Interestingly, the M79 of proven military relevance is an overgrown break-action shotgun, and the military is investigating 12ga grenades. I'd suggest that the combination is enough to earn them Miller protection, whether or not they're often used as such yet.
Also to remind you the Hero Mech design are Cash money only variants different from any acquired with in game currency that also have a bonus to exp and in game currency.
And my anecdote? During the "LRMAgeddon" phase of beta, just after missiles' lofted trajectories were dialed back to make cover work, I played a Centurion. It mounted 15 LRM tubes in the left torso, and an AC/20 in the right arm for when the missiles went dry and/or someone got too close for comfort.
A few weeks later, the server was reset and I lost my well-loved war machine. Then I found out that the economy was scaled back to the point of grinding with 'rental' mechs, after a month of evenings I plunked down my C-bills for a new Centurion chassis. I discovered I couldn't fit an AC/20 in the arm, and then I discovered they were selling my variant - but only for real-world money. And once I bought it, I'd earn money and XP 30% faster. The economy seemed to be balanced around those boosts now, for progress became painfully slow, and the game became boring - competing against real-money mecha with perfect builds in a 20-ton Commando, purchased so the 75% "you don't own your mech" penalty to earning money and the 100% "you don't own your mech" penalty to earning experience, is an exercise in futility. Because there is no respawning in this game, I typically spent about 5 minutes playing, 25 minutes spectating to get my money and XP.
Not strictly pay2win, but working your way into the real game content the cheap way became an exercise in masochism.
My second thought, however, was that cybernetic people like Motoko Kusinagi who have had their reproductive organs removed - along with all the other organs below the brain stem - will be turning to this kind of technology to have children who will be the cyborg issei, the first generation who never had to cope with the frailties of flesh. This could go terribly wrong, but I expect that on average the result will be happy families who don't ever get sick.
Strictly speaking, Plex requires running a space heater, just not in the same room with the TV. The server's a pain in the ass and doesn't support the better scrapers that XBMC does - AniDB, I'm looking at you - and while it's much improved in the last six months, I find it unpleasant that I have to settle for it.
The USB port is wasted on stock Roku firmware, and I don't know of anything better to run on it.:(
You seem to have misread the tenor of this discussion, which reads to me like an indictment of Google's wholesale violation of their code of ethics with these antics.
This leaves me still looking for a way to play arbitrary local media files on my TV; I don't terribly feel like waiting for stuff to buffer - if an online service will deign to give me a sufficiently large buffer - so I always download in advance whenever feasible.
Don't say "an HTPC" - I don't want to run a space heater to do this. Many Android dongles I've seen are out of date or will soon be out of date, and offer lousy codec support to boot. If you've found an exception to that, be my guest - a great many of us/.ers are going to be in need of a new playback device so let's try to be productive here.
And my Chromecast has a USB port? Actually, it does. But it's a power sink, not a power source, so you'd need some kind of weird PoE injector/receiver/USB-to-Ethernet device, and pray that the Chromecast can talk to an ethernet adapter over that USB port. I don't even know if USB OTG lets a device be a power source and a data sink.
What about my iPad? Am I to buy $60 in hardware and hope the camera kit will talk to an Apple ethernet-to-USB adapter (if you can still find that discontinued adapter)? What about the Nest thermostat? Where do I plug in the USB port?
The baseball bat, however, disproportionately helps the large and strong. A fifteen year old girl can shoot just as well as a football player, but you put them in a fight for their lives armed with baseball bats, and nobody will gamble on the outcome.
Many times, gun owners have been asked to meet in the middle, and many times they have. First they came for machine-guns and grenades, and that seemed reasonable at the time.
Then they came for short-barreled weapons; only a last minute rebellion didn't have every handgun in America rounded up.
Then they came for "assault weapons" - old fashioned rifles with ergonomic grips made of black plastic. Amusingly enough, bayonet mounts were gone after, even though Uncle Sam thinks bayonets are no longer militarily relevant.
Now most gun owners are sick of compromise. Can you blame 'em? They've been asked to compromise over and over again, and they have been pretty willing to it until about 2000. If America's big gun companies don't seem as innovative as any random Pakistani gunsmith with an anvil and a campfire there's a pretty good reason for that. Everything that's legal and technically feasible has been done, at least once, and much of it just isn't financially feasible.
