True enough. The ASIPS kicks the crap out of the old SINGCARS radio, being roughly half the size and weight and improved features, and even the ASIPS is getting up in age. I think it's been out for something like 7 years. While miniaturizing radios is always a step in the right direction, something I've always seen Platoon Leaders doing (except the one previous to my current one, worthless cherry) is having two hand-mikes up at a time. While sometimes confusing, having a pair of radio handsets clipped to the helmet is pretty easy and makes communicating on seperate radio nets relatively simple.
Sticking multiple switches in someone's mouth would probably suck.
Getting access to the PL's radios in case he gets hit or completely spazes out under fire and starts giving retarded orders would be a problem if they were connected to his mouth, though.
I mean, I could *say* I was punching the PL in the mouth so I could get access to his radios, but I don't think they'd let me keep my squad afterwards.:p
Various Shadowrun novels and John Steakly's Armor, too.
If I remember right, the 2nd edition of the Shadowrun sourcebook had a short story at the beginning where someone used a switch on a tooth to activate a phone or a radio, as well as wired reflexes.
You haven't looked too closely at the dirty underbelly of bit-torrent, have you?
popular, new files, such as sunday's episodes of American Dad and Family Guy recieve several thousand downloads in the first 24 hours they're up. Hell, there are 2,000 people connected to the American Dad tracker and 3,500 people connected to the Family Guy tracker right now.
true, people hosting trackers can get taken out somewhat easily since they're easily identifiable. however, there are tens of thousands of them. as much as RIAA and MPAA would like, they can't sue them all. Even they don't have the cash for all the legal fees associated with bringing them all in.
my guess would be that he wants to create a form of bit torrent that allows them to secure content against those that aren't paying and/or watching adverts.
I would assume that a passworded tracker, a server that monitors account usage and spits out strong, temporary passwords, and a client that logs into the server, asks for a password and then applies that to the tracker would be enough, however, I'm not the one getting millions of dollars.
they probably have a limit on the number of simultaneous connections, and it's been exceeded. they thought far enough ahead to be sure that each connection has enough bandwidth to do its work, but there aren't enough connections to go around, so everyone waits their turn to get their burst of traffic. kind of like token rings. blargh.
in short, yeah, it sounds like they're slashdotted.
Good point, I'd forgotten about those things. I'd imagine that for the AEGIS and similar systems that a human gunner would be undesirable. Last thing they want is for some stressed-out petty officer that's been on watch for the last 24 hours and is pumped full of adrenaline to be on the gun and fail to destroy an inbound missle. I mean, with most Navy operations, it's not like those guys have to worry too much about hitting a civilian or a friendly while they're out at sea.
I can't speak for every piece of the Army, but I know we have remote controled machineguns in various calibers. best I know of is a.50 cal that gets mounted to the top of a HMMWV, so that the gunner doesn't have to expose himself to enemy fire at all, that I saw while I was in Iraq. he just sits inside looking at a monitor and controling it with a joystick. I kind of wish I had had one, but we only had the one for our battalion, so I had to shoot threats the old fashioned way.
I remember reading on some (public, unclassified) site that we have at least prototypes of remote controled robots with various calibers of automatic weapons, ranging from 9mm to 7.62mm.
I don't think the Army's that interested in completely automated systems, but remote controlled turrets is something Uncle Sam would dig.
the thing's designed for the shaft above the point of a break to just float away. hurricanes would exert force perpendicular to the elevator. it wouldn't pull downwards on it. at worst, it'd jerk the counter-weight end down by a few dozen kilometers. if it did that and snapped, depending on the murphy-factor the builders put into it, it might come down, but I kind of doubt it. even if it did, it's set up to be in a geosynchronus orbit. if it snapped, it'd come down straight down, more or less. in order to whip out and lay waste to the earth with it's full length, it'd have to be stretched out in that direction first.
if a hurricane jerked it around before it snapped, the absolute worst area it could trashed wouldn't be much longer than the radius of the hurricane.
and if they do it right, they'll allow for another Murphy-factor that it won't come down at all in that situation. they would, however, have to fly something up to catch it and drag the top end back down for repairs.
