You can do it at close to room temps if you have a gas of atoms and you use lasers and evaporative cooling. There have been experiments done wher BECs were made on a chip.
Actually, when the neutron stars collide, there should be more radiation emitted by the pair as they get closer to each other. The reason is that the space around them is stretched and twisted as the two massive bodies collide. As the two bodies accelerate towards each other, their constituent parts (atoms, ions, neutrons, electrons) will be accelerated and will give off energy as a result. It's the same process as matter falling into a black hole.
Things should get very interesting if one or both of the neutron stars are rotating, and especially interesting if they revolve around each other (orbit each other). You might not be able to get more intense radiation levels unless you have black holes colliding and a lot of matter around to radiate energy away. Or unless you have a cosmic string interacting with matter; the shear stress on spacetime caused by the string should accelerate a LOT of different objects (atoms, planets, photons, etc.), and the string could be spotted by the gravitational lensing effect it would produce.
And one of the number one problems on spacecraft is thermal management. You have a hard time radiating all that extra heat away if you sit in direct sunlight all the time.;)
That white wall or window will do jack to reflect the energy back at you. Now, if there were a conductive surface back there, you'd be in trouble.
Glass has a hard time transmitting wavelengths shorter than blue light. Those x-rays won't reflect very easily off the glass or the white wall, and they'll actually penetrate into the material a bit which will decrease the chance of that particular photon getting back out. Visible light is transmitted very well, depending on the glass. And Infrared gets through for the most part. RF gets through unless your glass is metallic, or your white wall has conductive paint or sheetrock.
Definitely worry if the wall on the other side of your monitor is conductive. That'll likely bounce the radiation back at you.
The backside of a CRT is the most dangerous though. But you get more RF from the wiring in your house than if you were to stand more than 1 meter from the back of the CRT. And the CRT is MUCH more dangerous if you were to spill a liquid into the back of it... shorting out those electrical components gets very nasty. (Typically 50 kilovolts of charge in there, and a few amps of current switching back and forth for the electromagnets.)
Case in point: my former employer was a great place to work for me, but I just wasn't into doing some of the projects that they had me working on. So I started looking for another job, and it took about a year for me to get an offer.
I gave a notice to my bosses that I was looking at other options. This was two months prior to my current project end-date. I didn't hear anything for about 6 weeks, and I was putting the final drafts together for the project's final deliverables. I asked my direct boss (the company's technical manager), what the next project was. His reply was that the board decided that because I was looking at other options, that there woulnd't be a next project for me after my current one.
About the only reason I kept them in the loop was to be nice and make the transition smooth. But they screwed me over. I had a hard time getting unemployment, because I was basically terminated for lack of work. And for four months I had no money coming in, I got the job I was interested in, moved to a different state, and maxed out my credit cards.
From that point on, I vowed to never give more than two weeks notice. And if I had to because of the nature of my work, that I would do it only after having a job offer and it would be at MY convenience.
In my opinion, you owe this company nothing, and you can tell them to fsck off should they complain. There's no law that says you have to quit in a certain manner... at least not that I or anyone I know has ever heard of. And realize that you are only bound by that employer's contract with you until the moment that you quit (minus any clauses preventing you to work for a couple of years afterwards doing the same work... as is the case with many aerospace companies and the federal government).
Now, if you don't want to burn bridges with this company, you'll want to think about putting things in a diplomatic tone (no fsck offs). But if you've got several offers from various companies, I'd say that burning this bridge doesn't matter much in the long term.
Good luck, and remember to look out for yourself FIRST, then others.;)
Is it nuts when a virus can cause a LOT of damage?
Yes, rape, murder, and child sex abuse are nasty, vicious, horrendous crimes. And they cause a LOT of damage. Wouldn't meeting or exceeding a certain monetary threshold mean that a lesser crime should be a felony?
I mean, that's how I learned to program. Use the best algorithms for what data you are working on, and do little optimizations as you go. I did embedded systems work for a few years, and many years of modelling and simulation. In either case, you try to use the best algorithms first, then do little tweaks as you encounter spots to use them, while maintaining your documentation.
