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Intercontinental Mind-Meld Unites Two Rats 176

Posted by Soulskill
The Military

Researcher Warns That Military Must Prepare For "Mutant" Future 179

Posted by samzenpus
from the laser-eyes-forward dept.

Comment: Re:user space drivers (Score 1) 102

by simcop2387 (#42162337) Attached to: Multi-Server Microkernel OS Genode 12.11 Can Build Itself

It's usually because it requires the actual talking to the hardware to require a context change from userspace to kernel space on x86 based systems (I suspect the other major archs have similar issues but don't know for certain). This is because userspace is normally protected from touching hardware so that it can't cause side effects to other processes without the kernel knowing about it. A good microkernel should be able to give that access directly to userspace but I don't believe most CPUs play nicely with that idea currently, though if they did it could greatly reduce any performance hits to where it's negligable for most loads.

Comment: Re:...Why? (Score 1) 328

by simcop2387 (#41646711) Attached to: Galileo: Europe's Version of GPS Reaches Key Phase

The US also has the ability to disable GPS for certain areas and has in the past degraded the quality of data for national security reasons ( http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/ ). Though this has been changing (new satelites don't have it, though really it's just a software update), it puts pressure on other places to put up their own systems that are either compatible or at least non-interferring so that should the US ever do anything like that again, they cannot be impacted by it. It's a bit like MAD but instead of destruction, nobody can ever get degraded service (assuming enough players). This also raises the question of who should pay for it all, since with three systems now going that all work, it could let each place share only a part of the costs (eventually).

Comment: Re:write a new story? (Score 1) 396

by simcop2387 (#40757167) Attached to: What's Next For Superhero Movies?

For example, take the recent Avengers movie. It's a typical run-of-the-mill superhero movie - several superheroes (including the Iron Man) band together to save the humanity from strange invaders from the outer space. Could we instead see a movie about the technology beyond the Iron Man's suit being duplicated and mass-produced? After all, the Iron Man is roughly equal in power with the other superheroes in that movie so a battalion of them would have easily kicked invaders' asses.

You missed Iron Man 2. That's roughly what was going on (but the originals still managed to take down the army, same basic plot just different villian).

Such a movie would inevitably have to deal with lots of interesting stuff: the effect on society, governmental structure, place of humanity in the universe, etc. There are superhero movies that attempt to do this, but they are few and far between ("Watchmen" being the only recent one).

Unfortunately they only touched very lightly on that in Iron Man 2, despite doing nearly entirely what you were talking about before. This I think is one of the big problems with these movies at least as far as them being much more than just action for the sake of action.

Another example - science. In most superhero movies scientists are immoral and/or evil. They mostly do experiments on people (usually without consent of the test subjects) that later backfire. Alternatively, scientists along with their backers work on evil world domination schemes. And if a scientist is not evil, then he or she is most likely going to be exposed to their own experiment resulting in them gaining some superpower by accident. Is it such a wonder that science loses popularity in the USA?

There's a few counter examples in this, most notably would be the scientists in the captain america movies, but in the long run a number of the story all of them end up dead (according to the comics, cartoons, etc.). So it's just a slightly different take on the same concept. I've got to agree with you there.

Comment: Re:I know the open drivers may not be as good (Score 4, Insightful) 212

by simcop2387 (#40413655) Attached to: XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver

Not yet, AMD hasn't opened up the specs of the hardware video decoder for fear of DRM and other problems with it. There is work being done to do the decoding with the shader processor and it sort of works for mpeg2 (at least for me anyway) but not for anything more advanced. For the nvidia open source drivers i believe it's the same situation.
