Seriously, if you have to make major alterations to your lifestyle in order to keep your wife/girfriend happy, then you chose the wrong wife/girlfriend.
Your signifigant other and you should share goals and lifestyles; you should click into each other's lives with little to no behavioural modification for either party.
Your primary disagreements should be about *timing*, not philosophy - ie, you both want to do X, and the only real question is "when?". If you want X and she wants Y... problem.
Note that I'm talking in broad strokes here. Both of you will have to modifiy little bits of your behaviour as "social grease" to help make it easier to get along. There is plenty of give and take in a good marriage. But the give and take should be over small stuff, not major life issues & choices.
I was one of those guys who tried to overhaul his personality to fit the needs and wants of the Girl of the Moment, and that only ever led to tears. Once I decided to be me, and to find a girl that fit me the way I was (and vice versa) I met my wife and I've been blissfully happy (on the marital front at least) ever since.
I think a lot of guys, particularly technical, goal-oriented guys, get focussed on "making the relationship work" and start making these big personal sacrifices to that end, thinking that it gets them points. It doesn't. If you have to make radical alterations to who you are in order to keep your girlfriend, then let her go and find one who likes you as you are.
This is kinda cool: define a function (or a variable, and who knows what else) and CNTL-n drops down a list of functions or variables or whatever that match the pattern to the left of the cursor.
So it you have some_ungodly_function_name, you can type "som(CNTL-n) and autocomplete the name.
Well, I've worked on some large-team, large-size perl projects, and the code that team generated was sheer beauty and just stupid easy to maintain.
All it takes is a little professionalism and self-discipline - and that is a function of personal leadership and team dynamics, not the language enforcing conventions.
I'd rather work on beautiful code, elegant code, than slog through what the language designer thought was "good coding practice" and made manditory in his B&D language.
Well-written perl - and no, that is not an oxymoron - I find is very much easier to read than many other programming languages, mostly because it is so easy to visually separate variables from other code. All that extra "line noise" stuff, when formatted correctly, provides extra contextual information that makes it very much easier to understand what the code _does_, rather than just what it _says_.
In the hands of a skilled coder, perl just rocks. I'd rather support good perl than any other language. The perl I've written for years now is optimised for LEGIBILITY and that stuff is just a dream to support.
To me, it seems tough to get that level of legibility out of a Bondage and Discipline language like Java. Yes, you curb a lot of the excesses of the inept, but at the cost of hobbling the expert. You can write Shakespere in perl, but not Java.
I golf a little bit - which is to say I play a golf-like game I call "whackfuck".
As in:
*WHACK*
"FUCK!!"
Anyway... I have a terrible, intermittant slice that I don't have the time to dedicate eliminating via practice, and which greatly limits how much I can enjoy the game. When your drives have a beaten zone that starts at about 5 degrees left of intended line and 70 degrees right... it's no fun to hit balls onto the adjacent fairway, or into the parking lot (although there is amusement to be had by banking a shot off the glacis of an oncoming golf cart)
I have been resistant to dumping lots of cash on golf toys. I'm not interested in being the guy with the shiniest clubs; I just want to be able to play a few times a year with my buddies and not make an ass of myself.
So I'm at the driving range, which is connected to a big pro shop. I've just hit half of a big bucket of balls, and they are all 180 yards out and 100 yards right of my stall. So just out of curiousity, I go into the pro shop and ask to try out a couple of different drivers, ranging in price from $50 to $800.
Most of them make no difference, but this one club, a $150 Ti offset driver, goes straight as an arrow and maybe 220 yards out. I hit maybe two dozen more balls with it, and I only sliced maybe 2 or 3 of them. The rest joined the first one at 220-ish right out front.
I bought it on the spot.
I'll still occasionally slice a screamer hard right, but now my beaten zone off the tee is 5 degrees left to the right side edge of the fairway. It makes the game a lot more enjoyable for everyone, and the risk of accidentally injuring somebody has dropped way, way down.
I call that a win, and money well spent - and I realize that that level of success is rare, so I'm not out spending more money in search of more technology to make the game even easier, nor am I under the illusion that if I buy the right geegaws I can take on Tiger Woods. But sometimes, there is value in better equipment.
This XMas, Niner Domestic and I treated ourselves to a Samsung DLP 50" 720p rear-projection TV.
This replaced the 27" JVC CRT we'd had for well on 13 years.
We have a JVC DVD player that will output 480p (aka "progressive scan") and we updated our digital cable box to the HD-capable + built in DVR box provided by the cable company (Cogeco) with an upgrade to HD service.
And for grins, I picked up a calibration DVD (Digital Video Essentials) to set the screen settings on the TV. I wasn't able to get them reference-perfect, but got pretty close.
The old CRT TV had a really good tube for its size, so the primary benefits would be the bigger screen size, the increased resolution on DVDs (480p vs 480i) and the occasional HD broadcast (720p vs 480i).
