Maybe the scientists at CERN can discover some hidden force of nature, a Force that may be with them in their fight against the Avian Empire?
You don't understand your position. We are the ones with the planet destroying technology. Besides, any attack by the Avians against the Collider would be a useless gesture.
BALLISTIC MISSILES. They follow a freaking ballistic path, it's one of the easiest damned things to predict. High school level physics teaches you how that motion will work near the surface of the Earth, and first year physics in college will give you enough information to predict it's motion when you factor in atmospheric and changes in gravitational attraction at higher altitudes.
The hard part isn't hitting it with a laser.
The hard part is hitting it with a laser in the right spot with enough power to somehow prevent the warhead from reaching it's destination and compensating for any countermeasures that might be employed.
Their analogy is fine, you are just breaking it down to some argument about the feasibility of an entire anti-ICBM defense system.
I'm not sure what "the mystique of the sceptic" is
Mostly just the turning of skeptics (funny my spell check didn't catch that before) into celebrities. I was mostly referring to the culture that arises around what should be a rather straight forward operation. The concept of viewing skeptics as celebrities and the inevitable fanboyism that results around such activity.
Kind of how we will see concepts shot down with the 'proof' of one of the Mythbusters' experiments. The belief that because they have a show, they must know what they are doing. I see it come up with James Randi's fans as well.
The rest of my post was mostly just a public musing on my part stemming primarily from my experience of the gas lines on my property and how you could see subtle clues as to where they were IF you knew what to look for.
I once lost a phone (cell phone) when I was buckling my pants. I flushed the toilet, and then went to adjust my belt and shirt to make sure it wasn't bloused. A slight flick sent the belt slipping from the first beltloop and allowed the clip to which my phone was attached to slide right down the belt and hit dead center right as the toilet finished it's final surge in the flush sequence.
No chance for saving that phone. Cancelled the service before some damned alligator ran up the charges calling his buddies in Louisianna.
Followup to prevent people from bursting into rage at my post. I'm not implying that it is magical. I'm saying I'm not discounting something as impossible, but if possible, it should be testable.
I find it possible that there is something out there as rare as tetrachromacy, but once ONE person does it, then you are going to have x1000000 copycats who are most likely frauds who then completely overshadow the few legitimate ones.
Imagine that there were some condition that fewer than 0.000005% of the population acquired. Sensitivity to electric fields (or whatever, it's just an example). ~33,000 people should exhibit that sensitivity.
25% of the world's population doesn't even have electricity. 5.025 billion left
20% is under the age of 10 and likely won't be able to communicate that sensitivity. ~4.12 billion left
That gives us about 20,000 people with that sensitivity. If that were distributed normally across the globe, you end up with one person with that sensitivity for every 7,440 square km.
To give you a comparison: That's more sparse than Antarctica (assuming ~4000 people)
I wouldn't be surprised if there were people out there with abilities we don't normally see. Abilities fully testable in a scientific manner, but certainly possible.
I've got a couple dozen acres with gas lines crossing it in places. I can tell where the pipes are laid because the ground is slightly off from when they backfilled the trench they dug, in certain lines, the grass grows differently because, I suspect, the drainage is different for that location, and the undisturbed ground.
The pipes were laid 20 years ago.
Now, a lot of people here are ALSO falling for the mystique of the sceptic. Just because you don't have an immediate explanation for something, doesn't automatically make the 'capability' false.
I believe it is possible that there may be clues that our bodies pick up, but we ignore with our often distracted conscious minds. Now, does that mean I believe in dowsing? No, it isn't an admission of belief, but I wouldn't discount that we might be ignoring some feedback from our bodies that we normally don't acknowledge.
Let's say that at our current progress it would take us 30 years to develop a way to manufacture the cable. Then let's assume that it will take 15 years to develop a machine capable of climbing that cable.
Since the two technologies are completely distinct from each other (i.e. the solution will come from different industries) Doesn't it make sense to develop them in parallel rather than wait for the cable to be developed and then have to wait an additional 15 years for the climber technology to mature?
I've certainly polished my shoes while waiting for the limo to arrive. If the limo didn't arrive, it would have made the shoe polishing pointless, but I wouldn't want to pay for a limo to wait while I got ready.
Good job actually reading what I wrote... specifically, the line right before the one you quoted. It's bad juju to quote yourself, but I think in your case I can make an exception...
they should really distribute the blank media levy on basis of need rather than existing popularity
But clearly, you didn't see it. So good job. Props. You deserve a cookie.
I think he DID see it, since he DID reference it. He just didn't think it was that great of an idea.
If you advertise up to, but no one can ever reach it, are you really offering that service?
I'm willing to sell you this vehicle, I guarantee that you will be able to reach up to 10,000,000 miles without replacing the engine.
