"There is no financial burden on the telcos and there is no labor burden because they have special offices that are paid specifically to deal with these requests."
I'm no expert on nuclear engineering, but I gather that if you have a full nuclear power program it isn't that hard to make a bomb. The enrichment capability is exactly the same equipment, you just have to keep cycling until you reach weapons-grade. Once you've got the uranium to weapons-grade, a basic gun-type nuclear device is so simple any metalworking shop could make it with ease. It's the enrichment that's the big, expensive, highly-skilled part.
Why send craft up to mine it, when you can bring the rock to earth? Just aim for somewhere like the middle of Siberia and hope you don't miss. Rock lands, wait for the dust to settle, then send in the mining crew to collect the remains. You'd probably lose a big chunk of mass to atmospheric burn and impact damage, but it'd still be a lot cheaper than orbital mining.
I don't care how much good that water might do today: I want to know how long it'll last if a billion people start sucking it up. Aquifers replenish, but only very slowly. Even the scientists behind the research are stressing that industrial-scale drilling will exaust the supply eventually.
Depends who'se doing the attacking. If it's a country that cares about maintaining good international relations, like the US or any country in Europe, then you need troops. If, however, you couldn't care less about how the world sees you, then you can start the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets or even break out the nuclear bombs. Currently the only countries in the latter class, like North Korea, are run by people who know full well that if they started a war they would lose it.
A good solution would be to recognise enforced disconnection (not just move-to-a-new-ISP disconnection) as form of punishment akin to a jail sentence. Infringing of rights by nature and intention, and available to the government to enforce the law... but only for criminal offences, and only after the accused is found guilty by a fair trial with right of appeal. Nothing less.
Caves present survey problems. You need to make sure the cave is stable and isn't going to come crashing down once people and equipment start banging around. Trivial for a human team, but a real challenge when all you have are robots. Even worse if you're going any further than the moon and have to deal with light-lag.
You missed a constraint: It needs to be tiny. Lifting mass out of the gravity well costs a fortune, so you need to get those people living in as small and light a biodome as possible.
Depends on the objective. If the objective is to capture and control ground, then you need troops. If the objective is to simply obliterate an enemy, then you don't. You need bombers, missiles, and artillery. While the last one is ground-based, it also gets kept far away from the front line and so is at no risk of ground-based attack. If you're desperate, there are nukes. The old war of obliteration isn't politically feasable any more though - no matter how hostile the target has been, the world will react really badly to the mass-slaughter of civilians. This isn't WW2 any more, where both sides could quite happily carpet-bomb each other's cities.
They only let it get as free as it is because the internet snuck up on them. No-one in government really planned the civilian growth of the internet... it just happened. If the governments of any world were allowed a do-over, you can be sure they'd make it more centralised, controlled and policeable. For the children, naturally.
Consider me a weaponsmith for the resistance: I study compression and find ways to cram information into fewer bits, thus making it easier to transfer covertly.
It's standard political procedure though: First the politicians decide what they want to do, then they write a report saying how important it is that they do it. The US government actually did exactly the same thing years back with the Meese Report into the subject of pornography. Of the nine people commissioned to write the report, six of them were anti-porngraphy activists - and the remaining three, after completion of the report, publicly denounced the report-writing process as a sham and said they were given no real influence. It's exactly the same thing going on here.
They did filter wikipedia once, though. They only intended to filter one page, but their efforts screwed up wikipedia's access control. It shows that they can make mistakes - even if they only got caught that once because they filtered a high-profile site, it does raise the question of how many hundreds of lesser-known sites have been filtered needlessly? The IWF doesn't even inform the operators of sites it blocks, and the ISPs that actually impliment the block usually spoof a 404 message in order to hide even the fact that something has been deliberatly censored.
I'd listen more of the campaign against porn were coming from more professional psychiatrists - but the leaders seem to be a mixture of parents' organisations and religious groups. Not exactly people with any credibility on the matter.
It'd revolutionise transport, yes. A good thing, assuming it's no more energy-hungry than existing cars. But the dream of a flying car you can really fly, free to cruise the skies, to go wherever you please... out of the question.
Slashdot Mirror
"skipping surgery based on what some random dude on a blog says?"
I believe you underestimate the strength of human stupidity. A common mistake.
I only said that there was a financial burden... I never said how big. I'm sure they do deliberatly overstate it by a few orders of magnitude.
"There is no financial burden on the telcos and there is no labor burden because they have special offices that are paid specifically to deal with these requests."
Offices staffed by people who work for free?
