Very similar. Very very similar. But, even very, very, very, VERY similar is not "exactly the same".
The cops can get a plasma torch to get into my safe if all other methods of gaining entry fail. I don't HAVE to open it for them.
Let the cops use a plasma torch on my hard drive then. As you say, it's "exactly the same".
Alright, I'll clue you in here. The encrypted hard drive is an extension of my mind. Only my mind can unlock it. My mind is not subject to search. The cops can question me, but I don't have to answer any questions. Talk to my lawyer.
What is reasonable? If it's locked in my mind, you can't force it out of me. The decryption key is locked in my mind. My thoughts are my thoughts. If the hard disk doesn't work without "plugging it in" to my mind, you're shit out of luck.
You KNOW that I have top secret state secrets on my hard drive? You better prove it with real police work. I'm not incriminating myself.
You KNOW that I have industrial espionage documents? Again - you better prove it, 'cause I'm not GIVING you the evidence.
You KNOW that I have child porn on my machine? Well - you're fucked, because there isn't. You're on a fishing expedition, and I'm not biting.
You KNOW that I've visited chat sites that promote (terrorism, rebellion, insurrection, whatever)? Well, it's up to you to prove it, because it's your JOB to investigate. It's not my job to incriminate myself.
Bottom line is, if the only place you can get evidence against me, is from my own mind, then you are pissing into the wind.
No - not exactly. Perhaps the question could have been more accurately phrased, "Why do they put up with the warlords?"
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. It only takes a few good men to put paid to any given warlord. I KNOW that Africa has some good men. Where are the good men with balls? Oh - another ancient saying - fortune favors the bold. If the warlords are the only people with balls, then I guess fortune favors them.
I guarandamntee that if some drugged up sumbitches were riding through my hometown, shooting things up, my tired old ass would be out in the streets, looking for the biggest, meanest sumbitch among them. And, before you accuse me of being yet another blowhard living in his mama's basement - I am a veteran. I'm no stranger to abuse, whether it be incoming or outgoing.
One doesn't "permit" a free man to carry arms. A free man carries arms by right.
I'll grant that discharging firearms aboard an aircraft six miles up is plain stupid. Criminally stupid. But, the TSA is taking away the smallest of blades, anything long and pointy, anything metallic, anything that they can conceive of being used to hurt another person.
In short, paranoia rules, and the terrorists have won. And, the sheep are happy to fall into step with the flock.
I say, issue a Bowie knife or a bayonet to all air passengers. And, require that they know how to use that weapon in self defense. Real men don't snivel in their seats hoping that a pilot they've never met, and a cabin full of small women can protect them in an emergency.
I've heard that sort of argument before. My question is, if they need a tractor, why in hell aren't they building their own tractors? Or, much of anything else for that matter.
The ignorant love to point at America, and tell us that we have the most violent society in the world. The truly ignorant (and those with a political agenda) love to point at our right to bear arms as a source of that violence.
Meanwhile, warlords wander large areas of Africa, raping and pillaging where they please. Instead of building dams, water purification plants, water distribution and sewage systems, they invest in guns, draft young children into their "armies", and do their very best to tear down the fragments of civilization that African enjoy.
For the cost of maintaining a 1000 man "army", that warlord could have built a tractor producing factory. And, those tractors could have been priced so that a village could buy two or three tractors instead of one imported POS that couldn't be maintained.
Alright, so the warlord can't build a computerized behemoth like John Deere sells. Big deal. The village doesn't NEED said behemoth. They need an power source capable of being attached to plows, cultivators, manure spreaders, etc. If the village can get the equivalent of a 1930's tricycle John Deere "C" model, with a hand start flywheel, they can do what they need to do.
And, guess what? That ancient John Deere is easy to maintain. It meets the old engineering requirement, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. There are few moving parts, no electronics, the only electricity is the magneto hooked up to the ignition system.
Quite funny. In your haste to make a political point, you have confused the word "weapon" with the word "firearm". Interesting. Tell me - even with the prompting of my question here, can you not think of any other type of weapon that a passenger might legitimately carry aboard an aircraft?
Funny thing is, the TSA is quite busy disarming honest people, so that any dishonest person who gets aboard with a weapon is more likely to succeed in his mission.
