I think you are on to something with the idea of electronic transfer. If the original publisher or platform company could handle the secondary market and take their cut, suddenly selling used games would be no problem. If Nintendo were to offer what amounts to an escrow service, where the buyer pays a small fee for the transfer and the seller gets the rest, and Nintendo gets to inspect both consoles to confirm the transfer, then they would have no argument against resale. Until someone like GameStop undercuts them on the transfer service (assuming it would even be possible considering the DMCA).
This is a bit of a rant, and I don't really mean to direct it at you, so I apologize if it sounds that way.
Are you suggesting that chipmakers should apply their shiniest new memory controller technology to their 3+ year old processing technology and try to sell that instead of the latest and greatest? To be blunt, the technical community would cry foul. We know better, and would not be satisfied with anything other than their absolute best (at the top of the line). Neither side would dare make that decision, since the competition would simply release all their best tech in one package and annihilate them in every benchmark known, possibly aside from pure memory throughput.
Each use case is a little different. Even generalizations for types of data processing (graphics rendering, compiling, transcoding, etc.) are not as homogenous as they appear. The best solution is to decide what you can afford to spend, then get the best performance and reliability that you can get for that money. Sometimes that means going for 6 cores instead of 2 or 4. Sometimes that means Intel instead of AMD. Sometimes that means an old, cheap processor and a really nice motherboard and power supply.
To slashdot readers in general: I don't know where you get your average joe examples, but the average joe users I know have XP or Vista (eating 1 and 2 cores respectively [yes, I'm in the vista-hater fanboi camp]), heavy-duty antivirus (eating a core and half the hd bandwidth all by itself), and they have purchased dvd backup software and cd ripping software to go with their (or their kids') ipod. They like to watch movies on hulu or netflix, they like to transcode whole dvd's and they get pissed if it takes more than half an hour. They also use big, bloated MS Office to take simple notes. Their kids play flash games, rip cd's, chat, and pretend to do their homework all at the same time. My personal examples are all of people that would benefit more from a 6-core processor than they would from a x% improvement in memory bandwidth. Certainly they would notice a difference in either case, so the best choice would be a chip that has both and that's what AMD is offering. If they had more money than they could possibly spend, sure I'd set them up with a kilowatt PSU and a dual-quad Intel box and a SSD raid and four top of the line graphics cards and 4 big widescreen flatscreen monitors. Of course at that point they could have bought nice AMD systems for every kid on their block and a very nice machine for themselves at the same price.
This will already have been beaten to death by the time this posts, but here goes:
Probably the most important limit for fusion is the Lawson criterion. It states that the sum of temperature (meaning energy), density, and interaction time must add up to a minimum value for meaningful numbers of fusion reactions to occur. Inertial confinement uses a very short pulse of incredibly intense energy to compress a fuel pellet. This means that temperature and density are very very high, but interaction time is very short. Once the lasers have fired, there is nothing holding the fuel together but inertia. In other words, the fuel pellet will collapse and then basically explode. When it does this, the density decreases (because the same amount of mass is expanding very rapidly) and so does the temperature (because the same energy is being spread out over a larger and larger area). Even if the reaction created much more energy than we expect, the density drops far too fast for fusion to occur for more than a fraction of a second. It cannot create a stable fusion reaction because there is no confinement at all after the first laser pulse.
Something to consider for black holes is the Chandrasekhar limit. This formula basically says that you need at least 1.4 solar masses to create a black hole. Let me write this number out for you and make it clear: the minimum mass required for a black hole is about:
The targets for the NIF are made of 'heavy' hydrogen ice and are about 2 millimeters across. If this facility was going to make tiny black holes, we would already have been annihilated by gigantic black holes caused by nuclear weapons tests.
Apologies if you were just trolling for the inevitable responses. Wikipedia on those two subjects is informative, but you will need some physics background to make any sense of it.
How do you propose to do this when you have no access to records of lawsuits, malpractice insurance payouts, physician-specific success rates, or incidences of data loss or release? Even if you were to call for a price quote, they are under zero obligation to honor it. Of course, ignore the marketing hype. In fact, the one hospital in your town that doesn't blast out tv and radio commercials is probably the cheapest and likely the best quality. Unfortunately, there is no way for the average person to verify this assumption.
Talk to your local city administration office. Typically for a couple of bucks you can get the authority to operate a no-visibility business out of your house. You need not actually run any such business, the city just wants to be sure you won't be generating a bunch of street traffic and complaints. Next, send a certified copy of your form to your ISP and tell them you need a business-grade connection to start your company. If they ever call and ask about your business, tell them you never got the capital together.
Of course, the better option is to just dump them and move on, if that is possible for you.
No. Classified data is still protected by law, even if funded publicly and researched at a public university. Courts are extremely unlikely to ever decide that classified data should be blindly released for any reason, and the public nature of the funding behind it would not be grounds for release.
on the slim possibility that you are serious, and against my better judgment, here is your answer:
The iPad is an Apple device. Apple makes an operating system that competes with Microsoft Windows. Using your competitor's operating system to run your newest product is not a good idea. The modern core of Apple OS is openstep-based, and is UNIX/Linux compatible. It is more efficient than Windows. It benefits from the development efforts of the entire open-source community. Linux and relatives are well-known and respected in the mobile and embedded marketplaces. So is Windows CE, or rather it was (to the extent that Microsoft products ever are respected). The Windows offering is now Windows Mobile for most devices.
