Of ineffective and incompetent law enforcement getting legislation passed that allows them to function in today's world. Perhaps the public should ask why the FBI thinks it is entitled to everything it asks for delivered on a silver platter instead of getting off its bureaucratic ass and actually doing something for itself. Seriously folks, throwing a packet sniffer on a lan line isn't a feat of superhuman geekdom. I'm betting that 50% of you are sitting within 50 feet of the components necessary to create a system that you could use to throw a tap on a cat 5 line right now (although, to be fair, you might need to download some stuff) and that most of you could throw such a system together in less than an hour.
I'm not even going to go into the whole "government agency that has been utterly corrupted several times in the last century by people who used its resources pursue a personal agenda" thing. Fuck you, your switch and the technically illiterate politicians who said you could have it.
Ok, I suck at math and all, but I can't be the first one who picked this up.
1920 x 16 = 30720 != 7680 1080 x 16 = 17280 != 4320
Also, sometimes more resolution isn't always better. I don't really want to see the exact number of pimples on someone's face. That sort of stuff is visible even in this screen cap, which is in 720p and encoded with xvid (cap is from HBO's "Rome", BTW). I really don't want to be able to make out globs of makeup on someone's face. Ignorance is bliss I guess (teeny bopper pop stars would look terrible in this, but perhaps there is an advantage to having teens disgusted by the face of the latest coke snorting "musician")
1080i transport streams run about 5 gigs for 40 minutes and require a ~2Ghz processor to decode without dropping any frames or choppiness. I know 2Ghz isn't considered too fast - even now, but I am finding the trend to require an insanely fast machine to watch / record tv sightly odd. Without someone out there to create a unit out there that makes it easy to view HD content - and by easy, I mean "dear old mom and dad" easy, I'm worried that people won't adopt it and choose to just stick with plain jane devices (which won't drop the price on the cool stuff for us) There really isn't a lot of really great HDTV compatible stuff out there either. DirectTV is dragging their feet and the rest of the major players out there aren't exactly pushing anything terrible innovative either. Software for it is also pretty bad. I know a lot of people like MythTv, etc, but it could be a lot better. There really isn't a efficient way to compress any 1080 streams either - you need loads of time, a fair bit of ram and a great machine - even then a 250gig drive fills up really quickly.
Also, and this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine - is that with 1080i (and 720p), you can see if the camera isn't focused perfectly. I find this incredibly annoying. If the quality gets bumped up another couple of levels, this will be more noticable. I'm guessing this will be corrected as more and more people realize that it looks sloppy on the cameraman's part.
If you're bored, try and figure out storage requirements for the folks who film your favorite shows in 24p (BSG does, as well as a bunch of other shows) and then figure out the storage requirements for something recorded in this format;)
Kind of odd, I got all my cards from college signup tables (so it isn't like I got teh bestest cards evar). Discover is kind of unfriendly to chargebacks, or so I hear, so if you are thinking of signing up, keep that in mind.
How does the information gathered and sold by data brokers differ from the information collected and sold by a private investigator
Well, first off, data collected by a PI is more correct, given that someone actually spent the time to research it (I realize this is sort of idealistic, since a lot of PI's just search on the net, but let's be idealistic for a bit. I'll be a bitter sarcastic prick in the latter half of my post)
Choicepoint, and Lexsis (and to a certain extent, the credit bureaus), etc are just data aggregator which basically means they run a couple searches on the net, throw it all in one place and throw marketing pixie dust all over it. They don't care if the information they sell is wrong because they have essentially been granted the ability to slander someone and not face any liability because of it. As a result, accuracy is dismally bad, especially given the fact that these companies are pushed by their customers to provide "negative data" i.e. an excuse as to why you shouldn't hire Bob Jones, or lend money to Jill Smith (or perhaps what interest rate to give on a home loan) or, while we are at it, to deny someone the ability to fly. Most of the time even basic checking (like "was the person in this record alive when something happened")
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if their data is correct - a company investigating a potential employee is not going to investigate to see whether a black mark in a Lexis report is actually true, nor is the Federal government going to verify before throwing someone on the no or "latex glove" fly list. I don't think we even have to go into the fact that it is virtually impossible to correct data in their databases either.
