... though every version I have ever heard of the joke/tale replaced "Treausre" with "attractive woman". This was partially due to the (sadly) male-only content of my graduate-level EE classes.
Oblivion was annoying as as soon as i level those "bandits" suddenly had very very good gear. I don't like that it's no fun, sometimes it is nice to walk to an area you have been before with your gear and butcher the low level stuff for fun.
And that is why, months after the game was released, some very sophisticated mods began to be released which fixed this "feature". Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul is one of my favorites, and has undergone a massive amount of development work in the past few years. It makes Oblivion feel like a new game each time I return to it, update the mods, and play again.
To explain, the 'vanilla' Oblivion has an unusual feature where the enemies you face are generated either a few levels up or down from the PC's level, with corresponding gear. Therefore, a level 20 PC (that's fairly high--think more towards D&D, not WoW) can walk out of city gates and find a pair of bandits outfitted in gleaming Ebony armor, Glass helmets, and Daedric weapons which alone cost as much as a small house in-game. One of these, if allowed into the city, could probably take out the entire town guard.... except that they level with you, as well. What the many mods do is, in addition to re-writing the leveled lists entirely, fix the skill and equipment windows of enemies into a small range. Therefore, some enemies are generated at level 8 when you are a level 1, and so you had best stay out of their way. However, when you are level 20, they may only be level 12, meaning that you can rampage through without a second thought.
I love the game Oblivion. I am under no illusions that Bethesda is fully responsible for that, however. Bethesda designs some very interesting-yet-incomplete worlds and an engine that, though infamously unstable, is tremendously open to modding and design. It's comparable to the Lord of the Rings, in a way... Tolkien's writing style is very dry, and the text is anything but gripping, however the world he imagined has proven to be an incredible resource for plenty of other "modders", from Gary Gygax to Peter Jackson to the individual readers.
Wait, so you find all of western culture too insensitive for you to interact with comfortably?
The GP quite clearly stated that said jokes embraced by both FOSS and western culture in general were not the issue, but rather that leaders in the FOSS movement advocate rights, free-as-in-anything, and equality who have offended people do not seem to be willing to apologize when they do so.
how much do we lose in good will by weakening the herd immunity
Good will? Maybe... But actual weakening of the "herd immunity"? You aren't going to achieve that in an internet-world.
You can picture herd immunity using the following simplistic example: Imagine a grid (hexagonal, say...) of people. Each person can only infect those who are adjacent to them. Also, a virus has some finite probability of actually being able to infect each adjacent victim. If a victim makes their 'saving throw', they are safe (for the purposes of this thought experiment). You can clearly see here how having a good portion of people on the grid immune to receiving and transmitting the virus can prevent it from spreading across the board, as the virus is very limited in its connections.
On the internet, though, such a limitation does not exist. Each computer can (discounting firewalls, NAT's, proxys, etc.) contact 2^8.2^8.2^8.2^8 = 2^32 other IPv4 addresses... i.e., all of them. It doesn't matter if a huge subset of computers are 'vaccinated' against the computer virus, as the super-connectivity allows a malicious program to seek out and attempt to infect any computer in the world. Increased patching and protection will slow the spread of the software, but even then only by a small amount due to the geometric progression of infection. (Both (2^x)*10 and (2^x)/10 will cap out at the total number of computers in a similar amount of time.)
Increased proliferation and use of anti-virus and related programs will reduce the size of botnets, spamnets, and the like--which is certainly a good thing--but the concept of herd immunity simply doesn't apply to our modern-day internet.
For those of us on the West Coast, there is the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The California museum also has an Enigma and a Cray-1* (complete with benches), as well as a piece of ENIAC, an original Google server, a System 360, pieces from Apollo, and even a working Babbage Difference Engine. The focus is not on cryptography--rather the general history of computing--but there are plenty of pieces of cryptographic history and codebreakers in their collection.
(*I *thought* it was the Cray-1, rather than the -2, that had benches, but I could be mistaken.)
It probably fell more into obscurity due to its horrific 2600 VCS port.
