It'd be easy enough to jam, but really I doubt many common thieves would be able to rig up even the most basic 'hacked microwave guts' jammer. That puts it in the realm of semi-organised crime.
900W of 2.4-2.5GHz from a bodged microwave should be enough to knock out wireless even in the lower frequencies used by cellphones. Wouldn't want to be standing near the business end when it's turned on.
Writeable optical storage has severe issues with longevity. The medium is chemical in nature, and degrades over time. Optical discs are fine for short term, but don't depend on them still being readable in even a year.
I'd add: - Theft would become a trivial and risk-free activity. - 'Drone stoning' would become a new urban sport whenever they descend for landing.
I can imagine drones having certain delivery niches, but this is not one of them. An aircraft rather than octocopter would be good for making long-range drops to inaccessible places - good in rural areas, isolated settlements, etc. Just fit the cargo with a parachute. And they'd be brilliant in disaster situations where roads are going to be impassible.
Hypothetically, if it were to be made workable, here's how I'd do it:
1. Customer obtains a 'marker' - a piece of paper with a symbol on it. If A4 they can print their own. If it needs to be larger, Amazon can send one via post ahead of time - one marker would do for many, many drone flights. 2. Customer places the marker in a secure location (Back yard, roof if suitable). 3. Drone GPSs to approximate location. 4. Drone lands on marker via optical guidance. 5. Drop cargo, take off, return.
That solves the worst of the theft issues. The drone can fly most of the journey at a high enough altitude that it wouldn't be taken down by anything less than a rifle and skilled sniper, except for the final landing. Still got to deal with the pathetic range, pathetic cargo capacity and mechanical reliability, though.
That always struck me as a bit of an empty promise. God said he'd never destroy the world by flood - but he still has fire, massive tectonic activity, meteor impact, quantum vacuum collapse, wandering microsingularity, atmopheric poisoning, extreme heat...
Ask where all the money to fund this is coming from.
HFT doesn't actually manufacture anything or provide a valuable service. It's purely exploiting the numbers for profit, out-trading slower traders. The profits made in HFT are ultimately at the expense of everyone else on the stockmarket who can't keep up. Which likely includes your pension fund.
You've not debated enough believers then. A lot of them really do struggle to get their head's around the idea that someone could reject the idea of god. They can understand people believing in another god, or even in many gods - they disagree, but are at least on familiar ground. But no god at all? To them, the idea seems ridiculous out of hand. If there is no god, who could create the universe? What is the purpose of life? Was it all supposed to just pop into existance from nothing? It seems outragious to even propose such a thing.
Outgassing doesn't apply as much thrust as you'd estimate - the comet spins, so most of the thrust is canceled out when it's facing the other way. If it's as marginal as you claim though...
If it hasn't escaped, it looks unlikely to survive the next pass.
Looked it up, and... you are right. Cornflakes are made from maize. Huh.
After the processing they look quite unlike their source crop. I just always assumed they were wheat without thinking much about it, having seen a television program with information about their origin. On some research it appears that while the early cornflakes were made from wheat, the recipe has since been heavily revised - one of the revisions being the switch from wheat to maze as the primary ingredient.
I get the impression Kellogg himself would be very unhappy with the cereal today. He made it to be a healthy breakfast food, and the company has since switched ingredients for cheaper maze and loaded it up with added sugar and high-fructose syrup. But then, this is the man who worked tirelessly to reintroduce circumcision to the US as a preemptive way discourage masturbation, so screw him.
It's the reason a lot of people keep calling for a return to the gold standard: It's more resistant to government mismanagement. They fail to understand that the gold standard has its own serious problems, and is still quite mismanageable when the government owns a large proportion of the gold and can set the tax rate. Besides, there are so many levels of abstraction in finance it's hard for a layperson to figure out anything going on. Fractional reserve is tricky enough - always fun seeing when people realise that the number of dollars in circulation is actually many times greater than the number of dollars that technically exist.
