1. No matter how much automation is used to reduce manufacturing costs, air transport would use far more real resources than cars currently do. I mean more fuel, more materials, higher grade parts....everything would have been more expensive.
2. Lets face the truth here. As a whole, the human race isn't really that smart. The average individual makes countless poor and irresponsible decisions, gets stuck in stupid patterns and addictions, stops learning most new things past a certain age...(the list continues) I'd also say that most slashdotters (myself included) fall into part of this category. I know I've made plenty of dumb mistakes, even when I was aware that I was doing so.
There are simply not enough individuals in society capable of safely piloting these vehicles to put them into common use. There are not enough responsible mechanics who could keep fleets of these things running safely. Its not a lack of education : I'm saying we couldn't really find enough people to run this system who would be responsible enough.
3. The current system of cars for (relatively) short distances and planes for long distance does work. While many complain of long commutes, citizens do make it to work...the system functions. It would take considerable investment to build a short distance air transport system that was really significantly better than the compromise in use today.
How can this be built in the future?
By removing the human from much of it. At some point (it may require computers "Turing capable") it should be practical to build computer controlled flying vehicles where the human may lack even manual overrides.
To ease the maintainence problem, the flying machines moving parts would all be embedded with arrays of diagonostic sensors and the vehicle would refuse to start if a fault were detected. Any monkey of a mechanic could hopefully then swap out the faulty component, safely repairing the vehicle.
Quote "That is assuming that the distilling and burining of a standard unit amount of sugarcane does not generate more CO2 than the same unit amount of live sugarcane plants can absorb during their life cycle"
Check your high school chemistry, guy. If burning sugar cane released more CO2 than the plant absorbed in its life cycle, where did the extra carbon come from (hint : it didn't, and burning sugar cane releases EXACTLY the same amount of carbon as the plant originally absorbed)
That statistic was just to show that WITHOUT the extremely expensive work put into the space shuttle, it might blow up 5% of the time. So it HAS TO BE DONE with current chememical rockets (because 5% death rate is an unacceptable risk)
If the system were not nearly so complex, expensive, and requiring so much maintanence it would be a LOT cheaper.
Not to say that it wouldn't still be relatively expensive for ordinary people to go to space, but it would be at least within the ballpark.
The cost with todays rockets is a direct result OF THE SAFETY ISSUE. Go read up on what they do to the space shuttle after every flight. Its actually cheaper to build a whole new rocket than to try to be absolutely certain you can reuse the current one. (which is partly why the Russians can do it so much cheaper)
For commercial satellite launches, 5% of the BLOW UP OR DON't MAKE IT.
1. The actual propulsion system is ON THE GROUND. That means : it can weigh any arbitrary amount, take up lots of space (so you can easily maintain it), you can add tremendous redundancy (no reason not to have a duplicate or triplicate copy of everything). It doesn't have to endure the stresses of launch and reentry, and once one spacecraft is up you can start it right back up and launch another one right after. Thus, in reality only one engine is used to power the entire space program rather than needing one for every spacecraft.
2. More than 95% of the mass of the space shuttle is the fuel. This fuel has to both act as propellant and to supply the energy involved. In addition, you get an infinite series when calculating the amount of fuel needed (because every gram of fuel added means you need more fuel to carry that fuel and so forth) : this is why the number is so large.
In a laser launch system, the energy comes from a big electric power plant on the ground, converted to light. This light heats the inert propellant at the bottom of the rocket to far higher temperatures than burning hydrogen can achieve, and does so in pulses generating a shockwave parallel to the rocket (so no nozzle is needed to focus the force). Only a tiny amount of propellant is needed...most of the mass of the rocket would be payload. This means less energy is actually needed, even with losses due to conversion and scattering as the light goes through the clouds. (because in current rockets most of the fuel is needed right at takeoff, when the mass of the rest of the fuel must be lifted as well as the payload. This is GROSSLY inefficient)
Its not the energy that costs all the money, anyway : its building spacecraft that can handle the enormous stresses involved and maintaining them. This technology would greatly reduce the main stresses on the system (no longer does the spacecraft have a huge, complex, expensive engine system that must somehow contain millions of pounds of explosives. Instead there is just a big block of material, some gas attitude thrusters, gyroscopes, fins, and a reentry burn engine.