I owned the Atari 2600 port, and it was always one of my favorites for the system (when it worked, that is). The port required much more reprogramming than the 5600 port due to the limitations of the system, (4K cartridge memory, 128 bits RAM, and some absolutely crazy graphical display constraints that you can read about on Wikipedia.
By far, the biggest limitation to playing the game (aside from losing the manual and forgetting what all the buttons do) was the lousy quality of the keypad that came with the game. The 2600 controller only has a single button, so covering all the features (hyperspace, galactic map, scan, shields, etc.) required a special keypad laid out like a rubbery touch-tone telephone to be plugged into the controller 2 slot. Unfortunately, after a year or so, I started needing to pound the buttons harder and harder to get a response from the system, up to the point where it stopped working altogether. The internal contacts themselves tend to flatten out, and no amount of dusting was able to fix the device.
Still, a landmark game... Even though I rarely achieved a rank higher than "Ship's Cook" at the young age when I played the game.
Hmm... I agree with you on your first two points, but not so much on the rest.
T-Mobile is at fault for having useless coverage outside of major metro areas.
Um... that's their business model. They are a smaller company in the USA than Verizon, AT&T, and so forth, and so rather than try to compete toe to toe with the big guys, they target city-based youth with lower-priced plans and features like Android. Don't get angry at them just because they don't make the products you want... if you aren't their target market, you don't buy their products, plain and simple. However, plenty of people do want what they have to offer, which is why they are still around in the United States.
Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, etc. are at fault for continuing to push CDMA2000 shit rather than using the world standard of GSM, thus limiting themselves to the ghetto of the phone universe, just so they can fuck around with firmware to lock out features the phone would otherwise have.
MHz for MHz, CDMA (used in CDMA2000) is superior to TDMA (used in GSM and such) from the provider's perspective. CDMA supports more individual connections per cell tower, increasing network capacity. Also, for early adopters, CDMA had the advantage of having a wider evolutionary path than GSM. Even previous GSM networks are moving to the WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) standard for UMTS, meaning that CDMA's early adopters dodged a bullet of costly upgrades down the line.
The FCC is at fault for not working to align our mobile phone frequencies with the rest of the world and allowing T-Mobile to deploy their 3G on a different band than even AT&T, meaning that most "world" 3G phones are still not compatible, locking any of those users to AT&T only in the US.
Given what I just talked about above, I'm kind of glad that the FCC didn't see fit to stick their noses in and force companies to adopt an inferior technology, or one that conflicted with their business models.
If you want a phone that hasn't been fucked with by a carrier AND decent rural coverage, AT&T is the only game in the country here.
Having recently purchased two phones from Verizon, I know that most of their models, both high-end and low-end, have multiple radios in the phone so that you can use CDMA here in the 'States, or switch to GSM/UMTS for roaming abroad if you choose. Roaming sucks, but it does under pretty much any carrier these days. The phone is still there, though, if you need to make the call.
I hate giving any arm of AT&T my money, but I don't have a choice for now.
Before everyone starts posting stories about how they grew up on their Apple II using a 300 baud modem,
Too late. Did you watch the movie? There's some heavy handed "Get off my lawn"-ness going on in the article itself. To quote:
a lot of the youngsters nowadays have no real idea how primitive things were a few years ago.
"This is the first one I could say was my computer [...] You would have to plug it in because there was no battery, and you would work forever to get very little out of it..."
today's children have no concept of a life before computers.
Regardless, I say Happy Birthday, Internet! I can't wait to find out what sorts of wonders you will bring to my kids in another decade or so.
In his Known Space universe, the true separation of space-based ("Belter") culture from Earth-based ("Flatlander") culture occurred when the Belters completed their massive 'terraforming' of the inside of an asteroid named Sanctuary as a shelter and home for pregnant Belter women. Rotating the asteroid up to 1-g, they eliminated their last unwanted ties to Earth as women no longer needed to return to the home planet for the period of gestation and birth.
Though, if I remember correctly, Larry Niven's justification for the need was a bit different, as he reasoned that a human fetus brought to term in very low gravity would grow to a size that endangered the life of the mother... I think.
