All of these cooling problems could have been solved by some sort of waterproof backup power, even if it had to be stored 50 miles away and delivered via an underground cable that comes up under the reactors

50 miles of buried power cable; massive earthquake...

I think I see a flaw in this little plan.

You could always offer them a cut. If it takes you 3 months to write, and it takes them 1 week to edit, offer them about a 12th of the overall profit (which means you're about equal in terms of reward-per-hour). If thee book's a runaway success you can make them rich, if not then they get a trickle of pocket money for their trouble.

I wonder if Amazon or other places that support self-publishing ebooks might build in some support for that.

When you register your payment information for the book maybe they could also let you specify some additional payees and their percentages. So the book seller handles the paperwork for the profit splitting. (They're doing most of that anyway to document that they're giving the author their percentage, splitting that author share a few ways shouldn't be a huge amount of extra work for them.)

And it lets the author focus on writing and not on documenting profits and sending out royalty checks to editors.

I seem to recall that pastel colors make for the best aerial camouflage, but the pilots protested flying pastel blue and pink planes and so the military went with grays and blues

The US's current grey paint scheme is the result a a fair bit of testing about best color given the various conditions that the planes might find themselves flying in. (Day, night, clear weather, clouds, etc, etc).

As I heard it pastel pink was considered specifically for the F-117 stealth "fighter" because it was less visible in clear nighttime conditions, which was the only time the jet was expected to be used operationally.
Nighttime because a stealth jet you can see coming is seems counterproductive and clear because it needed unobstructed visibility for its precision weapons, laser guided bombs. (It's design predated the current GPS guided bombs.)

The pastel pink would optimize the likely usages at the expense of all other usages. Reasons for going with flat black instead are unclear but reportedly public image (not so much crew feelings) was a factor.

That's a good explanation except for the fact that there's a minimum OS version required to play online. One USED to be able to run otherOS and play online, and after a certain cutoff date, you had to choose to lose one or the other. That's where (some of) the contention comes from.

And it's not just a choice between otherOS and play online because some Blu-rays also require post-otherOS firmware to play.

So now you have to give up full Blu-ray compatibility as well as play online (and as some other posters pointed out access to some online purchased content) in order to keep otherOS.

I'm assuming you live somewhere where it doesn't get below zero much eh? Try living without power for a week in sub zero temperatures.

I'd hope that anyone living someplace that cold would have at least a backup heating system that didn't rely on electricity. (Or the ability to go someplace that did have such a system)

Assuming the court allowed states to collect this info, I would be required to keep a list of all my customers in 2011, separate them, and mail-out 51 letters to the 50 states plus DC. That would require several days worth of labor on my part, and that is "taxing".

And that's assuming the court ruling required each state to take that list and handle the And that's assuming the court ruling required each state to take that list and handle the futher processing to split it up according to county/parish, city, town, special tax district, etc to portion out the tax revenue to the appropriate intrastate bodies.

If they made you do that it gets significantly more taxing because now you have to track all that crap, not just do a database query on the state a purchase shipped to.

(Not to mention all the other ways sales tax is often complicated. Different rates for different categories of goods, tax holidays, etc, etc)processing to split it up according to county/parish, city, town, special tax district, etc to portion out the tax revinue to the approriate intrastate bodies.

If they made you do that it gets siginificantly more taxing because now you have to track all that crap, not just do a database query on the state a purchase shipped to.

(Not to mention all the other ways sales tax is often complicated. Different rates for different categories of goods, tax holidays, etc, etc)

This all rests on the assumption that the Germans were logical and used a predictable sequential serial number scheme. If they hadn't you'd have potentially gotten some very wrong answers out of this exercise in statistics.

Of course the truly dangerous thing would be to have plausibly wrong answers, not wildly wrong ones. You can discount a finding that they produce 4 tanks a month or that they produce 50,000. But 120 or 700 could be plausible enough to be accepted and then lead to miscalculations from basis.

I'm annoyed I can't remember the details well enough to find a reference to it, but back when gun were just transitioning to self-contained cartridges there was someone who patented a design. One of the gun makers signed an (exclusive?) licensing deal with him with the stipulation that he was responsible for defending the patent. They made a ton of money and he went broke from the court costs of suing the vast number of companies that simply ripped off his invention.

