Currently US prices run about $12 to $15 per disc, although I've seen a new brand at $10. (Single or small quantities.)
As a reference point, this is about 1/3 what blank CD-R media cost at the same stage in its introduction.
It will always cost more than single layer DVD 5, just because the extra manufacturing steps, but it should be in the $1-$2 range in a couple of years.
As for where to buy, google for DVD dual layer media. Best Buy, MicroCenter and Office Depot stock the Verbatim "Solution Kits" (1 DVD+R DL bundled with a bunch of single-layer discs), which is OK if you're going to use the singles anyway, it works out to about $15 for the DL and $15 for the other 9 disks (one of them an RW). Currently you'll have to order on-line if you want just the DL media.
At AUS $60 (+GST) for a 5-pack, that's a pretty good price, too. +R DL media here is more like US $14 a piece -- although about all you can find are the stupid Verbatim "Solution Kit"s that bundle 8 DVD+Rs, a DVD+RW and a single DVD+R DL in a package for about US $30.
Fortunately other media vendors are starting to roll out +R DL products so the price should start to drop.
I know/.'ers are expected to comment without RTFA, but crikey, the title of the article includes "R9". That means dual layer, people! (Rounding up the number of gigabytes it will hold -- 4.7 for single layer, 8.5 for dual.) Of the 120-plus postings so far, only a handful address the point.
So far the only dual-layer DVD burners I've seen, and the only dual-layer media I've seen, has been of the +R variety. My Mad Dog Megastor (really a NEC ND-2510A) supports both +R/RW and -R/RW as well as dual-layer +R DL. Of -R DL, the fineprint on the box says "at the time of production, a (-) format Dual Layer standard has not been released".
Format war for +/- R9? I'd say + has won by default, there's no - competition yet.
(As for compatibility, my year-old DVD player plays everything I've thrown at it including 4x +R, 4x -R, 2.4x +RW, 2.4x -RW, and 2.4x +RDL. An older player (several years old) generally recognized the media (one problem with -RW I think) but sometimes had glitchy playback.)
Nobody's suggesting using coal as a nuclear fuel. Just pointing out how radioactive it is. Consider that all that uranium and thorium is left lying around as ash (or goes up the smokestack) after the coal is burned -- and on a per megawatt basis, the coal plant probably produces more nuclear waste than does a nuclear plant. None of it subject to rad-waste controls.
Actually the ash from a coal-fired plant might even make a usable uranium ore
Actually, regional DVD's aren't about price fixing as much as it has to do with selling rights.
Exactly -- just as with book publishing, where if the publisher only has, say "North American rights", he uses region encoding on the book so that even if a copy makes its way overseas, nobody can read it.
There isn't a lot of uranium and thorium in coal. But there is enough that if you burned that in a nuclear reactor, it would yield more energy than would burning (oxidizing) that coal in a furnace.
And the former would release no CO2, SO2, or any of the other crap that burning coal does.
The cold fusion researchers aren't saying that hot fusion models are wrong, any more than Planck et al said that billiard models were wrong. Current hot fusion models, however, say nothing about possible nuclear effects in the solid state.
Physics "as we know it" says that fusion works well in hot, dense plasmas, and that hot dense plasmas occur for long periods either by gravitational confinement (eg the sun) or for short periods (inertial confinement, H-bombs). Nobody is disputing that.
The hot fusion as power proponents are saying that they can make it work in a hot, low-density plasma -- and they've had very limited success. The cold fusion proponents are saying that they've observed some wierd phenomenon in the solid state, and it should be investigated.
Seems to me the former are selling far more expensive snake oil than the latter.
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
the excess heat the observed was an artifact from their calorimetery equipment caused by the fact that neither of them knew how to properly use it
You do realize, don't you, that Pons and Fleischmann were both expert calorimetrists, which went along with their particular fields of study in chemistry. Certainly far more so than the average physicist who pooh-poohed their results.
To date there have been far more net-positive results from various cold fusion experiments than there have been from hot fusion experiments. Heck, it took decades in hot fusion research to even reach scientific break-even.