I'm no engineer, so this might be easily answered, but how do you create constant positive pressure in the staircase in the event of a fire?
I can only thing of having the ventilation system blow into it, which may not be the best idea when it comes to smoke and carbon monoxide. I suppose you could pump it in from the ground floor so that it'd be cleaner, but then during normal operation, it'd smell like the parking garage/street.
Also, if the fire knocks out the power to the ventilation system, the positive pressure goes away.
but, like I said, I don't have the background for this kind of stuff. is there an answer that'd fix those issues?
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines
Battlefield 2
Nexagon: Deathmatch
Toontown
Blade of Darkness
Freedom Force
Temple of Elemental Evil
There are probably other games out there. I'm not sure which use stackless Python,though, as I don't know what stackless Python is. At any rate, people have been finding it useful in games for awhile and that's not likely to stop any time soon.
do you have a source on that? as far as I know, it just contained an IR receiver and a CSS key. the DVD decoder and playback software was on the xbox itself. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding of it.
I don't have any figures to back it up, but everyone I know with an xbox that hasn't hacked theirs into a media center PC, has a DVD dongle and remote.
even paying liscensing costs, microsoft probably came out all right on the deal. especially considering that the dongle had almost nothing to it but an IR receiver.
While this game doesn't look as deep as I'd like to see from a cyberpunk setting, the graphics are really well done and it seems as though they've put a great deal of work into getting the one map that they have really well set up. It looks to have a fair amount of depth, as far as team-based FPSes go.
The fact that they actually have deckers and allow for the deckers to be put to good use in cyberspace makes for a really great concept.
I don't know why the article summary references the Matrix. Shadowrun and other cyberpunk sources are clearly much bigger influences on the development team. Their portrayal of cyberspace does look a lot like TRON 2.0, though.
I don't know. Most people I know that actually hacked their xbox, as opposed to installing a modchip, use their xbox more as a media center pc than to pirate games.
of course, most of the movies and tv shows they watch are pirate copies, but that's a whole other can of worms.
You've obviously never been part of a military deployment, but that's fast, man. There's a good amount of prep work that has to be done in order to deploy forces anywhere for any reason. Equipment and vehicles have to be inspected. Ammunition and mission-critical equipment has to be issued. Plans have to formulated, rehearsed and implemented. Not to mention that you have to put the unit on lock-down and get total accountability for every soldier and every sensitive item.
Truth be told, the only people we have able to deploy in under 24 hours are stone-cold killers. Most units, especially national guard units (they have pretty light control over their men, since they generally only "work" on the weekends) take several days to a week to deploy.
Granted, the main body of the National Guardsmen didn't show up until 4 days after landfall. 4 days is a long time to those crying in a shelter somewhere, but about standard for the national guard.
I'm pretty damned liberal for an infantry sergeant, but you can't pick at the weekend warriors for lying down on the job.
As much as I'd like to heap some blame on Bush, the response times from the federal government have been ranging from "as expected to fast". All in all, a job well done. Not perfectly. But not bad.
Hey, I didn't say it would be ridiculously easy - I just said it could be done. Okay, I may have said something about it being nothing on flat ground. That was a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Nah, you're on the money.
I've been in the US Army infantry for almost 8 years. I've done a LOT of marching. 2 miles an hour, on flat, paved ground, in cold rain, is an easy pace. Even for someone that's not physically active.
Cold rain helps out a hell of a lot. One of the first things to hit you during physical exertion is your body generating too much heat. In cold rain, that factor drops below concern. In the weather they were having before the hurricane hit, they'd pretty much have to run the whole way for heat to be a factor.
Arguements about having to carry food and water for their family are bullshit. Anyone with kids has bookbags they can stuff food and water in. Most women have purses of some sort. Many people have luggage of some sort, too. A lot of times, with wheels. If all that fails, jack a shopping cart.
Food and water weigh a bit, but as long as it's rationed, you can make do with a lot less than you think. Toting enough for a week or so isn't too hard. Especially if you steal a shopping cart.
25 miles (worst case) with 20 pounds of food and water is totally doable for a family. It's not like it's the fucking Baatan death march.
