From the article: "One way to reduce the cost of the NRO-WFIRST mission for NASA's astrophysics division would be to launch it on one of the new fleet of rockets that NASA will be eager to test at the end of the decade as it moves beyond the now-grounded space shuttles. But that would involve NASA's human space programme, an option that the science-definition team has been asked to consider. It could mean moving the mission from its intended orbit around the Sun -- at a dynamically stable spot known as a Lagrangian point some 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth's orbit -- to a geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilometers above Earth (still much further out than Hubble). The geostationary option would be within reach of a wider variety of rockets -- and of potential servicing missions by astronauts."
Bad news. NASA's "new fleet of rockets" may never happen. They're not funded, and every new NASA booster program since the Shuttle has failed. Just launch the thing on a Space-X Falcon Heavy.
Here's the problem: "Ultrabooks first landed last year, as part of a $300m marketing campaign by Intel to... push up margins for PC makers..." Intel doesn't have the power to determine prices any more. Intel and the old-line PC makers are desperately trying to stem the inevitable price decline. They're failing.
Ordinary "netbooks" like the EeePC 1000 are quite competent computers for $275. How much computer do you need to carry around? I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, LTSpice and Autodesk 123D on mine. It will play video. What more do you need?
Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk.
If they'd obtained patents, Disapora would have had an edge over Google. Instead, they lost.
If the guard force had responded properly, there would be dead bodies. The people approaching the facility had cut through three fences and had backpacks which could have contained explosives. Shooting them was authorized.
But the IG report doesn't admit that.
The oldest patent in the case is for de-duplication in storage using a cryptographic hash. Most web sites don't do that, although some caching systems do.
The European Union is strict about consumer law so that consumers will be comfortable buying across national boundaries within the Union. It's part of the "single market" concept which defines the EU.
"A practice is misleading if it contains false or untrue information or is likely to deceive the consumer, even though the information given may be correct. In particular, this information relates to:... the consumersâ(TM) rights on aspects of the sale of consumer goods."
Here's how Apple misleads customers: Start at the Apple UK site. Try to find warranty information. The "support" page does not mention a warranty. There's "AppleCare Products - extend support coverage for your Apple products." Going to that page, we see "All Apple hardware comes with a one-year limited warranty (1) and up to 90 days of complimentary telephone technical support.". Down at note 1, in grey 77% white type, there's a link to "Apple Products and EU Statutory Warranty"
Only there does Apple admit there's a 2-year warranty.
I have yet to see a low-end 3D printer that works consistently. TechShop has an "Up" and several RepRaps, but it seems to take several tries to make anything, and nobody gets consistently good parts. The machines that work by laying down a strand of ABS from a heated nozzle (which is all the low-end machines) have trouble getting a consistent bond to the previous layer. The temperature at the bonding point is too critical and not well enough controlled.
Somebody should try using some high power laser diodes to heat up the point where the ABS strands are fused. Those aren't expensive up to 2 watts or so. You only need a few watts, focused very tightly on the weld area. Welding is about applying heat to both sides of the joint in the weld area. The heated nozzle approach applies the heat on only one side, the new string approaching the weld. The material being joined to is cold. Of course the bond quality is poor.
The UV-bonded powder machines work fine, but cost about $50K.
Laser sintering machines seem to produce good results. The E-beam deposition approach reportedly works very well, but is even more expensive. But ABS through a heated nozzle, not so much.
OK, let's take a look at one of their derivative contracts. Read, especially, Margin Call. The example given is buying a derivative contract, but the real issue is selling one. (There must be an equal volume bought and sold; this is a zero sum game.) Buying a contract costs you a known amount up front,which you may lose. Selling a derivative contract implies that, at some specified future time, you must deliver what you sold, even if you take an arbitrarily high loss doing so.
This is implemented by draining the account of the seller as necessary to pay off the loss. That would be OK if it was a cash account, with no margin. But this exchange permits selling derivative contracts on margin, where the seller is effectively borrowing from the exchange. They currently require 75% margin. Does the exchange take the risk of a counterparty defaulting? No. They write "your profit is always limited by ability to pay of counterparties to your contract." Actually, that's incorrect - it's limited by the cash counterparties have on deposit with the exchange, not their total assets. (That's probably just as well.) However, as a contract buyer, you don't know, and aren't allowed to find out, who the counterparty is or how much money they have on deposit.
