Kid was obviously some kind of foreign pinko sleeper agent. No Real American would be caught dead with a replica assault rifle, rather than the real thing.
I suspect that it's more about the fact that hysteria sells than genuine cluelessness.
PCSOs and not-otherwise-alarmed officers don't routinely carry firearms; but 'Authorized Firearms Officers', potentially any officers with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and various other entities here and there, do, so it's not as though the necessary expertise isn't an internal phone call away, at most.
(The, um, unimpressive... build quality and design standards of 3d printed weapons may also be a factor: if you are hunting parts for firearms that are made out of shitty plastic, to a level of quality that would shame your average zipgun and make a 'saturday night special' look like some sort of futuristic H&K design concept, you may be inclined to consider the absence of 'normal' features to be mere shodiness, rather than a sign that it's a different part entirely.)
How can you call them 'clueless', you monster? The CAD monkey who designed the not-a-plastic-rectangle case to enclose the cheap Chinese reference platform, as well as the photoshop kid and the copywriter who put together the box, which appears to be in largely-not-mispelled English, clearly know something!
To assume that they had any more involvement with the hardware than they did with the software is fairly charitable... At least random Chinese OEMs know how to build webcams and cheap 'n cheerful ARM SoCs, so that aspect of the plan probably went OK.
Not to worry, statistics suggest that the luckless residents of the third world are having considerable trouble competing on price and surviving as well...
In certain specific cases, a sudden outbreak of competition-on-price (say, an outsourcing, or the liberalization of trade policy in a previously tariff-protected industry) may really show a group of first world workers how much they can't compete on price with some 3rd-worlders of similar skill; but in the longer term, it's not as though being unable to compete on price is exclusive to the first world: Unless you have some very-hard-to-reproduce talent (in which case you aren't competing on price), the expected price set by pure price competition will be whatever bare subsistence costs(any lower, and the labor will starve, any higher and somebody who is unemployed will be willing to work for bare subsistence...)
I had drone pilots in mind. Apparently, despite the safety and relative comfort, that job burns people out alarmingly fast. I'd assume that being a nuke-jockey has all the vices, and then some. Almost entirely boredom, sitting around being at readiness for some eventuality dreamed up by a paranoid game theorist back in the day, with the slight chance that you'll suddenly get the call to immolate a million or two people who probably won't even know that the war has started when you kill them.
That would certainly sap my morale pretty quickly.
Hey there troops, listen up! It's your job to sit in this drab, overbuilt concrete coffin, sitting on your lazy asses like the cold war relics you are, until such a time as you are instructed to commit the greatest mass slaughter in human history. Any questions?
USB device identification is already...special. You probably don't want to touch it if it can be avoided...
First you've got the Device Descriptor:
This gives you the VID/PID, USB spec compliance level, device class(if zero, there are multiple interface descriptors, each with different device classes, if 0xFF, device class is 'vendor specific', otherwise one of the standard device classes; mass storage class, USB Video Class,etc.), along with strings for the manufacturer, product, and serial, and the number of possible configurations).
Then you have the configuration descriptors, which define the interfaces for a given configuration, then the interface descriptors (which define the device classes for each interface, if not defined above), and specify the endpoints that the interface uses, which are then defined with their own endpoint descriptors.
If the gods smile upon you, you are dealing with some standard device, like a flash drive, and the device class is 0xo8h and you can load the appropriate driver. The difficulty comes in if you run into a device that is 0xFF, which only tells you that a vendor-specific driver is needed, (in which case your options are either trusting the VID/PID codes or one of the strings to actually be accurate, or gingerly poking the device and fingerprinting it by its responses).
Perhaps even more subtly and annoyingly, there are situations where you are given a standard device class ID (0x03H, human interface device, is a common one for this to happen to, as are some very generic vendor-specific devices like USB/serial adapters); but where the correct behavior is to load an additional driver that provides functions in addition to those provided by the default class driver, or where it is useful for the user to know that this USB serial device is an Arduino, while that one is their uninterruptable power supply, and the other one is just a generic USB->DB9 cable that they have plugged in.
I suppose the one upside of all this is that it would probably be doable to sneak a fair amount of data (that could be interpreted by a hypothetical non-spec ID protocol) into the structure without causing the USB device to freak out USB systems that aren't expecting it. A little abuse of the various string description interfaces seems like the quick and dangerous path... A normal USB system just pretty-prints them; but shouldn't actually pay attention to their contents. A wildcat system could presumably exploit that to embed ID data in the string fields without causing more than a visual mess on systems not expecting it. Wouldn't be pretty, though.
