Even an older embedded device(NSLU2 4 lyfe!) is substantially more capable. The one major kicker(at least for me, speaking as somebody who is OK in userland but not so much a hardware wonk) is that PC BIOSes suck; but(aside from a bunch of annoying bugs, and some relatively predictable losses in function as you go back in time) they largely suck in the same way. By contrast, two feature-identical embedded linux plastic router/AP boxes, released at the same time, might have totally different bootloaders and the ability to brick hard enough that some soldering and xmodem(if serial is still alive) or JTAG work will be required merely by messing up your flash partitioning...
You can brick a PC, at least one new enough to have a flash BIOS, or something old enough that configuring X wrong will possibly fry something; but embedded stuff is still much easier to really paint yourself into a corner with.
but what sort of effect would such a ruling have?
ie: why the fuck should we care?
Well, among other minor matters, it would tend to suggest that your registrar is more in the position of a landlord than of a software-licensor(ie. he doesn't have complete power to fuck you over arbitrarily) and it would also tend to suggest that your friendly local feds would be bound by whatever pitiful shreds of procedural protection govern seizing property, rather than something even weaker...
Some ruggedized systems do pretty much that. Lots of silicone or other rubber padding(there are also some neat non-newtonian gel materials in limited use, whose properties conveniently change according to the strength and speed of impact), flex space for vulnerable components like HDDs, and use of suitably flexible polycarbonate or other aesthetically-questionable-but-not-brittle case materials.
All that adds bulk, though. As best I can tell(in the same way that everybody loaths wall-wart AC adapters; but manufacturers use them because they are cheap and make the product itself look a lot slimmer), electronics design, outside of explicitly ruggedized products or low-end low-tolerance plasticy stuff, has headed in the direction of making slim, beautiful, and vulnerable hardware, and letting the customer feel the shiny first, and then go out and add the ugly-but practical silicone case after the initial purchase...
Obviously, in areas with comparatively early cell build-outs, there are very likely going to be areas where less-than-bleeding edge is all you get. So, if you live in one of those, paying a premium for some zOMG 4G++!!! burn-through-your-monthly-data-cap-in-10-minutes device is not a good plan. Ok. So much is obvious.
The relevant question is, do recent devices fall back gracefully, and how do older or 2G only devices compare to their contemporaries in terms of things like antenna quality? Having a 3G device; but being limited to 2G capabilities in a 2G area is simply an inevitable inconvenience. If, however, 3G devices that just silently fail outside of 3G areas, or take excessively long times to fall back, or do some silly little dance where they switch between a hopelessly weak 3G signal and the available 2G tower every couple of seconds, or if contemporary RF design is based on the theory that all customers loath antennas and live 300 meters from a cell tower, then the fact that some areas are 2G only starts to factor into your buying decision...
Well, I just went with the "$20 phone that practically bounced the one time I dropped it" strategy; but sacrificial components to protect high-value systems in the event of collision is a pretty standard practice(which makes me think that Bezos' patent is about as good as you'd expect a Bezos patent to be...) Getting the economics to work out is largely a matter of tweaking the sensitivity of the trigger and designing the consumable properly.
There are certainly designs and materials that are better and worse in terms of how well they make this tradeoff; but one problem with impact resistance(abundantly seen in recent trends in phone design) is that a number of the things that make a phone good at resisting impact ironically make it feel like cheap shit in use.
Your basic free-on-contract snap-on-ABS-modular-carrier-branding-panels-and-not-especially-tight-tolerances dumbphone is actually pretty good at being resistant to drops. The ABS flexes, absorbing some of the energy, the battery door pops off and goes flying, and the LCD is a dinky little module loosely held behind a plastic cover by a ribbon cable and a couple of pegs. You can practically feel the thing flex when you try to use it; but it simply flexes and springs back when dropped.
Your canonical contemporary smartphone, by contrast, is designed to feel like a solid 2001-but-with-a-touchscreen slab of the future. No flex, no wasted volume that acts as a 'crumple zone', toughened glass that is much more scuff resistant than plastic; but shatters rather than denting/scratching, etc. Feels impenetrable in use; but inelastic collisions are painful...
