Also - a biped robot would have mobility and stability problems. They would be top-heavy, and be prone to tripping (either accidentally or through enemy efforts), and once they fell over, they would be sitting ducks.
You can say that about any biped organism - but there are obvious examples all around you where nature has made it work.
Needless to say, if a "mechwarrior" were to be useful, it would have to be as stable as the human driving it, and capable of "getting up" if it gets knocked down for some reason. On the plus side, they would have excellent mobility over all kinds of terrain, be able to climb obstacles, exchange tools/weapons fairly rapidly, and feel fairly "natural" for even newbies to drive. I'm sure they'd probably be pretty damn intimidating as well, especially if they moved as fluidly as humans.
If they were strong enough, I'm pretty sure they'd be fairly effective against tanks - either flipping the tank upside down, or jumping up and down on top of the tank would work. (The hard part would be to approach the tank that closely w/o getting hit by the main gun - perhaps either ambush or short-range "jump jet" or parachuting tactics would work - basically, any tactic that a human could imagine themselves doing if they were "big".
Because the companies that produce the databases want to be able to license the use of the databases to others without allowing the people accessing it to just copy the entire database and stop paying for a subscription, or re-selling it.
Yeah, it's pretty funny/annoying when companies who can't figure out how to make their business models work turn to legislation to make sure they can keep the green rolling in.
It would only take one second (actually a lot less, but we are dealing with oven timers here) to fry an RFID chip. It looks as if he gave them a lot longer.
I thought that a lot of the recent RFID technology made them resistant to being destroyed by such things as microwaves.
When SCO loses and immediately files bankruptcy because they've spent far more on lawyers then they have taken in in revenue, it might be just a little difficult for anybody to get money out of them...
Maybe claimants can figure out a way to sue the lawyers...ahhhh, what a nice daydream...
The greater the deficit the less that future taxes will go for bullshit.
That's stupid reasoning - the greater the deficit, the less that future taxes will go to _anything_ (including defense, law enforcement, education, etc), but you _still_ have to pay those taxes.
So what your saying is, the first strategy of a corporate-friendly government is to wantonly shut down companies on a whim,
It's OK, they only do that to the small companies who can't protest too much and might be competition to the big ones who can give you more money for your campaign.
What if somebody cobbled together a cheap network-enabled low-power fm broadcaster? A $50 box which you plug into your high-speed network connection & point to a shoutcast stream, rebroadcasting the audio with a low power signal up to only a mile away.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how a group of volunteers or a small company could broadcast streams _all_ over the world, to precisely-targeted geographic areas (or saturating large areas, if the transmitters are smart enough to avoid conflicting with each other if they detect that they are all broadcasting at the same frequencies) - all without paying enormous license fees to the FCC or maintaining expensive (and dangerous) radio equipment at central locations.
People who haven't taken the time & effort to learn secure programming concepts (and yes, writing macros _is_ programming) should only be allowed to perform their trial-and-error attempts in carefully-supervised, self-contained environments. The Microsoft Office VBA environment does not qualify as such.
This doesn't even touch the restrictions that should be placed on people willing run every macro virus that comes along.
Self-defense: shooting someone in the leg is plenty to stop most attacks, killing not required.
I can't _ever_ recall an arms instructor telling me it was a good idea to try and shoot someone in the leg (or some other extremity). It was always: "If you have no way to avoid shooting somebody, then shoot to kill. Your life is more important than theirs."
I have to disagree with you on this one: when you're using a gun in self-defense, if you're not some kind of incredible quickdraw sharpshooter, then you shoot to kill. "Self-defense" is not a situation where you are trying not to kill.
Are you kidding? There's no way censors would let the frequent anti-authoritarian messages spewed out on Slashdot anywhere near their impressionable population.
Chinese internet users probably haven't been able to read Slashdot since they got their first net connection outside of China.
Damn, now I'm not sure if I was trying to be funny or not:(
Too bad we don't have a constitutional requirement that all laws which aren't regularly refreshed will expire.