I assume that the Linux VID is based on publicly known VIDs(so, mostly ones that show up in reasonably cheap hardware, or reasonably expensive hardware run by linux geeks).
The USB-IF purports to have a list (the link under 'Company list', saves as a.if file; but opens fine as text); but it looks awfully short to be anything close to a comprehensive list of companies selling USB widgets on a scale where just slapping a random number in the VID field isn't going to cut it.
Is there a public registry of VIDs somewhere, or do VIDs only become 'published' when somebody buys the product (or grabs the driver) and tells the world?
I think that the risk of collision with a legitimate VID was the reason to go for a VID that was known to have been assigned; but to a dead entity, rather than just choosing a 'random' VID that might have an obscure-but-functioning entity behind it. The USB-IF says, for instance, that these are obsolete.
Luddites had specifically economic motives, and were concerned with the technological changes in the means of production. This is about people with psychological motives concerned with technological changes largely outside of work (though I'm sure that people who realize that they weren't issued a company blackberry for their benefit probably count as well). Two totally different things.
You make me sick. Why 'get a life' when you can consume a premium lifestyle, defined by constant engagement with the most desired consumer goods and services, as modeled by the happy and attractive people on TV?
It has been proposed that, since some of the companies that had VIDs at one time are now defunct, and not even functioning as zombie brands anymore, that an 'unofficial registry' be set up to allocate PIDs from one or more of the VIDs whose owners are dead.
It is 'playing chicken' with the USB-IF, since they could decide to sell the VID in the future; but the idea is that, if there are enough squatter PIDs, along with whatever devices the dead company released during its life, in the wild, anybody paying actual cash to buy a VID would tell the USB-IF to go to hell if they were offered a 'used' VID.
I would hope that this absurd overreaction is just the legal/management assholes overreacting(the USB-IF is made up of technology companies; but their consortium's management and legal services are provided by an outside company that specializes in providing management and legal services to consortia, not in technology), and that the actual USB-IF stakeholders will see the wisdom of working with 'indie' device makers who are trying to work with them (rather than just wildcatting), especially now that hardware capable of implementing a USB slave device, with an arbitrary VID/PID prgrammed in, is so cheap.
If they don't, though, I would certainly be inclined to take the 'find a dead VID and squat on it' approach. Probably won't get your drivers past the WHQL process; but if it makes the Linux kernel maintainers' jobs easier, that's better than nothing.
I don't claim to know the details, in either case (though, given that Intel makes NICs, and made StrongARMs at that time, I'm inclined to accuse them for not doing it themselves or using their Chipzilla powers to muscle a suitable agreement out of their supplier).
My intended point was just that I don't understand the people who treat devices that treat devices with proprietary firmware burned into onboard flash as 'more free' than devices that request proprietary firmware on startup (since they both use proprietary firmware, one just skimps on the BoM and the other doesn't); but I do see a very significant difference in usability between vendors who are laid back about their firmware blobs, whether they are burned in or requested at power-on, vs. the vendors who treat their blobs as precious secrets and force you to go through some silly little dance to get the things. (Of course, the special place in hell is reserved for the vendors who treat the blobs, when distributed alone, as some terrifying threat; but treat the Windows driver, with the blob included so that that driver can load it, as an item on their support page. How, exactly, does my having to download win32driver.exe, then run driverdissector.sh, to get firmware.bin do anything other than annoy me, at no benefit to you, whose silicon I've already purchased?)
The article makes a perfectly reasonable observation, in one sense, (to go with your car analogy, it is in fact true that most people in the 'car industry' are blue-collar workers with on-the-job training or technical degrees/certs); but to extrapolate from "most workers are" to "the industry is" is folly, in almost any business.
I think I didn't express my point very well: As you say, the capabilities(and equipment) required to actually narrow down and fix a fault in something like a modern motherboard are Serious Business (excluding trivial cases like the capacitor plague, where getting a 30-50% fix rate with a supply of new capacitors and a $10 soldering iron is pretty doable).
My intended point was that, for that reason, it is almost always uneconomic to hire and equip your 'computer system specialists' to the standard that would be necessary to do that sort of thing. Instead, you just buy vendor warranties or a shelf of spares, and hire people who are capable of using basic diagnostics tools, mostly software, and handling board swaps. When even just throwing the thing away and buying a new one costs ~$100, well qualified EEs with sophisticated test equipment are priced right out.
