Wait a minute, you're using the "how could something this advanced have evolved naturally?" argument? Fucking seriously? I thought we already got over that when we examined human evolution.
You idiot, they didn't just "close down a school". It was quite obviously a propaganda center. As evidenced from the expedition leader stating stuff like "we tried to educate them, to teach them English". It doesn't take much to realize that it wasn't so much a school as a larger way of publicly announcing that they thought they were better than the Na'vi. And then there's the fact that the same people running the school were the same people that were pretty fucking trigger happy and were gunning down large numbers of the Na'vi.
It would be like Al-Qaeda setting up a "school" in the United States.
The same goes for them banning Grace. She was one of the people working with the people constantly gunning them down, again, not exactly the best way to gain their trust.
"National ninja warrior's advocacy group"? Is your main office by any chance located in a treehouse? Do you still believe that girls have cooties?
Something about your quite immature writing style makes me think that perhaps you haven't thought this through, especially that part where you assume that people don't know how to use guns. Sure, distributing firearms to a bunch of uneducated morons is a bad idea, but assuming you're properly trained in their use, they can be a great defensive weapon.
Carrying guns onto planes can cause a lot of problems if it's not done extremely carefully. For most situations on the ground, say a restaurant, a bunch of armed citizens could easily drop an armed robber and that'd be the end of it. In a plane, you have to worry about decompression (sure, it's no explosive decompression, but it's still something you have to worry about), the very tightly packed people, and the presence of hydraulic and other control lines that can easily be penetrated by a stray bullet. It's not a simple matter of "There's a terrorist, open fire".
What's the problem here? Someone who wasn't a threat made it past security. What's your argument, that people shouldn't be allowed the free speech to wear T-shirts with osama bin laden on them or that everyone who looks nervous is a terrorist? He had no ID, that shouldn't be a problem though because terrorists can quite easily get legitimate IDs. Before 9/11 you didn't even have to show ID to board a non-international flight.
So, he had a fake boarding pass. That's about as bad as sneaking into a movie theater. The fact that he got through with a fake boarding pass doesn't mean that security would have missed any explosives if he was carrying any, or that they wouldn't have found a knife if he was carrying one.
"It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable,"
No, really? Where have we heard this before? I don't think that anyone was under delusions that robots were really going to become self-aware this year.
For the most part, they gain a money and two giraffes on each ebook sale. Seriously, where is this "loosing money on ebook sales" coming from? It doesn't make any business sense for Amazon to do such a thing. I mean, sure, they sell more kindles but it doesn't do any good if they then loose $300 on each kindle user from book sales. (I assume that people with kindles would buy a lot of books thus causing a lot of loss, the casual reader wouldn't drop $300 on a kindle to read one or two books)
I'd suggest converting every book you own really fucking quick. No telling how long it will take Amazon to make a similar format that will take another year or so to break. You can bet that once they do, they'll remotely switch everyone's ebooks over to that new format and then push a firmware upgrade to ensure compliance.
"but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes."
You have clearly not seen video of that airshow where a pilot crashed into a bunch of trees. He was flying very low with the landing gear down along the runway at a slow speed. He tried to pull up and the computer wouldn't let him because it thought he was trying to land and pulling up wouldn't land the craft.
Before you call me out, you might want to pull your head out of your ass and learn just what the fuck you're actually talking about rather than assuming I meant "fly by wire" when I mentioned the airbus computers.
"From scratch" means literally attaching the wires to the board. Not even soldering them. You take the leads from the accelerometer and plug them into the headers on the board. That's about as much work as plugging the wimote into a computer.
Your argument about writing software is moot. The wiimote doesn't work right out of the box either. You have to write just as much, if not more, software to interface with it.
No, no, no. Obviously people are not watching in theaters because of piracy. It can't possibly have anything to do with the poor service, amazingly high food prices, dealing with annoying people, having that jackass walk through the theater with the flashlight to make sure you're not doing anything bad, being treated like crap, the sticky floors, it must be piracy.
Seriously though, I don't know how theaters can be so clueless.
"but the company providing the final keys (it is a process with several stages) could not produce the correct key" That is, by DEFINITION, a licensing issue. "technical difficulties" in the licensing system are called "licensing issues".
When your email goes down because exchange crashed, is it because of "MS exchange server problems" or because of "technical difficulties"?
"technical difficulties" is a term to describe anything involving any part of anything technical having a problem. It's a catch-all phrase necessary because your audience doesn't need to know whether your network switch is broken or your server crashed, all they need to know is that you're experiencing "technical difficulties". "Licensing issues" falls under the broader category of "technical difficulties". Unfortunately, you're trying to use "technical difficulties" as a term to make it sound as if it was all unavoidable and just a complete accident rather than saying "yeah, the rights management fucked itself again. It's a known issue and completely unnecessary but that's what's causing the problems."