Here are a couple of reasons: (this post describes goals, not what we think would probably actually happen)
1. development cost Current space-rated tools are designed for humans. A humanoid robot can use these tools with no further research expense. Building robotic tools for all likely tasks would be more expensive than building a humanoid robot, not to mention requiring more mass to orbit and failing to take advantage of existing in-orbit resources and introducing substantially more complexity (points of failure). For a peek at the cost of tools, try this: http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2008/11/so-why-does-a-n.html
2. adaptability Similar to the above point, a humanoid robot would be useful anywhere humans might end up. For a base on the moon or Mars, for example, send one of these after all the cargo arrives, but before the first humans arrive. Now you have something flexible, suitable for most tasks that a human would perform, and expendable. The robot(s) can be used to set up, unpack, etc. and confirm that the facility is safe for human habitation. There are other feasible concepts, but all of them require some level of parallel development and additional cargo mass beyond that of a compatible robot. A further complication is that if these alternatives should break down, then the human astronauts may not be physically able to complete the robot's tasks.
3. spinoff In keeping with NASA tech tradition, many technologies developed for use in space are adapted for use on Earth. The same advantages to using a humanoid robot in space apply on Earth. The launch fuel now becomes a transportation concern; can your shiny new robot fit in the passenger seat of your car or does it need to be shipped by freight? Once the basic hardware and software are developed, it becomes a much simpler task to adapt one into a lawn-mowing robot that uses your existing lawn mower. Or one that does your laundry, or weeds your garden, or replaces your siding. Given a robot with at least human range of motion and strength, any repetitive task then becomes a question of programing. Anything you are equipped to do, now your robot can do for you with no added tool costs.
When these three factors converge, the result is a strong marketplace in robotics that benefits us civilians and NASA, taking advantage of the risk behaviors of both groups to achieve something better and faster than either group could manage on their own. The publicity stunt angle was almost certainly in the top two reasons for sending it, and immediate cost was probably the other contender.
Don't let the next sentence scare you off.
I have read the Bible from cover to cover, both King James and Strong's Concordance (though not all of the ridiculously exhaustive supplementary material in that one). Most of what I hear from modern Christians does not blend with what I took from those readings. This includes apocalypse beliefs. For starters, the Bible implies a period of 1,000 years for the end of Earth to take place (not that biblical time spans mean anything), and mentions several events that would be fairly obvious.
Finding nearby objects of interest is worth hearing about. Having another stellar object that close is bound to be useful for astronomy. Consider this, though: if we could miss this brown dwarf until now (even using gravitational investigation), we could have missed one even closer. Since we have closer objects to visit, why don't we start with a probe (or a set of probes) to the Oort cloud? Let's get some more specific density and composition and orbit data on these things. Lots of ice? Cool, destabilize big chunks of it and send them to Mars or something. Long-term, obviously, but there is a lot that we do not know about that region of our solar system.
DynCorp operates in the states. I worked for them at the Goose Creek naval weapons station in 2002. Their primary function then was as contract mechanics for the rapid-reserve fleet. They did send mechanics overseas, but security was typically provided by Army or Marine Corps personnel. My time with them was brief and should in no way be interpreted as inside knowledge of any kind. Everything past this point is speculation.
They (DynCorp and most other contractors) have a presence in the US and could easily be fined or sanctioned for not behaving. If that has not yet been done, it probably means that whatever happened was sanctioned at some level of military or government authority. From what I've been able to read (from your links and others), it sounds like sanctioned misbehavior is exactly the intent of such contract combat units.
Aside from the ATCA, any individual committing violence would be subject to prosecution in Columbia. If their actions were severe enough, they could be tried as war criminals or for crimes against humanity in international court. As corporations operating in a UN member state, the organization which employs such a person would be subject to sanctions or fines decided by a body that they are a lot less likely to have successfully bribed. YMMV.
Either way, prosecuting one contractor would not be that hard compared to prosecuting a major pharmaceutical company. Ending DynCorp wouldn't be much of a blip in our economy, but Pfizer would be an earthquake. The punishment in this case does not fit the crime, but the alternative was for the prosecution to do serious damage not just to Pfizer but to hordes of relatively innocent people as well. Perhaps that is what should have happened, perhaps not.
Your strawman ai is correct, submarines fly through the water. For a suitably loose definition of 'fly', or perhaps by using 'fluid' instead of 'air' as the medium through which one flies.
This would lead to an interesting general-case definition of flight with some pretty complex special-case rules governing the medium, active or passive modes, animal/vegetable/mineral, etc. Of course, to build a database comprehensive enough to give good and complete rules for these situations, the ai would need exposure to several examples of 'flight' corresponding to each of the attributes discussed above and more. With such a dataset to draw upon, the ai should most probably have asked for more information about the bird before answering, but could reasonably have inferred that the bird could not fly.
If the ai also had a good grasp of physics (including buoyancy, aerodynamics, etc.), then asking it to produce an effective powered air-traveling vehicle would only ever result in known solutions (and the best of the field at that).
If the ai also had sufficient comprehension, ask it to design a non-traditional vehicle (or to improve upon an existing concept) with performance beyond the current state of the art for, say, powered fixed-wing aircraft and with the additional requirement that it can travel underwater. At this level of creativity, we're finally approaching what might be comparable to a good human engineer. The incredible wealth of knowledge necessary for a machine to perform this creative task is not prohibited by anything that we know about information systems; it is only our repeated failure to provide this data to a suitable system. I hope to see it achieved in my lifetime.