We're running component inputs switched through the sound system, but I hooked up the SVideo cables in parallel for debugging and comparison purposes.
My take on it is this:
1) DVDs are much nicer in 480p full widescreen than in 480i over SVideo. An SVideo signal blown up that big starts to show pixelization and other scaling artifacts. 480p adds enough extra information to eliminate most artifacts and lets you concentrate on the movie. Superbit transfers that increase picture bitrate at the expense of extra fluff are the best.
2) Standard TV depends a lot on the quality of the source material. Stuff filmed with a 480i NTSC camera is a little blocky, and sometimes (like on animated shows like the Simpsons) you can see visible ringing. It's not horrible, but it is there.
3) HD TV also depends a lot on the source material, and a LOT of "HD" is really upconverted NTSC stuff; most network TV in particular. Quality is a little bit better than standard TV (I assume the networks have better upconverters than I do) but you can still tell that you're looking at an upconverted NTSC signal. Sometimes, I'm pretty sure that "HD" movies, as shown on "Movie Network HD" are 480p DVD signals upconverted.
4) But real HD, shot with a real HD signal, is INCREDIBLE. Like, WOW, is that ever pretty. Amazingly, PBS-HD usually has the best/most real HD content, with the sports networks coming in second. Watching the Super Bowl in HD was just amazing, and to my mind, justified the purchase.
Summing up, on my system, I rate standard TV as "acceptable" (the increased picture size is slightly offset by reduced quality, with the size increase winning out by a noze) DVD is "good" to "very good" depending on the bitrate of the transfer (the big win is getting a good quality picture all the way out to the borders of the screen) and real HD signals are "outstanding".
Now, assume that somebody dropped a free HD-DVD player on me. Would I go out and re-purchase all my current flicks in HD?
I suspect not - there's a real step up in quality on a real HD signal when compared to a 480p signal; it's totally there. But that's not enough for me to go out and re-spend all that money. But I *would* get all my new purchases in HD, for sure.
How about early adopting? No bloody way - not until the industry sorts out which format is the standard, and until DRM is eliminated. The pain of choosing the wrong standard and having to deal with brain-dead DRM greatly exceeds the happiness of getting real HD content.
It's not 5.56mm. Misses would be akin to opening up with a C9 pointed in some random direction.
It's closer in operation to a short-range shotgun, or command-detonated reactive armour.
Note too that the blast effect is not what disrupts the HEAT jet in reactive armour. Instead, reactive armour uses the explosion of the propellant to force a series of steel plates laterally through the jet.
This system is a point defence system, similar in concept to the system deployed on the French LeClerc tank, and sort of a scaled-down, simplified version of a naval point defence like Phalanx.
But you aren't all that mistaken by comparing it to reactive armour, as the functionality of reactive armour is getting more complex all the time. A new-generation Russian reactive armour uses a sequence of outward-facing, linear shaped charges inside the reactive armour "brick", all tied together with a common detonator. If one of the charges is initiated by a long-rod penetrator or via a HEAT jet, all the charges initiate simultaniously, producing a series of "blades" that shoot out of the brick, and either section the rod/jet (as it very rarely hits dead-on) or cause it to yaw to the point where penetration is greatly reduced.
Or going in the other direction, there are new "bulging" armours that use metal plates separated by blocks of rubber. When a penetrator hits, the plates bulge, forcing the penetrator to continuously cut through the plates as they are forced into the side of the rod/jet. If you get lucky, the side force on the rod may become so great as to yaw or snap the penetrator.
Reactive armour doesn't really have any weaknesses. It's lighter per mm/RHA equivelent protection than a steel block, it can be serviced/replaced in the field, and if new technologies are invented, you just replace the bricks with the new stuff. Yes, if you take two hits to the same brick space, the protection is weaker on the second hit... but that's true of any armour.
Early reactive armour tended to be somewhat less than friendly to local infantry, but anything made in the last decade or so has largely solved that problem. If you are close enough to a hit to be damaged by the effects of a reactive armour initiation, the splash of the hit itself was likely to be injurous anyway.
The thing is... it's just not very funny. It's just some poor kid playing make-believe in front of a camera.
The editied version where some creative FX person has transformed his mike stand into a "real" lightsabre (complete with matching sound) is clever... but really, the clip just isn't funny; not even in a "football in the groin" sort of way.
So, is discovering that dear ol' Uncle DG had a 3-digit UID anything like finding a box of old IBM stock or something?
Do famous UID's appreciate?
Will CleverNickName's progeny inherit a ton of/. fans?
How manu UIDs have shuffled off this moral coil? Should there be a virtual graveyeard for the UIDs of the deceased?
Is there historical value to the early musings of UID so-and-so, who went on to become the first Supreme Hegemon of the Terran Aliance?
Will far-future biologists marvel at the distended rectums of the typical 21st century human?
