It's all a moot point though, since as you mention, in an urban environment the sniper is likely to be firing from a range of less than 200 yards. Assuming a muzzle velocity of 2500 fps, that gives the system less than a quarter-second to detect the threat, acquire enough data to plot the trajectory, and move the target out of the way. Even assuming you can do the processing that quickly, in moving the target out of the way quickly enough, the system might seriously injure/kill the individual it's supposed to be protecting.
Additionally, if the system is RF-based and is going to be able to detect something as tiny as a bullet, it's going to need to be throwing massive amounts of energy at around 25 GHz or higher everywhere in line-of-sight in order to have any hope of getting a return, which is probably not going to be very good for the people that get bathed in it. It's just not a practical idea, and just because the concept works on 30-pound artillery projectiles that are as big around as a CD and take 30 seconds to reach their target doesn't mean it will work in this situation.
Actually, I don't need the velocity to predict the path, because I know, the bullet is flying straight (or nearly so)
The bullet's not flying even close to straight except when observed over short distances - it's flying in a parabolic arc vertically, and then you have wind effects and whatnot to consider on top of that. The shape of that arc is going to depend quite heavily on exactly how fast the bullet is flying, the shape of the bullet (which in turn affects how fast the bullet decelerates), and a few other factors.
If your sensors are far enough away from the target to be able to do any good (more than 500 yards or so), then the curvature in the trajectory is going to become important, and if your sensors are acoustic in nature, odds are they're not even going to know of that bullet's presence until it's well past their location.
It's critically important to be able to locate that bullet in space accurately, precisely, and repeatably if the system is to be able to do anything more than soak up tax dollars. Having spent my fair share of time behind a rifle, I have my doubts.
You'd be scanning thousands of feet around you, not hundreds of miles.
You still need to transmit at a wavelength short enough that will interact with that tiny object, and you'll need to do it with enough power so you get enough energy being returned by the reflection from the bullet. I think it's that second part that's going to be a bear - you're probably going to need to transmit at about 24 GHz or so to be able to resolve the bullet, and even a 5 watt transmitter is probably going to be difficult to cart around. Police radar operates in that band, and even with the size of those units, they're only transmitting about 15 mW, and often have trouble dealing with car-sized objects 1000 feet away.
If we can solve the problem of power budget in getting the Earth to jump to the left, then the step to the right should be trivial. Dunno how the whole "hands on your hips" thing will play out though.
monitors could be placed in the area, calculating flight path and move the target accordingly.
Still isn't going to help a lot - the distance that the bullet leads the shock wave will be a function of the bullet's velocity, among other things. If you don't know at least that velocity, you can't know where the bullet is at the time of measurement, and thus can't predict the path. With multiple sensors in three dimensions, you might be able to get a good idea of the trajectory over time, but the bullet might easily have already reached its target by the time you pick up the sonic boom.
Can someone, anyone, tell me why "Oops I did it again" needs more financial incentive than the artificial kidney or the heart lung machine?
Because Britney & her boys at the RIAA spent a lot more on their Congressmen than did the engineers, and dammit, that kind of investment demands results!
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy knowing the RIAA owns the Justice Department now, doesn't it?
Or time to...you know... get copyright back to something that at least resembles its original intent, at least in the US. There's no reason whatsoever to justify the Beatles recordings still being under copyright, for instance.
But consider that you give away your thought processes and the foundations of your strategies to those opponents that should not be privy to your thoughts.
Occupational hazard of a free society. I'll deal with it.
Why not just charge users that want to subscribe to their service?
Because it's more profitable to do it the other way. Disney/ESPN's actions are entirely reasonable and make sense, whether it's this, the gutting of copyright law, or any number of other things they do to increase the company's revenues.