Alright, just a minute. Providing a link to google "avatar keygen" is complete bullshit. 95% of that is automatically generated nonsense. You can type in "any_string_of_characters" and "keygen" and get literally thousands of results for supposed key generators. They're usually just links to places that want you to pay to download some nonsense, or more often, they're malware downloads.
Because it wasn't the theater, it was the people in charge of the licensing that fucked up. Furthermore, if there were no DRM then this entire problem would be gone. The theater could have purchased the rights to show it, shown it, made money, everyone is happy
Who the fuck watches avatar for the plot anyway? Look, you watch avatar for the same reasons that you watch the first three star wars episodes. You don't watch for the plot, you watch for the "BOOM BANG POW POW POW BZZZSH LIGHTSABER FIGHT!!" and the obscene amount of special effects. You watch avatar for the special effects, the bang boom bzzzsh, and the smoking hot 10 foot tall blue alien women.
You'd be hard pressed to find a film projector today, it's all digital.
Although, you apparently didn't even bother to read past the headline, the summary should have made it obvious with the line "and per movie server in the theater."
I call bullshit. $2.5 million isn't much compared to the national budget, but compared to what that division of the military actually gets it's probably one hell of a lot. Provide me with documents and I'll consider believing you.
It's kind of both. It's what is effectively a shotgun that fires water. The bomb squad here likes to call it a "disruptor". I guess that makes it sounds better than "water gun".
I believe they use water because water will spread out and push components out of the way, rather than go through them like shot or bullets would. The entire point is to force the components of the bomb away from each other. Effectively like reaching into the bomb and ripping everything out and scattering it all at once. The idea is that it will disable the bomb by separating the bomb from the detonator from the controls from the.... Of course, the reason you use a robot is because it doesn't always work.
Wait a minute.... "This might be a bomb... better shoot it" At best, it's nothing. At worst, you set off the bomb.... which is what the terrorist probably intended anyway. Now, most commercial and military explosives won't detonate when shot, but if you're seriously counting on terrorists to use commercially available explosives and follow proper bomb making procedure then you're pretty fucking stupid. Seems to me there's a pretty high risk of jury-rigged unstable explosives being in terrorist-made bombs.
What dipshit modded this informative? This isn't informative, it's racist. He's taking details from the article out of context and adding nonsense. " -various Arab publications -photos condemning Israeli military action in Gaza "
Uhhhh... the free market works great when vendors can form monopolies. That's the definition. It's a FREE market, with NO regulation.
Now, consumers suffer when there is a completely unrestricted market thus the free market doesn't work in the interest of the people when companies can form monopolies.
You obviously have not done a single bit of research and yet have somehow formed your opinion on the matter. You are an idiot.
Philips head drivers were designed for use in automated manufacturing. Torque sensing tools were quite expensive thus the philips head was designed to cam out at a certain torque. This solved the problem of over-tightening screws. Philips is actually a good standard and it worked well for its purpose.
You, acting as an idiot would, made an assumption that was completely unfounded and assumed that the philips head was designed to be used for people driving screws into everything. In this case, yes, torx, richardson (sqare), tri-wing, and posidriv (a.k.a. supadriv) all work better, because they don't cam out and therefore there is less risk of stripping the screw.
Nowadays torque-sensing machinery is available for acceptable costs and screws other than philips are used for varying reasons.
There's nothing about a standard that makes anything inherently bad. Your assertion that government standardization results in stagnation is completely unfounded. The government used to produce standards for a wide variety of things these standard were called mil-specs. For military specification. These standards worked great for engineering. You could make technical drawings and reference whatever mil-spec was appropriate for the application (they specify things like tolerances and whatnot). Clinton, in his effort to balance the budget, removed this program and the government no longer releases mil-specs. So, the private industry took over, made specifications, and now charges fuckloads of money for access to them. This means that every machine shop, engineering firm, design firm, etc. now has to spend a large amount of money to use these standards. Before, there was no reason to budget in money to buy specifications. Now, you have to buy multiple different specifications form a number of different providers in order to get any fucking work done. THIS is what's causing stagnation. No one can fucking do any real work without shelling out huge portions of their budget for stuff that was free from the government before. How in the hell is this better?
Government standards destroy research and development? Seriously? Please, go look some of this shit up before you spout off more nonsense.
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Wait a minute, you're using the "how could something this advanced have evolved naturally?" argument? Fucking seriously? I thought we already got over that when we examined human evolution.