Will far-future anthropologists wonder at the pantheon that included Commander Taco, CoyboyNeil, and Natalie Portman? Will they re-enact the sacred ritual of pouring hot grits into one's shorts?
I came into the show - in glorious HD, no less (PBS has great HD content!) - a little late, so I missed the Jessica Lynch reference.
But I do understand the desire to attempt to make resupply trucks autonomous. I'm not entirely sure it's really possible... but I do understand the desire.
Modern militaries consume enourmous amounts of supplies, and those supplies are big, bulky, and heavy - and more often than not, highly explosive.
The main gun round for an M1A1 tank is around 200mm in diameter, weighs ~23kg, and is almost a metre long. A single Abrams will carry 40 of them, so a complete battle reload for a troop of 4 tanks is 3680kg (not counting packing material and dunnage; add 15% more weight to account for that and you're up to ~4250kg. The Abrams also uses a combustable cartridge case in its main gun ammo (the round is not encased in brass, only the base plate is metal - the rest of the powder case is burned up when the ammo is fired) which reduces the weight per round, but makes the ammo *V*E*R*Y* flammable.
The tank also carries 500 gallons of fuel, which is good for about 150 miles of cruising/fighting, or about 8 hours of operation. (The Abrams has a turbine engine which is very fuel efficiant and light at full power, but also burns almost as much fuel at idle as it does at full throttle) A typical tanker truck carries about 4000 gallons, so a single tanker truck will get 4 tanks 300 miles, or 16 hours of operation.
Because this stuff is so bulky and heavy, the trucks that carry it are all about payload. There just isn't any room in the weight budget to provide any real armour. You can sometimes help protect the crew, but there's no way in hell you can armour the cargo - and the cargo is basically a big ol' bomb. Until such time as the fuel and ammo are transferred inside the tanks (where they are safe - well, safe-ish) the supply trucks are enormously vulnerable.
During the "Thunder Run" that seized Bagdad, the armoured column that grabbed and held the centre of the city came within a whisker of running out of fuel, and the resupply column that saved them took fire and lost a number of vehicles.
Autonomous supply trucks could have driven supplies forward without submitting the crews to the terror of a charge through enemy-occupied territory while riding a bomb. And unlike an autonomous weapon system, you aren't handing a human life over to a machine.
It's an interesting idea. I don't think it'll fly... but it is interesting.
I was in a similar boat, but with Trek instead of Wars. Bought and read every single paperback that came out, starting with Blish's novelizations of the TV eps, then moving to Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the animated series, then all the other paperbacks up to about #100 or so, when I finally gave up.
Some of these, especially later ones, sucked really REALLY hard. But there were some landmark books in this series with some solid writing and adult tones and themes.
FASA latched on to some of this material for their Trek-based role playing game, but Paramount explicitly ignored it when they did Next Gen... and it was around that time that the quality of the writing did an absolute nose-dive and they became downright juvenile.
Shortly thereafter, I "grew out" of Trek, and with a couple of exceptions (a few Next Gen eps, and most of DS9) the quality of the work being produced validated that decision.
Somewhere I've got a big box full of Trek paperbacks. I wonder what they'd fetch on EBay?
It spends most of the episode making fun of the origins of Mormonism, and then slaps you at the end with a "So what? If they're happy and not hurting anyone, what the hell does it matter what they believe?"
When one reads about modern chemical weapons, one is struck by the almost ridiculous levels of lethality of these agents. Nerve agents like Vx can kill after an exposure measured in miligrams, with volumes comparable in size to a pinhead.
Ever wonder why this stuff has to be so lethal?
It turns out that the biggest problem in chemical warfare is that of DISTRUBUTION. It is very, very difficult to deliver an agent over an area with sufficient concentration to ensure the desired effect. Modern agents are so lethal because it is so difficult to bring a target into contact with the agent AT ALL that it must be lethal no matter how small the exposure - or it just won't work very well. And even then, you're still talking about volumes in terms of tanker trucks, not soda cans.
Planning for chemical strikes during the Cold War involved massed regiments of artillery, and in some cases, special delivery aircraft that resembled crop dusters - and even then, the primary intent behind chemical warefare wasn't the first-order casulties, but rather second-order area denial, and incidental effects from forcing your enemy into his NBCW gear. (If you've never lived in a gas mask and bunny suit before, it's a terrible pain in the ass that greatly reduces combat effectiveness)
The only terrorist attack to make use of chemical weapons picked probably the best place in the world to try it - the Tokyo subway, where you have an enclosed space with a super-high population density. They released 1l or Sarin into this space (in trains!) and killed only 16 people, with most of the injured being from panic/trampling rather than poisoning from the agent.
They would have done much better with plain old ordinary explosives - compare to the death toll during the London subway bombings, which was a target with a much lower population density.
Unless you are capable of fielding a massive delivery system, there just isn't much "mass" destruction with chemical weapons. They are horribly inefficient, and really, not much of a threat at all in real terms. They're really more of a threat to those who would try and use them than the intended targets.