Silly title. Of course Canada belongs on a watch list. Any nation that doesn't bow down to the will of Corporate America belongs on the watch lists. If you don't want to be on the watch lists, then get on our knees, and start licking our boots. What's that? You say real men and women don't lick boots? Well - we have a few more watch lists to have you listed to!
What Mark-t already said. You need to listen to RMS talking - or any of his phanbois. G-nu. A serious affectation. Wildly eccentric. This alone would be enough to make me avoid RMS socially. I can understand children talking with make-believe words of their own, but grown men? Naaahhhhh - I keep people like that at a distance, and at an even greater distance from my children.
The "g-nu" crowd can kiss my Linux ass. I run Linux. I run a lot of stuff that is not G-nu. Yeah, I use some G-nu stuff, but it doesn't merit being placed before Linux in their little "G-nu-Linux" thing. NO ONE advertises their distro as "G-nu-Linux". When that Hurd thingy finally gets released, then I'll take a look at the "G-nu-Hurd". Til then, I'll run Linux, thank you very much.
Pikes, almost. They're called bayonets these days. Ramming bow? Uhhh - yes, the bullnose would indeed make a pretty damned good ram, if the captain decided that was his last chance to defeat the enemy. Sharpshooter? That was me. As a member of the multi-purpose "special units" detail, I was ship's landing force, boarding party, security detail, drill team, honor guard, captain's body guard, and any other special detail that anyone might dream up. Larger ships carry a detachment of marines - destroyer size ships rely on ship's company to handle all of those necessary details that the marines would handle on a larger ship. So, I carried an M-14 and a model 1911 Colt.45 as part of my duties.
All those obsolete weapons that you can think of do indeed have their more modern counterparts aboard modern ships today.
And, if/when the starship SS Enterprise is finally launched, she will carry the same sort of weapons. It's a shame that Star Trek ignored the necessity of grunts in the future.
Like some of the other posters, you don't seem to grasp the concept of "combined arms". Even with today's technology, which does not include ship-killing lasers, photon torpedos and the like, a warship would presumably mount multiple weapons. So - the shuttle has AIM-54 missiles at it's disposal? What else does your ship mount? Unless this is the very first time a Phoenix has been used in a space duel, we can presume that the ship mounting a machine gun also has some sort of ECM, maybe some flares, and just maybe a missile or two of it's own.
The salt water destroyers I served aboard had machine guns, deck guns, rockets, torpedos, and missiles. Each weapon system had it's appropriate uses. Studying history, one finds that many a contest has been decided after the combatants on both sides have been seriously damaged, with the decision going to the side which still retains a functional close range weapon.
It would be interesting to see just what weapons a government such as the US would put aboard a shuttle-like ship today, if they saw the need to do so. I'm quite confident that just like our aircraft, they would mount a machine gun or two along with any missiles and energy weapons. If that machine gun served no other purpose in a ship's lifetime, it would tend to discourage attempts at piracy.
Then, it's time for him to go into another line of business. As a businessman, it's kind of up to him to manage his costs, rather than allow the costs to manage him.
Maybe he can sell what he has at this point in time to someone who knows how to make a profit from software.
I am somewhat curious what this ten thousand dollar per seat software does that an open source software can't do. Probably nothing. Ten thousand dollars. Crap, I could use ten thousand dollars to put a computer into as many as fifty classrooms in a third world country. Ten thousand, for just one license. That is ridiculously over priced. Sounds to me like the submitter has wasted his life developing something that no one in his right mind would pay for.
Precisely. We want to see damage similar to what a.45 dumdum does to a human body. Little hole going in, huge gaping void at the exit. Explosive and/or fragmenting ammo offers just that possibility.;^)
There are a number of efforts to boot up, and be on a working desktop in very few seconds. In fact, I plan on building my next desktop on a mainboard supported by Coreboot - http://www.coreboot.org/OpenBIOS With a custom BIOS, an SSD, and all the optimizations I can find for boot time in Linux, I should get 3 or 4 second boot times.
Instant on. I mean, even televisions are "instant on" these days. There aren't any tubes to warm up, or anything like that.
Yep. You forgot to include something though. Your own weapons are going to be noisy as hell. Few people can appreciate that, unless they've been around weapons and weapons platforms. Laser, railgun, gun, anything on your ship or attached to your ship is going to generate it's own hellacious noise.
