The THC appears to be harmless, but the most common delivery mechanism isn't - breathing smoke from a burning plant will ruin your lungs, be it from pot or tobacco. Cigarettes are actually less damaging, due to the invention of the filter tip. Though there are many alternatives to smoking it that pose less risk.
There are some other hobbies that get into similar trouble. Tropical fish breeding, for it's use of heated buildings. A recuring one is intensive horiculture, espicially growing of orchids. Given that it involves the accelerated growth of plants, the procedures are exactly the same as those for pot-growing - same power consumption, same thermal signature, same equipment requirements. That's where pot-growers get their equipment - they go to companies that supply orchid-growing equipment. For this reason a lot of those suppliers are on police watch-lists and their customers likely to be investigated.
In the UK, we had an incident some years ago in which an armed assault team raided a guina-pig shed. The heatlamps that were installed to keep the guina pigs warm looked a lot like a pot-growing shed on the helecopter thermal camera, and policy in cases of suspected drug production is to send in the big guns to bash the door down and get everyone cuffed as quickly as possible in order to deny suspects of any chance to destroy evidence.
This being the UK, it ended with the family not just getting compensation but a personal appology from the officer in charge.
In the one I remember, the signal is a form of radio-transmitted viral life parasitic on technological civilisations. It's picked up by a mars rover - which is insufficiently advanced for it to infect - and relayed through it's telemetry back to earth, where it is picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts with backyard radio telescopes, who then rebroadcast it at higher power for their friends - as well as much industrial machinary using advanced biological processors*. Those it can infect. Though it doesn't grow any nasty monsters it does play havoc as it spreads causing such disasters as the accidential death of hundreds of wristworn biomonitor-and-regulation devices, both infecting the biological processors as a computer virus would and using them to manufacture a conventional biological virus with which it can spread even to non-networked equipment. Throughout the struggle to contain the outbreak, human-engineered artificial intelligences are just starting to approach human levels of capability.
The head of a tech company has the caterpillar. A robotic organiser, given to him as a child. Most people outgrew them, transfering the database of life-managing information into a device more suitable for an adult to carry around, but he grew too attached to the personality to delete it. Being one of the longest-operating AIs around, and one who'se owner had been heavily into tinkering and actively encouraged it to attempt self-upgrade, it's one of the first to achieve the breakthrough to human-level thought. A fact it keeps to itsself for self-preservation, only choosing to reveal the full extent of it's intelligence towards the end of the book.
*One of them is a combine harvester. It's wetware chip is used as a image processor, scanning the stream of grain for insects and damaged crop then zapping it with lasers.
You got my hopes up there, thinking the quote might be from a much better book. I forgot the title, but it involves a sentient radio signal, an accidentally too-successful attempt to evolve artificial intelligence, wetware processors, and the eventual victory of a robotic caterpillar toy with a program more sophisticated than the owner expected.
Consumers will not have *eyes* capable of benefiting from that quality of video, unless you're planning to put them in some sort of device that occupies their entire field of view.
The BBC doesn't function anything like the FCC. The body you're looking for there is OFCOM. They handle frequency allocation*, what little broadcast content regulation we have**, the sort of thing the FCC would handle in the US. The US doesn't really have a counterpart to the BBC. The closest would be PBS, but they differ in some very important ways.
*Much like the FCC, they'll occasionally say something about public benefit before auctioning it all off to the highest bidder.
**As we don't have that many radio broadcast channels, and cable/sat are outside OFCOM's direct oversight, they don't have much to do here. They occasionally send a strongly-worded letter.
China has more serious things for people to be unrestful about, but it also has a government that excels in oppression. It's of a level so skilled that the people can actually feel *happy* in the oppression, and believe it's for their own good. True masters of propaganda and indoctrination.
