You sure it was Smith? The Architect made some comment, "The process [of coming here] has altered your consciousness, but you are still fundamentally human." Implying that when he went to the Source, he brought a something of it back with him.
That government bureaucrat's days are numbered. I can just see him taking some psychopath's money and then, with a straight face, tell him he never paid. That sorta behavior will draw out those inclined to go postal.
Their idea of 'effective' means that you had to use some tool to get around it. Can't break it without a pencil and paper? Oh, well then it's quite effective! Case in point, ROT13 on Adobe ebooks. Anyone capable of arithmetic and a knowledge of ASCII could do the translation in their heads.
And you don't want to get rid of the heat too quickly either. It has to be hot enough to keep melting the rock as it goes down.
Oh I wouldn't worry about that. After the first few miles, the temperature of the surrounding rock would be enough to keep the iron molten. Ever see pictures of lava moving through water? Kinda like that, only instead of being chilled on the outside and kept warm from the inside, it's the other way around.
Besides, if your probe's cooling system is good enough to actually chill several million tons of iron whilest encased in liquid silicate rocks, you could really dispense with the whole molten iron thing and just make the thing dense and massive enough to fall of its own accord and provide it with a heat source to keep the outside piping hot while your magical freon unit maintains room temperature on the inside.
Best case scenario (i.e., no air, no uncomfortable smacking into the surrounding rock at speeds normally reserved for outer space and particle accelerators, that sort of thing), you'd come just as far away from the center of mass of the planet as you started. So as long as your 'jump point' is higher up than your destination, you're fine. Just hop in, fly by rock hotter than the surface of the sun, and then pray to gods you don't believe in that someone'll catch you so you don't start on your return trip too early.
However, I think the pesky rotation problem will do you in anyways. Linear velocity at the equator exceeds Mach 1.5; at the exact core it's essentially zero. Dropping down a hole does not magically rid you of that sideways momentum, so you will probably be getting a stone wedgie long before you even hit the mantle. You'd have to stick a rail guide along the side which, since frictionless unobtainium isn't yet in mass production and Hotblack Desiato has first dibs on the stuff anyway, would cause you to lose some of that precious inertia on the way down, thus requiring that you expend power getting yourself up the last bit.
Assuming that I were particularly interested in going to China in the first place, I'll just take a cruise, thank you very much.
That'd work, but only if there was some place for the heat to go. Can't get rid of heat, right, all you can do is move it around? Hard to do that when you're surrounded by friggin molten iron. You'd need some kind of trailing superconducting radiator wire and an entire ocean for a heat sink to empty it into (don't plan on having that ocean after this is over with). _Maybe_ then you could keep the inside of your probe cool enough to operate.
Hell, I'm beginning to think they just write their lawyers a check each year with orders to 'keep busy'.
Re:These spam laws are a waste of time
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The similarities to the War on Drugs are debatable. Spamming can be run as a one-man operation on a shoe-string budget, but remember that the vast majority of it in this country comes from something like 200 people. The sort of operation alsky runs must stay in one spot and requires a lot of equipment.
Furthermore, the justification of a War on Spam is of a totally different nature than that of the failure that is Prohibition II. Almost all the problems usually attributed to drugs stemp only from their illegality. But Spam has until recently been quite legal and is now, as the Lords put it, 'choking the Internet'. Spam requires that the spammer be deceitful and intrusive to _everyone_ and actively waste their time, effort, and money. Plus the only people who get any enjoyment out of it are the ones directly making money off it, or think they are by hiring spammers. Drugs at least have the potential to be win-win for everyone involved.
My only real worry about arresting spammers is, like any other law, that it's going to be used entirely on the innocent or small fry and the schmucks actually clogging my inbox get off scot free. Or that even if we clear it up at home, we'll just get swamped by spammers from Asia (moreso than already, anyway) or whatver.
While I agree with you about the need to not be overly vindictive or spiteful, I can in all honesty say that I feel utterly no remorse for the dozen catalogs I 'accidentally' signed Felstein & Associates up for. These schmucks are adults. Mark knows exactly what he's doing and, after what happened to Ralsky, what the potential consequences are from his taking on such hypocritical slime for a client.
My thinking is, if these fucktards like spam so much, they can rot in it for all I care. Every single of the twenty or so non-techies I told the Ralsky story to thought he got exactly what he deserved.
