I have Lego bricks kicking round that i found outdoors in odd places, living in Australia plenty of them were heavily UV exposed. Got bored & did some destructive load testing on one once, the dye may fade the shine may dull and the corners may blunt, but that plastic lasts really really well. I wonder if there's any way to do more advanced stuff like molecular analysis or radiocarbon dating to determine the exact age of the Lego. Shame there's no place i can just mail a chip of the plastic as sample to for it to be analysed and get a report back... well any that don't ask which fortune 500 company/research university pays the bill and charge appropriately.
Its a bit of a network effect game that makes it harder to see.
You signed up with [legit online vendor/merchant A] the TOS you agreed to here grants them the right to share your information for certain things. You paid for a purchase online, allowing them to associate a name with your billing address. They share your info with [info harvesting company B] You anonymously sign up with [small store C] for a loyalty card. You buy something with your credit card at [small store C], the legally allowed information they can keep after the CC purchase is tagged matching your loyalty card. [Small store C] has a deal with [profiling service co D] who has a deal with [info harvester B], [D] uses the info from [B] in order to provide [C] with a nice legally obtained set of personal information that is likely much more detailed than you wish it was possibly including interests harvested online and physically for decades, distilled down into tags & labels associated to your unique personal details like the usual name, address & phone.
That's how we pretty much lost the last of our guns here in Australia. Three words, "Port Arthur Massacre", I couldn't bloody believe it, now even bloody paintball weapons are heavily regulated here, its pathetic.
That number may be wrong, but did you not notice the insanity of charging someone who used a toy gun to scare off someone attempting to steal from them? Please refute something worth refuting. I find it deplorable that people don't realize just how skewed the world is.
right wing, left wing, conservative, liberal, I dont bloody care what you call yourself and those 'other people' you dont like the opinions of. I want concealed carry with harsher penalties for people breaching the trust granted a person offered the right to carry a concealed weapon on their person. Is that liberal, no, is that conservative, nope. Gee, that would mean I must want to set fire to the entire system and live in anarchy, nope I like my fair taxes (hate corporate tax avoidance, so while Im ranting fuck you larry & sergei, not paying your taxes is evil, fix your company or change the motto) and my heavily subsidized public healthcare, while also thinking not enough of the education system is subsidized.
the State can and does garnish up to 100% of their wage to make them pay for the cost of their incarceration. In short, these people are marginalized to the point that the only options they have left are crime and return to prison.
Well that's an interesting detail I hadn't heard before. I always wondered just why recidivism was so grossly disproportionate with the numbers seen in other countries. Criminals in the USA are (based on some cursory averaging of statistics easily available with quality references) pretty much twice as likely to re-offend and wind up back behind bars. I always presumed it was some cultural quirk of the USA, longer sentences creating a sort of Stockholm syndrome or something.
However if they are having their wages garnished post release, yeah pushing someone strait back into the gutter while they try to 'go legit' is likely to just force them to various kinds of illegal activity, from fraud about wages, to less white collar crimes, in order to get by. Either they 'give up' and go back inside by commiting some small crime they know they arent likely to be shot while being arrested for, or they will break the law trying to survive. If you make it hard to go legit, less people will reform.
The way I always saw it was that if you had one person try to intimidate people, coercion, etc, otherwise trying to tip the scales. It would be considered 'just' if that person were to suffer an accident, or someone refuse to be intimidated and while justifiably threatened by the person attempting the intimidation, they would defend themselves to the fullest extent, be that anywhere on the scale from a light bruising through to lethal force.
Person A sells themselves into slavery, person B buys said person, person A gets fed up of the treatment, (typically viewed as breach of contract by person A) and vacates to ignore the rest of the contract. The issue between A and B has no impact on Person C, who when presented with the facts at hand, gets to make up their own mind as to the legitimacy of the deal.
Yes it would be unstable as hell. But it might work for at least a few years before changing from a 'I am lord of my own feifdom" to "i pledged my personal feifdom to Lord X in exchange for safety i was too scared/feeble to secure for myself"
P.S. I dont think its a good idea. Just trying to help explain why it doesnt actually matter about self interest still existing.
Yeah, that might work for radio... where we can accurately filter phase based on electronics. However doing it with optical frequencies is a major pita... I've spent a few years contemplating how it could be achieved let alone building one. Good idea, its bloody hard to do one rather important part, the 'phase filter'
While I still think he did 'a good thing' in principle. Your well elucidated post has left me more certain that while he did the right thing in principle, he clearly could have done it a better way. As to if he would have had the chance to 'work up the chain' without repercussions, I have my doubts. Either way, he could have taken a much better course of action and I cant see how a letter of the type you outlined done the way you suggested, would fail to get a reaction, particularly if leaked outside as 'last resort'.