The force of deceleration is a function of how fast you are going and over how short a distance you stop. People's desire to not have huge, bulbous cases sharply limits the amount of nice, gentle, elastic deceleration the case gets to provide before the 'concrete period' of the descent begins...
At the cost of additional complexity, airbags would theoretically give you all the advantages of having a case so comically thick that you would never use it, in a case that you would actually use.
The question with alpha-emitters is not 'green-death-ray-from-the-movies' style radiation exposure; but how readily the human body absorbs the stuff and starts receiving the zesty benefits of alpha particles that aren't blocked by intervening air or epidermis.
A nice stable chunk, of virtually arbitrary size, is no danger(unless you wait a really long time and the helium from alpha decay displaces the oxygen in the room); but fine dusts or bioavalable compounds can deliver serious radiation doses directly to vulnerable tissues.
If thorium isn't easily absorbed, even if it does its pyrophoric metal thing and forms fine airborne oxides, then its radioactive status is unimportant. If it is absorbed readily, you might want to avoid "Litvinenko" style incidents with the stuff...
It might be an improvement over the present in terms of the skin-contact portion of the apparatus; but doing a computer-brain interface without drilling holes in the skull and getting direct contact imposes some fairly annoying constraints:
The electrical activity of the brain is certainly externally detectable; but it isn't terribly strong, and you have to deal with EMI and scalp muscle activity and such. Only gives you a comparatively rough, aggregate sense of what the brain is up to, and the further from the brain surface you go, the harder it becomes.
If you don't want to stick to 'read-only', things get harder. The brain is somewhat conductive, so a sufficiently powerful transcranial magnetic field will indeed affect it; but "sufficiently powerful" means "probably doesn't run on batteries". Also, you still suffer from comparatively coarse resolution.
While transparency in public policy(and the contents of one's water supply) is generally better than the alternative, there is a very, very, important caveat:
Without accountability, and without means of redress(at least sufficient to be useful in practice, ie. typically not civil court for anybody who doesn't have substantial resources, and ideally sufficient to restrain, rather than merely punish, wrongdoing), transparency is basically just a PR stunt.
If it is wholly legal, or de-facto legal because nobody can afford to sue and wait a decade while the lawyers hash it out, to expose my water supply to fracking chemicals, it barely matters whether I get to know what is in them or not. If I do, writing that retrospective paper for the Journal of Epidemiological Toxicology will be a lot easier for some researcher. If I don't, I'll just have to live with the suspicion that my water's observable properties are alarming, and the local cancer rates seem high.
Short form: Impunity renders transparency irrelevant.
"Christian Science", as a religious movement, is approximately equivalent to other not-too-foaming-at-the-mouth strains of Protestantism, with the exception of its rather peculiar disinclination toward not availing itself of modern medicine.
For whatever reason, though, their newspaper does almost no water-carrying for the mothership, and is broadly considered respectable even by those who find the parent organization's doctrines silly in the extreme...
Arguably, GPS is better than legacy maps if you want to 'discover'; because all it does is(in most module implementations) spit out a NMEA or vendor binary equivalent of x,y,z coordinates, time, and heading at intervals.
You can have an absolutely blank "map" and still accurately place whatever you find within a reasonably well-behaved coordinate space. Plus, when you get lost, you can breadcrumb your way back home before you have to get all Donner Party on whoever is nearby...
If you prefer to pick your discoveries from categories that you actually care about, you can selectively or fully introduce map data for roads, businesses, manhole covers, whatever...
Plus, of course, there is the entire class of "discovery" where having a really accurate timebase that isn't full of caesium is pretty handy...
Guess what, back in the day, the fact that the horizon of human knowledge was so narrow didn't tend to promote discovery, it tended to promote people living, breeding, and dying within spitting distance of the same place and telling wild stories about antipodian monsters and the Kingdom Of Prestor John. Good navigational aids, on the other hand, get people off their asses because they make travel more valuable and less risky.
Now, if you want to talk about what GPS has done to the kiddie's compass and map-reading skills, go right ahead; but a highly accurate coordinate reference system is a boon to discoverers. Those poor guys undertaking the Great Trigonometric Survey would likely have happily given a testicle for access to GPS fixes...
