What would be preferable would be to release the product before the library is obsolete, then have a revenue stream to support an ongoing update schedule to resolve problems as they're found, rather than as spare time permits.
Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Market standards.
When I wrote my first released software, a good idea and a few hundred lines of code would be sufficient to get a customer base, because the odds were good that it was a unique new tool that helped somebody.
Now, to even get customers to try a product, it has to have a good website, professionally-designed interface, and be significantly better in some way than the dozen other equivalent tools available. All of that polish takes time, and if you're working on a spare-time basis, that means it takes a scale of years to produce a viable product. During that time, technology still changes, and that promising library that saved so much time is now obsolete and considered a security risk. Updating the product is possible, but it takes more time, and that means more risk. Finally, when the product is viable, it has to compete with an offering from a bigger company with an established revenue stream.
I don't mean to imply that it's impossible to succeed with spare-time projects, but it is more difficult now than even ten years ago. Software has moved from being a few amusements and office tools to a mature industry driving the majority of our civilization. There's competition out there for most of the current generation of ideas, where there simply wasn't before.
Having previously been an audio engineer and a software developer, I think I'm qualified to point out the distinction: Between digital and analog equipment, only one is easy to understand.
See, you have to realize that I grew up with this stuff. I can slap together a few bits after lunch and have a working custom mixer before dinner. I don't have to worry about a whole field of theory I don't know. This is easy.
From your perspective, it's just samples and code. From your dad's, it's signals and resistors. Yes, there are fascinating ways to emulate one with the other, but each is still different to the other, and switching means that a whole set of easy things become hard again, as you have to learn the other way.
The thing you're thinking of is called a "guitar". It's kinda cool... you have a string representing the waveform, and you manipulate it in several places with your fingers to change the pitch.
Of course, then there are effects, volume, pan, routing, and a number of other things that happen that don't really work by touching a "big ass touch screen".
I do use this kit (or did, anyway), and I agree with you.
Mouseover wheel functionality is phenomenal, and I've used a few tools that had it. Since I came from live mixing with physical controls, it seemed natural to just move to the control and turn the wheel (in my case, a side wheel on my mouse) to do the job.
I absolutely oppose the idea of sliders. That changes the size and relative position of the layout, and the visual appearance enough that it becomes a whole new beast to learn. For a digital product that still hasn't been able to fully replace its analog predecessors, adding such an extra hurdle is ridiculous.
Knobs don't belong in UIs, full stop. Use sliders instead.
Sliders mean precisely one thing in audio: attenuation.
They convey the same information, but are natural to use with the mouse.
No. To an audio engineer, they convey that they control is for adjusting the relative volume of a channel, because that's how we've used them for the last eight decades or so.
UIs should look like what other UIs on the same OS look like.
No, UIs should look like what other UIs on the same functional equipment look like. I mean, sure, there are the brands who have their "weird" controls, and every board puts the different functional blocks in different places, but a mixer channel is basically laid out the same regardless of who built it.
Now if you are a live performance musician or soundboard operator, you want everything you normally tweak to be in a known location so your muscle memory can get you there.
Well, yes. We don't exactly get much time to fix things before the audience notices, unless the house serves really good drinks...
Muscle memory won't carry over from a physical panel to a mouse. That's just not what muscle memory is.
It's not just muscles, though. It's also hand-eye coordination, and instant visual recognition of the controls. If I need to tweak a channel's gain, I know immediately I'm looking for a knob at the top of the channel stack. To change it to a slider means I have to look at something different and recognize it's the gain (rather than the typically-a-slider fader).
For another example, let's talk about pan. Usually it's a knob, but you're suggesting a slider. Since pan is a left-to-right control, it would make sense to have a horizontal slider. However, the fader is a up-or-down control, so it'd make sense to be a vertical slider. Now each channel is a wide and tall block, either wasting space or rearranging controls that have been standard for decades.
Awkward controls won't make things better. Putting the controls in about the same place on the screen as they are on the physical panel? Sure, that part makes sense. But knobs on a screen is just exasperating in its stupidity.