You idiot, they didn't just "close down a school". It was quite obviously a propaganda center. As evidenced from the expedition leader stating stuff like "we tried to educate them, to teach them English". It doesn't take much to realize that it wasn't so much a school as a larger way of publicly announcing that they thought they were better than the Na'vi. And then there's the fact that the same people running the school were the same people that were pretty fucking trigger happy and were gunning down large numbers of the Na'vi.
It would be like Al-Qaeda setting up a "school" in the United States.
The same goes for them banning Grace. She was one of the people working with the people constantly gunning them down, again, not exactly the best way to gain their trust.
"National ninja warrior's advocacy group"? Is your main office by any chance located in a treehouse? Do you still believe that girls have cooties?
Something about your quite immature writing style makes me think that perhaps you haven't thought this through, especially that part where you assume that people don't know how to use guns. Sure, distributing firearms to a bunch of uneducated morons is a bad idea, but assuming you're properly trained in their use, they can be a great defensive weapon.
Carrying guns onto planes can cause a lot of problems if it's not done extremely carefully. For most situations on the ground, say a restaurant, a bunch of armed citizens could easily drop an armed robber and that'd be the end of it. In a plane, you have to worry about decompression (sure, it's no explosive decompression, but it's still something you have to worry about), the very tightly packed people, and the presence of hydraulic and other control lines that can easily be penetrated by a stray bullet. It's not a simple matter of "There's a terrorist, open fire".
What's the problem here? Someone who wasn't a threat made it past security. What's your argument, that people shouldn't be allowed the free speech to wear T-shirts with osama bin laden on them or that everyone who looks nervous is a terrorist? He had no ID, that shouldn't be a problem though because terrorists can quite easily get legitimate IDs. Before 9/11 you didn't even have to show ID to board a non-international flight.
So, he had a fake boarding pass. That's about as bad as sneaking into a movie theater. The fact that he got through with a fake boarding pass doesn't mean that security would have missed any explosives if he was carrying any, or that they wouldn't have found a knife if he was carrying one.
"It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable,"
No, really? Where have we heard this before? I don't think that anyone was under delusions that robots were really going to become self-aware this year.
For the most part, they gain a money and two giraffes on each ebook sale. Seriously, where is this "loosing money on ebook sales" coming from? It doesn't make any business sense for Amazon to do such a thing. I mean, sure, they sell more kindles but it doesn't do any good if they then loose $300 on each kindle user from book sales. (I assume that people with kindles would buy a lot of books thus causing a lot of loss, the casual reader wouldn't drop $300 on a kindle to read one or two books)
I'd suggest converting every book you own really fucking quick. No telling how long it will take Amazon to make a similar format that will take another year or so to break. You can bet that once they do, they'll remotely switch everyone's ebooks over to that new format and then push a firmware upgrade to ensure compliance.
"but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes."
You have clearly not seen video of that airshow where a pilot crashed into a bunch of trees. He was flying very low with the landing gear down along the runway at a slow speed. He tried to pull up and the computer wouldn't let him because it thought he was trying to land and pulling up wouldn't land the craft.
Before you call me out, you might want to pull your head out of your ass and learn just what the fuck you're actually talking about rather than assuming I meant "fly by wire" when I mentioned the airbus computers.
"From scratch" means literally attaching the wires to the board. Not even soldering them. You take the leads from the accelerometer and plug them into the headers on the board. That's about as much work as plugging the wimote into a computer.
Your argument about writing software is moot. The wiimote doesn't work right out of the box either. You have to write just as much, if not more, software to interface with it.
No, no, no. Obviously people are not watching in theaters because of piracy. It can't possibly have anything to do with the poor service, amazingly high food prices, dealing with annoying people, having that jackass walk through the theater with the flashlight to make sure you're not doing anything bad, being treated like crap, the sticky floors, it must be piracy.
Seriously though, I don't know how theaters can be so clueless.
"but the company providing the final keys (it is a process with several stages) could not produce the correct key"
That is, by DEFINITION, a licensing issue. "technical difficulties" in the licensing system are called "licensing issues".
When your email goes down because exchange crashed, is it because of "MS exchange server problems" or because of "technical difficulties"?
"technical difficulties" is a term to describe anything involving any part of anything technical having a problem. It's a catch-all phrase necessary because your audience doesn't need to know whether your network switch is broken or your server crashed, all they need to know is that you're experiencing "technical difficulties". "Licensing issues" falls under the broader category of "technical difficulties". Unfortunately, you're trying to use "technical difficulties" as a term to make it sound as if it was all unavoidable and just a complete accident rather than saying "yeah, the rights management fucked itself again. It's a known issue and completely unnecessary but that's what's causing the problems."