I followed the link on "detecting imminent explosions", hoping to gain some insight about Li-Ion batteries or at least see some amusing stories about unusual system behavior shortly before an explosion. Instead, I found some of the most useless advice since I contacted Dell's tech support about a RAM issue.
The following are verbatim quotes from the page, taken from a section about 'steps you can take to be safer':
If the iPhone is getting hotter, if its start to make noises, raise smoke or shake un normally, it's a sign something is about to happen.
Or even worse...
Listen to your iPhone and get to know when the iPhone is about is explode in you hand on in the pocket. When you feel this is the time, the best thing to do is to throw it away and let the iPhone explode far from you. Later on, please collect all the pieces.
So... their advice on determining if your iPhone is at risk of explosion boils down to looking for smoke and then tossing the thing like a hand grenade. I particularly enjoy the fairly circular advice to "get to know when the iPhone is about is [sic] explode". Does one detonate and study a series of iPhones to gather this knowledge?
It has been a while since something on the internet actually struck me speechless, but this has done it.
This "Avatar" is unrelated to that one. Needless to say, I was still rather confused.
Even more so, here.
I've been playing old school (Pre-EA) Ultima, where every third schmo on the street greets you with something along the lines of:
"Avatar, you must save my son from the daemons!" "Avatar, seek out the rune of Compassion!" "Avatar, have you seen my daughter that I left in a tree stump last week?"
...So I understandably mis-parsed the article title "Avatar, Has Sci-fi Found Its Heaven's Gate?"
Good points, eldavojohn. Here are a few more thoughts regarding Stormtrooper armor and Blasters:
First off, blaster != laser gun. The official materials state how a blaster is supposed to be shooting some sort of highly energized packet of Tibanna Gas sealed in a way to deliver its explosive energies to a target. So yes, it is a projectile weapon, not a pulsed laser beam.
Why use blasters, then? First off, the blaster bolt is much more damaging than a standard projectile of equivalent mass, while having far less kickback than a rifle with similar destructive powers. Also, Stormtrooper armor can easily stop your average bullet! Got that? That is also one of the reasons for Stormtrooper armor. Also, the armor itself is seen to often be impenetrable to blaster bolts. There are plenty of instances in the movies when you can see a shot 'wing' a Stormtrooper or simply impact on the chest plate without disabling the Stormtrooper. A large number of the disabling shots in the movies actually hit joints in the armor (either the heroes are guided by the Force, or just sick-lucky).
of course it weas cooler when Origin still existed and owned it..
Agreed. I've recently been reading up on the Ultima IV - VII "Let's Play"'s, and I am quite impressed at what Lord British (the programmer, not the NPC) was able to achieve in the late 80's and early 90's with the series. It was enough to make me forget that there ever was this EA nonsense... that is, until Serpent's Isle came out and all the NPC's walked around calling Lord British a bastard and a beast.
Good catch there... sorry, I was trying to differentiate between active and passive detectors, of which both transmissive and reflective detectors are active detectors, while the OP posited a passive detector.
Its like infra-red in that its darn hard not to give off a signature of some kind. That's how you can use it in the airports for monitoring for hidden weapons without dousing people with all kinds of xrays.
Actually, terahertz radiation security monitoring works just like current x-ray monitoring at airports. In other words, they have a source on one side and a receiver on the other, and they look for anything blocking the radiation. THz radiation penetrates fabrics, plastics, and mostly flesh, but is non-ionizing (unlike x-rays), so it is an ideal choice to see what someone is carrying without asking them to strip down, first.
THz security systems do *not* rely on the natural emissions of objects. The power contained in this band is quite small and difficult to use. Additionally, the power radiated from an object is *not* dependent on density, but, like all thermal radiation, dependent on the heat of the object.
It is a silhouette based detection--like a photograph or an x-ray--not an emission based detection, such as a Geiger counter detecting radioactive material.
you get all sorts of emissions from this miniature lightning storm
Just to clarify my own post:
The emissions don't come from the electric field itself, but from the electrons, accelerated to a very high velocity, ramming into things like air molecules and the other strip of tape. The high energies imparted to the electrons on the receiving end of these collisions allows for emission of very low-wavelength photons (terahertz radiation, x-rays) as the electrons drop back to their natural states.
