So just to help me clarify here, we are not free men and we must exist and act within little narrowly defined jobs, all with conflicting standards and goals. Unfortunately this dude doesn't seem to have a clearly defined job so it's hard to evaluate him:
1) If he's a scientist he's supposed to at least appear objective and honest (reality, especially in private, is permitted some divergence). Both sides of this issue flake out from facts into intense social engineering so all players on both sides fail. There might exist a scientist on one side or the other who is just researching facts and is not carefully positioning activities and results to grind an axe... but I highly doubt it. So he fails, but not worse than anyone else in the game.
2) As a journalist he's supposed to just run any old garbage that gets for page hits and high ratings. He's failed at this because he wasted time and considerable ethical danger trying to verify if its true or not. He should have just scanned those docs and tossed them up on as many separate web pages as possible to maximize ad impressions. Poorly played, but at an ethical standard far about almost all contemporary journalists.
3) As a politician he's expected to tell whatever lie he was paid to tell as convincingly as possible. The ethical standard is so infinitely low that its impossible for him to fail. I can see some controversy if he's biting the hand that feeds him. He should expect the guys on the "other side" to spin the issue into turning him into a criminal mastermind, regardless of the facts, which seems to be what they're doing. He seems to waffle a bit about how sure he is, thats not good politician behavior. Again, poorly played, but at a high ethical standard.
4) Some flakes are trying to position the guy as being evil because he's a complete failure at NCIS / forensics by not operating in a manner fit for a FBI officer gathering evidence at a crime scene. I'm unimpressed, as far as I know the guy is not a lawyer nor does he play one on TV nor was he operating as a paid expert witness at the time.
Overall he didn't play it perfect, but he's not a crook. I'm moderately impressed with how he's playing it.
Why should he be fired if as you say possibly no crimes were committed, and what did he do that was unethical?
The primary problem seems to be: "In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name."
If he was a tech journalist reporting some babble about apple or samsung or the mighty GOOG or whoever, he'd have run the story without even bothering to verify and that would be considered "just show business as usual".
So uh, do populations where it's sunny year round have a significantly smaller population of people with memory loss attributed to ageing?
That alone proves its bogus. A simple trigonometric function of latitude should correlate strongly with age related problems. That strong correlation does exist for indoor lighting.
Another good point in favor of dead moon is the seismological studies that were done. Supposedly all evidence at that time pointed to a solid body. For example seismic waves reflect off solid/liq transition boundary, you see that on earth, not on moon, so either the entire moon is liquid or the entire moon is solid, and surface studies clearly show its solid, so the inside must also be solid. Plate tectonics are much harder if the whole moon is a solid cold rock.
Probably a good excuse to visit the moon again... drop a permanent base, several geologists with moon buggies and C-4 to run some standard seismic surveys...
Your spyware should be marketed as a corporate metric service where someone (da bossman?) gets an email listing how many hours per week per install or whatever.
Nothing bad, no legal documents, no permissions or guarantees, but you'd be insane not to track down and crack down upon an ip addrs from a major studio using it 60 hours per week every week for months, and you'd be equally insane to crack down on a residential cablemodem who used it once or twice for a couple hours.
Market it as a performance metric evaluation tracking value added feature, not a DRM problem.
nice idea, but quite unrealistic. video files are usually to big to "just upload" them to the pirate bay
So? No problemo. Upload a 30 second clip. Or a 10 second clip to youtube.
Commercial customers are going to freak out about a clip almost as bad as uploading the whole thing. Even worse, they could be video editing a 30 second superbowel commercial, in which case the 30 second clip IS the whole thing.
Even just posting a couple random stills converted to.jpg onto 4chan would freak out the commercial customers into paying up.
Is what the software does worth $10K? If it really is, then you'd be far better off hiring some in house editors and offering your services using your magic proprietary undistributed tools. After all, you'd be able to undercut all your competition by at least $10K/yr equivalent. Its has to be worth more than that, like $25K/yr, otherwise your purchasing clients would not waste the time and money learning new software, they'd just throw more bodies/billable hours at the task and not have to deal with you. They're planning to save $25K using your software of which they're giving you $10K to keep it legal. Why not keep the whole $25K for yourself? Its one of those put your money where your mouth is moments... if its really worth the dough, you'd make more money reselling video editing services than you'd make selling the tools to edit video. My guess is, you're about to discover the appropriate price would be maybe $100 not $10K.
