CNN was good twenty years ago, but decades of the TV news industry paying people dirt at the local level, salary cuts, job cuts, and the rapid demise of newspapers has resulted in most of the best and brightest picking other industries and avoiding journalism like the plague. As a result, you get people at the local level who are terrible at thinking on their feet and asking the tough questions.
And eventually, those people at the local level bubbled up to the highest levels. It was inevitable. I spoke about this problem more than a decade ago in front of a group of major industry players. It was obvious then where things were going. Now that they've gone, it's just about too late to fix it, so the best and most trustworthy sources of news are Comedy Central and blogs. It's all so very depressing.
If you are exceptionally violent with the machine, I suppose it's possible to damage or dislodge the flap, which would cause red light to shine out the audio jack whenever the sound card is on.
No violence necessary. And there's no flap. It's a microswitch that detects whether the longer connector is there or not. If that switch gets knocked into the wrong position, the computer assumes there's a digital connector in place and enables that hardware.
This happens occasionally to people. The fix is to take a bobby pin (rubber coated, please) and push it beyond the switch, then pull the switch back towards you, then pull it out. Either that or put in a real 1/8" TOSLINK connector and pull it out.
Windows 7 supports EFI natively. You apparently do need Apple drivers to use the internal keyboard and trackpad on laptops, though.
Regarding power management, AFAIK, the worst case scenario would be if the SMC drivers didn't load, in which case after the SMC's watchdog timer fires, the SMC should bring all the fans up to full blast. You're not going to overheat the CPU by failing to load the drivers. You can verify this if you'd like. With your computer idle, unload the fan control KEXT. Thirty seconds or a minute later, the fans should ramp up. When you reload the KEXT, they should spin immediately back down to what you'd expect with the machine idle. At least this is what happens in the G5 towers. I'm assuming the Intel laptops behave the same way.
CPU power management is handled by the CPU, not by any special bits in the chipset, AFAIK, so that should be unaffected no matter what. And the hardware is designed to protect against getting too hot, so at some point, the CPU starts putting itself to sleep to keep the temperature within bounds, and if even that isn't enough, the computer shuts down. AFAIK, most of that happens in hardware, so even a really broken OS shouldn't be able to damage hardware. At the very least, it's pretty unlikely.
You say that and then go on to describe a high end ultraportable far beyond what currently exists or is likely to exist in the next three years.
The only reason what I want doesn't exist today is that ultraportables are being designed primarily around price. I don't want a cheap netbook. I want an ultraportable that can go a day without recharging by having a limited CPU. Indeed, what I want is pretty much on the market today, with three exceptions, none of which are that hard to add.
Longer battery life. More on this later.
FireWire 800. Although a "high end" feature, AFAIK, it's single-digit dollars worth of silicon. Reason: By providing this (even if it is an unpowered or very low power FW800 port), you provide a way for this device to be used as a hard drive for another computer. That means that you can use a more powerful desktop computer, then unplug this thing from it and carry your digital life with you seamlessly. CPU power when you need it (at home, work, etc.), portability and long battery life when you need it (everywhere else).
DVI. Again, a couple bucks worth of silicon. Slight increase in power consumption, but only when it is active. Reason: VGA is being actively phased out. Every year, fewer and fewer of the monitors I see when I walk through Fry's still support it. Buying a laptop with VGA is just silly at this point. Either include a DVI (or mini-DVI) port or don't include a display port at all. A VGA port is just a waste of half a square inch of space that could be used for more useful connectors.
Twelve hour runtime on a dualcore Intel CPU while staying light, i.e. no fugly extra run battery hanging out?
Dual core Atom CPU. TDP is only 15W. And most of the time, one core is likely to be powered down anyway, so *average* power consumption (and by that, I mean typical consumption under light use) isn't that much higher than the netbook you're using now, and if you're using an older netbook with an older chipset, it might even be lower consumption by several watts.