Then the He could go around resurrecting people while wearing tight-fitting leather, spandex, and rubber.
Of course, he'd have a cool personality that fits into the X-MEN. And he could have a catch phrase, "Behold, My glory!"
They scrapped that thinking about 8 years ago. Now, it's whatever you can do to get the job done. C and C++ are well-liked for a lot of things.
Also, DoD has mandated that open source options be considered as much as possible for everything that is done. Ada is pretty much dead unless you come across some OLD hardware. It's good that they (DoD) finally realized it was stupid to stick with one language as much as possible. They also opened up almost everything to private contractors, and told them that they can use what they like and do things how they like, but they have to produce a product that works. Where I work, they're going to let several hundred military folks go (PCS'ing for the most part, though some specialties aren't needed anymore...), and the only civilians being brought on are replacing the old-farts-that-should-have-retired-ages-ago into retirement. It sucks in a way, and it's weird seeing private security guards at the base gates, along with MPs/SFs.
You also forget that it's not only the power output in the utility of a laser as a weapon, but the beam area. 1mW incident on a square mm is the same irradiance as a 1kW laser with an irradiance area of 1 meter squared. In both cases, you are putting 1kW of energy into an area the size of a square meter. (Assume that the angle of incidence is zero so there are no losses due to reflection... cos(0) = 1. In other words, a perfect hit.)
I guarantee that that 1 mW laser on that 1 mm squared of retina is still deadly to those cones and rods in your eye.
And since no one asked, I *do* work with weaponized laser systems.
The MTHEL is a 10KW Neodymium doped laser system
As for MTHEL, it's a Dueterium-Flouride laser. It has multiple shot capabilities as long as it's supplied with enough chemical fuel. Read up on it:
MTHEL Article
As for attenuation, that's totally dependent on the laser wavelength and the medium it travels through. This has a good diagram of attenuation curves:
Free Space Optics presentation
And yes, I *do* understand the attenuation problem. But a guy with a pointer is just as dangerous to a pilot's eyes as a guy with a MW class anti-missile laser. The pilot will still get his eyes irradiated, and he'll still be blinded. A pilot trying to land blindfolded is a rediculous idea, yet that's what would happen should the flight crew lose their eyesight if only for a few moments. Landing an aircraft is tricky, even if you are flying by instrument and have your glideslope outlined for you by your landing autopilot.
If you've ever worked around lasers, you don't have to point the beam directly into an eye to get damage. There's this thing called scattering, and there is this other thing called reflection. Both are possible in an airplane cockpit.
You don't have to hold the beam on the cockpit window and aim for the pilots' eyes. You just need to strafe it across the window a few times. The window will reflect some of the light, trap some of the light and scatter it in the glass, and transmit some of the light. All you need is some transmitted light to bounce around in the cockpit and you've at least temporarily blinded the pilots.
And finally, since your statements in your post betray the fact that you DO NOT work around lasers, and have no idea of how dangerous they are to human eyes, your arguments are bullshit. As for a laser system that can down targets (aircraft and missiles) look at MTHEL, the Army's high energy DF laser in New Mexico. That one HAS downed incoming missiles and can down aircraft.
I know of one person where I work that was blinded by a targeting laser that is used to align another laser. This laser was akin to a HE-Ne laser that you can buy from radio shack for 10 bucks. The guy suffered permanent retinal damage, and this is from a scattered beam that got out of it's containment tube and bounced off a wrench. And the guy wasn't wearing his eye protection, so he's also a dumbass, but his exposure was on the order of a millisecond of scattered laser light.
It's not double-speak, it's how the media reports what the government says.
The problem is, the government has it's own test requirements that they are testing for. If the thing accelerates at such and such g; if the engines can be throttled to nominal, maximum, and nominal; if the stages separate without problems; etc. Those are the test requirement kind of things that the government is looking at. The fact that a payload gets to whatever orbit is a plus.
