It's because they go through it. That's why you wear ceramic armor under your kevlar. Kevlar doesn't resist penetration, its just very strong, so it tends to slow a bullet down considerably.
You're right. The only "extra" energy is elastic recoil from the material, and that is not amplified. Getting "extra" force off an impact would violate conservation of energy.
The real reason it's better to have it bounce off is that the energy of impact is distributed over a wider area. Sure, getting shot in the nuts with no protection but this armor is going to put your childbearing days to an end, but it's probably not going to kill you, as opposed to the massive tissue damage that would result in getting shot with no protection. the bullet might go all the way through (thus imparting less energy) but everything between the point where it entered and the point where it exited would be hamburger, and an area in diameter proportional to the caliber of the bullet would suffer serious shock damage.
The way this stuff will end up being used, is over certain strategic pieces of hard armor, so the problem with transferring more energy to a delicate area will be minimized, and the type of protection can change from heavy plates (which have to be able to stop a bullet themselves) to kinetic padding to distribute impact. The advantage of being able to wear full body armor that is light and breathable cannot be overstated. Currently you can only wear very little armor because of the weight, which increases casualties from things like shrapnel which would be little more than a nuisance to someone wearing a suit of this stuff.
How did this get modded insightful? Of course it bounces off! The armor has very little mass, and it's being suspended vertically as a sheet. It's like hitting a little bullet trampoline. That stuff would have to be absurdly dense for a bullet to just hit it and drop down.
Now, if you're saying there needs to be some padding underneath to absorb kinetic impacts, sure, fine. But don't kid yourself...The bullets will still bounce off...That's just Newton; either it's going through, or it's bouncing off (or the material is dense enough to absorb the energy of impact without transfering enough of it back to the bullet to make it bounce). The only way to keep them from bouncing off would be to surround the soldier in some sort of substance that absorbs and redistributes impact, and I don't think they're going to be too keen on looking like the michelin man.
My mother had this stuff and she lasted three weeks after the surgery. Living past a year is pretty rare, and living past two is abberrant. Mind you, I wouldn't want to live three days with this stuff unless it was caught hella early. It's an ugly form of an ugly disease.
Sure, in England. I should have been more specific. I'd actually like to have a system like that in the US, so we could shut the damn parents up.
Think about it: Parents don't complain half as much about underage drinking as they do about violent video games. Why? Because the kid has to go out of his/her way to get booze, probably even breaking the law at some point. So you can't blame the alcohol manufacturers...It's legally not their fault.
If the same was true of games, then we could legitimately put it back on the goddamn bad parents. "Little Mikey blew his sisters head off after playing GTA LXIV? And did you purchase this game for him? And were you not clearly informed that it contained violence, nuditity, and abuse of kittens? You were? Uh huh."
First of all: Suck my cock you anonymous little bitch.
Second: When it comes around that you actually can rape a hooker, gut her, and run around with her entrails on her head in full glorious Life-Lyke(tm) color...and this will happen...you're going to want a system in place that prohibits little Mikey from picking this up because the cover is shiny, and causing serious kiddie trauma.
I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not saying it shouldn't be sold in stores. I've got no problem with sick, violent, or "obscene" video games.
I'm just saying that it's not a bad idea to prohibit kids from buying them, same as we prohibit them from buying porn, booze, and tobacco. It's a little something I like to call "common sense".
I don't care if they put an age limit on the purchase of the games. Why not? It's not really an issue today, because sex/violence is still pretty unrealistic, but as games get more realistic this will become a real issue.
Might as well start enforcing the age restrictions on content...If you want your kid to be able to play it, you can still buy it for 'em, but they shouldn't be able to pick it up unsupervised. This isn't to say this law was in any way justified. Utter shit would be a better word for it. But something like the laws we already have for R rated movies, etc, applied to games based on the content rating, isn't oppressive, weird, or hard to understand.
There are no age restriction laws on the selling of video games, which is the root of the whole issue. The ESRB rating is just a "suggestion".
Now, if they'd put out a law to make it a fine-able offense to sell games to kids who are under the ESRB suggested age rating, I'd have had no problem with that. But, as usual, they put all the blame on the buyer, so if you bought something that was age unsuitable the retailer got the money for the sale, and you got the fine.
Corn sucks for ethanol. The only reason we use corn is because certain senators from certain agricultural states are pushing for more subsidies for their damn corn farmers. You can make ethanol out of a lot of things, and a lot of them are way lower maintenance than freaking corn. Using more advanced processes like those for Cellulosic ethanol you can get cleaner fuel at a higher energy return rate from crops that are easier to grow.