Energy loss isn't where the cost is. Out of the $400 million or so a shuttle launch costs, only a tiny fraction of that is fuel (can't find the figure, but I know its under 10 million). I'm saying that a laser rocket system would have far lower operating and engineering costs because the rocket isn't a giant bomb that you try to engineer to not blow up ahead of time (that is, massive effort has to be put into testing and refitting the space shuttle for each flight, as well as documenting every nut and bolt with more paperwork than the mass of the unfueled shuttle)
In addition, it would require far less energy than rockets because the energy source is on the ground, and the mass of propellant would be far smaller.
There are obviously enormous difficulties with building this cable, with having it survive lightning strikes, deliberate damage ( could a single guided rocket with an armor piercing molten jet warhead destroy this wire in one hit? If that happened, wouldn't the $10,000 missile have caused 50 billion worth of damage or more...everyone knows that a project like this is going to cost 10 times the current estimate), the mechanical wear as the spacecraft slowly claw there way up...
A far simpler and cheaper solution is a massive ground based laser array. (which incidentally is how they are proposing to power this thing...why not skip the cable and build a much bigger laser). The beam would vaporize propellant attached to the bottom of the spacecraft, eliminating perhaps 90% of the danger of rocket travel (the rocket blowing up has always been the biggest risk...if it uses a nonvolatile, inert propellant) and reducing the cost to a tiny fraction of current expenses.
Since the laser system would be a large array, it would not have to be built to nearly the quality standards that a manned spacecraft has to be constructed to since if one of the lasers burns out, blows up, ect the rest of the system picks up the slack.
Dude, the whole purpose of biometrics is NOT to increase security (while it might stop password guessing as an attack there are tons of ways to get past it). Its to reduce tech support costs because people forgot their password. As long as you use a reasonably strong password you have JUST AS GOOD of security as biometric scanning.
This technology has the same old problem TONS of extremely cool failed entertainment techs have had.
Force feedback, HDTV, 3d displays, head mounted displays, smell devices, and many others. I suspect the first true V.R. rigs (with wires jacking right in to your nervous system) will suffer it too.
The old chicken and the egg. This tech is not quite good enough for the early adopters with the big budgets to buy it, and because of that prices will never come down enough so the rest of us can afford it.
Only when a new technology is SO much better than the current available do the earlier adopters buy it and the tech takes off. But there also has to be convincing content for it.
Well, obviously this experiment proves that links between computers and brain tissue are quite possible and usable. In addition, it beats the pants off other experiments...like that one the air force had where human volunteers would try to move a simulator left and right. It took weeks of training for the humans to "train" their brains to give the correct signal most of the time.
In this case no training seems to be required...you just move your arm and the software is able to translate that. VERY IMPRESSIVE.
But there is a price to be paid : the monkey is wired with actual hardware in the brain. Face it, the V.R. systems of the future and the cyborgs will have to have actual surgically inserted wiring. To get that cool V.R. rig you'll have to have a major operation installing thousands of tiny wires to the nerves of your body.
Granted, ham radio buffs are a thing of the past (I bet those same geeks were the first people on the internet and the early online services like compuserve in the late 80s) but I always had one basic question.
Since shortwave is more or less a party line with pure analog transmission, what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else? Sure, if you did that in the US FCC troops would come bust down your door but what's to stop, say, Sadaam from having a party one day and jaming all short wave channels with a few hundred megawatts of propoganda.
Has anyone considered that for MOST of America, in fact most of the world people are still using VHS tapes. The mass market does not adopt new technologies quickly, and many new media formats and such have failed because of this (how come it took 15 years for something better than vhs tape to come along to the mass market?)
Then consider what will be required to make these secure, registered devices that probably have to be connected to a network to be used. The most likely outcome is that people just won't buy them, and will stick with their old cds.