It's the media that reports things in a half-assed or ass-backwards manner.
The other thing is that Boeing is notorious for claiming success because something got off the ground, or it passed an inspection, or whatever. They're also notorious for trying to get around their contract-specified requirements by doing one test that was successful and treating the test item as if it runs flawlessly. And they're notorious for not fulfilling their contract requirements unless you are sitting there breathing down their neck telling them that their system doesn't satisfy the specs. And then they'll try and go back and re-spec the item.
^^^^^This bit is why programs have cost and schedule overruns. A company promises too much, and when they can't deliver, they ask for more money or more time. Or they make an excuse for why something can't be done and ask for the specs to be rewritten. I deal with this crap every day, and it's almost a miracle that things like the F22 or B2 ever get into the air. And then when things actually go right, Boeing acts like it was their idea all along.
I'm not bitter or anything, I just think they're stupid for spending so much time and money on things that are impossible, or un-doable at this time.
I've had my Koolance system for about four years. The ONLY problem I ever had was when I dropped my computer at my parent's house on their hardwood floor in 2002. I had just moved back home after finishing my MS degree, and was trying to move quick. I ended up breaking the reservior and water leaked out.
The absolute best part was talking with the Koolance repair folks. They told me to take the reservoir to a local computer parts store, and I got a new reservior, 1 meter of tubing, several clamps, and a bottle of additive, all for no cost other than the gas it took to drive about 20 miles to the particular store (about 1.25 back then in my car).
Since I installed the new reservior, and haven't dropped the thing, I've had absolutely ZERO problems. I now live in the Mojave desert in CA, and this summer had ZERO problems with dissipating heat when my AC failed. It was 110 F in my computer room, and my Koolance case was keeping my CPU at a relatively frosty 35 C. I was very impressed. It normally runs about 20 C.
It's extremely quiet, even on the highest fan setting, and the air blowing through the heating/ac ducts in my house are much louder.
I've also got to say that installation was a breeze. You just read the directions.;)
Maybe it was because I worked on cars for several years that I had a knack for using tools...
I'm not meaning to sound like a propaganda machine, but my experience was truly, purely positive. I would definitely go the Koolance route in the future. (BTW, I have the PC2C case. It has front USB and speaker/mic ports, and enough space for drives for my needs.)
I will admit that mine does sound a bit louder than a regular case because I added an extra 120 mm fan on the side to help keep my RAM cool. I also put filters on the intake side of EVERY fan, which I clean out about once a month (hey, it's dusty out here, even in winter). And I oriented the fans so that I have positive differential pressure inside the case (higher pressure inside than out). That helps keep the dust bunnies from sneaking in. And about every 4 months or so, I'll have to add water.
Maximum Exposure is a fun show to watch too. They point out how utterly stupid people are, how awesome nature is, and they've got the relation that stupidity is proportional to the size of one's mullet.
All of the episodes are like the Real TV thing: home video/news video/police video/etc. Except Maximum Exposure adds commentary to make what you are watching more entertaining than Real TV (which is too boring to even accidentally land on while flipping channels).
and he's going to a 4 year school to pursue a degree in engineering.
He did this in part because his older brother (me) is a rocket scientist and has that "older brother influence", and because of his robotics class in high school.
I took the same class when I was in highschool (about 10 years ago... same teacher too), and it only further cemented the fact that I wanted to get into engineering.
A robotics competition would be good, especially if you show them some videos of past competitions or the MIT ones. Or if you were to show them pictures/video of the mars rovers and tell them that they could make "one of those".
The key is to make the project challenging, yet simple enough that highschool students can do it. In other words, when you're going over AI techniques and you are talking about minimizing functions, A* algorithms and whatnot, remember that a lot of those involve concepts or techniques that could be above their heads.
Yes there is. What you are describing is done where I work. I am not quite sure how it is done.
