All you really need here is dense mass. The problem is getting that dense mass into space, moreso than it is propelling the mass to mars once it is in space.
If we do go ahead with the administration's somewhat-ridiculous moon base idea, we could just launch some carved lunar rock shields -- perhaps encased in a polymer to prevent micrometeor-induced fractures. Throw those off the surface of the moon for much less energy and attach them to the mars craft at Lagrange or in orbit. Get a slow but steady start helped by some gravity slingshotting and you're on your way to mars.
I'm sure there are slashdotters with a stronger grip on rocket science than I have (which is basically limited to F=ma). Is this feasible? Or would it make more sense to just pay for firing lead/water into space from earth?
QUICK! NO TIME FOR STORY SUBMISSION PROCEDURES!
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: -1, Troll
I have it on good authority that SCO omitted a comma on p 172 of their original brief (section: "Disclosure of SCO tipping policies / Dinner / Delivery / Asian Cuisine / Thai").
Preliminary analysis suggests that this means SCO is stupid, hates America and babies and will obviously be laughed out of court any day now, and their executive board should and most likely will be forced into indentured servitude, and that Linus' eyes are *such* a piercing steel blue, the observation of which it is not at all homoerotic to make. Sigh...
Look for an exhaustive analysis on groklaw tomorrow. In the meantime I suggest shutting down slashdot's other sections to accomodate the expected server load.
</sarcasm>
Now, repeat after me: I will not post more than one SCO story per day on the main section.
and it's causing problems. Digital technology has created the first economy ever where scarcity is irrelevant. Information can be copied limitlessly with a cost that approaches zero.
How do you reconcile this with the rest of the scarcity-based economy? When the producers of replicable content still need limited resources, problems emerge and the only solution is inelegant legislation that is ultimately unenforceable.
I think we can just now see the end of profit on the horizon. It will probably not arrive in our lifetimes. Still, technology does not seem to be opening any more markets -- it's making it easier for us to spend less money. Low-tech industries will probably prosper as material goods value relative to IP increases.
Perhaps the arrival of nanotech and free energy could rebalance this. I think we may see a reemergence of the middle class in the meantime, as manufacturing becomes much more valuable.
I certainly don't feel that modern science could work without information sharing, or that genes should be able to be privately owned. But I think you are right when you say that the prudent course is to be "more worried about unqualified people getting this information".
Here's the thing: OSS lets anybody get at the guts of the thing. I don't think this is a good paradigm for the dissemination of potentially deadly information. I'd advocate letting anyone with vetted academic credentials at the information, the same way that potentially dangerous pathogens are distributed for research purposes. But opening up a sourceforge project and sending the CVS password to the mailing list is not going to cut it when the stakes are this high.
I don't think a authorization procedure applied to potentially deadly biotech information would be a significant hindrance to personal liberties or scientific advancement. The educational barrier to safe, useful contribution to these endeavors remains considerably higher than that of OSS.
I suspect the most immediately dangerous pieces of information will be the sequences genomes of pathogens. Perhaps these could be distributed on a per-lab basis -- is there enough junk DNA in a virus to watermark it?
I don't know how we're going to restrict the spread of advanced biotech knowledge, but I wish I did. Yeah, information wants to be free -- I agree, until that information can kill people. In fifteen years an undergrab microbio degree will be enough to create a plague. The methods won't require particularly exotic reagents and the equipment won't be hard to get.
This is not equivalent to the debate over publishing exploit source. There is no guarantee that biological countermeasures can be created to counteract bio-malware, so increasing the pool of exploit-related knowledge is not to our benefit. Besides which, people will die while we wait for the equivalent of patches to be submitted.
Is it possible to amend the GPL to prohibit its use for distributing potentially dangerous biological information -- something like the ebola genome? Perhaps a review board could be established for biological information that is to be distributed under the GPL. I realize this does nothing to stop the information's spread under a different scheme, but at least it might discourage the foolish from cross-applying OSS principles to arenas where they most decidedly do NOT belong.
why is this an issue worthy of consideration? How is it that I know people who can speak more passionately on the subject of cola choice than they can on politics, abortion or religion?