The presence of a gun instantly escalates any confrontation to a potential deadly force encounter. Carrying one turns you from a minor nuicence into a deadly threat, and you can expect to be treated accordingly.
If you and I are involved in some sort of altercation, and I discover that you are carrying a gun (even if you have not threatened me with it or brandished it in any way) I am going to take steps to see you disarmed *at a minimum* because that gun can kill me (or a bystander) stone dead, and I have no way of knowing if you'll retreat out of physical range and then shoot me. A gun's very presence means my life is in danger and I have to take action *NOW*, before the gun is brought in play - because once it is, I lose.
Carrying a gun is to invite people to use deadly force against you, because you are quite clearly able and willing to use deadly force against them. It is NOT a deterrent.
When I think of "software as a service" I don't think of centrally-administered, service-providing software-based services like the Blackberry.
Instead, I think of the millions of software developers who write code designed to provide services to some sort of business entity, without trying to sell the software per sae.
As this software is never exposed (being that it is never sold as product) it is immune from patent protection. If you have invented and patented some widget, and I build a similar widget for my own use (but never sell it) then I am not infringing your patent.
"Software as a service" refers to the concept that a coder is esentially a mechanic, not a producer of a physical good that can be bought and sold - much the same way that a musician *should* be a performer who is paid for performances, not the producer of a physical good.
One of the major discoveries of last century was just how pervasive and powerful psychic trauma is to people, especially soldiers, police officers, and emergency rescue personel.
It is way, way, WAY more common than was ever suspected, has NOTHING to do with one's strength of character or moral fibre, and can be crippling in ways that physical injury can never be.
There is NO choice in who will wind up with PTSD, and little to no way to predict when a particular individual will come down with it, or how strongly. It is insidious, often nearly invisible, and powerful.
I have seen many friends struggle with the effects of PTSD, and it is not at all a laughing matter.
Happily, there are techinques to help people deal with it, and to lessen the impact it has on their lives. Two books I highly recommend are On Killing and On Combat, by Lt Col Dave Grossman. These books are, to the best of my understanding, the first books to really deal with the psychic cost of killing, and how to minimize it if you are forced to deal in violence.
They aren't perfect - Col Grossman makes much of the desensitizing nature of certain video games (which I think is overblown) and parts of On Combat start to read like advertisements for his consulting agency, but these are required reading for anybody in the military or law enforcement trades - or for anybody who thinks that PTSD victims in any way choose their fate.
Actually, as a real race car driver, I've used GT4 (and many other driving programs) to help practice for racing. Running a real racecar is very expensive in terms of $ per min of seat time, where a Playstation is pretty cheap.
Part of it is that I have the controls set up to replicate the race car as much as possible - that means a wheel and pedals, similar seating position, etc.
Playstation practice is really good training, especially the license tests. If you can get Gold on everything, you're doing well.
But like the show pointed out (Top Gear rocks BTW) the Playstation doesn't tell the whole story. It is very good for teaching line, hand/eye co-ordination, and agression. It does less well for teaching the sensation of keeping a car balanced right on the limit. With modern race tires, it's not unusual to pull 1.7G transients on concrete without aero. There's just no way for a game console to replicate that. The consoles also have trouble conveying elevation change and road camber (probably because you feel that more than you see it) The Nurburgring in person is *far* more intimidating than in GT4.
But if you understand the limitations, it makes a good training tool.
As far as ABS goes, my racecar has ABS, but its primary purpose is to keep the tires round. In testing, we found that driver modulation beat the ABS in terms of stopping distances (race tires and dry pavement) On wet pavement, same deal, but it was much harder for the driver to walk the line between "I've got it" and "it's got me". Part of the problem is the difficulty in an enclosed car of telling when the wheels are locked. With the ABS on, you could transgress the braking limit and the tires would stay round and the car would still stop.
For me, ABS has been an ass saver, but not a performance increasing device per sae (ie, I don't just mash the brakes and let the ABS do all the work - that's slow)
If *we* wanted to make music, we had to write PL/1 code that would overdrive the IBM 026 card punch while hand-feeding it rolls of paper towel (the old bleached white thick stuff too, none of this modern namby-pamby recycled "natural finish" crap neither) to generate Duo-Art player piano reels!
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Seriously, if you have to make major alterations to your lifestyle in order to keep your wife/girfriend happy, then you chose the wrong wife/girlfriend.
Your signifigant other and you should share goals and lifestyles; you should click into each other's lives with little to no behavioural modification for either party.
Your primary disagreements should be about *timing*, not philosophy - ie, you both want to do X, and the only real question is "when?". If you want X and she wants Y... problem.
Note that I'm talking in broad strokes here. Both of you will have to modifiy little bits of your behaviour as "social grease" to help make it easier to get along. There is plenty of give and take in a good marriage. But the give and take should be over small stuff, not major life issues & choices.
