In my more adventurous days I encountered what seemed to be (but wasn't) a rather fun immigration agent when entering the US from my 6th or 7th international business trip that year, and was faced with the question (while the officer was flipping through my well-stamped passport): "Have you ever come to the US before?"
My first thought was 'well, duh, I live here (on a visa)' but I chose a nicer reply: "I can't remember but it ought to be in my passport."
He was not amused... Luckily this was pre-9/11...
There's actually a good reason for asking that question. It's a knowledge-based verification, to try to catch someone who might pickpocket a passport off someone else in line. It's not a foolproof security measure, but if you happened to see someone who looks like you in line and swipe their passport it might be difficult to memorize their birthday and their prior itinerary in the few minutes you have before you're next in line (if you try to steal it earlier your theft is less likely to go unnoticed). On the other hand, you'll surely remember your own birthday, nationality, and whether or not you've been to a given country, so the questions cause minimal inconvenience to those going through immigration.
Interestingly enough, forced licensing of patents at a profit percentage margin would effectively kill off software patents by default. All you have to do is make a free version of software that does whatever the patent says, and since you're not making any profits from it you don't have to pay a dime. For example right now if I make an H.264 encoder in the U.S. I may have to license the codec and pay royalties per copy of the program distributed. But if it were based on profit percentages I could distribute a completely free implementation with no worries-- in fact, it would make no sense for a company to patent any software idea and try to make money off it since anyone could turn around and write a free version.
This also means you'll have to tighten up the standards for "derivative work" in the copyright domain; inevitably someone will distribute copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster with a dancing monkey in front of it, release it for free, and call it a derivative work. That's a loophole that would have to be closed. But if copyright were shorter you could close it up with little fuss.
Supersonic, eh? That's one fast Fournier! With this trick he'll be the master of his domain! Indeed, this feat will transform the field of skydiving forever!
Japanese is naturally a less abstraction oriented language
I agree with everything else you've said except this. I don't think the language is any more or less abstract than English. I can say whatever I want in either language. Whether or not that person has the background to understand what I'm saying is another story. The problem isn't linguistic, it's cultural.
The problem is that classrooms are overwhelmingly teacher-centric. The Confucian idea of a school is that you have the teacher in front disseminating all the knowledge, and the students in their seats receiving the knowledge. This is great for rote memorization of kanji but horribly inefficient for anything requiring creativity. A bad teacher will teach someone how to play baseball by sitting him down in a chair and telling him about gravity and the musculature of the human arm and the sweet spot of a baseball bat and the measurements of the playing field and the position of the players. A good teacher will throw him a ball and say, "Catch. Now throw it back. Here's a bat, try to hit the ball as I throw it." Baseball is learned by doing. The same goes for foreign languages such as English-- you learn by speaking to others, by writing new sentences, by practicing it repeatedly until you can do it easily. But English is taught here in middle school and high school by some goofball reciting grammar points from a textbook, and forcing students to memorize vocabulary lists and conjugation tables. And Japan wonders why its students can't do well on TOEIC and nobody can speak English. Programming and creative engineering work exactly the same way. They simply can't be grasped by listening to some guy jabbering in front of a group of people. Coding can only be mastered by doing. For some reason the test-obsessed Japanese haven't wrapped their heads around that concept.
Sorry, I'm a bit bitter. Years of trying to change the education system here will do that to you.
Very true. OTOH, if you're a foreign engineer who wants to work anywhere outside of Tokyo it's nearly impossible to find any sort of job doing anything but teaching English. (I'm thinking Osaka, Hiroshima, Sendai, maybe Nagoya; I'd rather not live in a shoebox apartment.) My search for jobs within Japan has been nothing but frustrating, to the point that when my contract expires this July I'm just going back to the USA to look for jobs on the west coast. How did you find out about your company, and do you have any tips for job-hunters?
I noticed from your site you've also got a JLPT 1 cert, which probably makes you hireable almost anywhere...
Okay, this is the third thread in a row on the front page that has been nothing more than an overblown opinion piece or random uninteresting conference coverage.
Well, let's see, this was a conference about using Linux in embedded systems. As Slashdot is a tech site with heavy emphasis on open source software, and embedded systems are a huge area of modern computing (if unglamorous), this story is certainly worthy of the front page. Now I haven't been able to access TFA because it's been slashdotted, but from the article description it sounds like it might be a rather informative and interesting set of talks. One more thing: if your router or video camera is running Linux it means you can hack it. If that isn't interesting to you, maybe you're spending your time on the wrong site.
One of the biggest regressive changes was the decision to make Funny moderations worthless, thereby turning funny posts and comments into karma sinks.