The way this is set up, a seller of a derivative contract can escape part of a loss by draining their account. If the value of a derivative is increasing, the seller can cut their losses by draining their account up to the margin limit. This will force the exchange to drain out the rest of their account and close out the derivative contract. The derivative contracts can't change price by more than 10% per day, so there's a maximum loss when selling a derivative contract. This makes derivative contracts less valuable than they would otherwise be.
Then there's the issue of allocating losses when a counterparty defaults. Everything is anonymous, so you have no idea if the exchange is screwing you.
On top of that, of course, you're relying on a pseudo-business with no identifying information to pay you money at a future date.
If you don't understand everything above, you should not be in this market.
I once tried Inkscape and realized in disgust that the "manual" was a wiki.
When I was working in aerospace, we would often write the manual first, then implement. This forces developers to deal with ugly problems cleanly, rather than having some elaborate after-the-fact explanation of how to work around some limitation.
And I imagine Mr. Sibal thinks that voice should be just as unreliable and as low priority as data services.
Cell phone to cell phone calls from Sprint to other carriers can have as much as a full second of round-trip delay. This is so long that the echo suppressors don't detect it as echo, which is really annoying.
Who pays for the local connection to the Internet? The users, though their ISP, telco, or cable bill.
Who pays for the backbone? The users, through their ISP's payments to the backbone companies?
Who pays for hosting? Every business with a web site of their own. Most ISP customers even get a free web site with their account. Commercial hosting services start at $4 per month.
Who pays for online shopping? The people who buy from the sellers? Amazon doesn't really need to run ads outside Amazon.
Who pays for eBay? The buyers?
Who pays for Netflix? The subscribers.
Who pays for search? AltaVista was originally a demo for DEC Alpha computers. DuckDuckGo and Bleeko cost about $30 million to $50 million to run. Most Google employees are ad sales reps. It really only takes about 100 people to run a search engine company. Add search to your ISP account for $2 a month? That was Google's original business plan.
Without ads, we'd lose Facebook. No great loss. Myspace, which is mostly paid for by bands, would still be around. Twitter would be replaced by IRC or something like it. Social services would be handled by some peer to peer system. You'd host your photos on your ISP-provided web site.
Classic science and engineering museums have been dumbed down. The Smithsonian used to be hard core, back when they were in the Arts and Industries building. The assumption was that visitors knew something about the subject and were there to see the historic original. The Henry Ford Museum used to be hard-core. ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1932"), but they added more "explanatory" exhibits.
The South Kensington Science Museum (now the "London Science Museum") has gone soft, too. I saw it in 1985 and 2002, and it felt dumber in 2002. They still have Maudsley's lathe (the first really good machine tool) on display. But the collection of James Bond cars from movies was getting the attention.
The question is whether TV directly influenced the suicide. That doesn't seem to have been the case here. This was apparently a failed crook who didn't want to go to jail.
It would be different if someone was attempting suicide to get attention, as in threatening to jump from a building, and that was covered on live TV. Then coverage would directly affect the odds of someone jumping.
The trouble with Python 3 is that nobody took responsibility for converting the third-party libraries. Many major libraries became abandonware in that transition. Rather than converting the old ones, in some cases, new incompatible libraries were developed. So not only do you have to convert your code from Python 2 to 3 (for which there is a tool to help), you have to change your code to use new libraries. Python doesn't have enough market share that major projects like MySQL and OpenSSL maintain the Python bindings for their project. At one point, the Python binding for OpenSSL was maintained by a World of Warcraft guild.
Perl has CPAN, which actually hosts library source and has some Q/A functions. Python just has PyPi (formerly "Cheese Shop"), which is just a directory of links.
This is Python's real problem. Python's Little Tin God For Life doesn't want the headaches of managing library maintenance. But he's not willing to let go and turn control over to an organization that can manage the grunt work of getting all the parts to work together. That's also why there is no Python ISO standard, and why none of the implementations other than CPython support 3.x.
Most space SF assumes the availability of a really, really powerful power source. Something far beyond a nuclear reactor, or even a fusion plant as currently envisioned.
Without that, most craft will be on ballistic trajectories most of the time.
Except for Weber, most SF assumes that battles will be conducted with low relative velocities. In reality, unless both sides work hard to get their relative velocities down, ships that can even get near each other are going to pass at very high speed, and may get a single shot off before having to start a long turnaround.
we're becoming an economy based on the Knowledge Age, and we need workers who are Knowledge Workers, not Industrial Workers.
