So if we're developing lasers that shoot down missiles "half a world away" why on earth are we also developing a missile defense system that uses other missiles to shoot down incoming ballistics?
Oh, that's easy. You see, the missile-based defense system was just to distract the liberals in America while the real laser-based ABM system was silently completed (with the help of Israel).
A very worthy expendature. The Democrats were so busy frothing at the mouth over the ABM missile tests, they didn't even see the ABL coming and weren't able kill it in congress.
Now that we finally have a real, working ABM system, MAD, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust, is forever dead.
That's the point - one less delivery vector to worry about.
Exactly. That alone completely justifies everything we spend on this system.
But these Tactical High-Energy Laser systems aren't limited to just shooting down ballistic missiles, they make perfect anti-aircraft and anti-satellite systems as well.
And the Israelis already had a ground-based THEL deployed - not for use against ballistic missiles, but against the cheaper missiles used by terrorists.
And heck, with the Orion, we could lift an entire moon/marsbase complete with automated refineries/factories in a single launch, instead of building a piddly little temporary space station over several decades. We've already detonated thousands of nukes aleady, but this would be for something worthwhile.
I didn't realize Kennedy was behind killing the program. Gives me another reason to dislike him.
If this "private" flag relies on cooperation from clients, then it is broken.
I agree, any system that requires clients to be trustworthy is fundamentally broken.
There's an ancient quote from the Mudding world that talks about this:
(From The Laws of Online World Design)
"Never trust the client. Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this."
It's amazing to see how often we software developers forget the lessons of the past.
..heading away from the crime scene along I-85 doing 65MPH. Clearly, he was speeding to try to get away from the crime scene
65MPH is speeding? Normal traffic on the freeways in town here (Phoenix, AZ) is 70-75MPH. Going anything less than 65 will get you run over. 55 is suicidal. The occasional 45MPH speed limit signs for construction are obviously someone's idea of a sick joke.
So we must encourage Iran, North Korea and so on to build as many nuclear power stations as they like.
I don't have a problem with this at all. I'm all in favor of every country getting nuclear technology, even if it means they get nuclear weapons as well.
Besides, the sooner everyone has nuclear weapons, the sooner we'll learn how to defend against them and clean up the messes.
I would pay someone to put a nuclear reactor in my backyard.
In fact, I hearby offer $100 USD to any group that builds a nuclear power reactor in my backyard. (where 'backyard' is defined to be within 10 miles from my place of residence at the time of construction)
I'm proud to already live ~50 miles from the Palo Verde reactor.
I don't think this is the same RFID you're thinking about. I interviewed with TSI (who makes the system), and the system actually does keep track of the real-time position of all the transmitters.
They accomplish this by having enough receivers to fully cover the monitored area. I'm guessing they use trangulation between the wristbands and multiple receivers. The wristbands are actually pretty hefty - larger than a wrist-watch, so it's got more to it than just an RFID chip.
They had people in the office wearing the transmitters, and through the system you could watch them moving around the office in real-time.
Java is the number one development environment for business applications. Bar none.
Bahahaha. Number one in what? Being slow? Being broken? Being inconsistent? Being verbose? Being a nightmare for sysadmins to manage?
From what I can tell, the reason Java seems becoming the number one business applications (bleah), is that the Java language structure does a pretty good job of straight-jacketting you into writing somewhat maintainable code.
From the PHBs' point of view, more maintainable code is more valueable than more efficent/faster developed code because it means they can treat the developers as interchangeable units they can add or remove on demand. Filling a Java opening is easy, filling a Lisp opening would be a nightmare.
The only restriction is that you can't call it Java unless it meets the spec (and proving that it meets the spec is, quite understandably, nontrivial because Java is a large, complex language).
I probably have this wrong, but I thought the problem was that while the Java Spec is open, the Java Compliance testing is not, so to get your implementation tested is a pretty expensive barrier.
And do you have to get your implementation tested on every architecture you want to support? That would really hurt.
