Orthogonal concepts. Its libel if it makes the plaintiff look bad, which is fairly irrelevant to truth or falsehood.
Some legal systems (by no means all) allow truth as a defense, pretty much "just because". But there's no logical connection, and certainly there are legal systems that do not allow truth as a defense, again pretty much "just because".
Then there are other defenses, some of which seem to apply to CoS such as being "incapable of further defamation", "Fair comment on a matter of public interest", "Statements made in a good faith and reasonable belief that they were true", "No actual injury".
All the defenses against libel vaguely revolve around either increasing tax revenues (by collecting income tax from the journalist/muckraking establishment, which would otherwise be destroyed) or around not wasting the courts time on what amounts to BS, aka attempting to eliminate "SLAPP lawsuits" etc. None of the reasoning for libel defenses is particularly concerned with the moral superiority of "truth".
To alter your body (tattoos, organ donations) is to desecrate it (the temple of God) is to disrespect God. So you could donate your organs, but you couldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetery, which as far as I can tell is their form of excommunication.
What did they do with all the concentration camp survivors, whom in my ignorance I believe were tattooed against their will?
My guess is they got a free pass since it was against their will.
So, simply have the secular govt pass a law that tough s**t everyone is going to donate and most certainly not of their free will. Everyone benefits, the recipients, the govt whom saved them, and the over-controlling taliban types get something to complain about (controversy always benefits religion).
You need to teach them flowcharts. Teach them a little about sorting algorithms. With respect to databases, they should at least know what the acronym CRUD stands for. At least introduce them to the name "Don Knuth" if not pull some simple examples from his books. They really need to know about common bugs like off by one errors, etc. Have at least a short discussion about each line of:
The folks telling you to teach then the vi editor or python or javascript whatever are confusing the trees with the forest. Learning to program by memorizing Stroustrup is like learning to drive by memorizing the Chilton technical manual, interesting, but a complete waste of time. On the other hand, a kid with a plan will succeed even if all they can write in is BASIC. A kid who knows Shakespeare can write something interesting with a crayon, at least compared to an idiot in front of the worlds most powerful word processor.
The kids also need to learn the patterns and anti-patterns, for obvious reasons.
The situation, of course, is that a player might simply lie about not knowing where enemy units are, or might substitute a different map, or might lie about which units he has killed or where his units are located.
When it comes time to show the cards (we will ignore the issue of exchanging cards; this is also possible to do, using a similar procedure), players 1 and 2 simple reveal their secret keys -- thus, cheating is easily detected, because player 2 can see if player 1 lied about his hand, and visa versa.
I don't think your plan would help detect players whom lie about enemy units.
Assuming the whole point is the actions are public but some items are hidden, and you want to prevent substitution, you'd just hash, sign, and share your interpretation of the gameboard at each move, and then at the end, when its time to reveal the board and tally up and see who won, you reverse engineer what the board should be at each step working backwards, recompute the hashes, and make sure the provided and calculated hashes match, and the sigs are valid? That would catch any odd substitutions that you mention.
Any way you look at it, if both computers have the information of every unit, a hack can be made. Now you can have counter hacks by security professionals to identify hackers and ban them.
Good luck using technical means to identify the guys using a passive protocol analyzer to watch the data.
To catch any collusion, maybe over a telephone or whatever, analyze player behavior to see if they make the correct decision too often, as if using "hidden" data. Kind of like they do in Vegas. But that's not "counter hacking" by "security professionals" or whatever, that's just common sense. The really good cheaters will only cheat once per game at the most important moment... you'll never catch them, and if you do, they'll claim to be following a "hunch" or "guessing".
What are the parts that, in your projects, you would be relieved if someone else looked at for you?
How about unreproducible bugs?
I hate the whole situation.
The bug reports; "Uh, I got an error or something when I tried to run it" "OK, what was the error" "I don't know" "So how do you know theres a problem?"
Failing to reproduce the error. This ties in with the "prove a negative" problem. When to give up? Just document what I'm doing and hope for the best, I guess.
Problems that are probably specification failures but you can't prove it. Closely tied to mystery black boxes that do something, but no one is entirely certain what. Even funnier when there isn't really a spec, just kind of a goal. Best of all, when two groups make opposing policy decisions and want you to consider each other's design to be a bug.