The reason that they Shock, Suprise! discovered that most IT workers don't have degrees, or don't have 'relevant' degrees is that those sorts of economic factors have largely bifurcated the market for "IT" workers. At one end, you have people who are nominally 'IT', because that's the department they work for; but every effort has been made to reduce the amount the actually have to know about electronics or computer science. Problem solving, organization, good interaction with users, some logistical skills; but all the technology is really just plugging stuff where it fits. On the other end, you have the people with assorted deep specializations in specific classes of products or problems.
Software has probably resisted the bifurcation effect a bit more than hardware, because (vendor promises aside) software 'solutions' never seem to quite fit, so IT operations of any nontrivial size sooner or later need somebody who can at least hack out some scripts (and if IT doesn't do it, somebody else will, probably in Excel), possibly do more significant customization to 'one size fits none' products, or even do some internal development of full-fledged applications.
1. If you don't go through whatever song-and-dance the USB IF wants you to to be 'certified', you can't use any of the trademarked logos (the little trident-thing symbol, possibly various words and phrases associated with 'USB'). Technologically, this isn't an issue, legally it might be(unless you are willing to use some janky-sounding circumlocution to suggest that, while not a 'USB device' your widget would probably do something useful if plugged into that rectangular, 4-pin port...)
2. VID/PID combinations are (ideally) supposed to be helpful in identifying USB devices without playing ugly little games of "20 questions" to try to discern what the hell you are talking to by fingerprinting its behavior. Device presents VID/PID, OS looks up appropriate driver, no muss, no fuss. There isn't anything the USB IF can do legally about a device declaring whatever VID/PID it wants (sure, just try to defend a trademark claim on a bunch of arbitrary numbers); but it would certainly be a huge pain for everyone involved if duplicate VID/PIDs start showing up in any quantity, since the OS would have to resort to fingerprinting heuristics to try to guess what it is actually talking to, and what driver should be used.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason(despite the fact that the namespace is huge), the USB IF is notably unhelpful for anybody who wants to do a small-run; but do so commercially. They, in their goodness, deign to make some "prototype" VID/PID blocks available, ostensibly only for noncommercial use; but getting a proper VID is some thousands of dollars, plus paperwork, and (as here) they are apparently pretty touchy about the (otherwise quite sensible) "Well, we have a lot of small hobbyists who can't afford a VID, and won't be putting out enough products to warrant one anyway, why can't we buy a single VID and hand out PIDs?" plan.
Some vendors, as a value-add for their USB-enabled silicon (FTDI for their USB/serial converters, some microcontroller makers with their USB-slave capable micros, etc.) will provide PIDs, for use with their products, for free, which is apparently OK for some reason; but they don't appear to like this idea very much.
It isn't even clear that they'd need to leave Denmark: It's not like the local authorities don't know about them, they aren't a low-profile organization, and so far the only issues they've had appear to be collisions with quirks of law written for other purposes entirely (some thing about parachutes, and the fact that dangerously energy-dense compounds with a history of use in firearms are regulated differently from rocket fuels); but nothing that suggests anybody with power and an axe to grind.
Assuming that that is in fact the case, the obligations of this UN treaty could presumably be satisfied just by having the Danish government find somebody to say "Yeah, sure, just don't crash into any expensive satellites or populated areas, ok?" and then sending the biggest rocketry enthusiast on the state payroll to go and geek out in the control center during the launch.
If they had the feds on their back, they probably would have learned that the hard way by now.
so what happened last time the British tried to enforce their morality across the pond....
I don't remember the American Revolution having much of a moral element.... In fact, while we've done a great deal to get over it, the US was substantially stocked by a mixture of moralizing assholes too moralistic to get along in Britain (ye olde puritans) and would-be feudal lords who couldn't compete with the incumbents at home and therefore went abroad (ye olde slave plantation regions).
Some political discontent, some economic interests; but King George wasn't exactly getting all up in our right to own filthy erotic lithographs...
Is there any part of the internet (aside from its utility for dystopian surveillance) that hasn't caused David Cameron to open his horrible, gormless, marshmallow-face and drone on about 'the children' and 'irresponsibility'?
It's as though his government has entirely run out of substantive policy or something...
