The You Hope part completely invalidates the "difference". Sure it is more difficult to make a copy of a physical book but it can be done.
And I suspect that it's done more than you'd expect. I was flicking through a technical reference work in the library of the oil rig that I'm working on a couple of days ago, leafing through what looked like a paperback book on polymer-enhanced waterflood technology. Nicely bound... well put together. It wasn't until I came to the frontispiece and saw that it had a photocopy of a Herriot-Watt University Library "issue date" sheet in it that I realised that it was in fact a copy. Someone, somewhere in S.Korea, had made a very good quality copy of a book that is probably fairly hard to get hold of. Looks a pretty professional job to me - certainly it's had the attentions of a bookbinder.
I'm not surprised that every memory stick in the country is rotten with viruses.
Yes, and people sticking their hands out the window trying to smack you on a high speed drive by, and attempting to side swipe you. This is worse in the FM 1960 area where I used to live as opposed to the Clear Lake area where I now live. The Clear Lake area has a bit higher class of people around.
Isn't this exactly the sort of problem that the death penalty is retained for in Texas : driver slaps ass of cyclist ; police pull over driver ; roadside shootout ; driver's body suspended from nearby tree with a sign (or a paid-for advert for a bike shop - why not?) around his neck detailing his crime ; driver's family sold into slavery to pay cyclist's hospital fees.
I thought Amerikka was the land of justice? When are you going to do something useful with your gun culture and your judicial murder?
"there's only 2 companies on the planet that build this particular specialist piece of equipment"
to
"Tell Washington, DC about that. [...] they should be regulated."
without passing through one of "Washington rules the world", "America is the world" or such-like parochialism? The inclusion of the "on the planet" phrase is a pretty clear flag to me that the two companies in question are in widely separated locations.
and the route resembles route of Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny (Oh, look what a pretty rock! Let's drill a hole in it and examine it! - and another week passes)
Hey, I resemble that remark!
No seriously, I mean "resemble", not "resent" which is the normal joke around here. Just ask any of my hill-walking buddies. Or the wife (who is more of the "oh, what a pretty cathedral" persuasion). Or Dad ("Oh what a stunning sedge/ grass/ lichen/ megalithic monument...") What's the second part of the phrase? Oh yes :
My opinion of the professors of [Wherever] University has gone downhill. All self-respecting universities should have at least one professor who owns and wears a clown suit which the entire university knows about. (Closeted clown-suit-wearing professors are just sad.)
Look people, use your fucking brains and don't buy property that doesn't have at least 10m of freeboard between it and the nearest drainage route. In a small number of areas, use a figure of 20m instead of 10m. As for people who've already been stupid enough to buy such property, which now has zero resale value : tough shit.
I've got 80m freeboard between my cellar and the nearest river, and this was not an accident. I simply rejected housing adverts from areas of the city that didn't have sufficient freeboard. It's not rocket surgery. Or brain science.
So, are you saying that Blackwater [..] just created and sent out the first version of these robots?
Surely not the first such robots - since the Egyptians (possibly the Sumerians), drill sergeants and priests have been striving towards that end for millennia.
Secutrity requires effort to check the keys, keep them private, accept the extra steps to apply and check it, remember passwords , keys and credentials ecc.ecc.
I sincerely hope that that's a joke. The "error-correcting-code.error-correcting-code" bit that is, not the typo.
90% users are plainly and loudly annoyed by common access password expire time and complexity requirements. They are simply not intellectually ready to manage encryption of fixed and removable media.
That's fine for those of us who are in the 10%, as long as the losing 90% end up losing their jobs, dieing of starvation and selling their children to the Dean Swift Fricassee Factory for a lifetime in catering. "Just think of it as evolution in action."
who let a reference to a dead parrot pass without a single "He's pining for the fjords" comment,
Stunned. Just stunned.
and who harbor absolutely no animosity towards Wil Wheaton.
Who? (I think that the guy has been mentioned as if he's an actor, but I don't know in what. Nor, particularly, do I care.) And yes, I have had a UID since years before I ever encountered Futurama ; it's possible that I had a UID before I'd even seen the Simpsons.
