I am not demanding anything. I was asking you to provide citations, and pointing out that unless you can do that you shouldn't expect others to take your conjectures at face value. I don't know why that makes you upset. I was the one being called a dick and to "just fucking google it" after having googled it.
The signal-to-noise ratio on Slashdot is bad enough as it is because of all the people who think they are experts after having made a lot of conclusions out of what they found on Google. If you are so obviously right it shouldn't be hard to substantiate (other than giving numbers on mirror reflectivity). But no one is forcing you.
And for the record: Where did you get the idea that I believe a reflective surface will defeat this weapon? I explicitly stated in my first post that I do not know.
I did google it, as you can see if you read all of this thread.
And you know, it is normally the one making the assertions that is supposed to provide citations. It does not become true just because nobody has proven it to be false.
My entire point was that his claims were unsubstantiated guesswork. And since he was responding to an honest question with a very authoritative tone I think it is rather important to point out that it really is speculation. If that makes me a dick then so be it.
Why would my assertiveness about the properties of mirrors have anything to do with my experience with lasers? Nor am I claiming any special knowledge of mirrors; merely the ability to do a little research before latching on to sci-fi fantasies about defense systems.
Well, we are talking about the properties of mirrors being exposed to high energy lasers. What research are you referring to by the way? Any links?
Making your aircraft as reflective as you can possibly make it will neither be a "simple" matter, nor do anything to protect the aircraft.
Yes, you keep saying that. Do you expect people to take your word for it (especially considering you admit to not being an expert)?
In reality, absorbing 1/10 of the energy from a laser weapon is going to cause the mirror to rapidly degrade, and the aircraft will soon be taking on almost all of the energy from the laser.
Sure, but all this is meaningless without numbers. How rapidly? How long is the laser pulse?
You are being very assertive. Is this because you have experience with high energy lasers?
Maybe there are no feasible countermeasures, but on the other hand, maybe there are. As far as I have read nobody has a definitive answer. (Example.)
If you can make a reflective layer that only absorbs 10% then you need a 10 times as powerful laser to do equivalent (meaning any) damage. Add to that heat resistant materials or other measures and you up the factor even more. Can you easily achieve the required laser power? I don't know, and I am curious how you can know (although I am suspecting you actually don't).
A GPS typically calculates velocity from Doppler shift of the D-band signal. This give higher accuracy since the position reading is somewhat unreliable. It also means you can (in principle) get the velocity information virtually instantaneously without having to sample two locations. However, in reality a lot of averaging and filtering is going on, and I think many receivers weighs in both position deltas and Doppler shift in the equations, so the reading is going to have at least some lag.
The only terminology I have ever heard of calls the X server "server" and applications using it "clients". Perhaps you are referring to the fact that the X server typically executes on the client computer (the user's computer), because that's where the keyboard and screen is, while the application (client) sometimes executes on a server computer, to which the user might have connected using a remote shell (such as SSH).
I'm not sure why you think I should have to respond to what other Swedes supposedly have said to you, or what the straw man about young pacifists has to do with foreign policy, so let's just leave it were we are.
Ok, Sweden has the openness. Still they weren't much help in either WWII or the Cold War. Nor really could they have been even if they'd wanted to. Which they didn't.
And I am sure there are other countries with similar openness as well. As for the situation in the Cold War it had more to do with being squeezed in between the NATO block and the Soviet Union, with a country full of natural resources and a very strategic location controlling the Baltic Sea providing access to the Atlantic.
Publicly picking either side would have been disastrous, resulting in imminent invasion from the other side. Nevertheless, behind the scenes Sweden actually conducted intelligence gathering against the Russians on behalf of the western block.
Sweden is a bit like the Tollan in SG1 - it's an advanced society but one that is too aloof too be much help when you're about to get overrun by the bad guys.
