Right, that's true. At the time the radar guns were "Always on" you'd just point them at something and the display would display a number. When there were no cars the cops would lay them in their laps and not turn them off. Several developed tumors on their legs. Many of them sued but None of them won their cases (that I know of) due to lack of evidence. But since then they've changed radar speed detectors to only be on momentarily.
And this is the difficulty with this issue... The number of people with a need to be using strong RF sources on a daily basis are very few, and it's something that's hard to study. And the solution to avoiding exposure is very simple in most cases. In the case of the police, leaving the radar on was giving away their position to radar detectors... In the case of powerful radar, it's dangerous in its own right so they power it down before working on it. In the case of cellphones and other consumer devices, having high wattage transmitters creates all sorts of interference and band leakage problems so there are plenty of reasons to want to limit RF power that don't include cancer.
There are lots of reasons to limit RF power before you get to levels where you have to start worrying about cancer. Pointing Doppler radar at a residential house though? That's just stupid. That's not been proven safe, so we should assume that it's not.
The point being, we don't know what's out there. There universe is literally infinite. If crystalline life is possible... and it certainly looks like it is... then it has to be out there somewhere. The question is how common is it?
There has been one published paper showing a possible link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer. That doesn't mean there is a link.
No, get your facts strait. There has been 1 study that has shown that the relatively low levels of RF in a cellphones might be linked to cancer. Which is worth further study. But strong RF sources (i.e. far stronger than a Cellphone) are well known to be harmful to human health in many ways. Mainly they heat tissues in a very abnormal way that the human body is not able to cope with. Repetitive damage to cells is known to be carcinogenic. There's not been conclusive evidence that it's a direct carcinogen but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. It's something that just hasn't been studied all that much because at the levels required to produce the effect the RF energy is already very dangerous and the FCC has strict limits on it anyway.
I remember the Mythbusters where they "Busted" the myth that you could cook a turkey in front of a radar dish. My father laughed his butt off at this. He was in the airforce in the 1970s as a radar tech and at one point was stationed in Alaska working on the BMEWS systems which had ranges in excess of 2000 miles. They put out Megawatts of power. One of the common problems he'd run into would be dead birds stuck in various parts of the radar dishes. They wouldn't just cook... they'd burst into flames.
Go stand in front of that and tell me non-ionizing radiation in safe and doesn't cause cancer. I've no idea what the police are using. I've no idea if it's safe... and neither do the police. Doplar radar has not been studied for safety when being pointed at a house, I can guarantee you that. They should not be doing this.
They are concerned because some of these Attacks are perpetrated by the FBI/NSA/CIA. Can't have people retaliating against their own infiltration operations...
Too bad the internet's down in North Korea, they'd be interested in this story for sure!
When you get your Armature radio license they hand you a sheet with warnings and exposure levels. Non-ionizing isn't nearly as bad as Ionizing radiation where even very low levels are dangerous. You need much higher energy levels of non-ionizing before it becomes dangerous. The 1 watt you find in most wifi devices is far far bellow what would be considered dangerous. I have a 70 watt 2 meter radio and even that's safe.
A wall penetrating Doppler radar device though? I would be concerned if that were pointed at me for anything more than a split second. It was deffinately not designed to be pointed at sleeping children. You'd really need to know exactly how it works though. The danger with non-ionizing radiation is not strait forward. It's not like you can just say "1hr of exposure to 1000watts is where it becomes dangerous!" It changes depending on the Frequency, duration, power and distance from the antenna. So it's really hard to say. I would think the FCC might be interested in talking to this police station.
I am absolutely fed up with the... what's it now? 3 year cycle? of what's productive?
I work in a 12 floor building with 3 wings. I've been on every floor of every wing. Before this I worked for a much much bigger company that had 2 wings but only 1 floor. I sware to god I sat in every cube in that building for at least a week.
STOP MOVING ME
I don't care how tall my cube is, or how much privacy there is. I guarantee that, no matter where you sit me I'll be between that 70yr old dude that needs to stop by 3x per day to tell me how things weren't this bad back when he did Cobol... and by that kid that's an intern that refused to admit that Ruby on Rails isn't new and poised to take over the world. Just stop, I don't want to move anymore. I literally keep a red flag over my desk so the people that need to find me can find me. I just tell them the floor, they stand on their tippy toes and... oh... there's Charlie!!! That's ridiculous. I don't care where I sit, just stop changing where I sit!!! Preferably place be half way between the Coffee/Soda and the bathroom but otherwise I have no preference.