If anyone is curious about how this happens, it is due to the very high voltages developed on clear sticky-tape when it is unrolled. The peeling action tends to create a very uneven distribution of charges on the tape surface... the tape itself is a wonderful insulator, and as a result the charges cannot easily snap back to equilibrium states.
This causes very high voltages and, where the tape is just being unrolled from the roll, extreme electric field as the distance is so small. (Remember, Electric field is measured in V/m!). Charges arc through the air easier than they can travel through the tape, so you get all sorts of emissions from this miniature lightning storm as the voltage drops back to a static level of 'only' about a kV.
Incidentally, this is why you should always use special ESD-approved tape when working anywhere around electrostatic-discharge-sensitive devices. My company's ESD training class had some quite interesting demonstrations where stuff was destroyed with a single piece of freshly unrolled tape. Unfortunately for me, I had yet to learn that lesson in graduate school, and so I ruined many a sensitive analog ASIC by taping a supposedly protective dust cover over the bare IC* (we were too cheap to pay for the black packaging that most people call a "chip").:-(
*Note to all the pedants out there: Yes, a fabricated IC has its own natural shield of silicon dioxide (glass) on top of the deposited layers, however the tens-of-micron-thin wire bonds that connected the IC to my prototyping board were exposed to air, and could easily be broken--or worse, shorted--by errant dust particles.
Just to clarify, I am no Apple fanboy. I just wished to point out how horrible is the RIM operating system for things like multitasking (having Google Maps open while I check an e-mail) or even Javascript. I'd be even happier if Verizon would get off of their collective rear ends and push for an Android based phone, but they have expressed a clear lack of interest in such progress, recently.
It comes down to signal quality or phone quality. You can either have a phone that can do anything (as long as it doesn't require an internet connection), or a phone with the world at your fingertips and only a battery pull or two away.
Hmm. My 3G data plan from Verizon for my Blackberry Storm is unlimited... Unlimited, as in, no small-print 5Gb (or GB or gb or whatever) limit and no bandwidth caps or extra data fees or whatever. (This is quite important, as the BB Storm lacks WiFi capability, so all of my data goes out over the EV-DO 1x connection.
My 5-month old loves taking walks in his stroller while I have Pandora streaming music to us, and I no longer need to worry about exorbitant SMS or MMS fees as I can e-mail whatever I want, whenever I want. The only limitation is that it is not an iPhone.
but many autistic kids benefit greatly from a gluten free diet.
It... depends on your interpretation. There is just enough truth in that statement to make it thoroughly confusing.
Psychological problems are diagnosed almost solely based upon symptoms (as you cannot test positive for the nonexistent a BPD bacteria or schizophrenia antibodies). As a result, a few select kids who actually have a digestive issue [preventing certain nutrients from being absorbed and presented to the brain], but no underlying brain architecture problems, are being diagnosed as "autistic".
We are beginning to understand some of the 'wiring' differences in autism, such as reduced neural connectivity in certain high-level areas of the brain (which seems to result in an increase in connectivity within sub-sections), and even a larger-than-normal brain. An fMRI of an autistic brain shows clear and measurable differences in activity and excitation from a neurotypical brain. It is certain, however, that these changes to the brain structure begin in the womb and are permanent.
What this boils down to is that, while a GF diet may aid in the treatment of a digestive/endocrine system-related condition which causes symptoms similar to autism, autism spectrum disorders (as defined by the re-wiring of the brain) cannot be treated quite so easily.
I work for the company (Qualcomm) that made *most* of the chips for the G1. I say "most" because HTC decided to go with their own homegrown power management solution, rather than the one we had prepared for them. The result? Exactly what you've been talking about.
With any luck, they'll come back to us (I'm on the power management team) for the... uh... G2?... and there will be an Android phone that is fast *and* efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true.
... though every version I have ever heard of the joke/tale replaced "Treausre" with "attractive woman". This was partially due to the (sadly) male-only content of my graduate-level EE classes.