The only thing hot fusion scientists have going for them is a working example -- and they carefully gloss over the fact that it works by gravitational rather than magnetic confinement, and requires a mass considerably in excess of Jupiter's. (Okay, inertial confinement works but is orders of magnitude below break-even at the moment. Inertial confinement coupled with high heat and intense neutron bombardment also works(*), but is rather messy.)
Downstream from Toronto -- to the extent that Lake Ontario can be said to have a "downstream" -- there are several gigawatts' worth of nuclear power plant (Pickering and Darlington).
Most of the electricity they produce goes to Toronto, in the summer a fair percentage of that is used for cooling Toronto. The nuke plants themselves are cooled by Lake Ontario water (with secondary cooling loops -- a leak in a primary reactor loop won't affect the lake).
Taking into account the (in)efficiencies of air conditioning and the (in)efficiencies of converting nuclear heat to electricity and transmitting that electricity to Toronto, using the lake water directly for cooling is probably several times more efficient and actually lowers the amount of heat dumped into the lake (and the air surrounding the powerlines and airconditioner outlets).
Sounds like a win-win all around, unless we're faced with another ice age;-)
Toast lands jelly down. If you jelly both sides of a piece of toast, it will hover in a state of quantum indecision.
Actually not, it will just fall twice as fast. Or at least be twice as likely to fall.
(True story: we had to perform and report on a practical experiment in my college statistics class. I tossed buttered toast (about a dozen slices, several times each). It landed butter side down about 62% of the time. Might have had higher percentages with jelly; I didn't try that.)
/me wonders how much data can be stored on a punch card,
Well, there were variants, but the standard "Hollerith" card (aka IBM card, etc) was 80 columns, and typically coded at 1 character per column. They could also be punched binary, and each column had 12 punch positions (bits). So, 80 to 120 (8-bit) bytes.
and how much a blank card cost back in the day.
I never paid for my own, so I have no idea how much they cost. They came in boxes of 2000. The only price I can turn up with a quick google is about $42/box in 1996 -- adjust downward for inflation and ubiquity further back in time. (Say, $10/box?)
patents protect a specific implementation. you can't patent the idea
That's completely, 180 degrees, wrong. I'd mod it down as overrated if I hadn't already commented in this topic.
Copyrights cover specific "implementations" (expressions), patents do cover ideas.
Now, the Patent Office in theory requires some sort of usefulness or utility to the idea to be patented, just putting a light in a box isn't a particularly useful idea in itself, you need to explain why you're putting the light in the box.
To make it easier to carry? Patent "a portable light source". To make pretty colors on the side of a translucent box? Patent "method and apparatus for illuminated boxes". To trap enough heat to cook something? Patent the "Kenner EZ Bake Oven" (a toy from the 60s/70s, before the safety nazi's worried about kids burning themselves). In high school I used a light in a box (controlled by a dimmer switch, and an insulated box) as an incubator for bacterial cultures (my GF was into microbiology). Need to sort slides (ancient pre-digital photo technology)? Put the light in a box with a translucent panel, patent the "light box".
If you have a refinement on somebody else's light in a box, you can patent that instead, although you need to refer to the original patent (and license it if you want to produce your invention).
Think mainframes, with their massive arrays of blinkenlights.
In particular, the Burroughs B6700 (and similar models, although the B6700 I have hands-on experience with) had a large rectangular array of lights on one panel of the case, (12x16 I think, for the top two double words (48 bit words) of its stack) that by default displayed the Burroughs "B" logo during idle time but could also be (and was) configured to display different patterns, text, and animation (although it took some creative hacking).
Instead, they should be assessed with regard to their consequences for efficiency in markets for creative works and other products.
Which says nothing at all.
One could argue that copyright terms should be reduced to, say, ten years, in order to force distributers of creative works to be as efficient as possible in bringing them to market before the copyright expires, ensuring a broad and rapid distribution.
Conversely, one could argue that copyrights be extended further so that creators of such work can get the most return for the minimum of creative effort -- another interpretation of "efficiency".
(Although IMHO the former interpretation makes more sense.)
Suuure. And how are they going to make that stick? "Sign this document or we... um... won't let you quit!" Or even better, "Sign this document or we'll fire you! Er..."
