but I'm starting to get nostalgic for the old sounds of the the early computer age.
I have to agree with you on half of those, but I'm also glad as hell the other half are gone.
Gone is the satisfying click-click-click feedback of the heavy tactile keyboards.
In moderation, only. The attraction wears off pretty quickly. Try listening to a room-full of typists for 8 hours a day (two loud clicks per every single button-press) and you'll appreciate quiet keyboards.
Gone is the deafening WHEEEEE-WHEEEEEE-WHEEEEEE of the dot matrix printer.
It was a nice sound in the old, slow days. Shortly before the jump to laser printers, though, they were getting very fast, and turning into just an irritating, constant rattle.
Gone is the atmospheric chuk-chuk-chuk grind of the hard disk.
I really miss MFM hard drives. Their nice, soft percolating sound when seeking was really unique. Though I'm not as euphoric as I was during the '90s, when 5400RPM drives, with their ear-piercing high-pitched whine, could drive anyone mad.
I still have one around. I've considered powering it up just once more, and recording about an hour of audio of it. Maybe some would be interested in a program which makes their GHz computer sound like a 286.
Gone is the ultrasonic whistle of the screen changing resolutions.
And on that note, let me add my own, soon-to-be obsolete sound... The static CRUNCH of any CRT, when the whole screen quickly changes from dark (black) to bright (white). And the static crispy sparkling sound when it goes the other way (or is turned off).
Gone is the inquisitive thuka-thuka-thuka of a floppy disk scan on bootup.
Can't say I miss that one at all. Pretty much an uneven metronome sound (sequential reads/writes), intermingled with a slowed-down European ambulance siren (seeking).
Gone is the warm handshake WEEE-ERRR-HISS of the modem.
Yes, back when they had a real speaker on the modem. By the 33.6/56k era, they were using cheap, tiny, tin tweaters on everything, which made it the most painfully shrill, ear-piercing squawk.
If the POST BEEP ever dissapears, I think the beauty and mystique of a computer coming to life will have been lost forever.
See: modems. When it was a real 2" speaker, it was a plesant sound. Now with crappy $1 tweaters, I'd rather not hear it at all.
That part is certainly untrue. Notebook hard drives use far less power than their desktop cousins. However, with the much smaller bodies, hence bulk and surface-area to disperse the heat, they are helped greatly by big bulky metal mounting brackets (to adapt it to fit the 3.5" bay), and the like.
and because they are not meant for use within a tower will require some creative mounting.
2.5" to 3.5" adapters aren't "creative" at all, they're incredibly common. I have 2-3 sets of them I don't use. My removable hard drive caddies all have pre-drilled holes for attaching a 2.5" drive without any other adapter. etc.
I have a pocket 2.5" in a travel case, and it isn't very quiet.
Well, either the travel case in to blame, or you're just confused since there's much less distance (and bulky plastic/metal cases) between you and your 3.5" desktop hard drives.
but IMHO the technology just doesn't seem mature enough.
WTF? How are 2.5" hard drives not mature tech? 15+ years of product development (based on the same 50+years of HDD tech) not enough for you?
And a HDD is still going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than flash.
Right now flash isn't near competing with notebook or desktop hard drives, but in the smaller CF form, they have surpassed Microdrives in price and capacity, while also being far faster, reliable, lower power, etc.
It's quite easy to see them surpassing 2.5" hard drives in a few more years of continued development.
I'm not so confident about it replacing 3.5" hard drives in the foreseeable future.
Docked, I am able to pretend it is a desktop, even using it with two monitors (a requirement in my computing book). Yet, I sip power, am quiet as a church mouse and produce next to no heat (compared to a desktop).
I tried running my Laptop as a desktop a couple years ago. It's quiet at first power-on, but after a while, it gets very hot, and the fast and tiny fan makes more noise than any of my desktops.
After 3 months I had to send it in to have the fan replaced, as it got incredibly noisy, and occasionally wouldn't start. Nice propritary parts you can't possibly get elsewhere...
Shortly thereafter the hard drive would start to spew out CRC errors, and had to be replaced.