I know that there are login scripts that are run when I log in. I also know that there are some scripts that are run from a central server after I log in. All of the machines are behind proxies that block anything beyond a strict G rating (I assume slashdot gets by because the IT folks look at it too). And most of the users have no admin privelidges where I am at, but in other buildings, the users do have admin priveledges.
The way we install things like new programs, updates, or whatever, is that we go to a specific shared directory and get the program's install package. Then we run the installer, and we get access to the program just fine. For things not in the shared directory, we have to ask IT to do a remote install. I did notice that the programs in the install directory are the same ones that I can pull at home; they're the same ones that come from that program's company website.
None of those programs in that shared directory ask for admin priveledges when they are installed.
I am writing this from a Win2k machine, and several other machines in my cubicle have XP. We do use *nix machines, but only for heavy duty or mission-critical applications.
You forgot about the pitched battle for Stalingrad that lasted several months, with a moving front, that killed several tens of millions of russians. (I think the number was 25 million.)
I would also argue that the use of weapons that kill or disable your adversary as quickly as possible, thus shortening the war and the lowering the loss of life, would mostly eliminate the moving front.
And bend over backwards while some bastard with a thing against the US tries to ram his sandpaper condom covered wee wee up the US' ass?
I think the US gives too much for that kind of insult.
And remember that just because some convention banned weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean that they won't be produced (or used) in the future. Just look at Israel, India, Pakistan, they all have nuclear weapons, and they all stole the designs from the US (though Pakistan was indirect by stealing from India what they stole from us).
If you think that some piece of paper is going to stop a person that doesn't give a crap about that piece of paper, then you kind of deserve to have those foreign tanks rolling down mainstreet of your town.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do it at close to room temps if you have a gas of atoms and you use lasers and evaporative cooling. There have been experiments done wher BECs were made on a chip.
Actually, when the neutron stars collide, there should be more radiation emitted by the pair as they get closer to each other. The reason is that the space around them is stretched and twisted as the two massive bodies collide. As the two bodies accelerate towards each other, their constituent parts (atoms, ions, neutrons, electrons) will be accelerated and will give off energy as a result. It's the same process as matter falling into a black hole.
Things should get very interesting if one or both of the neutron stars are rotating, and especially interesting if they revolve around each other (orbit each other). You might not be able to get more intense radiation levels unless you have black holes colliding and a lot of matter around to radiate energy away. Or unless you have a cosmic string interacting with matter; the shear stress on spacetime caused by the string should accelerate a LOT of different objects (atoms, planets, photons, etc.), and the string could be spotted by the gravitational lensing effect it would produce.
Okay...
;)
And one of the number one problems on spacecraft is thermal management. You have a hard time radiating all that extra heat away if you sit in direct sunlight all the time.
Yeah. They're talking about billions of dollars. Entire programs are being scaled back. :(
because of the war.
And there's a push, it seems, from the highest levels to really trim everything.
That white wall or window will do jack to reflect the energy back at you. Now, if there were a conductive surface back there, you'd be in trouble.
Glass has a hard time transmitting wavelengths shorter than blue light. Those x-rays won't reflect very easily off the glass or the white wall, and they'll actually penetrate into the material a bit which will decrease the chance of that particular photon getting back out. Visible light is transmitted very well, depending on the glass. And Infrared gets through for the most part. RF gets through unless your glass is metallic, or your white wall has conductive paint or sheetrock.
Definitely worry if the wall on the other side of your monitor is conductive. That'll likely bounce the radiation back at you.
The backside of a CRT is the most dangerous though. But you get more RF from the wiring in your house than if you were to stand more than 1 meter from the back of the CRT. And the CRT is MUCH more dangerous if you were to spill a liquid into the back of it... shorting out those electrical components gets very nasty. (Typically 50 kilovolts of charge in there, and a few amps of current switching back and forth for the electromagnets.)
I tried Mono for a month but wasn't really pleased with the results. Needless to say, I really dislike herpes virii now. :-/
As opposed to really liking them before?
of you.
;)
Case in point: my former employer was a great place to work for me, but I just wasn't into doing some of the projects that they had me working on. So I started looking for another job, and it took about a year for me to get an offer.