You don't even necessarily need to go that far, you just need to know whether the signatory state you are launching from gives a damn or not. The treaty doesn't specify that they have to be hardasses about 'authorization and continuing supervision', just that that has to exist.
Given that any spaceflight is going to carry you through the slice of atmosphere where manned aviation is sort of a big deal, it's not as though some largely-theoretical UN treaty is the only reason that you'll be having a chat with the feds before launch...
In practice, also, I suspect that you don't really want to get clever looking for 'loopholes'; because that rarely causes the opposing party to slap their foreheads and admit defeat: In a sense, the inverse of 'loopholes' are all the laws and regulations that are either largely unenforced or simply have almost no resources devoted to looking for violators. They are still there if Officer Hardass wants to use them, though. Do you think that somebody is launching a nontrivial rocket while complying with all Danish and EU laws and regulations concerning health, safety, threat to aviation, storage of hazardous and/or flammable materials, land use zoning, pollution emissions restrictions, etc, etc, etc? I'm guessing that the answer is "not entirely". Do you want to give someone a reason to check?
Or you could you know, just shave your goddamn head. Never understood why some people have such a want to get their hair back. Even tho transplants seem alot better than other solutions such as sprays and wigs, which will literally fall off or melt off your head in certain conditions, why waste the money. I have never understood this fascination.
For some combination of mortality-anxiety and the desire to get laid, people are obsessed with any measures that can keep aging indicators at bay and restore a youthful appearance. Only a fairly small subset of male aesthetics actually look suitably young with a shaved head.
It isn't...exactly... news, is it, that neither 'computer support specialists' nor 'network and computer systems administrators' are jobs that are particularly close to what a 'STEM' curriculum might teach you. You can't be afraid of computers, and the ability to bodge out some scripts when the occasion demands it is always handy; but it isn't as though you are expected (or even permitted) to break out the CS-fu and build some custom management system, or put your EE skills to work by diagnosing that malfunctioning motherboard properly rather than just shipping it back to the vendor for a replacement...
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily, they didn't go all Amercian on his ass and shot him on sight http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-24648974
Kid was obviously some kind of foreign pinko sleeper agent. No Real American would be caught dead with a replica assault rifle, rather than the real thing.
I suspect that it's more about the fact that hysteria sells than genuine cluelessness.
PCSOs and not-otherwise-alarmed officers don't routinely carry firearms; but 'Authorized Firearms Officers', potentially any officers with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and various other entities here and there, do, so it's not as though the necessary expertise isn't an internal phone call away, at most.
(The, um, unimpressive... build quality and design standards of 3d printed weapons may also be a factor: if you are hunting parts for firearms that are made out of shitty plastic, to a level of quality that would shame your average zipgun and make a 'saturday night special' look like some sort of futuristic H&K design concept, you may be inclined to consider the absence of 'normal' features to be mere shodiness, rather than a sign that it's a different part entirely.)
How can you call them 'clueless', you monster? The CAD monkey who designed the not-a-plastic-rectangle case to enclose the cheap Chinese reference platform, as well as the photoshop kid and the copywriter who put together the box, which appears to be in largely-not-mispelled English, clearly know something!
To assume that they had any more involvement with the hardware than they did with the software is fairly charitable... At least random Chinese OEMs know how to build webcams and cheap 'n cheerful ARM SoCs, so that aspect of the plan probably went OK.
Not to worry, statistics suggest that the luckless residents of the third world are having considerable trouble competing on price and surviving as well...
In certain specific cases, a sudden outbreak of competition-on-price (say, an outsourcing, or the liberalization of trade policy in a previously tariff-protected industry) may really show a group of first world workers how much they can't compete on price with some 3rd-worlders of similar skill; but in the longer term, it's not as though being unable to compete on price is exclusive to the first world: Unless you have some very-hard-to-reproduce talent (in which case you aren't competing on price), the expected price set by pure price competition will be whatever bare subsistence costs(any lower, and the labor will starve, any higher and somebody who is unemployed will be willing to work for bare subsistence...)
I had drone pilots in mind. Apparently, despite the safety and relative comfort, that job burns people out alarmingly fast. I'd assume that being a nuke-jockey has all the vices, and then some. Almost entirely boredom, sitting around being at readiness for some eventuality dreamed up by a paranoid game theorist back in the day, with the slight chance that you'll suddenly get the call to immolate a million or two people who probably won't even know that the war has started when you kill them.
