I have been out of the Army for well over a decade, and I still remember that wounded folks and medics are not to be targeted by the Geneva Convention.
Why does it take three books for some guys to walk to a volcano?!?
And its such a rip-off of DnD and pretty much every paper and pen or computer RPG...
Seriously though, I did overhear in a bookstore, one patron telling another, "look, they turned the LOTR movie into a book!". Then again it was 1/2 price books, which is kind of the Walmart of the book world.
I hate to break it to you, but wood is usually flammable.
Worse when soaked with accelerants. Like the difference between keeping a stack of firewood leaning against your house vs keeping a stack of gasoline-soaked firewood leaning against your house.
Hmm. Well, Si unit cell spacing is about 0.5 nm and graphene C-C spacing is about 0.15 nm. The longest diagonal of a hexagon is twice one side, so the minimal graphene unit cell lattice would be about 0.30 nm.
So, for all the trouble of scrapping an entire industry and starting over, we'd only go from 0.50 to 0.30 nm. Not sure if thats going to be worth it.
Not that graphene isn't interesting or cool, just that its unit cell isn't much smaller than Si unit cell.
For those in the know, this ever shrinking manufacturing process tech: when will it stop? Where will it stop? 10nm? Sub-1nm?
Well, if the lattice spacing of a silicon crystal is a bit more than 1/2 a nm, I think it unlikely we'd have a silicon crystal process much smaller than the smallest unit crystal of silicon.
Its interesting that a 25nm process means parts are only about 50 atoms across. So, one individual contaminant atom means about a 2% change in composition, probably resulting in much more than 2% change in electrical properties. So the design has to be pretty fault tolerant, or cleanliness must be amazing, or yields must be pretty low, or all of the above of course.
But there's a reason Comp B and C4 are used in place of Commercial Dynamite in military settings.
I may as well argue the fine point that the nitro in commercial dynamite seeps and settles and "weeps" and it gives you a terrible headache by touch and perhaps by fumes, unless you rotate/flip the crates every couple months, and there is no freaking way us guys in at the ammo depot are going to successfully accomplish that. Everything else in the bunkers is absolutely zero maintenance, lock the door and walk away until you need it.
Also wood supposedly gets flammable from the seeping nitro, so we'd end up with some re-usable wood pallets being hazardous flammable waste and some being "safe", or so we hope.
They told us that sometimes we'd have to stock commercial dynamite at a depot anyway, because its cheap, but everyone involved hated dealing with it. Thus, maintenance-free RDX-based military dynamite instead.
You dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block?
No idea for the OP, who's writing sounded like a combat engineer-ish perspective, but for me it was mostly very close second hand. My job at the ammo depot included maintenance of the computerized list of NSNs (essentially a military UPC code) and lot/serial numbers that failed those tests, which we would never issue to troops or transfer/ship, in peacetime are issued to EOD for training, and in wartime would probably be "disposed of" by myself and buddies, although I never got to do that. I knew guys whom were later assigned to the testing labs, but I didn't know them very well.
I would imagine anyone issued demolition explosives whom survived an IED attack or ambush in the sandbox has probably "dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block", and if the safety features failed, I'd have been the guy doing the grunt work for essentially an army style "product recall".
That sounds like an amazing drinking game.
Oh, we drank a lot. What a surprise, that when policy segregates out the illegal-drug users and tobacco smokers, you're left with only the legal drug users, mostly alkies. Seems like every drunk I know is or was in the army or at least the military in general...