No, the Knowledge Age is over. It peaked in the 1980 through the 00s, when huge numbers of people started using computers. But as the computers got better and became more interconnected, the steps that involved people became fewer and fewer. Computing has changed from "a computer on every desk" (once Microsoft's corporate goal) to giant data centers with almost nobody inside.
When you buy something on line, nowhere in the process does a human do any significant thinking. Along the way, a few humans take their orders from computers and move something from a shelf to a basket to a box to a truck. Humans are just hands for the machine. Computers think; humans work.
With educating humans, you have to put in too much effort per individual. It's hard to get computers to do a new task, but it scales. Once one computer has done something, many other computers can do the same thing.
Simply "knowing stuff" is far less important in the age of Google. Most of the information taught in schools is on line and available from a smartphone. Humans need to know the outline, but not the details of things.
In the last few years, it's become clear that, for many, perhaps most young people, higher education is a financial lose. The additional income isn't enough to pay off the heavy debt. That's a clear indication that the Knowledge Age is over.
There are several completely different missions for different types of UAVs. The common problem is airspace coordination, which seems to be what this is mostly about.
First, there's a role for little model-sized RC helicopters and quadrotors for local fire and police work. This is mostly for situations when you really need to look down on an emergency scene, or fly into it. As long as they stay below 500 feet AGL and under the weight limits for ultralights, the FAA doesn't regulate them. In terms of cost-effectiveness, those will probably be the most useful UAVs.
Police departments would like something as useful as a police helicopter with camera and spotlight, but not as expensive to operate. Those need to rise above the 500 foot level, so they need sensors that can detect other aircraft. This is the current big problem - operating UAVs in airspace under "see and be seen" rules. No UAV can yet do that. Police UAVs don't need huge range, but do need to hover, or at least circle in reasonably tight circles.
The border patrol people want something more like existing combat UAVs, with lots of range and good sensors. The drug enforcement people probably want something quiet with really good sensors. The main problem there will be to keep those efforts from becoming a money drain. Those guys do not need Global Hawks.
For a small project, any of the free open-source version control systems will work. Pick CVS, SVN, Git, or Mercurial, set up a repository on a server, and install the Tortoise client for it on all the relevant Windows machines. Then set up remote vaulting for the repository, preferably to at least two locations.
If it's just code, you don't need a commercial system. (Microsoft (Visual SourceSafe is rather retro.)
The version control system will work fine. It's getting users used to the idea of check-ins and visibility that takes work.
It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.
Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.
Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak RidgeNovouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them.
Only major countries could afford them.
Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.
Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.
All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.
There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.
The problem in the intelligence community today is not finding new ways of getting the data -- in fact, the technology to do that has been installed in every telco switch and every internet access point since not long after AT&T started replacing phone operators with banks of programmable relays. The effort required to get the data is trivial.
Big-time wiretapping never went into US electromechanical phone switches. I had to look into this once. Until switches went digital, wiretapping was a huge pain for law enforcement. Court-ordered wiretaps required manual wiring at the distributing frame. New York Telephone billed law enforcement for wiretaps at leased line rates. When Guliani was a prosecutor going after the Mafia, they had serious budget problems paying for wiretaps. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay their bill, and New York Telephone billed the party being wiretapped. That was one of the motivations for CALEA.
There was a very limited capability to listen in remotely by using the Automatic Line Insulation Test equipment. That equipment normally cycled through lines in the pre-dawn hours, when cables are damp, applying test voltages across the line and between line and ground. (This is the cause of the early morning "bell tap" problem with some low-end phones.) ALIT could be used remotely to test or listen in on a line. But an ALIT unit in the crossbar era was three racks of test gear, and a crossbar central office would typically only have two of them for 50,000 lines. Sometimes telcos would let the FBI use one for a while, but tying it up for any length of time interfered with operations. So dial-up wiretapping was strictly for emergencies.
The vaguer message of Occupy was that the Democratic Party in the US has utterly ignored the liberals in their base in an effort to pander to Wall St and the right wing.
