Not to mention that's a crap ton of energy per car:
The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them.
30 kWh is 108 MJ. Say your car weighs 2 tons, well that's 18.1 kN of force it exerts on the ground. So your car would have to push one of these plates down a total of 5.9 kilometers to generate that much energy. Assuming that the plate only moves an inch, that's 238 thousand car/plate crossings to generate the quoted energy.
Or you could just park in the marked bays and buy a ticket so they don't fine you. 6000 year old British zombies are lawful evil and can't write you an infraction unless you break a by-law.
Civilian infrastructure, maybe, if advanced weaponry is built on civilian rather than military technology. But there are always other targets than the enemy's civilians. Start with their economy, if that doesn't work then go to town on their infrastructure. Three days without a steady food supply and you've got a city on its knees.
They use guerrilla warfare, which is notoriously ineffective, because it's the best they can do.
It's what the who now? Guerrilla warfare is a P.R. and resource-denial strategy rather than an invasion strategy. That doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly effective, which is why the behemoth that is the U.S. military can't 'beat' a bunch of scruffy extremists hiding in schools and hospitals. The problem with guerrilla warfare is a moral one - in order to engage in it you need to be willing to get a lot of innocent people killed.
The only thing you have to stop people from believing in is their right to impose their beliefs on others. Whether it be Islamists trying to convert the world into a Sharia state, or the U.S. trying to 'help' foreign countries be democratic, no good comes of meddling in others' affairs. Sadly it's one of the most basic human endeavours.
It may not be marketed as such but on the Zicam website the nasal gel in question is described:
Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel is an over-the-counter homeopathic nasal gel that provides safe and effective relief from the symptoms of hay fever and other upper respiratory allergies, such as runny nose, sneezing, itchy and watery eyes, nasal congestion, and sinus pressure.
(Emphasis mine). So they themselves definitely describe it as homeopathic.
What made me laugh was this later entry in the Q&A:
Q: Why could it take 1-2 weeks before I notice the effect of Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel?
Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel begins working from the first time you use it. While it is not understood why consistent use over 1-2 weeks is necessary to see results, clinical research on this product indicate that it may take one to two weeks to see a decrease in symptoms. For best results, use Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel up to one week before contact to known causes of your allergies.
True. Apparently it "contains zinc" - according to this fact sheet:
While Zicam also makes zinc-containing oral cold remedies, these are not subject to this warning because the development of anosmia appears to be related to the intranasal application of zinc.
Don't these guys know ANYTHING about homeopathic medicines? The strongest ones don't have any of the 'active ingredient' in them at all, you just take sugar pills and think happy thoughts at them until the sun shines out your ass.
I don't know - I've always defined 'indie' for myself as being 'hobbyist with dreams of commercial success'. That's why Braid annoyed me so much - sure, the guy did it himself with the help of a hired artist, but if you re-mortgage your house and take a year off to build your dream game, you can't put yourself in the same box as someone who has to work full time to feed their family and develops games in the hour or two a night after his wife has finally stopped interrupting him and gone to sleep.
Ooh, good points! I guess, having thought about it more thoroughly (and just replied to your sibling post), my main concerns are less about a man-in-the-middle attack and more about a false sense of anonymity when downloading a prohibited file from a government-run node.
True, but I don't know how far plausible deniability goes as a defense if you're downloading something illegal. The data you're downloading ends up being sourced from a government honeypot:
The government knows what's being downloaded, because it originates from their network.
The government can approximate how many packets of that file go to the same node, even if the node requests fragments from different files, as long as they own a substantial (say >10%) proportion of the adjacent nodes
If they can prove (by collaborating between nodes) that a statistically unlikely percentage of the packets for the file were sent to a particular node, that strongly indicates that said node is the source of the query.
Therefore they can give enough of a 'reasonable cause' for a search warrant or similar.
Sure, they may not pin you (if you keep your local computer meticulously clean and don't leave anything lying around) but they can certainly make your life a real pain.
Good point! I think that 'freedom arbitrage' (if you can call it that; the trading of information between two jurisdictions, one of which allows the information and one of which outlaws it) is probably one of the very few valid reasons (from a government point of view) to use secure / untraceable communications. That said, it only works if you're in the jurisdiction that allows the information that you're trading. The problem is that, unless international philanthropy becomes far more widespread than it currently is, it still won't be remotely as prevalent as avoidance of 'moral police' laws.
Funny, I read the whole thing (including the 'God Bless' at the end) in Ned Flanders' voice. It makes it even more disturbing.;)
Sigs and religion aside, it's not surprising that this first wave of DIY genetic screening tests is somewhat iffy. It's a lot more complex than things like pregnancy tests, and they've only been around for a relatively short amount of time. Sorta like the difference between detecting a particular file on your computer vs. testing for a particular few bytes in that file being one of several values, except the computer's made out of goo.
