I solved this problem a couple years ago when I was working on a problem with fraudulent mass account signups at idrive.com. I display a warped image of random characters and requested that the user enter those characters in a text entry box on the signup page. (Yes, now you see that everywhere, but we did it first; Yahoo was next, a couple months later, then PayPal.) Now it has grown into a whole field called CAPTCHAs. I called it our "Turing test".
I mentioned this same idea to Gharlane of Eddore back in about 1986, after I got my first car. He told me that this very same water-injection technique is used for a short-term power boost in certain aircraft engines. I contemplated making a more rigorous calculation of the thermodynamic efficiency a few years later when I was taking P-Chem, but found that my attention was spread thin by my existing homework.
I suspect this policy might be revisited if the university received huge numbers of distinct-looking complaints for most or all of the systems on their network, and consequently shut off all internet access for the whole school (effectively). On a wider scale, if every institution that implemented such a blanket policy then had to disable access for all users within a few days, it might have the effect of being a P2P clue-distribution mechanism, thereby generating a popular groundswell of support among PHB types for changes in the DMCA. It's totally unthinkable that a free nation has created a law where the accused are essentially guilty until proven innocent, where no shred of proof is required before punitive sanctions are applied. The DMCA must be stopped, and in order for that to happen, the unwashed public must be made aware of this disgrace. Who has heard of the DMCA outside of the ??AA and other corporate cronies, the Slashdot crowd, and the Libertarians? It's entirely possible that the internet users at the University of Utah may soon learn a lot more about the DMCA.
Obviously this article was bought and paid for by the global hydrogen cartels, in a conspiracy to suppress the true energy source of the future: pure, clean antimatter! All we need is a $100 trillion/year subsidy to develop antimatter-resistant materials and technology for producing antimatter from medical waste and discarded athletic shoes. A distribution network would not be necessary because your car could run for 75 BILLION miles on a single kilogram of antimatter, which has four billion times the energy density of gasoline and SIXTEEN BILLION times the energy density of chemical hydrogen. Oh no they're breaking down the doKJY(W*#&^
SPEC scores tell me almost nothing useful. The code to run SPEC benchmarks is emitted by tricked-out compilers whose whole purpose is to emit hand-crafted assembly code specifically tuned to run those SPEC benchmarks. It doesn't tell me anything about how well common programs and subsystems perform at common tasks. You might as well buy a family car based on the quarter-mile time at the racetrack for a like-model car with a supercharger and dangerously-tweaked ignition timing, burning 120 octane racing fuel.
In five years, if the Itanium isn't a huge success, will you eat your words?
Right, that would be a terrible problem for a Java virtual machine running OpenBSD, if one can imagine such a thing. I'm sure the OpenBSD team will get to work on that once: * Microsoft releases source for all products under GPL; fixes all bugs and security holes * Linux developers get bored, call it quits * Intel admits Itanium is a flop; brings back Alpha
You do understand that stack protection pertains to execution of native processor instructions, right?
Yes, the eBook reader has numerous optional features like text-to-speech, printing and copying, but those features only work if they haven't been turned off by the publisher. Would you care to defend the legitimacy of the flag that disables text-to-speech feature, and explain why it should trump the fair use rights of the blind consumer?
When the publisher can disable a feature at whim, the feature is better described as a privilege, not a right. Fair use is a right, not a privilege.
Call the 800 number from a payphone, no less. That'll cost the recipient an extra FCC-mandated 38 cents or so, your privacy is preserved, and there can be no unexpected fees for calling.
Last month I got some spam from a company that sells coffee by mail, that had an 800 number listed on their home page. I called them from a payphone to thank them for sharing the word by email, even if I didn't have the foresight to request that valuable information and wasn't interested in ordering at that time. I'm also kind of forgetful, so I may have called a few times in my wanderings around town before remembering to cross the item off of my to-do list on the whiteboard at home.
Check out Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, UT. Don't worry, you'll be able to find it. It's purportedly one of two man-made features on Earth visible from space with the naked eye, the other being the Great Wall of China. (I don't think they're counting reservoirs.) If you arrive at the right time of day, you can watch them blast away the hillside using tons of explosives. The entire site is crawling with huge trucks and steamshovels, trains, pipelines and the like. The complex stretches for miles and miles, and there's a lot of interesting industrial stuff to see around the area in addition to the tour itself.