Come to Europe. We grow corn too - but our corn is a different plant entirely.
When European settlers came to the new world, they found a lot of new species they had no names for. So they named them after something familiar from back home. 'Corn' was named because it was the staple crop, just like the 'corn' back home - otherwise known as wheat, or the stuff cornflakes and bread are made from. This is also why you have a robin that isn't even in the same family as the european robin: It has a similar red breast, so it was called a robin.
All these anonymous routing techniques place a lot of load on the internet and a great deal of latency. I have a proposal to help:
A content-addressible distributed store for static content. You can make it work like Freenet if you really want to be paranoid, but that isn't needed. Just a distributed caching system indexed by, say, sha256 hash.
It'd take some minor revisions to web browsers, but you can make this work with backwards compatibility by using a reserved word in a URL. Eg, http://theserver.com/magicword/sha256/hash/mime/mime/filename.jpg. A non-compatible browser would simply treat it as a plain file request and get it as normal, while those supporting the protocol instead recognise the/magicword/sha256/ part. Longer term, once the infrastructure is in place, switching to magnet links would offer some significant advantages like the ability to specify multible hashes, size, etc.
Clients can then contact any convenient cache server (The source, ISP run caches, ones built into routers found by service discovery, other clients on the same segment) to obtain the desired file.
This address-by-hash approach has some major advantages in efficiency which would make anonymous routing and physical mesh networking much more viable. - Improved caching proxy performance: No more messing around with IMS requests. The hash defines the only correct response, and it doesn't expire. Ever. Think of the potential for how much better multi-user caches can work under those conditions. The first person views a viral video, and no-one else has to wait for it to download over the WAN. Great on moving vehicles, too: A train's cache can load up the day's iPlayer etc video in the morning and commuters can enjoy a high-performance cache rather than struggle with mobile access. - Improved resistance to takedowns: You can take down the site that first hosted content, but so long as the hash for that video is being passed around it'll be near-impossible to eliminate it from every caching node. It's also a lot easier to find new hosting for a few kilobytes of HTML than a twenty-meg video that half the country wants to see at once. - Reduced latency and improved performance by moving the content closer to the destination: It'd be like a CDN for the masses, except no need to pay a fortune for it. - Reduced hosting costs: For the same reason. Fewer re-requests for files already seen once, better caching proxy capabilities. - Improved offline access: Internet access unreliable? By eliminating the need for IMS queries for images, pages can load from cache much more easily. If the HTML is static and addressed via hash, an entire website could be stored that way.
CAN for static content, conventional packet switch for dynamic. I think that's a good way to go. Different types of traffic that need to be handled in completly different ways.
TOR on such wide usage would cripple the internet with the load. What is needed is some sort of anonymous decentralised content-addressible database to handle the bulk data distribution.
In their case, it'd be the political subversiveness that kept them out, not religion. They were largely religious, of course, but nothing exceptional by the standards of the time.
Many of the early settlers in the new world were religious nutters though - the reason there were so many puritans is that they were so extreme in their religious views they were being made very unwelcome back home, ranging from just being made social outcasts to being openly persecuted at times.
Slashdot Mirror
Easier way:
1. Kite.
It'd be easy enough to jam, but really I doubt many common thieves would be able to rig up even the most basic 'hacked microwave guts' jammer. That puts it in the realm of semi-organised crime.
900W of 2.4-2.5GHz from a bodged microwave should be enough to knock out wireless even in the lower frequencies used by cellphones. Wouldn't want to be standing near the business end when it's turned on.
Four and a half pounds.
Got to include the weatherproof packaging, too.
"the rich to not mind sparing a small percentage of all the surplus they produce"
When you reach the top level of wealth, money isn't money any more: It's a way of comparing your high score.
Writeable optical storage has severe issues with longevity. The medium is chemical in nature, and degrades over time. Optical discs are fine for short term, but don't depend on them still being readable in even a year.
Cheapest, sort of.