However, some of the described features made me grimace...they are the sort of thing that is almost GUARANTEED to be a security hazard and loaded with bugs.
Video email...sounds good til you realize that means that spammers will be sending 50meg files of porno videos. (porn good...bandwidth wasted because the spammers sent the same video 20 times...bad)
I just flinched when it talked about being able to send spreadsheets to a contact's cell phone or pda. Somehow this doesn't seem like a very safe or reliable method of distributing confidential financial information... (because of the tremendous complexity of the software that would be required to accomplish this means it is likely to have many security bugs)
Surround sound...star wars theme to copy files...lol I bet it even has a subwoofer. Unless you are the only one in the office I don't even need to address the problem here....
The wrap around screen might actually be useful, but it looks like it distorts the image. Pro developers have used multiple monitors for years now.
Finally, the mouse "automagically" moving from screen to screen...sharing network drives is shaky and buggy enough without this extra layer of complexity added in...
Trouble is, its NOT about learning to use your character effectively so you can move on. To get past the newbie phase all you need to do is invest a lot of time.
Like all things, this trend won't last forever. At some point our computer intelligences will finally become reasonably general, with knowledge of real world context. At that point we will have obsoleted humanity and it will be time for the new generation to take over.
Despite the dark horror science fiction to the contrary, this need not be a horrible event. In terms of available resources, some place like the astroid belt may in fact be the optimal place for our machine descendents to build their society. (I would think nanotechnological machine parts would operate far more efficiently in the relative cleanness of space, without all the garbage down here on earth). In addition, far far more energy is available up there.
Finally, usually when a new species is born it moves to an unoccupied ecological niche. Fact is, humans will never colonize space. Sure we might be able to make little self-contained bubbles of earth up there (sort of how the first amphibious creatures to go to land required constant moisture and had to return to water frequently) but we will never be able to really use the vast resources or do much more than huddle in our hab modules.
Intelligent machines smart enough to create new versions of themselves for this purpose will be subject to no such limits.
Its been a few million years for humanity : a really long road. But the season finale is almost upon us, with the last plot details wrapped up in the last few episodes as we finalize the work this century.
Read "ShowStopper!" and then say this again. Its quite a bit more likely that the endless problems with Outlook express were NOT deliberate. The developers just wanted to add some neat features, and made the scripting language as broad and full featured as possible. In THEORY, if the virtual machine that runs the scripts didn't have big holes in it, this would be a perfectly reasonable and secure thing to do.
Of course, the real problem with these kinds of scripts is not viruses...its behavoir the user doesn't want. Popup adds are a perfect example of that : giving a web page control of your browser merely because you visited the site was NOT a good design decision.
One big problem that is immediatly obvious. If the games fancy genetic algorithm is actually good, you could probably hack the game with a state file made by someone who was really GOOD at the game.
However, as anyone who's played this type of game before would attest : sometimes you just HAVE to go afk RIGHT NOW or you lose your connection to the server due to technical reasons.
It would be very nice if the game would take at least basic action to prevent death (such as casting teleportation spells, healing, running away...SOMETHING other than standing there) if you get attacked and you are afk or linkdead.
Fact is, a the reason parents don't want their kids to see sex scenes in movies is that it IS something one who watches it wants to mimic. While truly violent behavoir due to its obvious painful consequences is not something most children will be tempted to engage in (with a few rare exceptions) due to fear instincts that govern us, we instinctively WANT to have sex not long after the genitals finish forming.
Sex scenes with people merrily going at it (not to mention the other nastiness inherent in them) is not the message to be sent because sex is a far more prevalent danger than violence.
SEX IS DANGEROUS. Yes, its dangerous...stds are debilitating and sometimes lethal; unwanted pregnancies either result in the death of an unborn child or a massive economic burden on someone who probably can't afford it. Not to mention if the girl has the baby it can totally fuck the child up psychologically, growing up unwanted and without a strong father, ruining an entire life.
I know you feel you have to get off, but keep in mind : if you get her pregnant, and are not prepared to raise the baby, there are 3 possible outcomes and all of them are doing something horrible to another person (the child).
