Screw 'directed energy', the Soviets came up with an EMP weapon that could be built in any decently-equipped machine shop. No nukes needed. The plans are out in the wild now, I think the range was something like a half a kilometer radius. Fry the electronics in this thing and its utility is reduced to an immobile pile of armor to hide behind (if the soldier can even get out of it).
I'm not terribly worried about this yet. The power draw would be phenomenal, the batteries or fuel cell would weigh more than the suit. The only way I could think of to power this monstrosity would be a separate wheeled or tracked vehicle that hooks to the suit with an umbilical cord. It would make a lot more sense to put the grunt in a self propelled armored vehicle the size of a Smart car. That at least would have some possibility of functioning.
Cooks and drivers are now contracted out to KBR. In the '70s a lot of my classmates went into the military and came out with training in logistics, auto repair, electronics, heavy machinery operation, etc. because the military used all its own people to do all the work of supporting the front line troops. Hell, even Beetle Bailey did enough KP to know how to run a kitchen. Today that's all contracted out, at some bases even the guards are mercenaries. When guys leave the military today most of them have learned nothing at all besides how to carry a pack and shoot at people.
At least on mine it's not a safety interlock (which would prevent the chain from moving at all), it's a centripetal clutch. Clutch doesn't engage until the motor is going x-many RPM, which pushes the spring-loaded arms outward until they contact the inside of the drum of the clutch, which is what rotates the chain sprocket. I had a Motobecane moped years ago that functioned the same way.
In Texas they were looking at banning R/C helicopters that carried cameras after a non-profit took pictures of a 'river of blood' outside a slaughterhouse that drained into a public waterway. Don't know how that ever came out.
I've done lots of stupid things that could have killed me. Unlike this guy, I try to learn from them and NOT do them again. I certainly don't make a habit of them and put my stupidity on YouTube for the whole world to witness.
He got lucky, a lot of times. Luck doesn't last. This was the time it ran out, he could have lost his hand, killed a bystander, or sliced his gut open instead of getting hit in the head.
He'll probably win the Darwin Award for September, and deservedly so.
Hooray for Virgin Galactic! They've reproduced the flight of the Bell X-1 of the late 1940s. Impressive, I'm sure they'll be building their orbital hotel any day now.
Speeds up? Sure, I'll grant you that, but is it necessary for advances to happen? Not at all. The Reformation and the Renaissance happened in spite of the internecine warfare of the time, not because of it. Would it have taken longer if military research hadn't funded some of the scientists? Sure, but it almost certainly would have happened. Goddard, Von Braun and Korolev would still have plugged away year after year on rockets without the bottomless pit of military funding, and their successors would have gone to the moon instead.
BTW, in spite of the Pentagon's propaganda internetworking was already under way well before DARPANet. A former boss was an intern when her boss and a few others got their DEC to talk to the (IIRC) the HP mainframe at U of Colorado and the IBM at U of California, letting him get rid of two of the four dumb terminals on his desk. Salescritters saw what they had done and sold the idea to DARPA (at which point they had to start all over from scratch).
Baloney. All the real advances since the beginning of civilization have been brought about by advances in science, education and exploration. Military action (which I what I have to assume you mean by 'violence') has been nothing but a destructive force throughout history, frequently arm in arm with its sibling in ignorance, religion.
And why would Russia want to condemn the Syrian government for an action which it doesn't believe they committed? Would you have condemned the North Vietnamese government for the My Lai Massacre?
Just look at the last two people to die from smallpox; a journalist infected by an accidental release at a facility she was visiting, and the director of that facility who committed suicide (or was suicided) later.
DEC would never have bothered putting a UPC on their hardware, the production levels were not high enough to make it worthwhile and no one would go to their local CompUSA and expect to be able to buy a $25,000 Alpha server.
When all your neighbors follow suit the drain fields from the septic tanks will contaminate your well. Off-grid is fine for a few isolated mountain-man types. You can't run a civilization that way.