However, I do feel that the diplomatic cables leaked, provided the kind of window into how the political game is played at the big boy level that the general population sorely needed. This business of all diplomacy being classified is rather appalling, I dont see why no one can ever know "Mr Ambassador from Crap 3rd world country $X requested the USA support his tinpot dictator in an ethnic purge. request politely ignored by state department".
The way I see it, given that its all classified, the people never had a chance to know if the government was classifying stuff the people thought it shouldnt be, and thereby have the chance to affect that via due political process.
I was fairly sure the best performance cross browser wise would be with canvas.
My motives for SVG were more compression & transform speed. Being able to do the Window Manager 'theme' stuff Motif/CDE/twm/etc, farmed out to the browsers CSS/XSLT, and any other tricks that can be performed using the SVG in order to avoid sending image data for performance. SVG is getting better with time, and I'll agree it has a long way to go compared to canvas, but at higher resolutions, it would have distinct advantages. I also wanted to avoid it feeling too much like web based vnc and browser side handling of 'window' objects via floating SVG elements seemed like the best way to approach at least a few aspects with my goal of letting the browser handle as much of the code as I could.
Nice feature list there and Btw... this is a sufficiently awesome thing, that I'm likely to become a paying customer and possibly commit back to the github where I can.
Ok... I dont know how to handle the awesomeness that I just read.
Other than to offer to help. In the very least I can test the hell out of it...
I have been thinking of ways to make a HTML 5 or other web based "X11 server" for a while. The thinking has only gotten as far as a rough map of the most effective ways to do it so far. (Java and Flash are both non-starters in my book) Chrome + Native Client + websockets or inbuilt ssh tunnel over port 443 = most straitforward but a lot of work just to make an actual X11 server that still required lots of work building XDMP related stuff as well. Javascript + Canvas + webserver & X11 on the remote 'terminal server' = more web based, probably more doable, definitely more flexible. or Javascript + HTML5 & SVG + special web X11 server = best approach in my mind. Probably hardest, definitely wins points for simplicity if done right.
The issue would be going from a crude web page based equivalent of X2VNC to something more advanced like using as much SVG as possible for window borders, etc, while rendering individual window updates to jpeg/png/webp/whatever, and sending them via something like websockets, while sending back keyboard & mouse inputs captured on the page to the server. No small feat.
Which way were you thinking of going with your plans for X11?
I hate replying to myself, but the above comment still stands even if they distribute a binary. I only need to know its dependencies and where it expects files to be (hopefully in standard places unlike some proprietary binaries I've used over the years.) and based on the Mac version, they will compartmentalize the application quite well with per user settings in appropriate folders and such. Valve do seem to respect platform conventions. I just hope they dont ignore the convention of 'openness' that is at the heart of linux...
Otherwise I wont be able to test it on FreeBSD using Linux Binary Compatibility;-)
Infact the people running other OSes should get a second survey & become 'primary' testers.
Were the ones who will find (and should accept the fact fixes wont be immediate) the bugs and issues.
With my Gentoo box I could batch test the application through at least 12 library versions for whatever libraries they are using, in a couple of hours in a chroot prefix just so valve dont have to worry that the next version will break things when its added from upstream into Ubuntu... because it probably was (or could be) in a Gentoo prefix within a few hours of the upstream devs marking that branch stable.
The biggest reason I keep using Gentoo for development boxes and VMs, is just how easy it is to test library variations... well except for heavily used libraries that lots of other things depend on, but your being naive if your not sufficiently isolate your testing to avoid breaking your entire system when you start trying to play with a new version of things like glibc.
Knowing Disney what they tend to do with The Muppets... Odds are like 95% or better Kermit would get to be Han just because otherwise they wouldnt be able to use Miss Piggy for Leia. Not much chance they would do anything else.
I mean there is so much potential for a Muppet SW given how well some parody takes treat the material. I adored the Robot Chicken SW shorts and the Muppets past humor treatments of things such as Dickens & Treasure Island shows an appropriate amount of irreverence to do good humor with old subject matter. But its the Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia that breaks it for me. Everything else I picture is awesome, from Fozzie or Animal as Chewie, to a Gonzo as Han, Penguins as Jawas, Swedish Chef as Akbar, the list is endless as to how awesome they could make it. Pretty much anything other than the utterly predicable & tedious to watch Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia, with the mandatory side order of Scooter as Luke.
del Toro would do better with the first one. Hes got more nuance than Abrams.
I'd preffer it to be: Episode I: Directed by Guillermo del Toro Episode II: Directed by J.J. Abrams Episode III: Directed by Christopher Nolan
Because barring a completely different plot, I dont see how you could weave that many characters together and suck people into the world without being prepared to make an intricate, 3 hour remake of it so the story doesnt seem like a rushed hack job. Abrams would be about as good at Ep 1 with regards to being subtle about the political subplot as Michael Bay. Though... speaking of mr Bay. Ep 2 might be fun to watch his take of. I mean if anyone can make a massive robot fight scene fun, its Mr Bay.
