There's no way you can twist the US casualty figures to look bad. The fact is for the intensity of the conflict we're taking about 1/10th the casualties you'd expect based on previous wars. Part of that is the overwhelming firepower that will end a stand-up fight quickly, and part of it is the result of a superbly trained volunteer army. But you can't discount the effect of body armor.
The civilians are irrelevant to a discussion of body armor, unless they pick up weapons and become "insurgents" or "terrorists", as you prefer.
But it's not the good guys that make a story - it's the bad guys. Why was Die Hard a big movie? Alan Rickman's character, not Bruce Willis's. And then there's Darth Vader.
I thought "the operative" was sufficiently compelling to rate a couple of TV episodes, at least. Also, there's some mileage left in the blue-hand guys from the series. They were pretty creepy and could rate another couple episodes.
Honestly - suits are heavy and hot? Solution? Not fix suits/make them lighter or anything (I mean has/can anybody built stats of whether wearing so much "protection" disabling swift action and maneuvres can do more harm than help a soldier?).
Suits are heavy and hot because they're the best armor protection the troops can reasonably carry around. If you can come up with a better material the suits will still be just as heavy and hot, but they'll be able to stop higher power bullets. You can never really have enough protection; you carry as much armor as you can get away with.
The current conflict in Iraq is the first time troops could carry enough armor to stop a standard military rifle bullet, and then only if it hits one of the ceramic inserts secreted around the vest. There are lots of impact angles and surfaces that won't stop a rifle bullet - we have a long way to go before we can start thinking less weight is a good tradeoff for protection.
At the end only one wins: those damn firms coming up with absurd inventions to pitch to the military.
Now this is just pure ignorance. I would suggest you spend a little more time on milblogs and less on slashdot if you want to understand what's really going on here. There's a reason this war has a much, much lower casualty rate than previos wars.
Come on, is there anybody who believes that DRM of DVDs was successful?
CSS was broken because:
One of the licencees forgot to encrypt the key in their software.
It's only 40-bit encryption anyway and can be brute-forced pretty easily.
We're probably not going to see either of these mistakes again. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I suspect they've set up a validation process for the software and I'd be really surprised if they used a key less than 2048 bits in length.
Now, eventually the DRM will get cracked, though I don't think it will happend for awhile. The bigger question is will the technology catch on. I think joe consumer has "just about had it up to here" with the tech treadmill, and he's happy with the resolution he gets on his DVD player. Will the studios be able to refrain from releasing new movies on the old DVD format? They'll try, but I doubt it.
These numbers depend on who you ask, and there's a reason. The big tech companies can only get the H1-B visa cap raised if they can convince Congress and the media there's going to be a shortage of engineers in a year or two. There's never been a shortage (outside of the boom, which was driven by extraordinary demand) even though "they" forcast one every couple of years.
It turns out all you need to do to fool the media (and Congress, which gets its information from the media) is turn out a scientific-looking study showing a large gap between the number of graduates and the projected need. The vast majority of reporters and editors have no math skills whatsoever (remember, these guys are the journalism majors for college), so they don't have any way to evaluate the garbage churned out in advocacy research.
So they raise the H1 cap. That way the high-tech companies in the US have a way to exert downward pressure on engineering wages. And all for the price of a couple of bogus "studies".
So am I surprised US schools are turning out lots more engineers than we've been led to believe? Nah, not really.
Think about it... how else would you handle something as simple as a PHP or Perl script accessing the local database? The user supplies data to log in to access the script, not the database. There really isn't any other way.
I'm with you. Unless the database server is handling all your authentication, you've got to do something like that. On the bright side, the malicious hacker has to get access to the perl script to read it, so he'll have to get through the OS security somehow. The danger, in this case, is a rogue employee or contractor.
Because spending tons and tons of money on something that we have neither the technology nor the materials to build is good Slashdot policy. Oh, wait, I forgot, we can build it from Buckminster fullerenes! Nevermind that they're well below the physical tensile strength required to build a space elevator.
That simply isn't true. Carbon nanotubes do have the strength we need. If you're arguing we don't know how to create long enough fibers yet, well, that's true. That's why I would spend money there instead of a moon shot.
This has the additional advantage of being a known quantity before lots of money is spent. If we fund every CNT research team in the world we'll come up to a tiny fraction of NASA's current budget. NASA's current budget, in turn, is nowhere near enough to land men on the moon.
There are other more pressing problems.
I don't think so. What good is any of the other stuff if you have to break the bank to do it? Mining the moon? Why? It will never make sense economically if we have to truck all the parts into orbit with rockets. Getting raw tonnage to orbit is the key to doing anything useful in space, and without it we're just wasting money on overpriced science and national vanity projects.
Well, that's why I said 1973 and not 1963. While the first few were worth doing, the last two Apollo shots were scrubbed because, quite frankly, there wasn't any reason to go. That hasn't changed.