Yet the GOP panders to their most extreme right wing, even though there's no risk of losing that group.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article: "One way to reduce the cost of the NRO-WFIRST mission for NASA's astrophysics division would be to launch it on one of the new fleet of rockets that NASA will be eager to test at the end of the decade as it moves beyond the now-grounded space shuttles. But that would involve NASA's human space programme, an option that the science-definition team has been asked to consider. It could mean moving the mission from its intended orbit around the Sun -- at a dynamically stable spot known as a Lagrangian point some 1.5 million kilometers beyond Earth's orbit -- to a geostationary orbit about 36,000 kilometers above Earth (still much further out than Hubble). The geostationary option would be within reach of a wider variety of rockets -- and of potential servicing missions by astronauts."
Bad news. NASA's "new fleet of rockets" may never happen. They're not funded, and every new NASA booster program since the Shuttle has failed. Just launch the thing on a Space-X Falcon Heavy.
Right. Klout is essentially a promotion for Twitter/Facebook as a single sign-in system.
Allwinner A10/ ARM system on a chip - $7 in quantity. This is the chip inside most low-end tablets.
No American intellectual property inside.
Who is going to want a ZunePhone?
The ZunePhone. That was a joke. But Microsoft was rumored to be considering making the Zune 3 a phone.
Ordinary "netbooks" like the EeePC 1000 are quite competent computers for $275. How much computer do you need to carry around? I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, LTSpice and Autodesk 123D on mine. It will play video. What more do you need?
Diaspora had the equivalent of the "circles" feature before Google+ did. In fact, the first release of Google+ looked so similar to Diaspora that people started to talk.
If they'd obtained patents, Disapora would have had an edge over Google. Instead, they lost.
If the guard force had responded properly, there would be dead bodies. The people approaching the facility had cut through three fences and had backpacks which could have contained explosives. Shooting them was authorized. But the IG report doesn't admit that.
The oldest patent in the case is for de-duplication in storage using a cryptographic hash. Most web sites don't do that, although some caching systems do.
The European Union is strict about consumer law so that consumers will be comfortable buying across national boundaries within the Union. It's part of the "single market" concept which defines the EU.
"A practice is misleading if it contains false or untrue information or is likely to deceive the consumer, even though the information given may be correct. In particular, this information relates to: ... the consumersâ(TM) rights on aspects of the sale of consumer goods."
Here's how Apple misleads customers: Start at the Apple UK site. Try to find warranty information. The "support" page does not mention a warranty. There's "AppleCare Products - extend support coverage for your Apple products." Going to that page, we see "All Apple hardware comes with a one-year limited warranty (1) and up to 90 days of complimentary telephone technical support.". Down at note 1, in grey 77% white type, there's a link to "Apple Products and EU Statutory Warranty" Only there does Apple admit there's a 2-year warranty.
I have yet to see a low-end 3D printer that works consistently. TechShop has an "Up" and several RepRaps, but it seems to take several tries to make anything, and nobody gets consistently good parts. The machines that work by laying down a strand of ABS from a heated nozzle (which is all the low-end machines) have trouble getting a consistent bond to the previous layer. The temperature at the bonding point is too critical and not well enough controlled.
Somebody should try using some high power laser diodes to heat up the point where the ABS strands are fused. Those aren't expensive up to 2 watts or so. You only need a few watts, focused very tightly on the weld area. Welding is about applying heat to both sides of the joint in the weld area. The heated nozzle approach applies the heat on only one side, the new string approaching the weld. The material being joined to is cold. Of course the bond quality is poor.
The UV-bonded powder machines work fine, but cost about $50K. Laser sintering machines seem to produce good results. The E-beam deposition approach reportedly works very well, but is even more expensive. But ABS through a heated nozzle, not so much.
OK, let's take a look at one of their derivative contracts. Read, especially, Margin Call. The example given is buying a derivative contract, but the real issue is selling one. (There must be an equal volume bought and sold; this is a zero sum game.) Buying a contract costs you a known amount up front,which you may lose. Selling a derivative contract implies that, at some specified future time, you must deliver what you sold, even if you take an arbitrarily high loss doing so.
This is implemented by draining the account of the seller as necessary to pay off the loss. That would be OK if it was a cash account, with no margin. But this exchange permits selling derivative contracts on margin, where the seller is effectively borrowing from the exchange. They currently require 75% margin. Does the exchange take the risk of a counterparty defaulting? No. They write "your profit is always limited by ability to pay of counterparties to your contract." Actually, that's incorrect - it's limited by the cash counterparties have on deposit with the exchange, not their total assets. (That's probably just as well.) However, as a contract buyer, you don't know, and aren't allowed to find out, who the counterparty is or how much money they have on deposit.