Being video editing software the real solution is video edited by an unauthorized unlicensed copy automatically uploads the edited video file to pirate bay. That would scare the crap out of genuine commercial users, yet the future customers who are just experimenting or people who are experimenting and will never be customers simply won't care.
Doing some of the processing server-side might work for some applications but not for video editing because of the immense amounts of data that would need to be uploaded.
Thats assuming you'd need to upload/download the whole works.
It would be hilarious if the app had no concept of how to create a simple.avi header each time it saved to a new file (made up example). You can't just NOP around that, and its not much bandwidth and its probably too much of a PITA for the crackers to write their own.
The only thing funnier is the support calls when your https avi header webserver is down, or when the paying $10K customer is having a momentary internet outage or firewall issue. ha ha funny.
And if you use it, USE IT PROPERLY, bake in the encryption into your software so it becomes fiendishly difficult to crack (it will never be impossible.)
You must be new to the internets. The crack will be up on pirate bay (etc etc) by the end of the week. Why waste the time and money on something guaranteed not to work?
Would it be insane to release a 'not for commercial use' copy that does some spying and reporting on you, along with a spy-free version for ~$10,000?
Watermarked as non-commercial use only? Hilarious if you run your water mark detector on a TV show or movie and it shows up and you start blogging about the pirates.
Another good laugh would be bait and switch the free version has 75% of the features removed at compile time. You can left align or right align all you want but if you want to center its $10K. Or you could use any font you want for $10K but for free its only possible to use... comic sans.
Another good laugh would be speed. Intentional slow down loops in the free version. While evaluating your software for possible purchase do I care if everything happens 20% slower? Heck no. But if I'm a bean counter at corporate, I'd be insane to reduce my employees productivity by 20% just to save $10K Unless said employee using the software for 2 years earned less than $25K/yr, which is probably the case outside the US...
The problem you're going to have is "free or $10K" is an absolutely insane market. It better be unimaginably amazing to be worth $10K in a world of 99 cent apps and $100 video editors. Rather than the revenue from 100 sales at 10K each, wouldn't you prefer a million app store sales at $20 each?
Would I download your software for free at home if its legal? Maybe. Why not a license of pure profit where any CC released work is a $10 software license with no support. The cost to you is minimal and you get "free" revenue. Or a license where its gotta be CC licensed work with a link to your company in the comments or credits screen or something, basically they pay you, to market for you. Or "please support us by purchasing an anonymous coward XXL tee shirt along with a software license for CC released works for only $50" Or the software is free for CC editing work, but the fine manual in printed and pdf form is only available for $50 along with a formal written license for CC-released work.
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Govt and corps have merged, so all public schools are already under corporate dominance. The non-public schools aka private schools are also corporate controlled by definition. Not seeing the issue here.
If paying these fines is a problem, then make sure you don't get hit with them. If you don't want your kid to be educated with a strict set of rules in the school, then choose a different school.
The most important rule taught, is if you have a lot of money, you can do whatever you want regardless of rules. What a surprise that life lesson comes from a 1%er billionaire.
you'll never get a dense-enough region of gas to meaningfully deflect the beam.
Don't need to, just need to defocus somewhat. Lasers are not high energy weapons. Lets say you take an industrial cutting laser around 100 watts, which would be a pretty nice cutter. Now you focus that to a zillionth of a cm and it cuts thru metal. defocus it to a tenth of a square meter... and it dumps 100 watts over a tenth of a sq meter, which is equivalent to a KW per sq meter, which is roughly as harmless as sunlight...
Not to mention your attacker is going to be random-walking along with you to avoid return fire, which is going to make it pretty hard for the interceptor drone to be in the right place at the right time
Nobody says you can only have one, I'm assuming you're allowed technology more advanced than an early cold war era homing torpedo, not seeing this as an issue.
FCC form 312 "Registration of a New Earth Station" can be filled out for receive-only stations. I'm not 100% sure you are legally required to do that.