I don't care for cottage cheese. I think I'd have a much harder time getting into an argument over its merits than I would over Coke v. Pepsi, don't you?
Come to think of it, I don't like Heineken either, but I bet I could get into some arguments with people over that -- not as many as over colas, though. It'd be interesting to compare how easily a person can be drawn into debating a product vs. that product's advertising budget.
I realize this undercuts my previous point re: advertising's effectiveness waning as it saturates a given medium. But there are of course certain exceptions -- pervasive campaigns that make us use things we otherwise wouldn't, or, perhaps more insidiously, care about things we have little reason to care about.
Perhaps these products' ad campaigns are acting on us in a way I can't put my finger on. But it seems clear they have got a firm hold of our brains.
Let's face it: we're saturated. A 15 second spot saying "Widget X is 15% better than crappy old Widget Y" is unlikely to work the way it may once have, given that there is an equal and opposite amount of Widget Y propaganda out there. Admittedly, there are exceptions -- take McDonald's and Coca Cola, for instance. In fact, any time I mention Coca Cola's market dominance my 20something peers immediately jump into a defense of its superior taste. Hint to them: you are drones.
Commercials are increasingly amusing, unusual or abstract. It's downhill from here. Sure, IBM's horrible, *horrible* Linux ads may be better today than a vanilla ad saying "Linux is good and here's why". But a vanilla ad in 1985 saying "Linux is good and here's why" would have been immensely more effective.
Advertising must be novel to be effective. Unfortunately this means it always needs to be placed in new places, which means it will be ever-more intrusive on our daily lives. The death of the 30 second TV spot is just a tiny upside to the horrific travesty of the commodification of our private lives.
As others have mentioned, this is just logic, not the transmitter itself. But even if they do roll out integrated wifi, it'll never be "on die" with the processor. It'll most likely be a motherboard component. If it ever did come as part of the same component as the processor, you can bet there would be a wall of the a faraday cage between the xmitter and the processor.
you probably *could* have swapped in an ide controller board and just turned off the faulty integrated controller in the bios.
I agree that we should not sacrifice modularity for all-in-one disposability, but for all the applications you list (IDE, NIC, video) you can put in a modular card and override the integrated stuff. Personally, I think ubiquitous integrated mobo NICs are one of the handiest hardware improvements of the last five years.
What site is most universally beloved by the non-technical public? I'd say it's google: people know it works and see it as an altruistic enterprise since it doesn't make its money off of them. If you need evidence, look no further than its verbed formulation: "to google" is now synonymous with "to search" for a lot of people.
If Google gets attacked, people will notice. Hopefully, they'll start associating Linux with it as a result. If Linux can absorb even a little bit of Google's golden-boy glow it'll go a long way to creating a realistic entry point for consumer desktop Linux.
I know I've read articles suggesting that Cartoon Network is looking into starting a separate channel. I don't think it's a good idea.
An AS-only channel would just be another MTV2. It'd be cool for a while before getting much worse as executives realized its audience can only be expanded so far. Oh, and I wouldn't get it from my cable provider.
If you haven't noticed, CN airs a lot of crap. Sure, the kids-home-from-school to stoned-college-students-call-it-a-night hours have mostly good stuff. If you've perused their daytime offerings for purposes of TiVoing, you'll see that it's pretty bad.
Also, while I admire the fact that they feel they should offer original programming, let's face it: Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed Edd & Eddy, Grim & Evil, the Time whatever show... all are pretty weak. I have a soft spot for Dexter's Lab, and while I don't really like Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls, I can understand why some folks do. But a lot of their original series are not good. They could cut them and spend the freed resources to expand AS.
Home Movies is the reason I love adult swim (well, Futurama is pretty great too). But I thought new episodes were supposed to be here by now -- does anyone know what's going on w/ this? The last ep I saw was "Castaway". The site lists a season's worth of episodes past that, but I haven't seen any.
I use the same $20 tupperware bins everyone else here seems to (although mine features the snazzy addition of Plastic Castors That Don't Work Very Well technology). It helps, I guess.