The problem is that any bill everyone can agree on will be eviscerated by people who willfully disagree with anything Obama. The simple fix-everything bill is a myth. In order for any form of healthcare reform to pass, it must be made palatable to a sufficient number of legislators from both parties. Once the bill is in place, it becomes much easier to change it by degrees. An existing, approved healthcare bill makes it a lot easier to get things like a public option, a prescription drug price cap, tort reform, or any of the dozens of other measures that would actually give this effort some teeth. Trying to shove it all through at once simply won't happen unless we somehow get a democratic supermajority that doesn't infight over pork-spending line items.
The items you suggest are reasonable. I hope to see some of those reforms eventually.
If song royalties were the limiting factor, you would hear more talk during late night/early morning hours when ad revenue is at the lowest rates.
An hour of radio play containing only songs would have on average 16 songs. Add an average of 9 minutes of commercial content and another 1 minute of news and you are down to 12-13 songs. A DJ might talk for 3-6 minutes per hour (unless it is a morning show), which only reduces the song count by another 1-2 songs. Most stations are paying considerably more for their DJ's than they are for their audio royalties.
Morning shows are different math. The point of a show is to provide image for the station, to set it apart from others in the same format. For that reason, morning shows on music stations are often 30+ minutes of talk over the hour, which only leaves time for 4-6 songs in between commercial breaks. In some strange twist, most stations now run syndicated morning show content. It could be argued that this is the exact opposite of the desired effect, namely promoting an independent image. Additionally, morning shows often run 2-4 minutes more commercial time than the remainder of the station schedule. This is in part to make up for the cost of talent, in part because the segue from talk to commercial to talk is smoother (and causes less station switching) than comparable all-music formats, and in part because morning shows are during peak listener hours and get the highest per-minute ad rates.
At those speeds, your cone looks more like a flat disk. If other ships are behind you, they don't have to deal with stationary interstellar hydrogen. Instead, they have to deal head-on with your exhaust which is carrying substantially more energy. Efficient high-thrust engines also make efficient weapons. Beating a dead horse here, but you can't accelerate smoothly to c. The energy required to speed up is itself increasing due to your mass increasing according to your gamma factor. Under modern physics, this has nothing to do with friction*.
*(There are alternative theories that posit a quantum medium which would cause these lorentz effects as a result of something very like friction. They may even be true, but it is still an entirely separate problem from the interstellar hydrogen friction. Other theories suggest that the property of mass could be modified, in which case you could become massless and be accelerated to exactly c in the process. Then subjective time would stop and you would have no chance of reclaiming your mass at your destination.)
Have a look at that and some of the links presented. The launch costs are relevant only to the equipment needed for further manufacturing. The rest of the material can be found in space for orders of magnitude less investment. If solar wind turns out to be enough of a problem, then a minimal network of GEO relay satellites could receive high-intensity beams from non-GEO power satellites and relay as a low-intensity beam to the ground. The current space economy does not justify a full-scale system at this time, but those who take the risk and start doing real in-orbit testing now will be positioned far better when launch costs drop. It is possible that within the next 10 years the capital and launch costs will have fallen enough to make the idea commercially viable on the large scale. Something else to consider is that having a clean, reliable 24/7 power source available anywhere on earth makes some of those mass-driver or maglev launch concepts look a lot more viable politically and financially. All it takes is one launcher, and the capital cost for further space infrastructure investment drops staggeringly. The two concepts together have the potential for a strong feedback loop that drives launch costs well below anything we might think possible today. Or it might not. Can't tell until we try, really.
I'll comment under the assumption that you haven't thought this out to its many possible consequences. Maybe you could make a case for some intrinsic right of travel, but there are other natural rights (not to mention socially-accepted rights and responsibilities) that would supersede such a right.
Here is an extreme example: If Israel opened their borders, there wouldn't be an Israel, just a bunch of craters. Here's another: If the US opened their borders (ports, specifically), you wouldn't be able to trust that the antibiotic you're taking isn't actually cyanide or an ineffective knockoff. Here's another: If there was no barrier to trade in controlled arms and dual-use technology, North Korea and Iran (among others) would already have space-capable nuclear arsenals. For that matter, take any horrible thing you can imagine, from lethally incorrect medication to radioactive waste to biological and chemical weapons to slaves and make those things available anywhere in the world. Better get out your Geiger counter and make sure your toothpaste wasn't made with reactor-coolant sodium.
There are a lot of things that we get wrong. The mere existence of famine, poverty, and widespread illness are testaments to our social failures. These things do not invalidate what we have gotten right. Some things should be controlled, some things should be validated, some things deserve a chain of responsibility and a means of seeing that responsibility culminate in rational consequences for those that abuse their fellow man.
The real problem is that there is no one solution. Every problem plaguing us today is a trade-off. Drugs are illegal in part because of the collateral damage, in part because some people are just too stupid/irresponsible to have them, in part because it offends some people's morality, and in part because it damages someone's bottom line. Guns, same thing. The 'war on' targets are all like this. Other problems such as poverty, famine, economic collapse; these are due to many factors. Adjust that 'one thing' that seems like it will make everything better and something else collapses, some other unforeseen consequence hits us. We could do nothing and see no improvement at all, but then what would be the point of trying? Besides, different cultures define moral in different ways. There is no one right way.