Adoption is the best outcome, but its still pretty bad. Do you really trust some anonymous other couple more than you'd trust yourself to raise a kid?
Abortion : that's pretty fucked up, good look at what the fetuses look like when they come out. Maybe it isn't quite murder, but its pretty close.
She has it, you dump her or marry her and live in a trailer park. Now you've fucked another person economically and socially for life.
There's a reason why its tough to get a girl to have sex with you unless you are relatively strong socially and economically. (many slashdotters fall flat on the first one and even the slashdotters with their 31337 coding jobs are just the new version of the borgoise craftsmen of the middle ages. You aren't anyone especially important with you 40-100k a year salary)
Condoms are a statistical measure, but if you fuck up with it (lol no pun intended) and some of that junk gets in her...congradulations, you have a 1 in 15 chance or so of doing something really bad. Care to play that at a slot machine?
Surely an inch or two of Lexan combined with security cameras would make the machine at least resistant to this sort of attack. And more exotic technical solutions are certainly feasible.
The point is, there's plenty of ways to armor it such that vandalizing the device is difficult.
Unfortunatly, what you are neglecting to mention here is that these fancy techniques only work when the tanks are able to maneuver. If you are driving in a column down narrow third world streets surrounded by buildings, and the enemy fires on you from a few meters away from one of the buildings....
Not to mention molotov cocktails and other crude weapons, which could blind you (can't see out or use thermal sights if your viewports are covered with burning gas).
That is why the soviet army was actually defeated (well, that and other reasons) when they attempted to assault the capital of Chechnya.
Not to say that tanks can't still be useful, just that they won't be as useful as they were fighting out on the open desert.
Slashdot Mirror
Why didn't this happen?
1. No matter how much automation is used to reduce manufacturing costs, air transport would use far more real resources than cars currently do. I mean more fuel, more materials, higher grade parts....everything would have been more expensive.
2. Lets face the truth here. As a whole, the human race isn't really that smart. The average individual makes countless poor and irresponsible decisions, gets stuck in stupid patterns and addictions, stops learning most new things past a certain age...(the list continues) I'd also say that most slashdotters (myself included) fall into part of this category. I know I've made plenty of dumb mistakes, even when I was aware that I was doing so.
There are simply not enough individuals in society capable of safely piloting these vehicles to put them into common use. There are not enough responsible mechanics who could keep fleets of these things running safely. Its not a lack of education : I'm saying we couldn't really find enough people to run this system who would be responsible enough.
3. The current system of cars for (relatively) short distances and planes for long distance does work. While many complain of long commutes, citizens do make it to work...the system functions. It would take considerable investment to build a short distance air transport system that was really significantly better than the compromise in use today.
How can this be built in the future?
By removing the human from much of it. At some point (it may require computers "Turing capable") it should be practical to build computer controlled flying vehicles where the human may lack even manual overrides.
To ease the maintainence problem, the flying machines moving parts would all be embedded with arrays of diagonostic sensors and the vehicle would refuse to start if a fault were detected. Any monkey of a mechanic could hopefully then swap out the faulty component, safely repairing the vehicle.
But heating it up just changes its form...no more carbon was added.
well gee, must be imagining my 1.5 down basic...
Quote "That is assuming that the distilling and burining of a standard unit amount of sugarcane does not generate more CO2 than the same unit amount of live sugarcane plants can absorb during their life cycle"
Check your high school chemistry, guy. If burning sugar cane released more CO2 than the plant absorbed in its life cycle, where did the extra carbon come from (hint : it didn't, and burning sugar cane releases EXACTLY the same amount of carbon as the plant originally absorbed)
That statistic was just to show that WITHOUT the extremely expensive work put into the space shuttle, it might blow up 5% of the time. So it HAS TO BE DONE with current chememical rockets (because 5% death rate is an unacceptable risk) If the system were not nearly so complex, expensive, and requiring so much maintanence it would be a LOT cheaper. Not to say that it wouldn't still be relatively expensive for ordinary people to go to space, but it would be at least within the ballpark.