Much better than people karma whoring with stale memes. It was getting to the point where finding actual unique comments involved digging through piles of robotic Natalie Portman overlord "jokes". They may have been funny a couple years ago but they were getting out of hand. Nowadays you can still be clever with a witty comment and not be modded down, but if you aren't REALLY funny you'll probably take a karma hit or two. This keeps us on topic, and means the comments and debate at +3 are often more interesting to read than the article itself. If I were to change one thing, yeah, it might be nice if "-1 Overrated" didn't knock comments into negative karma. But that's a pretty minor nitpick on a generally good rating system.
The problem with gray and beige is that they are offensive precisely because they are trying to be so inoffensive. They're bland and ugly. Gray reminds me of concrete, which is durable but hideous unless you're designing parking garages. And beige seems to be the default color of anything that isn't supposed to look dirty... but it never really looks clean either. Have you ever tried to get an old beige box to look clean? It's impossible.
You want inoffensive? Silver is metallic, but clean. White gets dirty, looks boring on walls, but if office furniture isn't white on a white floor against a white wall, it can look pretty good. Black can look good if the rest of the office isn't gray and beige. Browns look great if they're actual wood, and dark stained wood can look downright elegant as long as it's not fiberboard crap from Ikea. Hell, even transparent glass or plastic for countertops or work surfaces looks pretty good (as long as you don't have to run an optical mouse on it). Other colors might offend certain people, but at least they won't be bland.
Here's offensive: every single office worker's desk in Japan is made out of metal, and painted gray and beige, and is exactly the same dimensions, right down to the three shelves. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I swear there must be a single company that makes all office desks in this country. They're so generic and utilitarian it makes me want to find the guy who designed them and slit his throat, spilling his blood all over the damn things. Maybe at least that would give it some color. And you wonder why the suicide rate is so high here, it's because of all the gray and beige in the concrete cities and in the offices and in the prefab apartments with their beige plastic walls. People need color and variety and texture or they go nuts. Does painting the thing navy blue instead of beige really cost all that much more?
Knock off? They're very similar in terms of layout and the StG44 certainly inspired the AK47 but I wouldn't go so far as to call the AK a knock off. Mechanically the AK47 is quite different than the StG44 (rotating bolt versus tilting bolt). It's even stated in the wiki article you cited, if you'd bothered to read it. The tolerances of the AK are loose, it's easy to machine, and it has a couple extra features that make it easy to use with heavy winter gloves on: one is the long charging handle, another is the oversized trigger guard. It's extremely cheap to manufacture, but its reliability is excellent nonetheless.
AK47 also weighs about 3 pounds less. If you replace the wooden stock with a composite or folding stock you can cut the weight down even more.
Seeing as the public is paying for ALL drug research anyway (whether through grants, tax-breaks, or just the purchase price of the drug), why not fund drug research publicly and give away the results?
There is an error in your reasoning. You are conflating the world public and the U.S. public. Currently the research for medications is paid off by a combination of taxes and the profits from selling and licensing to people around the world. With the current method, the world benefits and the world helps pay for the R&D. In the theoretical "give away the results" situation, the world benefits and the United States pays for the entirety of the research. That is a significant difference.
Wow, it sounds like every other 3d modeling app I've ever used!
Yeah, except this is an article about using it as a video editing and compositing tool, so we're not comparing it to Maya and the like. We should be comparing it to Premiere and Final Cut Pro. Does being powerful mean it must be difficult to figure out? I don't think so. Adobe Premiere took me about half an hour to figure out, behaves pretty much like film junkies would expect a video editing tool to work (with terminology like "razor tool" and "shuttle"), and doesn't have any rusted pointy edges to catch yourself on. If only Premiere didn't cost so damn much.
Looking at the tutorial, it seems like you CAN use Blender to edit and compose videos, but it seems like choosing a Leatherman to do surgery because it has a scalpel and tweezers and a screwdriver all in one tool. But you don't need a screwdriver when doing surgery. It'd be nice if they scrapped the existing UI skin and started with a deliberately limited interface specifically for video composition. Hide the buttons related to 3D rendering, rework it to make it look like Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Separate audio and video tracks. That's a start. Then start adding back in useful Blender features to the UI, under a separate extra toolbar or something. I don't need to know about the internals, I don't care that a fade transition effect is actually a Frazzleby-Zharfontane Swinklebury Matrix Transform chained to an iDCT followed by whatever. In fact I don't even want to see those things. It's confusing and irrelevant. In Premiere I drag the transition to the timeline between the two cuts and it works. I can tweak it if I want, but by default it does pretty much what I want. The focus is not on the how, but the what. KISS method.
I want a tool that only edits video and does it well. If you can fake it with a UI skin, then do it! This is one thing the pro tools do so well, and it's something the free tools would do well to emulate. Call it "Blender for Video". Same internals, different UI.