Another cool tour is the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Soudan, MN. They run you deep, deep underground in an old iron mine, and show you what it was like working a mile below the surface. That's also where the University of Minnesota built their cosmic ray detection lab.
"robot" -- another literary connection
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Karel Capek, an Czech author from the 20's and 30's, wrote several stories about man being stripped of his human essence in order to change him into an efficient and manageable working machine. The word robot was first coined in his best-known novel, "Rossum's Universal Robots", which was about this very same subject:
"Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. He rejected everything that makes man more expensive. In fact, he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul. Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside?" (from R.U.R., 1920, trans. by Paul Selver)
Before this, he wrote a humorous short story about a crafty businessman who rounds up all of society's undesirables, purges them of all emotion through lack of artistic and sensual stimulation, and turns them into a phenomenal working force. But his design is put in ruins when the keepers inadvertently leave the light on during a working man's monthly conjugal encounter. That man is so inspired by her beauty that he breaks out in song during work, and the domino effect continues as within days the men have organized debating societies, newspapers, amateur theater troupes and the like. Before the week is out, the men rebel against their oppression and lay the entire operation to waste.
I have a reciprocal agreement with a friend in another city to run remote incremental backups over SSL. On day zero, I created a giant tar file of my entire system, and an XML file containing the MD5 hash and interesting fields from lstat(2) for every file on the system. Every night, a cron job checks that the MD5 fingerprint matches (as a sanity check on the computer and hard drive), and builds a new compressed and encrypted tar file of all changes in the filesystem, excluding anything from a list of regular expressions representing uninteresting transient data. When I get time, I'll also write a script to dump the database nightly and send incremental changes to the backup server. The system is still improving as I get time to futz with it, but I sleep well knowing that I will never lose more than a day's worth of changes to the system, and no manual intervention is required to keep the system running.
One good reason that DVDs cost more than CDs is that the catering budget for one day of movie production exceeds the entire cost of recording and producing a CD. That may or may not be literally true, but the point is that making movies can be hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than recording music, so DVDs are a comparative bargain -- and CDs are an absolute ripoff.
I'm not your typical user, but the source code was indispensible for a problem I had last month. I had a badly corrupted FFS filesystem with important data. fsck_ffs crashed repeatedly on a segmentation fault because of an unchecked null pointer. If that had been a Windows problem, I would have been out of luck. But since I had the source, I recompiled fsck_ffs with debugging information, chased down the offending line in gdb, fixed it and submitted a bug report back to the OpenBSD project.
Lots of bugs are discovered by end-users because they subject the product to a whole lot of punishment under real-world conditions not forseen in the development testbed. It isn't often the case that the bugs are so obscure or elusive, that they cannot possibly be solved by anyone but rare experts. Localizing the problem through access to source code and debugging tools drastically enhances the chances of solving the problem, particularly when the problem is repeatable.
Conversely, in the land of Microsoft and closed source, most bugs go uncorrected to the endless chagrin of users. Lacking source code, you have almost no chance of understanding or fixing problems. And it's an extreme rarity to find a software company that will work with you immediately to track down and solve these problems, particularly at 3 AM on Sunday, unless you're paying some hefty fees for a gilt-edged support contract.
i can see a new open source project brewing: Stealth NAT. A NAT implementation that will rewrite TCP sequence numbers and randomize anything else that would give the impression that multiple machines were in use.
I believe OpenBSD 3.0 and the included 'pf' packet filter already have the ability to do so via the "modulate state" flag, i.e. in/etc/pf.conf:
pass out on ${EXTIF} from any to any modulate state
I agree completely. Pick just about any meaningful domain name out of the blue and find that it's probably got some lame, generic "portal" parked there, with an announcement that the domain is for sale at GreatDomains.com. It's allowed, or at least tolerated, for registrars to sit on huge numbers of domain names for their own greedy ends. Domain squatters aren't doing anything constructive to justify their land grab; there's no legitimate comparison to the homesteading of the early United States frontier. Though I'm a Libertarian and don't like to propose taxation other than in exceptional cases, I believe that tax policy could serve a useful role here:
* Charge an up-front $10/yr domain tax on all existing.com,.net and.org domains.