What really worries me was one posting of Mr. Felstein's home address further on up. There was no source for the address and phone given, so I tried to find it myself. No luck; all I could find was a mention on a pay-people-search that gave a different city (N Miami Beach instead of Boca Raton). Also, a reverse lookup on the phone number yielded someone else entirely. So please, double-check the identity of your victim before you bomb them. As Quantaman says, our own government dispenses more than its fair share of indiscriminant punishment, no need for us to add to the mix.
Note also that you do not take into account the relative difficulty of breaking the 'code-based restrictions'. Adobe e-books come to mind. If some security protection was similarly of a weakness that defies the imagination, so easy to break that an average person could break the code in his head, shouldn't the onus of guilt fall rather moreso on the jackass owner than the 'hacker'?
I hesitate to use an anology, but could someone actually be charged with the 'breaking' part of B&E if your front door consists of grocery bags taped together?
Naw, just build an electromagnet into your doorframe so that even if they seize your drive, simply taking it out of the room while the magnet is going wipes it clean.
Bingo. A monopoly is not intrinsically bad, in some ways it's better than perfect competition. It's just so very easy (and tempting!) to abuse it to enrich a few at the expense of the Little People.
Banning radar detectors is like saying, "You are not allowed to see this particular kind of light." It's just as stupid as if they were to do the same to UV, IR, or hyperintelligent shades of blue. "We're going to beam all kinds of radiation at you, but you have to pretend that you don't know it." Hell, current wireless radio frequencies aren't much 'further away' from police radar guns than red is from violet.
In any event, you're falling for the old "you must justify this behavior" fallacy. In a free state, I shouldn't have to justify to a cop anything I do, it is up to The Powers That Be to convince me (or a jury of my peers) why I shouldn't be allowed to do it. Ignoring this wisdom has lead to such wonderful legislation as Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and anti-sodomy laws that end up telling married couples how they may have sex.
So what if they corrupt half the files? I always grab several copies of whatever it is I'm looking for. If I get 4 versions and each is 50/50, there's still a 94% chance that one of them will be what I'm looking for. And the corrupt versions will not be spread anywhere near as quickly as valid ones; those capable of maintenance of their files would not be keeping them.
He specifically said, "when the cameras are placed for civilian use". As in, "if the cops are going to be using tools on a widespread basis against the very people that paid for them, we're damned well going to get more oversight and accountability than your average piece of military hardware."
Because the RIAA contains the only people on the planet who put misnamed files on the service? What if they download a song that is actually copyrighted by someone else? Oh my, they just broke the law trying to gather incriminating evidence!
Associated? Good Lord, what a heinous crime! We must execute him at once! Everyone knows that associating with criminals turns you into one!
There's some very good reasons the phrase 'guilt by association' has such negative connotations. Help terrorists? According to you, it's a crime just to be in the same coffee shop with them.
This trend towards preemptive law enforcement has really got me worried. Bad enough that there's so many laws there's not a single person in the US who isn't guilty of at least one felony, but we have to contend with 'you _could_ be a criminal' justice as well?
Slashdot Mirror
You sure it was Smith? The Architect made some comment, "The process [of coming here] has altered your consciousness, but you are still fundamentally human." Implying that when he went to the Source, he brought a something of it back with him.
That government bureaucrat's days are numbered. I can just see him taking some psychopath's money and then, with a straight face, tell him he never paid. That sorta behavior will draw out those inclined to go postal.
Their idea of 'effective' means that you had to use some tool to get around it. Can't break it without a pencil and paper? Oh, well then it's quite effective! Case in point, ROT13 on Adobe ebooks. Anyone capable of arithmetic and a knowledge of ASCII could do the translation in their heads.
Ah, so you want one-way insulation. Heat flows easily from the probe to the iron, but not the other way. Does such a thing exist?
Oh I wouldn't worry about that. After the first few miles, the temperature of the surrounding rock would be enough to keep the iron molten. Ever see pictures of lava moving through water? Kinda like that, only instead of being chilled on the outside and kept warm from the inside, it's the other way around.
Besides, if your probe's cooling system is good enough to actually chill several million tons of iron whilest encased in liquid silicate rocks, you could really dispense with the whole molten iron thing and just make the thing dense and massive enough to fall of its own accord and provide it with a heat source to keep the outside piping hot while your magical freon unit maintains room temperature on the inside.
That's cool, the probe would be communicating back up via tectonic/gravitic means. Rock in the way actually makes things easier.
However, I think the pesky rotation problem will do you in anyways. Linear velocity at the equator exceeds Mach 1.5; at the exact core it's essentially zero. Dropping down a hole does not magically rid you of that sideways momentum, so you will probably be getting a stone wedgie long before you even hit the mantle. You'd have to stick a rail guide along the side which, since frictionless unobtainium isn't yet in mass production and Hotblack Desiato has first dibs on the stuff anyway, would cause you to lose some of that precious inertia on the way down, thus requiring that you expend power getting yourself up the last bit.