One more thing: make the goddamn windows look right according to what OS it's compiled for. I made this point about GIMP before, and it applies equally to Blender. Spit and polish make a huge difference.
We really need to work on getting Wine perfected. Games should be the obvious target for this, because they tend to push the APIs the hardest. I'd love to switch permanently but I also like to play older Windows only games like Planescape: Torment and Alpha Centauri, neither of which are playable under Wine because of DIB and ddraw bugs. Many other games still have major unresolved issues or work only with massive tweaking, yet are listed as "Gold" on the Wine AppDB. (Examples: Morrowind and the broken ragdoll, Oblivion and HDR/graphical issues, System Shock 2 and a cursor in the way.) If I could run all my older classic games and newer games on the same machine with as good or better performance, I'd be all over it. As it stands I still have to dual boot if I want to run Linux, and the reasons to quit my XP session and interrupt my workflow just aren't compelling enough. At this point I've got a Debian build on my laptop but I find I just don't boot into it that much.
When Linux can run Windows programs better than Windows itself, there will be no compelling reason NOT to switch! I'm waiting in anticipation, but it's not nearly close enough.
There must be something ironic about the fact that they're releasing a bunch of mods for an old PC game, but you can't play them without a modded obsolete console. More confusing than ironic I suppose.
This is like saying "If you're low on parts for your 1972 Ford Pinto retrofitted with a diesel engine..." Yeah, Doom is an oldie but still a good game. Probably a few people still play it now and then. But seriously, how many people play it on the Dreamcast of all platforms? That's an intersection of two very small groups.
I think the main point here is that the UI should behave consistently with whatever OS/environment it's running under. While on vacation two weeks ago I tried to download and install a copy of GIMP onto my friend's Vista machine (yeah, bitch about it but it's what I had to work with). I wound up installing the newest GIMPshop based on some old 2.2 revision. I expected it to be similar enough to Photoshop that I could figure it out. It was anything but.
If it's running under Windows, I expect that the program open up with something resembling a standard File/Edit/Help bar at the top. Instead I got a standard container window (which in Windows symbolizes the actual program) with a single File menu. That File menu had a single option: Exit. This tells the user that this program can do exactly one thing, and that is to self-terminate. It took a few long moments to figure out the regular File->Open menu was actually on the toolbar?! I tried to open a file and got some hacked-together GTK dialog instead of the standard file browsing dialog box. While manipulating the image all the drop-down menus were buggy AND look like crap, because instead of using the native window manipulation functions it uses the GTK ones. All of the interface issues were a matter of consistency with other Windows programs.
If it's running on a Mac, I expect those menus for File, Edit, and so on to be up at the top just like every other Mac program. If it's running on Linux, I expect the same sort of consistency with other Linux apps. This consistency makes it easy to figure out the program. Every Windows program has a similar menu structure. Every program uses the same dialog boxes for opening files, and has the same X in the upper right corner, and every window looks and acts exactly the same. It means I don't have to think about how to perform the most basic operations and figure it out for each and every program. On top of that it looks professional; Windows users would say it looks like a "real program" instead of something hacked together in a basement. Like it or not, aesthetics and UI need to be taken seriously.
I understand the historical reasons, I know that GTK was developed in tandem with GIMP to make its window manipulation possible under X fifteen years ago or whatever. I know GTK works great under Linux, cures cancer, makes time travel possible, etc etc. But if the GIMP team wants their program to be taken seriously as multiplatform, they need to stuff their pride in a locker and use native window and menu functions when they are available. If that means rewriting GTK, then do it. If it means not using GTK for window management in Windows ports then they need to suck it down and do that. Moving things to GEGL might be a step in the right direction (assuming the engine and UI are finally separated), but at this rate it's going to be 2010 before a working UI is viable.
Don't assume that intelligent life could only develop on a planet exactly like ours. Even just considering carbon-based life as we know it, life could still survive just fine in a higher or lower gravity version of Earth. Lower gravity would likely mean a thinner atmosphere but oceans would still be habitable. Higher gravity would mean life forms couldn't grow as large on land. I don't think either of those would prohibit intelligent life from developing. And that's also assuming intelligent life just stays at home on one planet, which is highly unlikely. Any species competitive enough to climb its way to intelligence will probably keep flourishing and expanding.
In short, we shouldn't just focus all our SETI efforts on a few star systems just because they're similar to Sol.
Re:Sane police
on
The DIY Tank
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· Score: 4, Funny
So, umm, can I have your rifle now? I mean a promise is a promise, right?
I cast my vote for the Cookie Monster. They've tried to keep him down in recent years by forcing him to give speeches about vegetables and other such nonsense. But we all know underneath all that blue fur all he wants is more cookies...