But what really helps is keeping it in the laundry room, next to the server, in the ugliest part of the house. There are boxes, dead power supplies and a couple hundred Microcenter (east coast for "Fry's") bags wadded up and scattered about it.
The rest of the house is immaculate. Of course, having a roommate with just-below-worrisome OCD-style cleaning habits helps quite a bit (he's been known to get drunk and clean my other roommate's room without telling him). But we have an unspoken compact about the server area, and everything's fine so far -- although he did just buy a worryingly large kitchen knife set.
Anyway, that's my advice. We don't fight the disorder -- in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics. But we keep it in one place, and it makes it tolerable.
Yes, Hunt For Red October has taught us all that you've got to be vewy vewy quiet when you're on a sub, lest your noise be picked up by the other guy's passive sonar and used to find your position.
But that's for sub-to-sub situations, when both guys want to hide their location. If instead of a submarine you're manning, say, Miami, then your best efforts to hide your location are probably still going to fall short. So you can use active sonar to find these things. And then blow them up with torpedoes or depth charges.
Which shouldn't be too hard, given that the ferrari of the class moves at 5 mph. And there's not even any guarantee that these things can work in shallow water. Who even knows what "shallow" is in this case? I wouldn't be surprised if their effectiveness is crippled as soon as they run into a continental shelf -- keeping them quite a good ways off-shore. It seems logical to assume that their efficiency drops off the more up-and-down cycles they have to employ, and the smaller the surface/seabed pressure differential is.
Finally, delivering nukes by sea is not a good way to get the most value from your military-industrial dollar. My understanding is that for maximum wrath-of-god effect, you'd want to blow a nuclear weapon up in the atmosphere over your target -- hence MIRV's horrible destructiveness. Ground level is not where you want to detonate. And certainly not at sub-ground level, in the middle of a gigantic heat-and-radiation absorber.
Admittedly, you are not going to save your city by keeping that nuke covered with 10 feet of water. But it's just one more strike against this as a weapon-delivery system. (Bonus Simpsons paraphrase: "Three month ocean voyage? But I'm mad now!"). A good-old fashioned cargo container would be easier to obtain, easier to retrieve, and only somewhat easier for the feds to detect.
If I'm completely wrong here, someone please correct me, but the only reason for going to 64 bit is to escape the limitations on addressable memory imposed by 32 bits. Until embedded devices come bundled with more than 4GB of RAM, there will be zero reason to use a 64 bit chip.
Or am I wrong? Someone help me out here. I see an awful lot of coverage of 64 bit processors on slashdot and other consumer/overclocking sites given the fact that I know *no one* who's got 4 gigs of ram in their box.
These things are applicable for huge servers, industrial 3d rendering and video editing. But only the most advanced applications of each need more than 4GB of memory. I just don't understand this at all -- when you get to needing this amount of memory, odds are you'll be out of the prosumer space anyway (eg, making a feature film), and can drop money on one of the existing 64 bit processor options.
Why is a 64 bit entry by a consumer chipmaker such a big deal? Sure, making cutting edge tech affordable is nice, but the 4GB barrier is not what's keeping the average Joe from making Jurassic Park.
Basically, I'd argue that the number of flops available to the average user is a bigger barrier to him or her attempting these huge applications
than the amount of addressable memory is. Until AMD starts selling a rendering farm for $400, 64 bits will make very little difference for the people getting most excited about this stuff.
Although I will say that for the average university lab working with huge datasets, this could be a real boon.
In recent years Brazil has become the home to a lot of crackers (I believe there was a slashdot article on this recently as well). Presumably moving the government's preferred software solutions will also influence Brazil's populace, through compatibility requirements and civil workers becoming familiar with OSS, then taking that knowledge home.
If Brazil remains a locus of "grayhat" activity, could this mean more resources will be put toward finding Linux exploits? Certainly on the whole Linux is more secure than Microsoft's offerings, but I imagine most would agree that its small userbase has played a part in limiting the number of exploits uncovered.
If you're a slashdotter without an engineering degree (like myself), I can't recommend JR Pierce's book on Information Theory highly enough. Very accessible, well written, and a quick read.