The way this is set up, a seller of a derivative contract can escape part of a loss by draining their account. If the value of a derivative is increasing, the seller can cut their losses by draining their account up to the margin limit. This will force the exchange to drain out the rest of their account and close out the derivative contract. The derivative contracts can't change price by more than 10% per day, so there's a maximum loss when selling a derivative contract. This makes derivative contracts less valuable than they would otherwise be.
Then there's the issue of allocating losses when a counterparty defaults. Everything is anonymous, so you have no idea if the exchange is screwing you. On top of that, of course, you're relying on a pseudo-business with no identifying information to pay you money at a future date.
If you don't understand everything above, you should not be in this market.
I once tried Inkscape and realized in disgust that the "manual" was a wiki.
When I was working in aerospace, we would often write the manual first, then implement. This forces developers to deal with ugly problems cleanly, rather than having some elaborate after-the-fact explanation of how to work around some limitation.
And I imagine Mr. Sibal thinks that voice should be just as unreliable and as low priority as data services.
Cell phone to cell phone calls from Sprint to other carriers can have as much as a full second of round-trip delay. This is so long that the echo suppressors don't detect it as echo, which is really annoying.
Who pays for the local connection to the Internet? The users, though their ISP, telco, or cable bill.
Who pays for the backbone? The users, through their ISP's payments to the backbone companies?
Who pays for hosting? Every business with a web site of their own. Most ISP customers even get a free web site with their account. Commercial hosting services start at $4 per month.
Who pays for online shopping? The people who buy from the sellers? Amazon doesn't really need to run ads outside Amazon.
Who pays for eBay? The buyers?
Who pays for Netflix? The subscribers.
Who pays for search? AltaVista was originally a demo for DEC Alpha computers. DuckDuckGo and Bleeko cost about $30 million to $50 million to run. Most Google employees are ad sales reps. It really only takes about 100 people to run a search engine company. Add search to your ISP account for $2 a month? That was Google's original business plan.
Without ads, we'd lose Facebook. No great loss. Myspace, which is mostly paid for by bands, would still be around. Twitter would be replaced by IRC or something like it. Social services would be handled by some peer to peer system. You'd host your photos on your ISP-provided web site.
Classic science and engineering museums have been dumbed down. The Smithsonian used to be hard core, back when they were in the Arts and Industries building. The assumption was that visitors knew something about the subject and were there to see the historic original. The Henry Ford Museum used to be hard-core. ("Capacitor, Cornell-Dublier, 1932"), but they added more "explanatory" exhibits.
The South Kensington Science Museum (now the "London Science Museum") has gone soft, too. I saw it in 1985 and 2002, and it felt dumber in 2002. They still have Maudsley's lathe (the first really good machine tool) on display. But the collection of James Bond cars from movies was getting the attention.
The question is whether TV directly influenced the suicide. That doesn't seem to have been the case here. This was apparently a failed crook who didn't want to go to jail.
It would be different if someone was attempting suicide to get attention, as in threatening to jump from a building, and that was covered on live TV. Then coverage would directly affect the odds of someone jumping.
The trouble with Python 3 is that nobody took responsibility for converting the third-party libraries. Many major libraries became abandonware in that transition. Rather than converting the old ones, in some cases, new incompatible libraries were developed. So not only do you have to convert your code from Python 2 to 3 (for which there is a tool to help), you have to change your code to use new libraries. Python doesn't have enough market share that major projects like MySQL and OpenSSL maintain the Python bindings for their project. At one point, the Python binding for OpenSSL was maintained by a World of Warcraft guild.
Perl has CPAN, which actually hosts library source and has some Q/A functions. Python just has PyPi (formerly "Cheese Shop"), which is just a directory of links.
This is Python's real problem. Python's Little Tin God For Life doesn't want the headaches of managing library maintenance. But he's not willing to let go and turn control over to an organization that can manage the grunt work of getting all the parts to work together. That's also why there is no Python ISO standard, and why none of the implementations other than CPython support 3.x.
Most space SF assumes the availability of a really, really powerful power source. Something far beyond a nuclear reactor, or even a fusion plant as currently envisioned. Without that, most craft will be on ballistic trajectories most of the time.
Except for Weber, most SF assumes that battles will be conducted with low relative velocities. In reality, unless both sides work hard to get their relative velocities down, ships that can even get near each other are going to pass at very high speed, and may get a single shot off before having to start a long turnaround.
we're becoming an economy based on the Knowledge Age, and we need workers who are Knowledge Workers, not Industrial Workers.