As for Taiwan, they're just as bad as the PRC. Taiwan asserts ownership over all of mainland China (actually this view varies depending on which political party gets elected). Taiwan with its democracy is more corrupt than the CCP, just look at Chen Shui-bian. He would be under house arrest or in front of a firing squad if he pulled that shit in the PRC. The Western media didn't make a big deal out of his affairs because he is an ally.
Taiwan's policy of asserting ownership of all China is strictly for political reasons, and if you knew anything about the politics you'd understand that. China's policy is that if Taiwan declares independence, China goes to war with Taiwan (and would militarily steamroll it, because nobody else wants to intervene). While devastating to world opinion, it wouldn't stop China from doing it just to make a point. So instead of declaring independence, Taiwan makes the ridiculous claim that China should be unified... under the Taiwanese government. Amazingly, this non-confrontation policy has befuddled China's government for the past 50 years or so. China drew a clear line in the sand, and Taiwan has managed to keep its elected government without crossing it.
Taiwan's democratically elected government may be corrupt, but there is still open debate and freedom of the press. Hell, they're having political rallies a few days before an election, right now! The PRC's bureaucracy may well be corrupt, but there's a good chance that only party officials would find out about it. And even if they did, it's up to the party to change things, which they will only do if it's in their best interest. In Taiwan, people can vote out corrupt officials. If you think that'll ever happen in the PRC as it is, I have some beachfront property in Xinjiang you might be interested in.
I mean, what kind of car do you have where you need "$100,000" worth of equipment to work on it? About the most advanced thing you might need for certain problems is the little diagnostic reader, and you can still spend more on a nice floor jack. A socket set and some basic tools get you most of the way there. Read the back part of Popular Mechanics sometime - most common repairs are still basically the same. And cars on balance are much more reliable and free of maintenance. I've had some of the most unreliable cars on the market (thank you, GM), and they were STILL more reliable than what my parents had growing up.
I agree, and his remarks about tuneups are hilarious if you understand what's under the hood. New cars still require regular maintenance, but they don't require tuneups! Old cars needed tuneups because the springs in the distributor would wear out, throwing the timing off, and the jets in the carburetors would get clogged with fuel varnish, messing with the fuel-air ratio. Modern cars don't have distributors because their dwell and timing are controlled by a computer using a toothed gear attached directly to the cam or crankshaft, no springs to wear out or contacts to erode. Assuming the gear doesn't break off completely, timing will be exactly the same at 300,000 miles as it was when the car rolled off the line, no adjustment or tweaking required. The fuel-air ratio is measured out more precisely than a carburetor, again using a computer to inject fuel based on engine load and RPM. That same computer will even retard timing if the engine knocks, or shut off your engine if the temperature gets too high to prevent you from destroying your car accidentally. This makes cars more efficient AND more reliable than they used to be.
Smaller components are more susceptible to interference and voltage transients because they operate at lower voltages. You'll have to redesign the power supply to output a lower voltage, but realistically this also means that the original circuits for power conditioning won't work as well as they did on the old hardware. On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower. Redundancy won't help you if your identical devices all get fried on a single voltage transient. The proper solution is to design a new circuit using high quality components and test rigorously, and that isn't cheap. The new parts needed to improve power conditioning also require more space, meaning that you gained some space from smaller media but lost some to power conditioning.
If you want to use multiple smaller tapes, consider the following. While improvements in technology have allowed us to make smaller tapes, they have also reduced the physical tolerances in the recorder. A head mashing against a tape isn't as disastrous as a hard drive head crash, but it still can't be good for the media. The tensile strength of the smaller tape would also have to be evaluated to make sure it doesn't self-destruct on sudden acceleration. Again, if one tape snaps under certain conditions a redundant one probably will snap too. Maybe the older tapes are more durable. Maybe they aren't. Without testing it's impossible to tell. Testing costs money.
I hope I don't have to explain why spinning platter hard drives are not a good idea on a flight recorder.
Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance. If we can design something that withstands impact better, then that's great, but we need to be very cautious not to introduce new flaws.
The difference between a $40 mp3 player and a flight recorder is that the flight recorder must be engineered to never fail, ever. If you plug the mp3 player into an outlet to recharge and a power surge hits, it will get fried. You expect that. You can buy another one. But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function.
In addition, every component must survive the severe stresses involved in a plane crash. The severe acceleration can cause large components to get ripped off their solder points. The device will likely be cooked to several hundred degrees as the plane burns around it, so all the components need to survive that (electrolytic capacitors will explode well before that). Heck, if the plane spontaneously breaks apart on a trans-Pacific flight, the box gets cooled to the outside air temperature of around -50 C before slamming into the ocean at high speed. Let's see your music player take that and survive. And I hope whatever software running the thing wrote the data out cleanly before everything went to hell, because if any of those stresses caused a hardware glitch that overwrites or erases the log, you get to tell the FAA that you really don't know why that plane crashed. Oops.