Slashdot UID is still only running somewhere around 1 700 000. It's not an once and for all solution.
Speaking as someone who has several times already donated to Wikileaks (and who is likely to donate again after I've RTFA), I'll point out a flaw in your logic. There is no reason for there to be a simple connection between a membership number and the number of registered users on a site, and even less a reason for there to be a simple relationship between the number of registered users and the number of active users.
Particularly in situations where the number of users is important to the survival of a site, there are good reasons to inflate the number of users. Privileged users, friends or cow-orkers of the founder, etc tend to get the first few numbers ; then the numbers need to inflate to try to gain traffic and advertising revenue. So, you jump the membership number counter by a handful every few hours. A site with a thousand users doesn't sound as impressive as a site with two thousand users, and it's going to be a careful observer who notices that certain ranges of user numbers are missing. (I'm not alleging that SlashDot actually did this ; but the temptation is there. Just add the next number in the series of prime numbers to NEXT_USER_NUMBER each time you (or chron) collects the usage statistics ; who'd notice? Turn it off when you're getting lots of sign-ups, or re-zero it to the start of the series of primes.)
witness the difference in loss of life between Hiroshima (15kT) and Tunguska (15MT) - 70k vs 2.
I've not heard of reliable reports that anyone was killed in Tunguska, though it's entirely feasible. It's also entirely feasible, given the areas' population density, that no-one was killed. Do you have a source for this claim? I don't recall seeing it the last time I looked at the Wikipedia article, and I can't be bothered to trace this rumour further.
A kill switch for the GP hull, controlled by Puppeteers is consistent with the earlier books (consider the superior performance of Nessus's flycycle WRT the other vehicles in the original Ringworld) though I haven't read the later books.
Entirely consistent. But imagine if Speaker had taken Nessus' flycycle back to the Patriarchy, where they figured out enough of the notations so that on another mission, the Kzin could have flown Nessus' (or whichever other Puppeteer) flycycle in pursuit of the Puppeteer. So there'd be another system in there too. Or maybe that's why they took the more programmable stepping discs on the next mission.
But hang on a black hole is not a neutron star so that story doesn't apply. The GP hull is just an atom.
Now, I can't remember if this is in Flatlander or in the more recent books, but no, a GP hull is not "just an atom" it is (approximately) "a molecule with it's bonds strengthened by a [special process || internal power supply]". If it were made of nuclear matter, then it'd have a density comparable with neutronium... with very non-canon consequences.
I suspect the GP hull would be toast because the gravitational field in a small black hole brakes things up by requiring them to move faster than light to stay together, but I am not aware of Niven addressing the subject.
I think that we're in general agreement about the consequences, but you need to double-check your physics. Or the way you express your physics.
Now to address the issue of Stasis field vs Black Hole...
Hmmm, interesting question. There's nothing to stop a stasis field from going around a black hole. See the [non-canon] story about the Slaver/ Tnuctipun weapon that went through the Wunderland system during the occupation. If a black hole approached a stasis field from the outside... well, stasis is a non-physical effect (it's a temporal distortion - see 'World of Ptavvs'), so... I can't see why a black hole couldn't envelope a stasis field, and then who knows what would happen ; but if the stasis field enclosed a larger volume than the black hole's event horizon... interesting indeed.
You may want to follow this up on www.larryniven.org , the semi-official fan site ; I think they have forums there.
But the article also says that a gas disk with varying temperatures would cause certain orbits to migrate outwards instead of inwards and THIS is why proto-planets can survive. But it doesn't say how a temperature gradient can cause migration.
