Why am I all in "defend LP mode" today? Maybe it's because lame arguments annoy me. Or maybe I'm just a lame fanboi/sycophant myself. :-)
Anyway, I didn't read the article as suggesting that you Limeys sink all your non-carrier assets, just that without a carrier to defend, frigates and destroyers have only limited utility.
That's naive. All this means is that you won't be sued by the people who released the specification. Given the insanity of the current worldwide patent systems, you're still vulnerable to some patent troll who might claim that the spec originator (un)wittingly infringed the troll's patent, and who will then sue you, too!
I think you're confusing *design* age with *aircraft* age. The design of the Blackhawk may be old, but the examples the army would be buying would be new-build. Whereas the Pumas, apparently, really are 30yo flying accidents-waiting-to-happen.
Odd, it seems straightforward to me, but this is the second time I've seen someone make this same error. Perhaps Lewis can word things a bit more clearly in future?
The problem here is that there ARE no existing laws. They tried everything to convict Lori Drew and all they came up with was a a shockingly lame "breaking the terms of service of Facebook" pseudo-offense.
If there had been existing laws that could have been applied, Drew would already be turning big rocks into little rocks.
I just noticed: Chris W already said the same thing, but it seems some people didn't notice that.
"What's the saying.... ahh, yes.... "F_ck you if you can't take a joke!" - says the anonymous man. Irony much?
The moon and the Earth were seperated at birth. Things we learn about the Moon's geology mmight give us clues to unlock some of the secrets of Earth's geology. And maybe not. And the only way we'll know is to go there and try! That's what exploration and research are all about: Finding stuff you never knew existed.
Also, please remember that, despite the eye-wateringly high price-tags on NASA missions, the _entire_ NASA budget, including Earth observation missions, terrestrial aeronautical research, and unmanned missions, is still only about 1% of the US Federal budget.
When politicians slash NASA budgets they're really just grand-standing for the public. The actual influence on the budget is negligible.
"Something "Alien" managed to hit the martian surface without leaving a great big bloody hole?"
Actually, small meteorites don't make holes on earth. If they're small enough they get slowed down to mere "terminal velocity" before they hit the ground.
Of course, that's on Earth. The definition for "small enough" is much, err, smaller on Mars, given that the tenuous atmosphere would slow down an incoming meteor much, much less. So you may still have a point.
Anybody else got any ideas how this rock could have got there without making a mess of the surrounding surface?
So you figure a fit human is less attractive to EATR than a mouse-potato like myself? That's not good!
But it is like a shark: Apparently sharks only eat humies by mistake, as we taste absolutely horrible: Stringy and sinewy compared to the blubber-insulated seals and fish they prefer. Not enough energy in a human to balance the energy used in catching the things!
I agree, this is a statement of the bloody obvious. We all know that people not in agreement with us are blindly rejecting our superior position, or avoiding us entirely.
Whereas we ourselves are perfectly open-minded, and only reached our current positions after carefully viewing /all/ sides of the debate, and picking the correct one.
This guy is an unrepentant and obsessive criminal. His stunts weren't just 'bad', they were life-threatening. And interfering with witnesses is rightfully treated very seriously by the courts.
Plus he's too damned stupid to realise that when you're already in a hole, you need to stop digging!
"lady got so pissed screaming it had taken 2 months to organise the rape scene"
My heart bleeds for her. Not!
There are serious and obvious risks involved in realistically enacting a violation of the law. It is the duty of the police and the public to react to any perceived crime. Anyone with an IQ in double-digits or more could have foreseen this.
This dim-wit will probably end up "simulating" some other outré and dangerous act soon, again without properly assessing and preparing for any dangerous consequences thereof, and get herself a Darwin Award in the process.
My initial reaction to stories like this is to wish all sorts of horrid retribution on the perpetrator, to make him suffer as much as the victim did. But then I take a breath and remember that what holds society together is justice, not vengeance. This man shouldn't (and won't) be tortured, he should simply be removed from society like a cancer-cell is removed from the body, for the greater good.
Dump him in solitary for the rest of his life so that he can't hurt anyone again.
What, you say that living in solitary confinement for years or even decades is itself torture? Nonsense, no-one laid a hand on him! <evil, self-satisfied grin>
Since the wireless signal probably has to travel no more than a centimeter or two, and can probably be isolated from interference by a layer of tin-foil inside the gun, I doubt that jamming or spoofing will be much of a problem.
I'm sure the designers have come up with other safeguards, too. They've had enough time and been paid enough money to do so! Just how long has this development program been dragging on?
Hey! That was really funny - A most excellent imitation of your typical brainless, racist, scum-sucking, Bush-voting redneck. You got all the nuances just right. :-)
Oh! I just had a horrible thought...
Dear God! Please tell me you weren't actually SERIOUS!
I am intrigued by the oft-proposed (at least here in The Register Comments) explanation for your govt's actions: That it is not (just) prudery, populism and the usual moralistic grand-standing which lies at the heart of the problem of (especially) sex- and drug-related mal-administration of the law.
It is also the fear in national politicians' hearts that their usefulness has been supplanted by the European Union's over-arching legislation. That since broad policy is set in Brussels, not London, people might question either (a) how democratic this "government once-removed" is, or (b) if all the work is being done in Brussels, just why so many politicians are needed in Blighty. Thus, an endless stream of pseudo-populist legislation is produced, just to show that "local" (i.e. national rather than inter-national) government still has a purpose (and that its members deserve their high salaries.)
I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion. I don't even live on the same continent, so I don't have first-hand knowledge of the problem. And my second-hand opinions are derived from the scribblings of a skewed, self-selected sample of people (a small proportion of The Register commentors, which is in turn a small proportion of The Register readers, who are in turn only a small proportion of the British electorate.)
In fact, I can't even state categorically that there is a "problem" in the first place.
So I guess I in fact know enough to produce legislation on the subject, no? :-^
Thanks! You've actually answered my question nicely, by telling me the good things, the bad things that are not really so bad after all, and one more bad thing. Useful info I shall now mull over before my next upgrade.
@Jerry Masterson
You, sir, are a fanboi.
You contributed very little more than a lot of hot air to this discussion. You insulted me and called me ignorant, but you did nothing to relieve that ignorance - You didn't tell me what any of the good points are! You reacted as if I had insulted you, personally. It's just a sodding chunk of plastic silicon, not your penis! Who's the 12yo in this discussion?