Ive always wanted to see the diff output between the George Lucas version of Empire Strikes Back and the Irvin Kershner version. Its well known they butted heads over the Carbon Freeze scene. But that cant be the only one. He says that was the only disagrement they had, but was it really the only time he and Lucas saw it differently. I imagine he must have made countless small contributions to the movie and I always wanted to sit down with Kershner and ask him about what he was given in the script and what he chose to shoot for so many scenes that I doubt that I'll ever have answers from other people. Hes at one with the force now, so I wont have my chance to ask him directly but I always look forward to more behind the scenes content from the archives, more so than any new movie or game set in the SW galaxy.
I know he wasnt as deeply involved in SW as Lucas was, but I always wanted to know where he left his marks on the movie. Even if my questions were answered with "actually that was George's idea"
The top guestions I wanted to ask Kershner: 1 - The 'I am your father' scene. I wanted him to disect and describe this pivotal moment more than any other. 2 - The Dinner, deception reveal and then the exchange between Vader and Lando. Was that exactly as scripted. 3 - When they are briefing the bounty hunters, were all their little quirks of behavior in the script as written or did you direct the actors & puppeters to create some personanilty. 4 - Was working with so many characters that lacked an emotive'face' challenging? what did you do to compensate where you couldnt get a facial expression in a shot?
My fear is that if Steam in Linux is successful, people will become accepting on account-based DRM (which is what Steam is of course). They'll be invariably tied into Valve's ecosystem and that increased dependency seems dangerous for long-term security. If you could run everything on Steam without Steam, if Steam was merely a purchasing UI and launcher (but not authenticator) then it'd be great.
So if people are used to having the vendor define all the rules instead of the customer who's basically perpetually-renting access to all the games, this make it normal, accepted. Everyone then starts doing this, we dry up the marked for DRM-free games, and then we've lost what little power as consumers we once had. Not a great direction to be going in I think.
But once again, this doesn't seem unreasonable. Music no longer has DRM (in most places anyway), it's just gaming that people are sufficiently addicted to that means it can still be accepted even in Steam form. But proprietary? Don't really give a shit to be honest.
What your looking for is Desura... and it has been on Linux for a while already. Its not a bad little App. Even plays nice with Steam by installing Mods so they show up in both Steam and Desura. Its become sortof a companion app to steam with more of a noDRM/Modder/Indy oriented crowd. Shame GOG dont team up with Desura or release their own Linux 'store app' since they could easily automate the wrapper processes for their apps since most just use DOSBox.
This is a Late reply I know... but I wanted to directly give you and any subsequent readers with similar questions, the proper answer.
NBC Suits are designed to protect against exposure to contaminants. These are designed to prevent liquid contaminants from skin contact, airborne gasses, liquid aerosols, and physical particulate aerosols (think airborne dust) contaminants from being inhaled, and lastly provide a protective barrier from contact against any dangerous physical material that must be handled.
The term NBC suit is more commonly used with regard to Military issue equipment, the term Hazmat Suit tends to be used for civilian equipment. Regardless both are considered standard Personal Protective Equipment with regards to a wide range of environmental hazards from simple chemical protection against acid or other highly toxic vapors to biological protection when dealing with medical waste, and the other major use is as protection against radiological & nuclear hazards. They come in grades for which there are 2 major standards the 4 grade US version and the 6 grade EU version.
Now the thing about the level of protection these suits can offer (not all types will protect from radiation) is in 2 areas, hazmat gear designed specifically to deal with nuclear/radioactive material will likely have some additional layers of shielding which will protect against alpha (if its thicker than paper it shields against alpha), likely protects from beta (tinfoil does a decent job), and may offer some reduction in exposure to lower energy gamma radiation, but this is usually not considered the primary benefit of wearing such gear in a 'hot zone' since skin exposure to alpha and beta radiation are stopped with minimal effort. The biggest reason to wear full hazmat gear which includes its own air supply, (US level A or B) is that there are a number of substances that are radioactive gasses which emit alpha and beta radiation, which if you inhaled them, would be irradiating (in the can cause cancer fashion) AND burning your lungs from the inside due to a type of radiation burns typically called 'beta burns' and they are a lot the kind of serious burns received from heat/fire.
Airborne radioactive gasses & particles, be they already in the air, or more commonly due to radiation induced embrittlement accelerating the creation of fine dust like particles they can be coating surfaces and when disturbed are dispersed into the air surrounding the person that disturbed the material. By using this kind of protective clothing, they arent exposing themselves to surface and internal burns from radioactive gasses & airborne particulates. Which given the fact it takes 3 inches of lead to stop a gamma ray on average, means that you are providing the workers with as much protection as possible while still letting them do their work.