* Allow a simple, refundable tax credit for up to three registered domains (with proof of payment) on each tax return.
* Use funds collected to reduce the much-disliked USF tax on every phone bill.
I'm also open to ideas on a fair and practical way to exempt non-citizens from the tax on registration for a limited number of domains.
Of course another solution would be for ICANN to wake up and stop being the driving force behind the creation of these problems.
These parties, who aren't enamored of personal privacy, lobby for the abolition of the right to keep your thoughts private. Do they have any sense of the hopelessly overwhelming volume of data we already collect? Even if we outlawed strong crypto and everyone put the NSA in their CC field and wrote in plain, clear English, the spooks' task of defeating terrorism with electronic intelligence would be all but impossible because there's just too much data, and all the meaningful data is probably too ambiguous to stand out.
I think the intelligence community hopes that they can use those rudimentary techniques like keyword searches for a 90% solution. But do you think the terrorists are going to enter their real names and addresses when they sign up for Hotmail accounts? Are they going to spell out their plans in absolutely clear detail using those lovely government-sanctioned crypto programs, now New & Improved with Key Recovery! [After all, who are you going to call if you lose your keys???] No, they'll make their deadly points in completely innocuous language, under names like Fred and Sam and James. Assuming some minimal shared secrets between two or more parties (i.e. we're going to crash an airplane into a building), subsequent communications can be filled with meaning but appear totally innocuous:
"We're booked on flight 1234 to San Francisco this Tuesday for our presentation. Let's meet at 7:45 in the food court of terminal A to discuss the specifics of our pitch. If everything goes well, we'll also make presentations in New York and Washington."
"Okay, great, see you then. Don't forget to bring the visual aids. We want our presentation to make an impact! I understand that Max and Jim have arranged for the A/V equipment to be set up before we arrive for the presentation."
At my last company, I was responsible for cutting down on the volume of warez transmission and storage on our free service. Our traffic was only a small rivulet in a churning global sea of data but there was no way we could keep up. Abusive traffic was obvious at a glance but there was so much of it, we could only use crude, automatic filters to deal with the obvious offenders. To think that big brother's giant electronic ear will solve any problem -- that they will deduce every hidden shade of meaning and get the "inside joke" -- is folly. We had terabytes of data flowing through our system -- nice, neat, clean digital data -- and we were overwhelmed. We weren't even trying to deal with messy data like telephone audio. How many phone calls do we make in this country on an average day? How many are made throughout the world? How are they going to sift through all that data to find that needle in the haystack in time to save the day?
There's no way to stuff the encryption cat back in the bag, so it's high time for the intelligence community to drop their focus on the high tech toys and focus on human intelligence, just like regular cops. Regular cops deal with shady informants, they go undercover to infiltrate gangs and drug cartels and so on. Maybe the CIA and the NSA could partner up with some local cops to learn about good, old-fashioned footwork.
This goes to show that Lego is not only a cool toy, but a cool company too! I certainly hope that the authors of these great add-ons (in particular, LegOS) will accept this graciously-extended olive branch and find a compromise that suits everyone. Today I could really live with a world that's more friendly and less confrontational.
It's a pity that these issues so readily escalate to acrimonious exchanges and legal threats -- witness the current legal woes facing amdzone.com. Again, my commendation to Lego for taking the high road. May they enjoy continued healthy sales and goodwill with their enthusiast community.
future safeguards against airline hijacking
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I suspect we already have 90% of the pieces in place for fully automated takeoff, flight and landing of commercial airliners. I've wondered for years why we don't install a hijacking duress switch in the plane that would:
* Release a potent, fast-acting sleep gas
* Lock out all internal controls completely
* Autonomously land the plane at the nearest satisfactory airport, perhaps with rudimentary guidance from the nearest control tower
In any case, our antiquated flight telemetry and control systems should be improved along the way. It's surprising that we couldn't even be sure what had become of the missing planes, or which planes had crashed, until the smoke cleared.