If the battery in my MacBook can power a C2D laptop (around 40W including chipset) for an average of 6 hours, that same battery should power a dual core Atom (about 20W including chipset) for an average of 12 hours. So that gives you an idea of just how close the industry is to being able to achieve what I'm asking for. Adding just a couple of millimeters to the thickness of the unit should be enough to achieve comparable battery capacity in a netbook form factor.
Another possible solution is to use two batteries---a thin, flat one behind the LCD panel and a secondary swappable battery in the base of the machine. Add 2mm to the thickness of the machine and you've at least doubled your total battery capacity, and if you do it right, you would make the replaceable battery drain first so that you can swap it out while the machine is running, asleep, etc. without having to think about it.
If you want long runtime you want an ARM, period.
I really don't. I mean sure, an ARM CPU would be an order of magnitude lower power consumption. If you can't get 20+ hours of battery life in an ARM netbook, you're doing something wrong, and realistically, probably double that. I don't need *that* much runtime. I need to be able to reliably get through an eight hour day, even when running apps that stupidly waste CPU cycles and thwart attempts at proper power management.
The problem with ARM, however, is that you still have a CPU that can't run ANY of the software that I use regularly without CPU emulation, at which point performance would almost certainly fall well below the threshold of usability even with a 4-core Cortex. Sorry, but it just won't work for me. Maybe for some people, but not for me.
That's very true. That said, part of what makes the netbook so appealing is that the lack of processor power gives it the potential for battery life that wouldn't be practical with a faster CPU. I'd like a computer primarily for word processing, occasional light duty coding, etc. that I can carry easily with me on multi-hour airplane flights.
Here's what I want in a Netbook:
Reduced footprint/display height for use on airplanes
Average of 12 hour battery life
Dual-core Atom CPU
A real desktop OS like Linux or Mac OS X that allows apps full access to the hardware, the drive, etc.
256GB SATA flash drive from a reputable vendor.
Built-in flash reader that can handle BOTH CompactFlash cards and SD cards.
Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
One USB port for the rare occasion when anyone needs it.
Wired ethernet.
FireWire 800 port so that its internal hard drive can easily be accessed from a desktop computer. Alternatively, eSATA would be okay if the silicon can be used bidirectionally.
Mini-DVI output because VGA is going away and I think it's only a couple bucks difference in silicon cost.
Software that makes it easy to rip DVDs on another computer and push them into the iTunes library on this device (or similar).
Full-size keys. Rearrange and shrink the modifier keys, backspace, return, esc, ~, |, etc. to cut half an inch off the width if needed. Push the keyboard out to the left and right edges of the top case.
No-border display. Why waste potential screen real estate on a black or white plastic border around the screen?
Small trackpad.
Removable battery. This might not be necessary if you could guarantee at least 8 hours with the CPU at full bore; with my current laptop, I can go through two "6-hour" batteries in an afternoon without much effort at all, mainly because several apps I use are written so badly.
What I don't want:
Built-in camera for video conferencing (unless you can find a way to have one without adding a border around the screen).
VGA connector.
Optical drive.
Modem.
Soldered RAM or flash parts on the logic board.
What I don't care about:
price point (within reason)
thickness (within reason)
For me it's about portability and battery life. The problem is that every person you ask has different goals in a netbook. That's why it is important that there be a wide range of models with radically different characteristics. The only viable alternative to that is a handful of full-sized notebooks that try to be everything to everyone.
That was pretty much my thought, too. In fact, I had two reactions.
My first reaction was that this policy would end as soon as somebody had the balls to call the stewardess, ask to use the bathroom, be refused, then whip it out and urinate on the seat in front of him.
My second reaction was that it would be fun to get the words "urine bag" printed on the side of about a thousand clear plastic bags of appropriate shape and size. Tape instructions and three $1 bills to each one. The instructions would read as follows:
Take the attached $3 and purchase a bottle of apple juice after you pass through security. Carry it and this empty bag onto your flight. Thirty minutes prior to landing in the United States, pour the apple juice into the bag, seal the bag, hide the bottle, then press your call button. Present the bag to the flight attendant. Inform him or her that you could not wait. Try to suppress the urge to smile or laugh while doing so.