Oblivion was annoying as as soon as i level those "bandits" suddenly had very very good gear. I don't like that it's no fun, sometimes it is nice to walk to an area you have been before with your gear and butcher the low level stuff for fun.
And that is why, months after the game was released, some very sophisticated mods began to be released which fixed this "feature". Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul is one of my favorites, and has undergone a massive amount of development work in the past few years. It makes Oblivion feel like a new game each time I return to it, update the mods, and play again.
.... except that they level with you, as well. What the many mods do is, in addition to re-writing the leveled lists entirely, fix the skill and equipment windows of enemies into a small range. Therefore, some enemies are generated at level 8 when you are a level 1, and so you had best stay out of their way. However, when you are level 20, they may only be level 12, meaning that you can rampage through without a second thought.
To explain, the 'vanilla' Oblivion has an unusual feature where the enemies you face are generated either a few levels up or down from the PC's level, with corresponding gear. Therefore, a level 20 PC (that's fairly high--think more towards D&D, not WoW) can walk out of city gates and find a pair of bandits outfitted in gleaming Ebony armor, Glass helmets, and Daedric weapons which alone cost as much as a small house in-game. One of these, if allowed into the city, could probably take out the entire town guard
I love the game Oblivion. I am under no illusions that Bethesda is fully responsible for that, however. Bethesda designs some very interesting-yet-incomplete worlds and an engine that, though infamously unstable, is tremendously open to modding and design. It's comparable to the Lord of the Rings, in a way... Tolkien's writing style is very dry, and the text is anything but gripping, however the world he imagined has proven to be an incredible resource for plenty of other "modders", from Gary Gygax to Peter Jackson to the individual readers.
Wait, so you find all of western culture too insensitive for you to interact with comfortably?
The GP quite clearly stated that said jokes embraced by both FOSS and western culture in general were not the issue, but rather that leaders in the FOSS movement advocate rights, free-as-in-anything, and equality who have offended people do not seem to be willing to apologize when they do so.
how much do we lose in good will by weakening the herd immunity
Good will? Maybe... But actual weakening of the "herd immunity"? You aren't going to achieve that in an internet-world.
You can picture herd immunity using the following simplistic example: Imagine a grid (hexagonal, say...) of people. Each person can only infect those who are adjacent to them. Also, a virus has some finite probability of actually being able to infect each adjacent victim. If a victim makes their 'saving throw', they are safe (for the purposes of this thought experiment). You can clearly see here how having a good portion of people on the grid immune to receiving and transmitting the virus can prevent it from spreading across the board, as the virus is very limited in its connections.
On the internet, though, such a limitation does not exist. Each computer can (discounting firewalls, NAT's, proxys, etc.) contact 2^8.2^8.2^8.2^8 = 2^32 other IPv4 addresses... i.e., all of them. It doesn't matter if a huge subset of computers are 'vaccinated' against the computer virus, as the super-connectivity allows a malicious program to seek out and attempt to infect any computer in the world. Increased patching and protection will slow the spread of the software, but even then only by a small amount due to the geometric progression of infection. (Both (2^x)*10 and (2^x)/10 will cap out at the total number of computers in a similar amount of time.)
Increased proliferation and use of anti-virus and related programs will reduce the size of botnets, spamnets, and the like--which is certainly a good thing--but the concept of herd immunity simply doesn't apply to our modern-day internet.
Yo dawg, we'll just put a comment system in the comment system so we can comment on the comments on the web page while we comment on the web page.
i.e. ... Slashdot.
For those of us on the West Coast, there is the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The California museum also has an Enigma and a Cray-1* (complete with benches), as well as a piece of ENIAC, an original Google server, a System 360, pieces from Apollo, and even a working Babbage Difference Engine. The focus is not on cryptography--rather the general history of computing--but there are plenty of pieces of cryptographic history and codebreakers in their collection.
(*I *thought* it was the Cray-1, rather than the -2, that had benches, but I could be mistaken.)
It probably fell more into obscurity due to its horrific 2600 VCS port.