A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army
I took a lame one week version of that class in the summer of 93. Frankly the decommissioning part is pretty simple, if you can't figure out how to blow stuff up, you've got big problems. The class was mainly how to survive doing that, and some nifty tricks that save lives. Double fusing and double priming, do everything in an excavated pit with only one man in at a time, let EOD handle the rusty/damaged stuff, always test the burn rate of the actual fuse you intend to use, don't lay down your fuse in a big ole coil, fuse so long that if you twist your ankle the medics could haul you out, don't try to do multiple pits at one time (in an effort to avoid dealing with range control, whom seem universally to be a PITA), etc. And a lot of distance safety rules, which boil down to if you're not walking far enough to get sweaty, its probably not safe enough.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
With the exception of hammer and electrical shock, you can pretty much do that to bulk C4 without serious harm. You can also burn it, although the fumes are quite toxic. Note that C-4 is a very specific chemical substance that is a plastic explosive. Its entirely possible that another plastic explosive, say, PETN det cord, is much more sensitive to shock than bulk C-4. From memory, ANFO is harmless in sub-ton quantities without a very hefty booster.
This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place. It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an "accident."
Nuclear deterrence / M.A.D. theory has never been proposed as a way to prevent "A" individual nuclear detonation, so the article claiming that they've somehow proven it is not exactly insightful. However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
The Shuttle is going away, and with it one of the very few ways of transporting big equipment racks up & down.
Up, not much of a problem. Progress hauls 2400 Kg up per shot (plus or minus a Raduga capsule, depending on particular variation launched, etc). That's enough for a rack full of stuff.
Down, BIG problem. Raduga hauls 150 Kg per shot and is physically much smaller. Also, despite being a simple reentry vehicle, vaporizes on re-entry about 1/4 of the time. Makes you wonder how reliable are soviet ICBMs.
Big whoop. People have been making much better products for ages. Don't need huge grants. Add bodily fluids and bake for 9 months.
You're forgetting the 14 to 18 year delay after the 9 months before being legal for most slashdotters purposes.
What is the point of trying to make something as close to human as possible?
Well, aside from pr0n type activities, the first thing that came to mind was womens clothing mannequins. I remember in the 80s or so there was a very strange theme in mannequins of sort of silvery styrofoam abstract art old-school cylon-ish. But now a days the mannequins I see at the mall are mostly tan/brown paint headless or faceless young women, which is also bit weird, sort of a multicultural texas chainsaw massacre theme.
I'm imagining, instead of trying to sell "urban-ware" to rich white suburban kids on unmoving old fashioned mannequins, they'll have these real-doll type things wearing the clothes and doing hip-hop dance moves in time with the store's music system.
Or put them in a cage at a bar and have them dance, as long as the electricity holds out.
Shouldn't they be trying to make something that does things humans can't do?
Been there, done that. Check out a modern (Japanese) car factory. The "science" so to speak is long done, although engineering work remains to make them cheaper.
I think you're missing the point. Other than theological arguments, which I don't personally believe in, something that cannot be observed or perceived or tested, just simply doesn't exist. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall?
If a fourth spatial dimension existed, however weakly interacting with the other three, it would still interact in some way, for example, some of the scalar temperature heat "wiggle" would wiggle its way into the 4th spatial dimension. So, you figure out the scalar velocity of a vapor by some kinetic gas theories, some CFD, some thermodynamics, whatever, and get 100 m/s avg speed. Then you actually measure how fast an individual particle goes. It averages 99 m/s. Where's the remaining 1 m/s? It turned into wiggle in the 4th dimension. Enough cycles of theory and experiment later, and you have proven 4 spatial dimensions. Except, of course, that doesn't work. You can do similar quantum mechanical electron orbitals, measure moon/planetary/stellar orbits, etc. It (almost) never comes up short, or there are perfectly valid extenuating circumstances. Leading to the almost certain scientific conclusion there are only 3 spatial dimensions.
I was unaware that physics had shown that there wasn't a 4th dimension. I'm not sure how physics or physicists could prove this.
There's a lot of DoF thermodynamics calculations that prove, that at least at some scales of distance and energy, any extra dimensions must either not exist or interact a remarkably small amount with the other three. For instance, a rough definition of temperature is wiggling/flying in three dimensions, you can predict exactly how fast gas atoms should move at a certain temp, and interestingly enough when you resolve their movement into 3-d vectors the graph pretty much matches up. So either they don't exist, which is the simplest explanation, or at the very least, at the scales in the experiment they interact so minimally as to be irrelevant.