Depends. In a layoff situations, it's usually "sign this if you want to partake of the layoff compensation package we're offering". Might be a little trickier if you're quitting: "sign this or we'll un-vest all those matching contributions to your 401-K".
But most companies worried about this sort of thing have you sign at the beginning, not the end, of your employment with them.
Oh, yes, the Kzinti. That was one of the 2 or 3 episodes the ST cartoons that I ever saw.
But "Sliders" is already about multiple parallel worlds so it fits with the whole tangled multiverse mess -- if a bit early in the timeline.
(Mind, if you want real backstory/cross-story confusion, read Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" and "The Cat Who Walked Through Walls", both of which start out as great books before the crosstime/multiverse/whatever nonsense kicks in.)
It's strange that it's almost only credit cards that's used in the US. The only ones who gain from that is Visa and Mastercard. Debit cards without any fees is the future.
First of all, plenty of places in the US take debit cards. Gas pumps, grocery stores, etc.
Secondly, I'll never carry a debit card, but I carry credit cards. If I lose it or the card is stolen, my liability on a credit card is limited to $50 (and the CC company has waived that the couple of times it happened to me). If somebody else uses my debit card, my liability is my whole bank balance.
No thanks.
Besides, I like the couple of weeks of float (time between when I purchase the item and when I have to pay the charge) that a credit card gives me -- and I pay the full balance on time so have no interest charges, and use a no-fee card. (Yes, there are still some of those around, and many companies will waive the annual fee if you call them up and ask them to remove it or you'll switch cards.)
For soda or light rail (no subway here) ticket machines, I'll use the convenient, pre-printed paper slips called "dollar bills", which most machines accept.
So am I -- but I lost my last software job about 2.5 years ago. Did a few odd jobs, got a cert for being a Solaris Sys Admin. I've developed Unix for years, and run a mostly-Linux network at home. The cert cost me $300 testing fees, about $100 for a used box compatible with Solaris, $50 for the Exam Gear book and sample test CD, and a couple of weeks study and practise. (Now, if you've never admin'd a 'nix system, it'd take you longer).
The cert, and a rewrite of my resume to emphasize my sysadmin experience (mostly on development boxes) didn't get me the original job I was aiming at (through a friend's referral), but a month later it did get me a sysadmin job in a large shop, although for $25K less than I'd been making as a SW developer.
However, that experience (and a local uptick in IT hiring, the numbers in the article are counter to my local experience) led me to another sysadmin job that pays about what I was getting as a developer. Being a sys admin is a very different job than being a sw developer, but many of the skills carry across. (Specific OS knowledge, scripting languages esp. sh and Perl, analytic thinking.)
As for "I'm not going to become a mechanic or a soap salesman and nobody is going to hire me for such things.", well, with that attitude, you're right. Start with something you have at least some experience, talent for and/or interest in and have a go at it yourself. You may not make a successful business of it ("successful" defined as making enough to maintain the lifestyle you're used to), but it'll teach you aspects of running a business that will make you far more valuable to potential employers, and help you build up a network of contacts to help you find a job.
(Would you rather hire somebody whose resume showed an 18-month "unemployed" gap, or one whose resume showed an 18-month "self-employed" period? Hiring managers recognize that IT has been through some rough times -- my last manager was out for 9 months himself -- and appreciate a willingness to "do whatever it takes" rather than waiting for somebody else to do it for you.)
Re:Kinda gives a new meaning to '1337 hAx0r2'.
on
Ready, Aim, HACK!
·
· Score: 1
In most of the united states, carrying around an Fn sniper rifle is perfectly legal.
No, most FN (Fabrique Nationale d' Armes du Guerre, Belgian company) rifles fall under the prohibition on assault rifles and other scary-looking weapons.
(Sorry, I'll go away now...)
(I used to have an FN (-C1A1, 7.62mm NATO). I had to give it back when I left the army.)
Slashdot Mirror
Currently US prices run about $12 to $15 per disc, although I've seen a new brand at $10. (Single or small quantities.)
As a reference point, this is about 1/3 what blank CD-R media cost at the same stage in its introduction.
