True, that's probably the best use. But in all honesty, this thing is still going to be more detectable than just poking your head over the rise. It might be useful, but I doubt it overall.
This looks designed to be robotic, so don't worry about the pilot.
And, while not completely invisible, it has a much lower visual signature than anything else of comperable size. I'm just not quite sure what the use is: it probably has a higher radar cross-section, so it's fairly useless as a spy-plane. The only thing you are really hiding from are people. Or civilians. Might be usefull as a close-rage spybot on a battlefield, but anybody with smart weapons can see and hit it quickly.
Exactly. US Embassies have a specific department that does nothing but lobby for US companies in whatever country they are in. Other countries embassies have the same. This is not new, it is not unique to MS, or the USA.
This is standard practice. I'd have been surpised if the US hadn't lobbied the EU.
(Of course, there is lobbying and there is lobbying. MS, as a big company, is going to get more backing than most, and it may have crossed an unmentioned line someplace. Still, this story sounds like standard practice.)
For that matter, they all could basically be because someone ran a code-audit on Firefox recently. Something like that would raise the 'found vulnerablities' level through the roof for the moment, but it really doesn't mean there are bigger problems with it; just that there was a concerted effort to find them recently. (I don't know of any such audit off the top of my head, but I don't follow that closely. It wouldn't nececarrally make the news.)
Think of it as a rubber band airplane. It takes a certain amount of force to wind the rubber band, and the rubber band stores that force until it can accelerate the propeller. This uses microwaves to store energy until the storage unit can be accelerated. When the unit is accelerated the momentum is conserved through heat/mass gain, balanced by the loss of the momentum of the photons. (His big problem is the heating of the unit.) (If you want the full momentum track, you have to start with the momentum of the electrical current running the microwave generator. Remember, just because it doesn't have mass doesn't mean it doesn't have momentum.)
Gravitation and acceleration are identical, sure. But no energy is used until work is done, and work isn't done until something accelerates. To use this for hovering you balance potential force from this device (force which comes from the microwave transmitter, and would get converted to heat/velocity) with the potential force from gravity (from the attraction of the masses, and would get converted to heat/velocity) until they are equal. As long as the device doesn't accelerate in the direction of those two forces (relative, of course, to each other), no work is done and therefore no energy is used. (Well, except for heat/friction losses in the unit. For this to be practical those would have to be minimal.) So the only energy you need to input is the loss to heat, and you can keep a specific height against gravitational acceleration. (You are countering gravity's force, only.)
The article does make sense. Energy comes in from electricity, and is output in heat. Momentum does the same, with a directional bias. Total acceleration possible is no higher than the amount of energy input. He's just found a way to convert electrical energy to potential kinetic energy. There are losses, but the advantage is you can use it the same as potential kinetic energy from more normal sources. It just sounds odd because we are used to potential kinetic energy to be 'height above the ground'. There are clear inputs and outputs for all conserved quantities, in all cases.
No, actually, he's not. He's claiming that the thrust gets used up when you accelerate.
This is a device for 'storing' thrust: You input thrust using a microwave generator, and you can store thrust until the device overheats. When the device accelerates, it uses the stored thrust, you need to generate more for it to accelerate more.
The advantage of this is that it can store thrust generated over a long period of time. For continuous acceleration this is no better than just using the microwave generator as a thruster. But for impulse thrust it is much better, and it has the nice side effect that it has a continuous force that you can use as long as you don't let it accelerate you.
I'm not all that sure it would be useful as a space drive, given that, but it probably does produce the effect he's seeing. If he can get the storage efficiency up high enough it might be useful for hover vehicles though: The stored thrust could counter the continuous acceleration of gravity without doing any acceleration itself, which would produce a neat effect. The efficiency would have to be a lot higher though.
3. Install bad hardware. RAM in particular; if you can find bad RAM that passes the start-up test (not that hard, since the test basically checks if it is compatable and responding) you'll get random crashes and kernel panics.
As far as I know, outside some very speciallized mainframes and NASA equipment, that last trick will crash anything.
Single-issue parties can work quite well under some systems of government. In fact, from what I've seen, in a system that supports them they are as good or better than lobbying is in other systems.
But you have to have a coalition-style ruling government for them to have any useful effect. I don't know how Sweden's government is set up, and whether it can support single-issue parties as part of the government.
If they are going to sanitize it, why stop with just props?
Because the props can be changed without changing the show.
Frankly, I'm amazed at all the bad reactions here. It looks like they are going to show Lucas what he should have done: Update the special effects to what the orginial would have done had they had the budget/tech they wished for, but not change the story or feel of the show other than that. Done well they could actually give us a 'better' original Trek than the orginal. Leave the stories, the plots, the acting, but bring the visuals up to what we would expect from a decent show.
(Oh, and Shatner's acting wasn't actually all that bad. (Though it wasn't great.) It was just incredibly easy to parody.)
You can actually read the entire comment of the collapased comments if you try, at least on my old version of Mozilla. If I click into the comment preview I can scroll it using the arrow keys.