To bring this back to the original topic, no. We absolutely cannot throw the border open. We may not like our laws, but we are bound to respect them and it is not legal to enter this country without a visa or citizenship. We are not morally obligated to drive our own support systems past the point of collapse solely to appease the guilt-ridden people who feel bad about the terrible conditions across the border or anywhere else. To put it bluntly we're no help to anyone if we can't help ourselves, and we're not doing so hot right now. Maybe it sounds callous to you, but screw the people that drain our social support without giving anything back. If individuals want to donate their time, money, or expertise then so be it but we cannot allow a de facto aid package to be sucked out of our hospitals and food pantries and shelters.
For eve, assume that tank absorbs the healer role most of the time, as electronic warfare is far more significant than healing others. Ewar exists to negate damage, to negate speed advantages, to boost targeting speed, etc., which makes the bard/commander/buff+debuff class eve's de facto third member of the trinity.
Specialists don't succeed solo in eve (in combat). If you are all tank or all damage, you're all useless. A tank with no damage or ewar potential won't get attacked until everyone else is dead. An all-damage fit/skill will get primaried because they die the fastest and they are the biggest threat. All of this is irrelevant if your enemy is stupid of course, but let's concern ourselves with competent opponents here.
Success in pvp (and to some extent in pve) relies on doing enough damage to pose a credible threat while retaining enough tank to actualize that damage. Even in gangs or fleets, there may be a few specialists (tackle/ewar) but the generalists make it happen. Many successful gang arrangements have no specialization; the homogeneity of the group makes individual losses much less significant. Specialist groups can be more effective in the right circumstances (like gatecamping or frigate combat), but the range of situations encountered by a roving gang are hard to address with a group of specialists.
You may specialize in one weapon system, or one type of tank, or one flavor of ewar, but you cannot be called a competent combat pilot if you are missing one of the trinity. Even then, if your specialty is known it can be overcome. There is no invulnerable character, no perfect ship. Everything dies in the end; the more people you piss off the shorter the wait to go visit your cloning tank.
The publishers are the ones who are selling books to those same distributors that pay for click-through sales. The publishers are already making their money (now). The problem for them is when cheap online printing services pair up with authors (content creators if you prefer) and with google to eliminate the traditional publishers, publicists, and distributors.
VegaStrike has indirect speed limits. Your shields can only handle a certain amount/speed of debris before it starts depleting. You can go as fast as you want, but if you go too far over your rated speed for too long, space junk blows you up. (comment based on VS from some years ago, so may be different in more recent builds) Admittedly, EVE doesn't explain why there should be speed limits. Other physics elements such as thrust, mass, and rotational velocity/acceleration are taken into account in fairly realistic ways. The main reason is that speed is a combat advantage and the designers carefully control it as they do all combat advantages.
Imparting a force upon existing photons and creating new photons are two different endeavors (from an engineering standpoint; a physicist could easily argue that they are the same). The end result might be the same (photons running screaming from the back of your thruster), but the energy input could be very different. Since it hasn't been built yet, we do not really know for sure.
The best case would be that the drive allows for conversion of energy into momentum with reasonable efficiency and at an acceptable specific impulse. Transmission of EM fields occurs at c, so the drive would maintain its efficiency up to very high velocities.
The worst case (aside from not working at all) is that it works just like a photon drive. If that is the case, it may be useless for propulsion while still having lots of interesting implications/applications.
Assuming the Isp is reasonable and the energy requirement isn't ridiculous, a straightforward RTG would power spacecraft for decades without refueling.
I'm guessing you don't use outlook... ever... Two seconds from 'send' to responding again would be a blessing. When it was first installed and I had no messages at all, it was perhaps slightly faster than that. Now, with 20-100 messages in inbox and everything else ruthlessly redirected to local storage files it can take 7-10 seconds to return responsiveness to the main window after sending. (this is a reasonably recent machine, dual-core processor, 2gb ram) If I could use gmail at/for work, I would. I have a few thousand messages sitting there, but it loads in a fraction of the time that outlook does. Sending mail takes maybe a second or two until I can click 'compose' or click a message to read.
Personal experience and all that, but everyone I know who is stuck with outlook hates its bloated corpse.
Now, on to the relevant stuff:
This sounds more like something intended for netbooks (or similar)... Seriously, no hard disk? Think of a larger, much more capable version of a smartphone and the whole 'everything is web' approach makes sense. Just because it's all web all the time doesn't mean that you can't serve your own apps on 127.0.0.1. Local processing would still be possible (and necessary), it's just wrapped up in a nice little security sandbox. A side effect is that as long as it stays compatible with web standards, any application written for this OS will work in any standards-compliant browser. Should make porting kind of irrelevant (from Chromium to other OS).
(This post contains some generalizations; RF engineers are welcome to correct me on specifics.) In order to put up a transmitter, the FCC requires full transmission surveys. These can be theoretical, but are typically produced by a specialist engineering company under contract using full topography data. The resulting map of signal levels would be available to any carrier, as it is a part of their application to construct the transmitter in the first place. Some types of transmitter (especially for AM/FM broadcast) also require some number of sample readings to confirm the accuracy of the original projection and avoid any interference with nearby transmitters. These composite maps (theory plus corroborating data points) would of course also be available to the carrier. Verizon has this data, they simply choose not to advertise it.
It is nothing of the sort. It is a reasonable question, founded on perceptions common to many outside of the Christian faith. One answer is that since heaven is a place of eternal happiness, no discontent is possible. The only way for that to be possible is either to revoke free will or to remake people to be incapable of negative emotions and actions (which amounts to the same thing).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are on to something with the idea of electronic transfer. If the original publisher or platform company could handle the secondary market and take their cut, suddenly selling used games would be no problem. If Nintendo were to offer what amounts to an escrow service, where the buyer pays a small fee for the transfer and the seller gets the rest, and Nintendo gets to inspect both consoles to confirm the transfer, then they would have no argument against resale. Until someone like GameStop undercuts them on the transfer service (assuming it would even be possible considering the DMCA).