The sound-chip was a ridiculously noisy piece of crap, the USB1.1 ports were getting to be old and slow, and my $10 USB2 and Firewire PCI cards don't fit in that laptop too well...
Slim DVD-Burners cost about 5X as much as desktop units. Ditto for hard drives.
The lack of serial/parallel ports was a rather frustrating issue, since USB to serial/parallel adapters cost as much as buying a whole new desktop system.
Can you guess what I did? That's right, $200 on a new desktop, that put my notebook to shame in every way, and only uses 50% more power. 2 80mm (Enermax) tempurature controlled fans were quieter than what I had in my notebook.
And that was back then. These days, ultra-effecient desktop power supplies (Seasonic), and CnQ power management on desktop CPUs (AMD64) have more than made-up that ground, and cost less than even the cheapest notebooks.
If this happened to Dell, or Compaq, or random-nonname-clone, this wouldn't be news.
Sure it would be. Every notebook recall gets a story on/. and situations where there should be a recall, but there hasn't, get multiple stories.
Perhaps because people have a higher expectation of Apple, or a lower expectation of PC hardware?
Perhaps because people have a higher expectation of hardware they paid $3,000 for... Find a story about Thinkpads (still cheaper than Apple) with swelling batteries, and it will get posted to/. as well.
Well, actually, they wrote it because some Boston businessmen had to pay a little extra for tea and stamps. Kinda puts things into perspective if you think of it that way.
It would if it were true. Try to find "tea" and "stamps" in the Declaration. That's the half-bullshit Disney-ized version of US history.
You should really actually read it some time:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
Yeah, the tea was clearly the important part. It couldn't have been the large numbers of soldiers taking over homes, and quite literally getting away with murdering anyone they chose.
And, while I'm at it, it also explicitly says: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
popping several holes in a pressurized plane even a window will not destroy or even cause major damage to a plane.
Agreed. However:
as well as mythbusters also proved it.
"Mythbusters" and "proved" don't EVER belong in the same sentence.
They do silly little explosions and special-effects, but they aren't even REMOTELY as controlled as you need to be to prove anything. They also like to just arbitrarily pick numbers (height, speed, weight, pressure, etc). They can't even demonstrate/re-create something they KNOW has happened repeatedly.
For the airplane depressurization in particular, though they had it pressurized, they didn't even attempt to simulate the 1,000km/h winds.
As far as the exploding laptop, is it really the manufacturer's fault?
Yes. We all know and love Dell. In my own experience, out of 100 Dell monitors in a lab, 5 caught fire over the course of 3 months. That's right, we never even bothered to put the fire extinguisher away. That's just the start, though. If you can name it, Dell has made it, and it has caught fire. Their laptops are notorious. They've had to recall their products many, many times.
This question would apply regardless of who it is. It would seem to me that if it were a manufacturing defect in the laptop, say in the charging circuitry, those models would be exploding left and right.
No. Just because something is under-engineered, doesn't mean ALL of them will go up in flames. Like any engineering problem, you need a specific set of circumstances to trigger it, though some are certainly more common than others.
Perhaps the exhaust vents were blocked? Perhaps it had been running constantly for 8 hours? Perhaps the bright lights contributed? Perhaps the voltage was sagging and the power supply was drawing more current to compensate? Or perhaps the capacitors are just barely large enough for the load, and over time, they gave out...
I remember awhile back Kyocera had phones coming with counterfeit batteries that were exploding in peoples' pockets and hands, inflicting some serious injuries.
Yes, I heard about several stories like those months ago on the news, and the Kyocera rep telling people their products are fine, and don't buy counterfeit batteries. So, I did some research myself, and found SEVERAL cases of 100% legit Kyocera batteries exploding. One just hours after the person walked out of the store with it.
Companies ALWAYS want to spin this stuff, and counterfeit products are a good scapgoat. When asked why your products are exploding, change the subject to counterfeits, and repeatedly imply, just don't specifically say, that your legit products never explode.
Emailing them may work also, but I don't think it has the same significance as a letter in hand.