It would actually be quite interesting(if, as with so many interesting things, rather unethical) to see how readily adapted the visual systems of the brain would be to functioning for "hearing"...
The eyes cannot see sound; but there are a variety of ways of systematically visualizing sound. If one were to take a deaf individual, and fill their visual field with a visualization of the sounds around them at all times, would they come to experience "auditory" phenomena?
You aren't going to get useful amounts of light to the brain through the ears! Worse, what light you do get will be all dim and orange/reddish, and throw your circadian rhythms for a loop because you think it is sunset all the time. Worthless.
Here, just for my Slashdot friends, is the secret to really showing 'Seasonal Affective Disorder' who is boss:
Simply passing electrons through the cerebrospinal and intracellular fluids of the brain at a speed greater than that of light within those media will bathe the brain in a lovely, broad-spectrum, delicate blue glow. This will stimulate photo-receptors that aural lighting cannot hope to reach.
Unfortunately, due to high costs and a coverup by the alarm-clock/industrial complex, you may have to sneak into a nearby university or DOE laboratory in order to use a linear accelerator of sufficient power. While Cherenkov radiation can also restore vigor to the scalp and reverse balding, you need energy sufficient to pass through the skull in order to see circadian benefits.
OCZ was hardly the first to do direct flash-PCIe storage(though some of their earlier products were just a disk controller and SSD on the same card, they have native ones now). They do have the advantage of being one of the vendors of PCIe-SSDs whose prices are remotely accessible, and who are available through enthusiast channels.
Most of the other players are basically in the business of making people's Big Serious Expensive databases run faster, and their prices and "if you are serious, please call our sales department" distribution style. You probably don't want to know what one of these or these cost, and you won't find them at newegg...
Manufacturers want to be able to switch flash suppliers without doing board redesigns or modifying flash drivers in their bootloaders. Flash suppliers want to be able to do whatever they feel like, so long as a thin interface layer is preserved on top....
It would probably be most accurate to think of this "uSSD" as a faster, more PC-architecture-oriented version of the "eMMC" JEDEC standard for soldering flash directly onto a motherboard, with a lower board space, pin count, and controller requirement than raw flash chips.
"eMMC", which is basically an MMC card's guts in a BGA package, is already quite popular in things like cellphones(ever wonder why some cellphones filesystem names suggest that they have an MMC card that they don't really? It's because they do, in software terms...) "uSSD" will, presumably, be the big brother of that standard, putting SATA signals and power over a standardized BGA arrangement, rather than using MMC signals and power...
The root of my puzzlement(and, unless their is in fact a reasonable explanation that escapes me, my dismay at this waste of money) is that, if the new system cannot either achieve sensor stealth sufficiently good that early-warning systems don't notice it, or prove to the diplomatic satisfaction of everybody who would get all 'second-strike'-y if they saw a US ICBM zipping off to an urgent appointment with something, then it represents absolutely no improvement over cheaper, actually working, hardware with minor modifications:
The "Conventional Trident" proposal, for instance, would have provided a conventional warhead reentry vehicle for our existing supply of Trident missiles and launch platforms. It was nixed because a "Conventional Trident" strike and a Trident first-strike would look pretty much identical until the target was actually hit.
Unless this hypersonic glider widget is somehow not vulnerable to that objection(and I don't see why a nuclear hypersonic glider and a conventional hypersonic glider wouldn't look the same...), then the whole project would appear to be a pointless engineering stunt aimed at re-aquiring capabilities we've already had since partway through the cold war; but with the additional challenge of making it all work without leaving the atmosphere... Why bother?
That is certainly true. I'm guessing, though, that stock rioters aren't running BESes(it would be interesting, though, to see if more organized and pragmatic criminals have begun using the riot kiddies as cover, and pulling more organized property heists... They might well take communications security more seriously), and that any telco interference with BES traffic would provoke a certain degree of upset among Respectable People.
I suppose the more logical plan(combining both the control that the state would want and the revenue that the telco would want) would be to use the 3rd-party BES option as a price discrimination feature: Anybody who gets a Blackberry because those have become the de-facto cheap email/IM phones would be telco/RIM only. "Business" lines, which would cost more or be purchased at contractual bulk rates, could use arbitrarily specified BESes...