Re:What will be powering our cars 10 years from no
on
Vinod Khosla Talks Ethanol
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· Score: 4, Informative
Whenever someone pushes ethanol that hard, they're really pushing for corn subsidies. If he starts talking wood chips or sawgrass, that might be something worthwhile, but as it stands it's just another pork project.
Herbalism is good for cash as well. I also have a friend who makes crazy money through alchemy, by making stacks of potions and marking them up only 10-15 silver over the cost of materials. I've seen her pull in ~150g in profit in a day or two.
Come right down to it though, you're going to be grinding something for money. There's just no other way to get it. Either you're making 200+ potions, or you're spending hours mining, skinning, herbing, or just killing things that drop stuff thats worth money. I personally haunt the auction houses buying up low priced greens to disenchant, and then sell the materials, but that's not profitable enough to keep me off the streets.
Earth and Beyond had potential, but it was limited in a lot ways. Instead of a game where you had a ship, and a life, and could go around doing different things, you pretty much were the ship. You could never get a different ship without creating a new character. You could upgrade your ship as you leveled, la dee da, but it never really changed much.
Once you did the ship thing a few times, that was pretty much it. It was like half a game. If they'd added the other half (and a hell of a lot more content) it would have been pretty cool.
It's a semi-shady argument based on the fact that reverse-engineering has always been protected by common law, and by the fact that the constitution only provides for copyrights lasting a "limited time", which goes against the DMCA's strengthing of copyright law.
The whole problem revolves around the fact that the founders really had no conception of copyrights as applied to non-tangible things. Can't blame 'em. But now its a huge mess because the corporations want IP to fall under the same protections as, for example, office buildings, and this is strongly contradicted by peoples intuition that their purchase of a physical thing, gives them rights with regards to that physical thing.
It's going to be decades before this crap is ironed out to everyone's satisfaction.
Considering the uses the DMCA is commonly put toward, a game company using it so say, "If you're going to play one of our games over the internet, you've got to use our free service" is so low on the list so as not to register.
I'd love to see that crappy law thrown out and copyright intelligently reformed, but this is hardly the place to pick your fight.
Every time someone starts screaming about the game economics being utterly broken, I have to wonder about their actual evidence. I've played seriously on about 5 servers, and I currently play the auction house on two, and all I see are very predictable supply and demand fluctuations. Stuff goes up today, and down tomorrow. Prices run up on the weekends, and taper off during the week.
Sure you see items that are overpriced, and sometimes those get purchased. More often, however, you see the same item up for sale for a week or more, and get to watch its price trending gradually down until someone buys it.
It's not rampant inflation. It's exactly the sort of cyclical activity I would expect given variable supply.
So give me some data on this completely broken model, because I'm not seeing it.
Bnetd was an open source reverse engineer of Blizzards battle.net server protocol.
In a nutshell, it provided the ability to play the game online with a cracked CD, so they sued and had it taken down, thereby pissing off a horde of OS geeks who apparently can hold a grudge FOREVER. There are so many worse DMCA abusers out there, I really don't see the point of going nazi over one of the few cases where it was actually semi-legitimate.
To police effectively in WoW, you have to be able to police your own side. It's too hard to tell who's farming on the other side when they're immediately hostile, and you can't talk to them anyway.
I've been on guild "Squish the Farmer" events, but all to often it turns into a pitched battle because people on the other side misinterpret your assault on the farmers. Anyway, that's of extremely limited utility anyway, because the economics of the sides only impact each other through the little-utilized neutral auction houses.
There is no point in investing in stocks and bonds...You won't be able to leave the money in place long enough for it to be worthwhile. Don't get seduced by the day trading mentality...People forget the damn taxes. That stuff is only profitable if you can beat capital gains, and the market isn't volatile enough right now for that to be likely.
Put the cash in a money market account. You'll get better interest, and you can make large withdrawals several times a year. That's about all you can do unless you want to speculate with that money, and I think the bank would go apeshit (rightly) if they found out you were gambling with yer student loan money.
Politics change, but one thing will always remain the same: Left wing politics will always get you the cute girls. It's related to the ideology...Empathy, compassion for your fellow man, enviromentalism, all that crap is seriously touchy feely, and lends itself well to pre-coital discussions about solving all the worlds problems.
Right wing politics are just the opposite. Abstinence, fiscal conservatism, free market economics, the "neculur" (hehe) family. How the hell are you going to get laid talking about that stuff? Talking about the environment is foreplay, talking about the decline of modern morality is contraception!
Seriously. Think of all the right wing pundits, and tell me those people would be just as angry and misanthropic if they'd gotten some action in college.
So if I write a program that steals a penny from every bank transaction at a major bank, that's legal? Cool, thanks.