An area can be hazardously radioactive yet not have sufficient gamma radiation being produced by the contaminants to make humans working there impossible. These suits can block 2 of the 3 types of hazardous ionizing radiation, the ratio of alpha, beta and gamma radiation will depend on the isotopes contaminating the area, and so if the radioactive contamination isn't producing too much gamma radiation then these suits can make working in the area safe enough for people to work.
Those are 2 of the coolest air accident stories I have ever heard.... and I now have a mental picture of the SR-71 Blackbird disintegrating like in a cartoon, leaving the guy upright in his ejector seat looking round confused like Wile E Coyote after running off the edge of a cliff just before gravity kicks in.
This is contingent on the judges being cognizant of the systemic effects of the decision and basing a judgement on those effects being blatantly unreasonable. If I'm not mistaken, they are meant to be deciding if that's what the law as passed by congress was meant to do or not. Not if the outcome is potentially the start of the second american civil war.
Its a coin toss in my mind. Its easy to see both sides, one side appears to be a major plus for the profits & health of american companies and the economy as a whole, the other seems to be missing out on those advantages, however is better due to potentially unforeseen (by the judges) socioeconomic consequences implicit in not choosing this decision.
I would like to think the decision wont destroy first sale doctrine, however based on precedent in lower courts and the previous decision Omega S.A v. Costco Wholesale Corp. I see the distinct possibility that the court may decided in such a way as to subtly gut first use to the core for the entire USA and cause havoc and chaos.
On the other hand, nothing stops public economic pressure (car you can resell is worth more, and sells higher brand new, so 'first sale doctrine rights' may wind up like factory installed aircon and mag wheels as a little plus on luxury cars, and congress or state legislatures might try to mandate manufacturers of certain things such as cars to make their grant of sale rights a requirement for the products to be sold in a state. Such as the 'may cause cancer' warnings required by California.
I think the more fundamental question revolves around the difference between the rocket engines being 'fail-safe' and the rocket itself as a whole being 'fail-safe'.
The engines are clearly designed to be as fail-safe as they can make, complete with efforts to reduce the effect of an entire engine undergoing a violent, uncontrolled, rapid, exothermic dis-assembly. Its fail-safe in a unit test fashion.
The rocket as a whole however... is only partly fail-safe. Its designed to automatically react to faults (eg: that launch pad self abort), handle 2 dead engines and can as evidenced definitely handle 1 dead engine, its even designed to limit the impact of an engine exploding so it doesnt kill the other engines. There is a lot of work making sure individual failures dont destroy the rocket one way or another. But once its airborne, I am not aware of any launch abort that qualifies for the term fail-safe (correct me if I'm wrong, I love knowing how awesome the guys at SpaceX are). Once the ignition takes place and its airborne, I am aware of only 4 possible final outcomes, none of which is truly fail-safe in terms of mission success (payload to orbit safe, payload in the air safe, or payload on the ground safe).
These only refer to the scenarios after liftoff. Pad auto abort is clearly a fail-safe state (barring the rocket exploding on the pad lol) 1 => Launch runs ok - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit, - No failure - Not fail-safe 2 => Launch successful, but with anomaly eg: 1 engine failure - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit - No failure - Not fail-safe 3 => Launch failure, rocket goes out of control kerbal style, destroys itself without outside intervention, eg: nosedives into the Atlantic or shreds itself while airborne, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe 4 => Launch failure, rocket suffers from an issue requiring the Launch Control team to initiate a self destruct abort, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe
So while various parts are fail-safe I dont think we can qualify the rocket itself as fail-safe once its airborne, only while on the pad. Liftoff seems to be the moment the launch passes beyond the fail-safe point at present excluding the future possibilities of the planned powered reusable return stuff and the launch abort escape system which isn't used for regular satellite launches (would be awesome if it was, since normally its either orbit or explode for commercial satellites).
I really wish they would just test the damn 2 lump dumbbell configuration full size and be done with it already. Bidgelow put up 2 inflatable stations big enough to have tested the situation extremely effectively. We just need them linked together with a mechanically appropriate truss to prove we can manage the mechanical stresses & resonances involved.
I want to go to space (proper, not suborbital) one day, and will do it if I can, even if its on the top of a giant controlled explosion, and even if I have to float around in a semi-nauseous state for the few days I get to spend up there. But I sure would like a more comfortable place to sleep up there, and I'm sure many of the other less committed, more rich types are likely to be partially curious till they get the first 'vomit comet' ride as part of training and discover they have less control over the way they react to unpleasant sensations from their vestibular system than they thought. These people may like having a little region of comfortable gravity to return to in order to avoid the urge to vomit profusely.
The rich types are creating a whole new market, and its going to be a lot more profitable for the people who can offer a 7 day stay where you wont want to vomit and can sleep properly.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why Lego costs more.