Yes. Everything I do is confidential until I explicitly declare it's not. This text is displayed publicly for all to see. But how it got here, from where I'm logging in and who I am in real life is none of your business until I say I'm ok with that.
It is a public forum. Anyone, including an NSA agent can browse all your postings regardless of any encryption used between you and this site.
But linking them to me is an entirely different thing. Sure, anonymity doesn't gain me a lot currently. But we've no idea what the next US administration is going to look like do we? And what of my friends in China? I'd like to hear their thoughts on this as well. Oh... they can't even remotely post here... I guess Slashdot doesn't need 1/3rd of the worlds audience... oh well.
There would need to be a compelling business/financial reason for any site to do so. Helping others hide their traffic is not all that compelling from a beancounters point of view.
being a tech site, and the ever increasing consumer demand for secure communications, I think the rather trivial effort it would take to implement HTTPS would forever mar this "Tech" website as being ridiculously out of date. It doesn't really matter if you ever use the intermittent wipers in your car... it makes a new car look pretty stupid not to have them either way.
And who cares? I don't have anything that requires security or matters in PHP. I never would, it's just kind of a crappy scripting language to me. I've PHP that does "Stuff" but none of it is handling private data or writing to databases. At best it's manipulating the data after it's arrived locally and displaying it. Or manipulating it in a form or something before delivering it. I supose it could alter the users intent on send, but I don't care. I'd treat them as untrusted anyways, they're just as likely to be bad actors as some hacker... My users aren't using PHP to login, connect to APIs or anything else that matters... How many people actually use PHP to do anything sensitive? Really, tell me, I don't know. I live in my own microcosm of code so I'm interested if this is a real problem or not.
This is actually good news. The clearly state that "Ubiquitous Encryption" is a threat to the NSA. They are currently assuming that encrypted traffic is something they should target so if everything's encrypted... viola.
So go out, encrypt everything you can. I'm looking directly at you SlashDot. Fix your 10yrs out of date website for christs sake. You want me to start using "Beta"? Secure it!
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)
And that's about the most intelligent thing a person can say on the matter.
Ones the subject of logic and evidence. The other is the subject of faith. Those that lack logic and evidence seem to be completely baffled by people of sciences inability to have any spiritual understanding what-so-ever. And those that lack faith seem to be completely baffled by those that are spirituals complete lack of logic. The 2 subjects have little to do with one another other and to try and prove or disprove Science or God with Science or God makes about as much sense as what Douglas Adams eloquently illustrates in his example.
It's like if I were to play you Beethoven 5th and say "Isn't that a fantastic peace?" and you were to turn to me and say "Music is nothing is superstition!" and then recite to me the Pythagorean theorem. And to make matters worse I then force you to listen to the Beatles and claim that "Octopuses Garden" clearly shows that Calculus is actually just a government conspiracy.
I personally hope there is a God and that science is the method to understanding of his design. If I'm wrong? Oh well. At least I got Christmas out of the deal.
...and don't forget the SR-71... F-117 and U2 were practically average looking compared to that thing. My father was in the air-force and got to see one land before they were declassified. He said his first reaction was ALIENS! But changed his after it landed like any normal aircraft.
I'm not anything close to an expert, but wouldn't a stall be easily recoverable at 32,000+ feet? If a plane fell from this altitude without any radio contact I would think it would be some kind of catastrophic structural or mechanical failure.
Base on the reports of the weather I've been reading, it was about as bad as it gets for turbulence. They suspect the craft got hit by multiple lightening strikes as well. I've been on a plane when lightening has struck it before and while not immediately dangerous it's like being inside a flashbulb going off. It's terrifying. I couldn't imagine it happening multiple times while getting thrown around by turbulence.
Imagine being on a roller-coaster, inside a paint shaker while someone repeated shown a flashlight in your eyes... then try and pull one of the most sophisticated mechanical devices ever created by man out of a stall...
Really it is. Stall Stall Stall Then the captain returns: "Er what are you doing?"
Not an easily shaken man apparently. He had less than a minute before they hit the water at that point. But even the inexperienced pilot wasn't that far off. He thought he had the speed, he just didn't know the airspeed was totally wrong.