When to close out the hopeless bug. Well, it doesn't hurt anything to keep it open. But bean counters like easily counted beans, like how many open bugs. Will I insult the submitter by closing it? Some 3rd party weirdos like to get involved at that stage, "I'm morally superior to you because I never give up on a bug like you did, ha ha ha" while the reality of the situation is they merely have more spare time, a poor self image, and a desire to very publicly display it. aka the "ticket ss" "I am morally superior and I say we will have order here! Order! Achtung!"
Finally, last but not least, circumstantially, crazy/insane people seem to encounter more unreproducible bugs than typical people. Don't know if they're more ornery so the tend to report more, or more creative so they tend to find more, but I do know they're a pain to deal with.
The shuttle's promised capability of "bringing cargo back" is a bygone requirement of the days when retrieving a spy satellite was needed to recover the film. How many payloads did the shuttle actually BRING BACK, compared to how many times did it come back with an essentially empty cargo bay, thus purely wasting the space?
I doubt that you personally inspected the cargo hold after each classified military shuttle mission. Anyway, the wikipedia page you're looking for is:
The situation would imply that, at least in low earth orbit, the USSR was violating some earth orbit treaty, or was planning to do so, and we knew it via some "special means" but needed a public way to wave a geiger counter nearby their satellite to prove it. That, or, we just wanted to shooo them out of low earth orbit.
A lack of USSR spy satellite launches into low orbit during the shuttle program, is just possibly, a side effect of the existence of the shuttle, not just some random unfortunate unexplainable quantum fluctuation that unfortunately made the shuttle useless, like you seem to imply.
Wings on a space cargo mover add a lot of unnecessary weight that people should have concluded is more detrimental than useful. The space industry has ways to launch objects without big, heavy wings and even without a crew.
Oh, they've got plenty of ways to launch stuff without those big ole wings.
Amusingly, you're missing that the only possible use for wings on a re-entry vehicle is military...
The shuttle had them for two military reasons. The USAF kicked in a bunch of cash, or at least promised to, in exchange for:
1) Massive LANDING capacity. Grab that low earth orbit USSR spy satellite and examine it at your leisure. The USSR response is of course high earth orbit, making them less effective, and wasting satellite mass on things like self destruct systems. Much like nuclear weapons, the plan was never to actually use it, but to manipulate the other side's behavior... Why the USAR wanted the USSR out of low earth orbit in the 70s is a mystery to me. Maybe discourage orbital bombardment or space based ground attack lasers or something.
2) Abort once around and very strange orbit and reentry profiles. So you launch, do whatever cloak and dagger stuff you want, then you want to immediately land, like "NOW". Meanwhile the earth rotates underneath you. So put big old wings on to glide. So what if the L/D ratio averages only 3:1 if you start 200 miles up, that's 600 miles crossrange. Since the shuttle program promised everything to everyone, I'm sure a shuttle-class runway is accessible every 1200 miles or so, at least with a lot of imagination and creative hot-dog piloting. Also, if the Bulgarians threaten to shoot down any military overflight spacecraft, you can simply pick a bizarre orbit to avoid them, with a bizarre reentry requiring some gliding around. The ability to land anywhere at any time somewhat limits their ability to screw around with us, including watching our vehicles with their telescopes. Extra glide range adds a lot of capability to military flight plans. Civilians, of course, would simply wait and deorbit at a better time/place, but the military "needs" more capability.
In many ways, there's still nothing else like it. It is a whole universe, created from scratch. Not just an extrapolation of our own, and not just the pieces you need to see for the story. Humans are common, but not special in any particular way..... There are lots of places where a race is shown once, in a background character, and never seen again.
Lord of the Rings did it first, and better. Also, Ringworld, to some extent.
Note, about 95% of the population does not realize the LOTR series was a book for some decades before the recent movies. I've actually heard people refer to the LOTR books as being "novelizations of the movies". Um, no.
I have to imagine there was a reason the governments of the world went with radio frequencies like that for GPS and its non-US equivalents
Err, you mean the electrical engineers of the world...
So, its vaguely in the 1.5 GHz area. Lets try a proof by induction type thing and try going higher or lower.
If we dropped to 150 MHz, we'd get much better indoor reception, but the wavelength would be ten times larger, accuracy would probably be 10 times worse just on that account. Plus the blasted ionosphere is beginning to get frisky as low as 150 MHz and that'll REALLY screw it up. And there is a lot more interference at 150 MHz than 1.5 GHz.