At least this doesn't apply to flights within the U.S. Presumably they'll change that to include the first hour of departing flights, in which case many flights would not allow bathroom breaks at all if it included U.S. destinations.
Explosive goes into condoms which are then stored in your body cavities.
This is what I've been pointing out ever since they started talking about those millimeter wave scanners. It is a trivial escalation that completely defeats both backscatter X-Ray and millimeter wave scanners. That means that the only way those machines add ANYTHING to security AT ALL is if they are installed without anybody knowing they are there. Now that we know about them, they are USELESS.
And still our government is spending millions of dollars on this complete waste of money. Follow the money and I'd be willing to place a sizable bet that the manufacturer of those scanners has contributed a large sum of money to one or both major political parties and/or the campaigns of several high-profile members of our government. That's the only explanation for our government's complete and utter inability to comprehend what a colossal waste of money these things are.
There is exactly ONE scanner technology that will do ANY good, and that's NQR. Spending even one penny on millimeter wave or backscatter X-Ray systems is just flushing money down the toilet.
You're partially right about why we don't have more DRM now, but you have forgotten that DRM can never work.
I think you're greatly underestimating DRM. It can never be unbreakable. That's a fundamental truth. That's not the purpose of DRM, though. The purpose of DRM is to prevent the average user from being able to copy it. To that end, some DRM works quite well.
By "proper", I meant a system in which the compressed data cannot feasibly be extracted by the owner of the physical media on which it is contained.
As for the problems you mention, that's pretty much the whole point of DRM---destroying people's fair use rights. That's why DRM is evil.:-)
That said, only one of those problems is necessarily hard to solve if somebody wants to do so. You could do rights loaning and transfer from one account to another fairly trivially through a web interface, assuming the other person has an account. You could even make it so that all of your devices have the rights to play the media if they are designed in the same way. The issue of going outside the service area temporarily could be solved by the decryption/decompression chip having flash inside it and storing the keys for some period of days. The issue of living outside the service area could largely be solved through a wired network connection and/or by using a satellite data system instead. The problem of the DRM servers going away could be solved by using an open protocol and having agreements to transfer the keys to another party if the DRM key vendor goes under.
The problem of having to buy all new hardware? Yeah, that's pretty much a given. No current hardware can feasibly do DRM in even a slightly secure way.
Nothing that matters has changed. Music was hard to copy. Then we got recordings. Symphony musicians declared that music would die. Though the symphony has diminished, the recorded form (copyable) has spawned new forms. And when copying became easier with DRM-free music online, the industry saw growth, not contraction. The same happened with the theatre and movies and again when DVD encryption was broken (after a brief downturn caused by the economy as a whole going into a recession, but which the industry blamed incorrectly on piracy). And software used to all have copy protection. Vendors consistently found that when they removed it, sales *increased*, and as a result, only a few apps today incorporate any significant DRM. What makes you think that books will somehow magically be different when they become more easily copyable?
Proper DRM is easy. You just need a device that takes an input file and an account name, then goes online using built-in GSM or CDMA networking hardware. Store the key in SRAM inside the decoder chip so that it is never stored in any part that is readable by sniffing bus lies on the board. You nearly eliminate the analog hole by building a display encoder chip that uses DSA to exchange an AES session key with the decryption/decompression chip. Thus, the only way to break the DRM is to simultaneously read every signal line going out to the display panel.
The only reasons we don't have proper DRM now are: A. the hardware needed to do DSA and AES is still too expensive for mass-marketed devices, B. the people designing DRM are inept, and C. the manufacturers of these devices aren't willing to sign a hundred year contract to pay for cellular data.
They basically are. I mean sure, they'll wrinkle, but as long as you dry them correctly with something between the pages so they don't stick together too badly, you'll still have something you can read, generally speaking.
Besides, it's really about not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you drop a book in the bathtub, in the worst case, you've lost a $5-20 book. Drop a book reader in the bathtub and you've lost a $300 device containing $6,000 worth of books, many of which have DRM protection that only lets you read them on one device... which is now a paperweight....