I was one of those guys who tried to overhaul his personality to fit the needs and wants of the Girl of the Moment, and that only ever led to tears. Once I decided to be me, and to find a girl that fit me the way I was (and vice versa) I met my wife and I've been blissfully happy (on the marital front at least) ever since.
I think a lot of guys, particularly technical, goal-oriented guys, get focussed on "making the relationship work" and start making these big personal sacrifices to that end, thinking that it gets them points. It doesn't. If you have to make radical alterations to who you are in order to keep your girlfriend, then let her go and find one who likes you as you are.
DG
I managed to find out some of this myself.
This is kinda cool: define a function (or a variable, and who knows what else) and CNTL-n drops down a list of functions or variables or whatever that match the pattern to the left of the cursor.
So it you have some_ungodly_function_name, you can type "som(CNTL-n) and autocomplete the name.
Very nifty!
DG
But seriously, how does this work?
DG
Well, I've worked on some large-team, large-size perl projects, and the code that team generated was sheer beauty and just stupid easy to maintain.
All it takes is a little professionalism and self-discipline - and that is a function of personal leadership and team dynamics, not the language enforcing conventions.
I'd rather work on beautiful code, elegant code, than slog through what the language designer thought was "good coding practice" and made manditory in his B&D language.
DG
Well-written perl - and no, that is not an oxymoron - I find is very much easier to read than many other programming languages, mostly because it is so easy to visually separate variables from other code. All that extra "line noise" stuff, when formatted correctly, provides extra contextual information that makes it very much easier to understand what the code _does_, rather than just what it _says_.
In the hands of a skilled coder, perl just rocks. I'd rather support good perl than any other language. The perl I've written for years now is optimised for LEGIBILITY and that stuff is just a dream to support.
To me, it seems tough to get that level of legibility out of a Bondage and Discipline language like Java. Yes, you curb a lot of the excesses of the inept, but at the cost of hobbling the expert. You can write Shakespere in perl, but not Java.
DG
While there are plenty of critics out there who are a waste of print, Roger Ebert isn't one of them.
He is a serious student of film, he has seen almost everything ever made, and his opinions are well informed with details to back them up.
And yet, he's no stuffy academic either - he can enjoy a guilty pleasure as much as anybody.
Very, very rarely do I wind up disagreeing with him, and even when I do, I can usually see his point.
The man is a rarity: a great critic.
DG
I golf a little bit - which is to say I play a golf-like game I call "whackfuck".
As in:
*WHACK*
"FUCK!!"
Anyway... I have a terrible, intermittant slice that I don't have the time to dedicate eliminating via practice, and which greatly limits how much I can enjoy the game. When your drives have a beaten zone that starts at about 5 degrees left of intended line and 70 degrees right... it's no fun to hit balls onto the adjacent fairway, or into the parking lot (although there is amusement to be had by banking a shot off the glacis of an oncoming golf cart)
I have been resistant to dumping lots of cash on golf toys. I'm not interested in being the guy with the shiniest clubs; I just want to be able to play a few times a year with my buddies and not make an ass of myself.
So I'm at the driving range, which is connected to a big pro shop. I've just hit half of a big bucket of balls, and they are all 180 yards out and 100 yards right of my stall. So just out of curiousity, I go into the pro shop and ask to try out a couple of different drivers, ranging in price from $50 to $800.
Most of them make no difference, but this one club, a $150 Ti offset driver, goes straight as an arrow and maybe 220 yards out. I hit maybe two dozen more balls with it, and I only sliced maybe 2 or 3 of them. The rest joined the first one at 220-ish right out front.
I bought it on the spot.
I'll still occasionally slice a screamer hard right, but now my beaten zone off the tee is 5 degrees left to the right side edge of the fairway. It makes the game a lot more enjoyable for everyone, and the risk of accidentally injuring somebody has dropped way, way down.
I call that a win, and money well spent - and I realize that that level of success is rare, so I'm not out spending more money in search of more technology to make the game even easier, nor am I under the illusion that if I buy the right geegaws I can take on Tiger Woods. But sometimes, there is value in better equipment.
DG
Has anybody told Jon Katz about this?
Perhaps he could post a scathing investigate report on this....
DG
This XMas, Niner Domestic and I treated ourselves to a Samsung DLP 50" 720p rear-projection TV.
This replaced the 27" JVC CRT we'd had for well on 13 years.
We have a JVC DVD player that will output 480p (aka "progressive scan") and we updated our digital cable box to the HD-capable + built in DVR box provided by the cable company (Cogeco) with an upgrade to HD service.
And for grins, I picked up a calibration DVD (Digital Video Essentials) to set the screen settings on the TV. I wasn't able to get them reference-perfect, but got pretty close.
The old CRT TV had a really good tube for its size, so the primary benefits would be the bigger screen size, the increased resolution on DVDs (480p vs 480i) and the occasional HD broadcast (720p vs 480i).