The US has nukes. China has nukes. An all-out war would inevitably result in one side or the other being forced to use them to avoid defeat, or in fear the other would first. The result would be disasterous for both countries. Both the US and China know this, and so an open war is off the table. That doesn't mean no conflict - the countries compete for resources and very some very fundamental ideological differences - but it'll be the cold-war type of conflict. Proxy wars. Economic manipulation. Espionage. Poaching the best scientists and engineers. Anything they can do to get an advantage over each other without having to actually admit to doing so.
North Korea's army is dependant on numbers, their air force is a joke... but their long-range artillery is quite real. If they did invade the south, their plan would be to first shell the country to rubble, destroy every major city, and then just walk in and take over what little is left. They don't, because it's not a fast plan, and would involve many civilian deaths - which means international involvement would be very likely. Given a month or two, even the UN would be able to get something passed, and NK would find bombs being dropped upon their artillery installations. Quite possibly Chinese bombs. They want stability - a north-south Korean war would result in that refugee influx, and that is something China would rather avoid. It's also really embarassing to the Communist cause if another tinpot dictator tries to conquer the world and fails miserably.
They might do that one day. China plans long term - I wouldn't put it past them to cause such an economic collapse, with the intention of hurting their competitors more than they hurt themselves. Having a centrally planned market would give them some advantage in the ability to plan ahead - they could have stockpiles built up years in advance, employ blatant protectionism to help domestic industry recover faster. They government could spend vast amounts of money propping up unprofitable industries for a decade so they are ready the moment recovery starts, while the rest of the world is founding new companies and building new factories. It'd hurt their economy, yes - but if it hurts the rest of the world more, it's still a valid plan for financial warfare. Collapse the economy, recover faster than anyone else, and use the window thus created to take over foreign markets and purchase what competition remains. The end result would be a situation where most economic activity, even that not performed in China, would be by Chinese companies.
Not 'middle east guys.' Terrorists. They are clearly not (officially) supported by any country. There are only two situations in which it is considered politically correct to make a real country the villain of a game:
1. The events are set so long ago that not only does the side no longer exist, but nor do any direct successors. Eg, AoM you get to fight against ancient greece, ancient egypt.
2. The enemy is of a side so loathed that even the country of origin has condemned their action. The uberexample here are the Nazis - you can shoot them all you want without Germany making a fuss. This could also apply to, say, fighting the Confederacy in the American Civil War, but I can't think of any games that use that one.
If you defy these rules, then you can expect a bit of political fallout. Angry letters, a strongly-worded condemnation from the affected government, the banning of the game in some countries. On the plus side, it'll grab headlines, which means more publicity and thus sales.
You can't break spectrum up into ever-smaller bands. A Mr Nyquist figure out the math proving that. In 1927. A transmission (Unless it's a pure, perfect sine continuing from infinite past to infinite future) isn't a single frequency. It's a range of frequencies. It has to be. When you talk of a radio station transmitting at 88MHz, what that really means is that it's transmitting in a small band of frequencies centered upon 88MHz.
Under the common media definition of hacking, the one you'll find used by every non-techie, it means 'Anything illegal, computerised and beyond my understanding.'
Because the annoying laws of physics say you can't make equipment from nothing, and you can only squeeze so much data through a finite wireless spectrum.
"Any government agency won't care if someone is trying to hack you"
Not unless you are someone of particular noteworthyness. A government official, a celebrity of any kind. Then you'll get their attention. Because the police know that even a famous singer will raise hell if they talk about how useless the police are.
Because they'd spend many hours of police time and all the hastle of getting the ISP to hand over the address, and in all probability find some fourteen-year-old script kiddie who is playing with a brute-force program and password list he grabbed off of a site with two many Zs in the name.
It'd obviously be more valuable if someone threatened everyone else into using it. The US government, and governments of every other country, do just that in order to prevent the appearance of alternative currencies as a form of tax evasion.
Gold's value goes back long before it's practical use. It's been a valuable trade good since prehistoric times. It's only use then was for jewelry, and the reason it was used for jewelry was because it was so distinctive and expensive. That made it a very good way to show off wealth. It's very high value-to-size ratio and nonperishability also made it good as a pre-currency.