You could also overflow into an integer that contains a normally constant value of 1 that points into an array of pointers that changes depending on whether you are using version 1 or 2 of the data structure. When the value overflows, it resets it to zero and using version 1 on a version 2 data structure causes the contents of the comment to be used for the address.
Actually, I'd probably go with a packed data structure in which the string is allowed to overflow by one byte into the zip code integer or similar. Then, it will appear to be perfectly innocuous and functional. However, if you enter a string that is one byte too long, the top byte of the zip code integer becomes zero. Of course, it will always be zero on a big endian machine (assuming a 32-bit integer) because you only need the bottom 17 bits to hold all 5-digit zip codes. However, on little endian machines, it zeroes the LSB (which is usually nonzero). If you then calculate the city and state off the zip code and only use the human-entered value in the rare case of conflicts, you have something that would successfully misroute packages about 98% of the time when you specify a properly oversized comment value.
Normally, you would ignite it with an impact/compression force (often from another explosion). If you wanted it to combust all at once by merely adding heat, I *think* you would have to suddenly bring the entire mass up to combustion temperature all at once. That's harder than it sounds. That said, IANABE (I am not a bomb engineer), so I'm not the right person to answer that question.
Must be a regional thing. Slashdot tends to be reflective of engineers as a whole, and there's not a very big fundamentalist element here. They exist, but they aren't a sizable percentage of engineers.
Well, it doesn't take an engineer to strap on a bomb and push the button, so the liberal arts majors make good fodder. The fact is, of course, that the reason there are more engineers is that they more actively seek out engineers for their skills. For the same reason, there are more engineers in the military than would join by self selection. Seems pretty obvious to me and it has nothing to do withengineers having more conservative religious views (they are actually much less likely to hold any religious views at all) nor with views on compromising, etc.
In the long term, nothing happens because nearly all politicians are crooked. That said, if enough of them resign in disgrace quickly enough, we might--*might*--have a chance.
You're assuming that their hatred of the West has any basis in reality. It doesn't. Their hatred for the U.S. is entirely about power. The West has helped keep favorable regimes in power, and those regimes have tended to not be the people that the terrorists want in power. Thus, they hate the U.S. for aiding those regimes (some of whom may well have killed their friends and families, mind you, but the U.S. didn't do it directly). They hate the U.S. for protecting Israel. They hate the U.S. for... basically meddling in their affairs.
The fact of the matter is that if we were the monsters they think we are, the U.S. would have turned Yemen into glass already. It would take just a few minutes for a nuclear sub to launch a missile strike that would evaporate every human being in that entire country. We didn't do that. Why? Because it's wrong.
And that was my whole point. They're monsters because they massacre the innocent. They accuse us of being monsters, and yet despite having ample opportunity to wipe them off the map, we do not because we don't want to massacre the innocent. That's why they are evil and we are not. I'm not advocating such a response; I'm merely pointing out that it's disingenuous to say that we can't stop it. We simply don't have a good way of stopping terrorism without sinking to their level.
Finally, I would note that the vast majority of those folks' friends and families who have been killed by U.S. forces were killed because terrorists illegally used hospitals, schools, mosques, etc. as human shields. The terrorists put those people's friends and families deliberately in harm's way so that the U.S. would be forced to kill them to get the bad guys. I would argue that the terrorists are responsible for every one of those deaths, not the U.S. military.
Slashdot Mirror
You joke, but that model could actually work for textbooks.
CNN was good twenty years ago, but decades of the TV news industry paying people dirt at the local level, salary cuts, job cuts, and the rapid demise of newspapers has resulted in most of the best and brightest picking other industries and avoiding journalism like the plague. As a result, you get people at the local level who are terrible at thinking on their feet and asking the tough questions.
And eventually, those people at the local level bubbled up to the highest levels. It was inevitable. I spoke about this problem more than a decade ago in front of a group of major industry players. It was obvious then where things were going. Now that they've gone, it's just about too late to fix it, so the best and most trustworthy sources of news are Comedy Central and blogs. It's all so very depressing.
No violence necessary. And there's no flap. It's a microswitch that detects whether the longer connector is there or not. If that switch gets knocked into the wrong position, the computer assumes there's a digital connector in place and enables that hardware.