Nor did you mention the noises produced by you and your shipmates when your ship takes a hit. People do tend to emit noises when they take shrapnel into various parts of their bodies, or those various parts are exposed to extreme heat, cold, or vacuum.
Good point. A water cooled gun would solve that - for awhile. Or, oil cooled. But, as you imply, all that heat is going to be right there aboard the ship with you, until you find some kind of heat sink to drain it off to. Pretty much the only heat sink available in space would be chunks of ice from the asteroids.
Some bright boys have a real challenge to solve, don't they?
To be fair, "recoilless rifles" weren't precisely "recoilless". Instead, they absorbed the recoil, and/or dispersed the recoil so that the gun wasn't moved from it's position on the ground. In space, that recoil will still have an effect on your trajectory.
But, the first part of your post is on target. A good gunner will hit his target. An exceptional gunner and bridge crew will use that recoil to best advantage.
The "large" in "large guns" was not from my post. I used the word "guns". Unless, and until armored ships appear on the scene, a standard.30 caliber machine gun will be devastating to almost any spaceship. Even more so if the ammo is explosive and/or fragmenting. The ammunition is so cheap that you can spray and pray a large volume of space with the thing, for little cost. The greatest drawback to this approach is, the cost of transporting all that ammo. The problems with recoil are manageable with fire discipline, I would imagine.
Don't get me wrong here - energy weapons will be more and more important, militarily, as technology progresses. I just don't see lasers replacing guns for a long, long time to come. Even then, when the best equipped and best supported navies have cast away their last guns, less wealthy forces will probably create situations where their obsolete weapons can overcome the better equipped "Imperial forces".
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest as much. The US/NATO forces are vastly better equipped than the insurgents, but the US/NATO still suffer casualties. What's that term? "Improvised Explosive Devices".
Slashdot Mirror
Very similar. Very very similar. But, even very, very, very, VERY similar is not "exactly the same".
The cops can get a plasma torch to get into my safe if all other methods of gaining entry fail. I don't HAVE to open it for them.
Let the cops use a plasma torch on my hard drive then. As you say, it's "exactly the same".
Alright, I'll clue you in here. The encrypted hard drive is an extension of my mind. Only my mind can unlock it. My mind is not subject to search. The cops can question me, but I don't have to answer any questions. Talk to my lawyer.
What is reasonable? If it's locked in my mind, you can't force it out of me. The decryption key is locked in my mind. My thoughts are my thoughts. If the hard disk doesn't work without "plugging it in" to my mind, you're shit out of luck.
You KNOW that I have top secret state secrets on my hard drive? You better prove it with real police work. I'm not incriminating myself.
You KNOW that I have industrial espionage documents? Again - you better prove it, 'cause I'm not GIVING you the evidence.
You KNOW that I have child porn on my machine? Well - you're fucked, because there isn't. You're on a fishing expedition, and I'm not biting.
You KNOW that I've visited chat sites that promote (terrorism, rebellion, insurrection, whatever)? Well, it's up to you to prove it, because it's your JOB to investigate. It's not my job to incriminate myself.
Bottom line is, if the only place you can get evidence against me, is from my own mind, then you are pissing into the wind.
No - not exactly. Perhaps the question could have been more accurately phrased, "Why do they put up with the warlords?"
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. It only takes a few good men to put paid to any given warlord. I KNOW that Africa has some good men. Where are the good men with balls? Oh - another ancient saying - fortune favors the bold. If the warlords are the only people with balls, then I guess fortune favors them.
I guarandamntee that if some drugged up sumbitches were riding through my hometown, shooting things up, my tired old ass would be out in the streets, looking for the biggest, meanest sumbitch among them. And, before you accuse me of being yet another blowhard living in his mama's basement - I am a veteran. I'm no stranger to abuse, whether it be incoming or outgoing.
One doesn't "permit" a free man to carry arms. A free man carries arms by right.
I'll grant that discharging firearms aboard an aircraft six miles up is plain stupid. Criminally stupid. But, the TSA is taking away the smallest of blades, anything long and pointy, anything metallic, anything that they can conceive of being used to hurt another person.
In short, paranoia rules, and the terrorists have won. And, the sheep are happy to fall into step with the flock.
I say, issue a Bowie knife or a bayonet to all air passengers. And, require that they know how to use that weapon in self defense. Real men don't snivel in their seats hoping that a pilot they've never met, and a cabin full of small women can protect them in an emergency.