It's traditional that you can't sue for piddly amounts, but if you can convince the judge it's worth the states money, you can. Civil cases are often brought over relatively tiny amounts of money, and property with little intrinsic value.
"An unlawful act or fraudulent breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew, going against, and in conflict with the interests of the ship's or cargo's owner. For example; selling cargo and susequently claiming it was lost at sea."
Nah, it wasn't lost, it was those damn pirates
Seriously, however, you hardly ever see action against cases of barratry actually succeed. How often have you seen those damn class action legal commercials, soliciting victims of this industrial byproduct, or that drug that causes liver failure? Those are just sophisitcated barratry, yet you see them year after year.
Like most laws of it's kind, it's generally used by big business against individuals. It'd be interesting to see it done the other way, but I'm not holding my breath. Say what you will about the RIAA...It is copyright infringment that they're suing people over, and that is against the law. Their data collection methods are hugely unreliable, but they'd have to be proven negligent in court for that to even weigh for barratry.
Think about what the election results would look like under this method...Someone wins the popular vote, and magically, they get 100% of the electoral college votes. What?
NO. It's still crap. If someone wins 51% of the votes in a state, they should get 51% of the electoral college votes for that state, rounded up to the nearest whole number. If someone wins 5% they should get 5%, again rounded up. Or we could just get all crazy, and just go by the actual number of people. I know, I know, I'm just crazy like that...
Well, you do have a point in that the scale part is the weak point in the whole application. Local grocery store has them right next to the door, so if the door opens on a windy day, all the machines near the door freak out and tell you to put scan the item before putting it in the bag or put the item just scanned in the bag. Fun.
On the other hand, oh yes, oh yes, the people who use those things are slow as turtles. They plod through their thirty items, then the screen will present payment options, and they'll start at it for 5 minutes, trying to figure out if its a trap, then they'll select "cash" and count out the goddamn cash to the fricking penny!!
Grrrrrr. I take pleasure in ripping my 10 items through so fast that I pass that idiot in the parking lot. Those things are simple enough that a monkey could use 'em, which only convinces me that there are some inferior monkeys in my town.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because they go through it. That's why you wear ceramic armor under your kevlar. Kevlar doesn't resist penetration, its just very strong, so it tends to slow a bullet down considerably.
You're right. The only "extra" energy is elastic recoil from the material, and that is not amplified. Getting "extra" force off an impact would violate conservation of energy.
The real reason it's better to have it bounce off is that the energy of impact is distributed over a wider area. Sure, getting shot in the nuts with no protection but this armor is going to put your childbearing days to an end, but it's probably not going to kill you, as opposed to the massive tissue damage that would result in getting shot with no protection. the bullet might go all the way through (thus imparting less energy) but everything between the point where it entered and the point where it exited would be hamburger, and an area in diameter proportional to the caliber of the bullet would suffer serious shock damage.
The way this stuff will end up being used, is over certain strategic pieces of hard armor, so the problem with transferring more energy to a delicate area will be minimized, and the type of protection can change from heavy plates (which have to be able to stop a bullet themselves) to kinetic padding to distribute impact. The advantage of being able to wear full body armor that is light and breathable cannot be overstated. Currently you can only wear very little armor because of the weight, which increases casualties from things like shrapnel which would be little more than a nuisance to someone wearing a suit of this stuff.
How did this get modded insightful? Of course it bounces off! The armor has very little mass, and it's being suspended vertically as a sheet. It's like hitting a little bullet trampoline. That stuff would have to be absurdly dense for a bullet to just hit it and drop down.
Now, if you're saying there needs to be some padding underneath to absorb kinetic impacts, sure, fine. But don't kid yourself...The bullets will still bounce off...That's just Newton; either it's going through, or it's bouncing off (or the material is dense enough to absorb the energy of impact without transfering enough of it back to the bullet to make it bounce). The only way to keep them from bouncing off would be to surround the soldier in some sort of substance that absorbs and redistributes impact, and I don't think they're going to be too keen on looking like the michelin man.
My mother had this stuff and she lasted three weeks after the surgery. Living past a year is pretty rare, and living past two is abberrant. Mind you, I wouldn't want to live three days with this stuff unless it was caught hella early. It's an ugly form of an ugly disease.
Sure, in England. I should have been more specific. I'd actually like to have a system like that in the US, so we could shut the damn parents up.
Think about it: Parents don't complain half as much about underage drinking as they do about violent video games. Why? Because the kid has to go out of his/her way to get booze, probably even breaking the law at some point. So you can't blame the alcohol manufacturers...It's legally not their fault.
If the same was true of games, then we could legitimately put it back on the goddamn bad parents. "Little Mikey blew his sisters head off after playing GTA LXIV? And did you purchase this game for him? And were you not clearly informed that it contained violence, nuditity, and abuse of kittens? You were? Uh huh."
First of all: Suck my cock you anonymous little bitch.
Second: When it comes around that you actually can rape a hooker, gut her, and run around with her entrails on her head in full glorious Life-Lyke(tm) color...and this will happen...you're going to want a system in place that prohibits little Mikey from picking this up because the cover is shiny, and causing serious kiddie trauma.
I'm not saying it should be banned. I'm not saying it shouldn't be sold in stores. I've got no problem with sick, violent, or "obscene" video games.
I'm just saying that it's not a bad idea to prohibit kids from buying them, same as we prohibit them from buying porn, booze, and tobacco. It's a little something I like to call "common sense".
I don't care if they put an age limit on the purchase of the games. Why not? It's not really an issue today, because sex/violence is still pretty unrealistic, but as games get more realistic this will become a real issue.
Might as well start enforcing the age restrictions on content...If you want your kid to be able to play it, you can still buy it for 'em, but they shouldn't be able to pick it up unsupervised. This isn't to say this law was in any way justified. Utter shit would be a better word for it. But something like the laws we already have for R rated movies, etc, applied to games based on the content rating, isn't oppressive, weird, or hard to understand.
There are no age restriction laws on the selling of video games, which is the root of the whole issue. The ESRB rating is just a "suggestion".
Now, if they'd put out a law to make it a fine-able offense to sell games to kids who are under the ESRB suggested age rating, I'd have had no problem with that. But, as usual, they put all the blame on the buyer, so if you bought something that was age unsuitable the retailer got the money for the sale, and you got the fine.
Corn sucks for ethanol. The only reason we use corn is because certain senators from certain agricultural states are pushing for more subsidies for their damn corn farmers. You can make ethanol out of a lot of things, and a lot of them are way lower maintenance than freaking corn. Using more advanced processes like those for Cellulosic ethanol you can get cleaner fuel at a higher energy return rate from crops that are easier to grow.
Whenever someone pushes ethanol that hard, they're really pushing for corn subsidies. If he starts talking wood chips or sawgrass, that might be something worthwhile, but as it stands it's just another pork project.
Herbalism is good for cash as well. I also have a friend who makes crazy money through alchemy, by making stacks of potions and marking them up only 10-15 silver over the cost of materials. I've seen her pull in ~150g in profit in a day or two.
Come right down to it though, you're going to be grinding something for money. There's just no other way to get it. Either you're making 200+ potions, or you're spending hours mining, skinning, herbing, or just killing things that drop stuff thats worth money. I personally haunt the auction houses buying up low priced greens to disenchant, and then sell the materials, but that's not profitable enough to keep me off the streets.
Earth and Beyond had potential, but it was limited in a lot ways. Instead of a game where you had a ship, and a life, and could go around doing different things, you pretty much were the ship. You could never get a different ship without creating a new character. You could upgrade your ship as you leveled, la dee da, but it never really changed much.
Once you did the ship thing a few times, that was pretty much it. It was like half a game. If they'd added the other half (and a hell of a lot more content) it would have been pretty cool.
It's a semi-shady argument based on the fact that reverse-engineering has always been protected by common law, and by the fact that the constitution only provides for copyrights lasting a "limited time", which goes against the DMCA's strengthing of copyright law.
The whole problem revolves around the fact that the founders really had no conception of copyrights as applied to non-tangible things. Can't blame 'em. But now its a huge mess because the corporations want IP to fall under the same protections as, for example, office buildings, and this is strongly contradicted by peoples intuition that their purchase of a physical thing, gives them rights with regards to that physical thing.
It's going to be decades before this crap is ironed out to everyone's satisfaction.
Considering the uses the DMCA is commonly put toward, a game company using it so say, "If you're going to play one of our games over the internet, you've got to use our free service" is so low on the list so as not to register.
I'd love to see that crappy law thrown out and copyright intelligently reformed, but this is hardly the place to pick your fight.
Every time someone starts screaming about the game economics being utterly broken, I have to wonder about their actual evidence. I've played seriously on about 5 servers, and I currently play the auction house on two, and all I see are very predictable supply and demand fluctuations. Stuff goes up today, and down tomorrow. Prices run up on the weekends, and taper off during the week.
Sure you see items that are overpriced, and sometimes those get purchased. More often, however, you see the same item up for sale for a week or more, and get to watch its price trending gradually down until someone buys it.
It's not rampant inflation. It's exactly the sort of cyclical activity I would expect given variable supply.