Why would it be morally wrong to drive without a seatbelt? It's against the law in many places, but that doesn't make it morally wrong.
Wearing a seatbelt is a public declaration that someone doesn't care if everyone else has to pay more for their health care costs after their accident. Sort of like "threat of conspicuous consumption of everyone elses money". It is, to some extent, a zero sum world, and we have a moral obligation not to decide to waste each others money. To a limited extent, its like the "tragedy of the commons" argument, look at me, I declare I will take way more than my "fair share" of the common healthcare resources. I'm gonna lay in the hospital bed, just so you can't, ha ha ha.
You can pig out in private, abuse drugs in private, not exercise in private, but theres no way to "not wear a seatbelt" in private. Its a pretty aggressive in-your-face statement to everyone else about how much the driver respects the contents of everyone else's wallet. Antisocial.
Is it a major moral crisis? No. Does there need to be a law? No. But it is at least a minor moral failing.
TMS works by using quickly-changing magnetic fields to induce electric fields and neural firing.
So, if instead of blasting "yer moral compass" (ha ha) you blasted the area responsible for vision or hearing, what would you perceive? Can it be modulated around a couple Hz or so?
And, can you buy one of these TMS things cheap? And is it portable enough to take to a rave? I smell a business opportunity forming. Either that, or a really bad idea forming. Not sure which yet.
Bad news is more dead children from running between parked cars.
If the whole point is making the street less safe, thus they drive slower, couldn't they do it cheaper by just installing lots of potholes or not salting the roads in the winter so as to build up a thick ice layer?
I think that if the order came down from DC to 'turn off' the internet, it would be delayed and partially ignored.
That's for sure. Tell a network admin to do something, and at least a couple percent will screw it up, forget it, do it improperly, screw up the filtering, etc. Even if you give them cut-n-paste configs and a hard deadline, I'm sure at least 5% will not successfully implement it.
There is no centralized 'internet switch' to turn off.
Simply pass a law, that all AS in the USA must BGP peer with a certain govt AS and must not filter routes from that peer (unlike virtually every other intelligent network admin whom does filter their incoming routes from peers). Then when "they" want to, advertise a 0/0 route to shut 'er down. Not too complicated.
Not to mention the hacking opportunity this presents. Yes, I am sure there will be many many layers of security....but still.....if the president can do it, then someone else can also do it.
Humorously, as you'd expect, the number of grotesque BGP accidents has VASTLY exceeded the number of successful hacks.
Over the past couple decades (and I've been there) incompetence has been a much more successful threat than the hackers.
If Obama thinks he's going to be the first dude to try to advertise a 0/0 route into BGP, he doesn't have a lot of experience in the art and science of network engineering.
Send enough people packing and the rest will get the message.
The message being big corporations need to donate/bribe both sides to maintain control regardless of which figurehead wins. I think they already got that message.
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rescuing the wounded
Then they shoot and kill them all.
I haven't seen the video. You sure about that?
I have been out of the Army for well over a decade, and I still remember that wounded folks and medics are not to be targeted by the Geneva Convention.
I checked wikipedia and my memory was correct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#The_conventions_and_their_agreements
Why does it take three books for some guys to walk to a volcano?!?
And its such a rip-off of DnD and pretty much every paper and pen or computer RPG...
Seriously though, I did overhear in a bookstore, one patron telling another, "look, they turned the LOTR movie into a book!". Then again it was 1/2 price books, which is kind of the Walmart of the book world.
I hate to break it to you, but wood is usually flammable.
Worse when soaked with accelerants. Like the difference between keeping a stack of firewood leaning against your house vs keeping a stack of gasoline-soaked firewood leaning against your house.
Hmm. Well, Si unit cell spacing is about 0.5 nm and graphene C-C spacing is about 0.15 nm. The longest diagonal of a hexagon is twice one side, so the minimal graphene unit cell lattice would be about 0.30 nm.