ISPs easily reach what is termed in economics a natural monopoly. The barrier to entry in a region is very, very high. It involves fitting new equipment, and probably digging up roads to lay cables. It takes a lot of capital to start serving an area. This means that once one ISP has gotten established, then no other wants in - why would they spend all that money to enter a market where they would be up against a competitor that already has 100% of the customers? It's just not good business sense.
Wireless was supposed to help a bit, but it's still held back by fundamental laws of physics. A very narrow bandwidth over a shared medium just cannot offer the same performance as a wired network, either copper or fiber. Just doesn't work that way.
A well-resourced CDN provides far better and more consistant performance than P2P, and does so while placing less load on the networks. It's big downside is the very considerable cost - the hardware, rack rental, and negociating deals with ISPs. They arn't even doing to talk to any company that doesn't have a few million dollars to bolster their reputation. So the CDN remains the prefered distribution method of the well-financed company seeking to deliver the most reliable service at a premium price (netflix) while P2P remains the perfered distribution method of those who need good-enough delivery but can't afford to spend millions of dollars (Pirates, independent games developers, linux distros, non-profit media). There are a few exceptions like Blizzard who use p2p as a way to save a few bucks, but that's mostly how it goes. P2P offers 'good enough' for free, while CDN offers 'excellent' at a hefty price.
Ignoring the fact that you need to use a few dirty hacks to send binary, that basically is how NNTP works. ISPs do run the peering servers, and they do indeed have massive amounts of cache in those servers. It's an early form of what we would today call a distributed CDN. The main difference is that in a CDN, the data still comes from a central point - there is but one source that injects it. With NNTP, anyone could submit an article. Which is exactly why ISPs would never support it today - too much of a legal risk, creating the ideal means of piracy.
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The THC appears to be harmless, but the most common delivery mechanism isn't - breathing smoke from a burning plant will ruin your lungs, be it from pot or tobacco. Cigarettes are actually less damaging, due to the invention of the filter tip. Though there are many alternatives to smoking it that pose less risk.
There are some other hobbies that get into similar trouble. Tropical fish breeding, for it's use of heated buildings. A recuring one is intensive horiculture, espicially growing of orchids. Given that it involves the accelerated growth of plants, the procedures are exactly the same as those for pot-growing - same power consumption, same thermal signature, same equipment requirements. That's where pot-growers get their equipment - they go to companies that supply orchid-growing equipment. For this reason a lot of those suppliers are on police watch-lists and their customers likely to be investigated.
In the UK, we had an incident some years ago in which an armed assault team raided a guina-pig shed. The heatlamps that were installed to keep the guina pigs warm looked a lot like a pot-growing shed on the helecopter thermal camera, and policy in cases of suspected drug production is to send in the big guns to bash the door down and get everyone cuffed as quickly as possible in order to deny suspects of any chance to destroy evidence.
This being the UK, it ended with the family not just getting compensation but a personal appology from the officer in charge.
Nope, not the one.
In the one I remember, the signal is a form of radio-transmitted viral life parasitic on technological civilisations. It's picked up by a mars rover - which is insufficiently advanced for it to infect - and relayed through it's telemetry back to earth, where it is picked up by amateur radio enthusiasts with backyard radio telescopes, who then rebroadcast it at higher power for their friends - as well as much industrial machinary using advanced biological processors*. Those it can infect. Though it doesn't grow any nasty monsters it does play havoc as it spreads causing such disasters as the accidential death of hundreds of wristworn biomonitor-and-regulation devices, both infecting the biological processors as a computer virus would and using them to manufacture a conventional biological virus with which it can spread even to non-networked equipment. Throughout the struggle to contain the outbreak, human-engineered artificial intelligences are just starting to approach human levels of capability.