I personally like the legal structure of some Scandinavian tribe I heard about - they follow only the laws that the elders of the tribes can remember (and, I assume, agree on). If they pass something dumb, but nobody can remember it (or why it was a law) by the next tribal meeting, then nobody has to worry about it anymore:)
As another potential way of reducing the complexity of the legal system, there could be a constitutional requirement that everyone gets free legal counsel at taxpayer expense (lawyers become basically salaried employees of the government). Oh, and a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget too. With those two requirements together, every time Congress passes a new law, they have to do a cost-benefit analysis to figure out how much it will cost to hire lawyers to explain the new law to everyone. I figure (after the legal system collapses a few times) the resultant set of laws will be _really_ simple (and being a lawyer won't be a very high-paying job).
Aw darn, reality just woke me up from a really good dream:(
Re:Don't be led astray by things you don't need.
on
KISS
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A few months ago my mother was telling me that someone could get rich by making VCR programming easier (VCR+ is too complicated for her).
I take that she and you haven't been able to use a TiVo-enabled system.
In the long run, patents benefit more people than trade secrets do.
Not in the current situation, where many of the so-called ideas being patented are easy to figure out on your own. In this situation, patents are just a way to stop your competitors from coming up with the same thing independently, which is _not_ in the public interest.
Work on embryos is verboten in the United States. People in Europe don't have as many problems with it as Americans. The root of it is religious, and there's large differences between the United States and Europe WRT religion.
Bear in mind that the US political system is currently quite polarized. Our current "leaders" happen to be highly-religious people (or least people who are pretending to be highly-religious) primarily because they are the loudest & most organized voices in our political system.
I would hazard a guess that the general population doesn't feel too differently than the general population of Europe, but we have a highly-vocal minority claiming they know what's better for us than we do, and most of the US population is too concerned with trying to make a living to take the time to put the noisy idiots in their place.
That this "perception" of Electromagnetic interference, or maybe it is just a "sound", is so common in people with ADD or AD/HD
What makes you think it's a perception of electromagnetic radiation, when it might just be the detection of the high-frequency whine of the monitors? I would hazard a guess that people without ADD/ADHD filter out the sound without thinking about it (since it's usually a little too borderline for them to bring up to a conscious level), but people who have some difficulty filtering out environmental distractions might be more aware of this kind of thing.
The study might still be interesting, but I doubt you'd find that you were detecting electromagnetic radation as "sound".
Slashdot Mirror
You can say that about any biped organism - but there are obvious examples all around you where nature has made it work.
Needless to say, if a "mechwarrior" were to be useful, it would have to be as stable as the human driving it, and capable of "getting up" if it gets knocked down for some reason. On the plus side, they would have excellent mobility over all kinds of terrain, be able to climb obstacles, exchange tools/weapons fairly rapidly, and feel fairly "natural" for even newbies to drive. I'm sure they'd probably be pretty damn intimidating as well, especially if they moved as fluidly as humans.
If they were strong enough, I'm pretty sure they'd be fairly effective against tanks - either flipping the tank upside down, or jumping up and down on top of the tank would work. (The hard part would be to approach the tank that closely w/o getting hit by the main gun - perhaps either ambush or short-range "jump jet" or parachuting tactics would work - basically, any tactic that a human could imagine themselves doing if they were "big".
Yeah, it's pretty funny/annoying when companies who can't figure out how to make their business models work turn to legislation to make sure they can keep the green rolling in.
Not quite right. A _sequence_ of notes makes a song. An unordered collection of notes would not be a song. Your metaphor breaks down.
I thought that a lot of the recent RFID technology made them resistant to being destroyed by such things as microwaves.
Maybe claimants can figure out a way to sue the lawyers...ahhhh, what a nice daydream...
That's stupid reasoning - the greater the deficit, the less that future taxes will go to _anything_ (including defense, law enforcement, education, etc), but you _still_ have to pay those taxes.
It's OK, they only do that to the small companies who can't protest too much and might be competition to the big ones who can give you more money for your campaign.
It could if you organized it right.
What if somebody cobbled together a cheap network-enabled low-power fm broadcaster? A $50 box which you plug into your high-speed network connection & point to a shoutcast stream, rebroadcasting the audio with a low power signal up to only a mile away.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how a group of volunteers or a small company could broadcast streams _all_ over the world, to precisely-targeted geographic areas (or saturating large areas, if the transmitters are smart enough to avoid conflicting with each other if they detect that they are all broadcasting at the same frequencies) - all without paying enormous license fees to the FCC or maintaining expensive (and dangerous) radio equipment at central locations.