By the way, a manned moon shot is a lose-lose situation for NASA. If everything goes OK the public yawns and says "so what, we did that forty years ago?" If something goes wrong it's "the NASA people can't even do what their grandfathers did. Why are we funding them?"
Someone needs to go to the moon, eh? Why? That's the question NASA couldn't answer in 1973, and that's the question they can't answer now. I'd rather see my tax money go into something that had some chance of being usefull, like the space elevator or solar power satellites.
The DBA, who can always log in and see whatever the heck he wants(I almost said he or she, but who am I kidding).
This is one area where I think you're probably off base. There are lots of female DBAs out there, and some of them are quite good. I would say about half the DBAs I've known in my career have been women.
Yes, and that's based in reality. Lots of DoD computers aren't networked. It's a pain to get the results you want from place to place (by some kind of storage media), but even if you were on the inside you'd have to be working on that project to get at the complete dataset.
Or, maybe we have partially discovered a thing or two about whether it is useful or wise to exalt those who are merely most able to manipulate symbols. IQ is basically the ability to manipulate symbolic identifiers. While a useful talent in many ways, it says nothing about a person's wisdom or goodness, which are ultimately far more important traits.
That depends on what you're looking for. The people who will go on to produce the most important scientific discoveries - cures for diseases, fusion power, flying cars, etc - will most likely come from the ranks of people who are good at "manipulating symbolic identifiers".
If you're looking for a spouse, go with the "wisdom and goodness", by all means.
But do we know how to identify the child whose brilliance might change the world? And do we really want to?"
Yes, and yes. We know how to identify gifted children. Will a couple slip through the cracks of any real-world system? Sure. But from an overall, statistical perspective it can certainly be done.
But the last couple decades haven't been kind to cognitive science. Standardized intelligence tests put a lie to the concept everyone is equal, and that makes people uncomfortable. It's easier on your self-esteem if you refuse to believe the validity of the test instead of facing up to uncomfortable facts. The very idea we don't know how to identify gifted children is a political construction - we could do it more than 50 years ago. We haven't lost the science, we've lost the will.
Ehhh, yeah. But you realize, don't you, that a sitting Congress is under no obligation to enact the plans of Congress' of years past? There's lots of stuff in that act (budget cuts and such) that were conveniently pushed into the future. It's not hard to imagine a future Congress deciding postpone the end of analog because they didn't want to sping for the converter boxes.
Mind you, I don't see why the government should be buying TV converter boxes - people have known about this for a decade. I can't get any of my old computer games to work on Windows XP, and they didn't give me any money for that.
If you dress better, you get women or men whichever is your fancy.
Well, here in California we have the best government money can buy, and lawyers have lots of money. Not only is my work area characterized by a serious lack of XX chromosomes, even if that weren't the case I'm not about to risk my house over a work relationship.
So I dress purely for comfort at work, and when I go out I try to make a good impression.
As others have pointed out, this whole article is really about clothing manufacturers trying to tap into a demographic that has a lot of disposable income and not much in the closet.
Yes, well, when "greater Asia" becomes a single country I'll start to take that statistic more seriously. Maybe we should compare, say, China to "greater Europe" and see how that statistic looks. Or even better, lets lump Europe and North America together.
Hey, this is fun. We can make this number come out however we want!
Either we reform the system so that IP space is more evenly allocated, or we go to IPv6.
I'm not an expert on these protocols, but can't IPv4 and IPv6 co-exist? As I understand it, the Chinese (who've made IPv6 official policy) can have all the addresses they need without a reallocation of IPv4 addresses.
Whatever spin you like to put on it. It is at any rate a good thing that an agreement has been reached.
Basically they've agreed to set up a standard UN committee. They'll hold meetings, buy doughnuts with my tax dollars, take fact-finding tours to tropical islands (still using my tax dollars), then release reports critical of the US invasion of Iraq.
In addition, he says, companies should enact a security policy called "least privilege," which means users are given the least amount of access they need to do their jobs.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. I realize it makes your job easer as a security guy if nobody is allowed to do anything, but I wonder if companies are even thinking about what they're losing by putting all their technical employees in a box. Where I work we lose days at a time to simple problems the guys in the trenches could have dealt with in ten minutes if they had the right access.
Anyway the whole article reads like RIAA generated FUD. Companies have a lot less to fear from "darknets" than the music industry does.
Re:Benefit of Planned Economics
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
A situation such as this is virtually impossible to achieve in a free market situation. Hence this is showing the benefits of a planned economy.
The reason it's appealing is it hasn't failed yet. I recall throughout the entire life of the USSR had all sorts of ambitious 5-year plans. They were never able to execute successfully. Economies are simply too complex to be planned - you need the feedback loop free markets provide. The best you can do in the way of planning is subsidize behaviors you like and tax behaviors you don't, within limits.