Uh huh. And if you refuse, are they going to keep you, a citizen, from re-entering your own country? Arrest you? I wonder what the charges would be.
No, sir, here's the proper chain of dialog in this situation:
Them: Passport please. You: Here you are. Them: Fingers on the reader, please. You: No. Them: I can't let you into the country without fingerprints. You: I'm a British citizen. The passport and photo prove it. Are you going to keep me out of my own country? Them:... You: I'm a citizen, and I'm suspected of no crime. You have no right to take my fingerprints. I refuse to give them.
Do it calmly and nonviolently.
I suppose they'd arrest you then and get your fingerprints anyway. But if you did it, it would cause a row. If you and 4 other people did it, you might make the news. If you and 19 other people did it, it would certainly make the news. If you got a hundred people together to do it, it would make international headlines. And then things might have a chance at being changed. How much does a flight to Paris and back cost?
Slashdot Mirror
There's actually a good reason for asking that question. It's a knowledge-based verification, to try to catch someone who might pickpocket a passport off someone else in line. It's not a foolproof security measure, but if you happened to see someone who looks like you in line and swipe their passport it might be difficult to memorize their birthday and their prior itinerary in the few minutes you have before you're next in line (if you try to steal it earlier your theft is less likely to go unnoticed). On the other hand, you'll surely remember your own birthday, nationality, and whether or not you've been to a given country, so the questions cause minimal inconvenience to those going through immigration.
Hokey lambda calculus and ancient prefix notation are no match for a good printf at your side, kid.
Interestingly enough, forced licensing of patents at a profit percentage margin would effectively kill off software patents by default. All you have to do is make a free version of software that does whatever the patent says, and since you're not making any profits from it you don't have to pay a dime. For example right now if I make an H.264 encoder in the U.S. I may have to license the codec and pay royalties per copy of the program distributed. But if it were based on profit percentages I could distribute a completely free implementation with no worries-- in fact, it would make no sense for a company to patent any software idea and try to make money off it since anyone could turn around and write a free version.
This also means you'll have to tighten up the standards for "derivative work" in the copyright domain; inevitably someone will distribute copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster with a dancing monkey in front of it, release it for free, and call it a derivative work. That's a loophole that would have to be closed. But if copyright were shorter you could close it up with little fuss.
Supersonic, eh? That's one fast Fournier!
With this trick he'll be the master of his domain!
Indeed, this feat will transform the field of skydiving forever!
*dodges rotten fruit*
I agree with everything else you've said except this. I don't think the language is any more or less abstract than English. I can say whatever I want in either language. Whether or not that person has the background to understand what I'm saying is another story. The problem isn't linguistic, it's cultural.
The problem is that classrooms are overwhelmingly teacher-centric. The Confucian idea of a school is that you have the teacher in front disseminating all the knowledge, and the students in their seats receiving the knowledge. This is great for rote memorization of kanji but horribly inefficient for anything requiring creativity. A bad teacher will teach someone how to play baseball by sitting him down in a chair and telling him about gravity and the musculature of the human arm and the sweet spot of a baseball bat and the measurements of the playing field and the position of the players. A good teacher will throw him a ball and say, "Catch. Now throw it back. Here's a bat, try to hit the ball as I throw it." Baseball is learned by doing. The same goes for foreign languages such as English-- you learn by speaking to others, by writing new sentences, by practicing it repeatedly until you can do it easily. But English is taught here in middle school and high school by some goofball reciting grammar points from a textbook, and forcing students to memorize vocabulary lists and conjugation tables. And Japan wonders why its students can't do well on TOEIC and nobody can speak English. Programming and creative engineering work exactly the same way. They simply can't be grasped by listening to some guy jabbering in front of a group of people. Coding can only be mastered by doing. For some reason the test-obsessed Japanese haven't wrapped their heads around that concept.
Sorry, I'm a bit bitter. Years of trying to change the education system here will do that to you.
Very true. OTOH, if you're a foreign engineer who wants to work anywhere outside of Tokyo it's nearly impossible to find any sort of job doing anything but teaching English. (I'm thinking Osaka, Hiroshima, Sendai, maybe Nagoya; I'd rather not live in a shoebox apartment.) My search for jobs within Japan has been nothing but frustrating, to the point that when my contract expires this July I'm just going back to the USA to look for jobs on the west coast. How did you find out about your company, and do you have any tips for job-hunters?
I noticed from your site you've also got a JLPT 1 cert, which probably makes you hireable almost anywhere...
Yeah, "WARRIOR NEEDS NEWS BADLY!" just doesn't have the same ring to it...
