Heavy lift aircraft cannot lift 400 tonnes. The current world record is held by the An-225 carrying 250 tonnes. Most other heavy lift aircraft top out around 150 tons or so. Helicopters tend to top out around 20-25 tonnes (including fuel).
Bottom (and top and up and all the colours) are arbitrary names chosen by the scientists who discovered/theorized these particles. The names do not describe the properties of the particles in any way. You'll have to go ask them why they picked these names, but personally I think it's because they got bored of Greek and Latin.
Those crashes was because the computer was getting more data input than expected. More precisely, the programmers had only foreseen one of the radars (landing, or rendezvous) to be on at any given time. This is written down into the flight plan. But on approach, the astronauts felt that in the case of a screwup they wanted the rendezvous radar already on so they could meet up faster. Something of a bug, but perhaps more of a mis-communication of requirements.
Set up this system in Japan? Some of the densest populations in the world living right on active fault lines. They've done what they could with earthquake proofing, but extra warning certainly can't hurt. Given the sheer density in population and buildings there, spending a couple hundred million (or maybe even a billion) could prove to be a wonderful investment.
They still have that. You can buy the Gears of War songtrack if you wanted it, and it only has one licensed song on it (Maaaaad Wooorld). You can do the same with MGS4, Halo (soundtracks come in licensed versions, and actual game soundtrack versions), every damn final fantasy game (and then you can go buy the soundtracks with all the songs done in piano, vocal only, remixed, and whatever you want). Most (and I really mean most) games still have soundtracks which you can buy, which are made up of primarily in game music with a couple licensed tracks thrown in (often said tracks are also used in game... often during credits or something).
Madden is different (well, most sports games are different). The in game music is frequently just licensed tracks anyways (FIFA games are like this too), so when they release their soundtrack its just a collection of licensed tracks which are considered 'good enough for and captures the spirit of Madden/FIFA/NHL' or whatever. Their trying to capture the feel of actually being at the stadium/arena/the game, so the licensed tracks actually do fit in rather well.
The Asian market made the whole micropayment thing really popular/proved it worked. Make a game free or absurdly cheap, and make up for it with micro purchases. Design an MMORPG just right and 90% of the players will end up having/wanting to buy stuff so they can fit in, and because the equipment is just a bit better.
It is difficult to create this situation properly (actually measuring this would be hell), and you would have to define the pressure at which to measure at. And pressure is defined as kilograms over surface area. And so you have a circular definition. Ooops.
That's exactly what the TFA says. They've created two spheres made out of pure crystalline silicon (so now they've lined them up). The sphere is nearly perfect (its about 95mm in diameter, has small scale variations of 0.3nm, and deviations from perfect cruve of 60-70nm). Now they're going to independently measure 60 000 points of the surface of the sphere to map out all of the surface variations, and then they're going to measure spacing using X-ray crystallography.
Also, nitpicking but... one kilogram = 10^15 picograms, always.
You can define a kilogram in the number of atoms of X element, but you still need a physical object to calibrate your scales against. In this case, I believe they did it by number of silicon atoms. TFA says they went and milled a silicon sphere (purified to only Silicon-28) weighing as close to the current standard as they can get it. Next they're going to measure it (X-rays and the such) to find the density, spacing, and the such and end up getting a number of silicon atoms. This number will now BE the kilogram, and these spheres are going to be the new physical standards. They are suppose to be an improvement in that is it theoretically possible to recreate these spheres should anything happen to them (as we know the amount silicon needed), while it is not possible to recreate the current standards.
My other summary was a bit off, got the process a little backwards.
That article was amount this (they were planning). This article is about them actually completing the task. Almost a dupe, not quite. Random stuff I remember from the last discussing. The sphere works be calculating the amount of silicon atoms that would weigh one kilogram (I'm guessing the kilogram as defined by the Paris Standard), and then using the crystalline structure of silicon to find the exact dimensions of a sphere containing that amount of atoms, and then they would go and mill the perfect sphere. By defining it as a precise number of silicon atoms, people can in theory completely recreate the kilogram if every standard was destroyed. As it stands now, if we lost the Paris standards, all the scales in the world would lose precision, and a kilogram here would not be a kilogram there.