China (economically) has come a long way in the past 50 years and will probably go much further as they gain more influence over their super power buddy the US.
Actually, in the '60s they were going backwards, as Mao's cultural revolution and "great leap forward" caused mass starvation. They really didn't start to get on their collective feet until the '70s when Deng Xiaoping realized China would always be backward and poor unless it adopted a market economy.
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
This is silly. You have a misconception of which way the money goes, for the most part. Only government contractors are "given" money - the wealth the government spends is generated by corporations and comes to the government through various tax schemes (some corporate, but mostly income tax on employees). Having worked with the civil service, I can tell you the current situation is orders of magnitude better than the one we would be in if the government ran everything.
Don't they teach this stuff in the schools anymore?
From what I've been reading in the papers, the trendline for online mp3 sharing is in freefall. Between the lawsuits and all the garbage files out there it's just safer and easier for everyone to use iTunes. I don't think mp3 sharing is "as rampant as ever" at all.
Pretending like 40 billion dollars for a renewable, non-polluting, cheap energy source is a lot is silly.
That's certainly true. My problem with that statement is we have no idea how expensive fusion powere will be, since we haven't surmounted the technical challenges. $40 bn is a lot of money to invest in something that may never be commercially viable. Personally, I suspect if you took that kind of money and invested it in solar cell technology, you could get energy cheaply enough high-energy fusion could never touch it in $/kwh.
Slashdot Mirror
The civilians are irrelevant to a discussion of body armor, unless they pick up weapons and become "insurgents" or "terrorists", as you prefer.
I thought "the operative" was sufficiently compelling to rate a couple of TV episodes, at least. Also, there's some mileage left in the blue-hand guys from the series. They were pretty creepy and could rate another couple episodes.
Suits are heavy and hot because they're the best armor protection the troops can reasonably carry around. If you can come up with a better material the suits will still be just as heavy and hot, but they'll be able to stop higher power bullets. You can never really have enough protection; you carry as much armor as you can get away with.
The current conflict in Iraq is the first time troops could carry enough armor to stop a standard military rifle bullet, and then only if it hits one of the ceramic inserts secreted around the vest. There are lots of impact angles and surfaces that won't stop a rifle bullet - we have a long way to go before we can start thinking less weight is a good tradeoff for protection.
At the end only one wins: those damn firms coming up with absurd inventions to pitch to the military.
Now this is just pure ignorance. I would suggest you spend a little more time on milblogs and less on slashdot if you want to understand what's really going on here. There's a reason this war has a much, much lower casualty rate than previos wars.
CSS was broken because:
We're probably not going to see either of these mistakes again. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I suspect they've set up a validation process for the software and I'd be really surprised if they used a key less than 2048 bits in length.
Now, eventually the DRM will get cracked, though I don't think it will happend for awhile. The bigger question is will the technology catch on. I think joe consumer has "just about had it up to here" with the tech treadmill, and he's happy with the resolution he gets on his DVD player. Will the studios be able to refrain from releasing new movies on the old DVD format? They'll try, but I doubt it.
It turns out all you need to do to fool the media (and Congress, which gets its information from the media) is turn out a scientific-looking study showing a large gap between the number of graduates and the projected need. The vast majority of reporters and editors have no math skills whatsoever (remember, these guys are the journalism majors for college), so they don't have any way to evaluate the garbage churned out in advocacy research.
So they raise the H1 cap. That way the high-tech companies in the US have a way to exert downward pressure on engineering wages. And all for the price of a couple of bogus "studies".
So am I surprised US schools are turning out lots more engineers than we've been led to believe? Nah, not really.
I'm with you. Unless the database server is handling all your authentication, you've got to do something like that. On the bright side, the malicious hacker has to get access to the perl script to read it, so he'll have to get through the OS security somehow. The danger, in this case, is a rogue employee or contractor.
Get a grip. That's the way it's been every administration since the late 1800s. Ever heard of the "Monroe Doctrine"?
That simply isn't true. Carbon nanotubes do have the strength we need. If you're arguing we don't know how to create long enough fibers yet, well, that's true. That's why I would spend money there instead of a moon shot.
This has the additional advantage of being a known quantity before lots of money is spent. If we fund every CNT research team in the world we'll come up to a tiny fraction of NASA's current budget. NASA's current budget, in turn, is nowhere near enough to land men on the moon.
There are other more pressing problems.
I don't think so. What good is any of the other stuff if you have to break the bank to do it? Mining the moon? Why? It will never make sense economically if we have to truck all the parts into orbit with rockets. Getting raw tonnage to orbit is the key to doing anything useful in space, and without it we're just wasting money on overpriced science and national vanity projects.