I have Lego bricks kicking round that i found outdoors in odd places, living in Australia plenty of them were heavily UV exposed. Got bored & did some destructive load testing on one once, the dye may fade the shine may dull and the corners may blunt, but that plastic lasts really really well. I wonder if there's any way to do more advanced stuff like molecular analysis or radiocarbon dating to determine the exact age of the Lego. Shame there's no place i can just mail a chip of the plastic as sample to for it to be analysed and get a report back... well any that don't ask which fortune 500 company/research university pays the bill and charge appropriately.
Economics 104 - Whatever you thought you knew was wrong. a.k.a. Intro to banking & international finance.
Its a bit of a network effect game that makes it harder to see.
You signed up with [legit online vendor/merchant A] the TOS you agreed to here grants them the right to share your information for certain things.
You paid for a purchase online, allowing them to associate a name with your billing address.
They share your info with [info harvesting company B]
You anonymously sign up with [small store C] for a loyalty card.
You buy something with your credit card at [small store C], the legally allowed information they can keep after the CC purchase is tagged matching your loyalty card.
[Small store C] has a deal with [profiling service co D] who has a deal with [info harvester B], [D] uses the info from [B] in order to provide [C] with a nice legally obtained set of personal information that is likely much more detailed than you wish it was possibly including interests harvested online and physically for decades, distilled down into tags & labels associated to your unique personal details like the usual name, address & phone.
That's how we pretty much lost the last of our guns here in Australia.
Three words, "Port Arthur Massacre", I couldn't bloody believe it, now even bloody paintball weapons are heavily regulated here, its pathetic.
That number may be wrong, but did you not notice the insanity of charging someone who used a toy gun to scare off someone attempting to steal from them? Please refute something worth refuting. I find it deplorable that people don't realize just how skewed the world is.
right wing, left wing, conservative, liberal, I dont bloody care what you call yourself and those 'other people' you dont like the opinions of. I want concealed carry with harsher penalties for people breaching the trust granted a person offered the right to carry a concealed weapon on their person. Is that liberal, no, is that conservative, nope. Gee, that would mean I must want to set fire to the entire system and live in anarchy, nope I like my fair taxes (hate corporate tax avoidance, so while Im ranting fuck you larry & sergei, not paying your taxes is evil, fix your company or change the motto) and my heavily subsidized public healthcare, while also thinking not enough of the education system is subsidized.
In short, get off my lawn.
the State can and does garnish up to 100% of their wage to make them pay for the cost of their incarceration. In short, these people are marginalized to the point that the only options they have left are crime and return to prison.
Well that's an interesting detail I hadn't heard before. I always wondered just why recidivism was so grossly disproportionate with the numbers seen in other countries. Criminals in the USA are (based on some cursory averaging of statistics easily available with quality references) pretty much twice as likely to re-offend and wind up back behind bars. I always presumed it was some cultural quirk of the USA, longer sentences creating a sort of Stockholm syndrome or something.
However if they are having their wages garnished post release, yeah pushing someone strait back into the gutter while they try to 'go legit' is likely to just force them to various kinds of illegal activity, from fraud about wages, to less white collar crimes, in order to get by. Either they 'give up' and go back inside by commiting some small crime they know they arent likely to be shot while being arrested for, or they will break the law trying to survive. If you make it hard to go legit, less people will reform.
The way I always saw it was that if you had one person try to intimidate people, coercion, etc, otherwise trying to tip the scales. It would be considered 'just' if that person were to suffer an accident, or someone refuse to be intimidated and while justifiably threatened by the person attempting the intimidation, they would defend themselves to the fullest extent, be that anywhere on the scale from a light bruising through to lethal force.
Person A sells themselves into slavery, person B buys said person, person A gets fed up of the treatment, (typically viewed as breach of contract by person A) and vacates to ignore the rest of the contract. The issue between A and B has no impact on Person C, who when presented with the facts at hand, gets to make up their own mind as to the legitimacy of the deal.
Yes it would be unstable as hell. But it might work for at least a few years before changing from a 'I am lord of my own feifdom" to "i pledged my personal feifdom to Lord X in exchange for safety i was too scared/feeble to secure for myself"
P.S. I dont think its a good idea. Just trying to help explain why it doesnt actually matter about self interest still existing.
Yeah, that might work for radio... where we can accurately filter phase based on electronics. However doing it with optical frequencies is a major pita... I've spent a few years contemplating how it could be achieved let alone building one.
Good idea, its bloody hard to do one rather important part, the 'phase filter'
See above comments. Your completely wrong.
Internode (now iiNet) are on the record as routing direct from Perth to Singapore via SWA-ME-WE
While I still think he did 'a good thing' in principle. Your well elucidated post has left me more certain that while he did the right thing in principle, he clearly could have done it a better way. As to if he would have had the chance to 'work up the chain' without repercussions, I have my doubts. Either way, he could have taken a much better course of action and I cant see how a letter of the type you outlined done the way you suggested, would fail to get a reaction, particularly if leaked outside as 'last resort'.