I didn't read the whole article - far too mathematically dense - but I did get this understanding of the matter: Planetesimals orbit under essentially the rules of Kepler ; this establishes a baseline of velocities for comparison. A gas disk with a uniform temperature will support the motion of gas particles to some degree (a gas particle will on average experience more collisions on it's sunward side than on it's outer side), which will allow it to remain in "orbit" (orbit plus gas pressure) at lower circumferential velocity than a freely-falling planet. These gas particles will interact with the orbiting planets as if they were a headwind, and withdraw kinetic energy from the planetesimal into the gas cloud. Things then got too mathematical for me ; but when the gas disk has a non-uniform temperature distribution (or some non-uniform distributions, particularly the ones that are hotter at the centre), then the impact velocities of gas molecule on gas molecule and gas molecule on planetesimal vary with radial distance so that the gas molecules (and planetesimals) experience a degree of "buoyancy" which helps them to migrate outwards. That's where it gets hazy for me ; but I'm sure the reviewers have done their job properly.
Further, they probably have to store the image for a few days in case any aircraft carrying a person that passed through the machine comes to grief (accident or deliberate). Can you imagine the "scandal" if a plane goes down, it's suspicious, and the investigating body does not have this imagery?
How does the imagery help? You don't know who took the putative explosives, guns, or whatever through security and into the departure lounge.
I'm fed up with Abdul and Achmed getting the stick, so in today's scenario the two 'A's are going to be innocent passers-by, and the real terrorists are Jean-Paul and Francoise of the Free Qubequois. JP is booked onto one flight and carries half the explosives through security, following Achmed-the-innocent. The amount of explosives are calibrated to not trigger the detector (that's another issue). Later, F follows Abdul-the-guiltfree through a different security gate, booked onto a different plane and carrying the other parts of the bomb. JP and F then meet in the toilets (the old briefcase protruding-under-the-cubicle-door language) and join the several parts together. They draw lots and head off. Later, JP watches as Abdul-the-guiltfree is wrestled to the ground by security staff because of his suspected association with the probable bomber (Achmed) thought to have brought down F's flight.
Why do you think that the person who takes the bomb onto the plane is the person who carries the bomb through security? If bomb-builders are a limiting resource in your organisation, then you'll need to conserve them by sacrificing mules. If you're sufficiently sophisticated to build a bomb, you're probably sufficiently sophisticated to evade simplistic security. Or, if you just want to create mayhem, you detonate your bomb once you see the worried look on the scanner-operator's face. (If you don't see that look, then you board your plane and add several hundred thousand tonne-kilometres-per-second-squared of kinetic energy to the effect of your bomb. Same general effect, just different details.)
Since you Niven to the discussion, I should point out that the General Products hull could survive anything except collision with antimatter, but the I wonder about a black hole?
[Niven Pedant]You're significantly wrong in the canon, and the latter question has never been raised as far as I know. Within the canon, one of the more recent books ('Fleet of Worlds' IIRC, but my copy is on a different continent so I can't check) has as a central plot theme being able to "turn off" a GP hull remotely. That's a bug, not a feature. Or was it a feature that the Puppeteer's DARPA insisted on putting into the GP hulls before selling them to potentially unfriendly customers? To quote (approximately) 'Neutron Star', "Puppeteers are not in the habit of building invulnerable warships". So, against the possible prospect of the Kzin buying up a fleet of used GP hulls a thousand years after the Puppeteers have left Known Space, then setting off in pursuit of the dishonourably meddling leafeaters... well, now you see why they put that remote "off" switch into the GP hull. That's as "rationally cautious" as the UK and US governments keeping the fact that the Poles had broken the enigma machine secret for many years after the end of WWII - and reaping a reward in people still using the system. So, it was a feature to the designers, but a bug once non-Puppeteers knew of it.
'Neutron Star' itself clearly indicates the consequences of a black hole meeting a GP hull, for the crew - either entire consumption, GP hull and all (there's nothing about a GP hull that allows light elsewhere to exceed 'c', so the hole remains black outside the hull, once the hull is inside) ; or if the hole is small enough to fit into the GP hull, death by tidal forces for the occupants. In the latter case, 'Flatlander' provides the answer : contact between a black hole (or probably a neutron star) and a GP hull would result in occasional atoms being pulled from the GP hull into the black hole (or onto the neutronium) ; eventually enough atoms would leave the GP hull to destabilise it, at which point, 'poof'. The forces between atoms in a GP hull are clearly described as being molecular (though strengthened by the inbuilt power supply of the hull), so anything that provides nuclear-type forces will eventually be able to dislodge some atoms from the hull and so eventually the hull would go 'poof'. The claims that the Puppeteers make for their hulls sound like marketing speak.
