughed like hell. Stephenson knows s**t about SEALs.)
BTW, here's what I just flashed on for a game show...make it through the BUD/S program as a civilian and $1+e6 is yours! CBS' money would be pretty safe, damn betcha...
You guys all read Snow Crash...you do remember those pirates, right?
Read the rules. This tribal-council nonsense is gonna turn into an exercise in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Gee, and I was only thinking of corporate liability when I posted that remark about lawsuits.
...there are gonna be some serious lawsuits. I don't care what kind of waivers people sign, somebody's next of kin is going to sue. The legal eagles will never let this thing happen.
weapons cache???
Jeezus squeeze us, if this is about survival, leave the fscking guns outta this. 99% of people aren't trained and self-disciplined enough to handle a firearm without being more of a danger to themselves and their fellow marooneds than they are to their erstwhile game.
Issue everybody a K-Bar, though. Digging, skinning, whittling etc. with bare hands, teeth etc. gets old after awhile.
I knew I should've paid attention to the lecture on food gathering. Oh well. Anybody ever read the story "Dirty George the Roach Eater"? Yum, yum...
Isn't this the "slamhound" mentioned at the beginning of Neuromancer?
The problem's not the GPS' guts per se, but the antenna. There are lots of ways for subs to overcome this. For example, they come to "antenna depth" whereby they trail a floating wire of the requisite length that's optimal for the bandwidth they want to receive. Also, there are the ESM and other antenna masts at the top of the sail.
Normally the navigator wants to get a fresh fix on the GPS birds (or another, previous sat constellation put up precisely for the purpose -- acronym escapes me, damn Alzheimer's coming on) on a regular basis, but with all the depth-changing and gyrations required, sometimes it's better (read: quieter) to just stay at patrol depth, so the skipper will tell him the hell with the fix for the time being, there's nothing much to collide with beyond the thirty-fathom line on the charts anyway.
The only reason a sat fix is necessary at all is to periodically "tighten up" the sub's intertial-nav fix, which is good to within less than the width of the sub's attack center (control room) when it's dead on, but tends to spread out as the fix becomes less accurate over time.Believe it or not, with all this high-tech gee-whiz nav stuff, there aren't many QMs around who could competently use a sextant if everything else were out of commission. I think they're going to stop, or already have stopped, teaching sextants at Annapolis.
1200 bps....wow, it's more like spb (seconds per bit) for reliable ELF EAMs -- basically, it's a Morse signal that says "USS Ustafish, COMSUBEASTLANT sends, so wake the hell up and get your sorry keister to antenna depth toot sweet. We gotta SSIX message for you to suck down off the comm bird." Only it's done in far fewer bytes. And with an antenna you would not believe.
(musingly)...Curing the blind...
Due to a congenital cataract in my right eye -- a birth defect that went undetected until I was two -- I never developed stereooptic vision. I've always wondered what I've been missing, from those weird-looking cross-your-eyes 3-D pictures to enjoying the spectacle of the opposite sex. :)
I doubt that in my lifetime there will be the means to correct the lack of development in the optical center of my brain, but if I'm wrong, I sense that this kind of research will have a lot to do with how I overcome this partial handicap.
It sure is nice to dream about it.
Or that old standard "Am I Blue?"...
When I think back on the crap I went thru to find a copy of Pig Boats, I really wish this technology would be available at Kinko's or something; just pay a two-dollar royalty fee plus twenty for binding, or whatever.
Fawcett Crest or somebody (hey, I know: Penguin Editions!) should see the anecdotal evidence for the pent-up consumer demand. And if Stephenson doesn't want it republished, maybe it's time to coax him down out of his tree. Early novels are nothing to be ashamed of.
If I can have the holodeck, I'll have the holodeck AND the women. And some other women besides.
Predictions serve no purpose.
Neither does the hula hoop, but they're both a hell of a lot of fun.
The Nazis certainly had a similar set of principles that told them why it was sensible, from a eugenics point of view, to eliminate the handicapped, homosexuals, Jews and Gypsies. Their science said that they were inferior, after all.
In fact, a decade before Hitler came to power, euthanizing mentally handicapped and severely physically disabled and deformed people was already a "scientifically principled" norm. The Nazis rightly get the blame for further institutionalizing this in the name of racial purity, but they were continuing an already well-established practice.
The DOJ never tells Bill G what the end result of his guilt is supposed to be.
Then, at some point well after the case has ended, his head disappears suddenly -- splut! -- in a wet pink cloud. Nine hundred meters away, the ex-SEAL sniper ejects the spent .50 cal brass from his Barrett M-82A1, removes the custom-made supressor, breaks down the weapon, loads it back into the back of his stolen van, and drives away whistling.
Sorry. I forgot my Prozac this morning, and a long-gone laid-off programmer left me toxic waste to clean up for a system reference manual.
As for farmers, while "save the family farm!" is occaisionally heard from the lips of politicians and celebrities, it's nearly too late. The U.S. Census Bureau has stopped counting farming as an occupation, because there aren't enough farmers left to be statistically significant. Of those who are left, the traditional "family farm" has become nearly extinct.
Why the hell do Willie and John Cougar keep doing Farm Aid, anyway?
After reading Shaheen's and Zach Frey's posts ("We're There Already"), I can easily see how we'd wind up with The Corporation:
Let's add a little Nano to the mix and watch as everybody sucks from the high-tech teat. All your groceries, all your power, all your data, comin' down that Feed. The only drawback to putting Nano in everybody's kitchen is that the knowledge and infrastructural ramp-ups are gonna be huge. It's going to be a bitch to leverage that much technological know-how into a whole new category of "public" (investor-owned) utility.
Companies already understand how to vertically integrate out the wazoo and mergers/leveraged buyouts are getting too attractive to resist. I still wonder why it is that competition doesn't generate enough more efficiency than economy of scale to encourage companies to resist the siren song of Fewer But Bigger.
Does anyone besides me find it ironic that Microsoft has chosen the home site of GNU and the FSF?
What you call ironic, I call strategic. Being a conspiracy buff where M$ is concerned, it's the camel's gold-plated nose in the tent. Whatever Godawful crap they come up with to foist on an unsuspecting, least-path-of-resistance educational community will bear the imprimatur of MIT -- woohoo! Not to mention the slave labor^H^H^H^H^Hgrad students they can get to help develop and test all this crud.
Sure, Office is 'openly available' -- lay down your money.
If the above comes to pass, at least that $25 I spent on Sams' Teach Yourself Visual Basic 5 in 21 Days will become a worthwhile career resource after all. :P