I've been ignoring the iPhone for so long now I'd forgotten all its glaring omissions. No cut-and-paste, no tethering, no MMS, one app open at a time. That's just primitive! BTW, how's the Bluetooth stack looking these days? The last I heard it stank, but that was a while ago.
So can anybody tell me just why people like it so much? Is it the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field?
Having gotten used to all these features on *much* cheaper mid-range phones, it would irritate the blazes out of me to suddenly have them taken away. That's why even a free-with-contract offer didn't tempt me - I'd rather pay more for a supposedly inferior phone, such as the N85.
And I know it's probably childish, but I just don't like the way I can only do what Steve and his marketroids tell me I can do. What features I "don't need". What network I can use. What apps I can use, and where I can buy them. Making me pay twice for the same song if I want to use it as a ring-tone, or, potentially, make me pay extra to send bytes to my laptop.
In his essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson described the Apple corporate culture as one with a slick image of openness, non-conformity, and general "coolness". But behind this entirely artificial facade, it's really being run by sinister control-freaks. Probably a bit harsh, but more than just a grain of truth in it.
@Who gave these morons the power to confiscate property?
AC: "It's only a matter of time till some security moron tries to confiscate a really valuable brooch (say ten times the security moron's annual salary) because it has a "dangerous" pin."
Already happened. Except it wasn't worth 10x the id10t's annual gross - It was literally priceless:
You Godwinned yourself. Also, I see a lot of assertions. Could I actually see some arguments, please?
Too many people on the innertubes seem to be unable to distinguish the two. They think that simply *saying* that the Liberals/Conservatives/Christianists eat babies is enough. Challenge them to present evidence and argue a conclusion from that evidence, and all they do is assert the same bullshit all over again, as if that settles it.
I'd weep for the death of reason and logic, if I believed the the unwashed masses had ever had any. The intertoobs just highlighted this lack, it didn't create it. (This paragraph is unsupported assertion, not argument. But at least I admit it!)
Does this 1/4-wit have even the faintest idea how many schools, churches, government buildings and other "terrorist targets" there are in the world? Or even in his own State? Does he have any idea how much manual labour it will take to locate and blur out every single one of them? Or that this effort would be so outrageously expensive that not even Mountain View would be able to afford it, let alone find it profitable?
He may as well ask all these services to simply shut down completely.
Actually, he's not mathematically impaired. He's not even arithmetically impaired. He can't even count: He's innumerate!
Anyway, as we all know, "everything changed after 9/11":
Firstly, terrorists, bombs and even airplanes didn't even exist till 9/11.
Secondly, after 9/11 a new zeroeth Amendment magically came into being:
"The President shall do whatever the fcuk he wants, if he can somehow relate it to terrorism. This Amendment supercedes all other Amendments within the Bill of Rights".
Isn't there one of those geek "rules" that says something like "Reality will always be wierder than the most outrageous joke or satire"? We have here some more evidence supporting that statement. :-)
@robbie: I guess 200m is the best they can aspire to at present, rather than the most they think they'll ever need. Come any further advances in tech, and they'll gleefully extend the range to hit targets ever further inland. Anyway, we already have a large proportion of the human population within 200m of the sea. Russia, China and Iran may be out of range, but there are lots of smaller countries they can terrorise with such a weapon. And the Marines will love it - Having heavy arty support you as you land has got to have advantages over just having Harriers.
@Greg Trocchia: What I read years ago suggested that "Mach 5+" at launch is in fact Mach 7. If that is still correct, the shell only loses 2/7 of its velocity before hitting the target - A smaller fraction than I would have thought, but I guess travelling 200m at hypersonic speeds happens too quickly to matter much to the shell.
...they want a decent AI. They've just come up with a few new, insightful criteria. But it's still the same AI that scientists have been failing to produce for half-a-century or more.
What difference does it make that DARPA tells the world that they want this? It's been a bloody obvious goal for a very long time now. People will be working on this whether or not they they have official knowledge that DARPA will want it. They've known that implicitly for decades!
It's not like DARPA have created some new Grand Challenge with a clear, unambiguous, challenging yet realistic goals. It's not like they're putting any money on the table at all.
Unless I'm just not getting it, this seems like nothing more than an excuse to show some more Powerpoint slides.
Actually, they really are intending to do that. You must be psychic!
They're only firing inert rounds for now, while they're trying to get the basic gun to work. But other people are working on how the hell to make a GPS guidance system that will survive kilo-G accelerations. They really do want "Which window do you want it to go through?" levels of accuracy, even after a 200km flight.
The Army managed to get this idea to work with the Copperhead anti-tank artillery round. But I'm guessing the acceleration of a rail-gun round is a couple of orders of magnitude greater still
The excess heat from nuclear power-plants can apparently be used to help crack water. So while it is true that it takes a shed-load of energy to produce H2, it doesn't matter as much if much of that energy would have been wasted anyway.
And producing H2 from natural gas is not a long-term strategy, either, because we'd still be relying on fossil fuels and still pouring CO2 into the atmosphere.
Does anyone know when or if methanol fuel-cells will scale up to car-powering sizes?
I believe the problem is that adult chimps are just as obnoxious, bad-tempered, violent and downright murderous as their cousins Homo Sapiens. Just 6x stronger! Thus they are very hard to control, and capable of dishing out extraordinary amounts of damage to the comparatively puny human physiology.
Those few crazed humans that think that the best way to to save the planet is to destroy mankind in its entirety really should consider taking out the chimps, too. Leave the world to the gorillas (deceptively gentle giants) or to the bonobos (too busy having to sex to be violent).
1) The Kursk: This incident has no bearing on the Kursk tragedy. Even at the time, everyone already knew that there was an American sub in the area, spying on the Russian fleet operations. Which means it had to get damn close, leading everyone to suspect that a collision was the cause of the disaster.
Due to the partial failure of the salvaging operation, there will probably never be a definitive answer: The USA insists that it was a dud torp (and poor sub design) and the Russians will insist that it was a collision with a nosey and irresponsible Yank sub.
2) The subs deliberately shadowing each other: If this really was the case, one or both captains would deserve to be shot! Hunting boomers is a job for dedicated attack subs, not for other boomers.