Mass scales have to have something physical to be calibrated against, so even if they defined kilogram as so and so many natural constants (Plank mass?), there would still have to be some sort of stable physical thing to calibrate the scales with (hence this badass sphere).
TFA is a bit unclear, but it appears that in order to use this system, you also have to feed it your own information. Seems like a fair trade off (as long as its opt-in, can opt-out blah blah, standard privacy issues).
Some people enjoy having the real thing. They want a painting made by the person they thought made it. If you buy a Monet, and you pay the money for it, then you damn well better have a painting by Monet, not a painting that looks just like one from Monet. Fraud is fraud. This is true of people looking to own a piece of art created by a certain person, or a specific physical object because it has sentimental or other types of special value to them.
People out to own a pretty work of art really shouldn't care. If I wanted a pretty painting of a field, showing use of repetition, dry brushing, and composed with a lone popular tree standing on a hill at "x" position, then I really don't care if what I have is a real Monet, a painted counterfeit of a Monet, or a print of a Monet (unless I really wanted the texture of paint).
Assuming you could build a radio transmitter tough enough to handle it...
With tennis balls, I imagine there would be problems with balance and the response of the ball. Especially with such a small ball, mounting a rugidtized radio transmitter (a ball probably has to go through 20gs or something) would probably mess with the balance and how the ball deforms. Not to mention, unless you can mount the system directly in the center of the ball, then you still have a margin of error the diameter of the ball. I imagine that would be fairly significant amount of error in tennis (perhaps on the same level as this Hawkeye system?) when calling the lines.
The D2 team went and made Hellgate. Didn't pan out as they expected. It might seem a bit late... but look at how long SC2 took. Sure, starcraft had Korea to keep it going, but D2 still has its legion of nostalgic fans.
That's quite a lot. 100ms of lag is very noticeable in almost any FPS and even some RTS games (you can easily pick out 100ms lag in a Starcraft game). Widening the field a bit, many fighting games have timing down to one or two frames (as in, in order to block a certain attack, you have to complete another move within a few frames of the attack animation). Going back to FPS, say you have a rocket blasting at you (UT2k4, TF2, Halo, whatever). Say it takes maybe 300ms for the missile to hit you from the moment you see it, and you need to hit jump 100-50ms before impact to survive. With zero lag, you have 200ms to start (human reaction time to visual averages around 200ms). So you can pull it off fairly consistently. You have 100ms of lag, and now its just impossible.
Kind of. A megaton is just that. One million tons. When measuring explosive force, one megaton refers to an explosive with the power equivalent to one megaton of TNT. The explosive force of TNT is defined as 1000cal (small calorie) per gram of TNT (4180J per g). Normally when talking about mass, very large values get shifted into scientific notation, or just tons. The mega SI prefix is perfectly legit in that context though.
Maybe it's because they want to have a working model NOW and not in 10/20 years. I believe what you're describing is what we call feature creep. Better to get the core idea down first. As for why its only 60 pixels. Part of it certainly is power and size. They had enough trouble fitting 60 pixels worth of sensors and processing and power in. Getting more in is going to be hard.
Part of the reason why the debate has shifted to the home defense side is because of the basis of the pro gun control position. Their points often revolve in the use of guns in crimes. As a result, the defense has been to argue the merits of private gun ownership in the context of crimes (namely that of self defense). While this does ignore the true basis on the 2nd Amendment, if the pro gun ownership side had not shifted with the argument, then it seems probably that the gun control lobby would point to the anti-tyrannical arguments and say that 'their fears are over blown' and that they are completely side stepping the issue (people are being shot by guns) completely.
To draw resources and strength from a population does not mean that the population backs them (though it can mean that). Pre-Civil War America drew a significant amount of resources (and strength in a way) through the slave trade in Africa. I don't think the majority of people in Africa supported this. For an example closer at home, Scientology draws its resources and strength from the populations of countries, by bringing selected people into the fold (similar to how the fighters in Iraq draw manpower by bringing people into their fold). This does not mean that the populations of those countries as a whole support Scientology (or the fighters in Iraq... either side).