..which also fits uncompressed on a floppy disk, and supports just about every core function you could require in an OS.....
Well, I was intrigued enough to load it onto a floppy and give it a try.
It's pretty cool that you get a such a responsive and slick GUI running off a floppy.
I think all it needs to be of some minimal use is a half-decent web browser. They had some testing browser that can load the text of webpages (but no images), but I didn't see that even hyperlinks worked in it. I gave their telnet client a try too, but had no luck interacting through it, although it seemed to connect.
If they could get a nice browser running on it, it'd be great to use for cheap web kiosks.
I wonder how hard it would be to port something to it.
There's only about 0.0001% of the population that's angry, desperate & psychopathic enough to consider acts of terruh, times about 0.001% smart enough to plan an overly-complex scheme, times 0.1% motivated enough to follow through, times 50% odds of success. (So, worry about dying in a traffic accident instead.)
Uh, I don't know if you meant this to be intentional, but taking your "Drake's equation" and the last number I remember hearing for the US population:
(0.0001*0.001*0.1*0.5) * (population of US: ~200 million)
= 1
Slashdot readers probably won't like the last phrase, though: 'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
It isn't about using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Some of us don't have a Windows machine, so we don't even have the option of running Internet Explorer.
I suggest we don't do that before we're absolutely 100% sure that there isn't any life already there. E.g., this suggestion from 2002 is interesting (if not very probable, I suppose).
I think Venus could use some more study too. The russian landers managed to
take some pictures
, but I'd like to see some more of Venus.
Maybe with today's tech we could make landers that last longer and maybe get a rover out of the deal, though it probably couldn't last as long as Spirit and Opportunity.
As I understand it, the Honda one has been explicitly designed from the beginning with an eye towards doing useful work alongside humans in Honda's factories, while the Qrio has been designed as an evolutionary advance over the Aibo, with no intention of it being anything but a toy yet.
Both may yet evolve into something useful, but we'll have to wait and see which approach works better.
He's right. Until Asimo appeared, there were no self-balancing two-legged robots. American universities had given up on the idea. It took the Japanese to come along and prove it can be done, and now every electronics club in Japan has their own bipedal robot. I still haven't seen a working self-balancing bipedal robot of American design (unless you want to count the Segway).
really all you have to do is cram more junk in a multiple warhead missile. Still relatively cheap compared to the effort required to detect all the junk and determine which piece of junk is a nuke and which is merely junk.
So, ballistic missile defense will forever be impractical because of the cost of electronics?
I thought the number one lesson of our industry was that today's million dollar system is tomorrow's cheap kid's toy.
Does someone have a link to a real explanation/argument about why missile defense is impractical?
This is why I have never trusted GPS navigation systems. Everything that uses GPS should have some reliable backup systems for use in the event that GPS fails or goes down.
Slashdot Mirror
So if we're developing lasers that shoot down missiles "half a world away" why on earth are we also developing a missile defense system that uses other missiles to shoot down incoming ballistics?
Oh, that's easy. You see, the missile-based defense system was just to distract the liberals in America while the real laser-based ABM system was silently completed (with the help of Israel).
A very worthy expendature. The Democrats were so busy frothing at the mouth over the ABM missile tests, they didn't even see the ABL coming and weren't able kill it in congress.
Now that we finally have a real, working ABM system, MAD, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust, is forever dead.
Exactly. That alone completely justifies everything we spend on this system.
But these Tactical High-Energy Laser systems aren't limited to just shooting down ballistic missiles, they make perfect anti-aircraft and anti-satellite systems as well.
And the Israelis already had a ground-based THEL deployed - not for use against ballistic missiles, but against the cheaper missiles used by terrorists.
And heck, with the Orion, we could lift an entire moon/marsbase complete with automated refineries/factories in a single launch, instead of building a piddly little temporary space station over several decades. We've already detonated thousands of nukes aleady, but this would be for something worthwhile.
I didn't realize Kennedy was behind killing the program. Gives me another reason to dislike him.