That would certainly sap my morale pretty quickly.
Hey there troops, listen up! It's your job to sit in this drab, overbuilt concrete coffin, sitting on your lazy asses like the cold war relics you are, until such a time as you are instructed to commit the greatest mass slaughter in human history. Any questions?
USB device identification is already...special. You probably don't want to touch it if it can be avoided...
First you've got the Device Descriptor:
This gives you the VID/PID, USB spec compliance level, device class(if zero, there are multiple interface descriptors, each with different device classes, if 0xFF, device class is 'vendor specific', otherwise one of the standard device classes; mass storage class, USB Video Class,etc.), along with strings for the manufacturer, product, and serial, and the number of possible configurations).
Then you have the configuration descriptors, which define the interfaces for a given configuration, then the interface descriptors (which define the device classes for each interface, if not defined above), and specify the endpoints that the interface uses, which are then defined with their own endpoint descriptors.
If the gods smile upon you, you are dealing with some standard device, like a flash drive, and the device class is 0xo8h and you can load the appropriate driver. The difficulty comes in if you run into a device that is 0xFF, which only tells you that a vendor-specific driver is needed, (in which case your options are either trusting the VID/PID codes or one of the strings to actually be accurate, or gingerly poking the device and fingerprinting it by its responses).
Perhaps even more subtly and annoyingly, there are situations where you are given a standard device class ID (0x03H, human interface device, is a common one for this to happen to, as are some very generic vendor-specific devices like USB/serial adapters); but where the correct behavior is to load an additional driver that provides functions in addition to those provided by the default class driver, or where it is useful for the user to know that this USB serial device is an Arduino, while that one is their uninterruptable power supply, and the other one is just a generic USB->DB9 cable that they have plugged in.
I suppose the one upside of all this is that it would probably be doable to sneak a fair amount of data (that could be interpreted by a hypothetical non-spec ID protocol) into the structure without causing the USB device to freak out USB systems that aren't expecting it. A little abuse of the various string description interfaces seems like the quick and dangerous path... A normal USB system just pretty-prints them; but shouldn't actually pay attention to their contents. A wildcat system could presumably exploit that to embed ID data in the string fields without causing more than a visual mess on systems not expecting it. Wouldn't be pretty, though.
I assume that the Linux VID is based on publicly known VIDs(so, mostly ones that show up in reasonably cheap hardware, or reasonably expensive hardware run by linux geeks).
.if file; but opens fine as text); but it looks awfully short to be anything close to a comprehensive list of companies selling USB widgets on a scale where just slapping a random number in the VID field isn't going to cut it.
The USB-IF purports to have a list (the link under 'Company list', saves as a
Is there a public registry of VIDs somewhere, or do VIDs only become 'published' when somebody buys the product (or grabs the driver) and tells the world? I think that the risk of collision with a legitimate VID was the reason to go for a VID that was known to have been assigned; but to a dead entity, rather than just choosing a 'random' VID that might have an obscure-but-functioning entity behind it. The USB-IF says, for instance, that these are obsolete.
You do realize that execution is a hobby in Texas, don't you?
It's only 'your free time' in the sense that those pens you stole from the supply closet are 'your free pens'. Also, HR wants a word with you.
It's called being a luddite.
Luddites had specifically economic motives, and were concerned with the technological changes in the means of production. This is about people with psychological motives concerned with technological changes largely outside of work (though I'm sure that people who realize that they weren't issued a company blackberry for their benefit probably count as well). Two totally different things.
I call it 'get a life'
You make me sick. Why 'get a life' when you can consume a premium lifestyle, defined by constant engagement with the most desired consumer goods and services, as modeled by the happy and attractive people on TV?
It has been proposed that, since some of the companies that had VIDs at one time are now defunct, and not even functioning as zombie brands anymore, that an 'unofficial registry' be set up to allocate PIDs from one or more of the VIDs whose owners are dead.
It is 'playing chicken' with the USB-IF, since they could decide to sell the VID in the future; but the idea is that, if there are enough squatter PIDs, along with whatever devices the dead company released during its life, in the wild, anybody paying actual cash to buy a VID would tell the USB-IF to go to hell if they were offered a 'used' VID.
