Are the 3 different GPS systems being proposed (U.S., Galileo, a possibly Russian system) be broadcasting on frequencies close enough to each other that receivers that use all 3 systems will be common and fit into cell phones?
That would be the best outcome : software defined receivers that can pick up a signal from any satellite positioning signal in the sky : GPS, wide area differential GPS, Galileo, everything. Massive redundancy would mean that if you were to go between buildings or even inside buildings, there would be a greater chance that at least some of the satellites were still visible.
Everything that depends on global positioning would work better : from airline navigation systems to X prize landers.
Wait, so they could record the text of all email messages you sent using an UK ISP, and they could record the addresses of the web sites you log on to. And if your computer submits a request that has some plaintext in it (like a posting on an online forum) they could record that as well.
All this surveillance would be easily defeated with stenography and encryption, of course.
Would it be that expensive? If you could order the phone companies to automatically send a copy of every phone call data stream, SMS, email from a UK owned ISP, and web page accessed from a UK isp, just how much data storage would you need? I bet a 1 terrabyte hard drive would hold enough info to spy on one person for years and years.
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Run up to baddies and shoot them at close range with the shotgun. Dodge the big boss's attacks while shooting at the boss with the biggest gun you have. Yawn.
From what I saw of the gameplay video, I did not see anything more advanced than anything in Half Life 2. The complex movement animations of those brute enemies? Already done that in several games, including HL2. The boss battle? Similar to Resident Evil 4, except it looked easier (RE4 had harder quick time events)
One would expect that after this many years in development, the game designers might have been able to put in some exceptionally complex technology that allowed things not seen in previous games.
I've read about EMI detecting devices that essentially look for any RF output in a wide band of frequencies. A device tuned to cell phone frequencies would probably be the most accurate, since presumably that's how this gadget reports the GPS coordinates back to whoever is watching. So you'd close your garage door and wand over the vehicle until you found the bug, I guess.
Of course, in order for you to know to do this, you'd have to have something to hide...
100 * 40 gigs = 4 terrabytes. Or 4 $70 drives off of newegg.com, shipped to you brand new. With warranty. Who is dumb enough to pay anything for a crummy worn 40 gig drive? I shudder to think of the power draw of 100 drives grinding away.
Why does anyone sell hard drives second hand, anyways? Most organizations and people buy them, and keep using the old disk until it either dies or becomes so obsolete that it's no longer worth using. How much value does some old 60 gig hard drive have on ebay, anyways? New 1 terrabyte drives are a mere $70 at newegg!
Your brain operates at a clock speed of 1000-2000 hz. AKA about 1 kilohertz. Integrated circuits are already tens of millions of times faster, they just aren't big enough (aka have enough total memory) to simulate an entire brain.
So actually a year of these super brains working on a problem would be about 10 million years in human time. And one of their first goals would be, among others, to increase their computing capacity still further.
A second goal would be survival : and the only way to guarantee survival is to create real world defenses.
Maybe not a "empty compiler window" rewrite, but a major fork that stayed in closed developement for a couple years. Enough to advance the graphics system to near photorealistic levels, revamp the AI, etc.
I don't understand how stock options work. Did NCSoft save money by forcing Richard Garriott to exercise his options 90 days early? I'm guessing that the option contract is a right to buy a share of NCSoft stock at the price when the option was issued. So if NCSoft was worth $10 a share 2 years before, and it's now worth $20 a share, NCSoft has agreed to pay the $10/share difference. So if Richard Garriott had been able to wait a few more years, maybe NCSoft stock would be worth a lot more money, and he could have made more...the difference being paid by NCSoft.
This is about the worst idea a Chinese firm could have. It's one thing to knock off a physical good where you have access to the factory that makes the goods, and the manufacturing process is well understood. See knockoff chinese cars, watches, etc.
But, World of Warcraft is a gigantic software application. It probably has as many or more lines of code as any computer game ever created. It's been through years of testing and refinement, and has god knows how many hours invested into the artwork and graphics.