This is a bit of a rant, and I don't really mean to direct it at you, so I apologize if it sounds that way.
Are you suggesting that chipmakers should apply their shiniest new memory controller technology to their 3+ year old processing technology and try to sell that instead of the latest and greatest? To be blunt, the technical community would cry foul. We know better, and would not be satisfied with anything other than their absolute best (at the top of the line). Neither side would dare make that decision, since the competition would simply release all their best tech in one package and annihilate them in every benchmark known, possibly aside from pure memory throughput.
Each use case is a little different. Even generalizations for types of data processing (graphics rendering, compiling, transcoding, etc.) are not as homogenous as they appear. The best solution is to decide what you can afford to spend, then get the best performance and reliability that you can get for that money. Sometimes that means going for 6 cores instead of 2 or 4. Sometimes that means Intel instead of AMD. Sometimes that means an old, cheap processor and a really nice motherboard and power supply.
To slashdot readers in general: I don't know where you get your average joe examples, but the average joe users I know have XP or Vista (eating 1 and 2 cores respectively [yes, I'm in the vista-hater fanboi camp]), heavy-duty antivirus (eating a core and half the hd bandwidth all by itself), and they have purchased dvd backup software and cd ripping software to go with their (or their kids') ipod. They like to watch movies on hulu or netflix, they like to transcode whole dvd's and they get pissed if it takes more than half an hour. They also use big, bloated MS Office to take simple notes. Their kids play flash games, rip cd's, chat, and pretend to do their homework all at the same time. My personal examples are all of people that would benefit more from a 6-core processor than they would from a x% improvement in memory bandwidth. Certainly they would notice a difference in either case, so the best choice would be a chip that has both and that's what AMD is offering. If they had more money than they could possibly spend, sure I'd set them up with a kilowatt PSU and a dual-quad Intel box and a SSD raid and four top of the line graphics cards and 4 big widescreen flatscreen monitors. Of course at that point they could have bought nice AMD systems for every kid on their block and a very nice machine for themselves at the same price.
This will already have been beaten to death by the time this posts, but here goes:
Probably the most important limit for fusion is the Lawson criterion. It states that the sum of temperature (meaning energy), density, and interaction time must add up to a minimum value for meaningful numbers of fusion reactions to occur. Inertial confinement uses a very short pulse of incredibly intense energy to compress a fuel pellet. This means that temperature and density are very very high, but interaction time is very short. Once the lasers have fired, there is nothing holding the fuel together but inertia. In other words, the fuel pellet will collapse and then basically explode. When it does this, the density decreases (because the same amount of mass is expanding very rapidly) and so does the temperature (because the same energy is being spread out over a larger and larger area). Even if the reaction created much more energy than we expect, the density drops far too fast for fusion to occur for more than a fraction of a second. It cannot create a stable fusion reaction because there is no confinement at all after the first laser pulse.
Something to consider for black holes is the Chandrasekhar limit. This formula basically says that you need at least 1.4 solar masses to create a black hole. Let me write this number out for you and make it clear: the minimum mass required for a black hole is about:
6,125,873,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds(!).
The targets for the NIF are made of 'heavy' hydrogen ice and are about 2 millimeters across. If this facility was going to make tiny black holes, we would already have been annihilated by gigantic black holes caused by nuclear weapons tests.
Apologies if you were just trolling for the inevitable responses. Wikipedia on those two subjects is informative, but you will need some physics background to make any sense of it.
How do you propose to do this when you have no access to records of lawsuits, malpractice insurance payouts, physician-specific success rates, or incidences of data loss or release? Even if you were to call for a price quote, they are under zero obligation to honor it. Of course, ignore the marketing hype. In fact, the one hospital in your town that doesn't blast out tv and radio commercials is probably the cheapest and likely the best quality. Unfortunately, there is no way for the average person to verify this assumption.
Talk to your local city administration office. Typically for a couple of bucks you can get the authority to operate a no-visibility business out of your house. You need not actually run any such business, the city just wants to be sure you won't be generating a bunch of street traffic and complaints.
Next, send a certified copy of your form to your ISP and tell them you need a business-grade connection to start your company.
If they ever call and ask about your business, tell them you never got the capital together.
Of course, the better option is to just dump them and move on, if that is possible for you.
No. Classified data is still protected by law, even if funded publicly and researched at a public university. Courts are extremely unlikely to ever decide that classified data should be blindly released for any reason, and the public nature of the funding behind it would not be grounds for release.
on the slim possibility that you are serious, and against my better judgment, here is your answer:
The iPad is an Apple device. Apple makes an operating system that competes with Microsoft Windows. Using your competitor's operating system to run your newest product is not a good idea.
The modern core of Apple OS is openstep-based, and is UNIX/Linux compatible. It is more efficient than Windows. It benefits from the development efforts of the entire open-source community.
Linux and relatives are well-known and respected in the mobile and embedded marketplaces. So is Windows CE, or rather it was (to the extent that Microsoft products ever are respected). The Windows offering is now Windows Mobile for most devices.