The head of a tech company has the caterpillar. A robotic organiser, given to him as a child. Most people outgrew them, transfering the database of life-managing information into a device more suitable for an adult to carry around, but he grew too attached to the personality to delete it. Being one of the longest-operating AIs around, and one who'se owner had been heavily into tinkering and actively encouraged it to attempt self-upgrade, it's one of the first to achieve the breakthrough to human-level thought. A fact it keeps to itsself for self-preservation, only choosing to reveal the full extent of it's intelligence towards the end of the book.
*One of them is a combine harvester. It's wetware chip is used as a image processor, scanning the stream of grain for insects and damaged crop then zapping it with lasers.
You got my hopes up there, thinking the quote might be from a much better book. I forgot the title, but it involves a sentient radio signal, an accidentally too-successful attempt to evolve artificial intelligence, wetware processors, and the eventual victory of a robotic caterpillar toy with a program more sophisticated than the owner expected.
Consumers will not have *eyes* capable of benefiting from that quality of video, unless you're planning to put them in some sort of device that occupies their entire field of view.
The BBC doesn't function anything like the FCC. The body you're looking for there is OFCOM. They handle frequency allocation*, what little broadcast content regulation we have**, the sort of thing the FCC would handle in the US. The US doesn't really have a counterpart to the BBC. The closest would be PBS, but they differ in some very important ways.
*Much like the FCC, they'll occasionally say something about public benefit before auctioning it all off to the highest bidder.
**As we don't have that many radio broadcast channels, and cable/sat are outside OFCOM's direct oversight, they don't have much to do here. They occasionally send a strongly-worded letter.
China has more serious things for people to be unrestful about, but it also has a government that excels in oppression. It's of a level so skilled that the people can actually feel *happy* in the oppression, and believe it's for their own good. True masters of propaganda and indoctrination.
The US has nukes. China has nukes. An all-out war would inevitably result in one side or the other being forced to use them to avoid defeat, or in fear the other would first. The result would be disasterous for both countries. Both the US and China know this, and so an open war is off the table. That doesn't mean no conflict - the countries compete for resources and very some very fundamental ideological differences - but it'll be the cold-war type of conflict. Proxy wars. Economic manipulation. Espionage. Poaching the best scientists and engineers. Anything they can do to get an advantage over each other without having to actually admit to doing so.
North Korea's army is dependant on numbers, their air force is a joke... but their long-range artillery is quite real. If they did invade the south, their plan would be to first shell the country to rubble, destroy every major city, and then just walk in and take over what little is left. They don't, because it's not a fast plan, and would involve many civilian deaths - which means international involvement would be very likely. Given a month or two, even the UN would be able to get something passed, and NK would find bombs being dropped upon their artillery installations. Quite possibly Chinese bombs. They want stability - a north-south Korean war would result in that refugee influx, and that is something China would rather avoid. It's also really embarassing to the Communist cause if another tinpot dictator tries to conquer the world and fails miserably.
They might do that one day. China plans long term - I wouldn't put it past them to cause such an economic collapse, with the intention of hurting their competitors more than they hurt themselves. Having a centrally planned market would give them some advantage in the ability to plan ahead - they could have stockpiles built up years in advance, employ blatant protectionism to help domestic industry recover faster. They government could spend vast amounts of money propping up unprofitable industries for a decade so they are ready the moment recovery starts, while the rest of the world is founding new companies and building new factories. It'd hurt their economy, yes - but if it hurts the rest of the world more, it's still a valid plan for financial warfare. Collapse the economy, recover faster than anyone else, and use the window thus created to take over foreign markets and purchase what competition remains. The end result would be a situation where most economic activity, even that not performed in China, would be by Chinese companies.
Not 'middle east guys.' Terrorists. They are clearly not (officially) supported by any country. There are only two situations in which it is considered politically correct to make a real country the villain of a game:
1. The events are set so long ago that not only does the side no longer exist, but nor do any direct successors. Eg, AoM you get to fight against ancient greece, ancient egypt.
2. The enemy is of a side so loathed that even the country of origin has condemned their action. The uberexample here are the Nazis - you can shoot them all you want without Germany making a fuss. This could also apply to, say, fighting the Confederacy in the American Civil War, but I can't think of any games that use that one.
If you defy these rules, then you can expect a bit of political fallout. Angry letters, a strongly-worded condemnation from the affected government, the banning of the game in some countries. On the plus side, it'll grab headlines, which means more publicity and thus sales.
You can't break spectrum up into ever-smaller bands. A Mr Nyquist figure out the math proving that. In 1927. A transmission (Unless it's a pure, perfect sine continuing from infinite past to infinite future) isn't a single frequency. It's a range of frequencies. It has to be. When you talk of a radio station transmitting at 88MHz, what that really means is that it's transmitting in a small band of frequencies centered upon 88MHz.
Under the common media definition of hacking, the one you'll find used by every non-techie, it means 'Anything illegal, computerised and beyond my understanding.'
Because the annoying laws of physics say you can't make equipment from nothing, and you can only squeeze so much data through a finite wireless spectrum.
In thirty years, when you want to again see that obscure TV series you remembered watching a long time ago, you'll want to ask one of those hoarders.
"Any government agency won't care if someone is trying to hack you"
Not unless you are someone of particular noteworthyness. A government official, a celebrity of any kind. Then you'll get their attention. Because the police know that even a famous singer will raise hell if they talk about how useless the police are.
Because they'd spend many hours of police time and all the hastle of getting the ISP to hand over the address, and in all probability find some fourteen-year-old script kiddie who is playing with a brute-force program and password list he grabbed off of a site with two many Zs in the name.
It'd obviously be more valuable if someone threatened everyone else into using it. The US government, and governments of every other country, do just that in order to prevent the appearance of alternative currencies as a form of tax evasion.
Gold's value goes back long before it's practical use. It's been a valuable trade good since prehistoric times. It's only use then was for jewelry, and the reason it was used for jewelry was because it was so distinctive and expensive. That made it a very good way to show off wealth. It's very high value-to-size ratio and nonperishability also made it good as a pre-currency.
Pirates really care about quality, surprisingly.
Recent, yes...
ISPs easily reach what is termed in economics a natural monopoly. The barrier to entry in a region is very, very high. It involves fitting new equipment, and probably digging up roads to lay cables. It takes a lot of capital to start serving an area. This means that once one ISP has gotten established, then no other wants in - why would they spend all that money to enter a market where they would be up against a competitor that already has 100% of the customers? It's just not good business sense.
Wireless was supposed to help a bit, but it's still held back by fundamental laws of physics. A very narrow bandwidth over a shared medium just cannot offer the same performance as a wired network, either copper or fiber. Just doesn't work that way.
A well-resourced CDN provides far better and more consistant performance than P2P, and does so while placing less load on the networks. It's big downside is the very considerable cost - the hardware, rack rental, and negociating deals with ISPs. They arn't even doing to talk to any company that doesn't have a few million dollars to bolster their reputation. So the CDN remains the prefered distribution method of the well-financed company seeking to deliver the most reliable service at a premium price (netflix) while P2P remains the perfered distribution method of those who need good-enough delivery but can't afford to spend millions of dollars (Pirates, independent games developers, linux distros, non-profit media). There are a few exceptions like Blizzard who use p2p as a way to save a few bucks, but that's mostly how it goes. P2P offers 'good enough' for free, while CDN offers 'excellent' at a hefty price.
Ignoring the fact that you need to use a few dirty hacks to send binary, that basically is how NNTP works. ISPs do run the peering servers, and they do indeed have massive amounts of cache in those servers. It's an early form of what we would today call a distributed CDN. The main difference is that in a CDN, the data still comes from a central point - there is but one source that injects it. With NNTP, anyone could submit an article. Which is exactly why ISPs would never support it today - too much of a legal risk, creating the ideal means of piracy.