The problem with gray and beige is that they are offensive precisely because they are trying to be so inoffensive. They're bland and ugly. Gray reminds me of concrete, which is durable but hideous unless you're designing parking garages. And beige seems to be the default color of anything that isn't supposed to look dirty... but it never really looks clean either. Have you ever tried to get an old beige box to look clean? It's impossible.
You want inoffensive? Silver is metallic, but clean. White gets dirty, looks boring on walls, but if office furniture isn't white on a white floor against a white wall, it can look pretty good. Black can look good if the rest of the office isn't gray and beige. Browns look great if they're actual wood, and dark stained wood can look downright elegant as long as it's not fiberboard crap from Ikea. Hell, even transparent glass or plastic for countertops or work surfaces looks pretty good (as long as you don't have to run an optical mouse on it). Other colors might offend certain people, but at least they won't be bland.
Here's offensive: every single office worker's desk in Japan is made out of metal, and painted gray and beige, and is exactly the same dimensions, right down to the three shelves. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I swear there must be a single company that makes all office desks in this country. They're so generic and utilitarian it makes me want to find the guy who designed them and slit his throat, spilling his blood all over the damn things. Maybe at least that would give it some color. And you wonder why the suicide rate is so high here, it's because of all the gray and beige in the concrete cities and in the offices and in the prefab apartments with their beige plastic walls. People need color and variety and texture or they go nuts. Does painting the thing navy blue instead of beige really cost all that much more?
Knock off? They're very similar in terms of layout and the StG44 certainly inspired the AK47 but I wouldn't go so far as to call the AK a knock off. Mechanically the AK47 is quite different than the StG44 (rotating bolt versus tilting bolt). It's even stated in the wiki article you cited, if you'd bothered to read it. The tolerances of the AK are loose, it's easy to machine, and it has a couple extra features that make it easy to use with heavy winter gloves on: one is the long charging handle, another is the oversized trigger guard. It's extremely cheap to manufacture, but its reliability is excellent nonetheless.
AK47 also weighs about 3 pounds less. If you replace the wooden stock with a composite or folding stock you can cut the weight down even more.
There is an error in your reasoning. You are conflating the world public and the U.S. public. Currently the research for medications is paid off by a combination of taxes and the profits from selling and licensing to people around the world. With the current method, the world benefits and the world helps pay for the R&D. In the theoretical "give away the results" situation, the world benefits and the United States pays for the entirety of the research. That is a significant difference.
Yeah, except this is an article about using it as a video editing and compositing tool, so we're not comparing it to Maya and the like. We should be comparing it to Premiere and Final Cut Pro. Does being powerful mean it must be difficult to figure out? I don't think so. Adobe Premiere took me about half an hour to figure out, behaves pretty much like film junkies would expect a video editing tool to work (with terminology like "razor tool" and "shuttle"), and doesn't have any rusted pointy edges to catch yourself on. If only Premiere didn't cost so damn much.
Looking at the tutorial, it seems like you CAN use Blender to edit and compose videos, but it seems like choosing a Leatherman to do surgery because it has a scalpel and tweezers and a screwdriver all in one tool. But you don't need a screwdriver when doing surgery. It'd be nice if they scrapped the existing UI skin and started with a deliberately limited interface specifically for video composition. Hide the buttons related to 3D rendering, rework it to make it look like Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Separate audio and video tracks. That's a start. Then start adding back in useful Blender features to the UI, under a separate extra toolbar or something. I don't need to know about the internals, I don't care that a fade transition effect is actually a Frazzleby-Zharfontane Swinklebury Matrix Transform chained to an iDCT followed by whatever. In fact I don't even want to see those things. It's confusing and irrelevant. In Premiere I drag the transition to the timeline between the two cuts and it works. I can tweak it if I want, but by default it does pretty much what I want. The focus is not on the how, but the what. KISS method.
I want a tool that only edits video and does it well. If you can fake it with a UI skin, then do it! This is one thing the pro tools do so well, and it's something the free tools would do well to emulate. Call it "Blender for Video". Same internals, different UI.
One more thing: make the goddamn windows look right according to what OS it's compiled for. I made this point about GIMP before, and it applies equally to Blender. Spit and polish make a huge difference.
We really need to work on getting Wine perfected. Games should be the obvious target for this, because they tend to push the APIs the hardest. I'd love to switch permanently but I also like to play older Windows only games like Planescape: Torment and Alpha Centauri, neither of which are playable under Wine because of DIB and ddraw bugs. Many other games still have major unresolved issues or work only with massive tweaking, yet are listed as "Gold" on the Wine AppDB. (Examples: Morrowind and the broken ragdoll, Oblivion and HDR/graphical issues, System Shock 2 and a cursor in the way.) If I could run all my older classic games and newer games on the same machine with as good or better performance, I'd be all over it. As it stands I still have to dual boot if I want to run Linux, and the reasons to quit my XP session and interrupt my workflow just aren't compelling enough. At this point I've got a Debian build on my laptop but I find I just don't boot into it that much.