As for ethics, these shitbags who engage in slander on a grand scale have none. They will continue to send out incorrect information even after being notified and will throw up layers of bureaucracy in order to prevent you from changing the data. Nor do the credit bureaus, car dealerships, et al, who will knowingly use bad data and will inflate the cost of a loan on a home or a car). Of course, they bribe politicians - especially politicians whose constituents are ignorant morons - so nothing will change and we will continue getting screwed until something changes.
As for the worries of identity theft - you should be far more worried about companies who you knowingly give your data to - i.e. any tax preparation company.
I've mentioned this before, but as a $9/hour tech support monkey working for TaxCut a couple of years ago, I had access to every single return filed by EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAD FILED A TAX RETURN WITH H&R BLOCK SINCE 1998. I was able to see your income, your address, phone, names of your kids, the amount you paid on your mortgage, the names and addresses of your employers, etc, etc, etc. A single person, assuming they were properly motivated, could of have created the largest breach of customer data in history - or made millions if they played it right and used some data in a credit card fraud scheme .
Tech support is one of the easiest fields to get a job in and normally requires no background check or even a drug screen. In fact, the reason that we haven't heard of many such breaches is because most of the people who work in there are stoned or drunk. If anyone is interested, I believe that Stream in Beaverton, Oregon will be hiring for the TaxCut "team" for the 2005 tax year in the next couple of weeks. This would be an excellent opportunity for any organized crime groups to make some money, or for some anarchist group to cause some chaos if, say, 50 million tax returns were thrown onto a binaries newsgroup or onto bittorrent trackers in a foreign country. I'm afraid that only such a breach - and the resulting fraud - would convince the morons who live in this country that something needs to change.
Not all banks/credit cards have these. So unless you go out of your way to get one, it may not be available to you. Perhaps, but out of the 5 cards in my wallet, I know of 3 that have them. Check the website for your cards, odds are that they have it. Discover has it for sure.
You know, they have these things called disposable credit card numbers now... Create a number, set the limit to $0.01 and freely give it out for "free trials". Even if they try to run it, the transaction fees will put them in the red.
This might be a slightly odd response, but I think part of the reason is that in a situation such as a computer crime, there really isn't any possibility of the victim going apeshit (or doing something in retaliation) on the perpetrator if caught. During sentencing (and really, during the entire judicial process - the police probably won't respond in the first place if you call 911 and say "those darn kids are crossing my lawn", even if they do, the prosecutor probably won't try them for tresspassing) maybe the actual crime itself is irrelevant, but what is taken into consideration is how the crime is perceived by the majority of people and what the majority believes is appropriate punishment. Right now, most people feel that rootkits, malware, etc aren't really an issue - be it lack of education or whatever. If that changed (perhaps this could be spun as a "corporate espionage which aids terrorists" type of thing;), I think viewpoints would change and the punishments would get harsher and maybe someone in the justice system would actually take the issue seriously.
I've heard some of the fundies claim different things like the speed of light varied (by several orders of magnitude) over time, etc. These are the hard core, ranting fundies, not your typical uneducated American.
Sep 19th 2002 From The Economist print edition An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology
WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps--the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device.
The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments, in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the late Derek Price, a science historian at Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A new analysis, though, suggests that the device was cleverer than Price thought, and reinforces the evidence for his theory of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology.
Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, has based his new analysis on detailed X-rays of the mechanism using a technique called linear tomography. This involves moving an X-ray source, the film and the object being investigated relative to one another, so that only features in a particular plane come into focus. Analysis of the resulting images, carried out in conjunction with Allan Bromley, a computer scientist at Sydney University, found the exact position of each gear, and suggested that Price was wrong in several respects.