I gave a notice to my bosses that I was looking at other options. This was two months prior to my current project end-date. I didn't hear anything for about 6 weeks, and I was putting the final drafts together for the project's final deliverables. I asked my direct boss (the company's technical manager), what the next project was. His reply was that the board decided that because I was looking at other options, that there woulnd't be a next project for me after my current one.
About the only reason I kept them in the loop was to be nice and make the transition smooth. But they screwed me over. I had a hard time getting unemployment, because I was basically terminated for lack of work. And for four months I had no money coming in, I got the job I was interested in, moved to a different state, and maxed out my credit cards.
From that point on, I vowed to never give more than two weeks notice. And if I had to because of the nature of my work, that I would do it only after having a job offer and it would be at MY convenience.
In my opinion, you owe this company nothing, and you can tell them to fsck off should they complain. There's no law that says you have to quit in a certain manner... at least not that I or anyone I know has ever heard of. And realize that you are only bound by that employer's contract with you until the moment that you quit (minus any clauses preventing you to work for a couple of years afterwards doing the same work... as is the case with many aerospace companies and the federal government).
Now, if you don't want to burn bridges with this company, you'll want to think about putting things in a diplomatic tone (no fsck offs). But if you've got several offers from various companies, I'd say that burning this bridge doesn't matter much in the long term.
Good luck, and remember to look out for yourself FIRST, then others.
Is it nuts when a virus can cause a LOT of damage?
Yes, rape, murder, and child sex abuse are nasty, vicious, horrendous crimes. And they cause a LOT of damage. Wouldn't meeting or exceeding a certain monetary threshold mean that a lesser crime should be a felony?
Maybe... but at least the vulnerability no longer exists if you got the latest update, which has been out for a couple of weeks now...
from TFA:
If you have downloaded the Firefox 1.0.1 update, you have nothing to worry about.
Isn't that the first thing you do?
I mean, that's how I learned to program. Use the best algorithms for what data you are working on, and do little optimizations as you go. I did embedded systems work for a few years, and many years of modelling and simulation. In either case, you try to use the best algorithms first, then do little tweaks as you encounter spots to use them, while maintaining your documentation.
BTW I can't help but parallel this story to Jesus's life, crucifixion, and resurrection. I for one, welcome our new microbe lord.
That's blasphemy. God will strike you down for worshipping a false god.
Sounds good.
Then the He could go around resurrecting people while wearing tight-fitting leather, spandex, and rubber.
Of course, he'd have a cool personality that fits into the X-MEN. And he could have a catch phrase, "Behold, My glory!"
They scrapped that thinking about 8 years ago. Now, it's whatever you can do to get the job done. C and C++ are well-liked for a lot of things.
Also, DoD has mandated that open source options be considered as much as possible for everything that is done. Ada is pretty much dead unless you come across some OLD hardware. It's good that they (DoD) finally realized it was stupid to stick with one language as much as possible. They also opened up almost everything to private contractors, and told them that they can use what they like and do things how they like, but they have to produce a product that works. Where I work, they're going to let several hundred military folks go (PCS'ing for the most part, though some specialties aren't needed anymore...), and the only civilians being brought on are replacing the old-farts-that-should-have-retired-ages-ago into retirement. It sucks in a way, and it's weird seeing private security guards at the base gates, along with MPs/SFs.
You also forget that it's not only the power output in the utility of a laser as a weapon, but the beam area. 1mW incident on a square mm is the same irradiance as a 1kW laser with an irradiance area of 1 meter squared. In both cases, you are putting 1kW of energy into an area the size of a square meter. (Assume that the angle of incidence is zero so there are no losses due to reflection... cos(0) = 1. In other words, a perfect hit.)
I guarantee that that 1 mW laser on that 1 mm squared of retina is still deadly to those cones and rods in your eye.
Exactly.
And since no one asked, I *do* work with weaponized laser systems.