A boomer's job is to be always ready to destroy a small country at a moment's notice*. Something that is hard to do if you're playing silly buggers with another nation's boomer. So we'd be talking serious dereliction of duty on the part of the captains, which I judge rather unlikely. No nation will leave the keys to their only boomer in the hands of an irresponsible idiot.
*) Unless, of course, the boomer in question is a Russian Typhoon. Their job is to be always ready to destroy a LARGE country at a moment's notice. Can you imagine 200 warheads each of 200kT** yield? That's gonna leave a mark!
**) More than 10 Hiroshima-sized bombs (13-18kT)
3) Men have died under these circumstances before. As noted in the article, collisions were relatively common during the Cold War. I've read about one such incident where the Soviet sub struck the American sub's sail with its prop. The prop-shaft was bent so far out of shape that the water-seal ruptured. The sub filled up so quickly that there wasn't time to seal the bulkheads, and she imploded just a few minutes later.
(Obviously these details had to be inferred from the damage to the American sub, and the recordings of that sub's passive sonar. No-one on the Soviet sub survived, and I doubt anyone ever even found the wreckage.)
I think it's not only plausible, nut inevitable that this would happen sooner or later. While I agree that the volumes we're talking about here are ginormous, we do have thousands of satellites up there, many of them criss-crossing each other's orbits. Sooner or later, there will be a collision.
If you keep lobbing those peanuts, 100 times a day (figure dragged from a handy orifice), for 40 years (roughly how long we've had artificial satellites) they're going to connect eventually.
So, it was random chance that sent a goose or three into the engine, but God himself who arranged it that everybody was saved?
Or maybe it was random chance/good engineering that saved the plane?
It is really a cheap trick to ascribe to chance/the Devil all the bad things, and your favourite Deity all the good.
So no, Mr Sanctimonious Doug Glass, I have not "sold myself to the devil" literally or metaphorically. There is no Devil, and I don't see why it's wrong to put my trust only in things that are real, not in wishful thinking and superstition.
All these replies, and no-one has commented on the irony of being called cowardly by some-one too scared to put even his registered *pseudonym* on his rantings?
I comfort myself these days with the thought that many of the fuCk-you-foreigners, America-first, "all things things are permissible 'cos of 9/11", "genocide is OK if it's against brown people", "Jesus and George Bush are my saviours" - type pond-scum are having apoplectic attacks at the thought of Hussein Obama taking over the White House.
For everyone of those that dies of stroke, that's one less dose of Darwin-chlorine needed for the human gene-pool.
If there's one thing that the patent trolls must have noticed it's IBM et al stomping on, grinding into the dirt, and then setting fire to the remains of SCO. While not actually a patent dispute, it illustrates a universal point: If you're going to be a bully, don't pick on kids bigger than you, for crying out loud! You'll get what you deserve, in spades.
There's a tendency to react with "Oh the poor little darlings. Now they know how we feel, stuck in cattle class for the whole flight".
But it's actually not a joke. The last thing I want is for the pilot landing the plane to be sleep-deprived!
But I also note with amusement that now even the pilots have to suffer for the sake of the comfort of the well-heeled. And we're still waiting for our luxury shopping level/gym/what-hav-you -equipped flying hotel. :-)
"[T]hat quite chunky fighter aircraft" you're thinking of is probably the US A10, aka The Warthog.
Just two niggles: It's not a mini-gun. I think the term "mini-gun" refers only to Gatling guns under 20mm, and usually "just" 7.62mm. The A10's weapon is a terrifying 30mm!
Secondly, it's not so much a plane with a nose-mounted gun as it is a gun with a breech-mounted airplane! :-)
...I should have known better than to open a thread related to gun-control in the US. I'll need to spend the rest of the day cleaning the flecks of spittle off the inside of my monitor. Ah well, it beats working.
In the original draft of this post I insulted the US several times. Then I remembered that you do still have your guns, and that the posts here were proof enough that a lot of you are fear-filled psychopaths with no compunction about using then.
So I deleted the insults.
See? "Freedom from being insulted by foreign devils". Just one of the many overlooked benefits of gun ownership!
It seems to me that after every major recession in the last 100 years, authorities clamp down on whatever risky business the banks and stockbrokers were up to that put them in this mess. And then, a few decades later, these same institutions find a *new* way to be greedy and, ironically, screw themselves (and us!) over.
They're like overgrown, greedy children who need to be protected from themselves!
"Which would make it viable to have a viable (given El Reg's figures on their efficiencies) solar car in... ooh... 8 years?"
The problem is, we're dealing with *efficiency* here, not pure output. Once you have 100% efficiency, there is no higher that you can go without breaking some fundamental laws of physics.
There's only so much sunlight that can fall on a hiven area at a given latitude at a given time of year. That's all you have to work with, and if that ain't enough, it ain't enough!
AFAIK, photovoltaics have terrible efficiency, somewhere around 10%. So, we could (in theory) get about ten times more than The Reg's figures. Of course, it will never be that high - some more laws of physics intervene.
And then there's the issue of storing energy while your car is at work, so you can recharge it later. There will be losses involved in charging up and discharging this storage medium (chemical battery, hydrogen, flywheel, whatever.)
But since the theoretical maximum is so much higher than what we have now, it's tempting to think that, with just a few dozen more massive technological leaps, a practical solar-powered car will be possible.
Until it rains for three days straight. And I believe rain is fairly common in England.
1) Shouldn't beancounters actually *love* snipers? Snipers use a ludicrous number of rounds when training, but far fewer in combat, making them cheaper in the long run. Maybe I have my facts wrong, or maybe beancounters are idiots. (Just ask the BOFH.)
2) But didn't Hathcock use a 50-cal, the very round you said caused potentially fatal shrapnel?
Or were you drawing a distinction between "head shredded by flying bits of his own scope" on the one end, and "surgical shot leaving the scope barrel intact, like I saw in the movies, so it has to be true" on the other?
I'd have loved to be there watching you try out those guns. It does sound like a very Mythbuster-y experience and a lot of fun.
I certainly wouldn't want to buy a second-hand copy of "Ghost". I'd have to spend ages getting the pages unstuck from each other before I could read it.
I disagree that nukes have no purpose. I believe in their use usefulness as a deterrent. For example, I really don't believe that Iran or North Korea getting the bomb as such a big deal.