Actaully, read the context of your Shakespeare quote: In the play, the character is presenting ideas to create a dictatorial tyrrany (which he and the characters he is speaking to would run). Killing the lawyers is part of that.
(Ok, so if I remember correctly it's a fairly tounge in cheek presentation, but still...)
This ballot was a primary, not the final election. So, add to your above list the following: If you are a member of a polictial party, you can vote for who is going to run for several local, state, and national seats for that party. But not other parties.
So a Republican would get a different ballot than a Democrat or a Libertarian, and I (as an unaffiliated voter) would get a different one yet. And I would get a different one if I was in the next city, or district, over.
I won't say electronic voting is better, even if done correctly. But, done correctly, it is at least no worse than any other meathod. It has unique attack vectors, but so do paper ballots. We've just dealt with the ones for older meathods.
Counting millions of anything accuately is hard, and is something computers are good at.
Computers can be configured to present the ballot in different ways dynamically: Different lanuages, audible (for blind/hard illitterate voters), braille, etc. and you don't have to know who voted which way. Less chance to trace/influence votes.
You remove the 'interpretation' element of manual voting schemes: no 'Is this box checked or not' questions.
Computer voting, in and of itself, is not a bad idea. Nor should it be hard to implement correctly. But it hasn't been implemented correctly in the US yet.
Yes, alumnimum they said. (You can double check in the local Apple store in a few days, I'm sure.)
For the average user I'd say no... But around here I'd say check the web; some people have figured out the directory structure and how to access the 'songs' area of the standard iPods, and I'd assume it is the same here.
Actually, if you look at it, John Titor did say he went back to a slightly alternate timeline, one that shared his history to when he went back, but not necissarially after that. So, he could have been making perfectly valid predictions, but something small happened that meant history went another way. (I can think of a few things in late 2004 that could have escalated the situation. To civil war? Maybe.)
Just saying his story still holds together, if you want to believe it.
The free market is perfectly capable of keeping our computers secure... For anyone who values security.
Windows is not designed or sold to people who value security. It is designed for and sold to people who value being able to use the 'Windows System', which includes generic PCs, a large collection of software, and moderate ease of use to the unskilled. Security is not a primary concern, though that is changing.
Where did I mention software patents? I was talking patents in general, and I believe everything I mentioned would apply whether there were prototypes or not.
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True, that's probably the best use. But in all honesty, this thing is still going to be more detectable than just poking your head over the rise. It might be useful, but I doubt it overall.
This looks designed to be robotic, so don't worry about the pilot.
And, while not completely invisible, it has a much lower visual signature than anything else of comperable size. I'm just not quite sure what the use is: it probably has a higher radar cross-section, so it's fairly useless as a spy-plane. The only thing you are really hiding from are people. Or civilians. Might be usefull as a close-rage spybot on a battlefield, but anybody with smart weapons can see and hit it quickly.
...Imagine a Beowolf cluster of those!
(Runs in shame.)
Exactly. US Embassies have a specific department that does nothing but lobby for US companies in whatever country they are in. Other countries embassies have the same. This is not new, it is not unique to MS, or the USA.
This is standard practice. I'd have been surpised if the US hadn't lobbied the EU.
(Of course, there is lobbying and there is lobbying. MS, as a big company, is going to get more backing than most, and it may have crossed an unmentioned line someplace. Still, this story sounds like standard practice.)
For that matter, they all could basically be because someone ran a code-audit on Firefox recently. Something like that would raise the 'found vulnerablities' level through the roof for the moment, but it really doesn't mean there are bigger problems with it; just that there was a concerted effort to find them recently. (I don't know of any such audit off the top of my head, but I don't follow that closely. It wouldn't nececarrally make the news.)
Think of it as a rubber band airplane. It takes a certain amount of force to wind the rubber band, and the rubber band stores that force until it can accelerate the propeller. This uses microwaves to store energy until the storage unit can be accelerated. When the unit is accelerated the momentum is conserved through heat/mass gain, balanced by the loss of the momentum of the photons. (His big problem is the heating of the unit.) (If you want the full momentum track, you have to start with the momentum of the electrical current running the microwave generator. Remember, just because it doesn't have mass doesn't mean it doesn't have momentum.)
Gravitation and acceleration are identical, sure. But no energy is used until work is done, and work isn't done until something accelerates. To use this for hovering you balance potential force from this device (force which comes from the microwave transmitter, and would get converted to heat/velocity) with the potential force from gravity (from the attraction of the masses, and would get converted to heat/velocity) until they are equal. As long as the device doesn't accelerate in the direction of those two forces (relative, of course, to each other), no work is done and therefore no energy is used. (Well, except for heat/friction losses in the unit. For this to be practical those would have to be minimal.) So the only energy you need to input is the loss to heat, and you can keep a specific height against gravitational acceleration. (You are countering gravity's force, only.)