That's almost certainly true. I remember reading books about Vietnam and reading that a lot of commanders on the ground ended up being micromanaged by commanders back at base resulting in some incredibly bone headed moves. Repeating that certainly cannot be a good thing. But to be fair, there are certainly good aspects to this idea. Maximizing the amount of useful intelligence to forces on the ground cannot be a bad thing. The fog of war never really goes away, but this can definitely help. I remember reading somewhere that the future warrior stuff they sent to Iraq to test (laptops, PDAs and the like) proved to be extremely helpful IN SOME SITUATIONS. When troops were out on semi planned raids, the live intel proved to be a big bonus. But the rest of the time (regular patrol), the majority of the gear proved to be useless and just and lot of extra weight. As is the case with most technological advances (in any field, not just the military), it has its good and its bad.
They are cameras that good. They just cost more. People are cheap, and almost probably banking on cameras acting as a deterrence, not an actual 'ah ha! I can ID the kid who held up the night shift dude with a baseball bat'. I'm pretty sure places which actually places an emphasis on that aspect has the better cameras. The fact that many of crimes take place in poor lighting conditions really can't help the picture quality either.
Garroting someone is already a crime. If you can catch the guy using firecrackers as a distraction while murdering someone, I think you can catch the guy for murdering the guy. I don't see why making firecrackers a crime would work. It's not like they're impossible to make at home.
I thought the idea of having an AI working like a human (strong AI anyways) was not so it can have all the flaws we have, but so we can have a conscious machine. We are the conscious beings that we know the best, so conscious and human-like becomes largely the same thing.
That being said, standardizing human behavior is possible. The easiest way is to set up a standard form for prescriptions with nice fields for name, type, dosage, and etc, and then adding a nice 'other' field just in case. You know, just like how all those forms with dates have those nice little DD/MM/YYYY labels (or whatever system is correct).
Slashdot Mirror
Heavy lift aircraft cannot lift 400 tonnes. The current world record is held by the An-225 carrying 250 tonnes. Most other heavy lift aircraft top out around 150 tons or so. Helicopters tend to top out around 20-25 tonnes (including fuel).
Bottom (and top and up and all the colours) are arbitrary names chosen by the scientists who discovered/theorized these particles. The names do not describe the properties of the particles in any way. You'll have to go ask them why they picked these names, but personally I think it's because they got bored of Greek and Latin.
Those crashes was because the computer was getting more data input than expected. More precisely, the programmers had only foreseen one of the radars (landing, or rendezvous) to be on at any given time. This is written down into the flight plan. But on approach, the astronauts felt that in the case of a screwup they wanted the rendezvous radar already on so they could meet up faster. Something of a bug, but perhaps more of a mis-communication of requirements.
Set up this system in Japan? Some of the densest populations in the world living right on active fault lines. They've done what they could with earthquake proofing, but extra warning certainly can't hurt. Given the sheer density in population and buildings there, spending a couple hundred million (or maybe even a billion) could prove to be a wonderful investment.
They still have that. You can buy the Gears of War songtrack if you wanted it, and it only has one licensed song on it (Maaaaad Wooorld). You can do the same with MGS4, Halo (soundtracks come in licensed versions, and actual game soundtrack versions), every damn final fantasy game (and then you can go buy the soundtracks with all the songs done in piano, vocal only, remixed, and whatever you want). Most (and I really mean most) games still have soundtracks which you can buy, which are made up of primarily in game music with a couple licensed tracks thrown in (often said tracks are also used in game... often during credits or something).
Madden is different (well, most sports games are different). The in game music is frequently just licensed tracks anyways (FIFA games are like this too), so when they release their soundtrack its just a collection of licensed tracks which are considered 'good enough for and captures the spirit of Madden/FIFA/NHL' or whatever. Their trying to capture the feel of actually being at the stadium/arena/the game, so the licensed tracks actually do fit in rather well.
The Asian market made the whole micropayment thing really popular/proved it worked. Make a game free or absurdly cheap, and make up for it with micro purchases. Design an MMORPG just right and 90% of the players will end up having/wanting to buy stuff so they can fit in, and because the equipment is just a bit better.