When Linux can run Windows programs better than Windows itself, there will be no compelling reason NOT to switch! I'm waiting in anticipation, but it's not nearly close enough.
There must be something ironic about the fact that they're releasing a bunch of mods for an old PC game, but you can't play them without a modded obsolete console. More confusing than ironic I suppose.
This is like saying "If you're low on parts for your 1972 Ford Pinto retrofitted with a diesel engine..." Yeah, Doom is an oldie but still a good game. Probably a few people still play it now and then. But seriously, how many people play it on the Dreamcast of all platforms? That's an intersection of two very small groups.
Tag this "humor". Or "irony". I'm not sure which.
I think the main point here is that the UI should behave consistently with whatever OS/environment it's running under. While on vacation two weeks ago I tried to download and install a copy of GIMP onto my friend's Vista machine (yeah, bitch about it but it's what I had to work with). I wound up installing the newest GIMPshop based on some old 2.2 revision. I expected it to be similar enough to Photoshop that I could figure it out. It was anything but.
If it's running under Windows, I expect that the program open up with something resembling a standard File/Edit/Help bar at the top. Instead I got a standard container window (which in Windows symbolizes the actual program) with a single File menu. That File menu had a single option: Exit. This tells the user that this program can do exactly one thing, and that is to self-terminate. It took a few long moments to figure out the regular File->Open menu was actually on the toolbar?! I tried to open a file and got some hacked-together GTK dialog instead of the standard file browsing dialog box. While manipulating the image all the drop-down menus were buggy AND look like crap, because instead of using the native window manipulation functions it uses the GTK ones. All of the interface issues were a matter of consistency with other Windows programs.
If it's running on a Mac, I expect those menus for File, Edit, and so on to be up at the top just like every other Mac program. If it's running on Linux, I expect the same sort of consistency with other Linux apps. This consistency makes it easy to figure out the program. Every Windows program has a similar menu structure. Every program uses the same dialog boxes for opening files, and has the same X in the upper right corner, and every window looks and acts exactly the same. It means I don't have to think about how to perform the most basic operations and figure it out for each and every program. On top of that it looks professional; Windows users would say it looks like a "real program" instead of something hacked together in a basement. Like it or not, aesthetics and UI need to be taken seriously.
I understand the historical reasons, I know that GTK was developed in tandem with GIMP to make its window manipulation possible under X fifteen years ago or whatever. I know GTK works great under Linux, cures cancer, makes time travel possible, etc etc. But if the GIMP team wants their program to be taken seriously as multiplatform, they need to stuff their pride in a locker and use native window and menu functions when they are available. If that means rewriting GTK, then do it. If it means not using GTK for window management in Windows ports then they need to suck it down and do that. Moving things to GEGL might be a step in the right direction (assuming the engine and UI are finally separated), but at this rate it's going to be 2010 before a working UI is viable.
But Green Valley is pretty far from Phoenix, almost 150 miles if I remember correctly. Do you think it's a metric/imperial error?
Don't assume that intelligent life could only develop on a planet exactly like ours. Even just considering carbon-based life as we know it, life could still survive just fine in a higher or lower gravity version of Earth. Lower gravity would likely mean a thinner atmosphere but oceans would still be habitable. Higher gravity would mean life forms couldn't grow as large on land. I don't think either of those would prohibit intelligent life from developing. And that's also assuming intelligent life just stays at home on one planet, which is highly unlikely. Any species competitive enough to climb its way to intelligence will probably keep flourishing and expanding.
In short, we shouldn't just focus all our SETI efforts on a few star systems just because they're similar to Sol.
So, umm, can I have your rifle now? I mean a promise is a promise, right?
I cast my vote for the Cookie Monster. They've tried to keep him down in recent years by forcing him to give speeches about vegetables and other such nonsense. But we all know underneath all that blue fur all he wants is more cookies...
Taiwan's policy of asserting ownership of all China is strictly for political reasons, and if you knew anything about the politics you'd understand that. China's policy is that if Taiwan declares independence, China goes to war with Taiwan (and would militarily steamroll it, because nobody else wants to intervene). While devastating to world opinion, it wouldn't stop China from doing it just to make a point. So instead of declaring independence, Taiwan makes the ridiculous claim that China should be unified... under the Taiwanese government. Amazingly, this non-confrontation policy has befuddled China's government for the past 50 years or so. China drew a clear line in the sand, and Taiwan has managed to keep its elected government without crossing it.