In some cases, says Mr Wright, Price seems to have "massaged" the number of teeth on particular gears (most of which are, admittedly, incomplete) in order to arrive at significant astronomical ratios. Price's account also, he says, displays internal contradictions, selective use of evidence and unwarranted speculation. In particular, it postulates an elaborate reversal mechanism to get some gears to turn in the right direction.
Since so little of the mechanism survives, some guesswork is unavoidable. But Mr Wright noticed a fixed boss at the centre of the mechanism's main wheel. To his instrument-maker's eye, this was suggestive of a fixed central gear around which other moving gears could rotate. This does away with the need for Price's reversal mechanism and leads to the idea that the device was specifically designed to model a particular form of "epicyclic" motion.
The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.)
A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the three other planets known at the time--Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degre
Actually, if you want to be anal about it, the hi-def transport streams that you can download are much higher quality than anything on DVD (1080i, etc). That said, most people don't download that stuff.
Right, and the fact that doctors have been gouging medicare for simple procedures has nothing to do with the inflated prices of health care. You can't pin down all the problems on one thing.
Probably not, given that most of the people who buy tivos are sheep with too much money, but maybe the new "features" such as auto deletion of shows and "no record" flags are making people reconsider their purchase - especially if these "features" are forced on you. It could be just me, but the whole "you bought something that had a feature, and now doesn't anymore" seems like a kick in the balls - especially if you are expected to continue a monthly fee under their contract.
The lack of HD stuff - especially for DirectTV (they want $700 for a POS unit and that took forever to hit the market and it only does mpeg 2) is another concern. You'd think that Tivo would be kicking the ass of DirectTV, etc, in order to get their product out to market in a timely manner.
I've noticed the same thing - a small portion of techies switching to something like writing. The Myers-Briggs tests have a group classified as INFP, and they aparantly are pretty good (and happy) in fields such as technical writing...
9) The atmosphere is acrid - In a company where things are going well, there is usually a very strong atmosphere of comraderie. When things are going bad, or people are overstressed, that atmosphere turns sour. This cascades from the upper levels of management on down, so be aware when your coworkers stop being friendly. Except in cases such as call centers, which really shouldn't be a part of this discussion (except as a temporary job to pay for rent), but an acrid atmosphere is normal in places like that.
Fine, target with a gun on a pivot, string, and a mirror so you're not next to that gun. Or, if you've got them, cheap video cameras like webcams And miss most of your shots.
If you set up a webcam behind a scope and make sure it is centered (to eliminate parallax error) what you see in the crosshairs is going to get hit when the trigger gets pulled. Granted, it needs to be a bit more complex than a string (ooh a solenoid), but it isn't like it is something that can't be done (albeit somewhat half assed) with a webcam, a couple motors, a mount and a pair of laptops. The IDF has been doing something like this on their tanks for well over a year now.
Someone with a scope and a hunting rifle sitting in a van hitting targets center mass 100 yards away does not make a sniper make. Shit, I could have someone who has never fired a rifle hit a man sized target a hundred yards away in less than 15 minutes assuming they didn't have MS or something. It isn't a terribly difficult thing to do.
No, not unless you're Wesley Snipes and are in a movie. You can't really silence a.308 round or anything more powerful (at least not without 10 foot long silencer) so there really isn't any point in trying. To "verify" this, go to your range and listen to some of these rifles going off - especially if any of them have muzzle brakes. There is a lot of power there.
Slashdot Mirror
Of ineffective and incompetent law enforcement getting legislation passed that allows them to function in today's world.
Perhaps the public should ask why the FBI thinks it is entitled to everything it asks for delivered on a silver platter instead of getting off its bureaucratic ass and actually doing something for itself.