I think that if you hit a GP hull for long enough with a hard gamma-ray laser then you'd eventually be able to ablate through it. But I'm a spoilsport!
I wouldn't hire you if you provided that email address, but not because it is in any way lame. I'd hire you because you've already shown that you're incompetent at doing basic research. If you (or I) could reach back into the annals of SlashDot, you'd quite likely find that the initial address I signed up with was 100025.3053@compuserve.com (I'm stretching my memory the thick end of a decade now - I may have it wrong in detail.), which is a potentially valid Compuserve email address. The 6-digit regional identifier marks me as someone who signed up in the UK, and it says that I was probably one of the first few thousand subscribers in the UK (after they introduced that scheme ; there were many old timers with 7xxxx.xxxx numbers too). And of course the number is valid octal.
If you're going to invent a fake email address, do your research first. The only thing that would prevent your CV from going directly into the trash can would be if I wanted to use it as an initiative test for a youngling : "Oi, you : tell me why the person who wrote this CV is a wanker and shouldn't be employed."
That's odd, all the banks in the states have car parks. But then again, everything in the states have parking lots.
Chicken, meet Egg ; Egg, meet Chicken. Countries that have towns and cities where the agricultural hoi polloi had to walk from the village centre out to their fields every day, developed a ring of privately owned properties about an hour's walk out of the centre of the town/ village. Any much greater distance and the hoi polloi would have made pressure to set up a new hamlet/ village/ town/ city in the gap. Even today, with much faster modes of transport, people rarely travel more than an hour each way to their daily work (obviously there are exceptions ; these are averages). That left "foot propelled" countries hemmed in with a network of property obligations that were centuries old at "time immemorial", and each and every one of those property obligations was an encouragement to build within existing property boundaries, because combining ownership of plots is much harder than splitting a plot. Some of my acquaintances in my youth were into botanical archaeology (from the botanical and historical ends), and for Central England they used a calibrated rule of thumb that would allow them to estimate the age of a hedgerow to within a century in the time it took to walk a hundred yards of it. They were routinely mapping hedges that follow irregular, nonsensical paths cross-country because of collisions between property ownership boundaries, and which had been in place and nonsensical for 600 or 700 years.
America (and to a lesser extent, Canada and Australia, I think) are really unusual in the freedom that their "terra nullis" laws have allowed their lords and masters to divide the country with straight lines, to let their cities sprawl, etc. (Of course, you could regard the Norman conquest of Britain as the imposition of a sort of "terra nullis" law too. I may have that legal term named wrongly - they're the laws that boil down to "we own the land now, and no previous claims of ownership are considered important enough to get any argument other than a sword up the jacksie or an air fandango") Ultimately, you'll find that America gets hedged in too, and that as land prices go up, parking lots will become too valuable to use just for parking. You'll find more buildings being built with underground or on-roof parking, simply to make double-use of the land. It's the same logic that leads to skyscrapers. But everywhere will need to either improve public transport, or become more walking friendly. Personal motorised transport is too inefficient for mass use. (And it's bad for your health too. 20 minutes a day of fast walking does wonders for your heart; not your neighbours heart, but your heart!)
More to the point, what in the hell do they use at YOUR bank?
Feet. If you drive to the bank at all (and with 20 minutes to find a parking space, then 10 minutes to walk to the bank, why would you?), then you park in the car park (or the nearest one you can find ; few banks have car parks - I can only think of one branch of my main bank that has one, out of 20-odd branches in town) and walk into the branch to do your banking. Seriously, a system such as you describe would double or triple the amount of money that the banks have stored up in bricks, mortar and asphalt. Which is not a good use of my money.
the ever declining intellectual level of TV, they have to aim at whats left of their audience, primarily fans of the "ow my balls" program
Well, I get the reference. But I've temporarily forgotten the name of the satire film. "Idiocracy"? Yes. Of course, that'll go over the heads of the target audience. Bring on the thermonuclear revocation of contraceptive underuse, I say!