Same here. If the only way to pay for something is through PayPal then I won't buy it because I refuse to have an account with them. Besides, how many times has PayPal gotten hacked? In at least a couple of occasions they lost huge amounts of data including customer credit card accounts, billing addresses and real names. Those are the 'crown jewels' of personal financial transactions. It's bad enough that they're asshats, it's worse that they're too cheap/incompetent to adequately secure their customer database.
But the mercenaries and imported religious fanatics (a.k.a. "rebels" in the media) don't have the "20 people". Most of the civilian population wasn't terribly happy with Assad, but almost NONE of them like these new idiots and everyone blames them for the violence (rightfully so). If the gov't gasses a neighborhood and kills the 20 civilians, they've just killed a bunch of people who support them, the majority who don't like either side, and almost no one who opposes them. They're already frightened of anyone carrying a weapon at this point, they won't have gained anything except pissing off surviving relatives who otherwise wouldn't have done anything.
Doesn't actually work that way, it's very difficult to predict what the immune system's reaction to a particular sequence of proteins will be, and even more difficult to predict how efficient that response will be. If we can look at the animal where the disease originated, such as a pig, and see how the pig's immune system had developed appropriate responses and what their efficacy is **THEN** we'll have an idea what our vaccine needs to look like.
My grandmother died with Alzheimer's a few years ago, and my grandfather is 94 and will be in a nursing home the rest of his life. Rosa and I decided quite a while ago that when life isn't fun any more then it's time for it to end. I sometimes wonder how many cases of elderly people driving off a cliff or into a river are actually suicides.
Nope. We haven't even gotten a reasonable index of the various varieties of influenza, either porcine or avian. For that matter, I'm not really sure they've managed to collect all the different varieties of flu extant just in humans.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF?
We are so frelled . . .
Marketing.
Screw 'directed energy', the Soviets came up with an EMP weapon that could be built in any decently-equipped machine shop. No nukes needed. The plans are out in the wild now, I think the range was something like a half a kilometer radius. Fry the electronics in this thing and its utility is reduced to an immobile pile of armor to hide behind (if the soldier can even get out of it).
I'm not terribly worried about this yet. The power draw would be phenomenal, the batteries or fuel cell would weigh more than the suit. The only way I could think of to power this monstrosity would be a separate wheeled or tracked vehicle that hooks to the suit with an umbilical cord. It would make a lot more sense to put the grunt in a self propelled armored vehicle the size of a Smart car. That at least would have some possibility of functioning.
Cooks and drivers are now contracted out to KBR. In the '70s a lot of my classmates went into the military and came out with training in logistics, auto repair, electronics, heavy machinery operation, etc. because the military used all its own people to do all the work of supporting the front line troops. Hell, even Beetle Bailey did enough KP to know how to run a kitchen. Today that's all contracted out, at some bases even the guards are mercenaries. When guys leave the military today most of them have learned nothing at all besides how to carry a pack and shoot at people.
Don't want to pay for a divorce lawyer?
At least on mine it's not a safety interlock (which would prevent the chain from moving at all), it's a centripetal clutch. Clutch doesn't engage until the motor is going x-many RPM, which pushes the spring-loaded arms outward until they contact the inside of the drum of the clutch, which is what rotates the chain sprocket. I had a Motobecane moped years ago that functioned the same way.
In Texas they were looking at banning R/C helicopters that carried cameras after a non-profit took pictures of a 'river of blood' outside a slaughterhouse that drained into a public waterway. Don't know how that ever came out.
I've done lots of stupid things that could have killed me. Unlike this guy, I try to learn from them and NOT do them again. I certainly don't make a habit of them and put my stupidity on YouTube for the whole world to witness.
He got lucky, a lot of times. Luck doesn't last. This was the time it ran out, he could have lost his hand, killed a bystander, or sliced his gut open instead of getting hit in the head.
He'll probably win the Darwin Award for September, and deservedly so.