The real question comes down to how the individual people responsible for these actions have arrived at the conclusion that their greed is more important than everything else. The behavior of almost any given public corportation is pathologically anti-social.
why don't they sell their service on a "per customer" basis instead of on a "everyone pays weather or not they are a customer or not"
Because by doing it this way they can make more money, of course. Keeping charges as low-key and hidden as possible has always been a preferred way to do business, especially when you can charge millions of people without their knowledge. Imagine the outrage if the average US citizen actually had to write a check to the IRS every month instead of having it quietly deducted from their paycheck under force of federal law.
I'm not sure why this is so, given that the technique used on domestic animals pretty much Just Works; but it is.
Because animals are usually put down with a massive overdose of pentobarbital, which effectively turns their brain off. I had to have one of our cats put down last year - she was unconscious before the vet had completed the injection and dead less than 15 seconds later, with no signs of any discomfort.
This business of using a cocktail of drugs to paralyze and ultimately stop the heart of the condemned is just ridiculous. I don't know that pentobarbital overdose in humans works the same way as it does in animals, but there's got to be a better way. It's not pretty, but frankly a gunshot to the back of the head seems a lot more humane than most execution methods used in the US today.
Ask anyone who's ever been in the US military or been a military dependent how good socialized medicine is. You get a great level of care when your provider has a guaranteed paycheck and doesn't have to give a damn about his reputation.
Not saying it couldn't work, but my personal experiences with it are fraught with a lot of unnecessary pain and discomfort, with no legal means of holding the incompetent fools accountable for it.
"I wrote that this user of which you speak will simply install ubuntu."
You said nothing of the sort in the post to which I responded. You also said "none of the major distros use older versions of packages", and that's provably not true. Your average user won't necessarily make the distinction between a "desktop" and "server" distribution, so it's entirely possble that he ends up with RHEL/CentOS or Debian, both of which are extremely well-known and often use ridiculously out-of-date components in the interests of stability.
Just because you've not personally come across such a situation doesn't mean it's a "figment of my imagination", and it's exactly this kind of "I haven't experienced it, therefore it cannot exist!" attitude that permeates the Linux community and ultimately ends up turning a lot of potential users off.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of large organizations that use Windows backends. I'm not a MS fan, but the parent's post still stands - with almost 90% market share, it's silly to claim Microsoft is "proof the concept doesn't work". You may disagree with them, but if the product wasn't meeting customer needs, it wouldn't be out there.
I would expect him to deal with the problem that his distro is not using the latest versions of everything
I would expect him to say, "this Linux stuff sucks" and go back to Windows. Expecting the user to meet you halfway on such things pretty much guarantees you're not going to keep them as a user for long.
Within the Linux community there is still some kind of mistaken belief that everyday people have any kind of interest in computers for their own sake, and then contempt for them when they don't. 95% of people look at a computer as a tool to get a job done, and want it to do so in the quickest, most painless manner. They don't want to deal with dependency issues, having to find drivers for their hardware, etc. Part of Microsoft's (and Apple's) success is due to their willingness to spend millions of dollars to keep the user insulated from having to know a whole lot about their machines, and the willingness to embrace the technically ignorant.
If something goes badly, typically your CEO gets fired.
Often to find himself floating from a golden parachute, and likely another CEO position somewhere else. Carly Fiorina got *fired* from HP (how often do CEOs actually get terminated?), yet still walked out the door more than $20 million richer than when she got out of bed that morning.
CEOs do assume more responsibility than the rank-and-file workers, but unless they're the sole owner or a *big* shareholder (like Bill Gates), they're not usually assuming a damn bit of personal risk outside the value of their outstanding options, and I've *never* heard of the CEO of a public company leaving the position poorer than when he took it, no matter how badly he performed.
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It's all a moot point though, since as you mention, in an urban environment the sniper is likely to be firing from a range of less than 200 yards. Assuming a muzzle velocity of 2500 fps, that gives the system less than a quarter-second to detect the threat, acquire enough data to plot the trajectory, and move the target out of the way. Even assuming you can do the processing that quickly, in moving the target out of the way quickly enough, the system might seriously injure/kill the individual it's supposed to be protecting.