GR is easy, one just have to take time and read it through, for starters:)
Considering the story about Eddington (journalist [interviewing Eddington about the solar eclipse photography that provided some of the first tangible evidence that GR is a good description of the universe]: "Apparently only three people in the world really understand the theory, including yourself and Einstein." Eddington : "I'm trying to think who the third one would be."), I think that you're underestimating the subject matter. Or you're just trying to be funny. "trying".
Slashdot Mirror
And I suspect that it's done more than you'd expect. ... well put together. It wasn't until I came to the frontispiece and saw that it had a photocopy of a Herriot-Watt University Library "issue date" sheet in it that I realised that it was in fact a copy.
I was flicking through a technical reference work in the library of the oil rig that I'm working on a couple of days ago, leafing through what looked like a paperback book on polymer-enhanced waterflood technology. Nicely bound
Someone, somewhere in S.Korea, had made a very good quality copy of a book that is probably fairly hard to get hold of. Looks a pretty professional job to me - certainly it's had the attentions of a bookbinder.
I'm not surprised that every memory stick in the country is rotten with viruses.
Isn't this exactly the sort of problem that the death penalty is retained for in Texas : driver slaps ass of cyclist ; police pull over driver ; roadside shootout ; driver's body suspended from nearby tree with a sign (or a paid-for advert for a bike shop - why not?) around his neck detailing his crime ; driver's family sold into slavery to pay cyclist's hospital fees.
I thought Amerikka was the land of justice? When are you going to do something useful with your gun culture and your judicial murder?
How do you get from
to
without passing through one of "Washington rules the world", "America is the world" or such-like parochialism?
The inclusion of the "on the planet" phrase is a pretty clear flag to me that the two companies in question are in widely separated locations.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
No seriously, I mean "resemble", not "resent" which is the normal joke around here. Just ask any of my hill-walking buddies. Or the wife (who is more of the "oh, what a pretty cathedral" persuasion). Or Dad ("Oh what a stunning sedge/ grass/ lichen/ megalithic monument ...")
What's the second part of the phrase? Oh yes :
"You insensitive cuboid block of earth!"
My opinion of the professors of [Wherever] University has gone downhill. All self-respecting universities should have at least one professor who owns and wears a clown suit which the entire university knows about. (Closeted clown-suit-wearing professors are just sad.)
Look people, use your fucking brains and don't buy property that doesn't have at least 10m of freeboard between it and the nearest drainage route. In a small number of areas, use a figure of 20m instead of 10m. As for people who've already been stupid enough to buy such property, which now has zero resale value : tough shit.
I've got 80m freeboard between my cellar and the nearest river, and this was not an accident. I simply rejected housing adverts from areas of the city that didn't have sufficient freeboard. It's not rocket surgery. Or brain science.
For
?
OK, that's another tenner into the Wikileaks coffers.
Not just spammers ; bosses, wives, girlfriends, parents, landlord, people you owe money to and a whole range of other undesirable contacts too.
There are perfectly good reasons for not wanting to have a unique personal identifier. And even more not quite perfectly good reasons.
Surely not the first such robots - since the Egyptians (possibly the Sumerians), drill sergeants and priests have been striving towards that end for millennia.
Oh, you mean non-human robots?
I sincerely hope that that's a joke. The "error-correcting-code.error-correcting-code" bit that is, not the typo.
That's fine for those of us who are in the 10%, as long as the losing 90% end up losing their jobs, dieing of starvation and selling their children to the Dean Swift Fricassee Factory for a lifetime in catering. "Just think of it as evolution in action."
Stunned. Just stunned.
Who?
(I think that the guy has been mentioned as if he's an actor, but I don't know in what. Nor, particularly, do I care.)
And yes, I have had a UID since years before I ever encountered Futurama ; it's possible that I had a UID before I'd even seen the Simpsons.