Did I just sell you a car that can drive 10,000,000 miles? No of course not. I don't expect you to ever exceed 200,000 miles, but since I'm not preventing you from going 10,000,000, did I sell you that?
The 1% that expect 24/7 full throughput should understand they never bought that guarantee of service. Just because their aggregation point wasn't previously saturated and they weren't previously throttled doesn't mean that was an entitlement to that level of service forever.
I don't expect 24/7 full throughput. How about 72% for 24/7?
I'd figure that a "C minus" is more than reasonable on my part, but apparantly it will get me throttled.
I would have liked the last terminator movie a lot more if they had not blown the secret in the advertising campaign. The concept was actually intriguing and they could have made it without violating canon.
That really did it for me as well. Far too many studios let the marketeers blow their 'reveals' in the trailers. I wonder if that trend hasn't hurt their sales just as much as piracy has.
Of course, I'm one of the types who goes to great lengths to avoid spoilers. I pardon accidental slips, or things that are so well known they have become memes, 'No, I am your father.' or 'Snape kills Dumbledore', but never the first person.
In fact, the guy that first broke that latter spoiler to me is still buried somewhere in upstate NY.
Or maybe they optimized the kernel for SSE4? All Macs do SSE4 - the Atom doesn't. Perfectly reasonable, yet people always jump to the malicious explanation...
If it were almost any company other than Apple I might agree with you.
However, Apple is the KING of designing hardware and software that is explicitly incompatible with the predominate standards in the marketplace. Until recently if you took a look at the back of a Mac you would find an array of proprietary plugs that were specifically engineered to be different than the standards. Consider the chips that they place in the CABLES that attach to iphones/ipods which will prevent you from using certain features of your equipment.
Again in any other company I might chalk it up to simple optimization or oversight, but when it comes to Apple, incompatability is part of their business model.
So if I am a gun store owner, and I believe someone is going to murder someone, is it illegal for me to sell them bullets? If someone later (after the murder) can show that I knew about the murderer's intention and I sold the bullets anyway, can I be sent to prison?
Honest question - I genuinely want to know.
Here is an obvious example:
Some guy walks into a gun shop.
Guy: I want to purchase ammunition for my 357. I'm going to use it to kill my neighbor Bill. Shopkeeper: Here you go, $20/box. Guy: Thank You. Shopkeeper: Have a good day.
Let's say that somehow that conversation was recorded and brought forward in the case of 'Guy who murdered Bill'. You would almost certainly face criminal charges.
And if you did know that someone was purchasing an item to kill another person, you SHOULD go to jail.
Ironically, the places you need GPS the most are the places there is no cell phone coverage. As much as I like my Android its my Garmin that goes into the backpack.
In the back country, I can sit down with a map.
In the middle of Boston, I need my GPS with voice announcements.
And before anybody says "commerce clause". . . I can see how that would enable the federal government to regulate or tax the sale of games across state lines, regardless of their content. But if they started evaluating the contents and discriminating between games, then that bumps up against the 1st Amendment.
In the worst decision the Supreme Court ever made: Wickard v. Filburn.
The Supreme Court decided that a man growing grain on his own farm to feed his own chickens constituted Interstate Commerce.
Their 'justification' was that since his grain was a substitute for wheat he could have bought on the open market, then his grain was affecting the overall demand of the nationally traded grain.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ever see a newspaper printing press in action? Now imagine something similar but churning out small circuits for oneshot electronics (those disposable cameras for instance?) Or you could have electronic business cards with RFIDs built into them (Never going to happen unless you can convince EVERYONE to implement it into their cards) but aside from my 15s guesses, there are definately some interested parties.
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Cartman is going to be Pis*Z*Z*Z**ZZZZZZZZap. OUCH DAMN*Z*Z*Z*ZZZZAP. FuZ**Z*Z*Z*Z*Z*Z. OW!
Maybe the scientists at CERN can discover some hidden force of nature, a Force that may be with them in their fight against the Avian Empire?
You don't understand your position. We are the ones with the planet destroying technology. Besides, any attack by the Avians against the Collider would be a useless gesture.
For Pete's sake....
BALLISTIC MISSILES. They follow a freaking ballistic path, it's one of the easiest damned things to predict. High school level physics teaches you how that motion will work near the surface of the Earth, and first year physics in college will give you enough information to predict it's motion when you factor in atmospheric and changes in gravitational attraction at higher altitudes.
The hard part isn't hitting it with a laser.
The hard part is hitting it with a laser in the right spot with enough power to somehow prevent the warhead from reaching it's destination and compensating for any countermeasures that might be employed.
Their analogy is fine, you are just breaking it down to some argument about the feasibility of an entire anti-ICBM defense system.