They don't EVER get a letter in hand anymore. Since the anthrax thing, postal mail is scanned into a computer, and e-mailed to them.
Several senator's websites specifically say, if you want a quick reaction, e-mail them. Even an over-night letter may take several days to get to them.
Nothing short of a revolution can change the status quo.
Yes, a revolution is the perfectly rational thing to do, in the face of being unable to copy media with your home-made tivo. That was why they wrote The Declaration of Independence in the first place, wasn't it?
I mean, sure, a few million people will have to die in the revolutionary war, and it will throw the country (and yes, the world) into a depression unlike any that has been seen before, but that's a small price to pay for my satellite radio copies.
The alternative... starving the media companies by NOT BUYING ANYTHING FROM THEM AGAIN, is too horrible to even contemplate. You can't expect me to watch PBS. I'm not an animal!
And don't even discuss the idea of voting against those senators (like Feinstein, CA) who have been the most corrupt politicians for years. I mean... VOTING?! Good God man! Don't you dare suggest it.
Basically they took a Makita 54cc (3.3 cubic inches) engine off a chainsaw (capable of doing 12,000 rpm) and hooked it up to a chain/belt and used that.
Most insightful/informative comment here, and yet still only at +3. So very sad.
While an interesting study for academia, how does this help an automobile industry where the average car is a four door sedan?
The same way the development of the atomic bomb helps your neighborhood supermarket.
If contests are going to be sponsored for improving fuel efficiency, they should be targeted towards the cars that most of us drive, not theoretical, completely impractical academic-mobiles that will have absolutely no use on the road.
Yeah. What's wrong with these university students pushing technological limits to see what is possible. They should be making mundane, practical, marketable designs. You know... like a COMPANY.
Breaking modern crypto is going to require a math revolution; a few orders of magnitude in computer speed ain't nearly enough.
That's a bit over-simplistic.
While you might not consider something like RSA with a 512/1024-bit key "modern", it's still quite common.
Actually modern (and actually a cipher) crypto like AES128 could potentially be vunerable to a combinaton of a huge ammount of number-crunching, and the potential vulnerabilities that are already known.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that what MS is doing... providing it on the install disc...
No, they are forcing you to install it, no matter how much you don't want it. That's completely different than "providing it" on the install disc... That would actually make it an OPTION.
Not to mention that software still works the old fashioned way... Before IE took over the world, you could walk into a store and buy a low-priced CD with a web browser on it, and every CD (and floppy) you got from companies like Earthlink and AOL included full-fledged web browsers you could install (mainly Netscape). And when you signed-up with an ISP, the CD they sent you had web browsers on it. Private networks had public FTP servers and shares with browsers (and usually the Netware client, and things like that).
And the old standbys still work fine:
ftp ftp.mozilla.org anonymous
cd/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.5.0.4/win32/en -US get "Firefox Setup 1.5.0.4.exe" exit
A little bit better pictured quality is not going to motivate people to switch.
Tell that to all your DVDs. VHS to DVD was only a 3X improvement at best, while DVD to HD is a 6X improvement.
Looking at the audio world, there have been hi-def audio formats out for quite some time with little success.
Audio CDs are actually at the limit of what most people can hear, so they can't really improve the quality (for most of us), just add channels and other fluff. HDTV suffers from no such problem, and anyone who isn't blind can tell the difference.
If I sound annoyed, that might be because I've said this exact same thing about 20 times in the past few months on/., as everyone who hasn't seen any HDTV keeps repeating this nonsense.
Every watt of heat from one of these boxes is one less watt of heat the house heating system will have to produce (assuming there's a thermostat involved).
Bad armchair EE! Bad! No cookie!
You're completely ignoring PF. Your box may only be drawing a few watts, but it is likely doing it at a PF of around 0.4, due to cheap, crappy switching power supplies. That means you're putting significantly more load on the power lines than a fully-resistive load of the same wattage would.
In the US, residental customers don't have to explicitly pay for their PF, but companies certainly do, as do residental customers outside the US. And even though you aren't explictly paying for PF, lower PFs will increase operating costs of the power company, and eventually be passed-on.