From my post "Air to ground satellite is a primary service in that band and some pt-pt is secondary if and only if there exist no registered cband ground receivers that could be interfered with. All this means is they've declared their willingness to exert their rights as a primary user"
As a primary allocation user, you are free to roll over and play dead and let the secondary allocation users transmit all over you making your equipment unusable. Maybe you're not using it anymore, maybe the secondary users are too weak, maybe you just don't care. Nobody will force you to aggressively demand your legal rights. If you want to use the FCC as a big stick, you have to... ask them. This sort of pre-registration is all that's going on.
You tell the FCC you're a satellite RX station at a specific frequency and as a primary user they WILL NOT license a secondary user to do pt to pt on that same frequency if there's any realistic chance they'll interfere with you. On the other hand, if there's nobody within 150 km or whatever who filed as a primary, they assume its unused and fair game to license a secondary on top of that frequency.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
Google for EROEI and maybe theoildrum.com re-evaluate. If you have to burn 10 barrels equivalent of crude oil to make 1 barrel equivalent of food grade veg oil, then what is the break even point? (And no, I very unfortunately do not have that backwards)
Yeah no spoiler, that movie is like 30 years old? I'd argue poor acting or idiocracy struck severely. Remember, he was VERY happy with C2000 before the unfortunate washing machine incident, willing to do anything to save her. C2000 WAS as human as the human chicks in his social group, that was the whole point, unfortunately for the housewives of that era. Then again I've seen some reality TV shows where maybe he has it better off.... The molly ringwald chick was an outsider vastly superior to all the insider chicks in his own city but incredibly unusual and weird to him. Either that, or you read it as the outsider chick was so weird and unusual that she had to be ostracized from society for her weirdness, than again, I stand by my point, C2000 was more human than some humans of her time. I would say its bad acting or trying to make it easier on viewers to figure out C2000 was a robot and not just another boring suburban housewife. To fit the story she must have been at least as real as beaver cleavers mom or maybe the mom from the brady bunch or maybe ms howell. He certainly was surprised by the outsider chick, because she wasn't like the chicks in the real world where he lived.
In summary I'd stand by my post, C2000 sucked because she was an excellent silicon copy of the flaky carbon based chicks of his era, in fact a better copy than most, we're just looking at the exact same thing from different directions.
Remember its a Very Important plot point that he dumped C2000 for an outsider ostracized chick from the wilderness, NOT a local girl next door or some chick he met at work or a pickup bar.
I can't believe its 2012 and I remember this Fing movie. That means its a cult classic, right?
Once you have weapon-grade lasers, how are anti-matter warheads viable weapons? Seeing how anything trying to get close would be a prime priority target precisely to shoot them down.
Cool them down to 2.7 kelvin with liq He, make them outta composite plastic or whatever, toss them out like mines. Can't see them in IR because they're as cold as space. Can't lidar them because they're black. Can't look for occultation because they're too small. Hmm.
Hit one, it blows up into a big cloud that you can't laser thru for a couple seconds at least and who knows whats coming behind it, such as say a railgun drone hiding off axis watching the whole thing who now knows exactly where you are. Don't hit one and it blows up your ship on contact. Something to think about.
Gundam already takes your point into account. M Particles effectively block the long range anonymous forms of attack since it blocks all forms of electromagnetic communication, including laser targeting and gps. M Particles are the deus ex machina of close ranged Gundams.
Mylarized Chaff from off the shelf aircraft would seem to make an excellent "M Particle" without any deus ex machina. Hit one particle in a cloud and it vaporizes into a huge cloud you can't see thru and lasers can't blast thru.
If your space combat results in only one atom per cc, then you're not really doing combat, you're taking a nap.
Its still a "sound" even if you have to doctor it up. I can't hear ultrasonic sonar pings directly, but with a bit of mathematical fooling around I certainly can.
So if you're envisioning combat to be far enough away that the light speed delay poses a problem, exactly what weapon are you envisioning that *doesn't* have this problem? If light is too slow.... Plus, if you're that far away, you're not going to be closing in on each other worth a flip
Also you're gonna be a point source. You can just squirt plain old air from a drone precisely station keeping between you and the target and that small amount of air will completely defocus and decoliminate the beam... there is a reason why commercial laser cutters don't keep the expensive optics 20 feet away like they would like to protect them. Furthermore as a point source you just toss unfolded umbrellas along the vector... can't lase thru a fireball, so you get at most one hit per umbrella.