Then when the plane was crashing, he didn't realize what was happening. Maybe he thought the other pilot was nuts for going into a dive?
Google makes android because they didn't want the cell phone manufacturers cutting their core business (advertising) out of the hot new mobile market. Sure they give away android, because they have to. Android is a cut down Linux distro. Their own apps come with a lot of conditions, and they use those to make the android phone manufacturers give them access.
So you're agreeing with everything I just said? Thanks?
Does anyone else find it ironic that every time one of these breaches happens... all the employee and costumer data walks right out the door. But their source code? Propitiatory corporate secrets? Oh, those are locked up tighter than a drum.
It's not hard to prevent these "hacks" or "Leaks" they just only chose to actually spend money to protect what's valuable to them. After their employees or Customers personal info is out there, they throw some money at a Credit monitoring service and pretend like that means anything at all? What did it cost them? $1 a user? LOL
We need federal liability laws. The feds do not need to dictate what they need to do to secure data like they've requested. They know, and we know that's a joke. The law will be out of date before it even takes effect. Simply make them liable for $100k per persons personal data they leak. They will quickly just flat out stop storing the data in the first place and we'll all be better off.
I agree with your GM and President. Not all positions require computer competency, and computer competency should have nothing to do with your security measures.
I dont think telling people you can fix a mac book by baking it will end well. So perhaps a disclaimer saying NOT to do this would be in order?
It's a mac. Worst case... well there isn't one. Please put your apple products in the oven, even if they are currently working... you will be better off in the end. You should have a fire extinguisher nearby just in case Steve Jobs escapes hell via your device and attempts to exert his "Paranormal patent clause" which states specifically that ovens are not not an authorized repair tool like the "pentalobe screwdriver"
If Jobs does escape your oven he will consume your residence and all adjacent residences with his firey wrath. Also he will park his car in the closest handicapped spot to your house for weeks on end. Woe unto thee who attempts to repair Apple products without proper authorization and/or exorcism rights.
This assumes that a "Phablet" is a Phone that's just bigger... and not a tablet that just has a cellular connection. Assume the opposite and suddenly the phone market is dieing?
Thats what we did. Sorry if I gave the other impression. He had a round trip ticket from Ethiopia to the US and then back again. He never boarded the return flight. It was very sketchy though. I'd recommend talking to the airline before doing any of this. Our tickets still got screwed up every which way during the trip. Surprisingly the Ethiopian Airport was much more helpful than the US airlines. I suspect they valued their jobs more then the lazy uninterested staff I had to deal with in Chicago.
But those early cell phone innovators got a lot of patents. Google is probably rolling on driverless car and wearable tech patents.
You're dead on... I came here to post the same thing. Gene Marks is an idiot. Googles trying to figure out everything that will be needed to make a driverless car in the future... or Google Glass... Once they have it pretty much down they'll likely just dump the product and let everyone else build it while they skim a fortune off the top.
On top of that... look at android. They don't care about selling the OS... it's free. They just don't want companies like Apple and Microsoft closing the ecosystem and preventing Google from making money. Valves doing the same thing with SteamOS. They don't WANT to make an OS but when the big players, Microsoft and Apple, are openly hostile to their business model, they have to go out of their way to promote the OS that's agnostic... Linux.
Smart Business decisions aren't always about making 2% more profit next quarter. Some are about making 50% more profit 10yrs from now. If more corporations though in the long term like Google, and less in the short term like Mr Gene Marks and all the banks that collapsed our economy revently, we'd all be better off.
Wouldn't another name for these "Rockets" be "ICBMs"?
Seriously... if an amateur rocket has sub-orbital capabilities? Imagine a payload of drones with open wifi and internet access dropped over Beijing... Some university kids might think that was a great idea until China shot back.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, that's true. At the time the radar guns were "Always on" you'd just point them at something and the display would display a number. When there were no cars the cops would lay them in their laps and not turn them off. Several developed tumors on their legs. Many of them sued but None of them won their cases (that I know of) due to lack of evidence. But since then they've changed radar speed detectors to only be on momentarily.