So, apparently this hypersonic glider is part of the "Prompt Global Strike" concept, designed to deliver an explosive anywhere on earth in under an hour, for various purposes.
Now, we already have ICBMs that can do that; but we can't use those because ICBMs are typically equipped with thermonuclear warheads, which makes the world pretty jumpy about anybody launching one.
So, we are developing this rocket-boosted hypersonic glider thing that doesn't actually work yet to do it instead.
Here is what I don't understand: Is there anything about this new strike vehicle that would preclude a nuclear warhead in place of the conventional one? If so, it must have pretty serious payload limitations. If not, why would we expect global opinion to be any cheerier about this new toy than about the old one? Is it simply designed to be less visible to sensors than an ICBM?
I'm not seeing the contradiction here: The term "disaffected" is entirely neutral about whether the people described have legitimate or illegitimate grievances and about whether they have any idea what they are talking about, or complete morons. The interviewees in the link you provided certainly sound about as dumb as rocks, and without any idea what their grievances are; but they do sound pretty disaffected about something or other. Similarly, 'minority youth' is just a demographic description. Do you doubt my assertion that the Met cops probably don't have a terribly good supply of undercover agents and informers who can convincingly play teens-to-mid-20s underclass types, frequently drawn from ethnic backgrounds that cops aren't?
I'm not quite sure where in my post you detected the coddling liberal menace that you are now lashing out at... My point was simply that, logistically, doing data-mining and investigation on cellular networks, text messages, and social networks is absolute cake compared to doing human intelligence work especially if the group that you are investigating is substantially different in culture, language, ethnicity, or other group markers than most of your agents are. I'm guessing that the Met can get cooperation from facebook, BT, and RIM, along with hiring or contracting data-geeks to plow through the evidence a whole lot more easily than they can recruit a bunch of informants/undercover agents who convincingly pass for young, underclass, slum-dwellers... Is that somehow a controversial assertion?
Slashdot Mirror
Your ISP is, should it be in their financial interest, the 'man in the middle'. Every attack that involves one of those could involve them. Game over.
I can't believe that I was modded "interesting" for a joke post where I suggested sticking your head in a linear accelerator...
Even an older embedded device(NSLU2 4 lyfe!) is substantially more capable. The one major kicker(at least for me, speaking as somebody who is OK in userland but not so much a hardware wonk) is that PC BIOSes suck; but(aside from a bunch of annoying bugs, and some relatively predictable losses in function as you go back in time) they largely suck in the same way. By contrast, two feature-identical embedded linux plastic router/AP boxes, released at the same time, might have totally different bootloaders and the ability to brick hard enough that some soldering and xmodem(if serial is still alive) or JTAG work will be required merely by messing up your flash partitioning...
You can brick a PC, at least one new enough to have a flash BIOS, or something old enough that configuring X wrong will possibly fry something; but embedded stuff is still much easier to really paint yourself into a corner with.
but what sort of effect would such a ruling have? ie: why the fuck should we care?
Well, among other minor matters, it would tend to suggest that your registrar is more in the position of a landlord than of a software-licensor(ie. he doesn't have complete power to fuck you over arbitrarily) and it would also tend to suggest that your friendly local feds would be bound by whatever pitiful shreds of procedural protection govern seizing property, rather than something even weaker...
As the good Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz is unfortunately too dead to note:
"Looting is Consumerism by other means."
Some ruggedized systems do pretty much that. Lots of silicone or other rubber padding(there are also some neat non-newtonian gel materials in limited use, whose properties conveniently change according to the strength and speed of impact), flex space for vulnerable components like HDDs, and use of suitably flexible polycarbonate or other aesthetically-questionable-but-not-brittle case materials.
All that adds bulk, though. As best I can tell(in the same way that everybody loaths wall-wart AC adapters; but manufacturers use them because they are cheap and make the product itself look a lot slimmer), electronics design, outside of explicitly ruggedized products or low-end low-tolerance plasticy stuff, has headed in the direction of making slim, beautiful, and vulnerable hardware, and letting the customer feel the shiny first, and then go out and add the ugly-but practical silicone case after the initial purchase...
