Not that that type of gun couldn't be lethal - I've seen a man portable rail gun (similar to a gauss gun, but uses different forces) built in a (high school) classroom in AP (accelerated physics) for a group final project propel a nail through several cinder blocks. It did about as well as a 9mm handgun, if I recall correctly, though it was much heavier and fired much slower (like maybe 3-4 nails per minute max).
And no, they obviously didn't test shoot it at school, at least not with anything in it. All shooting was on a firing range and captured on a high speed camera (1000FPS) the physics department owned (thanks to concession stand sales). They also shot footage of several other guns (owned by people at the range, I believe, but at least one of them was 18 at the time, so it is possible he owned or obtained them for this purpose) shooting cinder blocks to compare speed and penetrating power compared to their rail gun. They mainly used different sized nails for railgun ammo, though they did try a thumbtack (and it failed spectacularly - too soft, too fluttery)
My thoughts exactly, and a construction of that size likely would take much longer and thus be distributed over many more years. And we're talking people wealth, not corporate wealth - if the corporations got involved, they could fund construction much more handily.
As for the cost, that could be reduced significantly. $6-20 billion for a space elevator (estimated cost). $7 billion more for a nuke plant to run it (why not? - and that is about what an AP1000 costs, and some of that cost could be absorbed selling excess energy). At that point you pay terrestrial assembly and vacuum testing costs and ship it up in segments, connecting them in space (probably using robots). Now you can build your station for terrestrial costs and make money on the side (shipping satellites or tourists, for instance).
The irony is Obama isn't getting what he wants, either. Obama's personal agenda is to eliminate all nukes worldwide and disarming Russia would help further that plan. OTOH, he also has said that he is willing to eliminate all nukes in the US even if other countries don't (the most asinine thing I've heard from him... I can just imagine in a Russian voice "give us all your food or we drop nukes").
Also the US doesn't consider solitary confinement torture and has used it extensively on Bradley Manning. The international community differs on that issue. Sorry, but condemning someone to insanity from 30 years in solitary is torture in my book.
Yeah, my bozo rep voted against it, too, and I against him. It's too bad, too - he's considered a moderate 'publican and I usually don't disagree with them too much except for on abortion, religion, and military spending. The Dems gave us an awful hard left candidate that lost in a landslide, so I don't feel bad about who won, but in an only slightly right leaning district, you shouldn't lose by twice the number of votes if you've chosen your candidates well (heck, if abortion was taken off the issues list, the district is so poor I think the Dems could win in a landslide, but poor + religious seem to go hand in hand). I may have to flip-flop on non-incumbent parties and start voting in their primaries - as a moderate with no party, it sucks that I can only vote in one primary.
Is it really worth losing your constitutional right to free speech? It is not unprecedented for the US to demand everything you write be reviewed (for confidential information) and censored (mainly for confidential information, though over-censoring is not unprecedented) after getting out of one of these government jobs.
The thing is, technically they haven't acquired these powers. Constitutionally the NSA is doing, by their own admittance, something that is illegal 49% of the time by spying on Americans. I could understand a 5% margin of error (seems an acceptable accidental range), but 49% is ridiculous - that is like saying going 96 miles an hour in a 65 mile per hour zone is OK. Where I grew up, we'd call that a reckless endangerment felony.
Dick Cheney (along with Karl Rove, Richard Armitage, and others) committed the exact same crime under the exact same act as Snowden did, specifically by giving information about something of national security (Valerie Plame's CIA cover) to someone that wasn't supposed to have it (the news). That makes him a hypocrite. George W. Bush turned the ECHELON successor PRISM against US citizens using his pet policy of the Patriot Act, but he is correct - Snowden probably did damage the security of the country by revealing that the NSA is snooping on and keyword matching even secure Scype calls, foreign and domestic. Typical politician - answering truthfully and not telling you anything more than you already know.
So was Reagan - ditching the metric conversion completely ruined this country.
Seriously, though, I don't think Carter was as bad as some people make him out to be. He inherited a disaster as the economy was slipping into recession, had rampant unemployment and inflation, an oil crisis, etc. Bush 2 got a lot of the same and wasn't able to fix it, either. The main thing Carter is blamed at failing at is rescuing the Iranian hostages, but the Algiers Accord was done and ready for signing before Reagan even took office (signing it was one of his first acts). Yeah, it took way too long and he mismanaged the parts he was involved with (calling student revolutionaries terrorists and refusing to negotiate with them on those grounds didn't help). So IMO, he wasn't an effective president, but also not the pariah Republicans make of him.