I'm thinking lasers will be utterly useless more than 1 KM or so away. Just too easy to defend against a point source.
that works a lot better if the victim hadn't already put a monitoring probe on each asteroid including the one you're Fing with, and also stabbed a robotic railgun into each of the other neighboring asteroids and the neighbors are pelting you continuously with railgun rounds as you try to nudge the asteroid into the target planet. I'm not placing good odds on this, but even if it works, once the target planet figures out what you're up to, they start nudging an asteroid of their own into a collision course with yours... in fact since robots are cheap, the start nudging 20 to impact your asteroid because they only need one to work, but they're cheap, so...
Amusingly the Russians F'ed around with firing a rifle in space about 50 years ago. Much more likely outcome is the first ship ejects the nukes and bails out second ship uses off the shelf naval CIWS to pop the incoming nukes, after all you don't need to vaporize them just damage them enough that they don't go off, then the second ship wins because they're still in orbit with a full payload of nukes surrounded by a shield of space junk you'd have to impact if you tried to sneak up on them.
Complicated, isn't it?
This is almost as much fun as old fashioned DnD. Now how did that go "I put on my robe and wizard hat, and"
Offensive ship minimizes defense area by being needle like with weapons/CIWS launchers at the tip. Nice and long... if you get to flank it, its dead, but point on its indestructible and and dish out amazing damage per exposed frontal area.
Defensive ship tries to minimize its surface area from all directions so its a sphere. You don't gain much by sneak attacks or flanking maneuvers on a sphere. I'd be a smart ass and make it as featureless as possible... Am I gazing into an engine nozzle, a railgun hole, or a nanite dump port? In attack mode you spin with the equator at the enemy and the poles in safe directions, to maximize how often each railgun at the equator can shoot. In deep space if you meet a sphere, they're probably cool, but if they start the "as the world turns" routine, then you'd best get the H outta there.
Maybe that's how star trek always seemed to know if they're friendly aliens or angry aliens. If it looks like a ball, they aren't gonna attack. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at them sideways, they're dead if you want so they'll be friendly at least for awhile. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at the pointy end, its "You have no chance to survive make your time"
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So just to help me clarify here, we are not free men and we must exist and act within little narrowly defined jobs, all with conflicting standards and goals. Unfortunately this dude doesn't seem to have a clearly defined job so it's hard to evaluate him:
1) If he's a scientist he's supposed to at least appear objective and honest (reality, especially in private, is permitted some divergence). Both sides of this issue flake out from facts into intense social engineering so all players on both sides fail. There might exist a scientist on one side or the other who is just researching facts and is not carefully positioning activities and results to grind an axe... but I highly doubt it. So he fails, but not worse than anyone else in the game.
2) As a journalist he's supposed to just run any old garbage that gets for page hits and high ratings. He's failed at this because he wasted time and considerable ethical danger trying to verify if its true or not. He should have just scanned those docs and tossed them up on as many separate web pages as possible to maximize ad impressions. Poorly played, but at an ethical standard far about almost all contemporary journalists.
3) As a politician he's expected to tell whatever lie he was paid to tell as convincingly as possible. The ethical standard is so infinitely low that its impossible for him to fail. I can see some controversy if he's biting the hand that feeds him. He should expect the guys on the "other side" to spin the issue into turning him into a criminal mastermind, regardless of the facts, which seems to be what they're doing. He seems to waffle a bit about how sure he is, thats not good politician behavior. Again, poorly played, but at a high ethical standard.
4) Some flakes are trying to position the guy as being evil because he's a complete failure at NCIS / forensics by not operating in a manner fit for a FBI officer gathering evidence at a crime scene. I'm unimpressed, as far as I know the guy is not a lawyer nor does he play one on TV nor was he operating as a paid expert witness at the time.
Overall he didn't play it perfect, but he's not a crook. I'm moderately impressed with how he's playing it.
Why should he be fired if as you say possibly no crimes were committed, and what did he do that was unethical?
The primary problem seems to be:
"In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name."
If he was a tech journalist reporting some babble about apple or samsung or the mighty GOOG or whoever, he'd have run the story without even bothering to verify and that would be considered "just show business as usual".
So uh, do populations where it's sunny year round have a significantly smaller population of people with memory loss attributed to ageing?
That alone proves its bogus. A simple trigonometric function of latitude should correlate strongly with age related problems. That strong correlation does exist for indoor lighting.