Taiwan's democratically elected government may be corrupt, but there is still open debate and freedom of the press. Hell, they're having political rallies a few days before an election, right now! The PRC's bureaucracy may well be corrupt, but there's a good chance that only party officials would find out about it. And even if they did, it's up to the party to change things, which they will only do if it's in their best interest. In Taiwan, people can vote out corrupt officials. If you think that'll ever happen in the PRC as it is, I have some beachfront property in Xinjiang you might be interested in.
I agree, and his remarks about tuneups are hilarious if you understand what's under the hood. New cars still require regular maintenance, but they don't require tuneups! Old cars needed tuneups because the springs in the distributor would wear out, throwing the timing off, and the jets in the carburetors would get clogged with fuel varnish, messing with the fuel-air ratio. Modern cars don't have distributors because their dwell and timing are controlled by a computer using a toothed gear attached directly to the cam or crankshaft, no springs to wear out or contacts to erode. Assuming the gear doesn't break off completely, timing will be exactly the same at 300,000 miles as it was when the car rolled off the line, no adjustment or tweaking required. The fuel-air ratio is measured out more precisely than a carburetor, again using a computer to inject fuel based on engine load and RPM. That same computer will even retard timing if the engine knocks, or shut off your engine if the temperature gets too high to prevent you from destroying your car accidentally. This makes cars more efficient AND more reliable than they used to be.
Smaller components are more susceptible to interference and voltage transients because they operate at lower voltages. You'll have to redesign the power supply to output a lower voltage, but realistically this also means that the original circuits for power conditioning won't work as well as they did on the old hardware. On a lightning strike, the circuit might let a 10V transient through which wouldn't harm the old analog tapes at all, but 10V spikes might be enough to glitch or erase modern SSD chips that operate at 3.3V or lower. Redundancy won't help you if your identical devices all get fried on a single voltage transient. The proper solution is to design a new circuit using high quality components and test rigorously, and that isn't cheap. The new parts needed to improve power conditioning also require more space, meaning that you gained some space from smaller media but lost some to power conditioning.
If you want to use multiple smaller tapes, consider the following. While improvements in technology have allowed us to make smaller tapes, they have also reduced the physical tolerances in the recorder. A head mashing against a tape isn't as disastrous as a hard drive head crash, but it still can't be good for the media. The tensile strength of the smaller tape would also have to be evaluated to make sure it doesn't self-destruct on sudden acceleration. Again, if one tape snaps under certain conditions a redundant one probably will snap too. Maybe the older tapes are more durable. Maybe they aren't. Without testing it's impossible to tell. Testing costs money.
I hope I don't have to explain why spinning platter hard drives are not a good idea on a flight recorder.
Give the original engineers a bit of credit. Those analog tapes might be stone-age and oversized, but they're time-tested and they work. The reluctance to replace them comes from years of experience saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" -- especially when lives hang in the balance. If we can design something that withstands impact better, then that's great, but we need to be very cautious not to introduce new flaws.
The difference between a $40 mp3 player and a flight recorder is that the flight recorder must be engineered to never fail, ever. If you plug the mp3 player into an outlet to recharge and a power surge hits, it will get fried. You expect that. You can buy another one. But the flight recorder has to withstand the aircraft getting struck by lightning repeatedly, and still continue to function.
In addition, every component must survive the severe stresses involved in a plane crash. The severe acceleration can cause large components to get ripped off their solder points. The device will likely be cooked to several hundred degrees as the plane burns around it, so all the components need to survive that (electrolytic capacitors will explode well before that). Heck, if the plane spontaneously breaks apart on a trans-Pacific flight, the box gets cooled to the outside air temperature of around -50 C before slamming into the ocean at high speed. Let's see your music player take that and survive. And I hope whatever software running the thing wrote the data out cleanly before everything went to hell, because if any of those stresses caused a hardware glitch that overwrites or erases the log, you get to tell the FAA that you really don't know why that plane crashed. Oops.
Uh huh. And if you refuse, are they going to keep you, a citizen, from re-entering your own country? Arrest you? I wonder what the charges would be.
...
No, sir, here's the proper chain of dialog in this situation:
Them: Passport please.
You: Here you are.
Them: Fingers on the reader, please.
You: No.
Them: I can't let you into the country without fingerprints.
You: I'm a British citizen. The passport and photo prove it. Are you going to keep me out of my own country?
Them:
You: I'm a citizen, and I'm suspected of no crime. You have no right to take my fingerprints. I refuse to give them.
Do it calmly and nonviolently.
I suppose they'd arrest you then and get your fingerprints anyway. But if you did it, it would cause a row. If you and 4 other people did it, you might make the news. If you and 19 other people did it, it would certainly make the news. If you got a hundred people together to do it, it would make international headlines. And then things might have a chance at being changed. How much does a flight to Paris and back cost?