For a home user, yes. For a spy plane, the added cost is a pittance. Everything is relative.
Cost is FAR from the only issue. Off the top of my head, how about power, heat, latency, accessibility (after power surge/failure of some sort), safety, radio frequency output/interference, FAA testing, etc.
As I said before, encryption would be an acceptable first line of defence. Still, people are acting as if there's no limits or down-sides to it.
How would you connect the equipment together? You need some sort of network interface.
Not at all. Peripheral interfaces will work just fine. The camera doesn't have any need to be a peer of the computer system, or to communicate independantly of it.
This claim assumes sequential writing of a single datastream.
No, it just assumes there aren't eg. 20 simultaneous large (ie. uncachable) writes going on constantly.
We are smart enough to be on the inside of it all. We're smart enough to be the ones at the top monitoring all the OTHER stupid citizens.
That's a TERRIBLE position to take. If you not only fail to resist, but support this activity, you're helping to create the monster, which may very well eat you when it is finally in place. How many of Stalin's top men found themselves in the gulags they helped to create? How many Jews were indespensible cogs in helping the Nazis suppress other Jews, only to end up sharing the same fate?
Being at the top is a short-term benefit at best, while helping establish something evil is a long-term proposition. It's a case of chosing death, or selling your soul to stay alive. I really hope most people have less self-centred ideals than yours, and can better look at the big picture.
Removing the human element shouldn't cause the paranoia i'm seeing here.
Sure it should. It's not the "removing the human" element, it's the "adding the machine" element. It's the "law enforcement database" thing, the "CCTV" thing, all over again. When you have an automated information-collection system, you have FAR, FAR more potential for abuse. A view which has been confirmed time and time again.
The British government is getting a lot of flack lately, for their own CCTV system, as people say the police are using it to prosecute trivial infractions, while serious crimes continue unabaited. Video after video gets released of someone getting repeated beaten and/or stabbed under the watchful eye of CCTV cameras, and perhaps a half hour elapses before any officers arrive. Not to mention repeated misidentification through the CCTV system, leading to innocent people being arrested, shot, etc.
Up until the modern era, it wasn't that you had privacy, it was that it was prohibitively expensive/difficult for police to piece together your every move, as they can now at trivial cost. At least with a police helicopter, you know they aren't going to go through the trouble of hovering over private homes, waiting for trivial laws to be broken.
Fair enough. It's a linear increase in difficulty, but the same goes for the parent, who said breaking it would be exponential, which also would actually be linear.
in the age of cheap MIPS is not really that important - unless you handle insane data rates.
I'm afraid it's much more CPU-intensive than you realize. Try transfering files over your network with SSH. Even the fast ciphers (AES128, Blowfish, etc) will max-out a rather fast CPU on a 100Mbps network, and the slower, much more secure ones are far, far worse (3DES, AES256, etc). Custom-built hardware (ASICs) do far better than cheap CPUs, but it's still a significant hurdle.
And I presume the airplanes in question certainly do have "insane data rates" since they are being used for surveilance, which means a very quick series of very high-resolution images.
the bottleneck may still be the network card or the disk head seeking.
Since when do airplanes have network cards? Unless you have fragments of large pieces of data spread over the drive (Windows with FAT32?) I can't imagine seek times being a bottleneck.
And, of course, they absolutely wouldn't use annealed glass in cars (without laminating it, making it safety glass), because it breaks into large, jagged pieces.
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I have to agree with you on half of those, but I'm also glad as hell the other half are gone.
In moderation, only. The attraction wears off pretty quickly. Try listening to a room-full of typists for 8 hours a day (two loud clicks per every single button-press) and you'll appreciate quiet keyboards.
It was a nice sound in the old, slow days. Shortly before the jump to laser printers, though, they were getting very fast, and turning into just an irritating, constant rattle.
I really miss MFM hard drives. Their nice, soft percolating sound when seeking was really unique. Though I'm not as euphoric as I was during the '90s, when 5400RPM drives, with their ear-piercing high-pitched whine, could drive anyone mad.