Now, the other thing to consider is that there is a reason the knobs are knobs on physical boards. The knobs are controls that rarely need adjustment. They're meant to be set at the beginning of a piece, and are typically left alone. Sure, there are a number of weird moments where the vocalist gets an effect bumped on, or the guitarist runs across the stage with his sound panning to match... but primarily, the knobs are just left alone. They're there if you need them, but you usually don't. Usually the primary control is the fader, literally sitting at your fingertips. From that perspective,
it seems silly to turn knobs (which are very dense controls combining a display output with a range input in a small footprint) into sliders (which waste a lot of space with the unused slide). That's wasting valuable display space that I could be using for another effect, another monitor, or simply more channels of control.
Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
If public transportation were more popular, it could reap some scaling benefits, becoming more efficient. Since you (and many other folks) have found the bus to be too inefficient for your needs, you instead choose to drive, adding to traffic and increasing the per-passenger cost of the bus system.
I'm not saying it's wrong to drive yourself. I just find the cyclic effect interesting.
Oh good... It's been days since I got involved in a holy war.
The problem with the inferred reference to sysvinit is that sysvinit is very labor-intensive for development. It's perfectly fine if all of your other software and systems are also rock-solid, but its simplicity puts a lot of work on the init script's author to not just define, but actively check prerequisites for service availability. The onus is also on the software author to handle service crashes and restarts gracefully, unless the inittab is used - but that doesn't have the flexibility of scripts.
Yes, sysvinit has been around for decades and is good enough for people who've spent decades getting used to its quirks, and running software where someone else has already put in the effort to make it work. Unfortunately, in environments like my company's product, where our software has to run different services based on what network resources are available, that architecture leads to a lot of complicated scripting and dependencies on other tools.
Back when a Unix system only needed a few services, and they were expected to run constantly in a controlled environment, sysvinit was fine. Now that Linux runs in practically every environment imaginable, the whole system needs to be designed with flexibility in mind. Systemd certainly isn't the only solution, but it's still better than what we had.
Ah, yes... That's why I've had to fight managers who wanted devs to have root on production systems. After all, the devs are all perfectly qualified to have admin power, since he was sure he only hired good people... and the devs need root to read the system log files and attach tools for debugging!
I don't think the current level of fraud is terribly bad, and I'm not suggesting dismantling anything. Rather, I'm suggesting that simplistic statements like "just give us single-payer healthcare" or "just give us universal basic income" or "just cut taxes" or "just cut spending" are all ridiculous, because the actual implementations are so much more complicated than their basic ideas. They're good ideas, but too often I see people under the illusion that they're something that can happen in the short term.
Now how much income? How do we account for inflation? Who gets to answer those questions? Is there any accommodation for unequal needs? What qualifies as "universal"? Does it apply to all citizens? Does it apply to all residents? Do convicted felons still get the paycheck while in prison? How do we stop fraud? Where does the money come from? Is that fair and just?
This basically summarizes why the government rarely implements simple solutions. They're rarely simple.
There is always fraud. If it's possible for someone to get the assistance while still getting income from illegal or under-the-table dealings, someone will do it, even if just as a way to get by while "sticking it to the Man". Yes, that creative ingenuity would probably be more profitable in a legal enterprise, but there is always someone who just wants to get away with a scam. Remember, humans are horrible creatures.
For reference, I will defer to an actual lawyer. The Illustrated Guide to Law is an absolutely fantastic reference for basic legal fundamentals. Twopages in particular are good places to start for a particular example, applicable in this case.
By coincidence, it even addresses the privacy issue: There's no such expectation while in someone else's home.
The rest of the series is also great material for understanding the principles involved.
So you would have them process/blacklist every possible audio track from every show, movie, and radio broadcast ever created?
...yes?
It's not an intractable problem; merely an issue of scale, and the folks producing these systems are excellent at solving scaling issues. After all, the process has already begun with music.
As one possible solution, start with the libraries from Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Those libraries are already digitized and delivered in high-quality streams. As broadcast streams are produced, take a feed from each content-producing station, and process that. Note that since these streams can be processed faster than they're viewed, the backlog can be eventually caught up.
On the blacklist side, false positives can be reduced by listening to identify what media is being played. If you're watching Law and Order, for example, the device (or more appropriately, the cloud system behind it) can recognize the episode, and know to ignore the remaining dialog. That in turn increases the confidence of matches that aren't part of the episode's audio track. Conversely, when you change the station, the device can detect the deviation from the soundtrack, and lower that confidence input.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that's not how it works.