That worked well for Van der Sloot, didn't it?
Yes, Africa will probably be the last 3rd world country . . . .
And, I'll bet that you are a Palin supporter. You can probably see Russia from your backyard, and all the other ignorant, inane shit that she spouted.
HINT: AFRICA IS A CONTINENT, STUPID!!!
I've heard that sort of argument before. My question is, if they need a tractor, why in hell aren't they building their own tractors? Or, much of anything else for that matter.
The ignorant love to point at America, and tell us that we have the most violent society in the world. The truly ignorant (and those with a political agenda) love to point at our right to bear arms as a source of that violence.
Meanwhile, warlords wander large areas of Africa, raping and pillaging where they please. Instead of building dams, water purification plants, water distribution and sewage systems, they invest in guns, draft young children into their "armies", and do their very best to tear down the fragments of civilization that African enjoy.
For the cost of maintaining a 1000 man "army", that warlord could have built a tractor producing factory. And, those tractors could have been priced so that a village could buy two or three tractors instead of one imported POS that couldn't be maintained.
Alright, so the warlord can't build a computerized behemoth like John Deere sells. Big deal. The village doesn't NEED said behemoth. They need an power source capable of being attached to plows, cultivators, manure spreaders, etc. If the village can get the equivalent of a 1930's tricycle John Deere "C" model, with a hand start flywheel, they can do what they need to do.
And, guess what? That ancient John Deere is easy to maintain. It meets the old engineering requirement, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. There are few moving parts, no electronics, the only electricity is the magneto hooked up to the ignition system.
Quite funny. In your haste to make a political point, you have confused the word "weapon" with the word "firearm". Interesting. Tell me - even with the prompting of my question here, can you not think of any other type of weapon that a passenger might legitimately carry aboard an aircraft?
"unlikely to tolerate threats"
Funny thing is, the TSA is quite busy disarming honest people, so that any dishonest person who gets aboard with a weapon is more likely to succeed in his mission.
Silly title. Of course Canada belongs on a watch list. Any nation that doesn't bow down to the will of Corporate America belongs on the watch lists. If you don't want to be on the watch lists, then get on our knees, and start licking our boots. What's that? You say real men and women don't lick boots? Well - we have a few more watch lists to have you listed to!
Chromium already does WebM, just fine. I haven't viewed a flash video in several weeks. Months I guess.
What Mark-t already said. You need to listen to RMS talking - or any of his phanbois. G-nu. A serious affectation. Wildly eccentric. This alone would be enough to make me avoid RMS socially. I can understand children talking with make-believe words of their own, but grown men? Naaahhhhh - I keep people like that at a distance, and at an even greater distance from my children.
The "g-nu" crowd can kiss my Linux ass. I run Linux. I run a lot of stuff that is not G-nu. Yeah, I use some G-nu stuff, but it doesn't merit being placed before Linux in their little "G-nu-Linux" thing. NO ONE advertises their distro as "G-nu-Linux". When that Hurd thingy finally gets released, then I'll take a look at the "G-nu-Hurd". Til then, I'll run Linux, thank you very much.
Pikes, almost. They're called bayonets these days. Ramming bow? Uhhh - yes, the bullnose would indeed make a pretty damned good ram, if the captain decided that was his last chance to defeat the enemy. Sharpshooter? That was me. As a member of the multi-purpose "special units" detail, I was ship's landing force, boarding party, security detail, drill team, honor guard, captain's body guard, and any other special detail that anyone might dream up. Larger ships carry a detachment of marines - destroyer size ships rely on ship's company to handle all of those necessary details that the marines would handle on a larger ship. So, I carried an M-14 and a model 1911 Colt .45 as part of my duties.
All those obsolete weapons that you can think of do indeed have their more modern counterparts aboard modern ships today.
And, if/when the starship SS Enterprise is finally launched, she will carry the same sort of weapons. It's a shame that Star Trek ignored the necessity of grunts in the future.
Like some of the other posters, you don't seem to grasp the concept of "combined arms". Even with today's technology, which does not include ship-killing lasers, photon torpedos and the like, a warship would presumably mount multiple weapons. So - the shuttle has AIM-54 missiles at it's disposal? What else does your ship mount? Unless this is the very first time a Phoenix has been used in a space duel, we can presume that the ship mounting a machine gun also has some sort of ECM, maybe some flares, and just maybe a missile or two of it's own.