The infirm wouldn't be able to make it, but most people would be fine.
I don't think it'll have quite as much impact as you think.
It doesn't really matter if their name is tarnished and developers feel that they're a bunch of bastards. It's not like the beginning of the graphically-oriented games, where there were only a few people that could code something that people would play.
decent game programmers and artists are dime a dozen now. it's no longer an arcane art understood by few. hell, they have college courses for it now. instead of publishers scrambling to pick up developers, developers are fighting to get someone to publish their work.
this fits in with the problems that all skilled-laborers have run into before. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a programmers' union in the next few years.
Slashdot Mirror
True, they do look more like normal girls than professional models.
If we ignore him, he's no longer an interesting controversial figure and he loses pretty much all his power.
Please, no more damn articles on this asshole.
Well, that about wraps it up for Linus.
watching those little bastards perform a group suicide wouldn't really be that interesting to me, but I'd still chip in some cash to make it happen.
Sticking multiple switches in someone's mouth would probably suck.
Getting access to the PL's radios in case he gets hit or completely spazes out under fire and starts giving retarded orders would be a problem if they were connected to his mouth, though.
I mean, I could *say* I was punching the PL in the mouth so I could get access to his radios, but I don't think they'd let me keep my squad afterwards. :p
If I remember right, the 2nd edition of the Shadowrun sourcebook had a short story at the beginning where someone used a switch on a tooth to activate a phone or a radio, as well as wired reflexes.
You haven't looked too closely at the dirty underbelly of bit-torrent, have you?
popular, new files, such as sunday's episodes of American Dad and Family Guy recieve several thousand downloads in the first 24 hours they're up. Hell, there are 2,000 people connected to the American Dad tracker and 3,500 people connected to the Family Guy tracker right now.
true, people hosting trackers can get taken out somewhat easily since they're easily identifiable. however, there are tens of thousands of them. as much as RIAA and MPAA would like, they can't sue them all. Even they don't have the cash for all the legal fees associated with bringing them all in.
bit torrent is a freaking playground for pirates.
I would assume that a passworded tracker, a server that monitors account usage and spits out strong, temporary passwords, and a client that logs into the server, asks for a password and then applies that to the tracker would be enough, however, I'm not the one getting millions of dollars.
in short, yeah, it sounds like they're slashdotted.
Good point, I'd forgotten about those things. I'd imagine that for the AEGIS and similar systems that a human gunner would be undesirable. Last thing they want is for some stressed-out petty officer that's been on watch for the last 24 hours and is pumped full of adrenaline to be on the gun and fail to destroy an inbound missle. I mean, with most Navy operations, it's not like those guys have to worry too much about hitting a civilian or a friendly while they're out at sea.
I remember reading on some (public, unclassified) site that we have at least prototypes of remote controled robots with various calibers of automatic weapons, ranging from 9mm to 7.62mm.
I don't think the Army's that interested in completely automated systems, but remote controlled turrets is something Uncle Sam would dig.
the thing's designed for the shaft above the point of a break to just float away. hurricanes would exert force perpendicular to the elevator. it wouldn't pull downwards on it. at worst, it'd jerk the counter-weight end down by a few dozen kilometers. if it did that and snapped, depending on the murphy-factor the builders put into it, it might come down, but I kind of doubt it. even if it did, it's set up to be in a geosynchronus orbit. if it snapped, it'd come down straight down, more or less. in order to whip out and lay waste to the earth with it's full length, it'd have to be stretched out in that direction first.
if a hurricane jerked it around before it snapped, the absolute worst area it could trashed wouldn't be much longer than the radius of the hurricane.
and if they do it right, they'll allow for another Murphy-factor that it won't come down at all in that situation. they would, however, have to fly something up to catch it and drag the top end back down for repairs.
I can only thing of having the ventilation system blow into it, which may not be the best idea when it comes to smoke and carbon monoxide. I suppose you could pump it in from the ground floor so that it'd be cleaner, but then during normal operation, it'd smell like the parking garage/street.
Also, if the fire knocks out the power to the ventilation system, the positive pressure goes away.
but, like I said, I don't have the background for this kind of stuff. is there an answer that'd fix those issues?