I still have one around. I've considered powering it up just once more, and recording about an hour of audio of it. Maybe some would be interested in a program which makes their GHz computer sound like a 286.
And on that note, let me add my own, soon-to-be obsolete sound... The static CRUNCH of any CRT, when the whole screen quickly changes from dark (black) to bright (white). And the static crispy sparkling sound when it goes the other way (or is turned off).
Can't say I miss that one at all. Pretty much an uneven metronome sound (sequential reads/writes), intermingled with a slowed-down European ambulance siren (seeking).
Yes, back when they had a real speaker on the modem. By the 33.6/56k era, they were using cheap, tiny, tin tweaters on everything, which made it the most painfully shrill, ear-piercing squawk.
See: modems. When it was a real 2" speaker, it was a plesant sound. Now with crappy $1 tweaters, I'd rather not hear it at all.
That part is certainly untrue. Notebook hard drives use far less power than their desktop cousins. However, with the much smaller bodies, hence bulk and surface-area to disperse the heat, they are helped greatly by big bulky metal mounting brackets (to adapt it to fit the 3.5" bay), and the like.
2.5" to 3.5" adapters aren't "creative" at all, they're incredibly common. I have 2-3 sets of them I don't use. My removable hard drive caddies all have pre-drilled holes for attaching a 2.5" drive without any other adapter. etc.
Well, either the travel case in to blame, or you're just confused since there's much less distance (and bulky plastic/metal cases) between you and your 3.5" desktop hard drives.
WTF? How are 2.5" hard drives not mature tech? 15+ years of product development (based on the same 50+years of HDD tech) not enough for you?
Right now flash isn't near competing with notebook or desktop hard drives, but in the smaller CF form, they have surpassed Microdrives in price and capacity, while also being far faster, reliable, lower power, etc.
It's quite easy to see them surpassing 2.5" hard drives in a few more years of continued development.
I'm not so confident about it replacing 3.5" hard drives in the foreseeable future.
Yes, the very old Mac mini...
Compare with the nice new Digital Multia/UDB.
I tried running my Laptop as a desktop a couple years ago. It's quiet at first power-on, but after a while, it gets very hot, and the fast and tiny fan makes more noise than any of my desktops.
After 3 months I had to send it in to have the fan replaced, as it got incredibly noisy, and occasionally wouldn't start. Nice propritary parts you can't possibly get elsewhere...
Shortly thereafter the hard drive would start to spew out CRC errors, and had to be replaced.
The sound-chip was a ridiculously noisy piece of crap, the USB1.1 ports were getting to be old and slow, and my $10 USB2 and Firewire PCI cards don't fit in that laptop too well...
Slim DVD-Burners cost about 5X as much as desktop units. Ditto for hard drives.
The lack of serial/parallel ports was a rather frustrating issue, since USB to serial/parallel adapters cost as much as buying a whole new desktop system.
Can you guess what I did? That's right, $200 on a new desktop, that put my notebook to shame in every way, and only uses 50% more power. 2 80mm (Enermax) tempurature controlled fans were quieter than what I had in my notebook.
And that was back then. These days, ultra-effecient desktop power supplies (Seasonic), and CnQ power management on desktop CPUs (AMD64) have more than made-up that ground, and cost less than even the cheapest notebooks.
Sure it would be. Every notebook recall gets a story on
Perhaps because people have a higher expectation of hardware they paid $3,000 for... Find a story about Thinkpads (still cheaper than Apple) with swelling batteries, and it will get posted to
Umm, what? How is it possibly NOT Apple's fault for picking a crappy battery supplier?
It would if it were true. Try to find "tea" and "stamps" in the Declaration. That's the half-bullshit Disney-ized version of US history.
You should really actually read it some time:
Yeah, the tea was clearly the important part. It couldn't have been the large numbers of soldiers taking over homes, and quite literally getting away with murdering anyone they chose.
And, while I'm at it, it also explicitly says: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
Agreed. However:
"Mythbusters" and "proved" don't EVER belong in the same sentence.