Here are a couple of reasons:
(this post describes goals, not what we think would probably actually happen)
1. development cost
Current space-rated tools are designed for humans. A humanoid robot can use these tools with no further research expense. Building robotic tools for all likely tasks would be more expensive than building a humanoid robot, not to mention requiring more mass to orbit and failing to take advantage of existing in-orbit resources and introducing substantially more complexity (points of failure).
For a peek at the cost of tools, try this: http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2008/11/so-why-does-a-n.html
2. adaptability
Similar to the above point, a humanoid robot would be useful anywhere humans might end up. For a base on the moon or Mars, for example, send one of these after all the cargo arrives, but before the first humans arrive. Now you have something flexible, suitable for most tasks that a human would perform, and expendable. The robot(s) can be used to set up, unpack, etc. and confirm that the facility is safe for human habitation. There are other feasible concepts, but all of them require some level of parallel development and additional cargo mass beyond that of a compatible robot. A further complication is that if these alternatives should break down, then the human astronauts may not be physically able to complete the robot's tasks.
3. spinoff
In keeping with NASA tech tradition, many technologies developed for use in space are adapted for use on Earth. The same advantages to using a humanoid robot in space apply on Earth. The launch fuel now becomes a transportation concern; can your shiny new robot fit in the passenger seat of your car or does it need to be shipped by freight? Once the basic hardware and software are developed, it becomes a much simpler task to adapt one into a lawn-mowing robot that uses your existing lawn mower. Or one that does your laundry, or weeds your garden, or replaces your siding. Given a robot with at least human range of motion and strength, any repetitive task then becomes a question of programing. Anything you are equipped to do, now your robot can do for you with no added tool costs.
When these three factors converge, the result is a strong marketplace in robotics that benefits us civilians and NASA, taking advantage of the risk behaviors of both groups to achieve something better and faster than either group could manage on their own. The publicity stunt angle was almost certainly in the top two reasons for sending it, and immediate cost was probably the other contender.
Don't let the next sentence scare you off.
I have read the Bible from cover to cover, both King James and Strong's Concordance (though not all of the ridiculously exhaustive supplementary material in that one). Most of what I hear from modern Christians does not blend with what I took from those readings. This includes apocalypse beliefs. For starters, the Bible implies a period of 1,000 years for the end of Earth to take place (not that biblical time spans mean anything), and mentions several events that would be fairly obvious.
Finding nearby objects of interest is worth hearing about. Having another stellar object that close is bound to be useful for astronomy. Consider this, though: if we could miss this brown dwarf until now (even using gravitational investigation), we could have missed one even closer. Since we have closer objects to visit, why don't we start with a probe (or a set of probes) to the Oort cloud? Let's get some more specific density and composition and orbit data on these things. Lots of ice? Cool, destabilize big chunks of it and send them to Mars or something. Long-term, obviously, but there is a lot that we do not know about that region of our solar system.
DynCorp operates in the states. I worked for them at the Goose Creek naval weapons station in 2002. Their primary function then was as contract mechanics for the rapid-reserve fleet. They did send mechanics overseas, but security was typically provided by Army or Marine Corps personnel. My time with them was brief and should in no way be interpreted as inside knowledge of any kind. Everything past this point is speculation.
They (DynCorp and most other contractors) have a presence in the US and could easily be fined or sanctioned for not behaving. If that has not yet been done, it probably means that whatever happened was sanctioned at some level of military or government authority. From what I've been able to read (from your links and others), it sounds like sanctioned misbehavior is exactly the intent of such contract combat units.
Aside from the ATCA, any individual committing violence would be subject to prosecution in Columbia. If their actions were severe enough, they could be tried as war criminals or for crimes against humanity in international court. As corporations operating in a UN member state, the organization which employs such a person would be subject to sanctions or fines decided by a body that they are a lot less likely to have successfully bribed. YMMV.
Either way, prosecuting one contractor would not be that hard compared to prosecuting a major pharmaceutical company. Ending DynCorp wouldn't be much of a blip in our economy, but Pfizer would be an earthquake. The punishment in this case does not fit the crime, but the alternative was for the prosecution to do serious damage not just to Pfizer but to hordes of relatively innocent people as well. Perhaps that is what should have happened, perhaps not.
Your strawman ai is correct, submarines fly through the water. For a suitably loose definition of 'fly', or perhaps by using 'fluid' instead of 'air' as the medium through which one flies.
This would lead to an interesting general-case definition of flight with some pretty complex special-case rules governing the medium, active or passive modes, animal/vegetable/mineral, etc. Of course, to build a database comprehensive enough to give good and complete rules for these situations, the ai would need exposure to several examples of 'flight' corresponding to each of the attributes discussed above and more. With such a dataset to draw upon, the ai should most probably have asked for more information about the bird before answering, but could reasonably have inferred that the bird could not fly.
If the ai also had a good grasp of physics (including buoyancy, aerodynamics, etc.), then asking it to produce an effective powered air-traveling vehicle would only ever result in known solutions (and the best of the field at that).
If the ai also had sufficient comprehension, ask it to design a non-traditional vehicle (or to improve upon an existing concept) with performance beyond the current state of the art for, say, powered fixed-wing aircraft and with the additional requirement that it can travel underwater. At this level of creativity, we're finally approaching what might be comparable to a good human engineer. The incredible wealth of knowledge necessary for a machine to perform this creative task is not prohibited by anything that we know about information systems; it is only our repeated failure to provide this data to a suitable system. I hope to see it achieved in my lifetime.