Also, on your second example, I think you actually meant "safety over liberty".
That really only works when you can count on hosts to not abuse robots.txt - if I were Google, I'd start ignoring all robots.txt on Tumblr. You can more or less expect them to be malicious, so you make rules to limit the damage. Easy peasy. You abuse it? Well, that's why you can't have nice things.
Japan lives under the American nuclear "umbrella". Nuclear attacks on them would be responded to with same.
Not so sure about what'd happen if every outlying island in the region had a Chinese military base on it; they need not use nukes, and they never need to fire a shot to change the balance of power enough to impact any negotiations for trade or treaty in the region.
Lactic acid, however, is an intermediate ion the energy metabolism of eukaryotic (AKA your) cells; it's produced as a fermentation by-product, which can then be broken down into CO2 + H2O in the presence of oxygen to extract remaining energy.
I'd go out on a limb and suggest that PLA is pretty damn "natural".
I've been using a Mac for serious productivity and Windows almost exclusively for video games for over five years now. Little things - better drag-n-drop functionality in "open file" dialogs is a banal but important example - make the same task significantly faster on the mac, once your workflow includes more than one application. Even when it doesn't, stuff like "space bar to preview any media/document" and better file-manager keyboard shortcuts generally make everything just a tiny bit easier all the time.
Sure, there's things I miss about windows - ctrl-X to cut files, as well as text - it isn't really logical when you sit down and think about it, but it's useful. Not as useful as the rest of Finder, however. I miss DirectX, or I wouldn't have to maintain a Windows system for games. Windows and Linux may have better OpenGL performance (until Mavericks comes out and something-like-doubles GL performance and reimplements most of DirectX's killer hardware abstraction features)
I can count on Macs having a good keyboard, a great trackpad, and some of the most incredibly useful freeware on the market. What more do I need in a "serious business" computer? What's that? Battery life? Ooohyeah.
If they throw in a keyboard cover at that price, I'll pick one up. Maybe. It's smaller than a Macbook Air and a third the price, and I guess I do occasionally need to type something on the go.
Okay, I'm sorry for being all snark and no informative on my previous post. T-worx,Wilcox,and even NATO are working on doing this - at the rifle scale. There's not much excess space in the average handgun, and anything you stick in front of the trigger guard that's big enough for a respectable battery is also probably big enough to be considered a forward pistol grip. It's the work of a half a second to attach a vertical foregrip to many pistols - and also a felony. Bonus: the organization charging with enforcing that law has a great deal of latitude to interpret the law, plus enforcement powers and have consistently demonstrated a short fuse and questionable intellectual honesty. (Did you know that if you attach a ring to a string, it's legally a machine-gun part?)
Not only are you trying to solve a non-trivial engineering problem, you're trying to optimize for both battery life, cost, and bulk. It's no wonder they're sticking to electrifying rifle-sized platforms, when you think about that. One more thing - you're trying to do it without accidentally committing a felony. Much easier to sell something like this to the Army, who gets to ignore laws aimed at private possession of weapons - but to do that you really need to find a way to improve significantly on the mechanical firearm action, which is awfully close to a solved engineering problem by now.
There's a gun range or two near where I live. A police range, and a public range next to each other.
The cops routinely miss the earthen berm while qualifying with their sidearms, according to the instructor at the public range. I hate to make the comparison - it makes me nervous to think too much about - but this thing's bigger than the broad side of an average barn.
Seriously, I don't think I could buy one if I wanted to. The gadgetophile in me loves the idea, but there's only one company making 'em, it's only a 10-round.22LR, and there's that infamous video of the salesman handing the gun to the customer to test - instead of going silent, he pulls the trigger and it clicks - the hammer fell on an empty chamber, in spite of the smart electronic safety being engaged at the time. After the first dry-firing, it stops going but if that's their idea of a promo video, I'm worried.