And this is the difficulty with this issue... The number of people with a need to be using strong RF sources on a daily basis are very few, and it's something that's hard to study. And the solution to avoiding exposure is very simple in most cases. In the case of the police, leaving the radar on was giving away their position to radar detectors... In the case of powerful radar, it's dangerous in its own right so they power it down before working on it. In the case of cellphones and other consumer devices, having high wattage transmitters creates all sorts of interference and band leakage problems so there are plenty of reasons to want to limit RF power that don't include cancer.
There are lots of reasons to limit RF power before you get to levels where you have to start worrying about cancer. Pointing Doppler radar at a residential house though? That's just stupid. That's not been proven safe, so we should assume that it's not.
I raise you another link: http://www.popsci.com/science/... ;-)
The point being, we don't know what's out there. There universe is literally infinite. If crystalline life is possible... and it certainly looks like it is... then it has to be out there somewhere. The question is how common is it?
There has been one published paper showing a possible link between non-ionizing radiation and cancer. That doesn't mean there is a link.
No, get your facts strait. There has been 1 study that has shown that the relatively low levels of RF in a cellphones might be linked to cancer. Which is worth further study. But strong RF sources (i.e. far stronger than a Cellphone) are well known to be harmful to human health in many ways. Mainly they heat tissues in a very abnormal way that the human body is not able to cope with. Repetitive damage to cells is known to be carcinogenic. There's not been conclusive evidence that it's a direct carcinogen but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. It's something that just hasn't been studied all that much because at the levels required to produce the effect the RF energy is already very dangerous and the FCC has strict limits on it anyway.
I remember the Mythbusters where they "Busted" the myth that you could cook a turkey in front of a radar dish. My father laughed his butt off at this. He was in the airforce in the 1970s as a radar tech and at one point was stationed in Alaska working on the BMEWS systems which had ranges in excess of 2000 miles. They put out Megawatts of power. One of the common problems he'd run into would be dead birds stuck in various parts of the radar dishes. They wouldn't just cook... they'd burst into flames.
Here's one of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Go stand in front of that and tell me non-ionizing radiation in safe and doesn't cause cancer.
I've no idea what the police are using. I've no idea if it's safe... and neither do the police. Doplar radar has not been studied for safety when being pointed at a house, I can guarantee you that. They should not be doing this.
They are concerned because some of these Attacks are perpetrated by the FBI/NSA/CIA.
Can't have people retaliating against their own infiltration operations...
Too bad the internet's down in North Korea, they'd be interested in this story for sure!
Radar is non ionizing. It could cook people, though, if it has enough power.
Actually, yes it can lead to cancer: http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-ce...
When you get your Armature radio license they hand you a sheet with warnings and exposure levels. Non-ionizing isn't nearly as bad as Ionizing radiation where even very low levels are dangerous. You need much higher energy levels of non-ionizing before it becomes dangerous. The 1 watt you find in most wifi devices is far far bellow what would be considered dangerous. I have a 70 watt 2 meter radio and even that's safe.
A wall penetrating Doppler radar device though? I would be concerned if that were pointed at me for anything more than a split second. It was deffinately not designed to be pointed at sleeping children. You'd really need to know exactly how it works though. The danger with non-ionizing radiation is not strait forward. It's not like you can just say "1hr of exposure to 1000watts is where it becomes dangerous!" It changes depending on the Frequency, duration, power and distance from the antenna. So it's really hard to say. I would think the FCC might be interested in talking to this police station.
well you could burn the place down.
Then I'd have to move again.
Kill me with a rusty spoon...
I am absolutely fed up with the... what's it now? 3 year cycle? of what's productive?
I work in a 12 floor building with 3 wings. I've been on every floor of every wing.
Before this I worked for a much much bigger company that had 2 wings but only 1 floor. I sware to god I sat in every cube in that building for at least a week.
STOP MOVING ME
I don't care how tall my cube is, or how much privacy there is. I guarantee that, no matter where you sit me I'll be between that 70yr old dude that needs to stop by 3x per day to tell me how things weren't this bad back when he did Cobol... and by that kid that's an intern that refused to admit that Ruby on Rails isn't new and poised to take over the world. Just stop, I don't want to move anymore. I literally keep a red flag over my desk so the people that need to find me can find me. I just tell them the floor, they stand on their tippy toes and... oh... there's Charlie!!! That's ridiculous. I don't care where I sit, just stop changing where I sit!!! Preferably place be half way between the Coffee/Soda and the bathroom but otherwise I have no preference.