However, I do feel that the diplomatic cables leaked, provided the kind of window into how the political game is played at the big boy level that the general population sorely needed. This business of all diplomacy being classified is rather appalling, I dont see why no one can ever know "Mr Ambassador from Crap 3rd world country $X requested the USA support his tinpot dictator in an ethnic purge. request politely ignored by state department".
The way I see it, given that its all classified, the people never had a chance to know if the government was classifying stuff the people thought it shouldnt be, and thereby have the chance to affect that via due political process.
I was fairly sure the best performance cross browser wise would be with canvas.
My motives for SVG were more compression & transform speed. Being able to do the Window Manager 'theme' stuff Motif/CDE/twm/etc, farmed out to the browsers CSS/XSLT, and any other tricks that can be performed using the SVG in order to avoid sending image data for performance. SVG is getting better with time, and I'll agree it has a long way to go compared to canvas, but at higher resolutions, it would have distinct advantages. I also wanted to avoid it feeling too much like web based vnc and browser side handling of 'window' objects via floating SVG elements seemed like the best way to approach at least a few aspects with my goal of letting the browser handle as much of the code as I could.
Nice feature list there and Btw... this is a sufficiently awesome thing, that I'm likely to become a paying customer and possibly commit back to the github where I can.
Ok... I dont know how to handle the awesomeness that I just read.
Other than to offer to help. In the very least I can test the hell out of it...
I have been thinking of ways to make a HTML 5 or other web based "X11 server" for a while. The thinking has only gotten as far as a rough map of the most effective ways to do it so far. (Java and Flash are both non-starters in my book)
Chrome + Native Client + websockets or inbuilt ssh tunnel over port 443 = most straitforward but a lot of work just to make an actual X11 server that still required lots of work building XDMP related stuff as well.
Javascript + Canvas + webserver & X11 on the remote 'terminal server' = more web based, probably more doable, definitely more flexible.
or
Javascript + HTML5 & SVG + special web X11 server = best approach in my mind. Probably hardest, definitely wins points for simplicity if done right.
The issue would be going from a crude web page based equivalent of X2VNC to something more advanced like using as much SVG as possible for window borders, etc, while rendering individual window updates to jpeg/png/webp/whatever, and sending them via something like websockets, while sending back keyboard & mouse inputs captured on the page to the server. No small feat.
Which way were you thinking of going with your plans for X11?
I hate replying to myself, but the above comment still stands even if they distribute a binary. I only need to know its dependencies and where it expects files to be (hopefully in standard places unlike some proprietary binaries I've used over the years.) and based on the Mac version, they will compartmentalize the application quite well with per user settings in appropriate folders and such. Valve do seem to respect platform conventions. I just hope they dont ignore the convention of 'openness' that is at the heart of linux...
Otherwise I wont be able to test it on FreeBSD using Linux Binary Compatibility ;-)
Infact the people running other OSes should get a second survey & become 'primary' testers.
Were the ones who will find (and should accept the fact fixes wont be immediate) the bugs and issues.
With my Gentoo box I could batch test the application through at least 12 library versions for whatever libraries they are using, in a couple of hours in a chroot prefix just so valve dont have to worry that the next version will break things when its added from upstream into Ubuntu... because it probably was (or could be) in a Gentoo prefix within a few hours of the upstream devs marking that branch stable.
The biggest reason I keep using Gentoo for development boxes and VMs, is just how easy it is to test library variations... well except for heavily used libraries that lots of other things depend on, but your being naive if your not sufficiently isolate your testing to avoid breaking your entire system when you start trying to play with a new version of things like glibc.
Knowing Disney what they tend to do with The Muppets... Odds are like 95% or better Kermit would get to be Han just because otherwise they wouldnt be able to use Miss Piggy for Leia.
Not much chance they would do anything else.
I mean there is so much potential for a Muppet SW given how well some parody takes treat the material. I adored the Robot Chicken SW shorts and the Muppets past humor treatments of things such as Dickens & Treasure Island shows an appropriate amount of irreverence to do good humor with old subject matter. But its the Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia that breaks it for me. Everything else I picture is awesome, from Fozzie or Animal as Chewie, to a Gonzo as Han, Penguins as Jawas, Swedish Chef as Akbar, the list is endless as to how awesome they could make it. Pretty much anything other than the utterly predicable & tedious to watch Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia, with the mandatory side order of Scooter as Luke.
del Toro would do better with the first one. Hes got more nuance than Abrams.
I'd preffer it to be:
Episode I: Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Episode II: Directed by J.J. Abrams
Episode III: Directed by Christopher Nolan
Because barring a completely different plot, I dont see how you could weave that many characters together and suck people into the world without being prepared to make an intricate, 3 hour remake of it so the story doesnt seem like a rushed hack job. Abrams would be about as good at Ep 1 with regards to being subtle about the political subplot as Michael Bay. Though... speaking of mr Bay. Ep 2 might be fun to watch his take of. I mean if anyone can make a massive robot fight scene fun, its Mr Bay.