The cost with todays rockets is a direct result OF THE SAFETY ISSUE. Go read up on what they do to the space shuttle after every flight. Its actually cheaper to build a whole new rocket than to try to be absolutely certain you can reuse the current one. (which is partly why the Russians can do it so much cheaper) For commercial satellite launches, 5% of the BLOW UP OR DON't MAKE IT.
1. The actual propulsion system is ON THE GROUND. That means : it can weigh any arbitrary amount, take up lots of space (so you can easily maintain it), you can add tremendous redundancy (no reason not to have a duplicate or triplicate copy of everything). It doesn't have to endure the stresses of launch and reentry, and once one spacecraft is up you can start it right back up and launch another one right after. Thus, in reality only one engine is used to power the entire space program rather than needing one for every spacecraft. 2. More than 95% of the mass of the space shuttle is the fuel. This fuel has to both act as propellant and to supply the energy involved. In addition, you get an infinite series when calculating the amount of fuel needed (because every gram of fuel added means you need more fuel to carry that fuel and so forth) : this is why the number is so large. In a laser launch system, the energy comes from a big electric power plant on the ground, converted to light. This light heats the inert propellant at the bottom of the rocket to far higher temperatures than burning hydrogen can achieve, and does so in pulses generating a shockwave parallel to the rocket (so no nozzle is needed to focus the force). Only a tiny amount of propellant is needed...most of the mass of the rocket would be payload. This means less energy is actually needed, even with losses due to conversion and scattering as the light goes through the clouds. (because in current rockets most of the fuel is needed right at takeoff, when the mass of the rest of the fuel must be lifted as well as the payload. This is GROSSLY inefficient) Its not the energy that costs all the money, anyway : its building spacecraft that can handle the enormous stresses involved and maintaining them. This technology would greatly reduce the main stresses on the system (no longer does the spacecraft have a huge, complex, expensive engine system that must somehow contain millions of pounds of explosives. Instead there is just a big block of material, some gas attitude thrusters, gyroscopes, fins, and a reentry burn engine.
Energy loss isn't where the cost is. Out of the $400 million or so a shuttle launch costs, only a tiny fraction of that is fuel (can't find the figure, but I know its under 10 million). I'm saying that a laser rocket system would have far lower operating and engineering costs because the rocket isn't a giant bomb that you try to engineer to not blow up ahead of time (that is, massive effort has to be put into testing and refitting the space shuttle for each flight, as well as documenting every nut and bolt with more paperwork than the mass of the unfueled shuttle) In addition, it would require far less energy than rockets because the energy source is on the ground, and the mass of propellant would be far smaller.
Couple of points :
There are obviously enormous difficulties with building this cable, with having it survive lightning strikes, deliberate damage ( could a single guided rocket with an armor piercing molten jet warhead destroy this wire in one hit? If that happened, wouldn't the $10,000 missile have caused 50 billion worth of damage or more...everyone knows that a project like this is going to cost 10 times the current estimate), the mechanical wear as the spacecraft slowly claw there way up...
A far simpler and cheaper solution is a massive ground based laser array. (which incidentally is how they are proposing to power this thing...why not skip the cable and build a much bigger laser). The beam would vaporize propellant attached to the bottom of the spacecraft, eliminating perhaps 90% of the danger of rocket travel (the rocket blowing up has always been the biggest risk...if it uses a nonvolatile, inert propellant) and reducing the cost to a tiny fraction of current expenses.
Since the laser system would be a large array, it would not have to be built to nearly the quality standards that a manned spacecraft has to be constructed to since if one of the lasers burns out, blows up, ect the rest of the system picks up the slack.
Dude, the whole purpose of biometrics is NOT to increase security (while it might stop password guessing as an attack there are tons of ways to get past it). Its to reduce tech support costs because people forgot their password. As long as you use a reasonably strong password you have JUST AS GOOD of security as biometric scanning.
This technology has the same old problem TONS of extremely cool failed entertainment techs have had.