To what end should slashdot secure itself?
To keep me as a viewer.
Are you storing confidential info here?
Yes. Everything I do is confidential until I explicitly declare it's not. This text is displayed publicly for all to see. But how it got here, from where I'm logging in and who I am in real life is none of your business until I say I'm ok with that.
It is a public forum. Anyone, including an NSA agent can browse all your postings regardless of any encryption used between you and this site.
But linking them to me is an entirely different thing. Sure, anonymity doesn't gain me a lot currently. But we've no idea what the next US administration is going to look like do we? And what of my friends in China? I'd like to hear their thoughts on this as well. Oh... they can't even remotely post here... I guess Slashdot doesn't need 1/3rd of the worlds audience... oh well.
There would need to be a compelling business/financial reason for any site to do so. Helping others hide their traffic is not all that compelling from a beancounters point of view.
being a tech site, and the ever increasing consumer demand for secure communications, I think the rather trivial effort it would take to implement HTTPS would forever mar this "Tech" website as being ridiculously out of date. It doesn't really matter if you ever use the intermittent wipers in your car... it makes a new car look pretty stupid not to have them either way.
And who cares?
I don't have anything that requires security or matters in PHP. I never would, it's just kind of a crappy scripting language to me.
I've PHP that does "Stuff" but none of it is handling private data or writing to databases. At best it's manipulating the data after it's arrived locally and displaying it. Or manipulating it in a form or something before delivering it. I supose it could alter the users intent on send, but I don't care. I'd treat them as untrusted anyways, they're just as likely to be bad actors as some hacker... My users aren't using PHP to login, connect to APIs or anything else that matters... How many people actually use PHP to do anything sensitive? Really, tell me, I don't know. I live in my own microcosm of code so I'm interested if this is a real problem or not.
This is actually good news. The clearly state that "Ubiquitous Encryption" is a threat to the NSA. They are currently assuming that encrypted traffic is something they should target so if everything's encrypted... viola.
So go out, encrypt everything you can. I'm looking directly at you SlashDot. Fix your 10yrs out of date website for christs sake. You want me to start using "Beta"? Secure it!
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)
And that's about the most intelligent thing a person can say on the matter.
Ones the subject of logic and evidence. The other is the subject of faith. Those that lack logic and evidence seem to be completely baffled by people of sciences inability to have any spiritual understanding what-so-ever. And those that lack faith seem to be completely baffled by those that are spirituals complete lack of logic. The 2 subjects have little to do with one another other and to try and prove or disprove Science or God with Science or God makes about as much sense as what Douglas Adams eloquently illustrates in his example.
It's like if I were to play you Beethoven 5th and say "Isn't that a fantastic peace?" and you were to turn to me and say "Music is nothing is superstition!" and then recite to me the Pythagorean theorem. And to make matters worse I then force you to listen to the Beatles and claim that "Octopuses Garden" clearly shows that Calculus is actually just a government conspiracy.
I personally hope there is a God and that science is the method to understanding of his design. If I'm wrong? Oh well. At least I got Christmas out of the deal.
...and don't forget the SR-71...
F-117 and U2 were practically average looking compared to that thing. My father was in the air-force and got to see one land before they were declassified. He said his first reaction was ALIENS! But changed his after it landed like any normal aircraft.
I'm not anything close to an expert, but wouldn't a stall be easily recoverable at 32,000+ feet? If a plane fell from this altitude without any radio contact I would think it would be some kind of catastrophic structural or mechanical failure.
Base on the reports of the weather I've been reading, it was about as bad as it gets for turbulence. They suspect the craft got hit by multiple lightening strikes as well. I've been on a plane when lightening has struck it before and while not immediately dangerous it's like being inside a flashbulb going off. It's terrifying. I couldn't imagine it happening multiple times while getting thrown around by turbulence.
Imagine being on a roller-coaster, inside a paint shaker while someone repeated shown a flashlight in your eyes... then try and pull one of the most sophisticated mechanical devices ever created by man out of a stall...
Really it is.
Stall
Stall
Stall
Then the captain returns: "Er what are you doing?"
Not an easily shaken man apparently. He had less than a minute before they hit the water at that point.
But even the inexperienced pilot wasn't that far off. He thought he had the speed, he just didn't know the airspeed was totally wrong.