We're running component inputs switched through the sound system, but I hooked up the SVideo cables in parallel for debugging and comparison purposes.
My take on it is this:
1) DVDs are much nicer in 480p full widescreen than in 480i over SVideo. An SVideo signal blown up that big starts to show pixelization and other scaling artifacts. 480p adds enough extra information to eliminate most artifacts and lets you concentrate on the movie. Superbit transfers that increase picture bitrate at the expense of extra fluff are the best.
2) Standard TV depends a lot on the quality of the source material. Stuff filmed with a 480i NTSC camera is a little blocky, and sometimes (like on animated shows like the Simpsons) you can see visible ringing. It's not horrible, but it is there.
3) HD TV also depends a lot on the source material, and a LOT of "HD" is really upconverted NTSC stuff; most network TV in particular. Quality is a little bit better than standard TV (I assume the networks have better upconverters than I do) but you can still tell that you're looking at an upconverted NTSC signal. Sometimes, I'm pretty sure that "HD" movies, as shown on "Movie Network HD" are 480p DVD signals upconverted.
4) But real HD, shot with a real HD signal, is INCREDIBLE. Like, WOW, is that ever pretty. Amazingly, PBS-HD usually has the best/most real HD content, with the sports networks coming in second. Watching the Super Bowl in HD was just amazing, and to my mind, justified the purchase.
Summing up, on my system, I rate standard TV as "acceptable" (the increased picture size is slightly offset by reduced quality, with the size increase winning out by a noze) DVD is "good" to "very good" depending on the bitrate of the transfer (the big win is getting a good quality picture all the way out to the borders of the screen) and real HD signals are "outstanding".
Now, assume that somebody dropped a free HD-DVD player on me. Would I go out and re-purchase all my current flicks in HD?
I suspect not - there's a real step up in quality on a real HD signal when compared to a 480p signal; it's totally there. But that's not enough for me to go out and re-spend all that money. But I *would* get all my new purchases in HD, for sure.
How about early adopting? No bloody way - not until the industry sorts out which format is the standard, and until DRM is eliminated. The pain of choosing the wrong standard and having to deal with brain-dead DRM greatly exceeds the happiness of getting real HD content.
DG
As I mentioned, this "weakness" has been largely solved with modern systems of reactive armour.
And.. uhhh.... these point-defence systems work by blowing fragments towards incoming missiles. That's the same problem....
DG
It's not 5.56mm. Misses would be akin to opening up with a C9 pointed in some random direction.
It's closer in operation to a short-range shotgun, or command-detonated reactive armour.
Note too that the blast effect is not what disrupts the HEAT jet in reactive armour. Instead, reactive armour uses the explosion of the propellant to force a series of steel plates laterally through the jet.
DG
This system is a point defence system, similar in concept to the system deployed on the French LeClerc tank, and sort of a scaled-down, simplified version of a naval point defence like Phalanx.
But you aren't all that mistaken by comparing it to reactive armour, as the functionality of reactive armour is getting more complex all the time. A new-generation Russian reactive armour uses a sequence of outward-facing, linear shaped charges inside the reactive armour "brick", all tied together with a common detonator. If one of the charges is initiated by a long-rod penetrator or via a HEAT jet, all the charges initiate simultaniously, producing a series of "blades" that shoot out of the brick, and either section the rod/jet (as it very rarely hits dead-on) or cause it to yaw to the point where penetration is greatly reduced.
Or going in the other direction, there are new "bulging" armours that use metal plates separated by blocks of rubber. When a penetrator hits, the plates bulge, forcing the penetrator to continuously cut through the plates as they are forced into the side of the rod/jet. If you get lucky, the side force on the rod may become so great as to yaw or snap the penetrator.
Reactive armour doesn't really have any weaknesses. It's lighter per mm/RHA equivelent protection than a steel block, it can be serviced/replaced in the field, and if new technologies are invented, you just replace the bricks with the new stuff. Yes, if you take two hits to the same brick space, the protection is weaker on the second hit... but that's true of any armour.
Early reactive armour tended to be somewhat less than friendly to local infantry, but anything made in the last decade or so has largely solved that problem. If you are close enough to a hit to be damaged by the effects of a reactive armour initiation, the splash of the hit itself was likely to be injurous anyway.
DG
The thing is... it's just not very funny. It's just some poor kid playing make-believe in front of a camera.
The editied version where some creative FX person has transformed his mike stand into a "real" lightsabre (complete with matching sound) is clever... but really, the clip just isn't funny; not even in a "football in the groin" sort of way.
Awkward and painful? Yes. Funny? No.
DG
So, is discovering that dear ol' Uncle DG had a 3-digit UID anything like finding a box of old IBM stock or something?
/. fans?
Do famous UID's appreciate?
Will CleverNickName's progeny inherit a ton of
How manu UIDs have shuffled off this moral coil? Should there be a virtual graveyeard for the UIDs of the deceased?