I owned the Atari 2600 port, and it was always one of my favorites for the system (when it worked, that is). The port required much more reprogramming than the 5600 port due to the limitations of the system, (4K cartridge memory, 128 bits RAM, and some absolutely crazy graphical display constraints that you can read about on Wikipedia.
By far, the biggest limitation to playing the game (aside from losing the manual and forgetting what all the buttons do) was the lousy quality of the keypad that came with the game. The 2600 controller only has a single button, so covering all the features (hyperspace, galactic map, scan, shields, etc.) required a special keypad laid out like a rubbery touch-tone telephone to be plugged into the controller 2 slot. Unfortunately, after a year or so, I started needing to pound the buttons harder and harder to get a response from the system, up to the point where it stopped working altogether. The internal contacts themselves tend to flatten out, and no amount of dusting was able to fix the device.
Still, a landmark game... Even though I rarely achieved a rank higher than "Ship's Cook" at the young age when I played the game.
T-Mobile is at fault for having useless coverage outside of major metro areas.
Um... that's their business model. They are a smaller company in the USA than Verizon, AT&T, and so forth, and so rather than try to compete toe to toe with the big guys, they target city-based youth with lower-priced plans and features like Android. Don't get angry at them just because they don't make the products you want... if you aren't their target market, you don't buy their products, plain and simple. However, plenty of people do want what they have to offer, which is why they are still around in the United States.
Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, etc. are at fault for continuing to push CDMA2000 shit rather than using the world standard of GSM, thus limiting themselves to the ghetto of the phone universe, just so they can fuck around with firmware to lock out features the phone would otherwise have.
MHz for MHz, CDMA (used in CDMA2000) is superior to TDMA (used in GSM and such) from the provider's perspective. CDMA supports more individual connections per cell tower, increasing network capacity. Also, for early adopters, CDMA had the advantage of having a wider evolutionary path than GSM. Even previous GSM networks are moving to the WCDMA (wideband-CDMA) standard for UMTS, meaning that CDMA's early adopters dodged a bullet of costly upgrades down the line.
The FCC is at fault for not working to align our mobile phone frequencies with the rest of the world and allowing T-Mobile to deploy their 3G on a different band than even AT&T, meaning that most "world" 3G phones are still not compatible, locking any of those users to AT&T only in the US.
Given what I just talked about above, I'm kind of glad that the FCC didn't see fit to stick their noses in and force companies to adopt an inferior technology, or one that conflicted with their business models.
If you want a phone that hasn't been fucked with by a carrier AND decent rural coverage, AT&T is the only game in the country here.
Having recently purchased two phones from Verizon, I know that most of their models, both high-end and low-end, have multiple radios in the phone so that you can use CDMA here in the 'States, or switch to GSM/UMTS for roaming abroad if you choose. Roaming sucks, but it does under pretty much any carrier these days. The phone is still there, though, if you need to make the call.
I hate giving any arm of AT&T my money, but I don't have a choice for now.
Look around. Options abound.
Before everyone starts posting stories about how they grew up on their Apple II using a 300 baud modem,
Too late. Did you watch the movie? There's some heavy handed "Get off my lawn"-ness going on in the article itself. To quote:
a lot of the youngsters nowadays have no real idea how primitive things were a few years ago.
"This is the first one I could say was my computer [...] You would have to plug it in because there was no battery, and you would work forever to get very little out of it..."
today's children have no concept of a life before computers.
Regardless, I say Happy Birthday, Internet! I can't wait to find out what sorts of wonders you will bring to my kids in another decade or so.
...Larry Niven predicted this years ago.
In his Known Space universe, the true separation of space-based ("Belter") culture from Earth-based ("Flatlander") culture occurred when the Belters completed their massive 'terraforming' of the inside of an asteroid named Sanctuary as a shelter and home for pregnant Belter women. Rotating the asteroid up to 1-g, they eliminated their last unwanted ties to Earth as women no longer needed to return to the home planet for the period of gestation and birth.
Though, if I remember correctly, Larry Niven's justification for the need was a bit different, as he reasoned that a human fetus brought to term in very low gravity would grow to a size that endangered the life of the mother... I think.