They do silly little explosions and special-effects, but they aren't even REMOTELY as controlled as you need to be to prove anything. They also like to just arbitrarily pick numbers (height, speed, weight, pressure, etc). They can't even demonstrate/re-create something they KNOW has happened repeatedly.
For the airplane depressurization in particular, though they had it pressurized, they didn't even attempt to simulate the 1,000km/h winds.
Yes. We all know and love Dell. In my own experience, out of 100 Dell monitors in a lab, 5 caught fire over the course of 3 months. That's right, we never even bothered to put the fire extinguisher away. That's just the start, though. If you can name it, Dell has made it, and it has caught fire. Their laptops are notorious. They've had to recall their products many, many times.
No. Just because something is under-engineered, doesn't mean ALL of them will go up in flames. Like any engineering problem, you need a specific set of circumstances to trigger it, though some are certainly more common than others.
Perhaps the exhaust vents were blocked? Perhaps it had been running constantly for 8 hours? Perhaps the bright lights contributed? Perhaps the voltage was sagging and the power supply was drawing more current to compensate? Or perhaps the capacitors are just barely large enough for the load, and over time, they gave out...
Yes, I heard about several stories like those months ago on the news, and the Kyocera rep telling people their products are fine, and don't buy counterfeit batteries. So, I did some research myself, and found SEVERAL cases of 100% legit Kyocera batteries exploding. One just hours after the person walked out of the store with it.
Companies ALWAYS want to spin this stuff, and counterfeit products are a good scapgoat. When asked why your products are exploding, change the subject to counterfeits, and repeatedly imply, just don't specifically say, that your legit products never explode.
They don't EVER get a letter in hand anymore. Since the anthrax thing, postal mail is scanned into a computer, and e-mailed to them.
Several senator's websites specifically say, if you want a quick reaction, e-mail them. Even an over-night letter may take several days to get to them.
Yes, a revolution is the perfectly rational thing to do, in the face of being unable to copy media with your home-made tivo. That was why they wrote The Declaration of Independence in the first place, wasn't it?
I mean, sure, a few million people will have to die in the revolutionary war, and it will throw the country (and yes, the world) into a depression unlike any that has been seen before, but that's a small price to pay for my satellite radio copies.
The alternative... starving the media companies by NOT BUYING ANYTHING FROM THEM AGAIN, is too horrible to even contemplate. You can't expect me to watch PBS. I'm not an animal!
And don't even discuss the idea of voting against those senators (like Feinstein, CA) who have been the most corrupt politicians for years. I mean... VOTING?! Good God man! Don't you dare suggest it.
Most insightful/informative comment here, and yet still only at +3. So very sad.
Divide by Zero. ERROR! ERROR!
According to their site, that car doesn't run on gas at all: http://www.paccar.ethz.ch/technics/index
Maybe they're doing something crazy, like counting a small ammount of lubrication oil...
The same way the development of the atomic bomb helps your neighborhood supermarket.
Yeah. What's wrong with these university students pushing technological limits to see what is possible. They should be making mundane, practical, marketable designs. You know... like a COMPANY.
That's a bit over-simplistic.
While you might not consider something like RSA with a 512/1024-bit key "modern", it's still quite common.
Actually modern (and actually a cipher) crypto like AES128 could potentially be vunerable to a combinaton of a huge ammount of number-crunching, and the potential vulnerabilities that are already known.
Umm... Not likely. CPUs don't get slower as they get hotter (blah, blah, except if you count throttling, but that's not the point).
I think what he means is: "I left several words out of this sentence. You guess which ones."
No, they are forcing you to install it, no matter how much you don't want it. That's completely different than "providing it" on the install disc... That would actually make it an OPTION.
Not to mention that software still works the old fashioned way... Before IE took over the world, you could walk into a store and buy a low-priced CD with a web browser on it, and every CD (and floppy) you got from companies like Earthlink and AOL included full-fledged web browsers you could install (mainly Netscape). And when you signed-up with an ISP, the CD they sent you had web browsers on it. Private networks had public FTP servers and shares with browsers (and usually the Netware client, and things like that).