Ive always wanted to see the diff output between the George Lucas version of Empire Strikes Back
and the Irvin Kershner version. Its well known they butted heads over the Carbon Freeze scene.
But that cant be the only one. He says that was the only disagrement they had, but was it
really the only time he and Lucas saw it differently. I imagine he must have made countless small
contributions to the movie and I always wanted to sit down with Kershner and ask him about what
he was given in the script and what he chose to shoot for so many scenes that I doubt that I'll ever
have answers from other people. Hes at one with the force now, so I wont have my chance to ask him directly
but I always look forward to more behind the scenes content from the archives, more so than any new movie or game set in the SW galaxy.
I know he wasnt as deeply involved in SW as Lucas was, but I always wanted to know where he left his marks on the movie. Even if my questions were answered with "actually that was George's idea"
The top guestions I wanted to ask Kershner:
1 - The 'I am your father' scene. I wanted him to disect and describe this pivotal moment more than any other.
2 - The Dinner, deception reveal and then the exchange between Vader and Lando. Was that exactly as scripted.
3 - When they are briefing the bounty hunters, were all their little quirks of behavior in the script as written or did you direct the actors & puppeters to create some personanilty.
4 - Was working with so many characters that lacked an emotive'face' challenging? what did you do to compensate where you couldnt get a facial expression in a shot?
My fear is that if Steam in Linux is successful, people will become accepting on account-based DRM (which is what Steam is of course). They'll be invariably tied into Valve's ecosystem and that increased dependency seems dangerous for long-term security. If you could run everything on Steam without Steam, if Steam was merely a purchasing UI and launcher (but not authenticator) then it'd be great.
So if people are used to having the vendor define all the rules instead of the customer who's basically perpetually-renting access to all the games, this make it normal, accepted. Everyone then starts doing this, we dry up the marked for DRM-free games, and then we've lost what little power as consumers we once had. Not a great direction to be going in I think.
But once again, this doesn't seem unreasonable. Music no longer has DRM (in most places anyway), it's just gaming that people are sufficiently addicted to that means it can still be accepted even in Steam form. But proprietary? Don't really give a shit to be honest.
What your looking for is Desura... and it has been on Linux for a while already. Its not a bad little App. Even plays nice with Steam by installing Mods so they show up in both Steam and Desura. Its become sortof a companion app to steam with more of a noDRM/Modder/Indy oriented crowd. Shame GOG dont team up with Desura or release their own Linux 'store app' since they could easily automate the wrapper processes for their apps since most just use DOSBox.
This is a Late reply I know... but I wanted to directly give you and any subsequent readers with similar questions, the proper answer.
NBC Suits are designed to protect against exposure to contaminants. These are designed to prevent liquid contaminants from skin contact, airborne gasses, liquid aerosols, and physical particulate aerosols (think airborne dust) contaminants from being inhaled, and lastly provide a protective barrier from contact against any dangerous physical material that must be handled.
The term NBC suit is more commonly used with regard to Military issue equipment, the term Hazmat Suit tends to be used for civilian equipment. Regardless both are considered standard Personal Protective Equipment with regards to a wide range of environmental hazards from simple chemical protection against acid or other highly toxic vapors to biological protection when dealing with medical waste, and the other major use is as protection against radiological & nuclear hazards. They come in grades for which there are 2 major standards the 4 grade US version and the 6 grade EU version.
Now the thing about the level of protection these suits can offer (not all types will protect from radiation) is in 2 areas, hazmat gear designed specifically to deal with nuclear/radioactive material will likely have some additional layers of shielding which will protect against alpha (if its thicker than paper it shields against alpha), likely protects from beta (tinfoil does a decent job), and may offer some reduction in exposure to lower energy gamma radiation, but this is usually not considered the primary benefit of wearing such gear in a 'hot zone' since skin exposure to alpha and beta radiation are stopped with minimal effort. The biggest reason to wear full hazmat gear which includes its own air supply, (US level A or B) is that there are a number of substances that are radioactive gasses which emit alpha and beta radiation, which if you inhaled them, would be irradiating (in the can cause cancer fashion) AND burning your lungs from the inside due to a type of radiation burns typically called 'beta burns' and they are a lot the kind of serious burns received from heat/fire.
Airborne radioactive gasses & particles, be they already in the air, or more commonly due to radiation induced embrittlement accelerating the creation of fine dust like particles they can be coating surfaces and when disturbed are dispersed into the air surrounding the person that disturbed the material.
By using this kind of protective clothing, they arent exposing themselves to surface and internal burns from radioactive gasses & airborne particulates. Which given the fact it takes 3 inches of lead to stop a gamma ray on average, means that you are providing the workers with as much protection as possible while still letting them do their work.