Maybe he regrets setting up the FISC in 1978 by signing the FISA Act that that overstepped its bounds using the Patriot Act and now spies on Americans (but only 49% of the time).
It doesn't seem like they had a plan for the additional money as the kickstarters I've funded had. I've chosen not to help fund a couple because their stretch goals would delay the game significantly, but this wasn't one (I believe that is why I didn't help fund Star Citizen, for instance, but I can't look again because that page is not accessible). The one's I've supported had smart stretch goals like additional localizations, which is almost entirely outsourced work (some sync and QA needs to be done, but text and voice acting usually is shipped to the natives).
Yeah - I think some games have much saner budgeting than others. Both games I've backed are still listed as on-time and within budget, and one is almost in beta (and not due for another year) suggesting they may be ahead of schedule. The other hasn't given as many specifics, but has said they are progressing well and are still on time. They didn't say anything about on budget, but most of their add-ons were localization related (and since voice work is outsourced, probably realistically obtainable goals to still meet the ship date).
What I found interesting about PRISM is that it isn't exactly new - it essentially did everything ECHELON did (keyword based harvesting of pretty much all data that goes through a switch), but relied a lot more on man in the middle, probably to get around encryption.
Yep - MitM works for public keys. In fact, Microsoft was caught as a MitM for encrypted Scype calls, and while I don't know exactly what encryption scheme they used, it is definitely a MitM attack.
Have you seen reddit? It is generally younger people and nearly all of them are anti-NSA. Meanwhile the mainstream press (newspapers, TV) has covered little to none of the unconstitutional NSA spying and seems to be taking the NSA position and calling for Snowden to be tried and hanged for treason. This is the medium of older viewers.
That tells me that the younger, more technical generation cares more about privacy and liberty than the older generation. I still read the newspaper and I haven't seen a single article calling for an investigation into NSA practices, and they haven't published any anti-NSA editorials (in fact, the entire editorial staff said his fleeing to _China_ and then Russia invalidated anything he said, showing their ignorance of the semi-autonomous island of Hong Kong). Again, an older generation media and again completely biased toward the government's position. They even called the act espionage, again agreeing with the government's position, which tells me they agree with the Espionage Act of 1917 which makes whistleblowing on any secret government activity, including illegal or unconstitutional ones, treason (yeah, it is that broad).
Yeah, my fundamental problem with LISP is that it's a scripting language, and that used to mean slow (especially before JIT compilers), but GPUs are designed for scripts. Personally I was never a fan of any language that made me count letters, so LISP and Scheme annoyed me with caaaaaaaaar and cddddddddr.
The stablest C code I've ever worked on used GOTO for error correction. It was WAY stabler than the C++ code that replaced it using try-catch blocks.
My biggest fear for a long time was templates. The reason I feared them is because I used them to re-write a C graphics engine I got a source copy of into C++. I used a lot of novel approaches that should have sped up the whole thing, including a blitter (that should date me...) that was 4x faster because I used the floating point unit's much wider data path for block memory moves than the C code did, and wrote it in assembly (in fact, that exact same technique was published in a book called The Black Art of Game Design, albeit with slower code than mine, partially because it was not in assembly). When I got it done and compiled it, I was dismayed because my code was slightly slower, and after a few more optimizations, about the same speed. Baffled by this, I profiled the code, and the entire slowdown was template calls at the lowest level that triggered a lookup table that was abysmally slow (templates were REALLY bad in the compiler I was using, which I think was Borland). Unfortunately, it broke the entire codebase and I essentially had to throw away the entire engine and redo it from scratch. On the plus side, the rewritten engine was not based on the existing one and landed me a job writing games, albeit briefly (working 16-18/7 for months during crunch, sleeping at work, etc - very rapid burnout).
No, he was worried because the semi-autonomous island Hong Kong has an extradition policy with the US. Russia was meant to be an intermediary location to get to South America, probably through Cuba because you can get a direct flight. There are few direct flights to South America from Asia and most of those go to US friendly countries.
Incidentally, he probably was safe in Hong Kong due to the US's blunder of charging him with espionage (thus making it a political crime). If they'd simply charged him with theft, got him extradited, and then dumped death penalty espionage charges he'd be at the end of a noose already, right where Obama and co want him so they can keep their super secret illegal spy ring going. If you don't think this is all about keeping the NSA spying going and sweeping Snowden's body under the rug, remember that Cheney and Armitage did the exact same thing exposing Plume and there certainly weren't any espionage charges filed for that.
To be fair, XP64 was more than a beta test, as the Windows NT it was based on was ported early on to a 64 bit architecture and many of the kinks worked out (specifically NT Workstation on the DEC Alpha). Driver support, on the other hand, was a nightmare. I had to support both Alpha NT and XP 64, and the latter was definitely less trouble, but still not perfect.