It is difficult to create this situation properly (actually measuring this would be hell), and you would have to define the pressure at which to measure at. And pressure is defined as kilograms over surface area. And so you have a circular definition. Ooops.
That's exactly what the TFA says. They've created two spheres made out of pure crystalline silicon (so now they've lined them up). The sphere is nearly perfect (its about 95mm in diameter, has small scale variations of 0.3nm, and deviations from perfect cruve of 60-70nm). Now they're going to independently measure 60 000 points of the surface of the sphere to map out all of the surface variations, and then they're going to measure spacing using X-ray crystallography.
Also, nitpicking but... one kilogram = 10^15 picograms, always.
You can define a kilogram in the number of atoms of X element, but you still need a physical object to calibrate your scales against. In this case, I believe they did it by number of silicon atoms. TFA says they went and milled a silicon sphere (purified to only Silicon-28) weighing as close to the current standard as they can get it. Next they're going to measure it (X-rays and the such) to find the density, spacing, and the such and end up getting a number of silicon atoms. This number will now BE the kilogram, and these spheres are going to be the new physical standards. They are suppose to be an improvement in that is it theoretically possible to recreate these spheres should anything happen to them (as we know the amount silicon needed), while it is not possible to recreate the current standards.
My other summary was a bit off, got the process a little backwards.
Covered this before on slashdot.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/15/0541230
That article was amount this (they were planning). This article is about them actually completing the task. Almost a dupe, not quite. Random stuff I remember from the last discussing. The sphere works be calculating the amount of silicon atoms that would weigh one kilogram (I'm guessing the kilogram as defined by the Paris Standard), and then using the crystalline structure of silicon to find the exact dimensions of a sphere containing that amount of atoms, and then they would go and mill the perfect sphere. By defining it as a precise number of silicon atoms, people can in theory completely recreate the kilogram if every standard was destroyed. As it stands now, if we lost the Paris standards, all the scales in the world would lose precision, and a kilogram here would not be a kilogram there.
Mass scales have to have something physical to be calibrated against, so even if they defined kilogram as so and so many natural constants (Plank mass?), there would still have to be some sort of stable physical thing to calibrate the scales with (hence this badass sphere).
TFA is a bit unclear, but it appears that in order to use this system, you also have to feed it your own information. Seems like a fair trade off (as long as its opt-in, can opt-out blah blah, standard privacy issues).
Some people enjoy having the real thing. They want a painting made by the person they thought made it. If you buy a Monet, and you pay the money for it, then you damn well better have a painting by Monet, not a painting that looks just like one from Monet. Fraud is fraud. This is true of people looking to own a piece of art created by a certain person, or a specific physical object because it has sentimental or other types of special value to them.
People out to own a pretty work of art really shouldn't care. If I wanted a pretty painting of a field, showing use of repetition, dry brushing, and composed with a lone popular tree standing on a hill at "x" position, then I really don't care if what I have is a real Monet, a painted counterfeit of a Monet, or a print of a Monet (unless I really wanted the texture of paint).
Assuming you could build a radio transmitter tough enough to handle it...
With tennis balls, I imagine there would be problems with balance and the response of the ball. Especially with such a small ball, mounting a rugidtized radio transmitter (a ball probably has to go through 20gs or something) would probably mess with the balance and how the ball deforms. Not to mention, unless you can mount the system directly in the center of the ball, then you still have a margin of error the diameter of the ball. I imagine that would be fairly significant amount of error in tennis (perhaps on the same level as this Hawkeye system?) when calling the lines.
The D2 team went and made Hellgate. Didn't pan out as they expected. It might seem a bit late... but look at how long SC2 took. Sure, starcraft had Korea to keep it going, but D2 still has its legion of nostalgic fans.