I would hope that this absurd overreaction is just the legal/management assholes overreacting(the USB-IF is made up of technology companies; but their consortium's management and legal services are provided by an outside company that specializes in providing management and legal services to consortia, not in technology), and that the actual USB-IF stakeholders will see the wisdom of working with 'indie' device makers who are trying to work with them (rather than just wildcatting), especially now that hardware capable of implementing a USB slave device, with an arbitrary VID/PID prgrammed in, is so cheap.
If they don't, though, I would certainly be inclined to take the 'find a dead VID and squat on it' approach. Probably won't get your drivers past the WHQL process; but if it makes the Linux kernel maintainers' jobs easier, that's better than nothing.
I don't claim to know the details, in either case (though, given that Intel makes NICs, and made StrongARMs at that time, I'm inclined to accuse them for not doing it themselves or using their Chipzilla powers to muscle a suitable agreement out of their supplier). My intended point was just that I don't understand the people who treat devices that treat devices with proprietary firmware burned into onboard flash as 'more free' than devices that request proprietary firmware on startup (since they both use proprietary firmware, one just skimps on the BoM and the other doesn't); but I do see a very significant difference in usability between vendors who are laid back about their firmware blobs, whether they are burned in or requested at power-on, vs. the vendors who treat their blobs as precious secrets and force you to go through some silly little dance to get the things. (Of course, the special place in hell is reserved for the vendors who treat the blobs, when distributed alone, as some terrifying threat; but treat the Windows driver, with the blob included so that that driver can load it, as an item on their support page. How, exactly, does my having to download win32driver.exe, then run driverdissector.sh, to get firmware.bin do anything other than annoy me, at no benefit to you, whose silicon I've already purchased?)
The article makes a perfectly reasonable observation, in one sense, (to go with your car analogy, it is in fact true that most people in the 'car industry' are blue-collar workers with on-the-job training or technical degrees/certs); but to extrapolate from "most workers are" to "the industry is" is folly, in almost any business.
I think I didn't express my point very well: As you say, the capabilities(and equipment) required to actually narrow down and fix a fault in something like a modern motherboard are Serious Business (excluding trivial cases like the capacitor plague, where getting a 30-50% fix rate with a supply of new capacitors and a $10 soldering iron is pretty doable).
My intended point was that, for that reason, it is almost always uneconomic to hire and equip your 'computer system specialists' to the standard that would be necessary to do that sort of thing. Instead, you just buy vendor warranties or a shelf of spares, and hire people who are capable of using basic diagnostics tools, mostly software, and handling board swaps. When even just throwing the thing away and buying a new one costs ~$100, well qualified EEs with sophisticated test equipment are priced right out.
The reason that they Shock, Suprise! discovered that most IT workers don't have degrees, or don't have 'relevant' degrees is that those sorts of economic factors have largely bifurcated the market for "IT" workers. At one end, you have people who are nominally 'IT', because that's the department they work for; but every effort has been made to reduce the amount the actually have to know about electronics or computer science. Problem solving, organization, good interaction with users, some logistical skills; but all the technology is really just plugging stuff where it fits. On the other end, you have the people with assorted deep specializations in specific classes of products or problems.
Software has probably resisted the bifurcation effect a bit more than hardware, because (vendor promises aside) software 'solutions' never seem to quite fit, so IT operations of any nontrivial size sooner or later need somebody who can at least hack out some scripts (and if IT doesn't do it, somebody else will, probably in Excel), possibly do more significant customization to 'one size fits none' products, or even do some internal development of full-fledged applications.
There are two main issues here:
1. If you don't go through whatever song-and-dance the USB IF wants you to to be 'certified', you can't use any of the trademarked logos (the little trident-thing symbol, possibly various words and phrases associated with 'USB'). Technologically, this isn't an issue, legally it might be(unless you are willing to use some janky-sounding circumlocution to suggest that, while not a 'USB device' your widget would probably do something useful if plugged into that rectangular, 4-pin port...)
2. VID/PID combinations are (ideally) supposed to be helpful in identifying USB devices without playing ugly little games of "20 questions" to try to discern what the hell you are talking to by fingerprinting its behavior. Device presents VID/PID, OS looks up appropriate driver, no muss, no fuss. There isn't anything the USB IF can do legally about a device declaring whatever VID/PID it wants (sure, just try to defend a trademark claim on a bunch of arbitrary numbers); but it would certainly be a huge pain for everyone involved if duplicate VID/PIDs start showing up in any quantity, since the OS would have to resort to fingerprinting heuristics to try to guess what it is actually talking to, and what driver should be used.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason(despite the fact that the namespace is huge), the USB IF is notably unhelpful for anybody who wants to do a small-run; but do so commercially. They, in their goodness, deign to make some "prototype" VID/PID blocks available, ostensibly only for noncommercial use; but getting a proper VID is some thousands of dollars, plus paperwork, and (as here) they are apparently pretty touchy about the (otherwise quite sensible) "Well, we have a lot of small hobbyists who can't afford a VID, and won't be putting out enough products to warrant one anyway, why can't we buy a single VID and hand out PIDs?" plan.