This happens occasionally to people. The fix is to take a bobby pin (rubber coated, please) and push it beyond the switch, then pull the switch back towards you, then pull it out. Either that or put in a real 1/8" TOSLINK connector and pull it out.
Windows 7 supports EFI natively. You apparently do need Apple drivers to use the internal keyboard and trackpad on laptops, though.
Regarding power management, AFAIK, the worst case scenario would be if the SMC drivers didn't load, in which case after the SMC's watchdog timer fires, the SMC should bring all the fans up to full blast. You're not going to overheat the CPU by failing to load the drivers. You can verify this if you'd like. With your computer idle, unload the fan control KEXT. Thirty seconds or a minute later, the fans should ramp up. When you reload the KEXT, they should spin immediately back down to what you'd expect with the machine idle. At least this is what happens in the G5 towers. I'm assuming the Intel laptops behave the same way.
CPU power management is handled by the CPU, not by any special bits in the chipset, AFAIK, so that should be unaffected no matter what. And the hardware is designed to protect against getting too hot, so at some point, the CPU starts putting itself to sleep to keep the temperature within bounds, and if even that isn't enough, the computer shuts down. AFAIK, most of that happens in hardware, so even a really broken OS shouldn't be able to damage hardware. At the very least, it's pretty unlikely.
The only reason what I want doesn't exist today is that ultraportables are being designed primarily around price. I don't want a cheap netbook. I want an ultraportable that can go a day without recharging by having a limited CPU. Indeed, what I want is pretty much on the market today, with three exceptions, none of which are that hard to add.
Dual core Atom CPU. TDP is only 15W. And most of the time, one core is likely to be powered down anyway, so *average* power consumption (and by that, I mean typical consumption under light use) isn't that much higher than the netbook you're using now, and if you're using an older netbook with an older chipset, it might even be lower consumption by several watts.
If the battery in my MacBook can power a C2D laptop (around 40W including chipset) for an average of 6 hours, that same battery should power a dual core Atom (about 20W including chipset) for an average of 12 hours. So that gives you an idea of just how close the industry is to being able to achieve what I'm asking for. Adding just a couple of millimeters to the thickness of the unit should be enough to achieve comparable battery capacity in a netbook form factor.
Another possible solution is to use two batteries---a thin, flat one behind the LCD panel and a secondary swappable battery in the base of the machine. Add 2mm to the thickness of the machine and you've at least doubled your total battery capacity, and if you do it right, you would make the replaceable battery drain first so that you can swap it out while the machine is running, asleep, etc. without having to think about it.
I really don't. I mean sure, an ARM CPU would be an order of magnitude lower power consumption. If you can't get 20+ hours of battery life in an ARM netbook, you're doing something wrong, and realistically, probably double that. I don't need *that* much runtime. I need to be able to reliably get through an eight hour day, even when running apps that stupidly waste CPU cycles and thwart attempts at proper power management.
The problem with ARM, however, is that you still have a CPU that can't run ANY of the software that I use regularly without CPU emulation, at which point performance would almost certainly fall well below the threshold of usability even with a 4-core Cortex. Sorry, but it just won't work for me. Maybe for some people, but not for me.
That's very true. That said, part of what makes the netbook so appealing is that the lack of processor power gives it the potential for battery life that wouldn't be practical with a faster CPU. I'd like a computer primarily for word processing, occasional light duty coding, etc. that I can carry easily with me on multi-hour airplane flights.
Here's what I want in a Netbook:
What I don't want:
What I don't care about:
For me it's about portability and battery life. The problem is that every person you ask has different goals in a netbook. That's why it is important that there be a wide range of models with radically different characteristics. The only viable alternative to that is a handful of full-sized notebooks that try to be everything to everyone.
That was pretty much my thought, too. In fact, I had two reactions.
My first reaction was that this policy would end as soon as somebody had the balls to call the stewardess, ask to use the bathroom, be refused, then whip it out and urinate on the seat in front of him.