Is there historical value to the early musings of UID so-and-so, who went on to become the first Supreme Hegemon of the Terran Aliance?
Will far-future biologists marvel at the distended rectums of the typical 21st century human?
Will far-future anthropologists wonder at the pantheon that included Commander Taco, CoyboyNeil, and Natalie Portman? Will they re-enact the sacred ritual of pouring hot grits into one's shorts?
The mind boggles; truly.
DG
I came into the show - in glorious HD, no less (PBS has great HD content!) - a little late, so I missed the Jessica Lynch reference.
But I do understand the desire to attempt to make resupply trucks autonomous. I'm not entirely sure it's really possible... but I do understand the desire.
Modern militaries consume enourmous amounts of supplies, and those supplies are big, bulky, and heavy - and more often than not, highly explosive.
The main gun round for an M1A1 tank is around 200mm in diameter, weighs ~23kg, and is almost a metre long. A single Abrams will carry 40 of them, so a complete battle reload for a troop of 4 tanks is 3680kg (not counting packing material and dunnage; add 15% more weight to account for that and you're up to ~4250kg. The Abrams also uses a combustable cartridge case in its main gun ammo (the round is not encased in brass, only the base plate is metal - the rest of the powder case is burned up when the ammo is fired) which reduces the weight per round, but makes the ammo *V*E*R*Y* flammable.
The tank also carries 500 gallons of fuel, which is good for about 150 miles of cruising/fighting, or about 8 hours of operation. (The Abrams has a turbine engine which is very fuel efficiant and light at full power, but also burns almost as much fuel at idle as it does at full throttle) A typical tanker truck carries about 4000 gallons, so a single tanker truck will get 4 tanks 300 miles, or 16 hours of operation.
Because this stuff is so bulky and heavy, the trucks that carry it are all about payload. There just isn't any room in the weight budget to provide any real armour. You can sometimes help protect the crew, but there's no way in hell you can armour the cargo - and the cargo is basically a big ol' bomb. Until such time as the fuel and ammo are transferred inside the tanks (where they are safe - well, safe-ish) the supply trucks are enormously vulnerable.
During the "Thunder Run" that seized Bagdad, the armoured column that grabbed and held the centre of the city came within a whisker of running out of fuel, and the resupply column that saved them took fire and lost a number of vehicles.
Autonomous supply trucks could have driven supplies forward without submitting the crews to the terror of a charge through enemy-occupied territory while riding a bomb. And unlike an autonomous weapon system, you aren't handing a human life over to a machine.
It's an interesting idea. I don't think it'll fly... but it is interesting.
DG
Nope, I've still got them.
For what that's worth.
DG
I was in a similar boat, but with Trek instead of Wars. Bought and read every single paperback that came out, starting with Blish's novelizations of the TV eps, then moving to Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the animated series, then all the other paperbacks up to about #100 or so, when I finally gave up.
Some of these, especially later ones, sucked really REALLY hard. But there were some landmark books in this series with some solid writing and adult tones and themes.
FASA latched on to some of this material for their Trek-based role playing game, but Paramount explicitly ignored it when they did Next Gen... and it was around that time that the quality of the writing did an absolute nose-dive and they became downright juvenile.
Shortly thereafter, I "grew out" of Trek, and with a couple of exceptions (a few Next Gen eps, and most of DS9) the quality of the work being produced validated that decision.
Somewhere I've got a big box full of Trek paperbacks. I wonder what they'd fetch on EBay?
DG
That's one of my favourite South Park episodes.
It spends most of the episode making fun of the origins of Mormonism, and then slaps you at the end with a "So what? If they're happy and not hurting anyone, what the hell does it matter what they believe?"
Which is exactly the point, isn't it?
DG
Hey, allright! A quote from an often overlooked and underrated 80's spy thriller, starring Clint Eastwood.
Well done!
DG
When one reads about modern chemical weapons, one is struck by the almost ridiculous levels of lethality of these agents. Nerve agents like Vx can kill after an exposure measured in miligrams, with volumes comparable in size to a pinhead.
Ever wonder why this stuff has to be so lethal?
It turns out that the biggest problem in chemical warfare is that of DISTRUBUTION. It is very, very difficult to deliver an agent over an area with sufficient concentration to ensure the desired effect. Modern agents are so lethal because it is so difficult to bring a target into contact with the agent AT ALL that it must be lethal no matter how small the exposure - or it just won't work very well. And even then, you're still talking about volumes in terms of tanker trucks, not soda cans.
Planning for chemical strikes during the Cold War involved massed regiments of artillery, and in some cases, special delivery aircraft that resembled crop dusters - and even then, the primary intent behind chemical warefare wasn't the first-order casulties, but rather second-order area denial, and incidental effects from forcing your enemy into his NBCW gear. (If you've never lived in a gas mask and bunny suit before, it's a terrible pain in the ass that greatly reduces combat effectiveness)
The only terrorist attack to make use of chemical weapons picked probably the best place in the world to try it - the Tokyo subway, where you have an enclosed space with a super-high population density. They released 1l or Sarin into this space (in trains!) and killed only 16 people, with most of the injured being from panic/trampling rather than poisoning from the agent.