Another good point in favor of dead moon is the seismological studies that were done. Supposedly all evidence at that time pointed to a solid body. For example seismic waves reflect off solid/liq transition boundary, you see that on earth, not on moon, so either the entire moon is liquid or the entire moon is solid, and surface studies clearly show its solid, so the inside must also be solid. Plate tectonics are much harder if the whole moon is a solid cold rock.
Probably a good excuse to visit the moon again... drop a permanent base, several geologists with moon buggies and C-4 to run some standard seismic surveys...
Your spyware should be marketed as a corporate metric service where someone (da bossman?) gets an email listing how many hours per week per install or whatever.
Nothing bad, no legal documents, no permissions or guarantees, but you'd be insane not to track down and crack down upon an ip addrs from a major studio using it 60 hours per week every week for months, and you'd be equally insane to crack down on a residential cablemodem who used it once or twice for a couple hours.
Market it as a performance metric evaluation tracking value added feature, not a DRM problem.
nice idea, but quite unrealistic. video files are usually to big to "just upload" them to the pirate bay
So? No problemo. Upload a 30 second clip. Or a 10 second clip to youtube.
Commercial customers are going to freak out about a clip almost as bad as uploading the whole thing. Even worse, they could be video editing a 30 second superbowel commercial, in which case the 30 second clip IS the whole thing.
Even just posting a couple random stills converted to .jpg onto 4chan would freak out the commercial customers into paying up.
Is what the software does worth $10K? If it really is, then you'd be far better off hiring some in house editors and offering your services using your magic proprietary undistributed tools. After all, you'd be able to undercut all your competition by at least $10K/yr equivalent.
Its has to be worth more than that, like $25K/yr, otherwise your purchasing clients would not waste the time and money learning new software, they'd just throw more bodies/billable hours at the task and not have to deal with you. They're planning to save $25K using your software of which they're giving you $10K to keep it legal. Why not keep the whole $25K for yourself?
Its one of those put your money where your mouth is moments... if its really worth the dough, you'd make more money reselling video editing services than you'd make selling the tools to edit video.
My guess is, you're about to discover the appropriate price would be maybe $100 not $10K.
Being video editing software the real solution is video edited by an unauthorized unlicensed copy automatically uploads the edited video file to pirate bay.
That would scare the crap out of genuine commercial users, yet the future customers who are just experimenting or people who are experimenting and will never be customers simply won't care.
Doing some of the processing server-side might work for some applications but not for video editing because of the immense amounts of data that would need to be uploaded.
Thats assuming you'd need to upload/download the whole works.
It would be hilarious if the app had no concept of how to create a simple .avi header each time it saved to a new file (made up example). You can't just NOP around that, and its not much bandwidth and its probably too much of a PITA for the crackers to write their own.
The only thing funnier is the support calls when your https avi header webserver is down, or when the paying $10K customer is having a momentary internet outage or firewall issue. ha ha funny.
And if you use it, USE IT PROPERLY, bake in the encryption into your software so it becomes fiendishly difficult to crack (it will never be impossible.)
You must be new to the internets. The crack will be up on pirate bay (etc etc) by the end of the week. Why waste the time and money on something guaranteed not to work?
Would it be insane to release a 'not for commercial use' copy that does some spying and reporting on you, along with a spy-free version for ~$10,000?
Watermarked as non-commercial use only? Hilarious if you run your water mark detector on a TV show or movie and it shows up and you start blogging about the pirates.
Another good laugh would be bait and switch the free version has 75% of the features removed at compile time. You can left align or right align all you want but if you want to center its $10K. Or you could use any font you want for $10K but for free its only possible to use... comic sans.
Another good laugh would be speed. Intentional slow down loops in the free version. While evaluating your software for possible purchase do I care if everything happens 20% slower? Heck no. But if I'm a bean counter at corporate, I'd be insane to reduce my employees productivity by 20% just to save $10K Unless said employee using the software for 2 years earned less than $25K/yr, which is probably the case outside the US...
The problem you're going to have is "free or $10K" is an absolutely insane market. It better be unimaginably amazing to be worth $10K in a world of 99 cent apps and $100 video editors. Rather than the revenue from 100 sales at 10K each, wouldn't you prefer a million app store sales at $20 each?