Patents have had problem with deep pockets for longer than 50 years.

And sadly by Doom 2 it morphed into the much more boring and descriptive 'idclip'.

>By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo

But what about those outside the Volvo?

Well there is one absolutely fool-proof way to keep anyone from being injured or killed in or around a new volvo in 2020. Don't build or sell any Volvos in 2019 or 2020. Presto, all injuries and deaths will be around old(er) Volvos.

There's also one at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.

However it's just on display behind glass. At the crypto museum the enigma is accessable and they let you use it. Much cooler, IMHO.

I think the second one can actually be fixed, and Nintendo is doing a great job of it in Mario Kart. First they don't let you talk to other players (which has benefits and drawbacks), and second they have a rating system, so when you log in the game automatically pairs you with people close to your level. This is great because you don't need to be awesome at the game to have a chance to win (and lets face it, human opponents are much more interesting than computer opponents), and all the cheaters move to the top ratings: which means the average player doesn't have to deal with cheaters.

Separating people by skill is a good idea, but it has it's own issues. Halo 2 had a similar system but, aside from issues tracking skill across game types, it also suffered from people gaming the system. Some more skilled players would create new accounts or perform actions to de-skill their account so that they would be matched against newer or less skilled players for the purpose of griefing them.

Now its possible that not implementing any voice communication would take some of the fun of that away since they'd know they would be unable to taunt their opponents, but a skill based matching system can work to avoid accidental mismatches, but there's not much it can do against people dedicated to griefing.

Again, solid state lasers, which are the topic of the article have their waste and ammunition limited only by their power source. Seeing as these are being tested for naval deployment, it's a pretty sure bet the power source for these in any significant deployment is going to be a nuclear reactor. That means the "ammunition" supply cycle for the ships lasers will by measured in years, so yes, that is as good as unlimited.

Since the only Naval ships which are, currently, nuclear powered are aircraft carriers and submarines I think it's a safe to say that most naval laser weapons will be getting electricity from a non-nuclear power source.

So their ammunition will only be measured in days, or possibly weeks, not years. But that's still far better than the ammo situation of the existing Phalanx, which has ammo for less than a minute of continuous firing.

Invisible walls suck ass. Even the "Indestructible, unclimable chain-link fence" mecanism works better and i hate that. For me that's the #1 immersion breaker.

Sure chain link fences are better, but they can still suck like Rainbow 6: Vegas 2 where they act as one way bullet shields. (I'm looking at you casino assault level where you start on the helipad)

The enemies can shoot through them but your bullets always get stopped. (Even with a sniper rifle when you can see that you're shooting through the opening, the bullet still fails to go through).

If they stopped all bullets it would be weird but understandable, but sheltering enemies who can fire with impunity is just bad design. But I guess at least you can see where you can and can't go.

Operation Flashpoint is also full of moments where you end up doing whatever works instead of doing what was intended. When your job is to sneak into an enemy base and blow up some tanks, you can often get away with just stealing a tank and shooting the base into piece with that. Or in some missions you can try to shoot helicopters from the sky with an LAW, its not what the weapons was designed for and most of the time you will simply miss, but if you hit, it is simply great.

I had a couple moments like that in Halo.
There's one section where if you hit the enemies just right you can steal a plane (banshee) use it to wipe out everyone, including one of their heavy tanks, and then skip an entire section by flying down from the elevated bridge you started on rather than fighting through a base to reach the lower door.

On the beach assult level there a scripted section where all the AI marines get killed while you're underground. Except you can find hiding places for them where they will survive. Also in that there's a cutscene, letting you know you unlocked a door across the island, where you see a sword equiped enemy step out. One time I left a jeep next to it and discovered it wasn't exactly a cut scene. You could see the sword guy taking fire from the jeep's gun.

Or when you have to fight your way back through one section, I like to take a ghost vehicle, run all the way to the end of the level, ignoring the enemies, steal a plane, and fly up to the elevated bridge that's suppose to be part of a different level. From there snipe and rocket the enemy until I get bored, and switch to ground attack runs with the plane.

It's those level breaking moments that have the best memories.