Additionally, if the system is RF-based and is going to be able to detect something as tiny as a bullet, it's going to need to be throwing massive amounts of energy at around 25 GHz or higher everywhere in line-of-sight in order to have any hope of getting a return, which is probably not going to be very good for the people that get bathed in it. It's just not a practical idea, and just because the concept works on 30-pound artillery projectiles that are as big around as a CD and take 30 seconds to reach their target doesn't mean it will work in this situation.
Actually, I don't need the velocity to predict the path, because I know, the bullet is flying straight (or nearly so)
The bullet's not flying even close to straight except when observed over short distances - it's flying in a parabolic arc vertically, and then you have wind effects and whatnot to consider on top of that. The shape of that arc is going to depend quite heavily on exactly how fast the bullet is flying, the shape of the bullet (which in turn affects how fast the bullet decelerates), and a few other factors.
If your sensors are far enough away from the target to be able to do any good (more than 500 yards or so), then the curvature in the trajectory is going to become important, and if your sensors are acoustic in nature, odds are they're not even going to know of that bullet's presence until it's well past their location.
It's critically important to be able to locate that bullet in space accurately, precisely, and repeatably if the system is to be able to do anything more than soak up tax dollars. Having spent my fair share of time behind a rifle, I have my doubts.
You'd be scanning thousands of feet around you, not hundreds of miles.
You still need to transmit at a wavelength short enough that will interact with that tiny object, and you'll need to do it with enough power so you get enough energy being returned by the reflection from the bullet. I think it's that second part that's going to be a bear - you're probably going to need to transmit at about 24 GHz or so to be able to resolve the bullet, and even a 5 watt transmitter is probably going to be difficult to cart around. Police radar operates in that band, and even with the size of those units, they're only transmitting about 15 mW, and often have trouble dealing with car-sized objects 1000 feet away.
If we can solve the problem of power budget in getting the Earth to jump to the left, then the step to the right should be trivial. Dunno how the whole "hands on your hips" thing will play out though.
monitors could be placed in the area, calculating flight path and move the target accordingly.
Still isn't going to help a lot - the distance that the bullet leads the shock wave will be a function of the bullet's velocity, among other things. If you don't know at least that velocity, you can't know where the bullet is at the time of measurement, and thus can't predict the path. With multiple sensors in three dimensions, you might be able to get a good idea of the trajectory over time, but the bullet might easily have already reached its target by the time you pick up the sonic boom.
Can someone, anyone, tell me why "Oops I did it again" needs more financial incentive than the artificial kidney or the heart lung machine?
Because Britney & her boys at the RIAA spent a lot more on their Congressmen than did the engineers, and dammit, that kind of investment demands results!
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy knowing the RIAA owns the Justice Department now, doesn't it?
Coffee cups and polo shirts too!
"I'm sorry, were you saying something?"
The Democrats are in the **AA's pockets even more than the Republicans, hell VP Biden might might as well be on the payroll.
The Justice Department certainly is.
Or time to...you know... get copyright back to something that at least resembles its original intent, at least in the US. There's no reason whatsoever to justify the Beatles recordings still being under copyright, for instance.
But consider that you give away your thought processes and the foundations of your strategies to those opponents that should not be privy to your thoughts.
Occupational hazard of a free society. I'll deal with it.
I hear the ping times really suck there.
'Tis hard to route around damage when it begins at your switch port.
Why not just charge users that want to subscribe to their service?
Because it's more profitable to do it the other way. Disney/ESPN's actions are entirely reasonable and make sense, whether it's this, the gutting of copyright law, or any number of other things they do to increase the company's revenues.
The real question comes down to how the individual people responsible for these actions have arrived at the conclusion that their greed is more important than everything else. The behavior of almost any given public corportation is pathologically anti-social.
why don't they sell their service on a "per customer" basis instead of on a "everyone pays weather or not they are a customer or not"
Because by doing it this way they can make more money, of course. Keeping charges as low-key and hidden as possible has always been a preferred way to do business, especially when you can charge millions of people without their knowledge. Imagine the outrage if the average US citizen actually had to write a check to the IRS every month instead of having it quietly deducted from their paycheck under force of federal law.