Obviously, in areas with comparatively early cell build-outs, there are very likely going to be areas where less-than-bleeding edge is all you get. So, if you live in one of those, paying a premium for some zOMG 4G++!!! burn-through-your-monthly-data-cap-in-10-minutes device is not a good plan. Ok. So much is obvious.
The relevant question is, do recent devices fall back gracefully, and how do older or 2G only devices compare to their contemporaries in terms of things like antenna quality? Having a 3G device; but being limited to 2G capabilities in a 2G area is simply an inevitable inconvenience. If, however, 3G devices that just silently fail outside of 3G areas, or take excessively long times to fall back, or do some silly little dance where they switch between a hopelessly weak 3G signal and the available 2G tower every couple of seconds, or if contemporary RF design is based on the theory that all customers loath antennas and live 300 meters from a cell tower, then the fact that some areas are 2G only starts to factor into your buying decision...
Well, I just went with the "$20 phone that practically bounced the one time I dropped it" strategy; but sacrificial components to protect high-value systems in the event of collision is a pretty standard practice(which makes me think that Bezos' patent is about as good as you'd expect a Bezos patent to be...) Getting the economics to work out is largely a matter of tweaking the sensitivity of the trigger and designing the consumable properly.
There are certainly designs and materials that are better and worse in terms of how well they make this tradeoff; but one problem with impact resistance(abundantly seen in recent trends in phone design) is that a number of the things that make a phone good at resisting impact ironically make it feel like cheap shit in use.
Your basic free-on-contract snap-on-ABS-modular-carrier-branding-panels-and-not-especially-tight-tolerances dumbphone is actually pretty good at being resistant to drops. The ABS flexes, absorbing some of the energy, the battery door pops off and goes flying, and the LCD is a dinky little module loosely held behind a plastic cover by a ribbon cable and a couple of pegs. You can practically feel the thing flex when you try to use it; but it simply flexes and springs back when dropped.
Your canonical contemporary smartphone, by contrast, is designed to feel like a solid 2001-but-with-a-touchscreen slab of the future. No flex, no wasted volume that acts as a 'crumple zone', toughened glass that is much more scuff resistant than plastic; but shatters rather than denting/scratching, etc. Feels impenetrable in use; but inelastic collisions are painful...
The force of deceleration is a function of how fast you are going and over how short a distance you stop. People's desire to not have huge, bulbous cases sharply limits the amount of nice, gentle, elastic deceleration the case gets to provide before the 'concrete period' of the descent begins...
At the cost of additional complexity, airbags would theoretically give you all the advantages of having a case so comically thick that you would never use it, in a case that you would actually use.
The question with alpha-emitters is not 'green-death-ray-from-the-movies' style radiation exposure; but how readily the human body absorbs the stuff and starts receiving the zesty benefits of alpha particles that aren't blocked by intervening air or epidermis.
A nice stable chunk, of virtually arbitrary size, is no danger(unless you wait a really long time and the helium from alpha decay displaces the oxygen in the room); but fine dusts or bioavalable compounds can deliver serious radiation doses directly to vulnerable tissues.
If thorium isn't easily absorbed, even if it does its pyrophoric metal thing and forms fine airborne oxides, then its radioactive status is unimportant. If it is absorbed readily, you might want to avoid "Litvinenko" style incidents with the stuff...
It might be an improvement over the present in terms of the skin-contact portion of the apparatus; but doing a computer-brain interface without drilling holes in the skull and getting direct contact imposes some fairly annoying constraints:
The electrical activity of the brain is certainly externally detectable; but it isn't terribly strong, and you have to deal with EMI and scalp muscle activity and such. Only gives you a comparatively rough, aggregate sense of what the brain is up to, and the further from the brain surface you go, the harder it becomes.
If you don't want to stick to 'read-only', things get harder. The brain is somewhat conductive, so a sufficiently powerful transcranial magnetic field will indeed affect it; but "sufficiently powerful" means "probably doesn't run on batteries". Also, you still suffer from comparatively coarse resolution.
While transparency in public policy(and the contents of one's water supply) is generally better than the alternative, there is a very, very, important caveat:
Without accountability, and without means of redress(at least sufficient to be useful in practice, ie. typically not civil court for anybody who doesn't have substantial resources, and ideally sufficient to restrain, rather than merely punish, wrongdoing), transparency is basically just a PR stunt.