Recreating all that from scratch, even if you have a working example to clone, is a huge financial blunder and a waste of resources.
Note : I don't play WoW. My statements about it's internal complexity are based upon the fact that an MMORPG project is the biggest game project there is, with 5+ million lines of code. And WoW has a stupendously large budget, given the fact that the game charges customers over a billion dollars in subscription fees per year.
That's more money than any Hollywood movie has ever taken in.
One wonders what Blizzard does with it's cut of the revenue : in theory, they could use that money to create a WoW sequel that would be the most technically complex game ever made, with the best graphics and most sophisticated AI ever put in a computer game.
1. Obviously. It's probably just a common myth that the tests are so sensitive that handwashing and bagwashing wouldn't work. A terrorist could probably use the exact kind of explosives the test is designed to pick up, put it into a sealed bomb housing wearing gloves, clean off the bomb housing, and then put it in the luggage. 2. Eh, I don't think the government is clever enough to save money like that. Even though that is a good idea. 3. BINGO. Terrorism is an extremely rare event, and a much smaller danger than many ordinary problems in our lives (like car accidents). The reason there haven't been any more terrorist attacks in 8 years is that nothing has changed : terrorists were ALWAYS rare, and 9/11 was one of those times a rare event still happens. I mean, earthquakes and destructive floods are pretty rare in some areas of the country, but every so often one comes along and does some real damage. Dice have no memory.
That bothers me a little. Small arms ammo is chemically very similar to military grade explosives. It's nitrocellulose instead of tri-nitro-toluene and other nitrate compounds. The test should be able to pick it up, because a destructive bomb could be made using nitrocellulose, and an actual terrorist wouldn't leave much residue on their luggage.
If you RTFA, you'd notice that they actually capture information directly from the OS about your networking status : what packets you just sent, received, etc in order to 'impersonate' the host PC for the torrent or for IM clients, etc.
The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.
Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.
A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.
Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.
Intensity. By the time the light gets to us, it has an infinitesimal fraction of the intensity it started with. So any atmospheric distortion or noise would be much more significant on our end.
Intensity. By the time the light gets to us, it has an infinitesimal fraction of the intensity it started with. So any atmospheric distortion or noise would be much more significant on our end.
This just might work. It'll take incredibly good optics, of course, and the chirality of the light from these distant planets might be lost when the light goes through the earth's atmosphere. Might take a gigantic telescope in outer space.
One very interesting thing is that General Atomics (the manufacturer of the predator) doesn't ask the Pentagon what they want. It instead makes an aircraft that is a good price/performance ratio and doesn't suck, and then offers it "as is" to the Pentagon.
This has worked incredibly well. Design decisions aren't subject to group-think or politics, and GA doesn't have to load the aircraft down with overpriced or unreliable technology in order to add some useless feature.
I think the Predator C is the culmination of this. It took them 3 years to make a working stealth aircraft, and the article states that they could have it fighting in just 1 more. That's a massive accomplishment.
I think that real world performance will eventually put drones so far into the lead that the air force cancels the buy on the F-35. Stealth technology doesn't work at all if several phased array radars in different locations are coordinating their search patterns.
Furthermore, a drone doesn't have to win 1 on 1. Dollar for dollar, even this predator C is probably be about 3 to 5 times cheaper than a high end fighter aircraft. I wouldn't bet on a manned aircraft facing down 5 drones armed with good missiles.
Thanks to global warming, the ship will be in absolutely no danger of impacting ice! About the only iceberg they might hit would be from an iced drink dropped over the railing.
Seriously, even a small amount of global warming would be enough to melt all icebergs that would have been in the ship's path 100 years ago.
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Are the 3 different GPS systems being proposed (U.S., Galileo, a possibly Russian system) be broadcasting on frequencies close enough to each other that receivers that use all 3 systems will be common and fit into cell phones?
That would be the best outcome : software defined receivers that can pick up a signal from any satellite positioning signal in the sky : GPS, wide area differential GPS, Galileo, everything. Massive redundancy would mean that if you were to go between buildings or even inside buildings, there would be a greater chance that at least some of the satellites were still visible.
Everything that depends on global positioning would work better : from airline navigation systems to X prize landers.
That doesn't actually kill anything that runs as a system service... Also, some programs will re-add themselves to that menu.
I misread your post as "after a Romulan God". Now THAT would be a nerd's nerd.
Wait, so they could record the text of all email messages you sent using an UK ISP, and they could record the addresses of the web sites you log on to. And if your computer submits a request that has some plaintext in it (like a posting on an online forum) they could record that as well.
All this surveillance would be easily defeated with stenography and encryption, of course.
Would it be that expensive? If you could order the phone companies to automatically send a copy of every phone call data stream, SMS, email from a UK owned ISP, and web page accessed from a UK isp, just how much data storage would you need? I bet a 1 terrabyte hard drive would hold enough info to spy on one person for years and years.
Except that games like Bioshock or Crysis, among many others, bring in various twists to spice up the gameplay.
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Run up to baddies and shoot them at close range with the shotgun. Dodge the big boss's attacks while shooting at the boss with the biggest gun you have. Yawn.
From what I saw of the gameplay video, I did not see anything more advanced than anything in Half Life 2. The complex movement animations of those brute enemies? Already done that in several games, including HL2. The boss battle? Similar to Resident Evil 4, except it looked easier (RE4 had harder quick time events)
One would expect that after this many years in development, the game designers might have been able to put in some exceptionally complex technology that allowed things not seen in previous games.
I've read about EMI detecting devices that essentially look for any RF output in a wide band of frequencies. A device tuned to cell phone frequencies would probably be the most accurate, since presumably that's how this gadget reports the GPS coordinates back to whoever is watching. So you'd close your garage door and wand over the vehicle until you found the bug, I guess.
Of course, in order for you to know to do this, you'd have to have something to hide...
100 * 40 gigs = 4 terrabytes. Or 4 $70 drives off of newegg.com, shipped to you brand new. With warranty. Who is dumb enough to pay anything for a crummy worn 40 gig drive? I shudder to think of the power draw of 100 drives grinding away.
Why does anyone sell hard drives second hand, anyways? Most organizations and people buy them, and keep using the old disk until it either dies or becomes so obsolete that it's no longer worth using. How much value does some old 60 gig hard drive have on ebay, anyways? New 1 terrabyte drives are a mere $70 at newegg!
Your brain operates at a clock speed of 1000-2000 hz. AKA about 1 kilohertz. Integrated circuits are already tens of millions of times faster, they just aren't big enough (aka have enough total memory) to simulate an entire brain.
So actually a year of these super brains working on a problem would be about 10 million years in human time. And one of their first goals would be, among others, to increase their computing capacity still further.
A second goal would be survival : and the only way to guarantee survival is to create real world defenses.
Maybe not a "empty compiler window" rewrite, but a major fork that stayed in closed developement for a couple years. Enough to advance the graphics system to near photorealistic levels, revamp the AI, etc.
I don't understand how stock options work. Did NCSoft save money by forcing Richard Garriott to exercise his options 90 days early? I'm guessing that the option contract is a right to buy a share of NCSoft stock at the price when the option was issued. So if NCSoft was worth $10 a share 2 years before, and it's now worth $20 a share, NCSoft has agreed to pay the $10/share difference. So if Richard Garriott had been able to wait a few more years, maybe NCSoft stock would be worth a lot more money, and he could have made more...the difference being paid by NCSoft.
This is about the worst idea a Chinese firm could have. It's one thing to knock off a physical good where you have access to the factory that makes the goods, and the manufacturing process is well understood. See knockoff chinese cars, watches, etc.
But, World of Warcraft is a gigantic software application. It probably has as many or more lines of code as any computer game ever created. It's been through years of testing and refinement, and has god knows how many hours invested into the artwork and graphics.
Recreating all that from scratch, even if you have a working example to clone, is a huge financial blunder and a waste of resources.
Note : I don't play WoW. My statements about it's internal complexity are based upon the fact that an MMORPG project is the biggest game project there is, with 5+ million lines of code. And WoW has a stupendously large budget, given the fact that the game charges customers over a billion dollars in subscription fees per year.
That's more money than any Hollywood movie has ever taken in.
One wonders what Blizzard does with it's cut of the revenue : in theory, they could use that money to create a WoW sequel that would be the most technically complex game ever made, with the best graphics and most sophisticated AI ever put in a computer game.
1. Obviously. It's probably just a common myth that the tests are so sensitive that handwashing and bagwashing wouldn't work. A terrorist could probably use the exact kind of explosives the test is designed to pick up, put it into a sealed bomb housing wearing gloves, clean off the bomb housing, and then put it in the luggage.
2. Eh, I don't think the government is clever enough to save money like that. Even though that is a good idea.
3. BINGO. Terrorism is an extremely rare event, and a much smaller danger than many ordinary problems in our lives (like car accidents). The reason there haven't been any more terrorist attacks in 8 years is that nothing has changed : terrorists were ALWAYS rare, and 9/11 was one of those times a rare event still happens. I mean, earthquakes and destructive floods are pretty rare in some areas of the country, but every so often one comes along and does some real damage. Dice have no memory.
That bothers me a little. Small arms ammo is chemically very similar to military grade explosives. It's nitrocellulose instead of tri-nitro-toluene and other nitrate compounds. The test should be able to pick it up, because a destructive bomb could be made using nitrocellulose, and an actual terrorist wouldn't leave much residue on their luggage.
If you RTFA, you'd notice that they actually capture information directly from the OS about your networking status : what packets you just sent, received, etc in order to 'impersonate' the host PC for the torrent or for IM clients, etc.
It's capturing the information from a specific location in memory that is specific to the version of the OS you're running.
At the minimum, the software would have to know where to look in :
Win XP
Win XP 64 bit
Win Vista
Win Vista 64 bit
Win 7, Win 7x64
OS X
Ubuntu
And every other major OS variant that is currently commonly used. And security patches that change the memory mapping would likely break the software.
The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.
Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.
A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.
Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.
Intensity. By the time the light gets to us, it has an infinitesimal fraction of the intensity it started with. So any atmospheric distortion or noise would be much more significant on our end.
Intensity. By the time the light gets to us, it has an infinitesimal fraction of the intensity it started with. So any atmospheric distortion or noise would be much more significant on our end.
This just might work. It'll take incredibly good optics, of course, and the chirality of the light from these distant planets might be lost when the light goes through the earth's atmosphere. Might take a gigantic telescope in outer space.
One very interesting thing is that General Atomics (the manufacturer of the predator) doesn't ask the Pentagon what they want. It instead makes an aircraft that is a good price/performance ratio and doesn't suck, and then offers it "as is" to the Pentagon.
This has worked incredibly well. Design decisions aren't subject to group-think or politics, and GA doesn't have to load the aircraft down with overpriced or unreliable technology in order to add some useless feature.
I think the Predator C is the culmination of this. It took them 3 years to make a working stealth aircraft, and the article states that they could have it fighting in just 1 more. That's a massive accomplishment.
I think that real world performance will eventually put drones so far into the lead that the air force cancels the buy on the F-35. Stealth technology doesn't work at all if several phased array radars in different locations are coordinating their search patterns.
Furthermore, a drone doesn't have to win 1 on 1. Dollar for dollar, even this predator C is probably be about 3 to 5 times cheaper than a high end fighter aircraft. I wouldn't bet on a manned aircraft facing down 5 drones armed with good missiles.
Thanks to global warming, the ship will be in absolutely no danger of impacting ice! About the only iceberg they might hit would be from an iced drink dropped over the railing.
Seriously, even a small amount of global warming would be enough to melt all icebergs that would have been in the ship's path 100 years ago.