Car racing is not a demonstration of physical prowess. Yes, I realize there is a lot of individual skill involved, and that it is physically taxing. But I doubt that the physical conditioning of winning drivers is reliably better than that of losing drivers. You can argue that skill is what people want to see, but I think physical feats speak to something basic in us. Otherwise I may as well be watching some "cyberathletes" frag each other -- it might be an entertaining exhibition, but it is not a sport.
There is less opportunity for specialization in individual sports like car racing, and hence, fewer opportunities for transcendent performance. I'm sure some drivers are better at taking the inside lane, others can trade paint more roughly, but I doubt any one of those skills will win someone a race. I can watch the Pistons' Ben Wallace dominate defensively or marvel at Keyshawn Johnson's showboat catch last week. These guys can be role players pushing the limits of what's possible in their sports. In NASCAR I suspect a broad range of above-average skills is what wins races.
There is too much emphasis on hardware. I know that the top racers all have virtually identical hardware, but surely you'll admit that teams with less financial backing have an inherent disadvantage, and that many races are lost before the car leaves the garage. I realize baseball suffers from the same money = wins problem. But then, I don't care for baseball either. The furor that can erupt over a spoiler being a couple of millimeters higher than regulation is about as interesting to me as reading posts on which processor is more overclockable -- which is to say not at all.
There is a cap placed on what is possible. For safety reasons there are hardware limits imposed. Perhaps football will have to introduce something like this someday, but for now the fact remains that today's football players are the best in history. Same goes for today's average baseball player. Basketball is a poorer example, but the physical capabilities of those athletes certainly have expanded. In racing, technological caps ensure that drivers can only do so much.
Which brings us to the most important point: the stakes are too high. Okay, there may be more dangerous sports (although I would like to see the statistics) -- skydiving and rock-climbing come to mind, I guess, although I wouldn't call them sports really. Boxing probably wreaks more damage on its participants (I'm no fan of boxing, either). At least these are in some way poetic, pitting man against man, or against nature, and stripping the contest to its bare essentials. Testing what humans can do, and who can do it better.
Racing is loud, long, repetitive and artificial. It's techno-fetishization with a high potential for death. It's about as ugly a sport as I could possibly imagine -- one carried out by screaming, polluting machines on strips of blacktop, and where the highlight reels are filled by brushes with unnecessary death. It's horrifying.
Most of these articles are from 6 months ago, the last time MS released information on how its Xbox division was doing. But I would be very surprised if these unspecified manufacturing process improvements have made up for the estimated $100 per console hit MS was taking in May.
Look, there's no reason to resort to ad-hominem attacks. The Xbox is losing money. MS is buying a share of the gaming market. That's not an indictment of the product, or even the business plan. But it's a fact.
ok -- maybe we agree. I can't tell. I realize that development is done with higher-resolution art. That's then downsampled for production, though -- the stuff that goes on the GDROM (or whatever nintendo calls it) is probably at the quality level the production system is going to want, so that the overhead associated with the downsampling doesn't have to be done every time the resources are used.
Yes, Nintendo could release a more powerful console, but users' discs don't have the data to take advantage of it. The developers do, no doubt -- but they'd have to rerelease the games in a higher-capacity format with the hi-res art. This is not a completely ludicrous idea ("Gold Edition" or similar marketing BS), but it'd be a very niche product. I suspect it'd flop, and I think Nintendo realizes this (esp. after the success they've enjoyed recently by making their product cheaper).
why would you assume this? when you have fixed hardware to support it makes no sense to put the data in anything but a ready-to-use format.
I really doubt a "gamecube pro" is in the works. If it is, the games won't change. I'd instead look for an integrated BBA (wireless?), built-in wavebird receivers, and some sort of prologic II -> 5.1 hack.
The GBA may be selling well but customers today expect 3D acceleration, MP3 and video playback
Huh?! MP3 I'll give you. 3D acceleration really demands higher resolution than a portable can give you to have big advantages over sprites, but perhaps kids are too stupid to realize that. But video? Where is it coming from? What portable video players are on the market today that make this seem like a standard? I've read nothing but bad review of the Archos and its kin. Do you think the average GBA user is prepared to rip their DVDs, compress them to a GBA-screen-sized divx file and dump them to compactflash?