So, for all the trouble of scrapping an entire industry and starting over, we'd only go from 0.50 to 0.30 nm. Not sure if thats going to be worth it.
Not that graphene isn't interesting or cool, just that its unit cell isn't much smaller than Si unit cell.
For those in the know, this ever shrinking manufacturing process tech: when will it stop? Where will it stop? 10nm? Sub-1nm?
Well, if the lattice spacing of a silicon crystal is a bit more than 1/2 a nm, I think it unlikely we'd have a silicon crystal process much smaller than the smallest unit crystal of silicon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon#Crystallization
Its interesting that a 25nm process means parts are only about 50 atoms across. So, one individual contaminant atom means about a 2% change in composition, probably resulting in much more than 2% change in electrical properties. So the design has to be pretty fault tolerant, or cleanliness must be amazing, or yields must be pretty low, or all of the above of course.
But there's a reason Comp B and C4 are used in place of Commercial Dynamite in military settings.
I may as well argue the fine point that the nitro in commercial dynamite seeps and settles and "weeps" and it gives you a terrible headache by touch and perhaps by fumes, unless you rotate/flip the crates every couple months, and there is no freaking way us guys in at the ammo depot are going to successfully accomplish that. Everything else in the bunkers is absolutely zero maintenance, lock the door and walk away until you need it.
Also wood supposedly gets flammable from the seeping nitro, so we'd end up with some re-usable wood pallets being hazardous flammable waste and some being "safe", or so we hope.
They told us that sometimes we'd have to stock commercial dynamite at a depot anyway, because its cheap, but everyone involved hated dealing with it. Thus, maintenance-free RDX-based military dynamite instead.
You dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block?
No idea for the OP, who's writing sounded like a combat engineer-ish perspective, but for me it was mostly very close second hand. My job at the ammo depot included maintenance of the computerized list of NSNs (essentially a military UPC code) and lot/serial numbers that failed those tests, which we would never issue to troops or transfer/ship, in peacetime are issued to EOD for training, and in wartime would probably be "disposed of" by myself and buddies, although I never got to do that. I knew guys whom were later assigned to the testing labs, but I didn't know them very well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_testing_of_explosives
I would imagine anyone issued demolition explosives whom survived an IED attack or ambush in the sandbox has probably "dropped, bumped, hammered, shot and lit a C4 block", and if the safety features failed, I'd have been the guy doing the grunt work for essentially an army style "product recall".
That sounds like an amazing drinking game.
Oh, we drank a lot. What a surprise, that when policy segregates out the illegal-drug users and tobacco smokers, you're left with only the legal drug users, mostly alkies. Seems like every drunk I know is or was in the army or at least the military in general...
A friend of mine did (among other things) munitions decomission in the Army
I took a lame one week version of that class in the summer of 93. Frankly the decommissioning part is pretty simple, if you can't figure out how to blow stuff up, you've got big problems. The class was mainly how to survive doing that, and some nifty tricks that save lives. Double fusing and double priming, do everything in an excavated pit with only one man in at a time, let EOD handle the rusty/damaged stuff, always test the burn rate of the actual fuse you intend to use, don't lay down your fuse in a big ole coil, fuse so long that if you twist your ankle the medics could haul you out, don't try to do multiple pits at one time (in an effort to avoid dealing with range control, whom seem universally to be a PITA), etc. And a lot of distance safety rules, which boil down to if you're not walking far enough to get sweaty, its probably not safe enough.
And, of course, you can drop them, bump them, hammer them, shock them, etc... without blowing it up. Try that with C4
With the exception of hammer and electrical shock, you can pretty much do that to bulk C4 without serious harm. You can also burn it, although the fumes are quite toxic. Note that C-4 is a very specific chemical substance that is a plastic explosive. Its entirely possible that another plastic explosive, say, PETN det cord, is much more sensitive to shock than bulk C-4. From memory, ANFO is harmless in sub-ton quantities without a very hefty booster.