Setting aside the comedy of a terms-of-use dispute, the police still (apparently) acted lawfully, as they believed they had probable cause to visit the house. Anything they observed during that visit would be evidence in its own right, including any threats or actions made leading to the arrest. Even if the recordings (911 call and Google's recordings, if available) were thrown own of court, the officers' testimony would probably still be admissible. They could say they were sent to the house by a 911 call, but wouldn't be able to say anything about the contents of the call.
And those audio tracks can be processed and blacklisted, so those particular lines won't have any effect. As I understand, there are ongoing efforts for such things, but they're still incomplete at the moment.
What criteria are used to determine whether that obligation is being met? Can they be gamed by lazy people to do the bare minimum work to get maximum benefits? Is it fair to let people take advantage of welfare programs like that? Is it right to force people to meet that obligation if they legitimately can't hold a job due to disability? Who decides what disabilities qualify? Who decides whether someone meets a disability? Who has the ability to even answer these questions?
I am an American as well, but with a different perspective.
our Department of Defense is funded to the tune of more than 500 billion dollars.
Our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars.
It employs close to three million people.
That's 1% of our population.
This doesnt count the literal millions of people whom are employed as military contractors
One. Literally one million. A quick search shows that adding up the top 9 contracters is under 900,000 people, and a large portion of each of those companies actually sits outside the defense industry. For simplicity, let's round up to a nice single million. That's not even enough to bump our percentage beyond statistical error.
providing everything from catering to private security and transportation (our troops fly commercial aircraft frequently.)
Their contracts are included in the DoD's budget. Our troops fly with paid tickets, most often coming out of that DoD budget as well.
we helped ourselves to the war chest during WW2 to get out of a crippling depression fueled by unregulated credit markets.
That's a nice story that resonates well with today's economic fears, but it's only partly true. When the stock (not credit) market crashed, it triggered a period of deflation. That in turn led to a drastic cut in spending, including the spending on new credit. Then Europe started to default on its credit that we had extended during World War I, and due to political instability, did not have much hope for recovering. That froze the credit market, as well. That would probably have not been so bad, except that a century of bad agricultural practices had crippled the Great Plains farmland, and a series of droughts decimated the recovery efforts.
When World War II began, the economic recovery was well underway, with the GDP back up to pre-1929 levels, but confidence was still low (much as it still is today after the 2007 recession). While the war brought us a huge new market for defense technology, it didn't bring much funding. Instead, the massive bond program led to what was essentially a crowdfunded war effort. In a curious turn, the war bonds effectively boosted the consumer confidence, because they offered a future income as well as inspiring patriotism.
Then the paranoia of a generation led us to stumble into central america, the middle east, and southeast asia.
To be fair, the paranoia was mostly warranted. During World War II, the Soviet bloc also recovered well from their own economic troubles, and their economies had led to political expansion that cut off emerging markets for the United States. The Soviet Union also gained a significant amount of territory in Europe through the war, and they maintained exclusive control, apparently fueling the Soviet economy at the West's expense.
Now, the US military is too big to do anything but sustain, or get bigger.
Or it could actually get smaller, as its budget did after 2010. It's ramping up again, but slowly.
rolling back the defense budget is not an option in a nation that makes nothing anymore.
Again, our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars. That's a lot of "nothing" we make. Our defense budget is only about 3.3% of that. For supporting 1% of the population, it's a little disproportionate, but not unreasonable.
So, we pick our battles and fight the wars we have an overwhelming supremacy in waging.
Again, in the interest of honesty, there are very few places where we don't have an overwhelming supremacy. We have nukes, if we chose to use them. Of course, nukes are bad. So is carpet-bombing. So is a fu
Gee... with numbers like that, it'd seem that it'd be practical to use nuclear bombs as propulsion to get all that energy into making a payload orbit the planet. It'd probably work well on paper, but you can be sure nobody would want to deal with the complexities of cleaning up after a bomb-based liftoff.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be preferable would be to release the product before the library is obsolete, then have a revenue stream to support an ongoing update schedule to resolve problems as they're found, rather than as spare time permits.
Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Market standards.
When I wrote my first released software, a good idea and a few hundred lines of code would be sufficient to get a customer base, because the odds were good that it was a unique new tool that helped somebody.