I doubt Nintendo is stupid enough to try producing their own video content. My money is on the phone/GBA combo.
Well, I think you've got a skewed perspective due to Microsoft's willingness to flush money down the crapper on XBox. Gamecube is graphically more powerful than the PS2, but otherwise I'd say the machines are fairly comparable (except the lack of DVD playback -- a conscious antipiracy decision this time that probably hurt console sales, although with commodity DVD player prices, people no longer care about their console playing movies).
The XBox's integrated ethernet, harddrive and processor power is impressive, but Microsoft is taking a big hit on every console sold, whereas the GCN was designed to be sold at a profit. Microsoft has artificially advanced the console SOTA by a generation in a bid to become a competitive player in a market where they had no foothold.
Yes, the next gen hardware will have to all have about the same specs to be competitive, but I think you're wrong to imply that Nintendo has been dragging their feet. The GCN is a pretty great machine for the price and size.
HRTFs are real enough, but they are mostly dependent on the shape of the listener's outer ear, which varies a lot from person to person. You can create surround sound with headphones (yes I know this has more drivers -- the required tech is the same). But it takes microphones that fit in the ear canal, some tedious calibration, and preferably an anechoic chamber. Hopefully the box for this thing lists these as "not included".
And seems to presume that the quantum-tunnelling theory of consciousness is correct. Which I think is reaching. It always seemed to me to boil down to "consciousness is hard to understand. So is quantum physics! the two must be connected. we'll figure it out later. for now, let's smash some more subatomic particles together."
Admittedly it's a more productive approach than just saying "consciousness is intractable" and heading down to the bar or philosophy library (equally productive destinations). But it doesn't really explain anything, it just points to a new system (quantum tunnelling rather than electrochemical activity) that's harder to observe and understand.
I can't claim to have studied it in any depth, though, so if anyone can better expand on the state of the art I'd be very interested to read their comments.
Slashdot Mirror
If we do go ahead with the administration's somewhat-ridiculous moon base idea, we could just launch some carved lunar rock shields -- perhaps encased in a polymer to prevent micrometeor-induced fractures. Throw those off the surface of the moon for much less energy and attach them to the mars craft at Lagrange or in orbit. Get a slow but steady start helped by some gravity slingshotting and you're on your way to mars.
I'm sure there are slashdotters with a stronger grip on rocket science than I have (which is basically limited to F=ma). Is this feasible? Or would it make more sense to just pay for firing lead/water into space from earth?
Preliminary analysis suggests that this means SCO is stupid, hates America and babies and will obviously be laughed out of court any day now, and their executive board should and most likely will be forced into indentured servitude, and that Linus' eyes are *such* a piercing steel blue, the observation of which it is not at all homoerotic to make. Sigh...
Look for an exhaustive analysis on groklaw tomorrow. In the meantime I suggest shutting down slashdot's other sections to accomodate the expected server load.
</sarcasm>
Now, repeat after me: I will not post more than one SCO story per day on the main section.
How do you reconcile this with the rest of the scarcity-based economy? When the producers of replicable content still need limited resources, problems emerge and the only solution is inelegant legislation that is ultimately unenforceable.
I think we can just now see the end of profit on the horizon. It will probably not arrive in our lifetimes. Still, technology does not seem to be opening any more markets -- it's making it easier for us to spend less money. Low-tech industries will probably prosper as material goods value relative to IP increases.
Perhaps the arrival of nanotech and free energy could rebalance this. I think we may see a reemergence of the middle class in the meantime, as manufacturing becomes much more valuable.
Here's the thing: OSS lets anybody get at the guts of the thing. I don't think this is a good paradigm for the dissemination of potentially deadly information. I'd advocate letting anyone with vetted academic credentials at the information, the same way that potentially dangerous pathogens are distributed for research purposes. But opening up a sourceforge project and sending the CVS password to the mailing list is not going to cut it when the stakes are this high.
I don't think a authorization procedure applied to potentially deadly biotech information would be a significant hindrance to personal liberties or scientific advancement. The educational barrier to safe, useful contribution to these endeavors remains considerably higher than that of OSS.