Well, it's also a no-fail guarantee that the convict in question will never re-offend.
I'm not sure why this is so, given that the technique used on domestic animals pretty much Just Works; but it is.
Because animals are usually put down with a massive overdose of pentobarbital, which effectively turns their brain off. I had to have one of our cats put down last year - she was unconscious before the vet had completed the injection and dead less than 15 seconds later, with no signs of any discomfort.
This business of using a cocktail of drugs to paralyze and ultimately stop the heart of the condemned is just ridiculous. I don't know that pentobarbital overdose in humans works the same way as it does in animals, but there's got to be a better way. It's not pretty, but frankly a gunshot to the back of the head seems a lot more humane than most execution methods used in the US today.
Yeah, "14 time Olympic gold medalist" does tend to add a bit of pop to the ol' resume/CV.
Ask anyone who's ever been in the US military or been a military dependent how good socialized medicine is. You get a great level of care when your provider has a guaranteed paycheck and doesn't have to give a damn about his reputation.
Not saying it couldn't work, but my personal experiences with it are fraught with a lot of unnecessary pain and discomfort, with no legal means of holding the incompetent fools accountable for it.
Individual freedom and responsibility good, everything else
Ideas, intriguing, newsletter, etc.
"I wrote that this user of which you speak will simply install ubuntu."
You said nothing of the sort in the post to which I responded. You also said "none of the major distros use older versions of packages", and that's provably not true. Your average user won't necessarily make the distinction between a "desktop" and "server" distribution, so it's entirely possble that he ends up with RHEL/CentOS or Debian, both of which are extremely well-known and often use ridiculously out-of-date components in the interests of stability.
Just because you've not personally come across such a situation doesn't mean it's a "figment of my imagination", and it's exactly this kind of "I haven't experienced it, therefore it cannot exist!" attitude that permeates the Linux community and ultimately ends up turning a lot of potential users off.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of large organizations that use Windows backends. I'm not a MS fan, but the parent's post still stands - with almost 90% market share, it's silly to claim Microsoft is "proof the concept doesn't work". You may disagree with them, but if the product wasn't meeting customer needs, it wouldn't be out there.
I would expect him to deal with the problem that his distro is not using the latest versions of everything
I would expect him to say, "this Linux stuff sucks" and go back to Windows. Expecting the user to meet you halfway on such things pretty much guarantees you're not going to keep them as a user for long.
Within the Linux community there is still some kind of mistaken belief that everyday people have any kind of interest in computers for their own sake, and then contempt for them when they don't. 95% of people look at a computer as a tool to get a job done, and want it to do so in the quickest, most painless manner. They don't want to deal with dependency issues, having to find drivers for their hardware, etc. Part of Microsoft's (and Apple's) success is due to their willingness to spend millions of dollars to keep the user insulated from having to know a whole lot about their machines, and the willingness to embrace the technically ignorant.
If something goes badly, typically your CEO gets fired.
Often to find himself floating from a golden parachute, and likely another CEO position somewhere else. Carly Fiorina got *fired* from HP (how often do CEOs actually get terminated?), yet still walked out the door more than $20 million richer than when she got out of bed that morning.
CEOs do assume more responsibility than the rank-and-file workers, but unless they're the sole owner or a *big* shareholder (like Bill Gates), they're not usually assuming a damn bit of personal risk outside the value of their outstanding options, and I've *never* heard of the CEO of a public company leaving the position poorer than when he took it, no matter how badly he performed.
I think I'm a little embarassed to say that I understood everything he just said with crystal clarity.
:-D
And to the GP - 10 silver ain't gonna come CLOSE to buying you a Ragefire Chasm run on my server.