By the way, a manned moon shot is a lose-lose situation for NASA. If everything goes OK the public yawns and says "so what, we did that forty years ago?" If something goes wrong it's "the NASA people can't even do what their grandfathers did. Why are we funding them?"
Someone needs to go to the moon, eh? Why? That's the question NASA couldn't answer in 1973, and that's the question they can't answer now. I'd rather see my tax money go into something that had some chance of being usefull, like the space elevator or solar power satellites.
This is one area where I think you're probably off base. There are lots of female DBAs out there, and some of them are quite good. I would say about half the DBAs I've known in my career have been women.
Yes, and that's based in reality. Lots of DoD computers aren't networked. It's a pain to get the results you want from place to place (by some kind of storage media), but even if you were on the inside you'd have to be working on that project to get at the complete dataset.
That depends on what you're looking for. The people who will go on to produce the most important scientific discoveries - cures for diseases, fusion power, flying cars, etc - will most likely come from the ranks of people who are good at "manipulating symbolic identifiers".
If you're looking for a spouse, go with the "wisdom and goodness", by all means.
Yes, and yes. We know how to identify gifted children. Will a couple slip through the cracks of any real-world system? Sure. But from an overall, statistical perspective it can certainly be done.
But the last couple decades haven't been kind to cognitive science. Standardized intelligence tests put a lie to the concept everyone is equal, and that makes people uncomfortable. It's easier on your self-esteem if you refuse to believe the validity of the test instead of facing up to uncomfortable facts. The very idea we don't know how to identify gifted children is a political construction - we could do it more than 50 years ago. We haven't lost the science, we've lost the will.
Mind you, I don't see why the government should be buying TV converter boxes - people have known about this for a decade. I can't get any of my old computer games to work on Windows XP, and they didn't give me any money for that.
Well, here in California we have the best government money can buy, and lawyers have lots of money. Not only is my work area characterized by a serious lack of XX chromosomes, even if that weren't the case I'm not about to risk my house over a work relationship.
So I dress purely for comfort at work, and when I go out I try to make a good impression.
As others have pointed out, this whole article is really about clothing manufacturers trying to tap into a demographic that has a lot of disposable income and not much in the closet.
Hey, this is fun. We can make this number come out however we want!
I'm not an expert on these protocols, but can't IPv4 and IPv6 co-exist? As I understand it, the Chinese (who've made IPv6 official policy) can have all the addresses they need without a reallocation of IPv4 addresses.
Basically they've agreed to set up a standard UN committee. They'll hold meetings, buy doughnuts with my tax dollars, take fact-finding tours to tropical islands (still using my tax dollars), then release reports critical of the US invasion of Iraq.
This is a good thing... how?
Sheeeeit. At my company that'd get you a visit by blue-handed guys in suits.
This kind of thing drives me nuts. I realize it makes your job easer as a security guy if nobody is allowed to do anything, but I wonder if companies are even thinking about what they're losing by putting all their technical employees in a box. Where I work we lose days at a time to simple problems the guys in the trenches could have dealt with in ten minutes if they had the right access.
Anyway the whole article reads like RIAA generated FUD. Companies have a lot less to fear from "darknets" than the music industry does.
This could only be flamebait on slashdot.
The reason it's appealing is it hasn't failed yet. I recall throughout the entire life of the USSR had all sorts of ambitious 5-year plans. They were never able to execute successfully. Economies are simply too complex to be planned - you need the feedback loop free markets provide. The best you can do in the way of planning is subsidize behaviors you like and tax behaviors you don't, within limits.
China (economically) has come a long way in the past 50 years and will probably go much further as they gain more influence over their super power buddy the US.
Actually, in the '60s they were going backwards, as Mao's cultural revolution and "great leap forward" caused mass starvation. They really didn't start to get on their collective feet until the '70s when Deng Xiaoping realized China would always be backward and poor unless it adopted a market economy.
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
This is silly. You have a misconception of which way the money goes, for the most part. Only government contractors are "given" money - the wealth the government spends is generated by corporations and comes to the government through various tax schemes (some corporate, but mostly income tax on employees). Having worked with the civil service, I can tell you the current situation is orders of magnitude better than the one we would be in if the government ran everything.
Don't they teach this stuff in the schools anymore?
From what I've been reading in the papers, the trendline for online mp3 sharing is in freefall. Between the lawsuits and all the garbage files out there it's just safer and easier for everyone to use iTunes. I don't think mp3 sharing is "as rampant as ever" at all.
That's certainly true. My problem with that statement is we have no idea how expensive fusion powere will be, since we haven't surmounted the technical challenges. $40 bn is a lot of money to invest in something that may never be commercially viable. Personally, I suspect if you took that kind of money and invested it in solar cell technology, you could get energy cheaply enough high-energy fusion could never touch it in $/kwh.