OK, now I feel guilty. And I've got 10 minutes before lunch. ... should be the most reliable source. Bologna university. Do they have a summary of "best evidence"? not that I can find.
A lot of the recent research on the Tunguska impact has come out of a university in Italy
"Closer to the site, windowpanes shattered, livestock were knocked off their feet and broken bones resulted when people were dashed to the ground."
"Yet, owing to the area's remoteness, only one nomad lost his life."
"Remarkably, there were only two reported human deaths." Oh, sorry, that's your link.
[SIGH] Pick a number, any number you want.
Poor bastards. I almost feel sympathy for them. And them, and probably some others too.
On the other hand ... I'll bet that the local road-name-plate makers have big cars, gaudy medallions and healthy profit margins.
Speaking as someone who has several times already donated to Wikileaks (and who is likely to donate again after I've RTFA), I'll point out a flaw in your logic. There is no reason for there to be a simple connection between a membership number and the number of registered users on a site, and even less a reason for there to be a simple relationship between the number of registered users and the number of active users.
Particularly in situations where the number of users is important to the survival of a site, there are good reasons to inflate the number of users. Privileged users, friends or cow-orkers of the founder, etc tend to get the first few numbers ; then the numbers need to inflate to try to gain traffic and advertising revenue. So, you jump the membership number counter by a handful every few hours. A site with a thousand users doesn't sound as impressive as a site with two thousand users, and it's going to be a careful observer who notices that certain ranges of user numbers are missing.
(I'm not alleging that SlashDot actually did this ; but the temptation is there. Just add the next number in the series of prime numbers to NEXT_USER_NUMBER each time you (or chron) collects the usage statistics ; who'd notice? Turn it off when you're getting lots of sign-ups, or re-zero it to the start of the series of primes.)
I've not heard of reliable reports that anyone was killed in Tunguska, though it's entirely feasible. It's also entirely feasible, given the areas' population density, that no-one was killed.
Do you have a source for this claim? I don't recall seeing it the last time I looked at the Wikipedia article, and I can't be bothered to trace this rumour further.
Entirely consistent. But imagine if Speaker had taken Nessus' flycycle back to the Patriarchy, where they figured out enough of the notations so that on another mission, the Kzin could have flown Nessus' (or whichever other Puppeteer) flycycle in pursuit of the Puppeteer. So there'd be another system in there too. Or maybe that's why they took the more programmable stepping discs on the next mission.
Now, I can't remember if this is in Flatlander or in the more recent books, but no, a GP hull is not "just an atom" it is (approximately) "a molecule with it's bonds strengthened by a [special process || internal power supply]". If it were made of nuclear matter, then it'd have a density comparable with neutronium ... with very non-canon consequences.
I think that we're in general agreement about the consequences, but you need to double-check your physics. Or the way you express your physics.
Hmmm, interesting question. There's nothing to stop a stasis field from going around a black hole. See the [non-canon] story about the Slaver/ Tnuctipun weapon that went through the Wunderland system during the occupation. If a black hole approached a stasis field from the outside ... well, stasis is a non-physical effect (it's a temporal distortion - see 'World of Ptavvs'), so ... I can't see why a black hole couldn't envelope a stasis field, and then who knows what would happen ; but if the stasis field enclosed a larger volume than the black hole's event horizon ... interesting indeed.
You may want to follow this up on www.larryniven.org , the semi-official fan site ; I think they have forums there.
I didn't read the whole article - far too mathematically dense - but I did get this understanding of the matter:
Planetesimals orbit under essentially the rules of Kepler ; this establishes a baseline of velocities for comparison.
A gas disk with a uniform temperature will support the motion of gas particles to some degree (a gas particle will on average experience more collisions on it's sunward side than on it's outer side), which will allow it to remain in "orbit" (orbit plus gas pressure) at lower circumferential velocity than a freely-falling planet. These gas particles will interact with the orbiting planets as if they were a headwind, and withdraw kinetic energy from the planetesimal into the gas cloud.