If we cranked her up to 15 GHz water attenuation is becoming a severe issue. Above 20 or so GHz you may as well forget extremely long distance propagation thru the atmosphere except for special conditions due to water attenuation. Usable for ham radio in certain conditions, sure. Usable for radar systems trying to bounce off the clouds, great. Also radio parts increase in cost in the microwave area at a rate much faster then the increase in frequency. So, the radio related parts are going to be well over ten times as expensive. Not sure what fraction of a $50 GPS engine is RF and what fraction is floating point trig and fancy timing stuff.
No don't get me wrong, I see the applications of Augmented Reality. I don't get the applications of Augmented Reality Games
Garmin GPS units, for something like a decade, have come with built in games where you physically run around an empty field playing tron or a couple other games. Putting those games in a augmented reality HUD would probably work better than looking at the screen while you run around.
For that matter, those whom geocache, or waypoint, or that lat/long grid intersection collecting "game" would probably like an AR interface when searching. It would be less inconvenient.
This is all aside from the fairly obvious LARP applications.
I suppose you could play paintball without using actual paint. Of course, I believe they call that "laser tag"
I think it would be hilarious fun to play a AR tag game with only three rules. 1) you're playing tag 2) Follow all laws or get DQ 3) If a non-player notices you're playing then you get DQ.
Lets be realistic here, the primary use of AR games, will probably be to upgrade how the other players look. Essentially, realtime CGI pr0n. If you can "upgrade" what the other players look like, I expect huge popularity in the beach volleyball sector.
Special kind of birth certificate?! What drugs are you on? There's only one kind of birth certificate in the U.S
Apparently not the good drugs, or at least my birth cert wasn't acid blotter.
My passport expires in a year, its been 9 years. But, as I recall, it was a month or so to get rejected and find out the cert that I used for decades wasn't "good enough", I needed to send away for one with some special sticker/seal or embossment or watermark or special parchment copy or some such BS. It was about a month or so to get a new BC and a month or so to get the passport on the second try. It took "about one season" from thinking about getting it, to actually holding my passport in my sweaty little hands. I was previously informed the hardest part of visiting Ireland would be getting my passport, so I did nothing else until I was physically holding my new passport, so it didn't mess up my travel schedule very much.
We got the birth certificate for my daughter, and her U.S. passport -- it took about 1.5 months total, nothing special about it, and I just can't see how is the middle class being punished here?
If passport level security was good enough, we would be calling this new ID card a "passport card" which you get as per above, except almost a decade ago it took about three or four months. This is either going to be tougher, in which case good luck, or its going to be more expensive, so as to funnel money to haliburton or some other corrupt contractor.
How long did it take to get my T/S clearance when I was in the military in the early 90s? Something like a year? I was in the reserves so I didn't care I was on undeployable status. That's what I'm talking about.
If a minor little hiccup means four extra months of unemployment, I'm scared about what a major malfunction could cause.
Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.)
Or, could exceed their monthly bandwidth "cap" in 155 microseconds. So, what good is it?
In most sane and civilized contexts, "Cowboy" is not a compliment.
Not fair to quote out of context. The problem is your subgroup of "sane and civilized contexts", has devolved into behavior that he (accurately and eloquently) describes as "legal bullshittery and political asshatting". Being aggressively rebellious against that sort of behavior is very complimentary.
Please do not compare a mass of cells to a human being. They are not the same thing.
Not fair to only look at the start of life. How bout the end? That brings up all kinds of fun arguments about vegetative states, and the exact date and time you can euthanize an Alzheimer patient.
But the main problem is, your argument is nothing more than "TooMuchToDo" says so. If you got too much to do, slow down a bit and take the time to enlighten us, not just preach.
Except that under the law one has to actually be born to become a citizen and gain the rights of citizenship.
You sure about that dude, "born" like corporations? Don't forget, corporations are citizens too, in fact superior to us second class human being "consumers" since they are above most criminal law, cannot be imprisoned, etc. I can think of several corporations that need aborting, if you'd like to collect their "stem cells". SCO, GM, Goldman Sachs, etc etc etc.
managed to screw up their medical coverage of that condition so they ended up dying in pain and broke
Wait a second, at first you said this dude was a doctor, but then you give the job description of an insurance company, especially the last bit of my quote.
Or, if we accept that everyone eventually ends up like that, regardless of this doctors actions, then what exactly is the downside of what this dude is doing? That they died in a great adventure? That they didn't die for nothing? That both the dr and the patients had more guts than the average pile of quivering flesh and we're all supposed to be conforming cowards, thus they're bad examples for us?
she'd gladly trade a risk of dying of cancer a couple of decades from now
If they're alive, they already have a chance to develop cancer.