Seriously folks, throwing a packet sniffer on a lan line isn't a feat of superhuman geekdom. I'm betting that 50% of you are sitting within 50 feet of the components necessary to create a system that you could use to throw a tap on a cat 5 line right now (although, to be fair, you might need to download some stuff) and that most of you could throw such a system together in less than an hour.
I'm not even going to go into the whole "government agency that has been utterly corrupted several times in the last century by people who used its resources pursue a personal agenda" thing.
Fuck you, your switch and the technically illiterate politicians who said you could have it.
Really? I'm running w/an 9600 on a athlon 2400xp and it barely runs worth a damn. What am I doing wrong?
Ok, I suck at math and all, but I can't be the first one who picked this up.
1920 x 16 = 30720 != 7680
1080 x 16 = 17280 != 4320
Also, sometimes more resolution isn't always better. I don't really want to see the exact number of pimples on someone's face.
That sort of stuff is visible even in this screen cap, which is in 720p and encoded with xvid (cap is from HBO's "Rome", BTW). I really don't want to be able to make out globs of makeup on someone's face. Ignorance is bliss I guess (teeny bopper pop stars would look terrible in this, but perhaps there is an advantage to having teens disgusted by the face of the latest coke snorting "musician")
1080i transport streams run about 5 gigs for 40 minutes and require a ~2Ghz processor to decode without dropping any frames or choppiness. I know 2Ghz isn't considered too fast - even now, but I am finding the trend to require an insanely fast machine to watch / record tv sightly odd. Without someone out there to create a unit out there that makes it easy to view HD content - and by easy, I mean "dear old mom and dad" easy, I'm worried that people won't adopt it and choose to just stick with plain jane devices (which won't drop the price on the cool stuff for us)
;)
There really isn't a lot of really great HDTV compatible stuff out there either. DirectTV is dragging their feet and the rest of the major players out there aren't exactly pushing anything terrible innovative either. Software for it is also pretty bad. I know a lot of people like MythTv, etc, but it could be a lot better.
There really isn't a efficient way to compress any 1080 streams either - you need loads of time, a fair bit of ram and a great machine - even then a 250gig drive fills up really quickly.
Also, and this is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine - is that with 1080i (and 720p), you can see if the camera isn't focused perfectly. I find this incredibly annoying. If the quality gets bumped up another couple of levels, this will be more noticable. I'm guessing this will be corrected as more and more people realize that it looks sloppy on the cameraman's part.
If you're bored, try and figure out storage requirements for the folks who film your favorite shows in 24p (BSG does, as well as a bunch of other shows) and then figure out the storage requirements for something recorded in this format
Kind of odd, I got all my cards from college signup tables (so it isn't like I got teh bestest cards evar).
Discover is kind of unfriendly to chargebacks, or so I hear, so if you are thinking of signing up, keep that in mind.
How does the information gathered and sold by data brokers differ from the information collected and sold by a private investigator
Well, first off, data collected by a PI is more correct, given that someone actually spent the time to research it (I realize this is sort of idealistic, since a lot of PI's just search on the net, but let's be idealistic for a bit. I'll be a bitter sarcastic prick in the latter half of my post)
Choicepoint, and Lexsis (and to a certain extent, the credit bureaus), etc are just data aggregator which basically means they run a couple searches on the net, throw it all in one place and throw marketing pixie dust all over it. They don't care if the information they sell is wrong because they have essentially been granted the ability to slander someone and not face any liability because of it.
As a result, accuracy is dismally bad, especially given the fact that these companies are pushed by their customers to provide "negative data" i.e. an excuse as to why you shouldn't hire Bob Jones, or lend money to Jill Smith (or perhaps what interest rate to give on a home loan) or, while we are at it, to deny someone the ability to fly. Most of the time even basic checking (like "was the person in this record alive when something happened")
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if their data is correct - a company investigating a potential employee is not going to investigate to see whether a black mark in a Lexis report is actually true, nor is the Federal government going to verify before throwing someone on the no or "latex glove" fly list.