As for AMD/ATI killing XP support, I guess I can understand - XP is the last supported version of Windows with the old driver model, so this most likely cuts support costs significantly.
Yeah - loved it in the early days, but Google just nuked it as far as speed of search results and page load time went, and then it went the way of the dodo. One of the things they did far better than Google for a long time was translate. Google's first few passes at it produced some pretty horrible translations and lacked much of an idiom database, something they've vastly improved since (milchgesicht comes out 'baby face' now, not 'milk face' when translated from German, for instance, and Altavista's babelfish was one of the few that got it correct for a long time).
Then the joke's on the military if they're not smart enough to know about proxy servers. Seeing that the House and Senate are completely oblivious to them in their efforts to block copyright and piracy, I guess that wouldn't surprise me.
they don't need it - they just use NSAKEY in ADVAPI.DLL and let you decode it for them (yeah, I know Microsoft denies NSAKEY Is a backdoor for the NSA, but we've already caught the NSA lying, and I'm sure Microsoft is under a rubber stamp FISA court order to deny it is a backdoor with punishment of being broken up into tiny pieces and barring those pieces from doing business in the US).
I was going to say they have a good presence in the embedded space, but you beat me to it. For example, I have a Taiwanese motherboard with a power on embedded Linux quick boot (or I can boot normally into Windows or other OSes, including Linux - I can't have a browser up in 3 seconds though, and that's where the embedded Linux shines).
According to wikipedia, the term wasn't even coined until the late 1930s in regards to the Nationalist bombing of Guernica with help from the German Luftwaffe and Italian Aviazione Legionaria, likely in fear that the Spanish civil war would spill over into another World War (and it pretty much did). If I remember correctly this was the first major case of "terror bombing" where civilian populations were intentionally targeted to break resistance rather than strategic bombing where resources and manufacturing are targeted.
So in that context, the Archbishop of Canterbury was most likely referring to conventional bombs dropped from aircraft when he coined the term, though these were much larger than the ones used in World War 1 (then known as the Great War) and largely leveled the town of Guernica. It is possible he was also referring to chemical weapons and fear of the war spreading, as well, since these were used in the earlier war.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that that type of gun couldn't be lethal - I've seen a man portable rail gun (similar to a gauss gun, but uses different forces) built in a (high school) classroom in AP (accelerated physics) for a group final project propel a nail through several cinder blocks. It did about as well as a 9mm handgun, if I recall correctly, though it was much heavier and fired much slower (like maybe 3-4 nails per minute max).
And no, they obviously didn't test shoot it at school, at least not with anything in it. All shooting was on a firing range and captured on a high speed camera (1000FPS) the physics department owned (thanks to concession stand sales). They also shot footage of several other guns (owned by people at the range, I believe, but at least one of them was 18 at the time, so it is possible he owned or obtained them for this purpose) shooting cinder blocks to compare speed and penetrating power compared to their rail gun. They mainly used different sized nails for railgun ammo, though they did try a thumbtack (and it failed spectacularly - too soft, too fluttery)
My thoughts exactly, and a construction of that size likely would take much longer and thus be distributed over many more years. And we're talking people wealth, not corporate wealth - if the corporations got involved, they could fund construction much more handily.
As for the cost, that could be reduced significantly. $6-20 billion for a space elevator (estimated cost). $7 billion more for a nuke plant to run it (why not? - and that is about what an AP1000 costs, and some of that cost could be absorbed selling excess energy). At that point you pay terrestrial assembly and vacuum testing costs and ship it up in segments, connecting them in space (probably using robots). Now you can build your station for terrestrial costs and make money on the side (shipping satellites or tourists, for instance).
The irony is Obama isn't getting what he wants, either. Obama's personal agenda is to eliminate all nukes worldwide and disarming Russia would help further that plan. OTOH, he also has said that he is willing to eliminate all nukes in the US even if other countries don't (the most asinine thing I've heard from him... I can just imagine in a Russian voice "give us all your food or we drop nukes").
Also the US doesn't consider solitary confinement torture and has used it extensively on Bradley Manning. The international community differs on that issue. Sorry, but condemning someone to insanity from 30 years in solitary is torture in my book.