If Iran nukes Tel Aviv, Iran is a glass parking-lot with 12 hours. And Iran know it.
If North Korea's nukes Seoul, they're damned stupid 'cos they've just contaminated their own soil, since Seoul is so close to their own border. AND they're a glass parking-lot by the end of the day. And they know it.
But of course, this only works if The Big Boys have enough nukes (and sophisticated delivery systems) to make this a credible threat. I'm afraid I must disagree with your "you've already lost the war" argument - These stocks of nukes are there to *prevent* wars. They're only useful if they're never used. This is an irony, but not an insanity.
But do I agree that they're (mostly) useless against terrorists. But don't buy the propaganda: Terrorists are not the only military threat left in the world. And while nukes are impossible to use *directly* against terrorists, they are still useful in deterring any nation stupid enough to consider giving nukes to terrorists. "Plausible deniability" only gets you so far after you've really, REALLY pissed off the USA or Russia.
And I also agree (without any reservation this time) that tactical nukes are only useful to tent the pants of generals. Because of the deterrent of "strategic" nukes, "tactical" nukes are the dumbest idea since the chocolate teapot.
Of course, all this is a totally different argument, only peripherally useful to deciding whether or not Britain in particular needs to be spending mega-bucks on new nukes while her entire military budget is such a shambles as to make Zimbabwean agriculture look like a model of efficiency and productivity.
re: Equifax gets even more of your personal information
I have no doubt that this is what they intend, and without Vaseline, a reach-around, or even a good-bye kiss.
Nevertheless, it might be possible in theory to do this without handing over all your data to anybody. Maybe using local storage, in combination with centrally stored hashes. You hand over to a banking or e-commerce site only as much info as you need to (you can't really get around this part) and they confirm your details by looking up the hash on Equifax's servers.
Or something. A text file recording everything I know about security would have fewer bytes than its own PGP signature.
Online shopping would be so much easier and safer (for both buyer and seller) if there was some centralised identification system. Of course, the problem is that sooner or later you have to trust *somebody* with your data, and you have to trust that no-one has compromised this most tempting of targets. Or simply registered a fake ID with them.
But only in a perfect world would we find such a system, and in a perfect world, we wouldn't need it, because everybody would already be trustworthy. Sigh.
You know, it used to annoy me that I these days I can't read any flippin conversation *anywhere* on the internet, even in non-US, non-political sites (obviously that last point doesn't apply to El Reg) without hearing some sad, deluded Republican wimp whining about how Obama will take away his job, his guns, his money, his Bible, and his heterosexuality.
Seeing people so ludicrously detached from the slightest hint of reality (including 911 "Truthers" and Moon Landing "Hoax" proponents) used to make me by turns sad and angry.
Now, I just laugh as they go red-faced and apoplectic. The throbbing veins on their foreheads are so pronounced, you can even see them in a text message over the Intertoobs! Who needs YouTube? :-)
My favourite cartoonist puts it far better than I could: http://thepaincomics.com/weekly081112.htm
Oh, and before the next *Democratic* bed-wetter comes along, worrying that all these Haters will try to assassinate The Big O (sorry Oprah, you done lost that title): Give the Secret Service some credit! They get smarter every year, thanks to training, research, and improved technology. OTOH, uneducated rednecks and skinheads will stay uneducated forever. And whereas those "brave" Muslim extremists are very good at murdering innocent civilians by the score, they suck against trained, armed and determined military and paramilitary forces.
Now, to get back on topic: This is an excellent idea. Todays youth are just too easily distractible to actually *listen* to something. They need "the bright shiny", such as video, to keep them focused long enough to hear what is being said. Why, in my day, we had to trudge three miles through snow, uphill both ways, just to crowd around a crystal radio set to listen to the commercials!
(To the youngsters: A crystal radio is an unpowered (and thus un-amplified) AM radio. It has all the wonderful sound quality AM is so famous for, along with a sound volume so low you have to strain to hear it, even through headphones.)
...but, it's less than one dollar for every septic out there. :-)
OffBeatMammal: According to Snopes, the story of the Fisher Space Pen vs. the Ruskie has a grain of truth to it, but is far from the full truth: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
But still, the idea of spending that much on a water-treatment facility that only needs to be big enough to support 6 people does sound ludicrous. Except that it also has to work in weightlessness, survive temperature extremes, survive the G-forces of take-off, and needs to be utterly reliable. (While having your water-supply dry up is not nearly as bad as your oxygen running out, it is still rather inconvenient. )
Then, add in the research needed, plus the fact that it's a one-off construction, with no economies of scale or broad amortising of costs, and all the testing to make sure it does meet those requirements, and you can easily end up with a device costing upwards of $25 million.
What's that? You say it actually costs $250 million, not just $25 million?
MOTHER OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!!! Sorry NASA, I tried my best to defend you, but by Einsein's Beard, how the flying fk do you justify that?
Register
269 posts • joined Tuesday 8th May 2007 14:28 GMT
Page:
This post has been deleted by a moderator
Misunderstood
Why am I all in "defend LP mode" today? Maybe it's because lame arguments annoy me. Or maybe I'm just a lame fanboi/sycophant myself. :-)
Anyway, I didn't read the article as suggesting that you Limeys sink all your non-carrier assets, just that without a carrier to defend, frigates and destroyers have only limited utility.
Not going to be sued?
That's naive. All this means is that you won't be sued by the people who released the specification. Given the insanity of the current worldwide patent systems, you're still vulnerable to some patent troll who might claim that the spec originator (un)wittingly infringed the troll's patent, and who will then sue you, too!
@Oliver Smith
I think you're confusing *design* age with *aircraft* age. The design of the Blackhawk may be old, but the examples the army would be buying would be new-build. Whereas the Pumas, apparently, really are 30yo flying accidents-waiting-to-happen.
Odd, it seems straightforward to me, but this is the second time I've seen someone make this same error. Perhaps Lewis can word things a bit more clearly in future?
No appropriate laws
The problem here is that there ARE no existing laws. They tried everything to convict Lori Drew and all they came up with was a a shockingly lame "breaking the terms of service of Facebook" pseudo-offense.
If there had been existing laws that could have been applied, Drew would already be turning big rocks into little rocks.