The price of storage roughly follows the y=mx+c linear graph: m is the cost of the media, while c is the cost of the equipment needed to access it.
For hard drives, it's easy: c=0. A drive is self-contained.
For tape, c is large (Up to several thousand pounds for one tape drive), but m is smaller (Tape, purchased in bulk, is cheap).
So if you're storing a small amount of data, a rack full of hard drives is cheaper. For larger amounts, tape is cheaper.
This ignores issues of ease of access and management software.
We already have them. They are just expensive to run and far to dangerous to allow anyone to fly without very demanding training and certification.
We call them helicopters.
Police are going to focus real resources on someone committing theft, murder and obstruction of traffic.
Drone heists? Not so much.
That's why I said back yard or roof. The thief can still break in, but if they are doing that there's plenty to steal already.
I'd add:
- Theft would become a trivial and risk-free activity.
- 'Drone stoning' would become a new urban sport whenever they descend for landing.
I can imagine drones having certain delivery niches, but this is not one of them. An aircraft rather than octocopter would be good for making long-range drops to inaccessible places - good in rural areas, isolated settlements, etc. Just fit the cargo with a parachute. And they'd be brilliant in disaster situations where roads are going to be impassible.
Hypothetically, if it were to be made workable, here's how I'd do it:
1. Customer obtains a 'marker' - a piece of paper with a symbol on it. If A4 they can print their own. If it needs to be larger, Amazon can send one via post ahead of time - one marker would do for many, many drone flights.
2. Customer places the marker in a secure location (Back yard, roof if suitable).
3. Drone GPSs to approximate location.
4. Drone lands on marker via optical guidance.
5. Drop cargo, take off, return.
That solves the worst of the theft issues. The drone can fly most of the journey at a high enough altitude that it wouldn't be taken down by anything less than a rifle and skilled sniper, except for the final landing. Still got to deal with the pathetic range, pathetic cargo capacity and mechanical reliability, though.
That always struck me as a bit of an empty promise. God said he'd never destroy the world by flood - but he still has fire, massive tectonic activity, meteor impact, quantum vacuum collapse, wandering microsingularity, atmopheric poisoning, extreme heat...
Ask where all the money to fund this is coming from.
HFT doesn't actually manufacture anything or provide a valuable service. It's purely exploiting the numbers for profit, out-trading slower traders. The profits made in HFT are ultimately at the expense of everyone else on the stockmarket who can't keep up. Which likely includes your pension fund.
You've not debated enough believers then. A lot of them really do struggle to get their head's around the idea that someone could reject the idea of god. They can understand people believing in another god, or even in many gods - they disagree, but are at least on familiar ground. But no god at all? To them, the idea seems ridiculous out of hand. If there is no god, who could create the universe? What is the purpose of life? Was it all supposed to just pop into existance from nothing? It seems outragious to even propose such a thing.
Outgassing doesn't apply as much thrust as you'd estimate - the comet spins, so most of the thrust is canceled out when it's facing the other way. If it's as marginal as you claim though...
If it hasn't escaped, it looks unlikely to survive the next pass.
Every religion looks crazy to outsiders. Including the lack of religion.
And yes, I know I misspelt 'maize' twice.
Looked it up, and... you are right. Cornflakes are made from maize. Huh.
After the processing they look quite unlike their source crop. I just always assumed they were wheat without thinking much about it, having seen a television program with information about their origin. On some research it appears that while the early cornflakes were made from wheat, the recipe has since been heavily revised - one of the revisions being the switch from wheat to maze as the primary ingredient.
I get the impression Kellogg himself would be very unhappy with the cereal today. He made it to be a healthy breakfast food, and the company has since switched ingredients for cheaper maze and loaded it up with added sugar and high-fructose syrup. But then, this is the man who worked tirelessly to reintroduce circumcision to the US as a preemptive way discourage masturbation, so screw him.
Me too...
Probably because I'm not American, and thus didn't grow up with Mays infomercials.