The MTHEL is a 10KW Neodymium doped laser system
As for MTHEL, it's a Dueterium-Flouride laser. It has multiple shot capabilities as long as it's supplied with enough chemical fuel. Read up on it:
MTHEL Article
As for attenuation, that's totally dependent on the laser wavelength and the medium it travels through. This has a good diagram of attenuation curves:
Free Space Optics presentation
And yes, I *do* understand the attenuation problem. But a guy with a pointer is just as dangerous to a pilot's eyes as a guy with a MW class anti-missile laser. The pilot will still get his eyes irradiated, and he'll still be blinded. A pilot trying to land blindfolded is a rediculous idea, yet that's what would happen should the flight crew lose their eyesight if only for a few moments. Landing an aircraft is tricky, even if you are flying by instrument and have your glideslope outlined for you by your landing autopilot.
You are an idiot.
If you've ever worked around lasers, you don't have to point the beam directly into an eye to get damage. There's this thing called scattering, and there is this other thing called reflection. Both are possible in an airplane cockpit.
You don't have to hold the beam on the cockpit window and aim for the pilots' eyes. You just need to strafe it across the window a few times. The window will reflect some of the light, trap some of the light and scatter it in the glass, and transmit some of the light. All you need is some transmitted light to bounce around in the cockpit and you've at least temporarily blinded the pilots.
And finally, since your statements in your post betray the fact that you DO NOT work around lasers, and have no idea of how dangerous they are to human eyes, your arguments are bullshit. As for a laser system that can down targets (aircraft and missiles) look at MTHEL, the Army's high energy DF laser in New Mexico. That one HAS downed incoming missiles and can down aircraft.
I know of one person where I work that was blinded by a targeting laser that is used to align another laser. This laser was akin to a HE-Ne laser that you can buy from radio shack for 10 bucks. The guy suffered permanent retinal damage, and this is from a scattered beam that got out of it's containment tube and bounced off a wrench. And the guy wasn't wearing his eye protection, so he's also a dumbass, but his exposure was on the order of a millisecond of scattered laser light.
It's not double-speak, it's how the media reports what the government says.
The problem is, the government has it's own test requirements that they are testing for. If the thing accelerates at such and such g; if the engines can be throttled to nominal, maximum, and nominal; if the stages separate without problems; etc. Those are the test requirement kind of things that the government is looking at. The fact that a payload gets to whatever orbit is a plus.
It's the media that reports things in a half-assed or ass-backwards manner.
The other thing is that Boeing is notorious for claiming success because something got off the ground, or it passed an inspection, or whatever. They're also notorious for trying to get around their contract-specified requirements by doing one test that was successful and treating the test item as if it runs flawlessly. And they're notorious for not fulfilling their contract requirements unless you are sitting there breathing down their neck telling them that their system doesn't satisfy the specs. And then they'll try and go back and re-spec the item.
^^^^^This bit is why programs have cost and schedule overruns. A company promises too much, and when they can't deliver, they ask for more money or more time. Or they make an excuse for why something can't be done and ask for the specs to be rewritten. I deal with this crap every day, and it's almost a miracle that things like the F22 or B2 ever get into the air. And then when things actually go right, Boeing acts like it was their idea all along.
I'm not bitter or anything, I just think they're stupid for spending so much time and money on things that are impossible, or un-doable at this time.
I've had my Koolance system for about four years. The ONLY problem I ever had was when I dropped my computer at my parent's house on their hardwood floor in 2002. I had just moved back home after finishing my MS degree, and was trying to move quick. I ended up breaking the reservior and water leaked out.
;)
The absolute best part was talking with the Koolance repair folks. They told me to take the reservoir to a local computer parts store, and I got a new reservior, 1 meter of tubing, several clamps, and a bottle of additive, all for no cost other than the gas it took to drive about 20 miles to the particular store (about 1.25 back then in my car).
Since I installed the new reservior, and haven't dropped the thing, I've had absolutely ZERO problems. I now live in the Mojave desert in CA, and this summer had ZERO problems with dissipating heat when my AC failed. It was 110 F in my computer room, and my Koolance case was keeping my CPU at a relatively frosty 35 C. I was very impressed. It normally runs about 20 C.
