Part of the background problem is political: Every attempt to to regulate guns in any way, no matter how small, faces an instant and powerful block from a lobby that regards every form of regulation as a conspiracy to take all their guns away.
- Give expendable solder anti-aircraft missile. Doesn't have to be a good one. If you need to, just paint a cardboard tube. - Position soldier on top of school. - Enemy helicopter sees soldier aiming missile, and quickly shoots first. - Make sure you have plenty of people with cameras nearby to capture this slaughter of children for the world to see.
There was a time when war was simpler: If you were at war with country X, then you did your best to slaughter everyone in that country until surrender or victory by default.
Why do you assume it has to be an intellectual who thinks he knows better how every person should live? There are plenty of regular old dumbasses who think they know better. That's the worst thing about ignorant people: They don't realise their own lack of knowledge.
The people working on 3d printing guns are mostly interested in the idea because it'd be very difficult to regulate - they believe that access to firearms is a fundamental constitutional right, even a human right, that no government should be permitted to take from the people. The manufacture of guns by conventional means requires large factories and an organised distribution chain that make it fairly easy for any government to regulate, keeping the guns in the hands of only the police, army, and the criminals well-connected enough to access a shadowy underworld of illegal imports and stolen guns. Guns made with 3d printing would be accessible to anyone able to buy some perfectly legal hardware and download a model file.
It's doable in theory, but prohibitively expensive. The only people with the knowledge would be the drive designers, and they'd need to spend weeks working with access to the type of cleanroom that makes an operating theater dirty.
You're close. Overwriting media with zeros almost entirely erases everything - there was a time when it was possible for someone with a highly specialised magnetic probe to pick up leftover traces from the space between the tracks, but modern drives have the tracks far too close for that. There is just one place data may survive: Remapped sectors. The drive logic does detect if a sector is going to fail or already failed, and if so will remap it to a spare area, just as SSDs do. The old data gets left behind in the now-disused space.
But all that'll save is the odd little fragment here and there, either 512 bytes or 16k depending on the drive. An attacker would need a lot of luck to find something good in there.
I see two: 1. It raises the cost of running a wifi hotspot. You can't just grab a copy of Net Nanny for this: You need a multi-user-licensed network filter. Those things come on subscription. For a small, independant retailer that price can be unacceptable. So this one again tilts the field in favor of large businesses over small ones. 2. The filters are not really reliable. Even the best-configured filter is going to let some porn through, and block some legitimate content. For example, I tried to read this article at work earlier today, and our filter did the content-analysis thing and classified the article itsself as porn.
So they'll block SSH too. Actually, I imagine quite a few public hotspots already block everything but http, SSL and perhaps pop3 - easiest way to make sure no-one runs a bittorrent client.
The children are going to see porn, one way or another. Filter or no. If the internet doesn't provide some accidential encounter, their friends at school will. The time-honored tradition of pass-the-playboy has gone digital now: They send pictures via phone, messanger and facebook*. Sometimes exchanges of USB stick for the big files.
* No modern teenager would be caught dead using email for social correspondance.
"They're just trying to look like they're trying to do something about a problem which concerns their constituents, in order to ensure reelection."
Then they are doing their job: Representing their constituents.
The problem isn't just with the politicians. It's also with the wider public, most of whome will happily throw their rights away to satisfy their pet cause (whatever that may be) while simutainously condemning all the other people who will happily throw their rights away for a different pet cause.
The codec/patent issues aren't from HTML. HTML itsself is content neutral. Things like this have happened before - most noteably the GIF format was patent-encumbered for many years, and the PNG format many proposed as an alternative was not fully supported by Microsoft*.
We're just repeating the same issues now that we already went through with image standards: HTML doesn't specify a media format, and there are no media formats that everyone can support. The open source side cannot support formats encumbered by patents (h264, ac3), while the commercial browser writers like Microsoft and Apple have a strong business incentive to support only their own technologies.
Google is a bit of an odd one out.
*This was back in the 'Linux is a cancer' years, which Microsoft were at their most openly evil regarding open standards.
The way metals behave normal conditions may not indicate the way in which they behave under the extreme forces of such a process. The only way to be sure is to try it.
I'm part of a Mad Science group, but we've not gotten up to coin shrinking yet. We do have a can-crusher. Four kilovolts, 100uf. Enough to cut a can in two, but not enough energy to shrink a coin. Not even close.
I want to know if it can shrink a manhole cover. Many people have used large capacitors to shrink coins before, but none I know of have shrunk larger metal discs. The power requirements would be silly, but a lightning strike may be enough.