If you can 'disappear' anyone who argues, or if you just have really f**king horribly implemented electronic voting that might very well be able to swing the election by itself as part of its own plan for world domination, then it's not so hard. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect that anyone trying to steal an election would be willing to spend not-inconsiderable resources on it. If you can influence the media then stories tend to go away too.
Hell, this happens in Australia to a certain degree - not with electoral fraud, but election promises. A polly will shout til he's blue in the face about "never ever" doing something, or "one hundred percent certainty" doing something else, and then just never mention it once he's elected, and the media will never call him on it. If they do there'll be some handwaving and it'll be dropped. There seems to be no system for holding politicians accountable for commitments they make.
This is my worry about things like Tor - as I understand it, the anonymity is provided by bouncing encrypted packets between nodes, and is predicated on the nodes not collaborating. As soon as you have one entity running N nodes, any request for any bounce length less than N becomes a simple client-server transaction and the server (probably Government-run) has a good chance to know what the client is downloading. Can anyone more qualified comment on this?
Hell, if I help out a guy with a flat tire who happens to proceed to rape a child, am I guilty of aiding a pedophile?
If you help a guy in a costume-shop janitor uniform change a flat tire on a white van over the road from a school, then there's a good chance you are. There are still legit reasons for the guy to be in this situation (maybe he's just been hired as the janitor?) but there's enough reasonable doubt to be suspicious.
I'm not saying it's right that you could be punished for either of our scenarios, but you must admit that the primary purpose of darknets is sharing of material that is criminally punishable for whatever reason. No-one bothers with darknets just to download music or movies, even when doing so opens you up to a potential lawsuit. They bother when whatever they're up/downloading will send them to jail. In countries with abusive governments, political dissent fits in that category, but in the U.S. along with most 'western' countries, you're quite welcome to shout whatever the hell you want on the street corners and the government will only move against you if you threaten to kill someone. So in western countries the only real motivations for using darknets are paranoia or kiddy porn.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never worked helpdesk, have you?
The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them.
30 kWh is 108 MJ. Say your car weighs 2 tons, well that's 18.1 kN of force it exerts on the ground. So your car would have to push one of these plates down a total of 5.9 kilometers to generate that much energy. Assuming that the plate only moves an inch, that's 238 thousand car/plate crossings to generate the quoted energy.
...and ward off 6000 year old British zombies.
Or you could just park in the marked bays and buy a ticket so they don't fine you. 6000 year old British zombies are lawful evil and can't write you an infraction unless you break a by-law.
Because that wouldn't be as funny. :P
I wonder when you will notice that karma is not his aim...
Oh, I see what you did there.
By the looks of it you're still waiting for a proportional font. ;)
Civilian infrastructure, maybe, if advanced weaponry is built on civilian rather than military technology. But there are always other targets than the enemy's civilians. Start with their economy, if that doesn't work then go to town on their infrastructure. Three days without a steady food supply and you've got a city on its knees.
They use guerrilla warfare, which is notoriously ineffective, because it's the best they can do.
It's what the who now? Guerrilla warfare is a P.R. and resource-denial strategy rather than an invasion strategy. That doesn't change the fact that it's incredibly effective, which is why the behemoth that is the U.S. military can't 'beat' a bunch of scruffy extremists hiding in schools and hospitals. The problem with guerrilla warfare is a moral one - in order to engage in it you need to be willing to get a lot of innocent people killed.
1. stop people believing in something
The only thing you have to stop people from believing in is their right to impose their beliefs on others. Whether it be Islamists trying to convert the world into a Sharia state, or the U.S. trying to 'help' foreign countries be democratic, no good comes of meddling in others' affairs. Sadly it's one of the most basic human endeavours.
I read it as "a-nose-MIA". A nose, missing in action.
Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel is an over-the-counter homeopathic nasal gel that provides safe and effective relief from the symptoms of hay fever and other upper respiratory allergies, such as runny nose, sneezing, itchy and watery eyes, nasal congestion, and sinus pressure.
(Emphasis mine). So they themselves definitely describe it as homeopathic.
What made me laugh was this later entry in the Q&A:
Q: Why could it take 1-2 weeks before I notice the effect of Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel?
Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel begins working from the first time you use it. While it is not understood why consistent use over 1-2 weeks is necessary to see results, clinical research on this product indicate that it may take one to two weeks to see a decrease in symptoms. For best results, use Zicam Allergy Relief Nasal Gel up to one week before contact to known causes of your allergies.