It will always cost more than single layer DVD 5, just because the extra manufacturing steps, but it should be in the $1-$2 range in a couple of years.
As for where to buy, google for DVD dual layer media. Best Buy, MicroCenter and Office Depot stock the Verbatim "Solution Kits" (1 DVD+R DL bundled with a bunch of single-layer discs), which is OK if you're going to use the singles anyway, it works out to about $15 for the DL and $15 for the other 9 disks (one of them an RW). Currently you'll have to order on-line if you want just the DL media.
At AUS $60 (+GST) for a 5-pack, that's a pretty good price, too. +R DL media here is more like US $14 a piece -- although about all you can find are the stupid Verbatim "Solution Kit"s that bundle 8 DVD+Rs, a DVD+RW and a single DVD+R DL in a package for about US $30.
Fortunately other media vendors are starting to roll out +R DL products so the price should start to drop.
I know /.'ers are expected to comment without RTFA, but crikey, the title of the article includes "R9". That means dual layer, people! (Rounding up the number of gigabytes it will hold -- 4.7 for single layer, 8.5 for dual.) Of the 120-plus postings so far, only a handful address the point.
So far the only dual-layer DVD burners I've seen, and the only dual-layer media I've seen, has been of the +R variety. My Mad Dog Megastor (really a NEC ND-2510A) supports both +R/RW and -R/RW as well as dual-layer +R DL. Of -R DL, the fineprint on the box says "at the time of production, a (-) format Dual Layer standard has not been released".
Format war for +/- R9? I'd say + has won by default, there's no - competition yet.
(As for compatibility, my year-old DVD player plays everything I've thrown at it including 4x +R, 4x -R, 2.4x +RW, 2.4x -RW, and 2.4x +RDL. An older player (several years old) generally recognized the media (one problem with -RW I think) but sometimes had glitchy playback.)
Nobody's suggesting using coal as a nuclear fuel. Just pointing out how radioactive it is. Consider that all that uranium and thorium is left lying around as ash (or goes up the smokestack) after the coal is burned -- and on a per megawatt basis, the coal plant probably produces more nuclear waste than does a nuclear plant. None of it subject to rad-waste controls.
Actually the ash from a coal-fired plant might even make a usable uranium ore
And you didn't even touch the thorium (which is bred to fissionable U-233 just as the U-238 is bred to Pu-239).
Actually, regional DVD's aren't about price fixing as much as it has to do with selling rights.
Exactly -- just as with book publishing, where if the publisher only has, say "North American rights", he uses region encoding on the book so that even if a copy makes its way overseas, nobody can read it.
Oh, wait...
There isn't a lot of uranium and thorium in coal. But there is enough that if you burned that in a nuclear reactor, it would yield more energy than would burning (oxidizing) that coal in a furnace.
And the former would release no CO2, SO2, or any of the other crap that burning coal does.
The cold fusion researchers aren't saying that hot fusion models are wrong, any more than Planck et al said that billiard models were wrong. Current hot fusion models, however, say nothing about possible nuclear effects in the solid state.
Physics "as we know it" says that fusion works well in hot, dense plasmas, and that hot dense plasmas occur for long periods either by gravitational confinement (eg the sun) or for short periods (inertial confinement, H-bombs). Nobody is disputing that.
The hot fusion as power proponents are saying that they can make it work in a hot, low-density plasma -- and they've had very limited success. The cold fusion proponents are saying that they've observed some wierd phenomenon in the solid state, and it should be investigated.
Seems to me the former are selling far more expensive snake oil than the latter.
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
the excess heat the observed was an artifact from their calorimetery equipment caused by the fact that neither of them knew how to properly use it
You do realize, don't you, that Pons and Fleischmann were both expert calorimetrists, which went along with their particular fields of study in chemistry. Certainly far more so than the average physicist who pooh-poohed their results.
To date there have been far more net-positive results from various cold fusion experiments than there have been from hot fusion experiments. Heck, it took decades in hot fusion research to even reach scientific break-even.