Things then got too mathematical for me ; but when the gas disk has a non-uniform temperature distribution (or some non-uniform distributions, particularly the ones that are hotter at the centre), then the impact velocities of gas molecule on gas molecule and gas molecule on planetesimal vary with radial distance so that the gas molecules (and planetesimals) experience a degree of "buoyancy" which helps them to migrate outwards. That's where it gets hazy for me ; but I'm sure the reviewers have done their job properly.
It sounds as intuitive as the Yarkovsky effect.
"Mr President, Iraq is on the phone ; they want to know when you're going to take away the uranium you've dumped in their country."
How does the imagery help? You don't know who took the putative explosives, guns, or whatever through security and into the departure lounge.
I'm fed up with Abdul and Achmed getting the stick, so in today's scenario the two 'A's are going to be innocent passers-by, and the real terrorists are Jean-Paul and Francoise of the Free Qubequois. JP is booked onto one flight and carries half the explosives through security, following Achmed-the-innocent. The amount of explosives are calibrated to not trigger the detector (that's another issue). Later, F follows Abdul-the-guiltfree through a different security gate, booked onto a different plane and carrying the other parts of the bomb. JP and F then meet in the toilets (the old briefcase protruding-under-the-cubicle-door language) and join the several parts together. They draw lots and head off. Later, JP watches as Abdul-the-guiltfree is wrestled to the ground by security staff because of his suspected association with the probable bomber (Achmed) thought to have brought down F's flight.
Why do you think that the person who takes the bomb onto the plane is the person who carries the bomb through security? If bomb-builders are a limiting resource in your organisation, then you'll need to conserve them by sacrificing mules.
If you're sufficiently sophisticated to build a bomb, you're probably sufficiently sophisticated to evade simplistic security. Or, if you just want to create mayhem, you detonate your bomb once you see the worried look on the scanner-operator's face. (If you don't see that look, then you board your plane and add several hundred thousand tonne-kilometres-per-second-squared of kinetic energy to the effect of your bomb. Same general effect, just different details.)
[Niven Pedant]You're significantly wrong in the canon, and the latter question has never been raised as far as I know. ... well, now you see why they put that remote "off" switch into the GP hull. That's as "rationally cautious" as the UK and US governments keeping the fact that the Poles had broken the enigma machine secret for many years after the end of WWII - and reaping a reward in people still using the system. So, it was a feature to the designers, but a bug once non-Puppeteers knew of it.
Within the canon, one of the more recent books ('Fleet of Worlds' IIRC, but my copy is on a different continent so I can't check) has as a central plot theme being able to "turn off" a GP hull remotely. That's a bug, not a feature.
Or was it a feature that the Puppeteer's DARPA insisted on putting into the GP hulls before selling them to potentially unfriendly customers? To quote (approximately) 'Neutron Star', "Puppeteers are not in the habit of building invulnerable warships". So, against the possible prospect of the Kzin buying up a fleet of used GP hulls a thousand years after the Puppeteers have left Known Space, then setting off in pursuit of the dishonourably meddling leafeaters
'Neutron Star' itself clearly indicates the consequences of a black hole meeting a GP hull, for the crew - either entire consumption, GP hull and all (there's nothing about a GP hull that allows light elsewhere to exceed 'c', so the hole remains black outside the hull, once the hull is inside) ; or if the hole is small enough to fit into the GP hull, death by tidal forces for the occupants. In the latter case, 'Flatlander' provides the answer : contact between a black hole (or probably a neutron star) and a GP hull would result in occasional atoms being pulled from the GP hull into the black hole (or onto the neutronium) ; eventually enough atoms would leave the GP hull to destabilise it, at which point, 'poof'. The forces between atoms in a GP hull are clearly described as being molecular (though strengthened by the inbuilt power supply of the hull), so anything that provides nuclear-type forces will eventually be able to dislodge some atoms from the hull and so eventually the hull would go 'poof'. The claims that the Puppeteers make for their hulls sound like marketing speak.
I think that if you hit a GP hull for long enough with a hard gamma-ray laser then you'd eventually be able to ablate through it. But I'm a spoilsport!