The problem is that any bill everyone can agree on will be eviscerated by people who willfully disagree with anything Obama. The simple fix-everything bill is a myth. In order for any form of healthcare reform to pass, it must be made palatable to a sufficient number of legislators from both parties. Once the bill is in place, it becomes much easier to change it by degrees. An existing, approved healthcare bill makes it a lot easier to get things like a public option, a prescription drug price cap, tort reform, or any of the dozens of other measures that would actually give this effort some teeth. Trying to shove it all through at once simply won't happen unless we somehow get a democratic supermajority that doesn't infight over pork-spending line items.
The items you suggest are reasonable. I hope to see some of those reforms eventually.
If song royalties were the limiting factor, you would hear more talk during late night/early morning hours when ad revenue is at the lowest rates.
An hour of radio play containing only songs would have on average 16 songs. Add an average of 9 minutes of commercial content and another 1 minute of news and you are down to 12-13 songs. A DJ might talk for 3-6 minutes per hour (unless it is a morning show), which only reduces the song count by another 1-2 songs. Most stations are paying considerably more for their DJ's than they are for their audio royalties.
Morning shows are different math. The point of a show is to provide image for the station, to set it apart from others in the same format. For that reason, morning shows on music stations are often 30+ minutes of talk over the hour, which only leaves time for 4-6 songs in between commercial breaks. In some strange twist, most stations now run syndicated morning show content. It could be argued that this is the exact opposite of the desired effect, namely promoting an independent image. Additionally, morning shows often run 2-4 minutes more commercial time than the remainder of the station schedule. This is in part to make up for the cost of talent, in part because the segue from talk to commercial to talk is smoother (and causes less station switching) than comparable all-music formats, and in part because morning shows are during peak listener hours and get the highest per-minute ad rates.
YMMV.
At those speeds, your cone looks more like a flat disk.
If other ships are behind you, they don't have to deal with stationary interstellar hydrogen. Instead, they have to deal head-on with your exhaust which is carrying substantially more energy. Efficient high-thrust engines also make efficient weapons.
Beating a dead horse here, but you can't accelerate smoothly to c. The energy required to speed up is itself increasing due to your mass increasing according to your gamma factor. Under modern physics, this has nothing to do with friction*.
*(There are alternative theories that posit a quantum medium which would cause these lorentz effects as a result of something very like friction. They may even be true, but it is still an entirely separate problem from the interstellar hydrogen friction. Other theories suggest that the property of mass could be modified, in which case you could become massless and be accelerated to exactly c in the process. Then subjective time would stop and you would have no chance of reclaiming your mass at your destination.)
First things first, the possibility of a pump and dump is definitely there. However...
http://www.permanent.com/p-sps.htm
Have a look at that and some of the links presented. The launch costs are relevant only to the equipment needed for further manufacturing. The rest of the material can be found in space for orders of magnitude less investment.
If solar wind turns out to be enough of a problem, then a minimal network of GEO relay satellites could receive high-intensity beams from non-GEO power satellites and relay as a low-intensity beam to the ground.
The current space economy does not justify a full-scale system at this time, but those who take the risk and start doing real in-orbit testing now will be positioned far better when launch costs drop. It is possible that within the next 10 years the capital and launch costs will have fallen enough to make the idea commercially viable on the large scale.
Something else to consider is that having a clean, reliable 24/7 power source available anywhere on earth makes some of those mass-driver or maglev launch concepts look a lot more viable politically and financially. All it takes is one launcher, and the capital cost for further space infrastructure investment drops staggeringly. The two concepts together have the potential for a strong feedback loop that drives launch costs well below anything we might think possible today. Or it might not. Can't tell until we try, really.
I'll comment under the assumption that you haven't thought this out to its many possible consequences. Maybe you could make a case for some intrinsic right of travel, but there are other natural rights (not to mention socially-accepted rights and responsibilities) that would supersede such a right.
Here is an extreme example: If Israel opened their borders, there wouldn't be an Israel, just a bunch of craters.
Here's another: If the US opened their borders (ports, specifically), you wouldn't be able to trust that the antibiotic you're taking isn't actually cyanide or an ineffective knockoff.
Here's another: If there was no barrier to trade in controlled arms and dual-use technology, North Korea and Iran (among others) would already have space-capable nuclear arsenals.
For that matter, take any horrible thing you can imagine, from lethally incorrect medication to radioactive waste to biological and chemical weapons to slaves and make those things available anywhere in the world. Better get out your Geiger counter and make sure your toothpaste wasn't made with reactor-coolant sodium.
There are a lot of things that we get wrong. The mere existence of famine, poverty, and widespread illness are testaments to our social failures. These things do not invalidate what we have gotten right. Some things should be controlled, some things should be validated, some things deserve a chain of responsibility and a means of seeing that responsibility culminate in rational consequences for those that abuse their fellow man.
The real problem is that there is no one solution. Every problem plaguing us today is a trade-off. Drugs are illegal in part because of the collateral damage, in part because some people are just too stupid/irresponsible to have them, in part because it offends some people's morality, and in part because it damages someone's bottom line. Guns, same thing. The 'war on' targets are all like this. Other problems such as poverty, famine, economic collapse; these are due to many factors. Adjust that 'one thing' that seems like it will make everything better and something else collapses, some other unforeseen consequence hits us. We could do nothing and see no improvement at all, but then what would be the point of trying? Besides, different cultures define moral in different ways. There is no one right way.