Everyone alive now, has a risk of dying of cancer a couple decades from now, unless they already have a short term terminal diagnosis or are very elderly (someone in their 90s now will almost certainly will not live another half century, etc)
Look at how effective printing "The surgeon general has determined that... a dramatically higher chance of cancer" on cigarette packs has been.
You can scare people with one per ten million sticking accelerators. You can scare them into anything by telling them there's a terrorist hiding behind every tree stump. They even verbally say they're scared of cancer because they know its the culturally correct thing to say. But in practice, virtually no healthy, non elderly people are genuinely scared of cancer to the point that it'll affect their decisions, even if their relatives die of it.
Isn't it much easier to cut a cancer out, than to wish flesh into existence? Cancer of the tendon or whatever isn't all that common anyway.
Now realize the cancer rate will NOT be zero, because the cancer rate of human flesh, natural or otherwise, is not zero. Therefore people whom get stem cell therapy will get cancer and die. Therefore, their Drs will get sued out existence. That will be the problem.
They are in violation of the agreement after all for disclosing it.
Too many people like NASA, that would be bad PR.
However, I expect thats the last app from the government that will ever be approved. Now those apps can still be developed and operated by 3rd parties upon contract by the govt, but we'll probably never see an "official census dept historical genealogy app", which is too bad.
Not going to work. International treaties specify how passports work. Some customs inspector in Zimbabwe can read and stamp your passport, but would have no idea what to do with a plastic card.
Also, if its electronic, you can erase stuff, and historically there is nothing arab nations customs inspectors like better than to harass people with Israeli stamps in their passports (and probably vice versa). They will not be amused with the idea of erasable entries. And of course, if you can intentionally erase entries, you can accidentally erase entries. And if you can accidentally erase entries, it'll be mighty hard to prove anything was intentionally erased. So whats the point of stamping an electronic passport anyway, since only non-crooks will bother?
but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs
Well, that's scary. You could easily form a permanent underclass of never-employable again people with that plan.
There's no point to getting a card unless its more effective than a passport or drivers license or military ID, or my freaking passport would be good enough so we wouldn't need this new thing. It took months to get my passport, including all kinds of hoops to jump thru for notarization and some special kind of birth certificate and other foolishness involving the local postmaster. I assume this new thing will be worse, otherwise we wouldn't need it. Its a safe assumption that in general, any time the govt does anything, its to make it worse for the middle class, and this specific situation seems to fit the mold.
For a upper middle class employed dude like myself, a couple months time and a couple thousand bucks is annoying but no big deal, similar to replacing a leaking roof and fixing the damage. For dirt poor, unemployed, barely HS educated, how-mucha-month, joe six pack, he's screwed. What if J6P needs to hire a lawyer to fix some paperwork, or needs to pay up front to get docs from various agencies to prove his existence?
Actually, I have the definition of supercritical wrong. I had confounded it with superheated. Supercritical is a substance that is above its critical point, where the liquid and gas phases combine.
Supercritical temp for toluene is only about 600 degrees F... not a heck of a lot hotter than a kitchen oven. I wonder how hot this thing gets. Your typo may inadvertently be correct. I'm curious how this technology handles different gasoline mixes over time and location. For example, in some states, "old gas magically turns into varnish" but that never happens in Wisconsin, probably because we get a different mix.
Admittedly I've never heard a good explanation of why, if some brands/mixes of gas magically turns into varnish merely by being stored, genuine hardware store varnish costs a heck of a lot more per gallon than gas.
You can use a single card for all your key access needs, including ecash payments, subway, rail, and event tickets? I thought not.
I would consider that a huge downgrade, a major security hole. Right now, every pimply teenager whom has access to my credit card has total control of my financial life with little legal liability to themselves. Thankfully, most people, even kids, are basically honest. And, even if I end up ruined, its only money.
With the new system, plus some conventional traditional MITM attacks, every scummy transportation operator, event operator, and scummy employer will be able to open my front door or enter my car whenever they want. As a guy that just means I'll be purchasing more shotgun shells or filling out more insurance paperwork, but I really can't see this appealing to women very much. Chicks don't like the idea that every creepy dude at work would essentially have access to a master key to their homes and cars.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not libel when it's true.
Orthogonal concepts. Its libel if it makes the plaintiff look bad, which is fairly irrelevant to truth or falsehood.
Some legal systems (by no means all) allow truth as a defense, pretty much "just because". But there's no logical connection, and certainly there are legal systems that do not allow truth as a defense, again pretty much "just because".