Prevent broken bones, keep the armor in place, provide mounting points for peripherals, redistribute weight more efficiently.
Hooray for Virgin Galactic! They've reproduced the flight of the Bell X-1 of the late 1940s. Impressive, I'm sure they'll be building their orbital hotel any day now.
Speeds up? Sure, I'll grant you that, but is it necessary for advances to happen? Not at all. The Reformation and the Renaissance happened in spite of the internecine warfare of the time, not because of it. Would it have taken longer if military research hadn't funded some of the scientists? Sure, but it almost certainly would have happened. Goddard, Von Braun and Korolev would still have plugged away year after year on rockets without the bottomless pit of military funding, and their successors would have gone to the moon instead.
BTW, in spite of the Pentagon's propaganda internetworking was already under way well before DARPANet. A former boss was an intern when her boss and a few others got their DEC to talk to the (IIRC) the HP mainframe at U of Colorado and the IBM at U of California, letting him get rid of two of the four dumb terminals on his desk. Salescritters saw what they had done and sold the idea to DARPA (at which point they had to start all over from scratch).
Only if the luxury electronic toilets are the targets of attack.
Baloney. All the real advances since the beginning of civilization have been brought about by advances in science, education and exploration. Military action (which I what I have to assume you mean by 'violence') has been nothing but a destructive force throughout history, frequently arm in arm with its sibling in ignorance, religion.
And why would Russia want to condemn the Syrian government for an action which it doesn't believe they committed? Would you have condemned the North Vietnamese government for the My Lai Massacre?
Just look at the last two people to die from smallpox; a journalist infected by an accidental release at a facility she was visiting, and the director of that facility who committed suicide (or was suicided) later.
So that the next time PayPal's database gets cracked (it's happened more than once) they have your cc info? I can see where that would be MUCH better.
DEC would never have bothered putting a UPC on their hardware, the production levels were not high enough to make it worthwhile and no one would go to their local CompUSA and expect to be able to buy a $25,000 Alpha server.
When all your neighbors follow suit the drain fields from the septic tanks will contaminate your well. Off-grid is fine for a few isolated mountain-man types. You can't run a civilization that way.
Same here. If the only way to pay for something is through PayPal then I won't buy it because I refuse to have an account with them. Besides, how many times has PayPal gotten hacked? In at least a couple of occasions they lost huge amounts of data including customer credit card accounts, billing addresses and real names. Those are the 'crown jewels' of personal financial transactions. It's bad enough that they're asshats, it's worse that they're too cheap/incompetent to adequately secure their customer database.
And when was the last time you saw a good flame war? The Internet is get awfully pedestrian nowadays.
But the mercenaries and imported religious fanatics (a.k.a. "rebels" in the media) don't have the "20 people". Most of the civilian population wasn't terribly happy with Assad, but almost NONE of them like these new idiots and everyone blames them for the violence (rightfully so). If the gov't gasses a neighborhood and kills the 20 civilians, they've just killed a bunch of people who support them, the majority who don't like either side, and almost no one who opposes them. They're already frightened of anyone carrying a weapon at this point, they won't have gained anything except pissing off surviving relatives who otherwise wouldn't have done anything.
Doesn't actually work that way, it's very difficult to predict what the immune system's reaction to a particular sequence of proteins will be, and even more difficult to predict how efficient that response will be. If we can look at the animal where the disease originated, such as a pig, and see how the pig's immune system had developed appropriate responses and what their efficacy is **THEN** we'll have an idea what our vaccine needs to look like.
My grandmother died with Alzheimer's a few years ago, and my grandfather is 94 and will be in a nursing home the rest of his life. Rosa and I decided quite a while ago that when life isn't fun any more then it's time for it to end. I sometimes wonder how many cases of elderly people driving off a cliff or into a river are actually suicides.
Nope. We haven't even gotten a reasonable index of the various varieties of influenza, either porcine or avian. For that matter, I'm not really sure they've managed to collect all the different varieties of flu extant just in humans.