I am still in shock, and my sympathies go out to those traumatized by this cruel tragedy. Let's all hope for brighter days ahead.
> "Jesus, how many different types of cars do we need?"
People gripe about SUVs all the time. So in that light, why are we pigging up the world with cycle and memory guzzling, unreliable garbage like Windows? Save the planet -- stop using MS!
Slashdot Mirror
Teenager dies from deodorant overdose
All your base are belong to us!
I solved this problem a couple years ago when I was working on a problem with fraudulent mass account signups at idrive.com. I display a warped image of random characters and requested that the user enter those characters in a text entry box on the signup page. (Yes, now you see that everywhere, but we did it first; Yahoo was next, a couple months later, then PayPal.) Now it has grown into a whole field called CAPTCHAs. I called it our "Turing test".
I mentioned this same idea to Gharlane of Eddore back in about 1986, after I got my first car. He told me that this very same water-injection technique is used for a short-term power boost in certain aircraft engines. I contemplated making a more rigorous calculation of the thermodynamic efficiency a few years later when I was taking P-Chem, but found that my attention was spread thin by my existing homework.
I suspect this policy might be revisited if the university received huge numbers of distinct-looking complaints for most or all of the systems on their network, and consequently shut off all internet access for the whole school (effectively). On a wider scale, if every institution that implemented such a blanket policy then had to disable access for all users within a few days, it might have the effect of being a P2P clue-distribution mechanism, thereby generating a popular groundswell of support among PHB types for changes in the DMCA. It's totally unthinkable that a free nation has created a law where the accused are essentially guilty until proven innocent, where no shred of proof is required before punitive sanctions are applied. The DMCA must be stopped, and in order for that to happen, the unwashed public must be made aware of this disgrace. Who has heard of the DMCA outside of the ??AA and other corporate cronies, the Slashdot crowd, and the Libertarians? It's entirely possible that the internet users at the University of Utah may soon learn a lot more about the DMCA.
Obviously this article was bought and paid for by the global hydrogen cartels, in a conspiracy to suppress the true energy source of the future: pure, clean antimatter!
All we need is a $100 trillion/year subsidy to develop antimatter-resistant materials and technology for producing antimatter from medical waste and discarded athletic shoes.
A distribution network would not be necessary because your car could run for 75 BILLION miles on a single kilogram of antimatter, which has four billion times the energy density of gasoline and SIXTEEN BILLION times the energy density of chemical hydrogen.
Oh no they're breaking down the doKJY(W*#&^
SPEC scores tell me almost nothing useful. The code to run SPEC benchmarks is emitted by tricked-out compilers whose whole purpose is to emit hand-crafted assembly code specifically tuned to run those SPEC benchmarks. It doesn't tell me anything about how well common programs and subsystems perform at common tasks. You might as well buy a family car based on the quarter-mile time at the racetrack for a like-model car with a supercharger and dangerously-tweaked ignition timing, burning 120 octane racing fuel.
In five years, if the Itanium isn't a huge success, will you eat your words?
Doh, I misread that, never mind...
Right, that would be a terrible problem for a Java virtual machine running OpenBSD, if one can imagine such a thing. I'm sure the OpenBSD team will get to work on that once:
* Microsoft releases source for all products under GPL; fixes all bugs and security holes
* Linux developers get bored, call it quits
* Intel admits Itanium is a flop; brings back Alpha
You do understand that stack protection pertains to execution of native processor instructions, right?
Yes, the eBook reader has numerous optional features like text-to-speech, printing and copying, but those features only work if they haven't been turned off by the publisher. Would you care to defend the legitimacy of the flag that disables text-to-speech feature, and explain why it should trump the fair use rights of the blind consumer?
When the publisher can disable a feature at whim, the feature is better described as a privilege, not a right. Fair use is a right, not a privilege.
Call the 800 number from a payphone, no less. That'll cost the recipient an extra FCC-mandated 38 cents or so, your privacy is preserved, and there can be no unexpected fees for calling.
Last month I got some spam from a company that sells coffee by mail, that had an 800 number listed on their home page. I called them from a payphone to thank them for sharing the word by email, even if I didn't have the foresight to request that valuable information and wasn't interested in ordering at that time. I'm also kind of forgetful, so I may have called a few times in my wanderings around town before remembering to cross the item off of my to-do list on the whiteboard at home.