Because we have: 1. Atmosphere. Good for humans, but not for solar power. 2. Clouds. 3. A nasty gravity well that makes getting off the planet a very expensive matter.
As is traditional, I converted the measurement into football fields. Once I saw how small a fraction of a field it would take, I took the conversion out. I neglected to remove the footnote specifying which 'football' field I'd used.
You're quite right: I didn't account for atmospheric attenuation. I mentioned that. I just gave very rough calculations. I also didn't account for cloud cover. But even if you need ten times my estimate, that's still only 1,920 M^2 of panels. It'd be far more expensive than grid power, but if for some reason you feel the need to run a cray 2 off of solar (I cannot imagine why you would) then it could be done. You won't need to pave over a continent, bankrupt a country or anything like that. Maybe as an art project. Any eccentric multi-millionaire could do it on a whim.
You did make a mistake yourself. The 'directly underneath the sun' part. Doesn't actually matter at all - you'd need more land for your panels at higher lattitudes, but the panel area remains the same, and the panels make up most of the cost. You just tilt the panels to keep them perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. You do get higher atmospheric attenuation when the sun is low.
Infiniband costs a fortune. That's fine if you've big money behind you. Otherwise, you go with ethernet. Thunderbolt could fill the space between: Faster than ethernet (and lower latency), yet still cheaper than infiniband. It could be just the thing for medium-scale computing clusters, the things used by smallish universities and companies that can't afford to spend millions of dollars on a top-of-the-range supercomputer. It'll easily match ten-gig ethernet for performance - all you need is a switch, and if demand is there someone will manufacture one. The protocol is basically just an external PCIe lane, there's nothing to stop you from sending frames over it with an address. Or you could just use an unswitched topology - loop, hypercube, torus. Something that runs entirely on point-to-point links.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is possible to make owning a collection of computer bits arranged in a particular way illegal."
And that works so well for stopping piracy, yes?
Part of the background problem is political: Every attempt to to regulate guns in any way, no matter how small, faces an instant and powerful block from a lobby that regards every form of regulation as a conspiracy to take all their guns away.
Use the environment to your advantage:
- Give expendable solder anti-aircraft missile. Doesn't have to be a good one. If you need to, just paint a cardboard tube.
- Position soldier on top of school.
- Enemy helicopter sees soldier aiming missile, and quickly shoots first.
- Make sure you have plenty of people with cameras nearby to capture this slaughter of children for the world to see.
There was a time when war was simpler: If you were at war with country X, then you did your best to slaughter everyone in that country until surrender or victory by default.
Things are so much more political now.
Why do you assume it has to be an intellectual who thinks he knows better how every person should live? There are plenty of regular old dumbasses who think they know better. That's the worst thing about ignorant people: They don't realise their own lack of knowledge.
The people working on 3d printing guns are mostly interested in the idea because it'd be very difficult to regulate - they believe that access to firearms is a fundamental constitutional right, even a human right, that no government should be permitted to take from the people. The manufacture of guns by conventional means requires large factories and an organised distribution chain that make it fairly easy for any government to regulate, keeping the guns in the hands of only the police, army, and the criminals well-connected enough to access a shadowy underworld of illegal imports and stolen guns. Guns made with 3d printing would be accessible to anyone able to buy some perfectly legal hardware and download a model file.
It's doable in theory, but prohibitively expensive. The only people with the knowledge would be the drive designers, and they'd need to spend weeks working with access to the type of cleanroom that makes an operating theater dirty.
If you want weird, program a PIC.
The RAM is eight-bit.
The ROM is fourteen-bit.
You're close. Overwriting media with zeros almost entirely erases everything - there was a time when it was possible for someone with a highly specialised magnetic probe to pick up leftover traces from the space between the tracks, but modern drives have the tracks far too close for that. There is just one place data may survive: Remapped sectors. The drive logic does detect if a sector is going to fail or already failed, and if so will remap it to a spare area, just as SSDs do. The old data gets left behind in the now-disused space.
But all that'll save is the odd little fragment here and there, either 512 bytes or 16k depending on the drive. An attacker would need a lot of luck to find something good in there.
I see two:
1. It raises the cost of running a wifi hotspot. You can't just grab a copy of Net Nanny for this: You need a multi-user-licensed network filter. Those things come on subscription. For a small, independant retailer that price can be unacceptable. So this one again tilts the field in favor of large businesses over small ones.