They would have done much better with plain old ordinary explosives - compare to the death toll during the London subway bombings, which was a target with a much lower population density.
Unless you are capable of fielding a massive delivery system, there just isn't much "mass" destruction with chemical weapons. They are horribly inefficient, and really, not much of a threat at all in real terms. They're really more of a threat to those who would try and use them than the intended targets.
DG
The presence of a gun instantly escalates any confrontation to a potential deadly force encounter. Carrying one turns you from a minor nuicence into a deadly threat, and you can expect to be treated accordingly.
If you and I are involved in some sort of altercation, and I discover that you are carrying a gun (even if you have not threatened me with it or brandished it in any way) I am going to take steps to see you disarmed *at a minimum* because that gun can kill me (or a bystander) stone dead, and I have no way of knowing if you'll retreat out of physical range and then shoot me. A gun's very presence means my life is in danger and I have to take action *NOW*, before the gun is brought in play - because once it is, I lose.
Carrying a gun is to invite people to use deadly force against you, because you are quite clearly able and willing to use deadly force against them. It is NOT a deterrent.
DG
When I think of "software as a service" I don't think of centrally-administered, service-providing software-based services like the Blackberry.
Instead, I think of the millions of software developers who write code designed to provide services to some sort of business entity, without trying to sell the software per sae.
As this software is never exposed (being that it is never sold as product) it is immune from patent protection. If you have invented and patented some widget, and I build a similar widget for my own use (but never sell it) then I am not infringing your patent.
"Software as a service" refers to the concept that a coder is esentially a mechanic, not a producer of a physical good that can be bought and sold - much the same way that a musician *should* be a performer who is paid for performances, not the producer of a physical good.
DG
One of the major discoveries of last century was just how pervasive and powerful psychic trauma is to people, especially soldiers, police officers, and emergency rescue personel.
It is way, way, WAY more common than was ever suspected, has NOTHING to do with one's strength of character or moral fibre, and can be crippling in ways that physical injury can never be.
There is NO choice in who will wind up with PTSD, and little to no way to predict when a particular individual will come down with it, or how strongly. It is insidious, often nearly invisible, and powerful.
I have seen many friends struggle with the effects of PTSD, and it is not at all a laughing matter.
Happily, there are techinques to help people deal with it, and to lessen the impact it has on their lives. Two books I highly recommend are On Killing and On Combat, by Lt Col Dave Grossman. These books are, to the best of my understanding, the first books to really deal with the psychic cost of killing, and how to minimize it if you are forced to deal in violence.
They aren't perfect - Col Grossman makes much of the desensitizing nature of certain video games (which I think is overblown) and parts of On Combat start to read like advertisements for his consulting agency, but these are required reading for anybody in the military or law enforcement trades - or for anybody who thinks that PTSD victims in any way choose their fate.
DG
Actually, as a real race car driver, I've used GT4 (and many other driving programs) to help practice for racing. Running a real racecar is very expensive in terms of $ per min of seat time, where a Playstation is pretty cheap.
Part of it is that I have the controls set up to replicate the race car as much as possible - that means a wheel and pedals, similar seating position, etc.
Playstation practice is really good training, especially the license tests. If you can get Gold on everything, you're doing well.
But like the show pointed out (Top Gear rocks BTW) the Playstation doesn't tell the whole story. It is very good for teaching line, hand/eye co-ordination, and agression. It does less well for teaching the sensation of keeping a car balanced right on the limit. With modern race tires, it's not unusual to pull 1.7G transients on concrete without aero. There's just no way for a game console to replicate that. The consoles also have trouble conveying elevation change and road camber (probably because you feel that more than you see it) The Nurburgring in person is *far* more intimidating than in GT4.
But if you understand the limitations, it makes a good training tool.
As far as ABS goes, my racecar has ABS, but its primary purpose is to keep the tires round. In testing, we found that driver modulation beat the ABS in terms of stopping distances (race tires and dry pavement) On wet pavement, same deal, but it was much harder for the driver to walk the line between "I've got it" and "it's got me". Part of the problem is the difficulty in an enclosed car of telling when the wheels are locked. With the ABS on, you could transgress the braking limit and the tires would stay round and the car would still stop.
For me, ABS has been an ass saver, but not a performance increasing device per sae (ie, I don't just mash the brakes and let the ABS do all the work - that's slow)
DG
You had a tape drive?
*Luxury*
If *we* wanted to make music, we had to write PL/1 code that would overdrive the IBM 026 card punch while hand-feeding it rolls of paper towel (the old bleached white thick stuff too, none of this modern namby-pamby recycled "natural finish" crap neither) to generate Duo-Art player piano reels!
We used to *dream* of having tape drives!
DG