Check out Kennecott Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, UT. Don't worry, you'll be able to find it. It's purportedly one of two man-made features on Earth visible from space with the naked eye, the other being the Great Wall of China. (I don't think they're counting reservoirs.) If you arrive at the right time of day, you can watch them blast away the hillside using tons of explosives. The entire site is crawling with huge trucks and steamshovels, trains, pipelines and the like. The complex stretches for miles and miles, and there's a lot of interesting industrial stuff to see around the area in addition to the tour itself.
Another cool tour is the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in Soudan, MN. They run you deep, deep underground in an old iron mine, and show you what it was like working a mile below the surface. That's also where the University of Minnesota built their cosmic ray detection lab.
Karel Capek, an Czech author from the 20's and 30's, wrote several stories about man being stripped of his human essence in order to change him into an efficient and manageable working machine. The word robot was first coined in his best-known novel, "Rossum's Universal Robots", which was about this very same subject:
"Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. He rejected everything that makes man more expensive. In fact, he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are, they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul. Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside?" (from R.U.R., 1920, trans. by Paul Selver)
Before this, he wrote a humorous short story about a crafty businessman who rounds up all of society's undesirables, purges them of all emotion through lack of artistic and sensual stimulation, and turns them into a phenomenal working force. But his design is put in ruins when the keepers inadvertently leave the light on during a working man's monthly conjugal encounter. That man is so inspired by her beauty that he breaks out in song during work, and the domino effect continues as within days the men have organized debating societies, newspapers, amateur theater troupes and the like. Before the week is out, the men rebel against their oppression and lay the entire operation to waste.
I have a reciprocal agreement with a friend in another city to run remote incremental backups over SSL. On day zero, I created a giant tar file of my entire system, and an XML file containing the MD5 hash and interesting fields from lstat(2) for every file on the system. Every night, a cron job checks that the MD5 fingerprint matches (as a sanity check on the computer and hard drive), and builds a new compressed and encrypted tar file of all changes in the filesystem, excluding anything from a list of regular expressions representing uninteresting transient data. When I get time, I'll also write a script to dump the database nightly and send incremental changes to the backup server. The system is still improving as I get time to futz with it, but I sleep well knowing that I will never lose more than a day's worth of changes to the system, and no manual intervention is required to keep the system running.
I didn't see anything about ogg vorbis support. That's a pity.
One good reason that DVDs cost more than CDs is that the catering budget for one day of movie production exceeds the entire cost of recording and producing a CD. That may or may not be literally true, but the point is that making movies can be hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than recording music, so DVDs are a comparative bargain -- and CDs are an absolute ripoff.
For that matter, who needs 4GB? There's no reason computers will ever need more than 64K, right?
I'm not your typical user, but the source code was indispensible for a problem I had last month. I had a badly corrupted FFS filesystem with important data. fsck_ffs crashed repeatedly on a segmentation fault because of an unchecked null pointer. If that had been a Windows problem, I would have been out of luck. But since I had the source, I recompiled fsck_ffs with debugging information, chased down the offending line in gdb, fixed it and submitted a bug report back to the OpenBSD project.
Lots of bugs are discovered by end-users because they subject the product to a whole lot of punishment under real-world conditions not forseen in the development testbed. It isn't often the case that the bugs are so obscure or elusive, that they cannot possibly be solved by anyone but rare experts. Localizing the problem through access to source code and debugging tools drastically enhances the chances of solving the problem, particularly when the problem is repeatable.
Conversely, in the land of Microsoft and closed source, most bugs go uncorrected to the endless chagrin of users. Lacking source code, you have almost no chance of understanding or fixing problems. And it's an extreme rarity to find a software company that will work with you immediately to track down and solve these problems, particularly at 3 AM on Sunday, unless you're paying some hefty fees for a gilt-edged support contract.
i can see a new open source project brewing: Stealth NAT. A NAT implementation that will rewrite TCP sequence numbers and randomize anything else that would give the impression that multiple machines were in use.