Would I download your software for free at home if its legal? Maybe. Why not a license of pure profit where any CC released work is a $10 software license with no support. The cost to you is minimal and you get "free" revenue. Or a license where its gotta be CC licensed work with a link to your company in the comments or credits screen or something, basically they pay you, to market for you. Or "please support us by purchasing an anonymous coward XXL tee shirt along with a software license for CC released works for only $50" Or the software is free for CC editing work, but the fine manual in printed and pdf form is only available for $50 along with a formal written license for CC-released work.
We've got enough problems in the US with the systems currently under corporate influence. Why give them another?
Govt and corps have merged, so all public schools are already under corporate dominance. The non-public schools aka private schools are also corporate controlled by definition. Not seeing the issue here.
If paying these fines is a problem, then make sure you don't get hit with them.
If you don't want your kid to be educated with a strict set of rules in the school, then choose a different school.
The most important rule taught, is if you have a lot of money, you can do whatever you want regardless of rules. What a surprise that life lesson comes from a 1%er billionaire.
There's no interstellar medium? There's no pressure waves in it? LOL
you'll never get a dense-enough region of gas to meaningfully deflect the beam.
Don't need to, just need to defocus somewhat. Lasers are not high energy weapons. Lets say you take an industrial cutting laser around 100 watts, which would be a pretty nice cutter. Now you focus that to a zillionth of a cm and it cuts thru metal. defocus it to a tenth of a square meter... and it dumps 100 watts over a tenth of a sq meter, which is equivalent to a KW per sq meter, which is roughly as harmless as sunlight...
Not to mention your attacker is going to be random-walking along with you to avoid return fire, which is going to make it pretty hard for the interceptor drone to be in the right place at the right time
Nobody says you can only have one, I'm assuming you're allowed technology more advanced than an early cold war era homing torpedo, not seeing this as an issue.
FCC form 312 "Registration of a New Earth Station" can be filled out for receive-only stations. I'm not 100% sure you are legally required to do that.
From my post "Air to ground satellite is a primary service in that band and some pt-pt is secondary if and only if there exist no registered cband ground receivers that could be interfered with. All this means is they've declared their willingness to exert their rights as a primary user"
As a primary allocation user, you are free to roll over and play dead and let the secondary allocation users transmit all over you making your equipment unusable. Maybe you're not using it anymore, maybe the secondary users are too weak, maybe you just don't care. Nobody will force you to aggressively demand your legal rights. If you want to use the FCC as a big stick, you have to ... ask them. This sort of pre-registration is all that's going on.
You tell the FCC you're a satellite RX station at a specific frequency and as a primary user they WILL NOT license a secondary user to do pt to pt on that same frequency if there's any realistic chance they'll interfere with you. On the other hand, if there's nobody within 150 km or whatever who filed as a primary, they assume its unused and fair game to license a secondary on top of that frequency.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
Google for EROEI and maybe theoildrum.com re-evaluate. If you have to burn 10 barrels equivalent of crude oil to make 1 barrel equivalent of food grade veg oil, then what is the break even point? (And no, I very unfortunately do not have that backwards)
Yeah no spoiler, that movie is like 30 years old? I'd argue poor acting or idiocracy struck severely. Remember, he was VERY happy with C2000 before the unfortunate washing machine incident, willing to do anything to save her. C2000 WAS as human as the human chicks in his social group, that was the whole point, unfortunately for the housewives of that era. Then again I've seen some reality TV shows where maybe he has it better off.... The molly ringwald chick was an outsider vastly superior to all the insider chicks in his own city but incredibly unusual and weird to him. Either that, or you read it as the outsider chick was so weird and unusual that she had to be ostracized from society for her weirdness, than again, I stand by my point, C2000 was more human than some humans of her time. I would say its bad acting or trying to make it easier on viewers to figure out C2000 was a robot and not just another boring suburban housewife. To fit the story she must have been at least as real as beaver cleavers mom or maybe the mom from the brady bunch or maybe ms howell. He certainly was surprised by the outsider chick, because she wasn't like the chicks in the real world where he lived.
In summary I'd stand by my post, C2000 sucked because she was an excellent silicon copy of the flaky carbon based chicks of his era, in fact a better copy than most, we're just looking at the exact same thing from different directions.