Correct. Stuxnet spread via multiple vectors, but the route by which it got into industrial control equipment was infected USB stick.
I'm no expert on nuclear engineering, but I gather that if you have a full nuclear power program it isn't that hard to make a bomb. The enrichment capability is exactly the same equipment, you just have to keep cycling until you reach weapons-grade. Once you've got the uranium to weapons-grade, a basic gun-type nuclear device is so simple any metalworking shop could make it with ease. It's the enrichment that's the big, expensive, highly-skilled part.
Real actors carry a union card?
Can you find a more sourced figure? Even if it's 90%, one-tenth might be worth more than a cheap ion-thrust robot.
Why send craft up to mine it, when you can bring the rock to earth? Just aim for somewhere like the middle of Siberia and hope you don't miss. Rock lands, wait for the dust to settle, then send in the mining crew to collect the remains. You'd probably lose a big chunk of mass to atmospheric burn and impact damage, but it'd still be a lot cheaper than orbital mining.
That's all very well, but what about here in the real world?
I see no racism. At worst, he might be insulting cultures that encourage unsupportably large families... but that is truely something worth insulting.
I don't care how much good that water might do today: I want to know how long it'll last if a billion people start sucking it up. Aquifers replenish, but only very slowly. Even the scientists behind the research are stressing that industrial-scale drilling will exaust the supply eventually.
Depends who'se doing the attacking. If it's a country that cares about maintaining good international relations, like the US or any country in Europe, then you need troops. If, however, you couldn't care less about how the world sees you, then you can start the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets or even break out the nuclear bombs. Currently the only countries in the latter class, like North Korea, are run by people who know full well that if they started a war they would lose it.
Somewhere, deep in our DNA, we will one day find the hidden message from our creators... a copyright notice.
A good solution would be to recognise enforced disconnection (not just move-to-a-new-ISP disconnection) as form of punishment akin to a jail sentence. Infringing of rights by nature and intention, and available to the government to enforce the law... but only for criminal offences, and only after the accused is found guilty by a fair trial with right of appeal. Nothing less.
Caves present survey problems. You need to make sure the cave is stable and isn't going to come crashing down once people and equipment start banging around. Trivial for a human team, but a real challenge when all you have are robots. Even worse if you're going any further than the moon and have to deal with light-lag.
You missed a constraint: It needs to be tiny. Lifting mass out of the gravity well costs a fortune, so you need to get those people living in as small and light a biodome as possible.
Depends on the objective. If the objective is to capture and control ground, then you need troops. If the objective is to simply obliterate an enemy, then you don't. You need bombers, missiles, and artillery. While the last one is ground-based, it also gets kept far away from the front line and so is at no risk of ground-based attack. If you're desperate, there are nukes. The old war of obliteration isn't politically feasable any more though - no matter how hostile the target has been, the world will react really badly to the mass-slaughter of civilians. This isn't WW2 any more, where both sides could quite happily carpet-bomb each other's cities.
They only let it get as free as it is because the internet snuck up on them. No-one in government really planned the civilian growth of the internet... it just happened. If the governments of any world were allowed a do-over, you can be sure they'd make it more centralised, controlled and policeable. For the children, naturally.
Consider me a weaponsmith for the resistance: I study compression and find ways to cram information into fewer bits, thus making it easier to transfer covertly.
That's actually quite tame by internet standards.
It's standard political procedure though: First the politicians decide what they want to do, then they write a report saying how important it is that they do it. The US government actually did exactly the same thing years back with the Meese Report into the subject of pornography. Of the nine people commissioned to write the report, six of them were anti-porngraphy activists - and the remaining three, after completion of the report, publicly denounced the report-writing process as a sham and said they were given no real influence. It's exactly the same thing going on here.
They did filter wikipedia once, though. They only intended to filter one page, but their efforts screwed up wikipedia's access control. It shows that they can make mistakes - even if they only got caught that once because they filtered a high-profile site, it does raise the question of how many hundreds of lesser-known sites have been filtered needlessly? The IWF doesn't even inform the operators of sites it blocks, and the ISPs that actually impliment the block usually spoof a 404 message in order to hide even the fact that something has been deliberatly censored.
I'd listen more of the campaign against porn were coming from more professional psychiatrists - but the leaders seem to be a mixture of parents' organisations and religious groups. Not exactly people with any credibility on the matter.
And I copied the mistake without noticing.
It'd revolutionise transport, yes. A good thing, assuming it's no more energy-hungry than existing cars. But the dream of a flying car you can really fly, free to cruise the skies, to go wherever you please... out of the question.