Alright, just a minute. Providing a link to google "avatar keygen" is complete bullshit. 95% of that is automatically generated nonsense. You can type in "any_string_of_characters" and "keygen" and get literally thousands of results for supposed key generators. They're usually just links to places that want you to pay to download some nonsense, or more often, they're malware downloads.
Here's evidence:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=asdfasdf+keygen&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
Because it wasn't the theater, it was the people in charge of the licensing that fucked up. Furthermore, if there were no DRM then this entire problem would be gone. The theater could have purchased the rights to show it, shown it, made money, everyone is happy
Who the fuck watches avatar for the plot anyway? Look, you watch avatar for the same reasons that you watch the first three star wars episodes. You don't watch for the plot, you watch for the "BOOM BANG POW POW POW BZZZSH LIGHTSABER FIGHT!!" and the obscene amount of special effects. You watch avatar for the special effects, the bang boom bzzzsh, and the smoking hot 10 foot tall blue alien women.
You'd be hard pressed to find a film projector today, it's all digital.
Although, you apparently didn't even bother to read past the headline, the summary should have made it obvious with the line "and per movie server in the theater."
Don't feed the trolls. This one is obviously a racist who links "arab" with "terrorist" or a moron who didn't bother to read the article.
I call bullshit. $2.5 million isn't much compared to the national budget, but compared to what that division of the military actually gets it's probably one hell of a lot. Provide me with documents and I'll consider believing you.
It's kind of both. It's what is effectively a shotgun that fires water. The bomb squad here likes to call it a "disruptor". I guess that makes it sounds better than "water gun".
I believe they use water because water will spread out and push components out of the way, rather than go through them like shot or bullets would. The entire point is to force the components of the bomb away from each other. Effectively like reaching into the bomb and ripping everything out and scattering it all at once. The idea is that it will disable the bomb by separating the bomb from the detonator from the controls from the.... Of course, the reason you use a robot is because it doesn't always work.
Right, but are you seriously counting on terrorists to use military grade explosives rather than homemade stuff?
Wait a minute.... "This might be a bomb... better shoot it"
At best, it's nothing. At worst, you set off the bomb.... which is what the terrorist probably intended anyway. Now, most commercial and military explosives won't detonate when shot, but if you're seriously counting on terrorists to use commercially available explosives and follow proper bomb making procedure then you're pretty fucking stupid. Seems to me there's a pretty high risk of jury-rigged unstable explosives being in terrorist-made bombs.
What dipshit modded this informative? This isn't informative, it's racist. He's taking details from the article out of context and adding nonsense.
"
-various Arab publications
-photos condemning Israeli military action in Gaza
"
These aren't mentioned in the article.
"If you're selling Product A', you can charge for the '. Be it added features, marketing, etc."
Am I the only one that doesn't know what the hell this sentence means? Seriously, I think you missed a word or two in there.
Uhhhh... the free market works great when vendors can form monopolies. That's the definition. It's a FREE market, with NO regulation.
Now, consumers suffer when there is a completely unrestricted market thus the free market doesn't work in the interest of the people when companies can form monopolies.
You obviously have not done a single bit of research and yet have somehow formed your opinion on the matter. You are an idiot.
Philips head drivers were designed for use in automated manufacturing. Torque sensing tools were quite expensive thus the philips head was designed to cam out at a certain torque. This solved the problem of over-tightening screws. Philips is actually a good standard and it worked well for its purpose.
You, acting as an idiot would, made an assumption that was completely unfounded and assumed that the philips head was designed to be used for people driving screws into everything. In this case, yes, torx, richardson (sqare), tri-wing, and posidriv (a.k.a. supadriv) all work better, because they don't cam out and therefore there is less risk of stripping the screw.
Nowadays torque-sensing machinery is available for acceptable costs and screws other than philips are used for varying reasons.
There's nothing about a standard that makes anything inherently bad. Your assertion that government standardization results in stagnation is completely unfounded.
The government used to produce standards for a wide variety of things these standard were called mil-specs. For military specification.
These standards worked great for engineering. You could make technical drawings and reference whatever mil-spec was appropriate for the application (they specify things like tolerances and whatnot). Clinton, in his effort to balance the budget, removed this program and the government no longer releases mil-specs. So, the private industry took over, made specifications, and now charges fuckloads of money for access to them.
This means that every machine shop, engineering firm, design firm, etc. now has to spend a large amount of money to use these standards. Before, there was no reason to budget in money to buy specifications. Now, you have to buy multiple different specifications form a number of different providers in order to get any fucking work done. THIS is what's causing stagnation. No one can fucking do any real work without shelling out huge portions of their budget for stuff that was free from the government before. How in the hell is this better?
Government standards destroy research and development? Seriously? Please, go look some of this shit up before you spout off more nonsense.