Some vendors, as a value-add for their USB-enabled silicon (FTDI for their USB/serial converters, some microcontroller makers with their USB-slave capable micros, etc.) will provide PIDs, for use with their products, for free, which is apparently OK for some reason; but they don't appear to like this idea very much.
It isn't even clear that they'd need to leave Denmark: It's not like the local authorities don't know about them, they aren't a low-profile organization, and so far the only issues they've had appear to be collisions with quirks of law written for other purposes entirely (some thing about parachutes, and the fact that dangerously energy-dense compounds with a history of use in firearms are regulated differently from rocket fuels); but nothing that suggests anybody with power and an axe to grind.
Assuming that that is in fact the case, the obligations of this UN treaty could presumably be satisfied just by having the Danish government find somebody to say "Yeah, sure, just don't crash into any expensive satellites or populated areas, ok?" and then sending the biggest rocketry enthusiast on the state payroll to go and geek out in the control center during the launch.
If they had the feds on their back, they probably would have learned that the hard way by now.
Facebook prefers that you refer to that content as "unfriending videos".
so what happened last time the British tried to enforce their morality across the pond....
I don't remember the American Revolution having much of a moral element.... In fact, while we've done a great deal to get over it, the US was substantially stocked by a mixture of moralizing assholes too moralistic to get along in Britain (ye olde puritans) and would-be feudal lords who couldn't compete with the incumbents at home and therefore went abroad (ye olde slave plantation regions).
Some political discontent, some economic interests; but King George wasn't exactly getting all up in our right to own filthy erotic lithographs...
Is there any part of the internet (aside from its utility for dystopian surveillance) that hasn't caused David Cameron to open his horrible, gormless, marshmallow-face and drone on about 'the children' and 'irresponsibility'? It's as though his government has entirely run out of substantive policy or something...
You don't even necessarily need to go that far, you just need to know whether the signatory state you are launching from gives a damn or not. The treaty doesn't specify that they have to be hardasses about 'authorization and continuing supervision', just that that has to exist.
Given that any spaceflight is going to carry you through the slice of atmosphere where manned aviation is sort of a big deal, it's not as though some largely-theoretical UN treaty is the only reason that you'll be having a chat with the feds before launch...
In practice, also, I suspect that you don't really want to get clever looking for 'loopholes'; because that rarely causes the opposing party to slap their foreheads and admit defeat: In a sense, the inverse of 'loopholes' are all the laws and regulations that are either largely unenforced or simply have almost no resources devoted to looking for violators. They are still there if Officer Hardass wants to use them, though. Do you think that somebody is launching a nontrivial rocket while complying with all Danish and EU laws and regulations concerning health, safety, threat to aviation, storage of hazardous and/or flammable materials, land use zoning, pollution emissions restrictions, etc, etc, etc? I'm guessing that the answer is "not entirely". Do you want to give someone a reason to check?
Or you could you know, just shave your goddamn head. Never understood why some people have such a want to get their hair back. Even tho transplants seem alot better than other solutions such as sprays and wigs, which will literally fall off or melt off your head in certain conditions, why waste the money. I have never understood this fascination.
For some combination of mortality-anxiety and the desire to get laid, people are obsessed with any measures that can keep aging indicators at bay and restore a youthful appearance. Only a fairly small subset of male aesthetics actually look suitably young with a shaved head.
It isn't...exactly... news, is it, that neither 'computer support specialists' nor 'network and computer systems administrators' are jobs that are particularly close to what a 'STEM' curriculum might teach you. You can't be afraid of computers, and the ability to bodge out some scripts when the occasion demands it is always handy; but it isn't as though you are expected (or even permitted) to break out the CS-fu and build some custom management system, or put your EE skills to work by diagnosing that malfunctioning motherboard properly rather than just shipping it back to the vendor for a replacement...