Three people at a test reactor is sad but pretty small potatoes compared to the Scorpion, Thresher, and the six Russian/Soviet subs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_nuclear_submarines
The conclusion at the end was pretty ignorant.
This small sampling of harrowing accounts clearly chinks the counter-intuitive and commonly argued position that nuclear weapons actually make the world a safer place. It reminds us that the shattering blast and fiery rain of a nuclear detonation may not occur because of war, terrorism, or miscalculation, but rather, because of something more common: an "accident."
Nuclear deterrence / M.A.D. theory has never been proposed as a way to prevent "A" individual nuclear detonation, so the article claiming that they've somehow proven it is not exactly insightful. However, it is a very reasonable and successful way to prevent "ALL" nukes from detonating aka full out total nuclear strategic warfare WWIII.
The Shuttle is going away, and with it one of the very few ways of transporting big equipment racks up & down.
Up, not much of a problem. Progress hauls 2400 Kg up per shot (plus or minus a Raduga capsule, depending on particular variation launched, etc). That's enough for a rack full of stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_(spacecraft)
Down, BIG problem. Raduga hauls 150 Kg per shot and is physically much smaller. Also, despite being a simple reentry vehicle, vaporizes on re-entry about 1/4 of the time. Makes you wonder how reliable are soviet ICBMs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBK-Raduga
Big whoop. People have been making much better products for ages. Don't need huge grants. Add bodily fluids and bake for 9 months.
You're forgetting the 14 to 18 year delay after the 9 months before being legal for most slashdotters purposes.
What is the point of trying to make something as close to human as possible?
Well, aside from pr0n type activities, the first thing that came to mind was womens clothing mannequins. I remember in the 80s or so there was a very strange theme in mannequins of sort of silvery styrofoam abstract art old-school cylon-ish. But now a days the mannequins I see at the mall are mostly tan/brown paint headless or faceless young women, which is also bit weird, sort of a multicultural texas chainsaw massacre theme.
I'm imagining, instead of trying to sell "urban-ware" to rich white suburban kids on unmoving old fashioned mannequins, they'll have these real-doll type things wearing the clothes and doing hip-hop dance moves in time with the store's music system.
Or put them in a cage at a bar and have them dance, as long as the electricity holds out.
Shouldn't they be trying to make something that does things humans can't do?
Been there, done that. Check out a modern (Japanese) car factory. The "science" so to speak is long done, although engineering work remains to make them cheaper.
And why is his theory so grand?
"You can call me Al"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Call_Me_Al
Great because it hit #23 on the charts.
I think you're missing the point. Other than theological arguments, which I don't personally believe in, something that cannot be observed or perceived or tested, just simply doesn't exist. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall?
If a fourth spatial dimension existed, however weakly interacting with the other three, it would still interact in some way, for example, some of the scalar temperature heat "wiggle" would wiggle its way into the 4th spatial dimension. So, you figure out the scalar velocity of a vapor by some kinetic gas theories, some CFD, some thermodynamics, whatever, and get 100 m/s avg speed. Then you actually measure how fast an individual particle goes. It averages 99 m/s. Where's the remaining 1 m/s? It turned into wiggle in the 4th dimension. Enough cycles of theory and experiment later, and you have proven 4 spatial dimensions. Except, of course, that doesn't work. You can do similar quantum mechanical electron orbitals, measure moon/planetary/stellar orbits, etc. It (almost) never comes up short, or there are perfectly valid extenuating circumstances. Leading to the almost certain scientific conclusion there are only 3 spatial dimensions.
I was unaware that physics had shown that there wasn't a 4th dimension. I'm not sure how physics or physicists could prove this.
There's a lot of DoF thermodynamics calculations that prove, that at least at some scales of distance and energy, any extra dimensions must either not exist or interact a remarkably small amount with the other three. For instance, a rough definition of temperature is wiggling/flying in three dimensions, you can predict exactly how fast gas atoms should move at a certain temp, and interestingly enough when you resolve their movement into 3-d vectors the graph pretty much matches up. So either they don't exist, which is the simplest explanation, or at the very least, at the scales in the experiment they interact so minimally as to be irrelevant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(physics_and_chemistry)
There's also some weird cosmological stuff you can do on the extremely large scale to prove there's probably only 3 space dimensions.