My second reaction was that it would be fun to get the words "urine bag" printed on the side of about a thousand clear plastic bags of appropriate shape and size. Tape instructions and three $1 bills to each one. The instructions would read as follows:
Take the attached $3 and purchase a bottle of apple juice after you pass through security. Carry it and this empty bag onto your flight. Thirty minutes prior to landing in the United States, pour the apple juice into the bag, seal the bag, hide the bottle, then press your call button. Present the bag to the flight attendant. Inform him or her that you could not wait. Try to suppress the urge to smile or laugh while doing so.
At least this doesn't apply to flights within the U.S. Presumably they'll change that to include the first hour of departing flights, in which case many flights would not allow bathroom breaks at all if it included U.S. destinations.
Yes. It's called whistleblower protection, and we have those laws for a reason.
This is what I've been pointing out ever since they started talking about those millimeter wave scanners. It is a trivial escalation that completely defeats both backscatter X-Ray and millimeter wave scanners. That means that the only way those machines add ANYTHING to security AT ALL is if they are installed without anybody knowing they are there. Now that we know about them, they are USELESS.
And still our government is spending millions of dollars on this complete waste of money. Follow the money and I'd be willing to place a sizable bet that the manufacturer of those scanners has contributed a large sum of money to one or both major political parties and/or the campaigns of several high-profile members of our government. That's the only explanation for our government's complete and utter inability to comprehend what a colossal waste of money these things are.
There is exactly ONE scanner technology that will do ANY good, and that's NQR. Spending even one penny on millimeter wave or backscatter X-Ray systems is just flushing money down the toilet.
I think you're greatly underestimating DRM. It can never be unbreakable. That's a fundamental truth. That's not the purpose of DRM, though. The purpose of DRM is to prevent the average user from being able to copy it. To that end, some DRM works quite well.
By "proper", I meant a system in which the compressed data cannot feasibly be extracted by the owner of the physical media on which it is contained.
As for the problems you mention, that's pretty much the whole point of DRM---destroying people's fair use rights. That's why DRM is evil. :-)
That said, only one of those problems is necessarily hard to solve if somebody wants to do so. You could do rights loaning and transfer from one account to another fairly trivially through a web interface, assuming the other person has an account. You could even make it so that all of your devices have the rights to play the media if they are designed in the same way. The issue of going outside the service area temporarily could be solved by the decryption/decompression chip having flash inside it and storing the keys for some period of days. The issue of living outside the service area could largely be solved through a wired network connection and/or by using a satellite data system instead. The problem of the DRM servers going away could be solved by using an open protocol and having agreements to transfer the keys to another party if the DRM key vendor goes under.
The problem of having to buy all new hardware? Yeah, that's pretty much a given. No current hardware can feasibly do DRM in even a slightly secure way.
Nothing that matters has changed. Music was hard to copy. Then we got recordings. Symphony musicians declared that music would die. Though the symphony has diminished, the recorded form (copyable) has spawned new forms. And when copying became easier with DRM-free music online, the industry saw growth, not contraction. The same happened with the theatre and movies and again when DVD encryption was broken (after a brief downturn caused by the economy as a whole going into a recession, but which the industry blamed incorrectly on piracy). And software used to all have copy protection. Vendors consistently found that when they removed it, sales *increased*, and as a result, only a few apps today incorporate any significant DRM. What makes you think that books will somehow magically be different when they become more easily copyable?
I did say "nearly". A camcorder pointing at the screen results in pretty substantial degradation in picture quality even with good LCD panels.
Proper DRM is easy. You just need a device that takes an input file and an account name, then goes online using built-in GSM or CDMA networking hardware. Store the key in SRAM inside the decoder chip so that it is never stored in any part that is readable by sniffing bus lies on the board. You nearly eliminate the analog hole by building a display encoder chip that uses DSA to exchange an AES session key with the decryption/decompression chip. Thus, the only way to break the DRM is to simultaneously read every signal line going out to the display panel.
The only reasons we don't have proper DRM now are: A. the hardware needed to do DSA and AES is still too expensive for mass-marketed devices, B. the people designing DRM are inept, and C. the manufacturers of these devices aren't willing to sign a hundred year contract to pay for cellular data.