Assuming that I were particularly interested in going to China in the first place, I'll just take a cruise, thank you very much.
That'd work, but only if there was some place for the heat to go. Can't get rid of heat, right, all you can do is move it around? Hard to do that when you're surrounded by friggin molten iron. You'd need some kind of trailing superconducting radiator wire and an entire ocean for a heat sink to empty it into (don't plan on having that ocean after this is over with). _Maybe_ then you could keep the inside of your probe cool enough to operate.
Hell, I'm beginning to think they just write their lawyers a check each year with orders to 'keep busy'.
Furthermore, the justification of a War on Spam is of a totally different nature than that of the failure that is Prohibition II. Almost all the problems usually attributed to drugs stemp only from their illegality. But Spam has until recently been quite legal and is now, as the Lords put it, 'choking the Internet'. Spam requires that the spammer be deceitful and intrusive to _everyone_ and actively waste their time, effort, and money. Plus the only people who get any enjoyment out of it are the ones directly making money off it, or think they are by hiring spammers. Drugs at least have the potential to be win-win for everyone involved.
My only real worry about arresting spammers is, like any other law, that it's going to be used entirely on the innocent or small fry and the schmucks actually clogging my inbox get off scot free. Or that even if we clear it up at home, we'll just get swamped by spammers from Asia (moreso than already, anyway) or whatver.
So, duplicate the first copy as much as you like.
My thinking is, if these fucktards like spam so much, they can rot in it for all I care. Every single of the twenty or so non-techies I told the Ralsky story to thought he got exactly what he deserved.
What really worries me was one posting of Mr. Felstein's home address further on up. There was no source for the address and phone given, so I tried to find it myself. No luck; all I could find was a mention on a pay-people-search that gave a different city (N Miami Beach instead of Boca Raton). Also, a reverse lookup on the phone number yielded someone else entirely. So please, double-check the identity of your victim before you bomb them. As Quantaman says, our own government dispenses more than its fair share of indiscriminant punishment, no need for us to add to the mix.
Also, this phone number of yours appears to belong to a "Kemeny, Yvonne K". Friend of yours?
Please /.ers, take care that you don't nail the wrong schmuck with spam-bombs.
I hesitate to use an anology, but could someone actually be charged with the 'breaking' part of B&E if your front door consists of grocery bags taped together?
Plus a 4-signal stereo modulator will put you back seven or eight hundred dollars easily.
Naw, just build an electromagnet into your doorframe so that even if they seize your drive, simply taking it out of the room while the magnet is going wipes it clean.
Bingo. A monopoly is not intrinsically bad, in some ways it's better than perfect competition. It's just so very easy (and tempting!) to abuse it to enrich a few at the expense of the Little People.
In any event, you're falling for the old "you must justify this behavior" fallacy. In a free state, I shouldn't have to justify to a cop anything I do, it is up to The Powers That Be to convince me (or a jury of my peers) why I shouldn't be allowed to do it. Ignoring this wisdom has lead to such wonderful legislation as Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and anti-sodomy laws that end up telling married couples how they may have sex.
So what if they corrupt half the files? I always grab several copies of whatever it is I'm looking for. If I get 4 versions and each is 50/50, there's still a 94% chance that one of them will be what I'm looking for. And the corrupt versions will not be spread anywhere near as quickly as valid ones; those capable of maintenance of their files would not be keeping them.
That rusted case is so cool! Redefines 'old and busted'.
Well, it's been said that a cop's duty is not to preserve order but instead to protect the current disorder.
He specifically said, "when the cameras are placed for civilian use". As in, "if the cops are going to be using tools on a widespread basis against the very people that paid for them, we're damned well going to get more oversight and accountability than your average piece of military hardware."
Because the RIAA contains the only people on the planet who put misnamed files on the service? What if they download a song that is actually copyrighted by someone else? Oh my, they just broke the law trying to gather incriminating evidence!
There's some very good reasons the phrase 'guilt by association' has such negative connotations. Help terrorists? According to you, it's a crime just to be in the same coffee shop with them.
This trend towards preemptive law enforcement has really got me worried. Bad enough that there's so many laws there's not a single person in the US who isn't guilty of at least one felony, but we have to contend with 'you _could_ be a criminal' justice as well?
Such a linguistic feat is typically called a 'Bacronym'.