Maybe I'll look into smart guns again in a decade or so, that should be enough time for them to 1: actually reach market, and 2: implement some worthwhile features. Let's say you've got a smartwatch, like the Armatix gun. It's got electrodes on the back. Make my wrist tingle when I'm getting low, and itch outright when the magazine's empty. Hell, this is 2023. Google Glass is out, and we've already got pica tinny "action cams". Let's make a camera under the barrel feed video to my Glass. If you gave me Land Warrior on a handgun, I'd be inclined to overlook the new points of failure; the ability to fight from behind cover without exposing yourself to return fire is pretty revolutionary. Set it up so my smartphone dials 911, feeds the operator my Glass-eye view, my words, and speakerphone audio - odds are if I'm drawing a weapon on short notice, I want the police to show up, know exactly where I am, and who I've been shooting at.
If domestic law-enforcement drones end up legal, automatically task one to my location, and let the 911 operator work with me to tag the bad guy so I know if I'm pinned down, or I can get away safely. Some of this is also going to involve a smart holster, but Viridian has developed the prototype for that already.
The problem is right now, smartguns are all stick, no carrot. I get a low-capacity, small-calibre, weapon that has glowing TRON lines (maybe they should have put the indicator in the front sight? The thing that's supposed to be easy to see while you're shooting?) to give away my position, an unreliable safety mechanism that'll only let me get shot with my own gun once, and all this for the price of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". I could get a very nice used, 10-round.22LR for a couple hundred bucks, and if I shop around I could get a really nice European gun made by people better known for making Olympic target pistols at that price. If I'm in a hurry, I can find a used Ruger Mk.3 for about that price just about anywhere. And that Triggersmart thing - that lump's so big I probably couldn't holster a retrofitted gun. I certainly can't use it alongside a Radtec round counter, which sits in the same spot but is a much smaller box. Additionally, I doubt most people could effectively conceal a handgun with an inch-thick block sticking out of the side; the trend is toward small, slim, and round-edged these days for a very good reason.
Seriously, right now there is no benefit to smartguns.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, the M79 of proven military relevance is an overgrown break-action shotgun, and the military is investigating 12ga grenades. I'd suggest that the combination is enough to earn them Miller protection, whether or not they're often used as such yet.
That just means Erroneus iswellnot erroneous on the issue.
Also to remind you the Hero Mech design are Cash money only variants different from any acquired with in game currency that also have a bonus to exp and in game currency.
And my anecdote? During the "LRMAgeddon" phase of beta, just after missiles' lofted trajectories were dialed back to make cover work, I played a Centurion. It mounted 15 LRM tubes in the left torso, and an AC/20 in the right arm for when the missiles went dry and/or someone got too close for comfort.
A few weeks later, the server was reset and I lost my well-loved war machine. Then I found out that the economy was scaled back to the point of grinding with 'rental' mechs, after a month of evenings I plunked down my C-bills for a new Centurion chassis. I discovered I couldn't fit an AC/20 in the arm, and then I discovered they were selling my variant - but only for real-world money. And once I bought it, I'd earn money and XP 30% faster. The economy seemed to be balanced around those boosts now, for progress became painfully slow, and the game became boring - competing against real-money mecha with perfect builds in a 20-ton Commando, purchased so the 75% "you don't own your mech" penalty to earning money and the 100% "you don't own your mech" penalty to earning experience, is an exercise in futility. Because there is no respawning in this game, I typically spent about 5 minutes playing, 25 minutes spectating to get my money and XP.
Not strictly pay2win, but working your way into the real game content the cheap way became an exercise in masochism.
I'll admit, that was my first thought too.
My second thought, however, was that cybernetic people like Motoko Kusinagi who have had their reproductive organs removed - along with all the other organs below the brain stem - will be turning to this kind of technology to have children who will be the cyborg issei, the first generation who never had to cope with the frailties of flesh. This could go terribly wrong, but I expect that on average the result will be happy families who don't ever get sick.
I don't have a PC I can leave running all the time plugged into gobs of storage.
Also, that just moves the space heater into another room.
Strictly speaking, Plex requires running a space heater, just not in the same room with the TV. The server's a pain in the ass and doesn't support the better scrapers that XBMC does - AniDB, I'm looking at you - and while it's much improved in the last six months, I find it unpleasant that I have to settle for it.
:(
The USB port is wasted on stock Roku firmware, and I don't know of anything better to run on it.
As the first person to recommend a Pi while logged in, I'll ask you this: where the heck can I find codec support for PiBMC? Ouya?