The following are verbatim quotes from the page, taken from a section about 'steps you can take to be safer':
If the iPhone is getting hotter, if its start to make noises, raise smoke or shake un normally, it's a sign something is about to happen.
Or even worse...
Listen to your iPhone and get to know when the iPhone is about is explode in you hand on in the pocket. When you feel this is the time, the best thing to do is to throw it away and let the iPhone explode far from you. Later on, please collect all the pieces.
So... their advice on determining if your iPhone is at risk of explosion boils down to looking for smoke and then tossing the thing like a hand grenade. I particularly enjoy the fairly circular advice to "get to know when the iPhone is about is [sic] explode". Does one detonate and study a series of iPhones to gather this knowledge?
It has been a while since something on the internet actually struck me speechless, but this has done it.
This "Avatar" is unrelated to that one. Needless to say, I was still rather confused.
Even more so, here.
I've been playing old school (Pre-EA) Ultima, where every third schmo on the street greets you with something along the lines of:
"Avatar, you must save my son from the daemons!"
"Avatar, seek out the rune of Compassion!"
"Avatar, have you seen my daughter that I left in a tree stump last week?"
...So I understandably mis-parsed the article title "Avatar, Has Sci-fi Found Its Heaven's Gate?"
First off, blaster != laser gun. The official materials state how a blaster is supposed to be shooting some sort of highly energized packet of Tibanna Gas sealed in a way to deliver its explosive energies to a target. So yes, it is a projectile weapon, not a pulsed laser beam.
Why use blasters, then? First off, the blaster bolt is much more damaging than a standard projectile of equivalent mass, while having far less kickback than a rifle with similar destructive powers. Also, Stormtrooper armor can easily stop your average bullet! Got that? That is also one of the reasons for Stormtrooper armor. Also, the armor itself is seen to often be impenetrable to blaster bolts. There are plenty of instances in the movies when you can see a shot 'wing' a Stormtrooper or simply impact on the chest plate without disabling the Stormtrooper. A large number of the disabling shots in the movies actually hit joints in the armor (either the heroes are guided by the Force, or just sick-lucky).
Midi-Chlorians?
...These aren't the droids you're looking for.
of course it weas cooler when Origin still existed and owned it. .
Agreed. I've recently been reading up on the Ultima IV - VII "Let's Play"'s, and I am quite impressed at what Lord British (the programmer, not the NPC) was able to achieve in the late 80's and early 90's with the series. It was enough to make me forget that there ever was this EA nonsense... that is, until Serpent's Isle came out and all the NPC's walked around calling Lord British a bastard and a beast.
... CURSE YOU SHAMINOOOO!
*Ahem*
Good catch there... sorry, I was trying to differentiate between active and passive detectors, of which both transmissive and reflective detectors are active detectors, while the OP posited a passive detector.
THz radiation penetrates [...] mostly flesh
My mistake. THz radiation does not penetrate water, so flesh would appear generally opaque.
Its like infra-red in that its darn hard not to give off a signature of some kind. That's how you can use it in the airports for monitoring for hidden weapons without dousing people with all kinds of xrays.
Actually, terahertz radiation security monitoring works just like current x-ray monitoring at airports. In other words, they have a source on one side and a receiver on the other, and they look for anything blocking the radiation. THz radiation penetrates fabrics, plastics, and mostly flesh, but is non-ionizing (unlike x-rays), so it is an ideal choice to see what someone is carrying without asking them to strip down, first.
THz security systems do *not* rely on the natural emissions of objects. The power contained in this band is quite small and difficult to use. Additionally, the power radiated from an object is *not* dependent on density, but, like all thermal radiation, dependent on the heat of the object.
It is a silhouette based detection--like a photograph or an x-ray--not an emission based detection, such as a Geiger counter detecting radioactive material.
you get all sorts of emissions from this miniature lightning storm
Just to clarify my own post:
The emissions don't come from the electric field itself, but from the electrons, accelerated to a very high velocity, ramming into things like air molecules and the other strip of tape. The high energies imparted to the electrons on the receiving end of these collisions allows for emission of very low-wavelength photons (terahertz radiation, x-rays) as the electrons drop back to their natural states.