The only thing hot fusion scientists have going for them is a working example -- and they carefully gloss over the fact that it works by gravitational rather than magnetic confinement, and requires a mass considerably in excess of Jupiter's. (Okay, inertial confinement works but is orders of magnitude below break-even at the moment. Inertial confinement coupled with high heat and intense neutron bombardment also works(*), but is rather messy.)
(*) I.e., fusion bombs.
Downstream from Toronto -- to the extent that Lake Ontario can be said to have a "downstream" -- there are several gigawatts' worth of nuclear power plant (Pickering and Darlington).
;-)
Most of the electricity they produce goes to Toronto, in the summer a fair percentage of that is used for cooling Toronto. The nuke plants themselves are cooled by Lake Ontario water (with secondary cooling loops -- a leak in a primary reactor loop won't affect the lake).
Taking into account the (in)efficiencies of air conditioning and the (in)efficiencies of converting nuclear heat to electricity and transmitting that electricity to Toronto, using the lake water directly for cooling is probably several times more efficient and actually lowers the amount of heat dumped into the lake (and the air surrounding the powerlines and airconditioner outlets).
Sounds like a win-win all around, unless we're faced with another ice age
It must be sad to be so humour-impaired.
My sympathies.
Toast lands jelly down. If you jelly both sides of a piece of toast, it will hover in a state of quantum indecision.
Actually not, it will just fall twice as fast. Or at least be twice as likely to fall.
(True story: we had to perform and report on a practical experiment in my college statistics class. I tossed buttered toast (about a dozen slices, several times each). It landed butter side down about 62% of the time. Might have had higher percentages with jelly; I didn't try that.)
/me wonders how much data can be stored on a punch card,
Well, there were variants, but the standard "Hollerith" card (aka IBM card, etc) was 80 columns, and typically coded at 1 character per column. They could also be punched binary, and each column had 12 punch positions (bits). So, 80 to 120 (8-bit) bytes.
and how much a blank card cost back in the day.
I never paid for my own, so I have no idea how much they cost. They came in boxes of 2000. The only price I can turn up with a quick google is about $42/box in 1996 -- adjust downward for inflation and ubiquity further back in time. (Say, $10/box?)
patents protect a specific implementation. you can't patent the idea
That's completely, 180 degrees, wrong. I'd mod it down as overrated if I hadn't already commented in this topic.
Copyrights cover specific "implementations" (expressions), patents do cover ideas.
Now, the Patent Office in theory requires some sort of usefulness or utility to the idea to be patented, just putting a light in a box isn't a particularly useful idea in itself, you need to explain why you're putting the light in the box.
To make it easier to carry? Patent "a portable light source". To make pretty colors on the side of a translucent box? Patent "method and apparatus for illuminated boxes". To trap enough heat to cook something? Patent the "Kenner EZ Bake Oven" (a toy from the 60s/70s, before the safety nazi's worried about kids burning themselves). In high school I used a light in a box (controlled by a dimmer switch, and an insulated box) as an incubator for bacterial cultures (my GF was into microbiology). Need to sort slides (ancient pre-digital photo technology)? Put the light in a box with a translucent panel, patent the "light box".
If you have a refinement on somebody else's light in a box, you can patent that instead, although you need to refer to the original patent (and license it if you want to produce your invention).
Think mainframes, with their massive arrays of blinkenlights.
In particular, the Burroughs B6700 (and similar models, although the B6700 I have hands-on experience with) had a large rectangular array of lights on one panel of the case, (12x16 I think, for the top two double words (48 bit words) of its stack) that by default displayed the Burroughs "B" logo during idle time but could also be (and was) configured to display different patterns, text, and animation (although it took some creative hacking).
Instead, they should be assessed with regard to their consequences for efficiency in markets for creative works and other products.
Which says nothing at all.
One could argue that copyright terms should be reduced to, say, ten years, in order to force distributers of creative works to be as efficient as possible in bringing them to market before the copyright expires, ensuring a broad and rapid distribution.
Conversely, one could argue that copyrights be extended further so that creators of such work can get the most return for the minimum of creative effort -- another interpretation of "efficiency".
(Although IMHO the former interpretation makes more sense.)
Yeah, I don't really think they could touch 401K stuff, not once it's vested.