If it is wholly legal, or de-facto legal because nobody can afford to sue and wait a decade while the lawyers hash it out, to expose my water supply to fracking chemicals, it barely matters whether I get to know what is in them or not. If I do, writing that retrospective paper for the Journal of Epidemiological Toxicology will be a lot easier for some researcher. If I don't, I'll just have to live with the suspicion that my water's observable properties are alarming, and the local cancer rates seem high.
Short form: Impunity renders transparency irrelevant.
"Christian Science", as a religious movement, is approximately equivalent to other not-too-foaming-at-the-mouth strains of Protestantism, with the exception of its rather peculiar disinclination toward not availing itself of modern medicine.
For whatever reason, though, their newspaper does almost no water-carrying for the mothership, and is broadly considered respectable even by those who find the parent organization's doctrines silly in the extreme...
Arguably, GPS is better than legacy maps if you want to 'discover'; because all it does is(in most module implementations) spit out a NMEA or vendor binary equivalent of x,y,z coordinates, time, and heading at intervals.
You can have an absolutely blank "map" and still accurately place whatever you find within a reasonably well-behaved coordinate space. Plus, when you get lost, you can breadcrumb your way back home before you have to get all Donner Party on whoever is nearby...
If you prefer to pick your discoveries from categories that you actually care about, you can selectively or fully introduce map data for roads, businesses, manhole covers, whatever...
Plus, of course, there is the entire class of "discovery" where having a really accurate timebase that isn't full of caesium is pretty handy...
Guess what, back in the day, the fact that the horizon of human knowledge was so narrow didn't tend to promote discovery, it tended to promote people living, breeding, and dying within spitting distance of the same place and telling wild stories about antipodian monsters and the Kingdom Of Prestor John. Good navigational aids, on the other hand, get people off their asses because they make travel more valuable and less risky.
Now, if you want to talk about what GPS has done to the kiddie's compass and map-reading skills, go right ahead; but a highly accurate coordinate reference system is a boon to discoverers. Those poor guys undertaking the Great Trigonometric Survey would likely have happily given a testicle for access to GPS fixes...
It would actually be quite interesting(if, as with so many interesting things, rather unethical) to see how readily adapted the visual systems of the brain would be to functioning for "hearing"...
The eyes cannot see sound; but there are a variety of ways of systematically visualizing sound. If one were to take a deaf individual, and fill their visual field with a visualization of the sounds around them at all times, would they come to experience "auditory" phenomena?
You aren't going to get useful amounts of light to the brain through the ears! Worse, what light you do get will be all dim and orange/reddish, and throw your circadian rhythms for a loop because you think it is sunset all the time. Worthless.
Here, just for my Slashdot friends, is the secret to really showing 'Seasonal Affective Disorder' who is boss:
Simply passing electrons through the cerebrospinal and intracellular fluids of the brain at a speed greater than that of light within those media will bathe the brain in a lovely, broad-spectrum, delicate blue glow. This will stimulate photo-receptors that aural lighting cannot hope to reach.
Unfortunately, due to high costs and a coverup by the alarm-clock/industrial complex, you may have to sneak into a nearby university or DOE laboratory in order to use a linear accelerator of sufficient power. While Cherenkov radiation can also restore vigor to the scalp and reverse balding, you need energy sufficient to pass through the skull in order to see circadian benefits.
OCZ was hardly the first to do direct flash-PCIe storage(though some of their earlier products were just a disk controller and SSD on the same card, they have native ones now). They do have the advantage of being one of the vendors of PCIe-SSDs whose prices are remotely accessible, and who are available through enthusiast channels.
Most of the other players are basically in the business of making people's Big Serious Expensive databases run faster, and their prices and "if you are serious, please call our sales department" distribution style. You probably don't want to know what one of these or these cost, and you won't find them at newegg...
It might make running up against the pathetically tiny supply of RAM a bit less painful...
Manufacturers want to be able to switch flash suppliers without doing board redesigns or modifying flash drivers in their bootloaders. Flash suppliers want to be able to do whatever they feel like, so long as a thin interface layer is preserved on top....