If anyone is curious about how this happens, it is due to the very high voltages developed on clear sticky-tape when it is unrolled. The peeling action tends to create a very uneven distribution of charges on the tape surface... the tape itself is a wonderful insulator, and as a result the charges cannot easily snap back to equilibrium states.
:-(
This causes very high voltages and, where the tape is just being unrolled from the roll, extreme electric field as the distance is so small. (Remember, Electric field is measured in V/m!). Charges arc through the air easier than they can travel through the tape, so you get all sorts of emissions from this miniature lightning storm as the voltage drops back to a static level of 'only' about a kV.
Incidentally, this is why you should always use special ESD-approved tape when working anywhere around electrostatic-discharge-sensitive devices. My company's ESD training class had some quite interesting demonstrations where stuff was destroyed with a single piece of freshly unrolled tape. Unfortunately for me, I had yet to learn that lesson in graduate school, and so I ruined many a sensitive analog ASIC by taping a supposedly protective dust cover over the bare IC* (we were too cheap to pay for the black packaging that most people call a "chip").
*Note to all the pedants out there: Yes, a fabricated IC has its own natural shield of silicon dioxide (glass) on top of the deposited layers, however the tens-of-micron-thin wire bonds that connected the IC to my prototyping board were exposed to air, and could easily be broken--or worse, shorted--by errant dust particles.
There are two conditions which can easily and reliably be alleviated with a sugar pill:
Hypoglycemia and Hypochondria.
The only limitation is that it is not an iPhone.
Just to clarify, I am no Apple fanboy. I just wished to point out how horrible is the RIM operating system for things like multitasking (having Google Maps open while I check an e-mail) or even Javascript. I'd be even happier if Verizon would get off of their collective rear ends and push for an Android based phone, but they have expressed a clear lack of interest in such progress, recently.
It comes down to signal quality or phone quality. You can either have a phone that can do anything (as long as it doesn't require an internet connection), or a phone with the world at your fingertips and only a battery pull or two away.
Hmm. My 3G data plan from Verizon for my Blackberry Storm is unlimited... Unlimited, as in, no small-print 5Gb (or GB or gb or whatever) limit and no bandwidth caps or extra data fees or whatever. (This is quite important, as the BB Storm lacks WiFi capability, so all of my data goes out over the EV-DO 1x connection.
My 5-month old loves taking walks in his stroller while I have Pandora streaming music to us, and I no longer need to worry about exorbitant SMS or MMS fees as I can e-mail whatever I want, whenever I want. The only limitation is that it is not an iPhone.
That's because two of the above get paid for what they do, and the third lives much like a graduate student in search of free food. :-p
but many autistic kids benefit greatly from a gluten free diet.
It... depends on your interpretation. There is just enough truth in that statement to make it thoroughly confusing.
Psychological problems are diagnosed almost solely based upon symptoms (as you cannot test positive for the nonexistent a BPD bacteria or schizophrenia antibodies). As a result, a few select kids who actually have a digestive issue [preventing certain nutrients from being absorbed and presented to the brain], but no underlying brain architecture problems, are being diagnosed as "autistic".
We are beginning to understand some of the 'wiring' differences in autism, such as reduced neural connectivity in certain high-level areas of the brain (which seems to result in an increase in connectivity within sub-sections), and even a larger-than-normal brain. An fMRI of an autistic brain shows clear and measurable differences in activity and excitation from a neurotypical brain. It is certain, however, that these changes to the brain structure begin in the womb and are permanent.
What this boils down to is that, while a GF diet may aid in the treatment of a digestive/endocrine system-related condition which causes symptoms similar to autism, autism spectrum disorders (as defined by the re-wiring of the brain) cannot be treated quite so easily.
I work for the company (Qualcomm) that made *most* of the chips for the G1. I say "most" because HTC decided to go with their own homegrown power management solution, rather than the one we had prepared for them. The result? Exactly what you've been talking about.
... uh... G2? ... and there will be an Android phone that is fast *and* efficient.
With any luck, they'll come back to us (I'm on the power management team) for the