Suuure. And how are they going to make that stick? "Sign this document or we... um... won't let you quit!" Or even better, "Sign this document or we'll fire you! Er..."
Depends. In a layoff situations, it's usually "sign this if you want to partake of the layoff compensation package we're offering". Might be a little trickier if you're quitting: "sign this or we'll un-vest all those matching contributions to your 401-K".
But most companies worried about this sort of thing have you sign at the beginning, not the end, of your employment with them.
Oh, yes, the Kzinti. That was one of the 2 or 3 episodes the ST cartoons that I ever saw.
But "Sliders" is already about multiple parallel worlds so it fits with the whole tangled multiverse mess -- if a bit early in the timeline.
(Mind, if you want real backstory/cross-story confusion, read Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" and "The Cat Who Walked Through Walls", both of which start out as great books before the crosstime/multiverse/whatever nonsense kicks in.)
Once you change your universe to a multiverse- anything is possible, even probable.
Sure, throw in the Kromags from "Sliders", why not?
It's strange that it's almost only credit cards that's used in the US. The only ones who gain from that is Visa and Mastercard. Debit cards without any fees is the future.
First of all, plenty of places in the US take debit cards. Gas pumps, grocery stores, etc.
Secondly, I'll never carry a debit card, but I carry credit cards. If I lose it or the card is stolen, my liability on a credit card is limited to $50 (and the CC company has waived that the couple of times it happened to me). If somebody else uses my debit card, my liability is my whole bank balance.
No thanks.
Besides, I like the couple of weeks of float (time between when I purchase the item and when I have to pay the charge) that a credit card gives me -- and I pay the full balance on time so have no interest charges, and use a no-fee card. (Yes, there are still some of those around, and many companies will waive the annual fee if you call them up and ask them to remove it or you'll switch cards.)
For soda or light rail (no subway here) ticket machines, I'll use the convenient, pre-printed paper slips called "dollar bills", which most machines accept.
This sig no verb.
Nonsense. Haven't you ever verbed a noun?
I'm a software guy.
So am I -- but I lost my last software job about 2.5 years ago. Did a few odd jobs, got a cert for being a Solaris Sys Admin. I've developed Unix for years, and run a mostly-Linux network at home. The cert cost me $300 testing fees, about $100 for a used box compatible with Solaris, $50 for the Exam Gear book and sample test CD, and a couple of weeks study and practise. (Now, if you've never admin'd a 'nix system, it'd take you longer).
The cert, and a rewrite of my resume to emphasize my sysadmin experience (mostly on development boxes) didn't get me the original job I was aiming at (through a friend's referral), but a month later it did get me a sysadmin job in a large shop, although for $25K less than I'd been making as a SW developer.
However, that experience (and a local uptick in IT hiring, the numbers in the article are counter to my local experience) led me to another sysadmin job that pays about what I was getting as a developer. Being a sys admin is a very different job than being a sw developer, but many of the skills carry across. (Specific OS knowledge, scripting languages esp. sh and Perl, analytic thinking.)
As for "I'm not going to become a mechanic or a soap salesman and nobody is going to hire me for such things.", well, with that attitude, you're right. Start with something you have at least some experience, talent for and/or interest in and have a go at it yourself. You may not make a successful business of it ("successful" defined as making enough to maintain the lifestyle you're used to), but it'll teach you aspects of running a business that will make you far more valuable to potential employers, and help you build up a network of contacts to help you find a job.
(Would you rather hire somebody whose resume showed an 18-month "unemployed" gap, or one whose resume showed an 18-month "self-employed" period? Hiring managers recognize that IT has been through some rough times -- my last manager was out for 9 months himself -- and appreciate a willingness to "do whatever it takes" rather than waiting for somebody else to do it for you.)
In most of the united states, carrying around an Fn sniper rifle is perfectly legal.
No, most FN (Fabrique Nationale d' Armes du Guerre, Belgian company) rifles fall under the prohibition on assault rifles and other scary-looking weapons.
(Sorry, I'll go away now...)
(I used to have an FN (-C1A1, 7.62mm NATO). I had to give it back when I left the army.)