Foreign policy of any country has more to do with game theory than good versus evil. You'll be hard pressed to find any government that doesn't either act in (what it thinks is) its own best interests or the best interests of its people (depending on how democratic it is). This is perhaps not what is said in the public rhetoric, but then we are at the stage of convincing and motivating the population.
I don't think any other government would do this - mistakes in the military would just get covered up as state secrets and anyone who tried to talk about them would get locked up or worse.
Eh. Forgive me, but do you have any basis whatsoever for this claim, or are you just being arrogant?
Even if a flawed design would have worked in the intended usage scenarios as you speculate, given the option of writing a correct program and an incorrect program with no significant difference in effort, why would you ever consciously consider choosing the broken solution from the start? This sounds more like plain and simple incompetence to me.
I don't know, it mostly sounds like you are complaining that some things are different. What did you expect when you switch to a different OS? An identical system with a different logotype? Of course there are Windows programs that won't run (well) on Linux, in the same way as there are Linux programs that won't run on Windows. That doesn't make one of them better than the other.
I could probably list at least a hundred similar points as those you described with things I am used to in Ubuntu that are missing or not working well in Windows. And I haven't just tried Windows a little -- I work with it professionally every day.
It's certainly not documented anywhere inside Ubuntu's Help Files. I looked. It wasn't there. I swore at being stuck in 640x480 and then reinstalled from CD
While I agree with you that presenting a dialog (any dialog for that matter) partly outside the screen is really bad behavior from a usage perspective, the Alt+drag combination certainly is in the help files. It took me less than 30 seconds to find it, and this was the first time I ever read any of the help files.
You can find it if you click New to Ubuntu and navigate to Desktop Overview->Windows->Manipulating Windows (here).
True, although the question about convergence needs to be stated in the context of relative rates. In other words... I certainly wouldn't trust mixed-markets to adapt faster.
It might be the case that none of the currently existing mixed-market economies outperform a free market in this respect (although I'm personally not sure this has been established). However, the more important question is: Does there exist a market different from the free market that is better? We should not limit ourselves to existing economies.
Also, I would argue that there doesn't really exist any truly free markets today. Even the USA have a multitude of rules regulating the economy. So instead of claiming that all rules are bad, I think we should investigate which rules might serve a useful purpose. As our understanding of economy increases, I suspect that we will be able to develop more and more purposeful adjustments to the free market, tuning its performance to our needs.
I disagree with this. The free market is a collection of individually acting humans, and optimizes for the values of those humans. If "WE" care about disabled people, so will the market. I suspect it's simply the case that "WE" as a collective do not care as much as "WE" the individual claim to.
You have a point, but at the same time it is very difficult for me as an individual to help a disabled person through my market actions. Of course, I can give charity (provided I am aware of those in need), but then I am acting against one of the fundamental principles of the theoretical free market. Which means we have actually created another market model.
Although, there seems to be strong evidence that the more free the economy, the greater the rate of charitable giving. Compare US vs EU, and then EU to, say, the Middle East or China.
Maybe, but there is also the fact that in mixed market economies charity is usually less needed, since social services usually takes care of the poor and homeless. The total transfer of wealth from the rich to people in need is actually much larger in for instance Sweden compared to the USA, but the difference is that it is done collectively through taxes. This model is in fact supported by the vast majority of the population and the entire spectrum of political parties in the parliament, conservatives included. One could almost call it institutionalized charity.
The free market doesn't have a goal; the whole idea is that it's a decentralized system of actors each pursuing their own goals. Under certain circumstances -- when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full knowledge, and no externalization of costs -- it can produce reduced costs and better goods and services for the consumer.
Just adding a few thoughts: The primary advantage of a free market, in this respect, is that (under the given ideal circumstances) it acts as a zero-intelligence optimization procedure. A regulated market or in the extreme case a planned economy requires someone to make active decisions to organize the society, which can be very complicated. Free market works even for idiots (as long as the participants have a slight clue about their own good).
But then there are a few problems.
Obviously, we do not have the said ideal circumstances.
It is not necessarily the case that the value function of the optimizer is exactly what we want. For instance, the free market doesn't care if disabled people die, but we do.
Even if the free market can be proven to reach optimum eventually, this says nothing about the convergence rate. And given that the premisses (such as the technology level) aren't static, we are chasing a moving target, which means convergence rate matters.
So the question is: Do we really have zero intelligence, or can we use the little intelligence we might have to modify (regulate?) the free market, and hopefully improve the convergence of the optimizer and/or adjust the value function to match our desired goals better?
Putting it in other words: The resolution bottleneck is not the pixel size, but the optics. The extra pixels are probably meaningless (unless maybe in a bright scene) since the actual resolution in the image content is lower, and this is reflected by the fact that you remove high frequencies (noise) immediately after capturing the image, effectively reducing the number of pixels.
Another interesting fact is that the pixels size is approaching the wavelength of the light it is trying to absorb. Putting 3000 pixels across 6 mm means you get 2 microns of space for each pixel, which is less than three times the wavelength of red light (~700 nm). However, in reality you will never have 100% fill factor so the actual pixels will have to be something like 1,4 microns. Already we are down to only twice the wavelength, and this would be for a 5 MP camera.
When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country. Don't want to do that? Don't go to war.
So you're saying that once you find yourself in a war, you should throw away your moral compass and just go for it, killing mercilessly as much as you can? If you have the choice not to kill an innocent child, you should still do it? Well, if the innocent child lives in a certain geographical territory that is -- otherwise it's a horrible murder.
It is intended to create an environment where equal opportunity exists for all; it does not guarantee equal outcomes for all
Honestly, I am not aware of any party in the world today that tries to guarantee that. This is coming from someone who lives in a country where the rightmost party in the parliament is pretty far to the left of the Democrats in the US. And who doesn't want there to be equal opportunity for all?
So what you're saying doesn't really tell what signifies "Republicanism" as an ideology.
Perhaps, perhaps not. If the transition is made as a step to a new generation of connectors, you will hopefully end up with a generation that has fewer connector types. After all, we have managed to go from
Furthermore, even if the power comes from fossil fuel plants, emissions can be controlled to a much higher degree at a central location compared to thousands of car engines scattered everywhere and moving around. For instance, technology is currently being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the combustion and pump it back into the ground.
Another advantage is that excess heat may be used to heat buildings (i.e. a CHP-plant).
Here is a map showing the amount of light pollution. Notice that you can find pretty dark areas in some rich countries as well, including about half of USA. (The next darkest colour in the map means you can still see the Triangulum Galaxy easily with the naked eye.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am not demanding anything. I was asking you to provide citations, and pointing out that unless you can do that you shouldn't expect others to take your conjectures at face value. I don't know why that makes you upset. I was the one being called a dick and to "just fucking google it" after having googled it.
The signal-to-noise ratio on Slashdot is bad enough as it is because of all the people who think they are experts after having made a lot of conclusions out of what they found on Google. If you are so obviously right it shouldn't be hard to substantiate (other than giving numbers on mirror reflectivity). But no one is forcing you.
And for the record: Where did you get the idea that I believe a reflective surface will defeat this weapon? I explicitly stated in my first post that I do not know.
I did google it, as you can see if you read all of this thread.
And you know, it is normally the one making the assertions that is supposed to provide citations. It does not become true just because nobody has proven it to be false.
My entire point was that his claims were unsubstantiated guesswork. And since he was responding to an honest question with a very authoritative tone I think it is rather important to point out that it really is speculation. If that makes me a dick then so be it.
Well, we are talking about the properties of mirrors being exposed to high energy lasers. What research are you referring to by the way? Any links?
Yes, you keep saying that. Do you expect people to take your word for it (especially considering you admit to not being an expert)?
Sure, but all this is meaningless without numbers. How rapidly? How long is the laser pulse?
You are being very assertive. Is this because you have experience with high energy lasers?
Maybe there are no feasible countermeasures, but on the other hand, maybe there are. As far as I have read nobody has a definitive answer. (Example.)
If you can make a reflective layer that only absorbs 10% then you need a 10 times as powerful laser to do equivalent (meaning any) damage. Add to that heat resistant materials or other measures and you up the factor even more. Can you easily achieve the required laser power? I don't know, and I am curious how you can know (although I am suspecting you actually don't).
Nah, more like nine years. According to wikipedia: "Version 0.17, also referred to as DR17 or E17, has been in development since December 2000."
I used to look forward to it during a couple of years at the beginning of this decade but have long since given up and lost interest.
A GPS typically calculates velocity from Doppler shift of the D-band signal. This give higher accuracy since the position reading is somewhat unreliable. It also means you can (in principle) get the velocity information virtually instantaneously without having to sample two locations. However, in reality a lot of averaging and filtering is going on, and I think many receivers weighs in both position deltas and Doppler shift in the equations, so the reading is going to have at least some lag.
(Reference)
The only terminology I have ever heard of calls the X server "server" and applications using it "clients". Perhaps you are referring to the fact that the X server typically executes on the client computer (the user's computer), because that's where the keyboard and screen is, while the application (client) sometimes executes on a server computer, to which the user might have connected using a remote shell (such as SSH).
I think you got it backwards -- the applications are the clients. They use the X server to receive input and get their windows displayed.
I'm not sure why you think I should have to respond to what other Swedes supposedly have said to you, or what the straw man about young pacifists has to do with foreign policy, so let's just leave it were we are.
And I am sure there are other countries with similar openness as well. As for the situation in the Cold War it had more to do with being squeezed in between the NATO block and the Soviet Union, with a country full of natural resources and a very strategic location controlling the Baltic Sea providing access to the Atlantic.
Publicly picking either side would have been disastrous, resulting in imminent invasion from the other side. Nevertheless, behind the scenes Sweden actually conducted intelligence gathering against the Russians on behalf of the western block.
Foreign policy of any country has more to do with game theory than good versus evil. You'll be hard pressed to find any government that doesn't either act in (what it thinks is) its own best interests or the best interests of its people (depending on how democratic it is). This is perhaps not what is said in the public rhetoric, but then we are at the stage of convincing and motivating the population.
Apologies. I started out trying to make a bullet list, but Slashdot's filter wouldn't let me submit it.
You want examples. By all means, here are a few incident reports I came up with after a quick search. Unfortunately they are all written in swedish. More are available at this site.
I'm not saying the US is bad at transparency, but the assumption that no other country is is simply wrong.
Eh. Forgive me, but do you have any basis whatsoever for this claim, or are you just being arrogant?
Even if a flawed design would have worked in the intended usage scenarios as you speculate, given the option of writing a correct program and an incorrect program with no significant difference in effort, why would you ever consciously consider choosing the broken solution from the start? This sounds more like plain and simple incompetence to me.
I don't know, it mostly sounds like you are complaining that some things are different. What did you expect when you switch to a different OS? An identical system with a different logotype? Of course there are Windows programs that won't run (well) on Linux, in the same way as there are Linux programs that won't run on Windows. That doesn't make one of them better than the other.
I could probably list at least a hundred similar points as those you described with things I am used to in Ubuntu that are missing or not working well in Windows. And I haven't just tried Windows a little -- I work with it professionally every day.
While I agree with you that presenting a dialog (any dialog for that matter) partly outside the screen is really bad behavior from a usage perspective, the Alt+drag combination certainly is in the help files. It took me less than 30 seconds to find it, and this was the first time I ever read any of the help files.
You can find it if you click New to Ubuntu and navigate to Desktop Overview->Windows->Manipulating Windows (here).