Now, to even get customers to try a product, it has to have a good website, professionally-designed interface, and be significantly better in some way than the dozen other equivalent tools available. All of that polish takes time, and if you're working on a spare-time basis, that means it takes a scale of years to produce a viable product. During that time, technology still changes, and that promising library that saved so much time is now obsolete and considered a security risk. Updating the product is possible, but it takes more time, and that means more risk. Finally, when the product is viable, it has to compete with an offering from a bigger company with an established revenue stream.
I don't mean to imply that it's impossible to succeed with spare-time projects, but it is more difficult now than even ten years ago. Software has moved from being a few amusements and office tools to a mature industry driving the majority of our civilization. There's competition out there for most of the current generation of ideas, where there simply wasn't before.
Having previously been an audio engineer and a software developer, I think I'm qualified to point out the distinction: Between digital and analog equipment, only one is easy to understand.
See, you have to realize that I grew up with this stuff. I can slap together a few bits after lunch and have a working custom mixer before dinner. I don't have to worry about a whole field of theory I don't know. This is easy.
From your perspective, it's just samples and code. From your dad's, it's signals and resistors. Yes, there are fascinating ways to emulate one with the other, but each is still different to the other, and switching means that a whole set of easy things become hard again, as you have to learn the other way.
The thing you're thinking of is called a "guitar". It's kinda cool... you have a string representing the waveform, and you manipulate it in several places with your fingers to change the pitch.
Of course, then there are effects, volume, pan, routing, and a number of other things that happen that don't really work by touching a "big ass touch screen".
I do use this kit (or did, anyway), and I agree with you.
Mouseover wheel functionality is phenomenal, and I've used a few tools that had it. Since I came from live mixing with physical controls, it seemed natural to just move to the control and turn the wheel (in my case, a side wheel on my mouse) to do the job.
I absolutely oppose the idea of sliders. That changes the size and relative position of the layout, and the visual appearance enough that it becomes a whole new beast to learn. For a digital product that still hasn't been able to fully replace its analog predecessors, adding such an extra hurdle is ridiculous.
Knobs don't belong in UIs, full stop. Use sliders instead.
Sliders mean precisely one thing in audio: attenuation.
They convey the same information, but are natural to use with the mouse.
No. To an audio engineer, they convey that they control is for adjusting the relative volume of a channel, because that's how we've used them for the last eight decades or so.
UIs should look like what other UIs on the same OS look like.
No, UIs should look like what other UIs on the same functional equipment look like. I mean, sure, there are the brands who have their "weird" controls, and every board puts the different functional blocks in different places, but a mixer channel is basically laid out the same regardless of who built it.
Now if you are a live performance musician or soundboard operator, you want everything you normally tweak to be in a known location so your muscle memory can get you there.
Well, yes. We don't exactly get much time to fix things before the audience notices, unless the house serves really good drinks...
Muscle memory won't carry over from a physical panel to a mouse. That's just not what muscle memory is.
It's not just muscles, though. It's also hand-eye coordination, and instant visual recognition of the controls. If I need to tweak a channel's gain, I know immediately I'm looking for a knob at the top of the channel stack. To change it to a slider means I have to look at something different and recognize it's the gain (rather than the typically-a-slider fader).
For another example, let's talk about pan. Usually it's a knob, but you're suggesting a slider. Since pan is a left-to-right control, it would make sense to have a horizontal slider. However, the fader is a up-or-down control, so it'd make sense to be a vertical slider. Now each channel is a wide and tall block, either wasting space or rearranging controls that have been standard for decades.
Awkward controls won't make things better. Putting the controls in about the same place on the screen as they are on the physical panel? Sure, that part makes sense. But knobs on a screen is just exasperating in its stupidity.
Now, the other thing to consider is that there is a reason the knobs are knobs on physical boards. The knobs are controls that rarely need adjustment. They're meant to be set at the beginning of a piece, and are typically left alone. Sure, there are a number of weird moments where the vocalist gets an effect bumped on, or the guitarist runs across the stage with his sound panning to match... but primarily, the knobs are just left alone. They're there if you need them, but you usually don't. Usually the primary control is the fader, literally sitting at your fingertips. From that perspective, it seems silly to turn knobs (which are very dense controls combining a display output with a range input in a small footprint) into sliders (which waste a lot of space with the unused slide). That's wasting valuable display space that I could be using for another effect, another monitor, or simply more channels of control.
Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
New standard procedure: Clip this thing onto that circuit board until the nerds arrive with their magic box.
If public transportation were more popular, it could reap some scaling benefits, becoming more efficient. Since you (and many other folks) have found the bus to be too inefficient for your needs, you instead choose to drive, adding to traffic and increasing the per-passenger cost of the bus system.
I'm not saying it's wrong to drive yourself. I just find the cyclic effect interesting.
Why bother with a telescope? In an area with little light pollution, you can see many satellites with the naked eye.
Oh good... It's been days since I got involved in a holy war.
The problem with the inferred reference to sysvinit is that sysvinit is very labor-intensive for development. It's perfectly fine if all of your other software and systems are also rock-solid, but its simplicity puts a lot of work on the init script's author to not just define, but actively check prerequisites for service availability. The onus is also on the software author to handle service crashes and restarts gracefully, unless the inittab is used - but that doesn't have the flexibility of scripts.
Yes, sysvinit has been around for decades and is good enough for people who've spent decades getting used to its quirks, and running software where someone else has already put in the effort to make it work. Unfortunately, in environments like my company's product, where our software has to run different services based on what network resources are available, that architecture leads to a lot of complicated scripting and dependencies on other tools.
Back when a Unix system only needed a few services, and they were expected to run constantly in a controlled environment, sysvinit was fine. Now that Linux runs in practically every environment imaginable, the whole system needs to be designed with flexibility in mind. Systemd certainly isn't the only solution, but it's still better than what we had.
Ah, yes... That's why I've had to fight managers who wanted devs to have root on production systems. After all, the devs are all perfectly qualified to have admin power, since he was sure he only hired good people... and the devs need root to read the system log files and attach tools for debugging!
I don't think the current level of fraud is terribly bad, and I'm not suggesting dismantling anything. Rather, I'm suggesting that simplistic statements like "just give us single-payer healthcare" or "just give us universal basic income" or "just cut taxes" or "just cut spending" are all ridiculous, because the actual implementations are so much more complicated than their basic ideas. They're good ideas, but too often I see people under the illusion that they're something that can happen in the short term.
Ah yes, the uncivilized land of Australia, where Google can't possibly get a data-sharing contract with the production studios.
Sure it does...
Now how much income? How do we account for inflation? Who gets to answer those questions? Is there any accommodation for unequal needs? What qualifies as "universal"? Does it apply to all citizens? Does it apply to all residents? Do convicted felons still get the paycheck while in prison? How do we stop fraud? Where does the money come from? Is that fair and just?
This basically summarizes why the government rarely implements simple solutions. They're rarely simple.
There is always fraud. If it's possible for someone to get the assistance while still getting income from illegal or under-the-table dealings, someone will do it, even if just as a way to get by while "sticking it to the Man". Yes, that creative ingenuity would probably be more profitable in a legal enterprise, but there is always someone who just wants to get away with a scam. Remember, humans are horrible creatures.
For reference, I will defer to an actual lawyer. The Illustrated Guide to Law is an absolutely fantastic reference for basic legal fundamentals. Two pages in particular are good places to start for a particular example, applicable in this case.
By coincidence, it even addresses the privacy issue: There's no such expectation while in someone else's home.
The rest of the series is also great material for understanding the principles involved.
So you would have them process/blacklist every possible audio track from every show, movie, and radio broadcast ever created?
...yes?
It's not an intractable problem; merely an issue of scale, and the folks producing these systems are excellent at solving scaling issues. After all, the process has already begun with music.
As one possible solution, start with the libraries from Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Those libraries are already digitized and delivered in high-quality streams. As broadcast streams are produced, take a feed from each content-producing station, and process that. Note that since these streams can be processed faster than they're viewed, the backlog can be eventually caught up.
On the blacklist side, false positives can be reduced by listening to identify what media is being played. If you're watching Law and Order, for example, the device (or more appropriately, the cloud system behind it) can recognize the episode, and know to ignore the remaining dialog. That in turn increases the confidence of matches that aren't part of the episode's audio track. Conversely, when you change the station, the device can detect the deviation from the soundtrack, and lower that confidence input.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that's not how it works.