I just noticed: Chris W already said the same thing, but it seems some people didn't notice that.
"What's the saying.... ahh, yes.... "F_ck you if you can't take a joke!" - says the anonymous man. Irony much?
@ Useful research please
The moon and the Earth were seperated at birth. Things we learn about the Moon's geology mmight give us clues to unlock some of the secrets of Earth's geology. And maybe not. And the only way we'll know is to go there and try! That's what exploration and research are all about: Finding stuff you never knew existed.
Also, please remember that, despite the eye-wateringly high price-tags on NASA missions, the _entire_ NASA budget, including Earth observation missions, terrestrial aeronautical research, and unmanned missions, is still only about 1% of the US Federal budget.
When politicians slash NASA budgets they're really just grand-standing for the public. The actual influence on the budget is negligible.
Alien rock on alien planet
@By Steen Hive
"Something "Alien" managed to hit the martian surface without leaving a great big bloody hole?"
Actually, small meteorites don't make holes on earth. If they're small enough they get slowed down to mere "terminal velocity" before they hit the ground.
Of course, that's on Earth. The definition for "small enough" is much, err, smaller on Mars, given that the tenuous atmosphere would slow down an incoming meteor much, much less. So you may still have a point.
Anybody else got any ideas how this rock could have got there without making a mess of the surrounding surface?
@TeeCee
So you figure a fit human is less attractive to EATR than a mouse-potato like myself? That's not good!
But it is like a shark: Apparently sharks only eat humies by mistake, as we taste absolutely horrible: Stringy and sinewy compared to the blubber-insulated seals and fish they prefer. Not enough energy in a human to balance the energy used in catching the things!
Defn: Recursion - See "recursion"
I agree, this is a statement of the bloody obvious. We all know that people not in agreement with us are blindly rejecting our superior position, or avoiding us entirely.
Whereas we ourselves are perfectly open-minded, and only reached our current positions after carefully viewing /all/ sides of the debate, and picking the correct one.
Unlike all the sheep.
Sectarian violence?
Forgive my ignorance, but I had though that NI tribal warfare was largely a thing of the past. Clearly I was mistaken.
11 years not at all excessive
This guy is an unrepentant and obsessive criminal. His stunts weren't just 'bad', they were life-threatening. And interfering with witnesses is rightfully treated very seriously by the courts.
Plus he's too damned stupid to realise that when you're already in a hole, you need to stop digging!
Rape play
"lady got so pissed screaming it had taken 2 months to organise the rape scene"
My heart bleeds for her. Not!
There are serious and obvious risks involved in realistically enacting a violation of the law. It is the duty of the police and the public to react to any perceived crime. Anyone with an IQ in double-digits or more could have foreseen this.
This dim-wit will probably end up "simulating" some other outré and dangerous act soon, again without properly assessing and preparing for any dangerous consequences thereof, and get herself a Darwin Award in the process.
Torture the torturer
My initial reaction to stories like this is to wish all sorts of horrid retribution on the perpetrator, to make him suffer as much as the victim did. But then I take a breath and remember that what holds society together is justice, not vengeance. This man shouldn't (and won't) be tortured, he should simply be removed from society like a cancer-cell is removed from the body, for the greater good.
Dump him in solitary for the rest of his life so that he can't hurt anyone again.
What, you say that living in solitary confinement for years or even decades is itself torture? Nonsense, no-one laid a hand on him! <evil, self-satisfied grin>
@Klaus
Since the wireless signal probably has to travel no more than a centimeter or two, and can probably be isolated from interference by a layer of tin-foil inside the gun, I doubt that jamming or spoofing will be much of a problem.
I'm sure the designers have come up with other safeguards, too. They've had enough time and been paid enough money to do so! Just how long has this development program been dragging on?
War on Sex
If the rest of us are really lucky, the Americans will "win" the war on sex, and then there won't be any more Americans!
@Miami Mike
Hey! That was really funny - A most excellent imitation of your typical brainless, racist, scum-sucking, Bush-voting redneck. You got all the nuances just right. :-)
Oh! I just had a horrible thought...
Dear God! Please tell me you weren't actually SERIOUS!
Echo chamber
I am intrigued by the oft-proposed (at least here in The Register Comments) explanation for your govt's actions: That it is not (just) prudery, populism and the usual moralistic grand-standing which lies at the heart of the problem of (especially) sex- and drug-related mal-administration of the law.
It is also the fear in national politicians' hearts that their usefulness has been supplanted by the European Union's over-arching legislation. That since broad policy is set in Brussels, not London, people might question either (a) how democratic this "government once-removed" is, or (b) if all the work is being done in Brussels, just why so many politicians are needed in Blighty. Thus, an endless stream of pseudo-populist legislation is produced, just to show that "local" (i.e. national rather than inter-national) government still has a purpose (and that its members deserve their high salaries.)
I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion. I don't even live on the same continent, so I don't have first-hand knowledge of the problem. And my second-hand opinions are derived from the scribblings of a skewed, self-selected sample of people (a small proportion of The Register commentors, which is in turn a small proportion of The Register readers, who are in turn only a small proportion of the British electorate.)
In fact, I can't even state categorically that there is a "problem" in the first place.
So I guess I in fact know enough to produce legislation on the subject, no? :-^
WIKILEAKS Mirror
"can their site be distributed over multiple servers?"
IIRC, that is exactly what they already do. Multiple sites across multiple jurisdictions. Makes a meaningful take-down rather tricky to achieve.
@JP Strauss
Hamsters.
Lots and lots of hamsters running in little wheels.
Have you seen the CSIR's feed bill lately?
Thanks
@Claire Rand
@OrsonX
@David Halko
@Damian Skeeles
Thanks! You've actually answered my question nicely, by telling me the good things, the bad things that are not really so bad after all, and one more bad thing. Useful info I shall now mull over before my next upgrade.
@Jerry Masterson
You, sir, are a fanboi.
You contributed very little more than a lot of hot air to this discussion. You insulted me and called me ignorant, but you did nothing to relieve that ignorance - You didn't tell me what any of the good points are! You reacted as if I had insulted you, personally. It's just a sodding chunk of plastic silicon, not your penis! Who's the 12yo in this discussion?
Please remind me...