That's quite a lot. 100ms of lag is very noticeable in almost any FPS and even some RTS games (you can easily pick out 100ms lag in a Starcraft game). Widening the field a bit, many fighting games have timing down to one or two frames (as in, in order to block a certain attack, you have to complete another move within a few frames of the attack animation). Going back to FPS, say you have a rocket blasting at you (UT2k4, TF2, Halo, whatever). Say it takes maybe 300ms for the missile to hit you from the moment you see it, and you need to hit jump 100-50ms before impact to survive. With zero lag, you have 200ms to start (human reaction time to visual averages around 200ms). So you can pull it off fairly consistently. You have 100ms of lag, and now its just impossible.
Kind of. A megaton is just that. One million tons. When measuring explosive force, one megaton refers to an explosive with the power equivalent to one megaton of TNT. The explosive force of TNT is defined as 1000cal (small calorie) per gram of TNT (4180J per g). Normally when talking about mass, very large values get shifted into scientific notation, or just tons. The mega SI prefix is perfectly legit in that context though.
Maybe it's because they want to have a working model NOW and not in 10/20 years. I believe what you're describing is what we call feature creep. Better to get the core idea down first. As for why its only 60 pixels. Part of it certainly is power and size. They had enough trouble fitting 60 pixels worth of sensors and processing and power in. Getting more in is going to be hard.
Part of the reason why the debate has shifted to the home defense side is because of the basis of the pro gun control position. Their points often revolve in the use of guns in crimes. As a result, the defense has been to argue the merits of private gun ownership in the context of crimes (namely that of self defense). While this does ignore the true basis on the 2nd Amendment, if the pro gun ownership side had not shifted with the argument, then it seems probably that the gun control lobby would point to the anti-tyrannical arguments and say that 'their fears are over blown' and that they are completely side stepping the issue (people are being shot by guns) completely.
To draw resources and strength from a population does not mean that the population backs them (though it can mean that). Pre-Civil War America drew a significant amount of resources (and strength in a way) through the slave trade in Africa. I don't think the majority of people in Africa supported this. For an example closer at home, Scientology draws its resources and strength from the populations of countries, by bringing selected people into the fold (similar to how the fighters in Iraq draw manpower by bringing people into their fold). This does not mean that the populations of those countries as a whole support Scientology (or the fighters in Iraq... either side).
That's almost certainly true. I remember reading books about Vietnam and reading that a lot of commanders on the ground ended up being micromanaged by commanders back at base resulting in some incredibly bone headed moves. Repeating that certainly cannot be a good thing. But to be fair, there are certainly good aspects to this idea. Maximizing the amount of useful intelligence to forces on the ground cannot be a bad thing. The fog of war never really goes away, but this can definitely help. I remember reading somewhere that the future warrior stuff they sent to Iraq to test (laptops, PDAs and the like) proved to be extremely helpful IN SOME SITUATIONS. When troops were out on semi planned raids, the live intel proved to be a big bonus. But the rest of the time (regular patrol), the majority of the gear proved to be useless and just and lot of extra weight. As is the case with most technological advances (in any field, not just the military), it has its good and its bad.
They are cameras that good. They just cost more. People are cheap, and almost probably banking on cameras acting as a deterrence, not an actual 'ah ha! I can ID the kid who held up the night shift dude with a baseball bat'. I'm pretty sure places which actually places an emphasis on that aspect has the better cameras. The fact that many of crimes take place in poor lighting conditions really can't help the picture quality either.
Garroting someone is already a crime. If you can catch the guy using firecrackers as a distraction while murdering someone, I think you can catch the guy for murdering the guy. I don't see why making firecrackers a crime would work. It's not like they're impossible to make at home.
I thought US Steel had more expensive steel because it only sells very high quality/specialty steel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Looking at the RAM usage from TFA, 120 megabytes is acceptable. Web browsers apparently use a lot of RAM (when you load a lot of sites).
I thought the idea of having an AI working like a human (strong AI anyways) was not so it can have all the flaws we have, but so we can have a conscious machine. We are the conscious beings that we know the best, so conscious and human-like becomes largely the same thing.
That being said, standardizing human behavior is possible. The easiest way is to set up a standard form for prescriptions with nice fields for name, type, dosage, and etc, and then adding a nice 'other' field just in case. You know, just like how all those forms with dates have those nice little DD/MM/YYYY labels (or whatever system is correct).