I'm not sure what "the mystique of the sceptic" is
Mostly just the turning of skeptics (funny my spell check didn't catch that before) into celebrities. I was mostly referring to the culture that arises around what should be a rather straight forward operation. The concept of viewing skeptics as celebrities and the inevitable fanboyism that results around such activity.
Kind of how we will see concepts shot down with the 'proof' of one of the Mythbusters' experiments. The belief that because they have a show, they must know what they are doing. I see it come up with James Randi's fans as well.
The rest of my post was mostly just a public musing on my part stemming primarily from my experience of the gas lines on my property and how you could see subtle clues as to where they were IF you knew what to look for.
I once lost a phone (cell phone) when I was buckling my pants. I flushed the toilet, and then went to adjust my belt and shirt to make sure it wasn't bloused. A slight flick sent the belt slipping from the first beltloop and allowed the clip to which my phone was attached to slide right down the belt and hit dead center right as the toilet finished it's final surge in the flush sequence.
No chance for saving that phone. Cancelled the service before some damned alligator ran up the charges calling his buddies in Louisianna.
So you say, but has it been done?
An object that is 0.6m across, moving at approximately 1 km/s, and is 384,000 km away.
Yes, about 40 years ago. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/21jul_llr.htm
Followup to prevent people from bursting into rage at my post. I'm not implying that it is magical. I'm saying I'm not discounting something as impossible, but if possible, it should be testable.
I find it possible that there is something out there as rare as tetrachromacy, but once ONE person does it, then you are going to have x1000000 copycats who are most likely frauds who then completely overshadow the few legitimate ones.
Imagine that there were some condition that fewer than 0.000005% of the population acquired. Sensitivity to electric fields (or whatever, it's just an example). ~33,000 people should exhibit that sensitivity.
25% of the world's population doesn't even have electricity.
5.025 billion left
20% is under the age of 10 and likely won't be able to communicate that sensitivity.
~4.12 billion left
That gives us about 20,000 people with that sensitivity. If that were distributed normally across the globe, you end up with one person with that sensitivity for every 7,440 square km.
To give you a comparison: That's more sparse than Antarctica (assuming ~4000 people)
I wouldn't be surprised if there were people out there with abilities we don't normally see. Abilities fully testable in a scientific manner, but certainly possible.
I've got a couple dozen acres with gas lines crossing it in places. I can tell where the pipes are laid because the ground is slightly off from when they backfilled the trench they dug, in certain lines, the grass grows differently because, I suspect, the drainage is different for that location, and the undisturbed ground.
The pipes were laid 20 years ago.
Now, a lot of people here are ALSO falling for the mystique of the sceptic. Just because you don't have an immediate explanation for something, doesn't automatically make the 'capability' false.
I believe it is possible that there may be clues that our bodies pick up, but we ignore with our often distracted conscious minds. Now, does that mean I believe in dowsing? No, it isn't an admission of belief, but I wouldn't discount that we might be ignoring some feedback from our bodies that we normally don't acknowledge.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_human_tetrachromats
Evander Holyfield lost a few fights as well, but you won't hear me utter a 'meh' if I faced him even today (or in 10 yrs)
Let's say that at our current progress it would take us 30 years to develop a way to manufacture the cable. Then let's assume that it will take 15 years to develop a machine capable of climbing that cable.
Since the two technologies are completely distinct from each other (i.e. the solution will come from different industries) Doesn't it make sense to develop them in parallel rather than wait for the cable to be developed and then have to wait an additional 15 years for the climber technology to mature?
I've certainly polished my shoes while waiting for the limo to arrive. If the limo didn't arrive, it would have made the shoe polishing pointless, but I wouldn't want to pay for a limo to wait while I got ready.
But we haven't demonstrated that we can hit an enemy ICBM with a laser, so what's the point?
Is the focus on the word on enemy? Hitting an ICBM with a laser is possible.
The challenges:
A. Of course, we aren't testing with 'enemy' ICBMS. At that point I wouldn't call it 'testing'. I'd call it 'Oh shit I hope this works'
B. Keeping the laser on target with enough energy to damage the warhead (premature detonation, breaking it's heat shield, etc)
C. Getting the laser on the ICBM prior to separation of the warhead to damage the rocket portion.
Hitting a high velocity target with a laser is the challenge they were talking about, and that IS doable.
Soluble, sure, but only in aqua fortis.
Or did you mean solvable?
Well Archimedes did say, "Give me a powerful enough solvent, and a large enough bathtub, and I'll dissolve the Earth."
Good job actually reading what I wrote... specifically, the line right before the one you quoted. It's bad juju to quote yourself, but I think in your case I can make an exception...
they should really distribute the blank media levy on basis of need rather than existing popularity
But clearly, you didn't see it. So good job. Props. You deserve a cookie.