Then there are other defenses, some of which seem to apply to CoS such as being "incapable of further defamation", "Fair comment on a matter of public interest", "Statements made in a good faith and reasonable belief that they were true", "No actual injury".
All the defenses against libel vaguely revolve around either increasing tax revenues (by collecting income tax from the journalist/muckraking establishment, which would otherwise be destroyed) or around not wasting the courts time on what amounts to BS, aka attempting to eliminate "SLAPP lawsuits" etc. None of the reasoning for libel defenses is particularly concerned with the moral superiority of "truth".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#Truth
To alter your body (tattoos, organ donations) is to desecrate it (the temple of God) is to disrespect God. So you could donate your organs, but you couldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetery, which as far as I can tell is their form of excommunication.
What did they do with all the concentration camp survivors, whom in my ignorance I believe were tattooed against their will?
My guess is they got a free pass since it was against their will.
So, simply have the secular govt pass a law that tough s**t everyone is going to donate and most certainly not of their free will. Everyone benefits, the recipients, the govt whom saved them, and the over-controlling taliban types get something to complain about (controversy always benefits religion).
You need to teach them flowcharts. Teach them a little about sorting algorithms. With respect to databases, they should at least know what the acronym CRUD stands for. At least introduce them to the name "Don Knuth" if not pull some simple examples from his books. They really need to know about common bugs like off by one errors, etc. Have at least a short discussion about each line of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug#Common_types_of_computer_bugs
The folks telling you to teach then the vi editor or python or javascript whatever are confusing the trees with the forest. Learning to program by memorizing Stroustrup is like learning to drive by memorizing the Chilton technical manual, interesting, but a complete waste of time. On the other hand, a kid with a plan will succeed even if all they can write in is BASIC. A kid who knows Shakespeare can write something interesting with a crayon, at least compared to an idiot in front of the worlds most powerful word processor.
The kids also need to learn the patterns and anti-patterns, for obvious reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)
awesome - somebody should make this a real language. Who knows, maybe even me.
L8 2 DA PARTY. CAN HAZ IMPLEMENTATIONS?
http://lolcode.com/implementations/implementations
The situation, of course, is that a player might simply lie about not knowing where enemy units are, or might substitute a different map, or might lie about which units he has killed or where his units are located.
When it comes time to show the cards (we will ignore the issue of exchanging cards; this is also possible to do, using a similar procedure), players 1 and 2 simple reveal their secret keys -- thus, cheating is easily detected, because player 2 can see if player 1 lied about his hand, and visa versa.
I don't think your plan would help detect players whom lie about enemy units.
Assuming the whole point is the actions are public but some items are hidden, and you want to prevent substitution, you'd just hash, sign, and share your interpretation of the gameboard at each move, and then at the end, when its time to reveal the board and tally up and see who won, you reverse engineer what the board should be at each step working backwards, recompute the hashes, and make sure the provided and calculated hashes match, and the sigs are valid? That would catch any odd substitutions that you mention.
Any way you look at it, if both computers have the information of every unit, a hack can be made. Now you can have counter hacks by security professionals to identify hackers and ban them.
Good luck using technical means to identify the guys using a passive protocol analyzer to watch the data.
To catch any collusion, maybe over a telephone or whatever, analyze player behavior to see if they make the correct decision too often, as if using "hidden" data. Kind of like they do in Vegas. But that's not "counter hacking" by "security professionals" or whatever, that's just common sense. The really good cheaters will only cheat once per game at the most important moment... you'll never catch them, and if you do, they'll claim to be following a "hunch" or "guessing".
What are the parts that, in your projects, you would be relieved if someone else looked at for you?
How about unreproducible bugs?
I hate the whole situation.
The bug reports; "Uh, I got an error or something when I tried to run it" "OK, what was the error" "I don't know" "So how do you know theres a problem?"
Failing to reproduce the error. This ties in with the "prove a negative" problem. When to give up? Just document what I'm doing and hope for the best, I guess.
Problems that are probably specification failures but you can't prove it. Closely tied to mystery black boxes that do something, but no one is entirely certain what. Even funnier when there isn't really a spec, just kind of a goal. Best of all, when two groups make opposing policy decisions and want you to consider each other's design to be a bug.
When to close out the hopeless bug. Well, it doesn't hurt anything to keep it open. But bean counters like easily counted beans, like how many open bugs. Will I insult the submitter by closing it? Some 3rd party weirdos like to get involved at that stage, "I'm morally superior to you because I never give up on a bug like you did, ha ha ha" while the reality of the situation is they merely have more spare time, a poor self image, and a desire to very publicly display it. aka the "ticket ss" "I am morally superior and I say we will have order here! Order! Achtung!"
Finally, last but not least, circumstantially, crazy/insane people seem to encounter more unreproducible bugs than typical people. Don't know if they're more ornery so the tend to report more, or more creative so they tend to find more, but I do know they're a pain to deal with.
Other than that, its not so bad.
The shuttle's promised capability of "bringing cargo back" is a bygone requirement of the days when retrieving a spy satellite was needed to recover the film. How many payloads did the shuttle actually BRING BACK, compared to how many times did it come back with an essentially empty cargo bay, thus purely wasting the space?
I doubt that you personally inspected the cargo hold after each classified military shuttle mission. Anyway, the wikipedia page you're looking for is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_theory
The situation would imply that, at least in low earth orbit, the USSR was violating some earth orbit treaty, or was planning to do so, and we knew it via some "special means" but needed a public way to wave a geiger counter nearby their satellite to prove it. That, or, we just wanted to shooo them out of low earth orbit.
A lack of USSR spy satellite launches into low orbit during the shuttle program, is just possibly, a side effect of the existence of the shuttle, not just some random unfortunate unexplainable quantum fluctuation that unfortunately made the shuttle useless, like you seem to imply.
Wings on a space cargo mover add a lot of unnecessary weight that people should have concluded is more detrimental than useful. The space industry has ways to launch objects without big, heavy wings and even without a crew.
Oh, they've got plenty of ways to launch stuff without those big ole wings.
Amusingly, you're missing that the only possible use for wings on a re-entry vehicle is military...
The shuttle had them for two military reasons. The USAF kicked in a bunch of cash, or at least promised to, in exchange for:
1) Massive LANDING capacity. Grab that low earth orbit USSR spy satellite and examine it at your leisure. The USSR response is of course high earth orbit, making them less effective, and wasting satellite mass on things like self destruct systems. Much like nuclear weapons, the plan was never to actually use it, but to manipulate the other side's behavior... Why the USAR wanted the USSR out of low earth orbit in the 70s is a mystery to me. Maybe discourage orbital bombardment or space based ground attack lasers or something.
2) Abort once around and very strange orbit and reentry profiles. So you launch, do whatever cloak and dagger stuff you want, then you want to immediately land, like "NOW". Meanwhile the earth rotates underneath you. So put big old wings on to glide. So what if the L/D ratio averages only 3:1 if you start 200 miles up, that's 600 miles crossrange. Since the shuttle program promised everything to everyone, I'm sure a shuttle-class runway is accessible every 1200 miles or so, at least with a lot of imagination and creative hot-dog piloting. Also, if the Bulgarians threaten to shoot down any military overflight spacecraft, you can simply pick a bizarre orbit to avoid them, with a bizarre reentry requiring some gliding around. The ability to land anywhere at any time somewhat limits their ability to screw around with us, including watching our vehicles with their telescopes. Extra glide range adds a lot of capability to military flight plans. Civilians, of course, would simply wait and deorbit at a better time/place, but the military "needs" more capability.
In many ways, there's still nothing else like it. It is a whole universe, created from scratch. Not just an extrapolation of our own, and not just the pieces you need to see for the story. Humans are common, but not special in any particular way. .... There are lots of places where a race is shown once, in a background character, and never seen again.
Lord of the Rings did it first, and better. Also, Ringworld, to some extent.
Note, about 95% of the population does not realize the LOTR series was a book for some decades before the recent movies. I've actually heard people refer to the LOTR books as being "novelizations of the movies". Um, no.
I have to imagine there was a reason the governments of the world went with radio frequencies like that for GPS and its non-US equivalents
Err, you mean the electrical engineers of the world...
So, its vaguely in the 1.5 GHz area. Lets try a proof by induction type thing and try going higher or lower.
If we dropped to 150 MHz, we'd get much better indoor reception, but the wavelength would be ten times larger, accuracy would probably be 10 times worse just on that account. Plus the blasted ionosphere is beginning to get frisky as low as 150 MHz and that'll REALLY screw it up. And there is a lot more interference at 150 MHz than 1.5 GHz.
If we cranked her up to 15 GHz water attenuation is becoming a severe issue. Above 20 or so GHz you may as well forget extremely long distance propagation thru the atmosphere except for special conditions due to water attenuation. Usable for ham radio in certain conditions, sure. Usable for radar systems trying to bounce off the clouds, great. Also radio parts increase in cost in the microwave area at a rate much faster then the increase in frequency. So, the radio related parts are going to be well over ten times as expensive. Not sure what fraction of a $50 GPS engine is RF and what fraction is floating point trig and fancy timing stuff.
Hard to select a band better than 1.5 GHZ...
No don't get me wrong, I see the applications of Augmented Reality. I don't get the applications of Augmented Reality Games
Garmin GPS units, for something like a decade, have come with built in games where you physically run around an empty field playing tron or a couple other games. Putting those games in a augmented reality HUD would probably work better than looking at the screen while you run around.
For that matter, those whom geocache, or waypoint, or that lat/long grid intersection collecting "game" would probably like an AR interface when searching. It would be less inconvenient.
This is all aside from the fairly obvious LARP applications.
I suppose you could play paintball without using actual paint. Of course, I believe they call that "laser tag"
I think it would be hilarious fun to play a AR tag game with only three rules. 1) you're playing tag 2) Follow all laws or get DQ 3) If a non-player notices you're playing then you get DQ.
Lets be realistic here, the primary use of AR games, will probably be to upgrade how the other players look. Essentially, realtime CGI pr0n. If you can "upgrade" what the other players look like, I expect huge popularity in the beach volleyball sector.
Special kind of birth certificate?! What drugs are you on? There's only one kind of birth certificate in the U.S
Apparently not the good drugs, or at least my birth cert wasn't acid blotter.
My passport expires in a year, its been 9 years. But, as I recall, it was a month or so to get rejected and find out the cert that I used for decades wasn't "good enough", I needed to send away for one with some special sticker/seal or embossment or watermark or special parchment copy or some such BS. It was about a month or so to get a new BC and a month or so to get the passport on the second try. It took "about one season" from thinking about getting it, to actually holding my passport in my sweaty little hands. I was previously informed the hardest part of visiting Ireland would be getting my passport, so I did nothing else until I was physically holding my new passport, so it didn't mess up my travel schedule very much.
We got the birth certificate for my daughter, and her U.S. passport -- it took about 1.5 months total, nothing special about it, and I just can't see how is the middle class being punished here?
If passport level security was good enough, we would be calling this new ID card a "passport card" which you get as per above, except almost a decade ago it took about three or four months. This is either going to be tougher, in which case good luck, or its going to be more expensive, so as to funnel money to haliburton or some other corrupt contractor.
How long did it take to get my T/S clearance when I was in the military in the early 90s? Something like a year? I was in the reserves so I didn't care I was on undeployable status. That's what I'm talking about.
If a minor little hiccup means four extra months of unemployment, I'm scared about what a major malfunction could cause.
Using a CRS-3, every person in China, which has a population just over 1.3 billion, could participate in a video phone call at the same time. (Or you could pump nearly one Library of Congress per second through the device, or give everyone in San Fransisco a 1Gbps internet connection.)
Or, could exceed their monthly bandwidth "cap" in 155 microseconds. So, what good is it?
In most sane and civilized contexts, "Cowboy" is not a compliment.
Not fair to quote out of context. The problem is your subgroup of "sane and civilized contexts", has devolved into behavior that he (accurately and eloquently) describes as "legal bullshittery and political asshatting". Being aggressively rebellious against that sort of behavior is very complimentary.
Please do not compare a mass of cells to a human being. They are not the same thing.
Not fair to only look at the start of life. How bout the end? That brings up all kinds of fun arguments about vegetative states, and the exact date and time you can euthanize an Alzheimer patient.
But the main problem is, your argument is nothing more than "TooMuchToDo" says so. If you got too much to do, slow down a bit and take the time to enlighten us, not just preach.
Except that under the law one has to actually be born to become a citizen and gain the rights of citizenship.
You sure about that dude, "born" like corporations? Don't forget, corporations are citizens too, in fact superior to us second class human being "consumers" since they are above most criminal law, cannot be imprisoned, etc. I can think of several corporations that need aborting, if you'd like to collect their "stem cells". SCO, GM, Goldman Sachs, etc etc etc.
managed to screw up their medical coverage of that condition so they ended up dying in pain and broke
Wait a second, at first you said this dude was a doctor, but then you give the job description of an insurance company, especially the last bit of my quote.
Or, if we accept that everyone eventually ends up like that, regardless of this doctors actions, then what exactly is the downside of what this dude is doing? That they died in a great adventure? That they didn't die for nothing? That both the dr and the patients had more guts than the average pile of quivering flesh and we're all supposed to be conforming cowards, thus they're bad examples for us?
but a chance they could eventually develop cancer
she'd gladly trade a risk of dying of cancer a couple of decades from now
If they're alive, they already have a chance to develop cancer.
Everyone alive now, has a risk of dying of cancer a couple decades from now, unless they already have a short term terminal diagnosis or are very elderly (someone in their 90s now will almost certainly will not live another half century, etc)
Look at how effective printing "The surgeon general has determined that ... a dramatically higher chance of cancer" on cigarette packs has been.
You can scare people with one per ten million sticking accelerators. You can scare them into anything by telling them there's a terrorist hiding behind every tree stump. They even verbally say they're scared of cancer because they know its the culturally correct thing to say. But in practice, virtually no healthy, non elderly people are genuinely scared of cancer to the point that it'll affect their decisions, even if their relatives die of it.
Isn't it much easier to cut a cancer out, than to wish flesh into existence? Cancer of the tendon or whatever isn't all that common anyway.
Now realize the cancer rate will NOT be zero, because the cancer rate of human flesh, natural or otherwise, is not zero. Therefore people whom get stem cell therapy will get cancer and die. Therefore, their Drs will get sued out existence. That will be the problem.
They are in violation of the agreement after all for disclosing it.
Too many people like NASA, that would be bad PR.
However, I expect thats the last app from the government that will ever be approved. Now those apps can still be developed and operated by 3rd parties upon contract by the govt, but we'll probably never see an "official census dept historical genealogy app", which is too bad.
Make it so this card also has my ... passport
Not going to work. International treaties specify how passports work. Some customs inspector in Zimbabwe can read and stamp your passport, but would have no idea what to do with a plastic card.
Also, if its electronic, you can erase stuff, and historically there is nothing arab nations customs inspectors like better than to harass people with Israeli stamps in their passports (and probably vice versa). They will not be amused with the idea of erasable entries. And of course, if you can intentionally erase entries, you can accidentally erase entries. And if you can accidentally erase entries, it'll be mighty hard to prove anything was intentionally erased. So whats the point of stamping an electronic passport anyway, since only non-crooks will bother?
but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs
Well, that's scary. You could easily form a permanent underclass of never-employable again people with that plan.
There's no point to getting a card unless its more effective than a passport or drivers license or military ID, or my freaking passport would be good enough so we wouldn't need this new thing. It took months to get my passport, including all kinds of hoops to jump thru for notarization and some special kind of birth certificate and other foolishness involving the local postmaster. I assume this new thing will be worse, otherwise we wouldn't need it. Its a safe assumption that in general, any time the govt does anything, its to make it worse for the middle class, and this specific situation seems to fit the mold.
For a upper middle class employed dude like myself, a couple months time and a couple thousand bucks is annoying but no big deal, similar to replacing a leaking roof and fixing the damage. For dirt poor, unemployed, barely HS educated, how-mucha-month, joe six pack, he's screwed. What if J6P needs to hire a lawyer to fix some paperwork, or needs to pay up front to get docs from various agencies to prove his existence?
Actually, I have the definition of supercritical wrong. I had confounded it with superheated. Supercritical is a substance that is above its critical point, where the liquid and gas phases combine.
Supercritical temp for toluene is only about 600 degrees F... not a heck of a lot hotter than a kitchen oven. I wonder how hot this thing gets. Your typo may inadvertently be correct. I'm curious how this technology handles different gasoline mixes over time and location. For example, in some states, "old gas magically turns into varnish" but that never happens in Wisconsin, probably because we get a different mix.
Admittedly I've never heard a good explanation of why, if some brands/mixes of gas magically turns into varnish merely by being stored, genuine hardware store varnish costs a heck of a lot more per gallon than gas.
You can use a single card for all your key access needs, including ecash payments, subway, rail, and event tickets? I thought not.
I would consider that a huge downgrade, a major security hole. Right now, every pimply teenager whom has access to my credit card has total control of my financial life with little legal liability to themselves. Thankfully, most people, even kids, are basically honest. And, even if I end up ruined, its only money.
With the new system, plus some conventional traditional MITM attacks, every scummy transportation operator, event operator, and scummy employer will be able to open my front door or enter my car whenever they want. As a guy that just means I'll be purchasing more shotgun shells or filling out more insurance paperwork, but I really can't see this appealing to women very much. Chicks don't like the idea that every creepy dude at work would essentially have access to a master key to their homes and cars.