"Wrong size scale for radar, which would require ~ 1 cm scale features (which might be difficult to combine with reasonable aerodynamic efficiency)"
Embed the whole thing in radar-transparent plastic or similar material.
Might still be too heavy for aircraft.
It's the reason a lot of people keep calling for a return to the gold standard: It's more resistant to government mismanagement. They fail to understand that the gold standard has its own serious problems, and is still quite mismanageable when the government owns a large proportion of the gold and can set the tax rate. Besides, there are so many levels of abstraction in finance it's hard for a layperson to figure out anything going on. Fractional reserve is tricky enough - always fun seeing when people realise that the number of dollars in circulation is actually many times greater than the number of dollars that technically exist.
Come to Europe. We grow corn too - but our corn is a different plant entirely.
When European settlers came to the new world, they found a lot of new species they had no names for. So they named them after something familiar from back home. 'Corn' was named because it was the staple crop, just like the 'corn' back home - otherwise known as wheat, or the stuff cornflakes and bread are made from. This is also why you have a robin that isn't even in the same family as the european robin: It has a similar red breast, so it was called a robin.
"However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work"
I work at a school. You are quite correct. If they want to find something enough, they will find a way.
All these anonymous routing techniques place a lot of load on the internet and a great deal of latency. I have a proposal to help:
A content-addressible distributed store for static content. You can make it work like Freenet if you really want to be paranoid, but that isn't needed. Just a distributed caching system indexed by, say, sha256 hash.
It'd take some minor revisions to web browsers, but you can make this work with backwards compatibility by using a reserved word in a URL. Eg, http://theserver.com/magicword/sha256/hash/mime/mime/filename.jpg. A non-compatible browser would simply treat it as a plain file request and get it as normal, while those supporting the protocol instead recognise the /magicword/sha256/ part. Longer term, once the infrastructure is in place, switching to magnet links would offer some significant advantages like the ability to specify multible hashes, size, etc.
Clients can then contact any convenient cache server (The source, ISP run caches, ones built into routers found by service discovery, other clients on the same segment) to obtain the desired file.
This address-by-hash approach has some major advantages in efficiency which would make anonymous routing and physical mesh networking much more viable.
- Improved caching proxy performance: No more messing around with IMS requests. The hash defines the only correct response, and it doesn't expire. Ever. Think of the potential for how much better multi-user caches can work under those conditions. The first person views a viral video, and no-one else has to wait for it to download over the WAN. Great on moving vehicles, too: A train's cache can load up the day's iPlayer etc video in the morning and commuters can enjoy a high-performance cache rather than struggle with mobile access.
- Improved resistance to takedowns: You can take down the site that first hosted content, but so long as the hash for that video is being passed around it'll be near-impossible to eliminate it from every caching node. It's also a lot easier to find new hosting for a few kilobytes of HTML than a twenty-meg video that half the country wants to see at once.
- Reduced latency and improved performance by moving the content closer to the destination: It'd be like a CDN for the masses, except no need to pay a fortune for it.
- Reduced hosting costs: For the same reason. Fewer re-requests for files already seen once, better caching proxy capabilities.
- Improved offline access: Internet access unreliable? By eliminating the need for IMS queries for images, pages can load from cache much more easily. If the HTML is static and addressed via hash, an entire website could be stored that way.
CAN for static content, conventional packet switch for dynamic. I think that's a good way to go. Different types of traffic that need to be handled in completly different ways.
TOR on such wide usage would cripple the internet with the load. What is needed is some sort of anonymous decentralised content-addressible database to handle the bulk data distribution.
ie, Freenet.
In their case, it'd be the political subversiveness that kept them out, not religion. They were largely religious, of course, but nothing exceptional by the standards of the time.
Many of the early settlers in the new world were religious nutters though - the reason there were so many puritans is that they were so extreme in their religious views they were being made very unwelcome back home, ranging from just being made social outcasts to being openly persecuted at times.
*The natives didn't count.