I suspect the most immediately dangerous pieces of information will be the sequences genomes of pathogens. Perhaps these could be distributed on a per-lab basis -- is there enough junk DNA in a virus to watermark it?
This is not equivalent to the debate over publishing exploit source. There is no guarantee that biological countermeasures can be created to counteract bio-malware, so increasing the pool of exploit-related knowledge is not to our benefit. Besides which, people will die while we wait for the equivalent of patches to be submitted.
Is it possible to amend the GPL to prohibit its use for distributing potentially dangerous biological information -- something like the ebola genome? Perhaps a review board could be established for biological information that is to be distributed under the GPL. I realize this does nothing to stop the information's spread under a different scheme, but at least it might discourage the foolish from cross-applying OSS principles to arenas where they most decidedly do NOT belong.
I don't care for cottage cheese. I think I'd have a much harder time getting into an argument over its merits than I would over Coke v. Pepsi, don't you?
Come to think of it, I don't like Heineken either, but I bet I could get into some arguments with people over that -- not as many as over colas, though. It'd be interesting to compare how easily a person can be drawn into debating a product vs. that product's advertising budget.
I realize this undercuts my previous point re: advertising's effectiveness waning as it saturates a given medium. But there are of course certain exceptions -- pervasive campaigns that make us use things we otherwise wouldn't, or, perhaps more insidiously, care about things we have little reason to care about.
Perhaps these products' ad campaigns are acting on us in a way I can't put my finger on. But it seems clear they have got a firm hold of our brains.
Let's face it: we're saturated. A 15 second spot saying "Widget X is 15% better than crappy old Widget Y" is unlikely to work the way it may once have, given that there is an equal and opposite amount of Widget Y propaganda out there. Admittedly, there are exceptions -- take McDonald's and Coca Cola, for instance. In fact, any time I mention Coca Cola's market dominance my 20something peers immediately jump into a defense of its superior taste. Hint to them: you are drones.
Commercials are increasingly amusing, unusual or abstract. It's downhill from here. Sure, IBM's horrible, *horrible* Linux ads may be better today than a vanilla ad saying "Linux is good and here's why". But a vanilla ad in 1985 saying "Linux is good and here's why" would have been immensely more effective.
Advertising must be novel to be effective. Unfortunately this means it always needs to be placed in new places, which means it will be ever-more intrusive on our daily lives. The death of the 30 second TV spot is just a tiny upside to the horrific travesty of the commodification of our private lives.
As others have mentioned, this is just logic, not the transmitter itself. But even if they do roll out integrated wifi, it'll never be "on die" with the processor. It'll most likely be a motherboard component. If it ever did come as part of the same component as the processor, you can bet there would be a wall of the a faraday cage between the xmitter and the processor.
I agree that we should not sacrifice modularity for all-in-one disposability, but for all the applications you list (IDE, NIC, video) you can put in a modular card and override the integrated stuff. Personally, I think ubiquitous integrated mobo NICs are one of the handiest hardware improvements of the last five years.
If Google gets attacked, people will notice. Hopefully, they'll start associating Linux with it as a result. If Linux can absorb even a little bit of Google's golden-boy glow it'll go a long way to creating a realistic entry point for consumer desktop Linux.
An AS-only channel would just be another MTV2. It'd be cool for a while before getting much worse as executives realized its audience can only be expanded so far. Oh, and I wouldn't get it from my cable provider.
If you haven't noticed, CN airs a lot of crap. Sure, the kids-home-from-school to stoned-college-students-call-it-a-night hours have mostly good stuff. If you've perused their daytime offerings for purposes of TiVoing, you'll see that it's pretty bad.
Also, while I admire the fact that they feel they should offer original programming, let's face it: Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed Edd & Eddy, Grim & Evil, the Time whatever show... all are pretty weak. I have a soft spot for Dexter's Lab, and while I don't really like Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls, I can understand why some folks do. But a lot of their original series are not good. They could cut them and spend the freed resources to expand AS.
Home Movies is the reason I love adult swim (well, Futurama is pretty great too). But I thought new episodes were supposed to be here by now -- does anyone know what's going on w/ this? The last ep I saw was "Castaway". The site lists a season's worth of episodes past that, but I haven't seen any.