The Roku's format support and USB playback app is a joke, and I regret picking one over an AppleTV.
This isn't another "H264 or nothing" box, is it?
Dear coward:
You seem to have misread the tenor of this discussion, which reads to me like an indictment of Google's wholesale violation of their code of ethics with these antics.
This leaves me still looking for a way to play arbitrary local media files on my TV; I don't terribly feel like waiting for stuff to buffer - if an online service will deign to give me a sufficiently large buffer - so I always download in advance whenever feasible.
/.ers are going to be in need of a new playback device so let's try to be productive here.
Don't say "an HTPC" - I don't want to run a space heater to do this. Many Android dongles I've seen are out of date or will soon be out of date, and offer lousy codec support to boot. If you've found an exception to that, be my guest - a great many of us
You might be interested to know that the green party is very much the libertarian-left you're looking for.
And my Chromecast has a USB port? Actually, it does. But it's a power sink, not a power source, so you'd need some kind of weird PoE injector/receiver/USB-to-Ethernet device, and pray that the Chromecast can talk to an ethernet adapter over that USB port. I don't even know if USB OTG lets a device be a power source and a data sink.
What about my iPad? Am I to buy $60 in hardware and hope the camera kit will talk to an Apple ethernet-to-USB adapter (if you can still find that discontinued adapter)? What about the Nest thermostat? Where do I plug in the USB port?
Actually, aren't you "Citizen 2587965"?
Send it to Mars, I hear they're short on air over there.
The baseball bat, however, disproportionately helps the large and strong. A fifteen year old girl can shoot just as well as a football player, but you put them in a fight for their lives armed with baseball bats, and nobody will gamble on the outcome.
Many times, gun owners have been asked to meet in the middle, and many times they have. First they came for machine-guns and grenades, and that seemed reasonable at the time.
Then they came for short-barreled weapons; only a last minute rebellion didn't have every handgun in America rounded up.
Then they came for "assault weapons" - old fashioned rifles with ergonomic grips made of black plastic. Amusingly enough, bayonet mounts were gone after, even though Uncle Sam thinks bayonets are no longer militarily relevant.
Now most gun owners are sick of compromise. Can you blame 'em? They've been asked to compromise over and over again, and they have been pretty willing to it until about 2000. If America's big gun companies don't seem as innovative as any random Pakistani gunsmith with an anvil and a campfire there's a pretty good reason for that. Everything that's legal and technically feasible has been done, at least once, and much of it just isn't financially feasible.
Also, on your second example, I think you actually meant "safety over liberty".
That really only works when you can count on hosts to not abuse robots.txt - if I were Google, I'd start ignoring all robots.txt on Tumblr. You can more or less expect them to be malicious, so you make rules to limit the damage. Easy peasy. You abuse it? Well, that's why you can't have nice things.
Japan lives under the American nuclear "umbrella". Nuclear attacks on them would be responded to with same.
Not so sure about what'd happen if every outlying island in the region had a Chinese military base on it; they need not use nukes, and they never need to fire a shot to change the balance of power enough to impact any negotiations for trade or treaty in the region.
Lactic acid, however, is an intermediate ion the energy metabolism of eukaryotic (AKA your) cells; it's produced as a fermentation by-product, which can then be broken down into CO2 + H2O in the presence of oxygen to extract remaining energy.
I'd go out on a limb and suggest that PLA is pretty damn "natural".
I've been using a Mac for serious productivity and Windows almost exclusively for video games for over five years now. Little things - better drag-n-drop functionality in "open file" dialogs is a banal but important example - make the same task significantly faster on the mac, once your workflow includes more than one application. Even when it doesn't, stuff like "space bar to preview any media/document" and better file-manager keyboard shortcuts generally make everything just a tiny bit easier all the time.
Sure, there's things I miss about windows - ctrl-X to cut files, as well as text - it isn't really logical when you sit down and think about it, but it's useful. Not as useful as the rest of Finder, however. I miss DirectX, or I wouldn't have to maintain a Windows system for games. Windows and Linux may have better OpenGL performance (until Mavericks comes out and something-like-doubles GL performance and reimplements most of DirectX's killer hardware abstraction features)
I can count on Macs having a good keyboard, a great trackpad, and some of the most incredibly useful freeware on the market. What more do I need in a "serious business" computer? What's that? Battery life? Ooohyeah.