I don't think we even have to go into the fact that it is virtually impossible to correct data in their databases either.
As for ethics, these shitbags who engage in slander on a grand scale have none. They will continue to send out incorrect information even after being notified and will throw up layers of bureaucracy in order to prevent you from changing the data.
Nor do the credit bureaus, car dealerships, et al, who will knowingly use bad data and will inflate the cost of a loan on a home or a car). Of course, they bribe politicians - especially politicians whose constituents are ignorant morons - so nothing will change and we will continue getting screwed until something changes.
As for the worries of identity theft - you should be far more worried about companies who you knowingly give your data to - i.e. any tax preparation company.
I've mentioned this before, but as a $9/hour tech support monkey working for TaxCut a couple of years ago, I had access to every single return filed by EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAD FILED A TAX RETURN WITH H&R BLOCK SINCE 1998. I was able to see your income, your address, phone, names of your kids, the amount you paid on your mortgage, the names and addresses of your employers, etc, etc, etc.
A single person, assuming they were properly motivated, could of have created the largest breach of customer data in history - or made millions if they played it right and used some data in a credit card fraud scheme .
Tech support is one of the easiest fields to get a job in and normally requires no background check or even a drug screen. In fact, the reason that we haven't heard of many such breaches is because most of the people who work in there are stoned or drunk.
If anyone is interested, I believe that Stream in Beaverton, Oregon will be hiring for the TaxCut "team" for the 2005 tax year in the next couple of weeks. This would be an excellent opportunity for any organized crime groups to make some money, or for some anarchist group to cause some chaos if, say, 50 million tax returns were thrown onto a binaries newsgroup or onto bittorrent trackers in a foreign country. I'm afraid that only such a breach - and the resulting fraud - would convince the morons who live in this country that something needs to change.
Not all banks/credit cards have these. So unless you go out of your way to get one, it may not be available to you.
Perhaps, but out of the 5 cards in my wallet, I know of 3 that have them. Check the website for your cards, odds are that they have it. Discover has it for sure.
You know, they have these things called disposable credit card numbers now... Create a number, set the limit to $0.01 and freely give it out for "free trials". Even if they try to run it, the transaction fees will put them in the red.
This might be a slightly odd response, but I think part of the reason is that in a situation such as a computer crime, there really isn't any possibility of the victim going apeshit (or doing something in retaliation) on the perpetrator if caught. ;), I think viewpoints would change and the punishments would get harsher and maybe someone in the justice system would actually take the issue seriously.
During sentencing (and really, during the entire judicial process - the police probably won't respond in the first place if you call 911 and say "those darn kids are crossing my lawn", even if they do, the prosecutor probably won't try them for tresspassing) maybe the actual crime itself is irrelevant, but what is taken into consideration is how the crime is perceived by the majority of people and what the majority believes is appropriate punishment.
Right now, most people feel that rootkits, malware, etc aren't really an issue - be it lack of education or whatever. If that changed (perhaps this could be spun as a "corporate espionage which aids terrorists" type of thing
*golf clap*
Doubt that you'll get an answer.
I've heard some of the fundies claim different things like the speed of light varied (by several orders of magnitude) over time, etc.
These are the hard core, ranting fundies, not your typical uneducated American.
(notice the date, not quite "news")
The Antikythera mechanism
The clockwork computer
Sep 19th 2002
From The Economist print edition
An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology
WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps--the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device.
The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments, in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the late Derek Price, a science historian at Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A new analysis, though, suggests that the device was cleverer than Price thought, and reinforces the evidence for his theory of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology.
Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, has based his new analysis on detailed X-rays of the mechanism using a technique called linear tomography. This involves moving an X-ray source, the film and the object being investigated relative to one another, so that only features in a particular plane come into focus. Analysis of the resulting images, carried out in conjunction with Allan Bromley, a computer scientist at Sydney University, found the exact position of each gear, and suggested that Price was wrong in several respects.