They basically are. I mean sure, they'll wrinkle, but as long as you dry them correctly with something between the pages so they don't stick together too badly, you'll still have something you can read, generally speaking.
Besides, it's really about not putting all your eggs in one basket. If you drop a book in the bathtub, in the worst case, you've lost a $5-20 book. Drop a book reader in the bathtub and you've lost a $300 device containing $6,000 worth of books, many of which have DRM protection that only lets you read them on one device... which is now a paperweight....
You could also overflow into an integer that contains a normally constant value of 1 that points into an array of pointers that changes depending on whether you are using version 1 or 2 of the data structure. When the value overflows, it resets it to zero and using version 1 on a version 2 data structure causes the contents of the comment to be used for the address.
Actually, I'd probably go with a packed data structure in which the string is allowed to overflow by one byte into the zip code integer or similar. Then, it will appear to be perfectly innocuous and functional. However, if you enter a string that is one byte too long, the top byte of the zip code integer becomes zero. Of course, it will always be zero on a big endian machine (assuming a 32-bit integer) because you only need the bottom 17 bits to hold all 5-digit zip codes. However, on little endian machines, it zeroes the LSB (which is usually nonzero). If you then calculate the city and state off the zip code and only use the human-entered value in the rare case of conflicts, you have something that would successfully misroute packages about 98% of the time when you specify a properly oversized comment value.
So do sugar pills.
Very much so.
Like I said, "some of whom may well have killed their friends and families, mind you, but the U.S. didn't do it directly".
Normally, you would ignite it with an impact/compression force (often from another explosion). If you wanted it to combust all at once by merely adding heat, I *think* you would have to suddenly bring the entire mass up to combustion temperature all at once. That's harder than it sounds. That said, IANABE (I am not a bomb engineer), so I'm not the right person to answer that question.
Must be a regional thing. Slashdot tends to be reflective of engineers as a whole, and there's not a very big fundamentalist element here. They exist, but they aren't a sizable percentage of engineers.
Well, it doesn't take an engineer to strap on a bomb and push the button, so the liberal arts majors make good fodder. The fact is, of course, that the reason there are more engineers is that they more actively seek out engineers for their skills. For the same reason, there are more engineers in the military than would join by self selection. Seems pretty obvious to me and it has nothing to do withengineers having more conservative religious views (they are actually much less likely to hold any religious views at all) nor with views on compromising, etc.
In the long term, nothing happens because nearly all politicians are crooked. That said, if enough of them resign in disgrace quickly enough, we might--*might*--have a chance.
You're assuming that their hatred of the West has any basis in reality. It doesn't. Their hatred for the U.S. is entirely about power. The West has helped keep favorable regimes in power, and those regimes have tended to not be the people that the terrorists want in power. Thus, they hate the U.S. for aiding those regimes (some of whom may well have killed their friends and families, mind you, but the U.S. didn't do it directly). They hate the U.S. for protecting Israel. They hate the U.S. for... basically meddling in their affairs.
The fact of the matter is that if we were the monsters they think we are, the U.S. would have turned Yemen into glass already. It would take just a few minutes for a nuclear sub to launch a missile strike that would evaporate every human being in that entire country. We didn't do that. Why? Because it's wrong.
And that was my whole point. They're monsters because they massacre the innocent. They accuse us of being monsters, and yet despite having ample opportunity to wipe them off the map, we do not because we don't want to massacre the innocent. That's why they are evil and we are not. I'm not advocating such a response; I'm merely pointing out that it's disingenuous to say that we can't stop it. We simply don't have a good way of stopping terrorism without sinking to their level.
Finally, I would note that the vast majority of those folks' friends and families who have been killed by U.S. forces were killed because terrorists illegally used hospitals, schools, mosques, etc. as human shields. The terrorists put those people's friends and families deliberately in harm's way so that the U.S. would be forced to kill them to get the bad guys. I would argue that the terrorists are responsible for every one of those deaths, not the U.S. military.