Then when the plane was crashing, he didn't realize what was happening. Maybe he thought the other pilot was nuts for going into a dive?
Google makes android because they didn't want the cell phone manufacturers cutting their core business (advertising) out of the hot new mobile market. Sure they give away android, because they have to. Android is a cut down Linux distro. Their own apps come with a lot of conditions, and they use those to make the android phone manufacturers give them access.
So you're agreeing with everything I just said? Thanks?
If it's marketed as a phone, it's a phablet
If it's marketed as a tablet, it's a tablet with 3g or 4g or whatever
And if they are both sold by the same company? Does the distinction have any baring on reality at all?
Does anyone else find it ironic that every time one of these breaches happens... all the employee and costumer data walks right out the door. But their source code? Propitiatory corporate secrets? Oh, those are locked up tighter than a drum.
It's not hard to prevent these "hacks" or "Leaks" they just only chose to actually spend money to protect what's valuable to them. After their employees or Customers personal info is out there, they throw some money at a Credit monitoring service and pretend like that means anything at all? What did it cost them? $1 a user? LOL
We need federal liability laws. The feds do not need to dictate what they need to do to secure data like they've requested. They know, and we know that's a joke. The law will be out of date before it even takes effect. Simply make them liable for $100k per persons personal data they leak. They will quickly just flat out stop storing the data in the first place and we'll all be better off.
I agree with your GM and President. Not all positions require computer competency, and computer competency should have nothing to do with your security measures.
I dont think telling people you can fix a mac book by baking it will end well. So perhaps a disclaimer saying NOT to do this would be in order?
It's a mac. Worst case... well there isn't one. Please put your apple products in the oven, even if they are currently working... you will be better off in the end. You should have a fire extinguisher nearby just in case Steve Jobs escapes hell via your device and attempts to exert his "Paranormal patent clause" which states specifically that ovens are not not an authorized repair tool like the "pentalobe screwdriver"
If Jobs does escape your oven he will consume your residence and all adjacent residences with his firey wrath. Also he will park his car in the closest handicapped spot to your house for weeks on end. Woe unto thee who attempts to repair Apple products without proper authorization and/or exorcism rights.
Suborbital doesn't mean they have the capability to reach another continent.
I guess you're right. These are more comparable to a Scud Missile with an operational range of 500 to 1000km. But you could hit Russia from Alaska! :-p
This assumes that a "Phablet" is a Phone that's just bigger... and not a tablet that just has a cellular connection.
Assume the opposite and suddenly the phone market is dieing?
It's dumb no matter which way you look at it.
Thats what we did. Sorry if I gave the other impression. He had a round trip ticket from Ethiopia to the US and then back again. He never boarded the return flight. It was very sketchy though. I'd recommend talking to the airline before doing any of this. Our tickets still got screwed up every which way during the trip. Surprisingly the Ethiopian Airport was much more helpful than the US airlines. I suspect they valued their jobs more then the lazy uninterested staff I had to deal with in Chicago.
But those early cell phone innovators got a lot of patents.
Google is probably rolling on driverless car and wearable tech patents.
You're dead on... I came here to post the same thing. Gene Marks is an idiot. Googles trying to figure out everything that will be needed to make a driverless car in the future... or Google Glass... Once they have it pretty much down they'll likely just dump the product and let everyone else build it while they skim a fortune off the top.
On top of that... look at android. They don't care about selling the OS... it's free. They just don't want companies like Apple and Microsoft closing the ecosystem and preventing Google from making money. Valves doing the same thing with SteamOS. They don't WANT to make an OS but when the big players, Microsoft and Apple, are openly hostile to their business model, they have to go out of their way to promote the OS that's agnostic... Linux.
Smart Business decisions aren't always about making 2% more profit next quarter. Some are about making 50% more profit 10yrs from now. If more corporations though in the long term like Google, and less in the short term like Mr Gene Marks and all the banks that collapsed our economy revently, we'd all be better off.
Wouldn't another name for these "Rockets" be "ICBMs"?
Seriously... if an amateur rocket has sub-orbital capabilities?
Imagine a payload of drones with open wifi and internet access dropped over Beijing...
Some university kids might think that was a great idea until China shot back.
Maybe because the things powered by solar panels that could barely heat a cup of coffee much less get a flash card to 800 degrees?