Yeah, my bozo rep voted against it, too, and I against him. It's too bad, too - he's considered a moderate 'publican and I usually don't disagree with them too much except for on abortion, religion, and military spending. The Dems gave us an awful hard left candidate that lost in a landslide, so I don't feel bad about who won, but in an only slightly right leaning district, you shouldn't lose by twice the number of votes if you've chosen your candidates well (heck, if abortion was taken off the issues list, the district is so poor I think the Dems could win in a landslide, but poor + religious seem to go hand in hand). I may have to flip-flop on non-incumbent parties and start voting in their primaries - as a moderate with no party, it sucks that I can only vote in one primary.
Is it really worth losing your constitutional right to free speech? It is not unprecedented for the US to demand everything you write be reviewed (for confidential information) and censored (mainly for confidential information, though over-censoring is not unprecedented) after getting out of one of these government jobs.
The thing is, technically they haven't acquired these powers. Constitutionally the NSA is doing, by their own admittance, something that is illegal 49% of the time by spying on Americans. I could understand a 5% margin of error (seems an acceptable accidental range), but 49% is ridiculous - that is like saying going 96 miles an hour in a 65 mile per hour zone is OK. Where I grew up, we'd call that a reckless endangerment felony.
Dick Cheney (along with Karl Rove, Richard Armitage, and others) committed the exact same crime under the exact same act as Snowden did, specifically by giving information about something of national security (Valerie Plame's CIA cover) to someone that wasn't supposed to have it (the news). That makes him a hypocrite. George W. Bush turned the ECHELON successor PRISM against US citizens using his pet policy of the Patriot Act, but he is correct - Snowden probably did damage the security of the country by revealing that the NSA is snooping on and keyword matching even secure Scype calls, foreign and domestic. Typical politician - answering truthfully and not telling you anything more than you already know.
So was Reagan - ditching the metric conversion completely ruined this country.
Seriously, though, I don't think Carter was as bad as some people make him out to be. He inherited a disaster as the economy was slipping into recession, had rampant unemployment and inflation, an oil crisis, etc. Bush 2 got a lot of the same and wasn't able to fix it, either. The main thing Carter is blamed at failing at is rescuing the Iranian hostages, but the Algiers Accord was done and ready for signing before Reagan even took office (signing it was one of his first acts). Yeah, it took way too long and he mismanaged the parts he was involved with (calling student revolutionaries terrorists and refusing to negotiate with them on those grounds didn't help). So IMO, he wasn't an effective president, but also not the pariah Republicans make of him.
Maybe he regrets setting up the FISC in 1978 by signing the FISA Act that that overstepped its bounds using the Patriot Act and now spies on Americans (but only 49% of the time).
Um, the subject line is an essential on this one.... are you a PFY?
It doesn't seem like they had a plan for the additional money as the kickstarters I've funded had. I've chosen not to help fund a couple because their stretch goals would delay the game significantly, but this wasn't one (I believe that is why I didn't help fund Star Citizen, for instance, but I can't look again because that page is not accessible). The one's I've supported had smart stretch goals like additional localizations, which is almost entirely outsourced work (some sync and QA needs to be done, but text and voice acting usually is shipped to the natives).
Yeah - I think some games have much saner budgeting than others. Both games I've backed are still listed as on-time and within budget, and one is almost in beta (and not due for another year) suggesting they may be ahead of schedule. The other hasn't given as many specifics, but has said they are progressing well and are still on time. They didn't say anything about on budget, but most of their add-ons were localization related (and since voice work is outsourced, probably realistically obtainable goals to still meet the ship date).
What I found interesting about PRISM is that it isn't exactly new - it essentially did everything ECHELON did (keyword based harvesting of pretty much all data that goes through a switch), but relied a lot more on man in the middle, probably to get around encryption.
Yep - MitM works for public keys. In fact, Microsoft was caught as a MitM for encrypted Scype calls, and while I don't know exactly what encryption scheme they used, it is definitely a MitM attack.
Have you seen reddit? It is generally younger people and nearly all of them are anti-NSA. Meanwhile the mainstream press (newspapers, TV) has covered little to none of the unconstitutional NSA spying and seems to be taking the NSA position and calling for Snowden to be tried and hanged for treason. This is the medium of older viewers.
That tells me that the younger, more technical generation cares more about privacy and liberty than the older generation. I still read the newspaper and I haven't seen a single article calling for an investigation into NSA practices, and they haven't published any anti-NSA editorials (in fact, the entire editorial staff said his fleeing to _China_ and then Russia invalidated anything he said, showing their ignorance of the semi-autonomous island of Hong Kong). Again, an older generation media and again completely biased toward the government's position. They even called the act espionage, again agreeing with the government's position, which tells me they agree with the Espionage Act of 1917 which makes whistleblowing on any secret government activity, including illegal or unconstitutional ones, treason (yeah, it is that broad).