So that pretty much rules a 4th space dimension out, from molecular scale up to astronomical scale. Maybe not at string theory subatomic scale. Maybe.
Why would it be morally wrong to drive without a seatbelt? It's against the law in many places, but that doesn't make it morally wrong.
Wearing a seatbelt is a public declaration that someone doesn't care if everyone else has to pay more for their health care costs after their accident. Sort of like "threat of conspicuous consumption of everyone elses money". It is, to some extent, a zero sum world, and we have a moral obligation not to decide to waste each others money. To a limited extent, its like the "tragedy of the commons" argument, look at me, I declare I will take way more than my "fair share" of the common healthcare resources. I'm gonna lay in the hospital bed, just so you can't, ha ha ha.
You can pig out in private, abuse drugs in private, not exercise in private, but theres no way to "not wear a seatbelt" in private. Its a pretty aggressive in-your-face statement to everyone else about how much the driver respects the contents of everyone else's wallet. Antisocial.
Is it a major moral crisis? No. Does there need to be a law? No. But it is at least a minor moral failing.
TMS works by using quickly-changing magnetic fields to induce electric fields and neural firing.
So, if instead of blasting "yer moral compass" (ha ha) you blasted the area responsible for vision or hearing, what would you perceive? Can it be modulated around a couple Hz or so?
And, can you buy one of these TMS things cheap? And is it portable enough to take to a rave? I smell a business opportunity forming. Either that, or a really bad idea forming. Not sure which yet.
I can't think of anything that's morally wrong that doesn't cause harm.
Cheat in a game of Solitaire? Its "wrong" to cheat, but nothing bad could possibly happen as a result?
Q*Bert?
well, thats an interesting image. You may want a Dr to check that out.
I always thought it much more of a "tube shooter" like Tempest or Torus Trooper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(arcade_game)
Through the use of roadside parking,
Good news is cars drive slower.
Bad news is more dead children from running between parked cars.
If the whole point is making the street less safe, thus they drive slower, couldn't they do it cheaper by just installing lots of potholes or not salting the roads in the winter so as to build up a thick ice layer?
I think that if the order came down from DC to 'turn off' the internet, it would be delayed and partially ignored.
That's for sure. Tell a network admin to do something, and at least a couple percent will screw it up, forget it, do it improperly, screw up the filtering, etc. Even if you give them cut-n-paste configs and a hard deadline, I'm sure at least 5% will not successfully implement it.
There is no centralized 'internet switch' to turn off.
Simply pass a law, that all AS in the USA must BGP peer with a certain govt AS and must not filter routes from that peer (unlike virtually every other intelligent network admin whom does filter their incoming routes from peers). Then when "they" want to, advertise a 0/0 route to shut 'er down. Not too complicated.
Not to mention the hacking opportunity this presents. Yes, I am sure there will be many many layers of security....but still.....if the president can do it, then someone else can also do it.
Humorously, as you'd expect, the number of grotesque BGP accidents has VASTLY exceeded the number of successful hacks.
Over the past couple decades (and I've been there) incompetence has been a much more successful threat than the hackers.
If Obama thinks he's going to be the first dude to try to advertise a 0/0 route into BGP, he doesn't have a lot of experience in the art and science of network engineering.
Send enough people packing and the rest will get the message.
The message being big corporations need to donate/bribe both sides to maintain control regardless of which figurehead wins. I think they already got that message.
You really think darknets will remain legal much longer?
Its just a non-corporate VPN, more or less. Going to VERY hard to ban darknets without inadvertently banning VPNs.
in order to allow emergency personnel to have dependable access, they
... contact their pals at Akamai? Its kind of a solved problem, you know.
And dependable access to what, 4chan?