But what really helps is keeping it in the laundry room, next to the server, in the ugliest part of the house. There are boxes, dead power supplies and a couple hundred Microcenter (east coast for "Fry's") bags wadded up and scattered about it.
The rest of the house is immaculate. Of course, having a roommate with just-below-worrisome OCD-style cleaning habits helps quite a bit (he's been known to get drunk and clean my other roommate's room without telling him). But we have an unspoken compact about the server area, and everything's fine so far -- although he did just buy a worryingly large kitchen knife set.
Anyway, that's my advice. We don't fight the disorder -- in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics. But we keep it in one place, and it makes it tolerable.
But that's for sub-to-sub situations, when both guys want to hide their location. If instead of a submarine you're manning, say, Miami, then your best efforts to hide your location are probably still going to fall short. So you can use active sonar to find these things. And then blow them up with torpedoes or depth charges.
Which shouldn't be too hard, given that the ferrari of the class moves at 5 mph. And there's not even any guarantee that these things can work in shallow water. Who even knows what "shallow" is in this case? I wouldn't be surprised if their effectiveness is crippled as soon as they run into a continental shelf -- keeping them quite a good ways off-shore. It seems logical to assume that their efficiency drops off the more up-and-down cycles they have to employ, and the smaller the surface/seabed pressure differential is.
Finally, delivering nukes by sea is not a good way to get the most value from your military-industrial dollar. My understanding is that for maximum wrath-of-god effect, you'd want to blow a nuclear weapon up in the atmosphere over your target -- hence MIRV's horrible destructiveness. Ground level is not where you want to detonate. And certainly not at sub-ground level, in the middle of a gigantic heat-and-radiation absorber.
Admittedly, you are not going to save your city by keeping that nuke covered with 10 feet of water. But it's just one more strike against this as a weapon-delivery system. (Bonus Simpsons paraphrase: "Three month ocean voyage? But I'm mad now!"). A good-old fashioned cargo container would be easier to obtain, easier to retrieve, and only somewhat easier for the feds to detect.
Or am I wrong? Someone help me out here. I see an awful lot of coverage of 64 bit processors on slashdot and other consumer/overclocking sites given the fact that I know *no one* who's got 4 gigs of ram in their box.
These things are applicable for huge servers, industrial 3d rendering and video editing. But only the most advanced applications of each need more than 4GB of memory. I just don't understand this at all -- when you get to needing this amount of memory, odds are you'll be out of the prosumer space anyway (eg, making a feature film), and can drop money on one of the existing 64 bit processor options.
Why is a 64 bit entry by a consumer chipmaker such a big deal? Sure, making cutting edge tech affordable is nice, but the 4GB barrier is not what's keeping the average Joe from making Jurassic Park.
Basically, I'd argue that the number of flops available to the average user is a bigger barrier to him or her attempting these huge applications than the amount of addressable memory is. Until AMD starts selling a rendering farm for $400, 64 bits will make very little difference for the people getting most excited about this stuff.
Although I will say that for the average university lab working with huge datasets, this could be a real boon.
If Brazil remains a locus of "grayhat" activity, could this mean more resources will be put toward finding Linux exploits? Certainly on the whole Linux is more secure than Microsoft's offerings, but I imagine most would agree that its small userbase has played a part in limiting the number of exploits uncovered.
If you're a slashdotter without an engineering degree (like myself), I can't recommend JR Pierce's book on Information Theory highly enough. Very accessible, well written, and a quick read.
There is less opportunity for specialization in individual sports like car racing, and hence, fewer opportunities for transcendent performance. I'm sure some drivers are better at taking the inside lane, others can trade paint more roughly, but I doubt any one of those skills will win someone a race. I can watch the Pistons' Ben Wallace dominate defensively or marvel at Keyshawn Johnson's showboat catch last week. These guys can be role players pushing the limits of what's possible in their sports. In NASCAR I suspect a broad range of above-average skills is what wins races.