While Zicam also makes zinc-containing oral cold remedies, these are not subject to this warning because the development of anosmia appears to be related to the intranasal application of zinc.
Don't these guys know ANYTHING about homeopathic medicines? The strongest ones don't have any of the 'active ingredient' in them at all, you just take sugar pills and think happy thoughts at them until the sun shines out your ass.
I've heard that the failure rate on SSD's can be as high as 20%.
As Heinlein put it wonderfully in 'Tunnel in the Sky':
The death rate is the same for us as for anybody ... one person, one death, sooner or later. - Cpt. Helen Walker
There are no pirates on the sun. That's why the surface of the sun is so hot. In retrospect, it's obvious, isn't it?
1. The developer does the work on his own dime.
I don't know - I've always defined 'indie' for myself as being 'hobbyist with dreams of commercial success'. That's why Braid annoyed me so much - sure, the guy did it himself with the help of a hired artist, but if you re-mortgage your house and take a year off to build your dream game, you can't put yourself in the same box as someone who has to work full time to feed their family and develops games in the hour or two a night after his wife has finally stopped interrupting him and gone to sleep.
Well, unless these guys are wrong (or lying, paid for by big oil and coal of course!), our carbon emissions are heating Mars and Jupiter...
Ooh, good points! I guess, having thought about it more thoroughly (and just replied to your sibling post), my main concerns are less about a man-in-the-middle attack and more about a false sense of anonymity when downloading a prohibited file from a government-run node.
Sure, they may not pin you (if you keep your local computer meticulously clean and don't leave anything lying around) but they can certainly make your life a real pain.
Good point! I think that 'freedom arbitrage' (if you can call it that; the trading of information between two jurisdictions, one of which allows the information and one of which outlaws it) is probably one of the very few valid reasons (from a government point of view) to use secure / untraceable communications. That said, it only works if you're in the jurisdiction that allows the information that you're trading. The problem is that, unless international philanthropy becomes far more widespread than it currently is, it still won't be remotely as prevalent as avoidance of 'moral police' laws.
Funny, I read the whole thing (including the 'God Bless' at the end) in Ned Flanders' voice. It makes it even more disturbing. ;)
Sigs and religion aside, it's not surprising that this first wave of DIY genetic screening tests is somewhat iffy. It's a lot more complex than things like pregnancy tests, and they've only been around for a relatively short amount of time. Sorta like the difference between detecting a particular file on your computer vs. testing for a particular few bytes in that file being one of several values, except the computer's made out of goo.
If you can 'disappear' anyone who argues, or if you just have really f**king horribly implemented electronic voting that might very well be able to swing the election by itself as part of its own plan for world domination, then it's not so hard. I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect that anyone trying to steal an election would be willing to spend not-inconsiderable resources on it. If you can influence the media then stories tend to go away too.
Hell, this happens in Australia to a certain degree - not with electoral fraud, but election promises. A polly will shout til he's blue in the face about "never ever" doing something, or "one hundred percent certainty" doing something else, and then just never mention it once he's elected, and the media will never call him on it. If they do there'll be some handwaving and it'll be dropped. There seems to be no system for holding politicians accountable for commitments they make.
This is my worry about things like Tor - as I understand it, the anonymity is provided by bouncing encrypted packets between nodes, and is predicated on the nodes not collaborating. As soon as you have one entity running N nodes, any request for any bounce length less than N becomes a simple client-server transaction and the server (probably Government-run) has a good chance to know what the client is downloading. Can anyone more qualified comment on this?
Hell, if I help out a guy with a flat tire who happens to proceed to rape a child, am I guilty of aiding a pedophile?
If you help a guy in a costume-shop janitor uniform change a flat tire on a white van over the road from a school, then there's a good chance you are. There are still legit reasons for the guy to be in this situation (maybe he's just been hired as the janitor?) but there's enough reasonable doubt to be suspicious.
I'm not saying it's right that you could be punished for either of our scenarios, but you must admit that the primary purpose of darknets is sharing of material that is criminally punishable for whatever reason. No-one bothers with darknets just to download music or movies, even when doing so opens you up to a potential lawsuit. They bother when whatever they're up/downloading will send them to jail. In countries with abusive governments, political dissent fits in that category, but in the U.S. along with most 'western' countries, you're quite welcome to shout whatever the hell you want on the street corners and the government will only move against you if you threaten to kill someone. So in western countries the only real motivations for using darknets are paranoia or kiddy porn.
Last I checked, more communication was a good thing.
That's what my wife keeps telling me. I keep replying that it doesn't help much if it's only going one way... >.<