I agree, any system that requires clients to be trustworthy is fundamentally broken.
There's an ancient quote from the Mudding world that talks about this:
(From The Laws of Online World Design)
"Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this."
It's amazing to see how often we software developers forget the lessons of the past.
I don't have a problem with this at all. I'm all in favor of every country getting nuclear technology, even if it means they get nuclear weapons as well.
Besides, the sooner everyone has nuclear weapons, the sooner we'll learn how to defend against them and clean up the messes.
I'm with you. I'm from the Phoenix area, and we already have one ~50 miles away, but I wouldn't mind one much closer.
I would pay someone to put a nuclear reactor in my backyard.
In fact, I hearby offer $100 USD to any group that builds a nuclear power reactor in my backyard. (where 'backyard' is defined to be within 10 miles from my place of residence at the time of construction)
I'm proud to already live ~50 miles from the Palo Verde reactor.
I don't think this is the same RFID you're thinking about. I interviewed with TSI (who makes the system), and the system actually does keep track of the real-time position of all the transmitters.
They accomplish this by having enough receivers to fully cover the monitored area. I'm guessing they use trangulation between the wristbands and multiple receivers. The wristbands are actually pretty hefty - larger than a wrist-watch, so it's got more to it than just an RFID chip.
They had people in the office wearing the transmitters, and through the system you could watch them moving around the office in real-time.
From the PHBs' point of view, more maintainable code is more valueable than more efficent/faster developed code because it means they can treat the developers as interchangeable units they can add or remove on demand. Filling a Java opening is easy, filling a Lisp opening would be a nightmare.
And do you have to get your implementation tested on every architecture you want to support? That would really hurt.
Well, I was intrigued enough to load it onto a floppy and give it a try.
It's pretty cool that you get a such a responsive and slick GUI running off a floppy.
I think all it needs to be of some minimal use is a half-decent web browser. They had some testing browser that can load the text of webpages (but no images), but I didn't see that even hyperlinks worked in it. I gave their telnet client a try too, but had no luck interacting through it, although it seemed to connect.
If they could get a nice browser running on it, it'd be great to use for cheap web kiosks.
I wonder how hard it would be to port something to it.
Oh duh, I can't believe I screwed that up.
Uh, I don't know if you meant this to be intentional, but taking your "Drake's equation" and the last number I remember hearing for the US population:
(0.0001*0.001*0.1*0.5) * (population of US: ~200 million) = 1
It isn't about using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Some of us don't have a Windows machine, so we don't even have the option of running Internet Explorer.
I think Venus could use some more study too. The russian landers managed to take some pictures , but I'd like to see some more of Venus.
Maybe with today's tech we could make landers that last longer and maybe get a rover out of the deal, though it probably couldn't last as long as Spirit and Opportunity.
Does anyone know if they do have a plan to try to pick up more data from Huygens if it's still somehow alive when Cassini comes back over the horizon?
What if Huygens is still alive when Cassini comes back over the horizon?
Will (Can?) they have Cassini point back to Titan to get another pass of data from Huygens?
Both may yet evolve into something useful, but we'll have to wait and see which approach works better.
Can the robosapien stand back up after you knock it over, like the QRIO?
He's right. Until Asimo appeared, there were no self-balancing two-legged robots. American universities had given up on the idea. It took the Japanese to come along and prove it can be done, and now every electronics club in Japan has their own bipedal robot. I still haven't seen a working self-balancing bipedal robot of American design (unless you want to count the Segway).
Actually, it makes tons of sense compared to the fact that Toyota was originally a textiles company.
So, ballistic missile defense will forever be impractical because of the cost of electronics?
I thought the number one lesson of our industry was that today's million dollar system is tomorrow's cheap kid's toy.
Does someone have a link to a real explanation/argument about why missile defense is impractical?
This is why I have never trusted GPS navigation systems. Everything that uses GPS should have some reliable backup systems for use in the event that GPS fails or goes down.