2. The filters are not really reliable. Even the best-configured filter is going to let some porn through, and block some legitimate content. For example, I tried to read this article at work earlier today, and our filter did the content-analysis thing and classified the article itsself as porn.
So they'll block SSH too. Actually, I imagine quite a few public hotspots already block everything but http, SSL and perhaps pop3 - easiest way to make sure no-one runs a bittorrent client.
The children are going to see porn, one way or another. Filter or no. If the internet doesn't provide some accidential encounter, their friends at school will. The time-honored tradition of pass-the-playboy has gone digital now: They send pictures via phone, messanger and facebook*. Sometimes exchanges of USB stick for the big files.
* No modern teenager would be caught dead using email for social correspondance.
Most of the world has has to set up 911 as an emergency services number, for much the same reason. It's just the first number people think of.
"They're just trying to look like they're trying to do something about a problem which concerns their constituents, in order to ensure reelection."
Then they are doing their job: Representing their constituents.
The problem isn't just with the politicians. It's also with the wider public, most of whome will happily throw their rights away to satisfy their pet cause (whatever that may be) while simutainously condemning all the other people who will happily throw their rights away for a different pet cause.
I just looked at some Scheme code. I won't be doing that again for a while. I'll stick to good old fashioned C!
The codec/patent issues aren't from HTML. HTML itsself is content neutral. Things like this have happened before - most noteably the GIF format was patent-encumbered for many years, and the PNG format many proposed as an alternative was not fully supported by Microsoft*.
We're just repeating the same issues now that we already went through with image standards: HTML doesn't specify a media format, and there are no media formats that everyone can support. The open source side cannot support formats encumbered by patents (h264, ac3), while the commercial browser writers like Microsoft and Apple have a strong business incentive to support only their own technologies.
Google is a bit of an odd one out.
*This was back in the 'Linux is a cancer' years, which Microsoft were at their most openly evil regarding open standards.
So is lambda calculus. There's more than a passing simularity there, too.
The way metals behave normal conditions may not indicate the way in which they behave under the extreme forces of such a process. The only way to be sure is to try it.
I'm part of a Mad Science group, but we've not gotten up to coin shrinking yet. We do have a can-crusher. Four kilovolts, 100uf. Enough to cut a can in two, but not enough energy to shrink a coin. Not even close.
I want to know if it can shrink a manhole cover. Many people have used large capacitors to shrink coins before, but none I know of have shrunk larger metal discs. The power requirements would be silly, but a lightning strike may be enough.
Wannabe martyrs, desperate to be 'persecuted' for their beliefs to prove how oppressed they are and how evil their opponents.
Give them what they want, then.
Does 'being eaten' count as a purpose?
Because we have:
1. Atmosphere. Good for humans, but not for solar power.
2. Clouds.
3. A nasty gravity well that makes getting off the planet a very expensive matter.
As is traditional, I converted the measurement into football fields. Once I saw how small a fraction of a field it would take, I took the conversion out. I neglected to remove the footnote specifying which 'football' field I'd used.
You're quite right: I didn't account for atmospheric attenuation. I mentioned that. I just gave very rough calculations. I also didn't account for cloud cover. But even if you need ten times my estimate, that's still only 1,920 M^2 of panels. It'd be far more expensive than grid power, but if for some reason you feel the need to run a cray 2 off of solar (I cannot imagine why you would) then it could be done. You won't need to pave over a continent, bankrupt a country or anything like that. Maybe as an art project. Any eccentric multi-millionaire could do it on a whim.
You did make a mistake yourself. The 'directly underneath the sun' part. Doesn't actually matter at all - you'd need more land for your panels at higher lattitudes, but the panel area remains the same, and the panels make up most of the cost. You just tilt the panels to keep them perpendicular to the incoming sunlight. You do get higher atmospheric attenuation when the sun is low.
Infiniband costs a fortune. That's fine if you've big money behind you. Otherwise, you go with ethernet. Thunderbolt could fill the space between: Faster than ethernet (and lower latency), yet still cheaper than infiniband. It could be just the thing for medium-scale computing clusters, the things used by smallish universities and companies that can't afford to spend millions of dollars on a top-of-the-range supercomputer. It'll easily match ten-gig ethernet for performance - all you need is a switch, and if demand is there someone will manufacture one. The protocol is basically just an external PCIe lane, there's nothing to stop you from sending frames over it with an address. Or you could just use an unswitched topology - loop, hypercube, torus. Something that runs entirely on point-to-point links.