If they throw in a keyboard cover at that price, I'll pick one up. Maybe. It's smaller than a Macbook Air and a third the price, and I guess I do occasionally need to type something on the go.
Okay, I'm sorry for being all snark and no informative on my previous post. T-worx, Wilcox, and even NATO are working on doing this - at the rifle scale. There's not much excess space in the average handgun, and anything you stick in front of the trigger guard that's big enough for a respectable battery is also probably big enough to be considered a forward pistol grip. It's the work of a half a second to attach a vertical foregrip to many pistols - and also a felony. Bonus: the organization charging with enforcing that law has a great deal of latitude to interpret the law, plus enforcement powers and have consistently demonstrated a short fuse and questionable intellectual honesty. (Did you know that if you attach a ring to a string, it's legally a machine-gun part?)
Not only are you trying to solve a non-trivial engineering problem, you're trying to optimize for both battery life, cost, and bulk. It's no wonder they're sticking to electrifying rifle-sized platforms, when you think about that. One more thing - you're trying to do it without accidentally committing a felony. Much easier to sell something like this to the Army, who gets to ignore laws aimed at private possession of weapons - but to do that you really need to find a way to improve significantly on the mechanical firearm action, which is awfully close to a solved engineering problem by now.
Where in the magazine, precisely? It's already full of bullets.
There's a gun range or two near where I live. A police range, and a public range next to each other.
The cops routinely miss the earthen berm while qualifying with their sidearms, according to the instructor at the public range. I hate to make the comparison - it makes me nervous to think too much about - but this thing's bigger than the broad side of an average barn.
Seriously, I don't think I could buy one if I wanted to. The gadgetophile in me loves the idea, but there's only one company making 'em, it's only a 10-round .22LR, and there's that infamous video of the salesman handing the gun to the customer to test - instead of going silent, he pulls the trigger and it clicks - the hammer fell on an empty chamber, in spite of the smart electronic safety being engaged at the time. After the first dry-firing, it stops going but if that's their idea of a promo video, I'm worried.
.22LR for a couple hundred bucks, and if I shop around I could get a really nice European gun made by people better known for making Olympic target pistols at that price. If I'm in a hurry, I can find a used Ruger Mk.3 for about that price just about anywhere. And that Triggersmart thing - that lump's so big I probably couldn't holster a retrofitted gun. I certainly can't use it alongside a Radtec round counter, which sits in the same spot but is a much smaller box. Additionally, I doubt most people could effectively conceal a handgun with an inch-thick block sticking out of the side; the trend is toward small, slim, and round-edged these days for a very good reason.
Maybe I'll look into smart guns again in a decade or so, that should be enough time for them to 1: actually reach market, and 2: implement some worthwhile features. Let's say you've got a smartwatch, like the Armatix gun. It's got electrodes on the back. Make my wrist tingle when I'm getting low, and itch outright when the magazine's empty. Hell, this is 2023. Google Glass is out, and we've already got pica tinny "action cams". Let's make a camera under the barrel feed video to my Glass. If you gave me Land Warrior on a handgun, I'd be inclined to overlook the new points of failure; the ability to fight from behind cover without exposing yourself to return fire is pretty revolutionary. Set it up so my smartphone dials 911, feeds the operator my Glass-eye view, my words, and speakerphone audio - odds are if I'm drawing a weapon on short notice, I want the police to show up, know exactly where I am, and who I've been shooting at.
If domestic law-enforcement drones end up legal, automatically task one to my location, and let the 911 operator work with me to tag the bad guy so I know if I'm pinned down, or I can get away safely. Some of this is also going to involve a smart holster, but Viridian has developed the prototype for that already.
The problem is right now, smartguns are all stick, no carrot. I get a low-capacity, small-calibre, weapon that has glowing TRON lines (maybe they should have put the indicator in the front sight? The thing that's supposed to be easy to see while you're shooting?) to give away my position, an unreliable safety mechanism that'll only let me get shot with my own gun once, and all this for the price of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". I could get a very nice used, 10-round
Seriously, right now there is no benefit to smartguns.
Throw statistics at it. We have T-tests for finding significance.