I've been ignoring the iPhone for so long now I'd forgotten all its glaring omissions. No cut-and-paste, no tethering, no MMS, one app open at a time. That's just primitive! BTW, how's the Bluetooth stack looking these days? The last I heard it stank, but that was a while ago.
So can anybody tell me just why people like it so much? Is it the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field?
Having gotten used to all these features on *much* cheaper mid-range phones, it would irritate the blazes out of me to suddenly have them taken away. That's why even a free-with-contract offer didn't tempt me - I'd rather pay more for a supposedly inferior phone, such as the N85.
And I know it's probably childish, but I just don't like the way I can only do what Steve and his marketroids tell me I can do. What features I "don't need". What network I can use. What apps I can use, and where I can buy them. Making me pay twice for the same song if I want to use it as a ring-tone, or, potentially, make me pay extra to send bytes to my laptop.
In his essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line", Neal Stephenson described the Apple corporate culture as one with a slick image of openness, non-conformity, and general "coolness". But behind this entirely artificial facade, it's really being run by sinister control-freaks. Probably a bit harsh, but more than just a grain of truth in it.
@Who gave these morons the power to confiscate property?
AC: "It's only a matter of time till some security moron tries to confiscate a really valuable brooch (say ten times the security moron's annual salary) because it has a "dangerous" pin."
Already happened. Except it wasn't worth 10x the id10t's annual gross - It was literally priceless:
http://www.aero-news.net/columns/avsoapbox.cfm?ContentBlockID=38b4d817-25b7-4629-b664-80683acad131&
(A WW2 vet and ex-State Governor nearly had his Congressional Medal of Hono(u)r confiscated.)
@AC at 20:04
You Godwinned yourself. Also, I see a lot of assertions. Could I actually see some arguments, please?
Too many people on the innertubes seem to be unable to distinguish the two. They think that simply *saying* that the Liberals/Conservatives/Christianists eat babies is enough. Challenge them to present evidence and argue a conclusion from that evidence, and all they do is assert the same bullshit all over again, as if that settles it.
I'd weep for the death of reason and logic, if I believed the the unwashed masses had ever had any. The intertoobs just highlighted this lack, it didn't create it. (This paragraph is unsupported assertion, not argument. But at least I admit it!)
Mathematically impaired
Does this 1/4-wit have even the faintest idea how many schools, churches, government buildings and other "terrorist targets" there are in the world? Or even in his own State? Does he have any idea how much manual labour it will take to locate and blur out every single one of them? Or that this effort would be so outrageously expensive that not even Mountain View would be able to afford it, let alone find it profitable?
He may as well ask all these services to simply shut down completely.
Actually, he's not mathematically impaired. He's not even arithmetically impaired. He can't even count: He's innumerate!
It's not illegal...
...if the President does it!
Anyway, as we all know, "everything changed after 9/11":
Firstly, terrorists, bombs and even airplanes didn't even exist till 9/11.
Secondly, after 9/11 a new zeroeth Amendment magically came into being:
"The President shall do whatever the fcuk he wants, if he can somehow relate it to terrorism. This Amendment supercedes all other Amendments within the Bill of Rights".
@Why: J
Probably related to the reason that UFO, Nessie and Bigfoot photographs are also always of such poor quality.
@Matt
Isn't there one of those geek "rules" that says something like "Reality will always be wierder than the most outrageous joke or satire"? We have here some more evidence supporting that statement. :-)
@robbie: I guess 200m is the best they can aspire to at present, rather than the most they think they'll ever need. Come any further advances in tech, and they'll gleefully extend the range to hit targets ever further inland. Anyway, we already have a large proportion of the human population within 200m of the sea. Russia, China and Iran may be out of range, but there are lots of smaller countries they can terrorise with such a weapon. And the Marines will love it - Having heavy arty support you as you land has got to have advantages over just having Harriers.
@Greg Trocchia: What I read years ago suggested that "Mach 5+" at launch is in fact Mach 7. If that is still correct, the shell only loses 2/7 of its velocity before hitting the target - A smaller fraction than I would have thought, but I guess travelling 200m at hypersonic speeds happens too quickly to matter much to the shell.
IOW...
...they want a decent AI. They've just come up with a few new, insightful criteria. But it's still the same AI that scientists have been failing to produce for half-a-century or more.
What difference does it make that DARPA tells the world that they want this? It's been a bloody obvious goal for a very long time now. People will be working on this whether or not they they have official knowledge that DARPA will want it. They've known that implicitly for decades!
It's not like DARPA have created some new Grand Challenge with a clear, unambiguous, challenging yet realistic goals. It's not like they're putting any money on the table at all.
Unless I'm just not getting it, this seems like nothing more than an excuse to show some more Powerpoint slides.
@Matt
Actually, they really are intending to do that. You must be psychic!
They're only firing inert rounds for now, while they're trying to get the basic gun to work. But other people are working on how the hell to make a GPS guidance system that will survive kilo-G accelerations. They really do want "Which window do you want it to go through?" levels of accuracy, even after a 200km flight.
The Army managed to get this idea to work with the Copperhead anti-tank artillery round. But I'm guessing the acceleration of a rail-gun round is a couple of orders of magnitude greater still
Nukular!
The excess heat from nuclear power-plants can apparently be used to help crack water. So while it is true that it takes a shed-load of energy to produce H2, it doesn't matter as much if much of that energy would have been wasted anyway.
And producing H2 from natural gas is not a long-term strategy, either, because we'd still be relying on fossil fuels and still pouring CO2 into the atmosphere.
Does anyone know when or if methanol fuel-cells will scale up to car-powering sizes?
Chimps are bad news
I believe the problem is that adult chimps are just as obnoxious, bad-tempered, violent and downright murderous as their cousins Homo Sapiens. Just 6x stronger! Thus they are very hard to control, and capable of dishing out extraordinary amounts of damage to the comparatively puny human physiology.
Those few crazed humans that think that the best way to to save the planet is to destroy mankind in its entirety really should consider taking out the chimps, too. Leave the world to the gorillas (deceptively gentle giants) or to the bonobos (too busy having to sex to be violent).
Coupl'a points on the ravings of others
1) The Kursk: This incident has no bearing on the Kursk tragedy. Even at the time, everyone already knew that there was an American sub in the area, spying on the Russian fleet operations. Which means it had to get damn close, leading everyone to suspect that a collision was the cause of the disaster.