I think he DID see it, since he DID reference it. He just didn't think it was that great of an idea.
Careful with snarks, they sometimes bite back.
If you advertise up to, but no one can ever reach it, are you really offering that service?
I'm willing to sell you this vehicle, I guarantee that you will be able to reach up to 10,000,000 miles without replacing the engine.
Did I just sell you a car that can drive 10,000,000 miles? No of course not. I don't expect you to ever exceed 200,000 miles, but since I'm not preventing you from going 10,000,000, did I sell you that?
The 1% that expect 24/7 full throughput should understand they never bought that guarantee of service. Just because their aggregation point wasn't previously saturated and they weren't previously throttled doesn't mean that was an entitlement to that level of service forever.
I don't expect 24/7 full throughput. How about 72% for 24/7?
I'd figure that a "C minus" is more than reasonable on my part, but apparantly it will get me throttled.
There is no earth.
Great. Now what am I going to do with all these turtles?
I would have liked the last terminator movie a lot more if they had not blown the secret in the advertising campaign. The concept was actually intriguing and they could have made it without violating canon.
That really did it for me as well. Far too many studios let the marketeers blow their 'reveals' in the trailers. I wonder if that trend hasn't hurt their sales just as much as piracy has.
Of course, I'm one of the types who goes to great lengths to avoid spoilers. I pardon accidental slips, or things that are so well known they have become memes, 'No, I am your father.' or 'Snape kills Dumbledore', but never the first person.
In fact, the guy that first broke that latter spoiler to me is still buried somewhere in upstate NY.
And if I decided to put custom rims on a Ferrari? Should Ferrari disable the vehicle's computer because it doesn't like the rims?
Or maybe they optimized the kernel for SSE4? All Macs do SSE4 - the Atom doesn't. Perfectly reasonable, yet people always jump to the malicious explanation...
If it were almost any company other than Apple I might agree with you.
However, Apple is the KING of designing hardware and software that is explicitly incompatible with the predominate standards in the marketplace. Until recently if you took a look at the back of a Mac you would find an array of proprietary plugs that were specifically engineered to be different than the standards. Consider the chips that they place in the CABLES that attach to iphones/ipods which will prevent you from using certain features of your equipment.
Again in any other company I might chalk it up to simple optimization or oversight, but when it comes to Apple, incompatability is part of their business model.
So if I am a gun store owner, and I believe someone is going to murder someone, is it illegal for me to sell them bullets? If someone later (after the murder) can show that I knew about the murderer's intention and I sold the bullets anyway, can I be sent to prison?
Honest question - I genuinely want to know.
Here is an obvious example:
Some guy walks into a gun shop.
Guy: I want to purchase ammunition for my 357. I'm going to use it to kill my neighbor Bill.
Shopkeeper: Here you go, $20/box.
Guy: Thank You.
Shopkeeper: Have a good day.
Let's say that somehow that conversation was recorded and brought forward in the case of 'Guy who murdered Bill'. You would almost certainly face criminal charges.
And if you did know that someone was purchasing an item to kill another person, you SHOULD go to jail.
My wife is 4'9" and we just had our first child. We are both engineers, and I'm none too tall myself.
I think we might as well save them the trouble and name our next child Nali Mekkatorque and just get the Gnome race started.
Ironically, the places you need GPS the most are the places there is no cell phone coverage. As much as I like my Android its my Garmin that goes into the backpack.
In the back country, I can sit down with a map.
In the middle of Boston, I need my GPS with voice announcements.
And before anybody says "commerce clause". . . I can see how that would enable the federal government to regulate or tax the sale of games across state lines, regardless of their content. But if they started evaluating the contents and discriminating between games, then that bumps up against the 1st Amendment.
In the worst decision the Supreme Court ever made: Wickard v. Filburn.
The Supreme Court decided that a man growing grain on his own farm to feed his own chickens constituted Interstate Commerce.
Their 'justification' was that since his grain was a substitute for wheat he could have bought on the open market, then his grain was affecting the overall demand of the nationally traded grain.
Pure and utter bullshit.
Funny, I see it as one of the best arguments for a decreased federal budget that I've ever seen.
I'm not sure what this is marketed as, for prototyping? Fast prototypes would be nice. But the vast majority of electronics are mass produced stuff, where the physical cost of the PCB is a small portion of the overall circuitry, with components, labour, and R&D being the real cost. I can't see printing traces of silver being cheaper than the existing methods. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ever see a newspaper printing press in action? Now imagine something similar but churning out small circuits for oneshot electronics (those disposable cameras for instance?) Or you could have electronic business cards with RFIDs built into them (Never going to happen unless you can convince EVERYONE to implement it into their cards) but aside from my 15s guesses, there are definately some interested parties.