Remember its a Very Important plot point that he dumped C2000 for an outsider ostracized chick from the wilderness, NOT a local girl next door or some chick he met at work or a pickup bar.
I can't believe its 2012 and I remember this Fing movie. That means its a cult classic, right?
Once you have weapon-grade lasers, how are anti-matter warheads viable weapons? Seeing how anything trying to get close would be a prime priority target precisely to shoot them down.
Cool them down to 2.7 kelvin with liq He, make them outta composite plastic or whatever, toss them out like mines. Can't see them in IR because they're as cold as space. Can't lidar them because they're black. Can't look for occultation because they're too small. Hmm.
Hit one, it blows up into a big cloud that you can't laser thru for a couple seconds at least and who knows whats coming behind it, such as say a railgun drone hiding off axis watching the whole thing who now knows exactly where you are. Don't hit one and it blows up your ship on contact. Something to think about.
Gundam already takes your point into account. M Particles effectively block the long range anonymous forms of attack since it blocks all forms of electromagnetic communication, including laser targeting and gps. M Particles are the deus ex machina of close ranged Gundams.
Mylarized Chaff from off the shelf aircraft would seem to make an excellent "M Particle" without any deus ex machina. Hit one particle in a cloud and it vaporizes into a huge cloud you can't see thru and lasers can't blast thru.
If your space combat results in only one atom per cc, then you're not really doing combat, you're taking a nap.
Its still a "sound" even if you have to doctor it up. I can't hear ultrasonic sonar pings directly, but with a bit of mathematical fooling around I certainly can.
So if you're envisioning combat to be far enough away that the light speed delay poses a problem, exactly what weapon are you envisioning that *doesn't* have this problem? If light is too slow.... Plus, if you're that far away, you're not going to be closing in on each other worth a flip
Also you're gonna be a point source. You can just squirt plain old air from a drone precisely station keeping between you and the target and that small amount of air will completely defocus and decoliminate the beam... there is a reason why commercial laser cutters don't keep the expensive optics 20 feet away like they would like to protect them. Furthermore as a point source you just toss unfolded umbrellas along the vector... can't lase thru a fireball, so you get at most one hit per umbrella.
I'm thinking lasers will be utterly useless more than 1 KM or so away. Just too easy to defend against a point source.
that works a lot better if the victim hadn't already put a monitoring probe on each asteroid including the one you're Fing with, and also stabbed a robotic railgun into each of the other neighboring asteroids and the neighbors are pelting you continuously with railgun rounds as you try to nudge the asteroid into the target planet. I'm not placing good odds on this, but even if it works, once the target planet figures out what you're up to, they start nudging an asteroid of their own into a collision course with yours... in fact since robots are cheap, the start nudging 20 to impact your asteroid because they only need one to work, but they're cheap, so...
Amusingly the Russians F'ed around with firing a rifle in space about 50 years ago. Much more likely outcome is the first ship ejects the nukes and bails out second ship uses off the shelf naval CIWS to pop the incoming nukes, after all you don't need to vaporize them just damage them enough that they don't go off, then the second ship wins because they're still in orbit with a full payload of nukes surrounded by a shield of space junk you'd have to impact if you tried to sneak up on them.
Complicated, isn't it?
This is almost as much fun as old fashioned DnD. Now how did that go "I put on my robe and wizard hat, and"
Offensive ship minimizes defense area by being needle like with weapons/CIWS launchers at the tip. Nice and long... if you get to flank it, its dead, but point on its indestructible and and dish out amazing damage per exposed frontal area.
Defensive ship tries to minimize its surface area from all directions so its a sphere. You don't gain much by sneak attacks or flanking maneuvers on a sphere. I'd be a smart ass and make it as featureless as possible... Am I gazing into an engine nozzle, a railgun hole, or a nanite dump port? In attack mode you spin with the equator at the enemy and the poles in safe directions, to maximize how often each railgun at the equator can shoot. In deep space if you meet a sphere, they're probably cool, but if they start the "as the world turns" routine, then you'd best get the H outta there.
Maybe that's how star trek always seemed to know if they're friendly aliens or angry aliens. If it looks like a ball, they aren't gonna attack. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at them sideways, they're dead if you want so they'll be friendly at least for awhile. If it looks like a needle and you're looking at the pointy end, its "You have no chance to survive make your time"