Force feedback, HDTV, 3d displays, head mounted displays, smell devices, and many others. I suspect the first true V.R. rigs (with wires jacking right in to your nervous system) will suffer it too.
The old chicken and the egg. This tech is not quite good enough for the early adopters with the big budgets to buy it, and because of that prices will never come down enough so the rest of us can afford it.
Only when a new technology is SO much better than the current available do the earlier adopters buy it and the tech takes off. But there also has to be convincing content for it.
Well, obviously this experiment proves that links between computers and brain tissue are quite possible and usable. In addition, it beats the pants off other experiments...like that one the air force had where human volunteers would try to move a simulator left and right. It took weeks of training for the humans to "train" their brains to give the correct signal most of the time.
In this case no training seems to be required...you just move your arm and the software is able to translate that. VERY IMPRESSIVE.
But there is a price to be paid : the monkey is wired with actual hardware in the brain. Face it, the V.R. systems of the future and the cyborgs will have to have actual surgically inserted wiring. To get that cool V.R. rig you'll have to have a major operation installing thousands of tiny wires to the nerves of your body.
Granted, ham radio buffs are a thing of the past (I bet those same geeks were the first people on the internet and the early online services like compuserve in the late 80s) but I always had one basic question.
Since shortwave is more or less a party line with pure analog transmission, what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else? Sure, if you did that in the US FCC troops would come bust down your door but what's to stop, say, Sadaam from having a party one day and jaming all short wave channels with a few hundred megawatts of propoganda.
Has anyone considered that for MOST of America, in fact most of the world people are still using VHS tapes. The mass market does not adopt new technologies quickly, and many new media formats and such have failed because of this (how come it took 15 years for something better than vhs tape to come along to the mass market?) Then consider what will be required to make these secure, registered devices that probably have to be connected to a network to be used. The most likely outcome is that people just won't buy them, and will stick with their old cds.
Well, the article isn't very in depth.
However, some of the described features made me grimace...they are the sort of thing that is almost GUARANTEED to be a security hazard and loaded with bugs.
Video email...sounds good til you realize that means that spammers will be sending 50meg files of porno videos. (porn good...bandwidth wasted because the spammers sent the same video 20 times...bad)
I just flinched when it talked about being able to send spreadsheets to a contact's cell phone or pda. Somehow this doesn't seem like a very safe or reliable method of distributing confidential financial information... (because of the tremendous complexity of the software that would be required to accomplish this means it is likely to have many security bugs)
Surround sound...star wars theme to copy files...lol I bet it even has a subwoofer. Unless you are the only one in the office I don't even need to address the problem here....
The wrap around screen might actually be useful, but it looks like it distorts the image. Pro developers have used multiple monitors for years now.
Finally, the mouse "automagically" moving from screen to screen...sharing network drives is shaky and buggy enough without this extra layer of complexity added in...
Trouble is, its NOT about learning to use your character effectively so you can move on. To get past the newbie phase all you need to do is invest a lot of time.
Like all things, this trend won't last forever. At some point our computer intelligences will finally become reasonably general, with knowledge of real world context. At that point we will have obsoleted humanity and it will be time for the new generation to take over.
Despite the dark horror science fiction to the contrary, this need not be a horrible event. In terms of available resources, some place like the astroid belt may in fact be the optimal place for our machine descendents to build their society. (I would think nanotechnological machine parts would operate far more efficiently in the relative cleanness of space, without all the garbage down here on earth). In addition, far far more energy is available up there.
Finally, usually when a new species is born it moves to an unoccupied ecological niche. Fact is, humans will never colonize space. Sure we might be able to make little self-contained bubbles of earth up there (sort of how the first amphibious creatures to go to land required constant moisture and had to return to water frequently) but we will never be able to really use the vast resources or do much more than huddle in our hab modules.
Intelligent machines smart enough to create new versions of themselves for this purpose will be subject to no such limits.
Its been a few million years for humanity : a really long road. But the season finale is almost upon us, with the last plot details wrapped up in the last few episodes as we finalize the work this century.