And the old standbys still work fine:
ftp ftp.mozilla.org
anonymous
cd
get "Firefox Setup 1.5.0.4.exe"
exit
Tell that to all your DVDs. VHS to DVD was only a 3X improvement at best, while DVD to HD is a 6X improvement.
Audio CDs are actually at the limit of what most people can hear, so they can't really improve the quality (for most of us), just add channels and other fluff. HDTV suffers from no such problem, and anyone who isn't blind can tell the difference.
If I sound annoyed, that might be because I've said this exact same thing about 20 times in the past few months on
Bad armchair EE! Bad! No cookie!
You're completely ignoring PF. Your box may only be drawing a few watts, but it is likely doing it at a PF of around 0.4, due to cheap, crappy switching power supplies. That means you're putting significantly more load on the power lines than a fully-resistive load of the same wattage would.
In the US, residental customers don't have to explicitly pay for their PF, but companies certainly do, as do residental customers outside the US. And even though you aren't explictly paying for PF, lower PFs will increase operating costs of the power company, and eventually be passed-on.
Cost is FAR from the only issue. Off the top of my head, how about power, heat, latency, accessibility (after power surge/failure of some sort), safety, radio frequency output/interference, FAA testing, etc.
As I said before, encryption would be an acceptable first line of defence. Still, people are acting as if there's no limits or down-sides to it.
Not at all. Peripheral interfaces will work just fine. The camera doesn't have any need to be a peer of the computer system, or to communicate independantly of it.
No, it just assumes there aren't eg. 20 simultaneous large (ie. uncachable) writes going on constantly.
That's a TERRIBLE position to take. If you not only fail to resist, but support this activity, you're helping to create the monster, which may very well eat you when it is finally in place. How many of Stalin's top men found themselves in the gulags they helped to create? How many Jews were indespensible cogs in helping the Nazis suppress other Jews, only to end up sharing the same fate?
Being at the top is a short-term benefit at best, while helping establish something evil is a long-term proposition. It's a case of chosing death, or selling your soul to stay alive. I really hope most people have less self-centred ideals than yours, and can better look at the big picture.
Sure it should. It's not the "removing the human" element, it's the "adding the machine" element. It's the "law enforcement database" thing, the "CCTV" thing, all over again. When you have an automated information-collection system, you have FAR, FAR more potential for abuse. A view which has been confirmed time and time again.
The British government is getting a lot of flack lately, for their own CCTV system, as people say the police are using it to prosecute trivial infractions, while serious crimes continue unabaited. Video after video gets released of someone getting repeated beaten and/or stabbed under the watchful eye of CCTV cameras, and perhaps a half hour elapses before any officers arrive. Not to mention repeated misidentification through the CCTV system, leading to innocent people being arrested, shot, etc.
Up until the modern era, it wasn't that you had privacy, it was that it was prohibitively expensive/difficult for police to piece together your every move, as they can now at trivial cost. At least with a police helicopter, you know they aren't going to go through the trouble of hovering over private homes, waiting for trivial laws to be broken.
Fair enough. It's a linear increase in difficulty, but the same goes for the parent, who said breaking it would be exponential, which also would actually be linear.
I'm afraid it's much more CPU-intensive than you realize. Try transfering files over your network with SSH. Even the fast ciphers (AES128, Blowfish, etc) will max-out a rather fast CPU on a 100Mbps network, and the slower, much more secure ones are far, far worse (3DES, AES256, etc). Custom-built hardware (ASICs) do far better than cheap CPUs, but it's still a significant hurdle.
And I presume the airplanes in question certainly do have "insane data rates" since they are being used for surveilance, which means a very quick series of very high-resolution images.
Since when do airplanes have network cards? Unless you have fragments of large pieces of data spread over the drive (Windows with FAT32?) I can't imagine seek times being a bottleneck.
No. It says "TEMPERED SAFETY GLASS" on the pane, in no uncertain terms.
Tempered glass:
And, of course, they absolutely wouldn't use annealed glass in cars (without laminating it, making it safety glass), because it breaks into large, jagged pieces.