Battlefield 2
Nexagon: Deathmatch
Toontown
Blade of Darkness
Freedom Force
Temple of Elemental Evil
There are probably other games out there. I'm not sure which use stackless Python,though, as I don't know what stackless Python is. At any rate, people have been finding it useful in games for awhile and that's not likely to stop any time soon.
do you have a source on that? as far as I know, it just contained an IR receiver and a CSS key. the DVD decoder and playback software was on the xbox itself. I could be wrong, but that was my understanding of it.
even paying liscensing costs, microsoft probably came out all right on the deal. especially considering that the dongle had almost nothing to it but an IR receiver.
trackers can be overloaded, you know.
While this game doesn't look as deep as I'd like to see from a cyberpunk setting, the graphics are really well done and it seems as though they've put a great deal of work into getting the one map that they have really well set up. It looks to have a fair amount of depth, as far as team-based FPSes go.
The fact that they actually have deckers and allow for the deckers to be put to good use in cyberspace makes for a really great concept.
I don't know why the article summary references the Matrix. Shadowrun and other cyberpunk sources are clearly much bigger influences on the development team. Their portrayal of cyberspace does look a lot like TRON 2.0, though.
of course, most of the movies and tv shows they watch are pirate copies, but that's a whole other can of worms.
that is one truely horribly cutesy flash. I'm only glad that it crashed mozilla before I could get sucked in and be forced to gouge my eyes out.
really? I could have sworn that refugee was derived from refuge. refugee meaning someone that's seeking or taking refuge.
You've obviously never been part of a military deployment, but that's fast, man. There's a good amount of prep work that has to be done in order to deploy forces anywhere for any reason. Equipment and vehicles have to be inspected. Ammunition and mission-critical equipment has to be issued. Plans have to formulated, rehearsed and implemented. Not to mention that you have to put the unit on lock-down and get total accountability for every soldier and every sensitive item.
Truth be told, the only people we have able to deploy in under 24 hours are stone-cold killers. Most units, especially national guard units (they have pretty light control over their men, since they generally only "work" on the weekends) take several days to a week to deploy.
Granted, the main body of the National Guardsmen didn't show up until 4 days after landfall. 4 days is a long time to those crying in a shelter somewhere, but about standard for the national guard.
I'm pretty damned liberal for an infantry sergeant, but you can't pick at the weekend warriors for lying down on the job.
As much as I'd like to heap some blame on Bush, the response times from the federal government have been ranging from "as expected to fast". All in all, a job well done. Not perfectly. But not bad.
Nah, you're on the money.
I've been in the US Army infantry for almost 8 years. I've done a LOT of marching. 2 miles an hour, on flat, paved ground, in cold rain, is an easy pace. Even for someone that's not physically active.
Cold rain helps out a hell of a lot. One of the first things to hit you during physical exertion is your body generating too much heat. In cold rain, that factor drops below concern. In the weather they were having before the hurricane hit, they'd pretty much have to run the whole way for heat to be a factor.
Arguements about having to carry food and water for their family are bullshit. Anyone with kids has bookbags they can stuff food and water in. Most women have purses of some sort. Many people have luggage of some sort, too. A lot of times, with wheels. If all that fails, jack a shopping cart.
Food and water weigh a bit, but as long as it's rationed, you can make do with a lot less than you think. Toting enough for a week or so isn't too hard. Especially if you steal a shopping cart.
25 miles (worst case) with 20 pounds of food and water is totally doable for a family. It's not like it's the fucking Baatan death march.
The infirm wouldn't be able to make it, but most people would be fine.
No one uses laser sights anymore.
It doesn't really matter if their name is tarnished and developers feel that they're a bunch of bastards. It's not like the beginning of the graphically-oriented games, where there were only a few people that could code something that people would play.
decent game programmers and artists are dime a dozen now. it's no longer an arcane art understood by few. hell, they have college courses for it now. instead of publishers scrambling to pick up developers, developers are fighting to get someone to publish their work.
this fits in with the problems that all skilled-laborers have run into before. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a programmers' union in the next few years.