Yeah, my fundamental problem with LISP is that it's a scripting language, and that used to mean slow (especially before JIT compilers), but GPUs are designed for scripts. Personally I was never a fan of any language that made me count letters, so LISP and Scheme annoyed me with caaaaaaaaar and cddddddddr.
The stablest C code I've ever worked on used GOTO for error correction. It was WAY stabler than the C++ code that replaced it using try-catch blocks.
My biggest fear for a long time was templates. The reason I feared them is because I used them to re-write a C graphics engine I got a source copy of into C++. I used a lot of novel approaches that should have sped up the whole thing, including a blitter (that should date me...) that was 4x faster because I used the floating point unit's much wider data path for block memory moves than the C code did, and wrote it in assembly (in fact, that exact same technique was published in a book called The Black Art of Game Design, albeit with slower code than mine, partially because it was not in assembly). When I got it done and compiled it, I was dismayed because my code was slightly slower, and after a few more optimizations, about the same speed. Baffled by this, I profiled the code, and the entire slowdown was template calls at the lowest level that triggered a lookup table that was abysmally slow (templates were REALLY bad in the compiler I was using, which I think was Borland). Unfortunately, it broke the entire codebase and I essentially had to throw away the entire engine and redo it from scratch. On the plus side, the rewritten engine was not based on the existing one and landed me a job writing games, albeit briefly (working 16-18/7 for months during crunch, sleeping at work, etc - very rapid burnout).
No, he was worried because the semi-autonomous island Hong Kong has an extradition policy with the US. Russia was meant to be an intermediary location to get to South America, probably through Cuba because you can get a direct flight. There are few direct flights to South America from Asia and most of those go to US friendly countries.
Incidentally, he probably was safe in Hong Kong due to the US's blunder of charging him with espionage (thus making it a political crime). If they'd simply charged him with theft, got him extradited, and then dumped death penalty espionage charges he'd be at the end of a noose already, right where Obama and co want him so they can keep their super secret illegal spy ring going. If you don't think this is all about keeping the NSA spying going and sweeping Snowden's body under the rug, remember that Cheney and Armitage did the exact same thing exposing Plume and there certainly weren't any espionage charges filed for that.
To be fair, XP64 was more than a beta test, as the Windows NT it was based on was ported early on to a 64 bit architecture and many of the kinks worked out (specifically NT Workstation on the DEC Alpha). Driver support, on the other hand, was a nightmare. I had to support both Alpha NT and XP 64, and the latter was definitely less trouble, but still not perfect.
As for AMD/ATI killing XP support, I guess I can understand - XP is the last supported version of Windows with the old driver model, so this most likely cuts support costs significantly.
Yeah - loved it in the early days, but Google just nuked it as far as speed of search results and page load time went, and then it went the way of the dodo. One of the things they did far better than Google for a long time was translate. Google's first few passes at it produced some pretty horrible translations and lacked much of an idiom database, something they've vastly improved since (milchgesicht comes out 'baby face' now, not 'milk face' when translated from German, for instance, and Altavista's babelfish was one of the few that got it correct for a long time).
Then the joke's on the military if they're not smart enough to know about proxy servers. Seeing that the House and Senate are completely oblivious to them in their efforts to block copyright and piracy, I guess that wouldn't surprise me.
they don't need it - they just use NSAKEY in ADVAPI.DLL and let you decode it for them (yeah, I know Microsoft denies NSAKEY Is a backdoor for the NSA, but we've already caught the NSA lying, and I'm sure Microsoft is under a rubber stamp FISA court order to deny it is a backdoor with punishment of being broken up into tiny pieces and barring those pieces from doing business in the US).
I was going to say they have a good presence in the embedded space, but you beat me to it. For example, I have a Taiwanese motherboard with a power on embedded Linux quick boot (or I can boot normally into Windows or other OSes, including Linux - I can't have a browser up in 3 seconds though, and that's where the embedded Linux shines).
According to wikipedia, the term wasn't even coined until the late 1930s in regards to the Nationalist bombing of Guernica with help from the German Luftwaffe and Italian Aviazione Legionaria, likely in fear that the Spanish civil war would spill over into another World War (and it pretty much did). If I remember correctly this was the first major case of "terror bombing" where civilian populations were intentionally targeted to break resistance rather than strategic bombing where resources and manufacturing are targeted.
So in that context, the Archbishop of Canterbury was most likely referring to conventional bombs dropped from aircraft when he coined the term, though these were much larger than the ones used in World War 1 (then known as the Great War) and largely leveled the town of Guernica. It is possible he was also referring to chemical weapons and fear of the war spreading, as well, since these were used in the earlier war.