Setting aside the comedy of a terms-of-use dispute, the police still (apparently) acted lawfully, as they believed they had probable cause to visit the house. Anything they observed during that visit would be evidence in its own right, including any threats or actions made leading to the arrest. Even if the recordings (911 call and Google's recordings, if available) were thrown own of court, the officers' testimony would probably still be admissible. They could say they were sent to the house by a 911 call, but wouldn't be able to say anything about the contents of the call.
And those audio tracks can be processed and blacklisted, so those particular lines won't have any effect. As I understand, there are ongoing efforts for such things, but they're still incomplete at the moment.
The devil's in the details.
What criteria are used to determine whether that obligation is being met? Can they be gamed by lazy people to do the bare minimum work to get maximum benefits? Is it fair to let people take advantage of welfare programs like that? Is it right to force people to meet that obligation if they legitimately can't hold a job due to disability? Who decides what disabilities qualify? Who decides whether someone meets a disability? Who has the ability to even answer these questions?
disclosure: american here.
I am an American as well, but with a different perspective.
our Department of Defense is funded to the tune of more than 500 billion dollars.
Our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars.
It employs close to three million people.
That's 1% of our population.
This doesnt count the literal millions of people whom are employed as military contractors
One. Literally one million. A quick search shows that adding up the top 9 contracters is under 900,000 people, and a large portion of each of those companies actually sits outside the defense industry. For simplicity, let's round up to a nice single million. That's not even enough to bump our percentage beyond statistical error.
providing everything from catering to private security and transportation (our troops fly commercial aircraft frequently.)
Their contracts are included in the DoD's budget. Our troops fly with paid tickets, most often coming out of that DoD budget as well.
we helped ourselves to the war chest during WW2 to get out of a crippling depression fueled by unregulated credit markets.
That's a nice story that resonates well with today's economic fears, but it's only partly true. When the stock (not credit) market crashed, it triggered a period of deflation. That in turn led to a drastic cut in spending, including the spending on new credit. Then Europe started to default on its credit that we had extended during World War I, and due to political instability, did not have much hope for recovering. That froze the credit market, as well. That would probably have not been so bad, except that a century of bad agricultural practices had crippled the Great Plains farmland, and a series of droughts decimated the recovery efforts.
When World War II began, the economic recovery was well underway, with the GDP back up to pre-1929 levels, but confidence was still low (much as it still is today after the 2007 recession). While the war brought us a huge new market for defense technology, it didn't bring much funding. Instead, the massive bond program led to what was essentially a crowdfunded war effort. In a curious turn, the war bonds effectively boosted the consumer confidence, because they offered a future income as well as inspiring patriotism.
Then the paranoia of a generation led us to stumble into central america, the middle east, and southeast asia.
To be fair, the paranoia was mostly warranted. During World War II, the Soviet bloc also recovered well from their own economic troubles, and their economies had led to political expansion that cut off emerging markets for the United States. The Soviet Union also gained a significant amount of territory in Europe through the war, and they maintained exclusive control, apparently fueling the Soviet economy at the West's expense.
Now, the US military is too big to do anything but sustain, or get bigger.
Or it could actually get smaller, as its budget did after 2010. It's ramping up again, but slowly.
rolling back the defense budget is not an option in a nation that makes nothing anymore.
Again, our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars. That's a lot of "nothing" we make. Our defense budget is only about 3.3% of that. For supporting 1% of the population, it's a little disproportionate, but not unreasonable.
So, we pick our battles and fight the wars we have an overwhelming supremacy in waging.
Again, in the interest of honesty, there are very few places where we don't have an overwhelming supremacy. We have nukes, if we chose to use them. Of course, nukes are bad. So is carpet-bombing. So is a fu
Gee... with numbers like that, it'd seem that it'd be practical to use nuclear bombs as propulsion to get all that energy into making a payload orbit the planet. It'd probably work well on paper, but you can be sure nobody would want to deal with the complexities of cleaning up after a bomb-based liftoff.
Somebody designing such a thing would be a good sanity check on your math.
I talk to the chickens, all the time. ... They are foul beasts ...
They are fowl beasts.
Eh... not so much. The NSA only makes the tools for a honeypot. Actually deploying them is a CIA job.
Then again, the CIA could be running the op, using the NSA as a cover...