It might be the case that none of the currently existing mixed-market economies outperform a free market in this respect (although I'm personally not sure this has been established). However, the more important question is: Does there exist a market different from the free market that is better? We should not limit ourselves to existing economies.
Also, I would argue that there doesn't really exist any truly free markets today. Even the USA have a multitude of rules regulating the economy. So instead of claiming that all rules are bad, I think we should investigate which rules might serve a useful purpose. As our understanding of economy increases, I suspect that we will be able to develop more and more purposeful adjustments to the free market, tuning its performance to our needs.
You have a point, but at the same time it is very difficult for me as an individual to help a disabled person through my market actions. Of course, I can give charity (provided I am aware of those in need), but then I am acting against one of the fundamental principles of the theoretical free market. Which means we have actually created another market model.
Maybe, but there is also the fact that in mixed market economies charity is usually less needed, since social services usually takes care of the poor and homeless. The total transfer of wealth from the rich to people in need is actually much larger in for instance Sweden compared to the USA, but the difference is that it is done collectively through taxes. This model is in fact supported by the vast majority of the population and the entire spectrum of political parties in the parliament, conservatives included. One could almost call it institutionalized charity.
Just adding a few thoughts: The primary advantage of a free market, in this respect, is that (under the given ideal circumstances) it acts as a zero-intelligence optimization procedure. A regulated market or in the extreme case a planned economy requires someone to make active decisions to organize the society, which can be very complicated. Free market works even for idiots (as long as the participants have a slight clue about their own good).
But then there are a few problems.
So the question is: Do we really have zero intelligence, or can we use the little intelligence we might have to modify (regulate?) the free market, and hopefully improve the convergence of the optimizer and/or adjust the value function to match our desired goals better?
Putting it in other words: The resolution bottleneck is not the pixel size, but the optics. The extra pixels are probably meaningless (unless maybe in a bright scene) since the actual resolution in the image content is lower, and this is reflected by the fact that you remove high frequencies (noise) immediately after capturing the image, effectively reducing the number of pixels.
Another interesting fact is that the pixels size is approaching the wavelength of the light it is trying to absorb. Putting 3000 pixels across 6 mm means you get 2 microns of space for each pixel, which is less than three times the wavelength of red light (~700 nm). However, in reality you will never have 100% fill factor so the actual pixels will have to be something like 1,4 microns. Already we are down to only twice the wavelength, and this would be for a 5 MP camera.
So you're saying that once you find yourself in a war, you should throw away your moral compass and just go for it, killing mercilessly as much as you can? If you have the choice not to kill an innocent child, you should still do it? Well, if the innocent child lives in a certain geographical territory that is -- otherwise it's a horrible murder.
Honestly, I am not aware of any party in the world today that tries to guarantee that. This is coming from someone who lives in a country where the rightmost party in the parliament is pretty far to the left of the Democrats in the US. And who doesn't want there to be equal opportunity for all?
So what you're saying doesn't really tell what signifies "Republicanism" as an ideology.
Perhaps, perhaps not. If the transition is made as a step to a new generation of connectors, you will hopefully end up with a generation that has fewer connector types. After all, we have managed to go from
DE-9 (Serial port) + DB-25 (Parallel port) + DA-15 (Game port) + PS/2 (Keyboard and mouse) + VGA (Screen)
to
USB + DVI (+ FireWire for some cameras).
Furthermore, even if the power comes from fossil fuel plants, emissions can be controlled to a much higher degree at a central location compared to thousands of car engines scattered everywhere and moving around. For instance, technology is currently being developed to capture carbon dioxide from the combustion and pump it back into the ground.
Another advantage is that excess heat may be used to heat buildings (i.e. a CHP-plant).
Here is a map showing the amount of light pollution. Notice that you can find pretty dark areas in some rich countries as well, including about half of USA. (The next darkest colour in the map means you can still see the Triangulum Galaxy easily with the naked eye.)