Due to the partial failure of the salvaging operation, there will probably never be a definitive answer: The USA insists that it was a dud torp (and poor sub design) and the Russians will insist that it was a collision with a nosey and irresponsible Yank sub.
2) The subs deliberately shadowing each other: If this really was the case, one or both captains would deserve to be shot! Hunting boomers is a job for dedicated attack subs, not for other boomers.
A boomer's job is to be always ready to destroy a small country at a moment's notice*. Something that is hard to do if you're playing silly buggers with another nation's boomer. So we'd be talking serious dereliction of duty on the part of the captains, which I judge rather unlikely. No nation will leave the keys to their only boomer in the hands of an irresponsible idiot.
*) Unless, of course, the boomer in question is a Russian Typhoon. Their job is to be always ready to destroy a LARGE country at a moment's notice. Can you imagine 200 warheads each of 200kT** yield? That's gonna leave a mark!
**) More than 10 Hiroshima-sized bombs (13-18kT)
3) Men have died under these circumstances before. As noted in the article, collisions were relatively common during the Cold War. I've read about one such incident where the Soviet sub struck the American sub's sail with its prop. The prop-shaft was bent so far out of shape that the water-seal ruptured. The sub filled up so quickly that there wasn't time to seal the bulkheads, and she imploded just a few minutes later.
(Obviously these details had to be inferred from the damage to the American sub, and the recordings of that sub's passive sonar. No-one on the Soviet sub survived, and I doubt anyone ever even found the wreckage.)
Laws of chance...
@Tim Spence
I think it's not only plausible, nut inevitable that this would happen sooner or later. While I agree that the volumes we're talking about here are ginormous, we do have thousands of satellites up there, many of them criss-crossing each other's orbits. Sooner or later, there will be a collision.
If you keep lobbing those peanuts, 100 times a day (figure dragged from a handy orifice), for 40 years (roughly how long we've had artificial satellites) they're going to connect eventually.
No Miracle
So, it was random chance that sent a goose or three into the engine, but God himself who arranged it that everybody was saved?
Or maybe it was random chance/good engineering that saved the plane?
It is really a cheap trick to ascribe to chance/the Devil all the bad things, and your favourite Deity all the good.
So no, Mr Sanctimonious Doug Glass, I have not "sold myself to the devil" literally or metaphorically. There is no Devil, and I don't see why it's wrong to put my trust only in things that are real, not in wishful thinking and superstition.
re: Everyone's fav troll/moron
All these replies, and no-one has commented on the irony of being called cowardly by some-one too scared to put even his registered *pseudonym* on his rantings?
I comfort myself these days with the thought that many of the fuCk-you-foreigners, America-first, "all things things are permissible 'cos of 9/11", "genocide is OK if it's against brown people", "Jesus and George Bush are my saviours" - type pond-scum are having apoplectic attacks at the thought of Hussein Obama taking over the White House.
For everyone of those that dies of stroke, that's one less dose of Darwin-chlorine needed for the human gene-pool.
F**king cowards?
If there's one thing that the patent trolls must have noticed it's IBM et al stomping on, grinding into the dirt, and then setting fire to the remains of SCO. While not actually a patent dispute, it illustrates a universal point: If you're going to be a bully, don't pick on kids bigger than you, for crying out loud! You'll get what you deserve, in spades.
RTFA
To all the hard-of-thinking who have recommended earplugs: The bloody article states that theyve already tried that, to no avail.
And this story does not help Emirates. They'd be admitting that their cattle-class is a miserable, noisy, sleep-depriving place.
But it does look good for Airbus, and whichever engine-maker they chose.
No joke
There's a tendency to react with "Oh the poor little darlings. Now they know how we feel, stuck in cattle class for the whole flight".
But it's actually not a joke. The last thing I want is for the pilot landing the plane to be sleep-deprived!
But I also note with amusement that now even the pilots have to suffer for the sake of the comfort of the well-heeled. And we're still waiting for our luxury shopping level/gym/what-hav-you -equipped flying hotel. :-)
@Stu (cool name, btw.)
"[T]hat quite chunky fighter aircraft" you're thinking of is probably the US A10, aka The Warthog.
Just two niggles: It's not a mini-gun. I think the term "mini-gun" refers only to Gatling guns under 20mm, and usually "just" 7.62mm. The A10's weapon is a terrifying 30mm!
Secondly, it's not so much a plane with a nose-mounted gun as it is a gun with a breech-mounted airplane! :-)
My own fault, really...
...I should have known better than to open a thread related to gun-control in the US. I'll need to spend the rest of the day cleaning the flecks of spittle off the inside of my monitor. Ah well, it beats working.
In the original draft of this post I insulted the US several times. Then I remembered that you do still have your guns, and that the posts here were proof enough that a lot of you are fear-filled psychopaths with no compunction about using then.
So I deleted the insults.
See? "Freedom from being insulted by foreign devils". Just one of the many overlooked benefits of gun ownership!
Banking Regs
It seems to me that after every major recession in the last 100 years, authorities clamp down on whatever risky business the banks and stockbrokers were up to that put them in this mess. And then, a few decades later, these same institutions find a *new* way to be greedy and, ironically, screw themselves (and us!) over.
They're like overgrown, greedy children who need to be protected from themselves!
@Adam Foxton
"Which would make it viable to have a viable (given El Reg's figures on their efficiencies) solar car in... ooh... 8 years?"
The problem is, we're dealing with *efficiency* here, not pure output. Once you have 100% efficiency, there is no higher that you can go without breaking some fundamental laws of physics.
There's only so much sunlight that can fall on a hiven area at a given latitude at a given time of year. That's all you have to work with, and if that ain't enough, it ain't enough!
AFAIK, photovoltaics have terrible efficiency, somewhere around 10%. So, we could (in theory) get about ten times more than The Reg's figures. Of course, it will never be that high - some more laws of physics intervene.
And then there's the issue of storing energy while your car is at work, so you can recharge it later. There will be losses involved in charging up and discharging this storage medium (chemical battery, hydrogen, flywheel, whatever.)
But since the theoretical maximum is so much higher than what we have now, it's tempting to think that, with just a few dozen more massive technological leaps, a practical solar-powered car will be possible.