Huh? Then why not just rely on the RAID redundancy to back up your data...or do the obvious, get 2 10k storage units and have one be the backup...
Read "ShowStopper!" and then say this again. Its quite a bit more likely that the endless problems with Outlook express were NOT deliberate. The developers just wanted to add some neat features, and made the scripting language as broad and full featured as possible. In THEORY, if the virtual machine that runs the scripts didn't have big holes in it, this would be a perfectly reasonable and secure thing to do.
Of course, the real problem with these kinds of scripts is not viruses...its behavoir the user doesn't want. Popup adds are a perfect example of that : giving a web page control of your browser merely because you visited the site was NOT a good design decision.
One big problem that is immediatly obvious. If the games fancy genetic algorithm is actually good, you could probably hack the game with a state file made by someone who was really GOOD at the game.
However, as anyone who's played this type of game before would attest : sometimes you just HAVE to go afk RIGHT NOW or you lose your connection to the server due to technical reasons.
It would be very nice if the game would take at least basic action to prevent death (such as casting teleportation spells, healing, running away...SOMETHING other than standing there) if you get attacked and you are afk or linkdead.
Fact is, a the reason parents don't want their kids to see sex scenes in movies is that it IS something one who watches it wants to mimic. While truly violent behavoir due to its obvious painful consequences is not something most children will be tempted to engage in (with a few rare exceptions) due to fear instincts that govern us, we instinctively WANT to have sex not long after the genitals finish forming. Sex scenes with people merrily going at it (not to mention the other nastiness inherent in them) is not the message to be sent because sex is a far more prevalent danger than violence. SEX IS DANGEROUS. Yes, its dangerous...stds are debilitating and sometimes lethal; unwanted pregnancies either result in the death of an unborn child or a massive economic burden on someone who probably can't afford it. Not to mention if the girl has the baby it can totally fuck the child up psychologically, growing up unwanted and without a strong father, ruining an entire life. I know you feel you have to get off, but keep in mind : if you get her pregnant, and are not prepared to raise the baby, there are 3 possible outcomes and all of them are doing something horrible to another person (the child). Adoption is the best outcome, but its still pretty bad. Do you really trust some anonymous other couple more than you'd trust yourself to raise a kid? Abortion : that's pretty fucked up, good look at what the fetuses look like when they come out. Maybe it isn't quite murder, but its pretty close. She has it, you dump her or marry her and live in a trailer park. Now you've fucked another person economically and socially for life. There's a reason why its tough to get a girl to have sex with you unless you are relatively strong socially and economically. (many slashdotters fall flat on the first one and even the slashdotters with their 31337 coding jobs are just the new version of the borgoise craftsmen of the middle ages. You aren't anyone especially important with you 40-100k a year salary) Condoms are a statistical measure, but if you fuck up with it (lol no pun intended) and some of that junk gets in her...congradulations, you have a 1 in 15 chance or so of doing something really bad. Care to play that at a slot machine?
That happened in a Tom Clancy book... This guy was sitting in his apartment and suddenly the T.V. started changing channels....
Little did he know it was due to the infrared laser guiding the hellfire into his window...
Surely an inch or two of Lexan combined with security cameras would make the machine at least resistant to this sort of attack. And more exotic technical solutions are certainly feasible.
The point is, there's plenty of ways to armor it such that vandalizing the device is difficult.
Unfortunatly, what you are neglecting to mention here is that these fancy techniques only work when the tanks are able to maneuver. If you are driving in a column down narrow third world streets surrounded by buildings, and the enemy fires on you from a few meters away from one of the buildings....
Not to mention molotov cocktails and other crude weapons, which could blind you (can't see out or use thermal sights if your viewports are covered with burning gas).
That is why the soviet army was actually defeated (well, that and other reasons) when they attempted to assault the capital of Chechnya.
Not to say that tanks can't still be useful, just that they won't be as useful as they were fighting out on the open desert.
Easily. Carbon is the main ingredient for all your tissue. Heck, you'd easily have enough carbon just by collecting your shit or your hair.