And tie blocks of raw spam around their bodies? Or would that scare the lions off?
Some of that is just to get around the filters looking for correctly-spelled words and phrases.
Damn, you just gave me a mental image of a lacey bra-type strap for cow udders. (shudder)
Nah, you can only shoot somebody once (well, once per extremity & the body)...
Yeah, that kind of death is usually reserved for large-scale military operations (or nuclear war).
By the standards of "typical" U.S. citizens, strict Libertarians _are_ anarchist nutjobs by definition.
When my brother asked me for something like that, it usually ended with the object being passed at high speed and with little accuracy...
Damn rock got too smooth after a couple of months scraping away at _my_ beard - besides, using a branding iron was faster & lasted longer.
You had a small typo in your statement there.
People who haven't taken the time & effort to learn secure programming concepts (and yes, writing macros _is_ programming) should only be allowed to perform their trial-and-error attempts in carefully-supervised, self-contained environments. The Microsoft Office VBA environment does not qualify as such.
This doesn't even touch the restrictions that should be placed on people willing run every macro virus that comes along.
You mean like most of the linux distro ISO images? I guess in the eyes of industry, since they're free they don't count as a "useful" purpose of P2P.
I can't _ever_ recall an arms instructor telling me it was a good idea to try and shoot someone in the leg (or some other extremity). It was always: "If you have no way to avoid shooting somebody, then shoot to kill. Your life is more important than theirs."
I have to disagree with you on this one: when you're using a gun in self-defense, if you're not some kind of incredible quickdraw sharpshooter, then you shoot to kill. "Self-defense" is not a situation where you are trying not to kill.
Are you kidding? There's no way censors would let the frequent anti-authoritarian messages spewed out on Slashdot anywhere near their impressionable population.
Chinese internet users probably haven't been able to read Slashdot since they got their first net connection outside of China.
Damn, now I'm not sure if I was trying to be funny or not :(
Too bad we don't have a constitutional requirement that all laws which aren't regularly refreshed will expire.
I personally like the legal structure of some Scandinavian tribe I heard about - they follow only the laws that the elders of the tribes can remember (and, I assume, agree on). If they pass something dumb, but nobody can remember it (or why it was a law) by the next tribal meeting, then nobody has to worry about it anymore :)
As another potential way of reducing the complexity of the legal system, there could be a constitutional requirement that everyone gets free legal counsel at taxpayer expense (lawyers become basically salaried employees of the government). Oh, and a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget too. With those two requirements together, every time Congress passes a new law, they have to do a cost-benefit analysis to figure out how much it will cost to hire lawyers to explain the new law to everyone. I figure (after the legal system collapses a few times) the resultant set of laws will be _really_ simple (and being a lawyer won't be a very high-paying job).
Aw darn, reality just woke me up from a really good dream :(
I take that she and you haven't been able to use a TiVo-enabled system.
Not in the current situation, where many of the so-called ideas being patented are easy to figure out on your own. In this situation, patents are just a way to stop your competitors from coming up with the same thing independently, which is _not_ in the public interest.
Bear in mind that the US political system is currently quite polarized. Our current "leaders" happen to be highly-religious people (or least people who are pretending to be highly-religious) primarily because they are the loudest & most organized voices in our political system.
I would hazard a guess that the general population doesn't feel too differently than the general population of Europe, but we have a highly-vocal minority claiming they know what's better for us than we do, and most of the US population is too concerned with trying to make a living to take the time to put the noisy idiots in their place.
What makes you think it's a perception of electromagnetic radiation, when it might just be the detection of the high-frequency whine of the monitors? I would hazard a guess that people without ADD/ADHD filter out the sound without thinking about it (since it's usually a little too borderline for them to bring up to a conscious level), but people who have some difficulty filtering out environmental distractions might be more aware of this kind of thing.
The study might still be interesting, but I doubt you'd find that you were detecting electromagnetic radation as "sound".