The salt water destroyers I served aboard had machine guns, deck guns, rockets, torpedos, and missiles. Each weapon system had it's appropriate uses. Studying history, one finds that many a contest has been decided after the combatants on both sides have been seriously damaged, with the decision going to the side which still retains a functional close range weapon.
It would be interesting to see just what weapons a government such as the US would put aboard a shuttle-like ship today, if they saw the need to do so. I'm quite confident that just like our aircraft, they would mount a machine gun or two along with any missiles and energy weapons. If that machine gun served no other purpose in a ship's lifetime, it would tend to discourage attempts at piracy.
Then, it's time for him to go into another line of business. As a businessman, it's kind of up to him to manage his costs, rather than allow the costs to manage him.
Maybe he can sell what he has at this point in time to someone who knows how to make a profit from software.
My hat is off to you, Moryath. Excellent reply.
I am somewhat curious what this ten thousand dollar per seat software does that an open source software can't do. Probably nothing. Ten thousand dollars. Crap, I could use ten thousand dollars to put a computer into as many as fifty classrooms in a third world country. Ten thousand, for just one license. That is ridiculously over priced. Sounds to me like the submitter has wasted his life developing something that no one in his right mind would pay for.
Precisely. We want to see damage similar to what a .45 dumdum does to a human body. Little hole going in, huge gaping void at the exit. Explosive and/or fragmenting ammo offers just that possibility. ;^)
What I really want, is something like http://www.eetasia.com/articleLogin.do?artId=8800626684&fromWhere=/ART_8800626684_1034362_NP_93053a1f.HTM&catId=1034362&newsType=NP&pageNo=null&encode=93053a1f
There are a number of efforts to boot up, and be on a working desktop in very few seconds. In fact, I plan on building my next desktop on a mainboard supported by Coreboot - http://www.coreboot.org/OpenBIOS With a custom BIOS, an SSD, and all the optimizations I can find for boot time in Linux, I should get 3 or 4 second boot times.
Instant on. I mean, even televisions are "instant on" these days. There aren't any tubes to warm up, or anything like that.
The alternative would be, "All governments are assholes."
Yep. You forgot to include something though. Your own weapons are going to be noisy as hell. Few people can appreciate that, unless they've been around weapons and weapons platforms. Laser, railgun, gun, anything on your ship or attached to your ship is going to generate it's own hellacious noise.
Nor did you mention the noises produced by you and your shipmates when your ship takes a hit. People do tend to emit noises when they take shrapnel into various parts of their bodies, or those various parts are exposed to extreme heat, cold, or vacuum.
Good point. A water cooled gun would solve that - for awhile. Or, oil cooled. But, as you imply, all that heat is going to be right there aboard the ship with you, until you find some kind of heat sink to drain it off to. Pretty much the only heat sink available in space would be chunks of ice from the asteroids.
Some bright boys have a real challenge to solve, don't they?
To be fair, "recoilless rifles" weren't precisely "recoilless". Instead, they absorbed the recoil, and/or dispersed the recoil so that the gun wasn't moved from it's position on the ground. In space, that recoil will still have an effect on your trajectory.
But, the first part of your post is on target. A good gunner will hit his target. An exceptional gunner and bridge crew will use that recoil to best advantage.
The "large" in "large guns" was not from my post. I used the word "guns". Unless, and until armored ships appear on the scene, a standard .30 caliber machine gun will be devastating to almost any spaceship. Even more so if the ammo is explosive and/or fragmenting. The ammunition is so cheap that you can spray and pray a large volume of space with the thing, for little cost. The greatest drawback to this approach is, the cost of transporting all that ammo. The problems with recoil are manageable with fire discipline, I would imagine.
Don't get me wrong here - energy weapons will be more and more important, militarily, as technology progresses. I just don't see lasers replacing guns for a long, long time to come. Even then, when the best equipped and best supported navies have cast away their last guns, less wealthy forces will probably create situations where their obsolete weapons can overcome the better equipped "Imperial forces".
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest as much. The US/NATO forces are vastly better equipped than the insurgents, but the US/NATO still suffer casualties. What's that term? "Improvised Explosive Devices".
(*especially* in China of all places!)
I find that amusing. Legality and morality have little in common here in the US of A.