Until it rains for three days straight. And I believe rain is fairly common in England.
Oh, and Scotland? You're hosed!
@jake
1) Shouldn't beancounters actually *love* snipers? Snipers use a ludicrous number of rounds when training, but far fewer in combat, making them cheaper in the long run. Maybe I have my facts wrong, or maybe beancounters are idiots. (Just ask the BOFH.)
2) But didn't Hathcock use a 50-cal, the very round you said caused potentially fatal shrapnel?
Or were you drawing a distinction between "head shredded by flying bits of his own scope" on the one end, and "surgical shot leaving the scope barrel intact, like I saw in the movies, so it has to be true" on the other?
I'd have loved to be there watching you try out those guns. It does sound like a very Mythbuster-y experience and a lot of fun.
Dodgy book...
I certainly wouldn't want to buy a second-hand copy of "Ghost". I'd have to spend ages getting the pages unstuck from each other before I could read it.
@boltar
Erm, son, when engaged in a debate, it's simply not cricket to just MAKE SHIT UP!
@Andy Bright
I disagree that nukes have no purpose. I believe in their use usefulness as a deterrent. For example, I really don't believe that Iran or North Korea getting the bomb as such a big deal.
If Iran nukes Tel Aviv, Iran is a glass parking-lot with 12 hours. And Iran know it.
If North Korea's nukes Seoul, they're damned stupid 'cos they've just contaminated their own soil, since Seoul is so close to their own border. AND they're a glass parking-lot by the end of the day. And they know it.
But of course, this only works if The Big Boys have enough nukes (and sophisticated delivery systems) to make this a credible threat. I'm afraid I must disagree with your "you've already lost the war" argument - These stocks of nukes are there to *prevent* wars. They're only useful if they're never used. This is an irony, but not an insanity.
But do I agree that they're (mostly) useless against terrorists. But don't buy the propaganda: Terrorists are not the only military threat left in the world. And while nukes are impossible to use *directly* against terrorists, they are still useful in deterring any nation stupid enough to consider giving nukes to terrorists. "Plausible deniability" only gets you so far after you've really, REALLY pissed off the USA or Russia.
And I also agree (without any reservation this time) that tactical nukes are only useful to tent the pants of generals. Because of the deterrent of "strategic" nukes, "tactical" nukes are the dumbest idea since the chocolate teapot.
Of course, all this is a totally different argument, only peripherally useful to deciding whether or not Britain in particular needs to be spending mega-bucks on new nukes while her entire military budget is such a shambles as to make Zimbabwean agriculture look like a model of efficiency and productivity.
@Obama Smith
I don't know if you heard, but the election is over. You're stuck with Obama for at least four years.
So suck it up, man! Stop whining and do something positive to help your seriously fucked-up country.
re: Equifax gets even more of your personal information
I have no doubt that this is what they intend, and without Vaseline, a reach-around, or even a good-bye kiss.
Nevertheless, it might be possible in theory to do this without handing over all your data to anybody. Maybe using local storage, in combination with centrally stored hashes. You hand over to a banking or e-commerce site only as much info as you need to (you can't really get around this part) and they confirm your details by looking up the hash on Equifax's servers.
Or something. A text file recording everything I know about security would have fewer bytes than its own PGP signature.
Online shopping would be so much easier and safer (for both buyer and seller) if there was some centralised identification system. Of course, the problem is that sooner or later you have to trust *somebody* with your data, and you have to trust that no-one has compromised this most tempting of targets. Or simply registered a fake ID with them.
But only in a perfect world would we find such a system, and in a perfect world, we wouldn't need it, because everybody would already be trustworthy. Sigh.
Whining wimps
You know, it used to annoy me that I these days I can't read any flippin conversation *anywhere* on the internet, even in non-US, non-political sites (obviously that last point doesn't apply to El Reg) without hearing some sad, deluded Republican wimp whining about how Obama will take away his job, his guns, his money, his Bible, and his heterosexuality.
Seeing people so ludicrously detached from the slightest hint of reality (including 911 "Truthers" and Moon Landing "Hoax" proponents) used to make me by turns sad and angry.
Now, I just laugh as they go red-faced and apoplectic. The throbbing veins on their foreheads are so pronounced, you can even see them in a text message over the Intertoobs! Who needs YouTube? :-)
My favourite cartoonist puts it far better than I could: http://thepaincomics.com/weekly081112.htm
Oh, and before the next *Democratic* bed-wetter comes along, worrying that all these Haters will try to assassinate The Big O (sorry Oprah, you done lost that title): Give the Secret Service some credit! They get smarter every year, thanks to training, research, and improved technology. OTOH, uneducated rednecks and skinheads will stay uneducated forever. And whereas those "brave" Muslim extremists are very good at murdering innocent civilians by the score, they suck against trained, armed and determined military and paramilitary forces.
Now, to get back on topic: This is an excellent idea. Todays youth are just too easily distractible to actually *listen* to something. They need "the bright shiny", such as video, to keep them focused long enough to hear what is being said. Why, in my day, we had to trudge three miles through snow, uphill both ways, just to crowd around a crystal radio set to listen to the commercials!
(To the youngsters: A crystal radio is an unpowered (and thus un-amplified) AM radio. It has all the wonderful sound quality AM is so famous for, along with a sound volume so low you have to strain to hear it, even through headphones.)
Yeah, $250,000,000 seems like a lot of money...
...but, it's less than one dollar for every septic out there. :-)
OffBeatMammal: According to Snopes, the story of the Fisher Space Pen vs. the Ruskie has a grain of truth to it, but is far from the full truth: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
But still, the idea of spending that much on a water-treatment facility that only needs to be big enough to support 6 people does sound ludicrous. Except that it also has to work in weightlessness, survive temperature extremes, survive the G-forces of take-off, and needs to be utterly reliable. (While having your water-supply dry up is not nearly as bad as your oxygen running out, it is still rather inconvenient. )
Then, add in the research needed, plus the fact that it's a one-off construction, with no economies of scale or broad amortising of costs, and all the testing to make sure it does meet those requirements, and you can easily end up with a device costing upwards of $25 million.
What's that? You say it actually costs $250 million, not just $25 million?
MOTHER OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!!! Sorry NASA, I tried my best to defend you, but by Einsein's Beard, how the flying fk do you justify that?
Page: