The exactly wording in the original post is "telling friend from foe" and that's exactly what IFF is supposed to do without any kind of human intervention.
Assuming the active IFF is enabled, which it frequently isn't in a combat zone. Telling your friends that you're there and friendly is great, but you're also telling the enemy that you're their and hostile.
I, too, don't believe we reached the point where an UAV can do everything a manned aircraft
There's a big difference between unmanned and lacking a human operator. The IFF issue is basically irrelevant because the basic operation of UAV requires constant communication with our forces. While theoretically possible to set up a communication network with lasers to avoid broadcasting the UAV's position, that would severely limit the usefulness of the craft. The situations where you can put laser beacons in line-of-sight with each other to talk with a UAV are more or less the same situations where you don't really have to worry about stealth in the first place because it's territory you "own" and are patrolling. It'd work over Afghanistan, not so much China.
Instead of following the American model of WWII... buy the best weapon that you can get in large numbers affordably... we've adopted the German model of WWII, which is to design the finest, most exotic weapons and make do with limited quantities of them.
I think we desperately need large numbers of easy to use and maintain weapons, not 187 F-22's.
I tend to agree, I've always thought that America's true military strength was logistics and manufacturing -- making lots of weapons and ordinance, and making sure we got them where they needed to be so they could be dumped on the enemy with overwhelming force.
What do you think the odds are that this photo will spur a movement to restart the F-22 program?
The F-35 is not an air superiority aircraft, because it is a versatile airframe that can take on many roles, one of which is air superiority. In its air superiority role, it would prove more than adequate against anything known today except the F-22.
The F-35 trades off not being quite as potent as the F-22 in air-to-air combat for being useful after the first two days of combat.
How is it possible to defecate on an expression of humor? I mean maybe one could shit on a fixed representation of a joke, like a joke book, but this is on the internet, so I can only guess you just crapped on your monitor. Which seems like a pointless and self-defeating gesture if I may say so.
They did try to make it hard to detect (which is one reason it looked so strange), it did much better at that goal than probably any other plane of the era.
True... The result was still a useless level of stealth that contributed nothing to the plane's survivability. Speed and altitude are why none of them were ever shot down despite being fired on by Russian SAMs. But they were easy to track via radar.
But it does show that aerospace engineers were trying to tackle the problem back then.
Worse yet, WoW didn't have any excuse for the majority of its launch issues.
They had a great excuse! It was 6 years ago, and standards were vastly lower. Unpolished, buggy MMOs were the norm of the day, including ones that had been out for years, and people somewhat expect more problems at launch time. So compared to what was out there, sure the WoW launch was buggy but it wasn't so bad that it turned people off. Wait, did I say excuse? I meant reason why it didn't matter.
But today, when WoW is polished and standards for MMOs are much, much higher... Now every MMO that's buggy and unpolished at launch gets compared to WoW, and found lacking. Now, it matters. Now, a WoW-like launch would look really bad.
WoW is a perfect example of being in the right place in the right time with the right idea, and it's a strategy Blizzard has pulled off several times -- take ideas from the first few generations of a generations of a genre, polish the hell out of it, trounce the competition by being more polished, and raise the bar for anyone who tries to follow.
That's the definition of Power, in physics. See, they're making a joke by taking two common sayings about knowledge and money, and then relating them via a physics equation to create a new and humorous observation. But of course the "power" in "knowledge is power" isn't talking about "power" in the physics sense, and you can't actually do math on colloquialisms, which is also part of the joke.
And I'm sure now that it's been explained to you, you're hyperventilating with uncontrollable laughter.
Um, no, where did you hear that? You don't try to eliminate the ambiguity of plural/singular by adding ambiguity of plural/possessive! And much worse ambiguity, since the apostrophe doesn't mean plural!
Arguably, if it works as well as what modern medicine is doing, is it any more bullshit than that is?
They don't work as well. Not working better than the placebo is the definition of an ineffective medicine (aka "not medicine") and won't be approved.
To the extent that some medicines were erroneously thought to be better than placebo, but then proved not to be, we move towards rejecting those medicines, not accepting every type of placebo on earth as a legitimate treatment.
I'm not advocating for homeopathy, but from what I understand... in some cases modern medicine would consider itself doing well if they could reach the levels of relief they get with placebos using actual medicine.
Which is to say, in those cases there is no medicine.
And, as someone I used to know in sales used to say... it's not a lie if you believe it.:-P
Which is a sales technique whereby you convince yourself that you believe the lie, so as to lie more effectively.
I like to think of homeopathy as optimized placebo effect.
Yeah, optimized for the profits of those selling these pills with nothing in them.
Does my dog sense my confidence?
Yes, of course dogs can sense the attitudes of their owners, and owners will subconsciously give their dogs extra encouragement when they expect them to get better (which is why real medical studies are double-blind wherever possible).
That plus coincidence and confirmation bias explain the anecdotal evidence.
but nevertheless there's something going on which deserves investigation.
There is nothing going on. No scientific study has demonstrated homeopathic preparations to have an effect greater than a placebo. Because they are placebos. So there's nothing which deserves investigation, except the placebo effect itself, which can easily be studied while completely ignoring the particular kind of placebo called homeopathy.
Yeah. The only positive thing homeopathy did for the world was prevent people from dying from their "medicine" in a time when things like significant dosages of mercury were considered "medicine". It turns out not dosing people with mercury is better than doing so. Medical fact.
Too bad it wasn't a "let's not give people poisons" movement and instead was a "hey since giving people less mercury is better for them than giving them lots of mercury, maybe that means the more dilute any solution is, the better for you it will be!"
How can claiming that your medicine has a therapeutic effect above and beyond the placebo effect, and specifically tailored for your ailment, and charging out the ass for it, when in fact it is nothing more than a placebo, not be bullshit.
If homeopaths actually said "Here's a sugar pill, take it and tell yourself you're going to get better. That'll be twenty cents." then it wouldn't be bullshit.
"Not better than a placebo" is the definition of an ineffective medicine. Homeopaths claim their "medicine" is effective. Ergo it's bullshit.
"Hmm, I see blue eyes with large lashes. A nose with some large pores. The chin is somewhat pointy. I'm guessing this is Jennifer. Oh wait, she wears the same shoes that Jennifer wore three months ago. Yes, I think it might very well be her."
Wow. That definitely deserves a top spot in the Big List of Awkward Things to Say Out Loud While Having Sex.
On the downside... it's the DC Universe. The Villain campaign is especially black and white ("Doing Good is an affront to Trigon!" says random NPCs), and poorly written.
"And pleasing Trigon is good, and doing good is bad, so we should displease Trigon by doing good to do bad which is good which is bad.. aaaaiiieee! "
To me, it doesn't matter where in the implementation the bug is, since it has to be rewritten anyway for readability reasons.
Which is a fallacious viewpoint, because when you reject the patch, the author could easily recode it within the appropriate coding guidelines yet the bug would remain. In fact, you could have refactored the code yourself and yet still kept the malicious payload.
Code style is important and it's right to reject a patch with it. It's wrong to say this negates the need to actually find the bug. Which you didn't.
It also BTW would trigger another alarm in the eyes of seasoned code reviewers: in the "isdigit() == true" branch it looses the read character, printing '0' instead.
And then someone would say "No, that's the [intended, benign] purpose of the routine".
So with the style issues resolved, and the thing you thought was the bug not being a bug at all, on what basis would this "seasoned code reviewer" reject the patch? At this point the only reason is because you know it's malicious. But if you didn't, it looks like this would have passed your review.
Don't feel bad about that, though. Feel bad about thinking finding flaws in deliberately crafted malicious code is so easy when real seasoned code reviewers know it isn't.
I preferred to go to the source of the information rather than filtering it through a reporter -- especially when the source has perfectly accessible text that doesn't need a scientist to explain for us.
Sorry, I meant hadn't been implemented properly yet. They only started working very recently, and I haven't played much recently (and when I have it's been on my SP world).
Nothing implied that the link should be to an article. You assume that they "should" have linked to a news article, instead of the observatory itself. There is no such requirement of slashdot summaries, either implicit or explicit, and there is plenty of information about IceCube on the IceCube site [wisc.edu]. If the linked text implied that there was a news article behind it, you would have a point.
Er, maybe there's no requirement as such.
But it does make a rather large amount of sense to have a link to an article describing the news that the story is about, if such a news article exists, and it does. And it makes sense to also have a link to the main website of the subject of the news story, if such a website exists, which it does. "Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory" should be linked to the main Ice Cube website, and "completed Dec. 18th" should be linked to the actual story.
And of course I mean "should" in the sense of "would be better", not "should" as in "to do otherwise is wrong". Still.
As for the content of slashdot summaries being bad or needing more informaton, I believe that is a perennial issue that transcends what submitters choose to link to.
Er, yes, but most of the time they at least have a link to a news item that's about the news that the story is trying to inform us about. Ones that don't are complained about even louder than usual, and for good reason I think.
I think one of the neatest things about Ice Cube is that it is essentially using the entire freaking planet earth as a filter for muon sources other than neutrino interactions. It can detect what direction a source of Cherenkov radiation came from, and if it came from the direction of the sky then it's vastly more likely to have been caused by some other form of cosmic ray and neutrino interactions would be completely lost in the noise. Neutrinos can pass through the whole planet with ease, though, so by subtracting out the sky-originating muons, they are left with the probable neutrinos.
In fact I remember a Slashdot article from a while back where they took the data that they usually subtract out as non-neutrino noise and analyzed it, and were able to make some interesting discoveries about cosmic rays. Oh hey, found the article: http://www.physorg.com/news199468476.html
I find spelunking with stone tools (and one iron pick) is fine, since the only things I'm really digging out are ore veins I come across and incidental digging to help navigate the cave. Not like mining where every step forward is two ticks of pick durability, though honestly even then I use stone tools because the whole point is to increase my collection of diamonds.
Once I started basically hollowing out a mountain for a large base with metro station, I started thinking about hacking diamond tools... But instead I settled on using a map viewer to identify profitable locations for branch mining. It gives me the satisfaction of actually digging out the ore myself, while preventing exceedingly frustrating bouts of mining with nothing to show, and keeping the hackery to a minimum.
Ice Cube was great in Boyz n the Hood, and nobody can ever take that away from him. Not even himself, despite trying with pretty much every acting role he's taken since.
Since I only heard of the game from Penny Arcade, whose comics coincided (and partially caused it seems) the collapse of the webserver and the seizure of funds by Pay-Pal, and thus got to play for free over that weekend, I personally had 10 Euros worth of fun before I even payed! So when I bought it, I was basically rewarding the game maker for the fun I had already had, and the chances of me feeling short-changed by the transaction were zero.
Slashdot Mirror
The exactly wording in the original post is "telling friend from foe" and that's exactly what IFF is supposed to do without any kind of human intervention.
Assuming the active IFF is enabled, which it frequently isn't in a combat zone. Telling your friends that you're there and friendly is great, but you're also telling the enemy that you're their and hostile.
I, too, don't believe we reached the point where an UAV can do everything a manned aircraft
There's a big difference between unmanned and lacking a human operator. The IFF issue is basically irrelevant because the basic operation of UAV requires constant communication with our forces. While theoretically possible to set up a communication network with lasers to avoid broadcasting the UAV's position, that would severely limit the usefulness of the craft. The situations where you can put laser beacons in line-of-sight with each other to talk with a UAV are more or less the same situations where you don't really have to worry about stealth in the first place because it's territory you "own" and are patrolling. It'd work over Afghanistan, not so much China.
I tend to agree, I've always thought that America's true military strength was logistics and manufacturing -- making lots of weapons and ordinance, and making sure we got them where they needed to be so they could be dumped on the enemy with overwhelming force.
What do you think the odds are that this photo will spur a movement to restart the F-22 program?
The F-35 is not an air superiority aircraft, because it is a versatile airframe that can take on many roles, one of which is air superiority. In its air superiority role, it would prove more than adequate against anything known today except the F-22.
The F-35 trades off not being quite as potent as the F-22 in air-to-air combat for being useful after the first two days of combat.
Tadah! Captain Literal shits on another joke!
How is it possible to defecate on an expression of humor? I mean maybe one could shit on a fixed representation of a joke, like a joke book, but this is on the internet, so I can only guess you just crapped on your monitor. Which seems like a pointless and self-defeating gesture if I may say so.
Or am I taking Captain Literal too literally?
They did try to make it hard to detect (which is one reason it looked so strange), it did much better at that goal than probably any other plane of the era.
True... The result was still a useless level of stealth that contributed nothing to the plane's survivability. Speed and altitude are why none of them were ever shot down despite being fired on by Russian SAMs. But they were easy to track via radar.
But it does show that aerospace engineers were trying to tackle the problem back then.
Worse yet, WoW didn't have any excuse for the majority of its launch issues.
They had a great excuse! It was 6 years ago, and standards were vastly lower. Unpolished, buggy MMOs were the norm of the day, including ones that had been out for years, and people somewhat expect more problems at launch time. So compared to what was out there, sure the WoW launch was buggy but it wasn't so bad that it turned people off. Wait, did I say excuse? I meant reason why it didn't matter.
But today, when WoW is polished and standards for MMOs are much, much higher... Now every MMO that's buggy and unpolished at launch gets compared to WoW, and found lacking. Now, it matters. Now, a WoW-like launch would look really bad.
WoW is a perfect example of being in the right place in the right time with the right idea, and it's a strategy Blizzard has pulled off several times -- take ideas from the first few generations of a generations of a genre, polish the hell out of it, trounce the competition by being more polished, and raise the bar for anyone who tries to follow.
That's the definition of Power, in physics. See, they're making a joke by taking two common sayings about knowledge and money, and then relating them via a physics equation to create a new and humorous observation. But of course the "power" in "knowledge is power" isn't talking about "power" in the physics sense, and you can't actually do math on colloquialisms, which is also part of the joke.
And I'm sure now that it's been explained to you, you're hyperventilating with uncontrollable laughter.
Um, no, where did you hear that? You don't try to eliminate the ambiguity of plural/singular by adding ambiguity of plural/possessive! And much worse ambiguity, since the apostrophe doesn't mean plural!
How much does it cost to (re-)name Mars?
Nothing if you're the Mars Corporation. Maybe they'll win the bid by saving on paperwork.
Arguably, if it works as well as what modern medicine is doing, is it any more bullshit than that is?
They don't work as well. Not working better than the placebo is the definition of an ineffective medicine (aka "not medicine") and won't be approved.
To the extent that some medicines were erroneously thought to be better than placebo, but then proved not to be, we move towards rejecting those medicines, not accepting every type of placebo on earth as a legitimate treatment.
I'm not advocating for homeopathy, but from what I understand ... in some cases modern medicine would consider itself doing well if they could reach the levels of relief they get with placebos using actual medicine.
Which is to say, in those cases there is no medicine.
And, as someone I used to know in sales used to say ... it's not a lie if you believe it. :-P
Which is a sales technique whereby you convince yourself that you believe the lie, so as to lie more effectively.
I like to think of homeopathy as optimized placebo effect.
Yeah, optimized for the profits of those selling these pills with nothing in them.
Does my dog sense my confidence?
Yes, of course dogs can sense the attitudes of their owners, and owners will subconsciously give their dogs extra encouragement when they expect them to get better (which is why real medical studies are double-blind wherever possible).
That plus coincidence and confirmation bias explain the anecdotal evidence.
but nevertheless there's something going on which deserves investigation.
There is nothing going on. No scientific study has demonstrated homeopathic preparations to have an effect greater than a placebo. Because they are placebos. So there's nothing which deserves investigation, except the placebo effect itself, which can easily be studied while completely ignoring the particular kind of placebo called homeopathy.
Yeah. The only positive thing homeopathy did for the world was prevent people from dying from their "medicine" in a time when things like significant dosages of mercury were considered "medicine". It turns out not dosing people with mercury is better than doing so. Medical fact.
Too bad it wasn't a "let's not give people poisons" movement and instead was a "hey since giving people less mercury is better for them than giving them lots of mercury, maybe that means the more dilute any solution is, the better for you it will be!"
If it works, how can it be bullshit?
How can claiming that your medicine has a therapeutic effect above and beyond the placebo effect, and specifically tailored for your ailment, and charging out the ass for it, when in fact it is nothing more than a placebo, not be bullshit.
If homeopaths actually said "Here's a sugar pill, take it and tell yourself you're going to get better. That'll be twenty cents." then it wouldn't be bullshit.
"Not better than a placebo" is the definition of an ineffective medicine. Homeopaths claim their "medicine" is effective. Ergo it's bullshit.
Wow. That definitely deserves a top spot in the Big List of Awkward Things to Say Out Loud While Having Sex.
On the downside... it's the DC Universe. The Villain campaign is especially black and white ("Doing Good is an affront to Trigon!" says random NPCs), and poorly written.
"And pleasing Trigon is good, and doing good is bad, so we should displease Trigon by doing good to do bad which is good which is bad.. aaaaiiieee! "
To me, it doesn't matter where in the implementation the bug is, since it has to be rewritten anyway for readability reasons.
Which is a fallacious viewpoint, because when you reject the patch, the author could easily recode it within the appropriate coding guidelines yet the bug would remain. In fact, you could have refactored the code yourself and yet still kept the malicious payload.
Code style is important and it's right to reject a patch with it. It's wrong to say this negates the need to actually find the bug. Which you didn't.
It also BTW would trigger another alarm in the eyes of seasoned code reviewers: in the "isdigit() == true" branch it looses the read character, printing '0' instead.
And then someone would say "No, that's the [intended, benign] purpose of the routine".
So with the style issues resolved, and the thing you thought was the bug not being a bug at all, on what basis would this "seasoned code reviewer" reject the patch? At this point the only reason is because you know it's malicious. But if you didn't, it looks like this would have passed your review.
Don't feel bad about that, though. Feel bad about thinking finding flaws in deliberately crafted malicious code is so easy when real seasoned code reviewers know it isn't.
a graphics engine that wasn't acceptable two decades ago.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!
Go play with your legos; legos are cool. That'll be more productive than trying to troll people who actually played video games two decades ago. :)
I preferred to go to the source of the information rather than filtering it through a reporter -- especially when the source has perfectly accessible text that doesn't need a scientist to explain for us.
You should link directly to said text then. :)
If you want to see many news articles about it, Google News [slashdot.org] will find them quickly.
True, but you could say the same about the main Ice Cube project page.
That was my first try at a submission -- next time I'll put more in the summary.
It was fine, it just needed a direct link to something talking specifically about this news item.
Sorry, I meant hadn't been implemented properly yet. They only started working very recently, and I haven't played much recently (and when I have it's been on my SP world).
One word: Friday. Good thing they never made any shitty sequels to that classic.
Damn straight. If they ever did, I bet Chris Tucker would have nothing to do with it.
Nothing implied that the link should be to an article. You assume that they "should" have linked to a news article, instead of the observatory itself. There is no such requirement of slashdot summaries, either implicit or explicit, and there is plenty of information about IceCube on the IceCube site [wisc.edu]. If the linked text implied that there was a news article behind it, you would have a point.
Er, maybe there's no requirement as such.
But it does make a rather large amount of sense to have a link to an article describing the news that the story is about, if such a news article exists, and it does. And it makes sense to also have a link to the main website of the subject of the news story, if such a website exists, which it does. "Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory" should be linked to the main Ice Cube website, and "completed Dec. 18th" should be linked to the actual story.
And of course I mean "should" in the sense of "would be better", not "should" as in "to do otherwise is wrong". Still.
As for the content of slashdot summaries being bad or needing more informaton, I believe that is a perennial issue that transcends what submitters choose to link to.
Er, yes, but most of the time they at least have a link to a news item that's about the news that the story is trying to inform us about. Ones that don't are complained about even louder than usual, and for good reason I think.
I think one of the neatest things about Ice Cube is that it is essentially using the entire freaking planet earth as a filter for muon sources other than neutrino interactions. It can detect what direction a source of Cherenkov radiation came from, and if it came from the direction of the sky then it's vastly more likely to have been caused by some other form of cosmic ray and neutrino interactions would be completely lost in the noise. Neutrinos can pass through the whole planet with ease, though, so by subtracting out the sky-originating muons, they are left with the probable neutrinos.
In fact I remember a Slashdot article from a while back where they took the data that they usually subtract out as non-neutrino noise and analyzed it, and were able to make some interesting discoveries about cosmic rays. Oh hey, found the article: http://www.physorg.com/news199468476.html
I find spelunking with stone tools (and one iron pick) is fine, since the only things I'm really digging out are ore veins I come across and incidental digging to help navigate the cave. Not like mining where every step forward is two ticks of pick durability, though honestly even then I use stone tools because the whole point is to increase my collection of diamonds.
Once I started basically hollowing out a mountain for a large base with metro station, I started thinking about hacking diamond tools... But instead I settled on using a map viewer to identify profitable locations for branch mining. It gives me the satisfaction of actually digging out the ore myself, while preventing exceedingly frustrating bouts of mining with nothing to show, and keeping the hackery to a minimum.
Ice Cube was great in Boyz n the Hood, and nobody can ever take that away from him. Not even himself, despite trying with pretty much every acting role he's taken since.
Since I only heard of the game from Penny Arcade, whose comics coincided (and partially caused it seems) the collapse of the webserver and the seizure of funds by Pay-Pal, and thus got to play for free over that weekend, I personally had 10 Euros worth of fun before I even payed! So when I bought it, I was basically rewarding the game maker for the fun I had already had, and the chances of me feeling short-changed by the transaction were zero.