To bring this back to the original topic, no. We absolutely cannot throw the border open. We may not like our laws, but we are bound to respect them and it is not legal to enter this country without a visa or citizenship. We are not morally obligated to drive our own support systems past the point of collapse solely to appease the guilt-ridden people who feel bad about the terrible conditions across the border or anywhere else. To put it bluntly we're no help to anyone if we can't help ourselves, and we're not doing so hot right now. Maybe it sounds callous to you, but screw the people that drain our social support without giving anything back. If individuals want to donate their time, money, or expertise then so be it but we cannot allow a de facto aid package to be sucked out of our hospitals and food pantries and shelters.
For eve, assume that tank absorbs the healer role most of the time, as electronic warfare is far more significant than healing others. Ewar exists to negate damage, to negate speed advantages, to boost targeting speed, etc., which makes the bard/commander/buff+debuff class eve's de facto third member of the trinity.
Specialists don't succeed solo in eve (in combat). If you are all tank or all damage, you're all useless. A tank with no damage or ewar potential won't get attacked until everyone else is dead. An all-damage fit/skill will get primaried because they die the fastest and they are the biggest threat. All of this is irrelevant if your enemy is stupid of course, but let's concern ourselves with competent opponents here.
Success in pvp (and to some extent in pve) relies on doing enough damage to pose a credible threat while retaining enough tank to actualize that damage. Even in gangs or fleets, there may be a few specialists (tackle/ewar) but the generalists make it happen. Many successful gang arrangements have no specialization; the homogeneity of the group makes individual losses much less significant. Specialist groups can be more effective in the right circumstances (like gatecamping or frigate combat), but the range of situations encountered by a roving gang are hard to address with a group of specialists.
You may specialize in one weapon system, or one type of tank, or one flavor of ewar, but you cannot be called a competent combat pilot if you are missing one of the trinity. Even then, if your specialty is known it can be overcome. There is no invulnerable character, no perfect ship. Everything dies in the end; the more people you piss off the shorter the wait to go visit your cloning tank.
And that's why I play eve.
something else to consider...
The publishers are the ones who are selling books to those same distributors that pay for click-through sales. The publishers are already making their money (now). The problem for them is when cheap online printing services pair up with authors (content creators if you prefer) and with google to eliminate the traditional publishers, publicists, and distributors.
VegaStrike has indirect speed limits. Your shields can only handle a certain amount/speed of debris before it starts depleting. You can go as fast as you want, but if you go too far over your rated speed for too long, space junk blows you up.
(comment based on VS from some years ago, so may be different in more recent builds)
Admittedly, EVE doesn't explain why there should be speed limits. Other physics elements such as thrust, mass, and rotational velocity/acceleration are taken into account in fairly realistic ways. The main reason is that speed is a combat advantage and the designers carefully control it as they do all combat advantages.
Imparting a force upon existing photons and creating new photons are two different endeavors (from an engineering standpoint; a physicist could easily argue that they are the same). The end result might be the same (photons running screaming from the back of your thruster), but the energy input could be very different. Since it hasn't been built yet, we do not really know for sure.
The best case would be that the drive allows for conversion of energy into momentum with reasonable efficiency and at an acceptable specific impulse. Transmission of EM fields occurs at c, so the drive would maintain its efficiency up to very high velocities.
The worst case (aside from not working at all) is that it works just like a photon drive. If that is the case, it may be useless for propulsion while still having lots of interesting implications/applications.
Assuming the Isp is reasonable and the energy requirement isn't ridiculous, a straightforward RTG would power spacecraft for decades without refueling.
In rust we trust.
This is not a troll, it is an opinion.
I'm guessing you don't use outlook... ever...
Two seconds from 'send' to responding again would be a blessing. When it was first installed and I had no messages at all, it was perhaps slightly faster than that. Now, with 20-100 messages in inbox and everything else ruthlessly redirected to local storage files it can take 7-10 seconds to return responsiveness to the main window after sending. (this is a reasonably recent machine, dual-core processor, 2gb ram)
If I could use gmail at/for work, I would. I have a few thousand messages sitting there, but it loads in a fraction of the time that outlook does. Sending mail takes maybe a second or two until I can click 'compose' or click a message to read.
Personal experience and all that, but everyone I know who is stuck with outlook hates its bloated corpse.
Now, on to the relevant stuff:
This sounds more like something intended for netbooks (or similar)... Seriously, no hard disk? Think of a larger, much more capable version of a smartphone and the whole 'everything is web' approach makes sense. Just because it's all web all the time doesn't mean that you can't serve your own apps on 127.0.0.1. Local processing would still be possible (and necessary), it's just wrapped up in a nice little security sandbox. A side effect is that as long as it stays compatible with web standards, any application written for this OS will work in any standards-compliant browser. Should make porting kind of irrelevant (from Chromium to other OS).
(This post contains some generalizations; RF engineers are welcome to correct me on specifics.)
In order to put up a transmitter, the FCC requires full transmission surveys. These can be theoretical, but are typically produced by a specialist engineering company under contract using full topography data. The resulting map of signal levels would be available to any carrier, as it is a part of their application to construct the transmitter in the first place. Some types of transmitter (especially for AM/FM broadcast) also require some number of sample readings to confirm the accuracy of the original projection and avoid any interference with nearby transmitters. These composite maps (theory plus corroborating data points) would of course also be available to the carrier.
Verizon has this data, they simply choose not to advertise it.
It is nothing of the sort. It is a reasonable question, founded on perceptions common to many outside of the Christian faith. One answer is that since heaven is a place of eternal happiness, no discontent is possible. The only way for that to be possible is either to revoke free will or to remake people to be incapable of negative emotions and actions (which amounts to the same thing).