It would probably be most accurate to think of this "uSSD" as a faster, more PC-architecture-oriented version of the "eMMC" JEDEC standard for soldering flash directly onto a motherboard, with a lower board space, pin count, and controller requirement than raw flash chips.
"eMMC", which is basically an MMC card's guts in a BGA package, is already quite popular in things like cellphones(ever wonder why some cellphones filesystem names suggest that they have an MMC card that they don't really? It's because they do, in software terms...) "uSSD" will, presumably, be the big brother of that standard, putting SATA signals and power over a standardized BGA arrangement, rather than using MMC signals and power...
The root of my puzzlement(and, unless their is in fact a reasonable explanation that escapes me, my dismay at this waste of money) is that, if the new system cannot either achieve sensor stealth sufficiently good that early-warning systems don't notice it, or prove to the diplomatic satisfaction of everybody who would get all 'second-strike'-y if they saw a US ICBM zipping off to an urgent appointment with something, then it represents absolutely no improvement over cheaper, actually working, hardware with minor modifications:
The "Conventional Trident" proposal, for instance, would have provided a conventional warhead reentry vehicle for our existing supply of Trident missiles and launch platforms. It was nixed because a "Conventional Trident" strike and a Trident first-strike would look pretty much identical until the target was actually hit.
Unless this hypersonic glider widget is somehow not vulnerable to that objection(and I don't see why a nuclear hypersonic glider and a conventional hypersonic glider wouldn't look the same...), then the whole project would appear to be a pointless engineering stunt aimed at re-aquiring capabilities we've already had since partway through the cold war; but with the additional challenge of making it all work without leaving the atmosphere... Why bother?
That is certainly true. I'm guessing, though, that stock rioters aren't running BESes(it would be interesting, though, to see if more organized and pragmatic criminals have begun using the riot kiddies as cover, and pulling more organized property heists... They might well take communications security more seriously), and that any telco interference with BES traffic would provoke a certain degree of upset among Respectable People.
I suppose the more logical plan(combining both the control that the state would want and the revenue that the telco would want) would be to use the 3rd-party BES option as a price discrimination feature: Anybody who gets a Blackberry because those have become the de-facto cheap email/IM phones would be telco/RIM only. "Business" lines, which would cost more or be purchased at contractual bulk rates, could use arbitrarily specified BESes...
So, apparently this hypersonic glider is part of the "Prompt Global Strike" concept, designed to deliver an explosive anywhere on earth in under an hour, for various purposes.
Now, we already have ICBMs that can do that; but we can't use those because ICBMs are typically equipped with thermonuclear warheads, which makes the world pretty jumpy about anybody launching one.
So, we are developing this rocket-boosted hypersonic glider thing that doesn't actually work yet to do it instead.
Here is what I don't understand: Is there anything about this new strike vehicle that would preclude a nuclear warhead in place of the conventional one? If so, it must have pretty serious payload limitations. If not, why would we expect global opinion to be any cheerier about this new toy than about the old one? Is it simply designed to be less visible to sensors than an ICBM?
I'm not seeing the contradiction here: The term "disaffected" is entirely neutral about whether the people described have legitimate or illegitimate grievances and about whether they have any idea what they are talking about, or complete morons. The interviewees in the link you provided certainly sound about as dumb as rocks, and without any idea what their grievances are; but they do sound pretty disaffected about something or other. Similarly, 'minority youth' is just a demographic description. Do you doubt my assertion that the Met cops probably don't have a terribly good supply of undercover agents and informers who can convincingly play teens-to-mid-20s underclass types, frequently drawn from ethnic backgrounds that cops aren't?
I'm not quite sure where in my post you detected the coddling liberal menace that you are now lashing out at... My point was simply that, logistically, doing data-mining and investigation on cellular networks, text messages, and social networks is absolute cake compared to doing human intelligence work especially if the group that you are investigating is substantially different in culture, language, ethnicity, or other group markers than most of your agents are. I'm guessing that the Met can get cooperation from facebook, BT, and RIM, along with hiring or contracting data-geeks to plow through the evidence a whole lot more easily than they can recruit a bunch of informants/undercover agents who convincingly pass for young, underclass, slum-dwellers... Is that somehow a controversial assertion?