The article does make sense. Energy comes in from electricity, and is output in heat. Momentum does the same, with a directional bias. Total acceleration possible is no higher than the amount of energy input. He's just found a way to convert electrical energy to potential kinetic energy. There are losses, but the advantage is you can use it the same as potential kinetic energy from more normal sources. It just sounds odd because we are used to potential kinetic energy to be 'height above the ground'. There are clear inputs and outputs for all conserved quantities, in all cases.
No, actually, he's not. He's claiming that the thrust gets used up when you accelerate.
This is a device for 'storing' thrust: You input thrust using a microwave generator, and you can store thrust until the device overheats. When the device accelerates, it uses the stored thrust, you need to generate more for it to accelerate more.
The advantage of this is that it can store thrust generated over a long period of time. For continuous acceleration this is no better than just using the microwave generator as a thruster. But for impulse thrust it is much better, and it has the nice side effect that it has a continuous force that you can use as long as you don't let it accelerate you.
I'm not all that sure it would be useful as a space drive, given that, but it probably does produce the effect he's seeing. If he can get the storage efficiency up high enough it might be useful for hover vehicles though: The stored thrust could counter the continuous acceleration of gravity without doing any acceleration itself, which would produce a neat effect. The efficiency would have to be a lot higher though.
3. Install bad hardware. RAM in particular; if you can find bad RAM that passes the start-up test (not that hard, since the test basically checks if it is compatable and responding) you'll get random crashes and kernel panics.
As far as I know, outside some very speciallized mainframes and NASA equipment, that last trick will crash anything.
Single-issue parties can work quite well under some systems of government. In fact, from what I've seen, in a system that supports them they are as good or better than lobbying is in other systems.
But you have to have a coalition-style ruling government for them to have any useful effect. I don't know how Sweden's government is set up, and whether it can support single-issue parties as part of the government.
Don't worry. I'm sure everyone there has installed AIM on their computers without letting the IT department know.
Because the props can be changed without changing the show.
Frankly, I'm amazed at all the bad reactions here. It looks like they are going to show Lucas what he should have done: Update the special effects to what the orginial would have done had they had the budget/tech they wished for, but not change the story or feel of the show other than that. Done well they could actually give us a 'better' original Trek than the orginal. Leave the stories, the plots, the acting, but bring the visuals up to what we would expect from a decent show.
(Oh, and Shatner's acting wasn't actually all that bad. (Though it wasn't great.) It was just incredibly easy to parody.)
You can actually read the entire comment of the collapased comments if you try, at least on my old version of Mozilla. If I click into the comment preview I can scroll it using the arrow keys.
I find it fun.
Actaully, read the context of your Shakespeare quote: In the play, the character is presenting ideas to create a dictatorial tyrrany (which he and the characters he is speaking to would run). Killing the lawyers is part of that.
(Ok, so if I remember correctly it's a fairly tounge in cheek presentation, but still...)
He discusses other chaos besides what was reported. In fact, what was reported only slightly affected him. (His location had cards.)
The problems talked about in this entry are seperate from that, aside from where he talks about helping another polling place out.
Actually, to add complexity...
This ballot was a primary, not the final election. So, add to your above list the following: If you are a member of a polictial party, you can vote for who is going to run for several local, state, and national seats for that party. But not other parties.
So a Republican would get a different ballot than a Democrat or a Libertarian, and I (as an unaffiliated voter) would get a different one yet. And I would get a different one if I was in the next city, or district, over.
I won't say electronic voting is better, even if done correctly. But, done correctly, it is at least no worse than any other meathod. It has unique attack vectors, but so do paper ballots. We've just dealt with the ones for older meathods.
Reasons to use a computer at all:
Computer voting, in and of itself, is not a bad idea. Nor should it be hard to implement correctly. But it hasn't been implemented correctly in the US yet.
iTunes has been able to do this since version 1... It's only the iPod that had trouble.
True... But it also does agree with current physics as well.
It's awfully hard to conclusively call him a hoax. Which at least makes him interesting.
Actually, if you look at it, John Titor did say he went back to a slightly alternate timeline, one that shared his history to when he went back, but not necissarially after that. So, he could have been making perfectly valid predictions, but something small happened that meant history went another way. (I can think of a few things in late 2004 that could have escalated the situation. To civil war? Maybe.)
Just saying his story still holds together, if you want to believe it.
'Afford' and 'want to pay for' are seperate concepts.
Nope, sorry. ...I do remember telling people not to buy 56k modems until the standard was finalized though...
The free market is perfectly capable of keeping our computers secure... For anyone who values security.
Windows is not designed or sold to people who value security. It is designed for and sold to people who value being able to use the 'Windows System', which includes generic PCs, a large collection of software, and moderate ease of use to the unskilled. Security is not a primary concern, though that is changing.
The famous equation: E=MC^2 converts to M=E/C^2. For truely tiny masses, that's the easiest way to measure and specify them.
Where did I mention software patents? I was talking patents in general, and I believe everything I mentioned would apply whether there were prototypes or not.