An area can be hazardously radioactive yet not have sufficient gamma radiation being produced by the contaminants to make humans working there impossible. These suits can block 2 of the 3 types of hazardous ionizing radiation, the ratio of alpha, beta and gamma radiation will depend on the isotopes contaminating the area, and so if the radioactive contamination isn't producing too much gamma radiation then these suits can make working in the area safe enough for people to work.
Those are 2 of the coolest air accident stories I have ever heard.... and I now have a mental picture of the SR-71 Blackbird disintegrating like in a cartoon, leaving the guy upright in his ejector seat looking round confused like Wile E Coyote after running off the edge of a cliff just before gravity kicks in.
This is contingent on the judges being cognizant of the systemic effects of the decision and basing a judgement on those effects being blatantly unreasonable.
If I'm not mistaken, they are meant to be deciding if that's what the law as passed by congress was meant to do or not.
Not if the outcome is potentially the start of the second american civil war.
Its a coin toss in my mind. Its easy to see both sides, one side appears to be a major plus for the profits & health of american companies and the economy as a whole, the other seems to be missing out on those advantages, however is better due to potentially unforeseen (by the judges) socioeconomic consequences implicit in not choosing this decision.
I would like to think the decision wont destroy first sale doctrine, however based on precedent in lower courts and the previous decision Omega S.A v. Costco Wholesale Corp. I see the distinct possibility that the court may decided in such a way as to subtly gut first use to the core for the entire USA and cause havoc and chaos.
On the other hand, nothing stops public economic pressure (car you can resell is worth more, and sells higher brand new, so 'first sale doctrine rights' may wind up like factory installed aircon and mag wheels as a little plus on luxury cars, and congress or state legislatures might try to mandate manufacturers of certain things such as cars to make their grant of sale rights a requirement for the products to be sold in a state. Such as the 'may cause cancer' warnings required by California.
I think the more fundamental question revolves around the difference between the rocket engines being 'fail-safe' and the rocket itself as a whole being 'fail-safe'.
The engines are clearly designed to be as fail-safe as they can make, complete with efforts to reduce the effect of an entire engine undergoing a violent, uncontrolled, rapid, exothermic dis-assembly. Its fail-safe in a unit test fashion.
The rocket as a whole however... is only partly fail-safe. Its designed to automatically react to faults (eg: that launch pad self abort), handle 2 dead engines and can as evidenced definitely handle 1 dead engine, its even designed to limit the impact of an engine exploding so it doesnt kill the other engines. There is a lot of work making sure individual failures dont destroy the rocket one way or another.
But once its airborne, I am not aware of any launch abort that qualifies for the term fail-safe (correct me if I'm wrong, I love knowing how awesome the guys at SpaceX are). Once the ignition takes place and its airborne, I am aware of only 4 possible final outcomes, none of which is truly fail-safe in terms of mission success (payload to orbit safe, payload in the air safe, or payload on the ground safe).
These only refer to the scenarios after liftoff. Pad auto abort is clearly a fail-safe state (barring the rocket exploding on the pad lol)
1 => Launch runs ok - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit, - No failure - Not fail-safe
2 => Launch successful, but with anomaly eg: 1 engine failure - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit - No failure - Not fail-safe
3 => Launch failure, rocket goes out of control kerbal style, destroys itself without outside intervention, eg: nosedives into the Atlantic or shreds itself while airborne, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe
4 => Launch failure, rocket suffers from an issue requiring the Launch Control team to initiate a self destruct abort, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe
So while various parts are fail-safe I dont think we can qualify the rocket itself as fail-safe once its airborne, only while on the pad. Liftoff seems to be the moment the launch passes beyond the fail-safe point at present excluding the future possibilities of the planned powered reusable return stuff and the launch abort escape system which isn't used for regular satellite launches (would be awesome if it was, since normally its either orbit or explode for commercial satellites).
Just my thoughts.
Would love to read the PhD thesis, that sounds like some quality work. Do you have a citation I can look up?
... What a wonderful thing to learn after starting to learn Finish.
Finland +1, USA, -1
I really wish they would just test the damn 2 lump dumbbell configuration full size and be done with it already.
Bidgelow put up 2 inflatable stations big enough to have tested the situation extremely effectively. We just need them linked together with a mechanically appropriate truss to prove we can manage the mechanical stresses & resonances involved.
I want to go to space (proper, not suborbital) one day, and will do it if I can, even if its on the top of a giant controlled explosion, and even if I have to float around in a semi-nauseous state for the few days I get to spend up there. But I sure would like a more comfortable place to sleep up there, and I'm sure many of the other less committed, more rich types are likely to be partially curious till they get the first 'vomit comet' ride as part of training and discover they have less control over the way they react to unpleasant sensations from their vestibular system than they thought. These people may like having a little region of comfortable gravity to return to in order to avoid the urge to vomit profusely.
The rich types are creating a whole new market, and its going to be a lot more profitable for the people who can offer a 7 day stay where you wont want to vomit and can sleep properly.