So give me some data on this completely broken model, because I'm not seeing it.
Bnetd was an open source reverse engineer of Blizzards battle.net server protocol.
In a nutshell, it provided the ability to play the game online with a cracked CD, so they sued and had it taken down, thereby pissing off a horde of OS geeks who apparently can hold a grudge FOREVER. There are so many worse DMCA abusers out there, I really don't see the point of going nazi over one of the few cases where it was actually semi-legitimate.
To police effectively in WoW, you have to be able to police your own side. It's too hard to tell who's farming on the other side when they're immediately hostile, and you can't talk to them anyway.
I've been on guild "Squish the Farmer" events, but all to often it turns into a pitched battle because people on the other side misinterpret your assault on the farmers. Anyway, that's of extremely limited utility anyway, because the economics of the sides only impact each other through the little-utilized neutral auction houses.
There is no point in investing in stocks and bonds...You won't be able to leave the money in place long enough for it to be worthwhile. Don't get seduced by the day trading mentality...People forget the damn taxes. That stuff is only profitable if you can beat capital gains, and the market isn't volatile enough right now for that to be likely.
Put the cash in a money market account. You'll get better interest, and you can make large withdrawals several times a year. That's about all you can do unless you want to speculate with that money, and I think the bank would go apeshit (rightly) if they found out you were gambling with yer student loan money.
Politics change, but one thing will always remain the same: Left wing politics will always get you the cute girls. It's related to the ideology...Empathy, compassion for your fellow man, enviromentalism, all that crap is seriously touchy feely, and lends itself well to pre-coital discussions about solving all the worlds problems.
Right wing politics are just the opposite. Abstinence, fiscal conservatism, free market economics, the "neculur" (hehe) family. How the hell are you going to get laid talking about that stuff? Talking about the environment is foreplay, talking about the decline of modern morality is contraception!
Seriously. Think of all the right wing pundits, and tell me those people would be just as angry and misanthropic if they'd gotten some action in college.
So if I write a program that steals a penny from every bank transaction at a major bank, that's legal? Cool, thanks.
It's traditional that you can't sue for piddly amounts, but if you can convince the judge it's worth the states money, you can. Civil cases are often brought over relatively tiny amounts of money, and property with little intrinsic value.
"An unlawful act or fraudulent breach of duty on the part of a ship's master or crew, going against, and in conflict with the interests of the ship's or cargo's owner. For example; selling cargo and susequently claiming it was lost at sea."
Nah, it wasn't lost, it was those damn pirates
Seriously, however, you hardly ever see action against cases of barratry actually succeed. How often have you seen those damn class action legal commercials, soliciting victims of this industrial byproduct, or that drug that causes liver failure? Those are just sophisitcated barratry, yet you see them year after year.
Like most laws of it's kind, it's generally used by big business against individuals. It'd be interesting to see it done the other way, but I'm not holding my breath. Say what you will about the RIAA...It is copyright infringment that they're suing people over, and that is against the law. Their data collection methods are hugely unreliable, but they'd have to be proven negligent in court for that to even weigh for barratry.
Actual number of votes, sorry.
Goddamn "Slow down cowboy." Just let me edit and I wouldn't be trying to post again. Grumble.
Yea, it's still stupid.
Think about what the election results would look like under this method...Someone wins the popular vote, and magically, they get 100% of the electoral college votes. What?
NO. It's still crap. If someone wins 51% of the votes in a state, they should get 51% of the electoral college votes for that state, rounded up to the nearest whole number. If someone wins 5% they should get 5%, again rounded up. Or we could just get all crazy, and just go by the actual number of people. I know, I know, I'm just crazy like that...
Winner take all is for poker, not government.
Well, you do have a point in that the scale part is the weak point in the whole application. Local grocery store has them right next to the door, so if the door opens on a windy day, all the machines near the door freak out and tell you to put scan the item before putting it in the bag or put the item just scanned in the bag. Fun.
On the other hand, oh yes, oh yes, the people who use those things are slow as turtles. They plod through their thirty items, then the screen will present payment options, and they'll start at it for 5 minutes, trying to figure out if its a trap, then they'll select "cash" and count out the goddamn cash to the fricking penny!!
Grrrrrr. I take pleasure in ripping my 10 items through so fast that I pass that idiot in the parking lot. Those things are simple enough that a monkey could use 'em, which only convinces me that there are some inferior monkeys in my town.
Tactics is units, movement, and positioning.
Strategy is which units, resource management, and larger scale goals.
It's the macro/micro thing. Strategy is the macro, the big picture. Tactics is the micro, where the rubber meets the road.