I wouldn't hire you if you provided that email address, but not because it is in any way lame. I'd hire you because you've already shown that you're incompetent at doing basic research.
If you (or I) could reach back into the annals of SlashDot, you'd quite likely find that the initial address I signed up with was 100025.3053@compuserve.com (I'm stretching my memory the thick end of a decade now - I may have it wrong in detail.), which is a potentially valid Compuserve email address. The 6-digit regional identifier marks me as someone who signed up in the UK, and it says that I was probably one of the first few thousand subscribers in the UK (after they introduced that scheme ; there were many old timers with 7xxxx.xxxx numbers too). And of course the number is valid octal.
If you're going to invent a fake email address, do your research first. The only thing that would prevent your CV from going directly into the trash can would be if I wanted to use it as an initiative test for a youngling : "Oi, you : tell me why the person who wrote this CV is a wanker and shouldn't be employed."
[SIGH] Kids today.
Chicken, meet Egg ; Egg, meet Chicken.
Countries that have towns and cities where the agricultural hoi polloi had to walk from the village centre out to their fields every day, developed a ring of privately owned properties about an hour's walk out of the centre of the town/ village. Any much greater distance and the hoi polloi would have made pressure to set up a new hamlet/ village/ town/ city in the gap. Even today, with much faster modes of transport, people rarely travel more than an hour each way to their daily work (obviously there are exceptions ; these are averages). That left "foot propelled" countries hemmed in with a network of property obligations that were centuries old at "time immemorial", and each and every one of those property obligations was an encouragement to build within existing property boundaries, because combining ownership of plots is much harder than splitting a plot.
Some of my acquaintances in my youth were into botanical archaeology (from the botanical and historical ends), and for Central England they used a calibrated rule of thumb that would allow them to estimate the age of a hedgerow to within a century in the time it took to walk a hundred yards of it. They were routinely mapping hedges that follow irregular, nonsensical paths cross-country because of collisions between property ownership boundaries, and which had been in place and nonsensical for 600 or 700 years.
America (and to a lesser extent, Canada and Australia, I think) are really unusual in the freedom that their "terra nullis" laws have allowed their lords and masters to divide the country with straight lines, to let their cities sprawl, etc. (Of course, you could regard the Norman conquest of Britain as the imposition of a sort of "terra nullis" law too. I may have that legal term named wrongly - they're the laws that boil down to "we own the land now, and no previous claims of ownership are considered important enough to get any argument other than a sword up the jacksie or an air fandango")
Ultimately, you'll find that America gets hedged in too, and that as land prices go up, parking lots will become too valuable to use just for parking. You'll find more buildings being built with underground or on-roof parking, simply to make double-use of the land. It's the same logic that leads to skyscrapers.
But everywhere will need to either improve public transport, or become more walking friendly. Personal motorised transport is too inefficient for mass use. (And it's bad for your health too. 20 minutes a day of fast walking does wonders for your heart; not your neighbours heart, but your heart!)
Feet.
If you drive to the bank at all (and with 20 minutes to find a parking space, then 10 minutes to walk to the bank, why would you?), then you park in the car park (or the nearest one you can find ; few banks have car parks - I can only think of one branch of my main bank that has one, out of 20-odd branches in town) and walk into the branch to do your banking.
Seriously, a system such as you describe would double or triple the amount of money that the banks have stored up in bricks, mortar and asphalt. Which is not a good use of my money.
Well, I get the reference. But I've temporarily forgotten the name of the satire film. "Idiocracy"? Yes.
Of course, that'll go over the heads of the target audience. Bring on the thermonuclear revocation of contraceptive underuse, I say!
Considering the story about Eddington (journalist [interviewing Eddington about the solar eclipse photography that provided some of the first tangible evidence that GR is a good description of the universe]: "Apparently only three people in the world really understand the theory, including yourself and Einstein." Eddington : "I'm trying to think who the third one would be."), I think that you're underestimating the subject matter.
Or you're just trying to be funny.
"trying".