There is too much emphasis on hardware. I know that the top racers all have virtually identical hardware, but surely you'll admit that teams with less financial backing have an inherent disadvantage, and that many races are lost before the car leaves the garage. I realize baseball suffers from the same money = wins problem. But then, I don't care for baseball either. The furor that can erupt over a spoiler being a couple of millimeters higher than regulation is about as interesting to me as reading posts on which processor is more overclockable -- which is to say not at all.
There is a cap placed on what is possible. For safety reasons there are hardware limits imposed. Perhaps football will have to introduce something like this someday, but for now the fact remains that today's football players are the best in history. Same goes for today's average baseball player. Basketball is a poorer example, but the physical capabilities of those athletes certainly have expanded. In racing, technological caps ensure that drivers can only do so much.
Which brings us to the most important point: the stakes are too high. Okay, there may be more dangerous sports (although I would like to see the statistics) -- skydiving and rock-climbing come to mind, I guess, although I wouldn't call them sports really. Boxing probably wreaks more damage on its participants (I'm no fan of boxing, either). At least these are in some way poetic, pitting man against man, or against nature, and stripping the contest to its bare essentials. Testing what humans can do, and who can do it better.
Racing is loud, long, repetitive and artificial. It's techno-fetishization with a high potential for death. It's about as ugly a sport as I could possibly imagine -- one carried out by screaming, polluting machines on strips of blacktop, and where the highlight reels are filled by brushes with unnecessary death. It's horrifying.
this site estimates it's about $100 per console
more links
Most of these articles are from 6 months ago, the last time MS released information on how its Xbox division was doing. But I would be very surprised if these unspecified manufacturing process improvements have made up for the estimated $100 per console hit MS was taking in May.
Look, there's no reason to resort to ad-hominem attacks. The Xbox is losing money. MS is buying a share of the gaming market. That's not an indictment of the product, or even the business plan. But it's a fact.
Yes, Nintendo could release a more powerful console, but users' discs don't have the data to take advantage of it. The developers do, no doubt -- but they'd have to rerelease the games in a higher-capacity format with the hi-res art. This is not a completely ludicrous idea ("Gold Edition" or similar marketing BS), but it'd be a very niche product. I suspect it'd flop, and I think Nintendo realizes this (esp. after the success they've enjoyed recently by making their product cheaper).
I really doubt a "gamecube pro" is in the works. If it is, the games won't change. I'd instead look for an integrated BBA (wireless?), built-in wavebird receivers, and some sort of prologic II -> 5.1 hack.
Huh?! MP3 I'll give you. 3D acceleration really demands higher resolution than a portable can give you to have big advantages over sprites, but perhaps kids are too stupid to realize that. But video? Where is it coming from? What portable video players are on the market today that make this seem like a standard? I've read nothing but bad review of the Archos and its kin. Do you think the average GBA user is prepared to rip their DVDs, compress them to a GBA-screen-sized divx file and dump them to compactflash?
I doubt Nintendo is stupid enough to try producing their own video content. My money is on the phone/GBA combo.
The XBox's integrated ethernet, harddrive and processor power is impressive, but Microsoft is taking a big hit on every console sold, whereas the GCN was designed to be sold at a profit. Microsoft has artificially advanced the console SOTA by a generation in a bid to become a competitive player in a market where they had no foothold.
Yes, the next gen hardware will have to all have about the same specs to be competitive, but I think you're wrong to imply that Nintendo has been dragging their feet. The GCN is a pretty great machine for the price and size.
HRTFs are real enough, but they are mostly dependent on the shape of the listener's outer ear, which varies a lot from person to person. You can create surround sound with headphones (yes I know this has more drivers -- the required tech is the same). But it takes microphones that fit in the ear canal, some tedious calibration, and preferably an anechoic chamber. Hopefully the box for this thing lists these as "not included".
Admittedly it's a more productive approach than just saying "consciousness is intractable" and heading down to the bar or philosophy library (equally productive destinations). But it doesn't really explain anything, it just points to a new system (quantum tunnelling rather than electrochemical activity) that's harder to observe and understand.
I can't claim to have studied it in any depth, though, so if anyone can better expand on the state of the art I'd be very interested to read their comments.