No, the Knowledge Age is over. It peaked in the 1980 through the 00s, when huge numbers of people started using computers. But as the computers got better and became more interconnected, the steps that involved people became fewer and fewer. Computing has changed from "a computer on every desk" (once Microsoft's corporate goal) to giant data centers with almost nobody inside.
When you buy something on line, nowhere in the process does a human do any significant thinking. Along the way, a few humans take their orders from computers and move something from a shelf to a basket to a box to a truck. Humans are just hands for the machine. Computers think; humans work.
With educating humans, you have to put in too much effort per individual. It's hard to get computers to do a new task, but it scales. Once one computer has done something, many other computers can do the same thing.
Simply "knowing stuff" is far less important in the age of Google. Most of the information taught in schools is on line and available from a smartphone. Humans need to know the outline, but not the details of things.
In the last few years, it's become clear that, for many, perhaps most young people, higher education is a financial lose. The additional income isn't enough to pay off the heavy debt. That's a clear indication that the Knowledge Age is over.
There are several completely different missions for different types of UAVs. The common problem is airspace coordination, which seems to be what this is mostly about.
First, there's a role for little model-sized RC helicopters and quadrotors for local fire and police work. This is mostly for situations when you really need to look down on an emergency scene, or fly into it. As long as they stay below 500 feet AGL and under the weight limits for ultralights, the FAA doesn't regulate them. In terms of cost-effectiveness, those will probably be the most useful UAVs.
Police departments would like something as useful as a police helicopter with camera and spotlight, but not as expensive to operate. Those need to rise above the 500 foot level, so they need sensors that can detect other aircraft. This is the current big problem - operating UAVs in airspace under "see and be seen" rules. No UAV can yet do that. Police UAVs don't need huge range, but do need to hover, or at least circle in reasonably tight circles.
The border patrol people want something more like existing combat UAVs, with lots of range and good sensors. The drug enforcement people probably want something quiet with really good sensors. The main problem there will be to keep those efforts from becoming a money drain. Those guys do not need Global Hawks.
Violet Blue has a story about which major sites were suckered into publishing that press release. Slashdot FAIL.
For a small project, any of the free open-source version control systems will work. Pick CVS, SVN, Git, or Mercurial, set up a repository on a server, and install the Tortoise client for it on all the relevant Windows machines. Then set up remote vaulting for the repository, preferably to at least two locations. If it's just code, you don't need a commercial system. (Microsoft (Visual SourceSafe is rather retro.)
The version control system will work fine. It's getting users used to the idea of check-ins and visibility that takes work.
It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.
Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.
Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak Ridge Novouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them. Only major countries could afford them.
Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.
Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.
All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.
There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.
The problem in the intelligence community today is not finding new ways of getting the data -- in fact, the technology to do that has been installed in every telco switch and every internet access point since not long after AT&T started replacing phone operators with banks of programmable relays. The effort required to get the data is trivial.
Big-time wiretapping never went into US electromechanical phone switches. I had to look into this once. Until switches went digital, wiretapping was a huge pain for law enforcement. Court-ordered wiretaps required manual wiring at the distributing frame. New York Telephone billed law enforcement for wiretaps at leased line rates. When Guliani was a prosecutor going after the Mafia, they had serious budget problems paying for wiretaps. On one occasion, the FBI didn't pay their bill, and New York Telephone billed the party being wiretapped. That was one of the motivations for CALEA.
There was a very limited capability to listen in remotely by using the Automatic Line Insulation Test equipment. That equipment normally cycled through lines in the pre-dawn hours, when cables are damp, applying test voltages across the line and between line and ground. (This is the cause of the early morning "bell tap" problem with some low-end phones.) ALIT could be used remotely to test or listen in on a line. But an ALIT unit in the crossbar era was three racks of test gear, and a crossbar central office would typically only have two of them for 50,000 lines. Sometimes telcos would let the FBI use one for a while, but tying it up for any length of time interfered with operations. So dial-up wiretapping was strictly for emergencies.
Now we have wiretapping designed into everything.
The vaguer message of Occupy was that the Democratic Party in the US has utterly ignored the liberals in their base in an effort to pander to Wall St and the right wing.
Yet the GOP panders to their most extreme right wing, even though there's no risk of losing that group.