It's extremely quiet, even on the highest fan setting, and the air blowing through the heating/ac ducts in my house are much louder.
I've also got to say that installation was a breeze. You just read the directions.
Maybe it was because I worked on cars for several years that I had a knack for using tools...
I'm not meaning to sound like a propaganda machine, but my experience was truly, purely positive. I would definitely go the Koolance route in the future. (BTW, I have the PC2C case. It has front USB and speaker/mic ports, and enough space for drives for my needs.)
I will admit that mine does sound a bit louder than a regular case because I added an extra 120 mm fan on the side to help keep my RAM cool. I also put filters on the intake side of EVERY fan, which I clean out about once a month (hey, it's dusty out here, even in winter). And I oriented the fans so that I have positive differential pressure inside the case (higher pressure inside than out). That helps keep the dust bunnies from sneaking in. And about every 4 months or so, I'll have to add water.
I used to. It's a great place to hit on girls. =)
(Hey, it's better than the DMV.)
Maximum Exposure is a fun show to watch too. They point out how utterly stupid people are, how awesome nature is, and they've got the relation that stupidity is proportional to the size of one's mullet.
All of the episodes are like the Real TV thing: home video/news video/police video/etc. Except Maximum Exposure adds commentary to make what you are watching more entertaining than Real TV (which is too boring to even accidentally land on while flipping channels).
and he's going to a 4 year school to pursue a degree in engineering.
He did this in part because his older brother (me) is a rocket scientist and has that "older brother influence", and because of his robotics class in high school.
I took the same class when I was in highschool (about 10 years ago... same teacher too), and it only further cemented the fact that I wanted to get into engineering.
A robotics competition would be good, especially if you show them some videos of past competitions or the MIT ones. Or if you were to show them pictures/video of the mars rovers and tell them that they could make "one of those".
The key is to make the project challenging, yet simple enough that highschool students can do it. In other words, when you're going over AI techniques and you are talking about minimizing functions, A* algorithms and whatnot, remember that a lot of those involve concepts or techniques that could be above their heads.
Yes there is. What you are describing is done where I work. I am not quite sure how it is done.
I know that there are login scripts that are run when I log in. I also know that there are some scripts that are run from a central server after I log in. All of the machines are behind proxies that block anything beyond a strict G rating (I assume slashdot gets by because the IT folks look at it too). And most of the users have no admin privelidges where I am at, but in other buildings, the users do have admin priveledges.
The way we install things like new programs, updates, or whatever, is that we go to a specific shared directory and get the program's install package. Then we run the installer, and we get access to the program just fine. For things not in the shared directory, we have to ask IT to do a remote install. I did notice that the programs in the install directory are the same ones that I can pull at home; they're the same ones that come from that program's company website.
None of those programs in that shared directory ask for admin priveledges when they are installed.
I am writing this from a Win2k machine, and several other machines in my cubicle have XP. We do use *nix machines, but only for heavy duty or mission-critical applications.
You forgot about the pitched battle for Stalingrad that lasted several months, with a moving front, that killed several tens of millions of russians. (I think the number was 25 million.)
I would also argue that the use of weapons that kill or disable your adversary as quickly as possible, thus shortening the war and the lowering the loss of life, would mostly eliminate the moving front.
And bend over backwards while some bastard with a thing against the US tries to ram his sandpaper condom covered wee wee up the US' ass?
I think the US gives too much for that kind of insult.
And remember that just because some convention banned weapons of mass destruction doesn't mean that they won't be produced (or used) in the future. Just look at Israel, India, Pakistan, they all have nuclear weapons, and they all stole the designs from the US (though Pakistan was indirect by stealing from India what they stole from us).
If you think that some piece of paper is going to stop a person that doesn't give a crap about that piece of paper, then you kind of deserve to have those foreign tanks rolling down mainstreet of your town.