In some cases, says Mr Wright, Price seems to have "massaged" the number of teeth on particular gears (most of which are, admittedly, incomplete) in order to arrive at significant astronomical ratios. Price's account also, he says, displays internal contradictions, selective use of evidence and unwarranted speculation. In particular, it postulates an elaborate reversal mechanism to get some gears to turn in the right direction.
Since so little of the mechanism survives, some guesswork is unavoidable. But Mr Wright noticed a fixed boss at the centre of the mechanism's main wheel. To his instrument-maker's eye, this was suggestive of a fixed central gear around which other moving gears could rotate. This does away with the need for Price's reversal mechanism and leads to the idea that the device was specifically designed to model a particular form of "epicyclic" motion.
The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.)
A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the three other planets known at the time--Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degre
Real digital cameras (read "not $200 consumer HP shit") don't have that issue. Not trying to flame you or anything, but the tech is there.
Note the distinct lack of a "s" after the word episode.
Actually, if you want to be anal about it, the hi-def transport streams that you can download are much higher quality than anything on DVD (1080i, etc). That said, most people don't download that stuff.
Right, and the fact that doctors have been gouging medicare for simple procedures has nothing to do with the inflated prices of health care. You can't pin down all the problems on one thing.
Probably not, given that most of the people who buy tivos are sheep with too much money, but maybe the new "features" such as auto deletion of shows and "no record" flags are making people reconsider their purchase - especially if these "features" are forced on you. It could be just me, but the whole "you bought something that had a feature, and now doesn't anymore" seems like a kick in the balls - especially if you are expected to continue a monthly fee under their contract.
The lack of HD stuff - especially for DirectTV (they want $700 for a POS unit and that took forever to hit the market and it only does mpeg 2) is another concern. You'd think that Tivo would be kicking the ass of DirectTV, etc, in order to get their product out to market in a timely manner.
This single minded "money, money money" mantra is begining to get a bit old.
They also have a promo with Best Buy if you buy some stuff, you get a dvd with ep 1 for free.
I've noticed the same thing - a small portion of techies switching to something like writing. The Myers-Briggs tests have a group classified as INFP, and they aparantly are pretty good (and happy) in fields such as technical writing...
Hey, look. A manager from EA has posted.
Was wondering when they would come by.
9) The atmosphere is acrid
- In a company where things are going well, there is usually a very strong atmosphere of comraderie. When things are going bad, or people are overstressed, that atmosphere turns sour. This cascades from the upper levels of management on down, so be aware when your coworkers stop being friendly.
Except in cases such as call centers, which really shouldn't be a part of this discussion (except as a temporary job to pay for rent), but an acrid atmosphere is normal in places like that.
Fine, target with a gun on a pivot, string, and a mirror so you're not next to that gun. Or, if you've got them, cheap video cameras like webcams
And miss most of your shots.
If you set up a webcam behind a scope and make sure it is centered (to eliminate parallax error) what you see in the crosshairs is going to get hit when the trigger gets pulled. Granted, it needs to be a bit more complex than a string (ooh a solenoid), but it isn't like it is something that can't be done (albeit somewhat half assed) with a webcam, a couple motors, a mount and a pair of laptops. The IDF has been doing something like this on their tanks for well over a year now.
Someone with a scope and a hunting rifle sitting in a van hitting targets center mass 100 yards away does not make a sniper make.
Shit, I could have someone who has never fired a rifle hit a man sized target a hundred yards away in less than 15 minutes assuming they didn't have MS or something. It isn't a terribly difficult thing to do.
No, not unless you're Wesley Snipes and are in a movie. You can't really silence a .308 round or anything more powerful (at least not without 10 foot long silencer) so there really isn't any point in trying. To "verify" this, go to your range and listen to some of these rifles going off - especially if any of them have muzzle brakes. There is a lot of power there.