/etc/pf.conf:
I believe OpenBSD 3.0 and the included 'pf' packet filter already have the ability to do so via the "modulate state" flag, i.e. in
pass out on ${EXTIF} from any to any modulate state
I agree completely. Pick just about any meaningful domain name out of the blue and find that it's probably got some lame, generic "portal" parked there, with an announcement that the domain is for sale at GreatDomains.com. It's allowed, or at least tolerated, for registrars to sit on huge numbers of domain names for their own greedy ends. Domain squatters aren't doing anything constructive to justify their land grab; there's no legitimate comparison to the homesteading of the early United States frontier. Though I'm a Libertarian and don't like to propose taxation other than in exceptional cases, I believe that tax policy could serve a useful role here:
.com, .net and .org domains.
* Charge an up-front $10/yr domain tax on all existing
* Allow a simple, refundable tax credit for up to three registered domains (with proof of payment) on each tax return.
* Use funds collected to reduce the much-disliked USF tax on every phone bill.
I'm also open to ideas on a fair and practical way to exempt non-citizens from the tax on registration for a limited number of domains.
Of course another solution would be for ICANN to wake up and stop being the driving force behind the creation of these problems.
These parties, who aren't enamored of personal privacy, lobby for the abolition of the right to keep your thoughts private. Do they have any sense of the hopelessly overwhelming volume of data we already collect? Even if we outlawed strong crypto and everyone put the NSA in their CC field and wrote in plain, clear English, the spooks' task of defeating terrorism with electronic intelligence would be all but impossible because there's just too much data, and all the meaningful data is probably too ambiguous to stand out.
I think the intelligence community hopes that they can use those rudimentary techniques like keyword searches for a 90% solution. But do you think the terrorists are going to enter their real names and addresses when they sign up for Hotmail accounts? Are they going to spell out their plans in absolutely clear detail using those lovely government-sanctioned crypto programs, now New & Improved with Key Recovery! [After all, who are you going to call if you lose your keys???] No, they'll make their deadly points in completely innocuous language, under names like Fred and Sam and James. Assuming some minimal shared secrets between two or more parties (i.e. we're going to crash an airplane into a building), subsequent communications can be filled with meaning but appear totally innocuous:
"We're booked on flight 1234 to San Francisco this Tuesday for our presentation. Let's meet at 7:45 in the food court of terminal A to discuss the specifics of our pitch. If everything goes well, we'll also make presentations in New York and Washington."
"Okay, great, see you then. Don't forget to bring the visual aids. We want our presentation to make an impact! I understand that Max and Jim have arranged for the A/V equipment to be set up before we arrive for the presentation."
At my last company, I was responsible for cutting down on the volume of warez transmission and storage on our free service. Our traffic was only a small rivulet in a churning global sea of data but there was no way we could keep up. Abusive traffic was obvious at a glance but there was so much of it, we could only use crude, automatic filters to deal with the obvious offenders. To think that big brother's giant electronic ear will solve any problem -- that they will deduce every hidden shade of meaning and get the "inside joke" -- is folly. We had terabytes of data flowing through our system -- nice, neat, clean digital data -- and we were overwhelmed. We weren't even trying to deal with messy data like telephone audio. How many phone calls do we make in this country on an average day? How many are made throughout the world? How are they going to sift through all that data to find that needle in the haystack in time to save the day?
There's no way to stuff the encryption cat back in the bag, so it's high time for the intelligence community to drop their focus on the high tech toys and focus on human intelligence, just like regular cops. Regular cops deal with shady informants, they go undercover to infiltrate gangs and drug cartels and so on. Maybe the CIA and the NSA could partner up with some local cops to learn about good, old-fashioned footwork.
I wonder whether the Justice Department will punish Lego for failing to uphold the spirit of the DMCA.
This goes to show that Lego is not only a cool toy, but a cool company too! I certainly hope that the authors of these great add-ons (in particular, LegOS) will accept this graciously-extended olive branch and find a compromise that suits everyone. Today I could really live with a world that's more friendly and less confrontational.
It's a pity that these issues so readily escalate to acrimonious exchanges and legal threats -- witness the current legal woes facing amdzone.com. Again, my commendation to Lego for taking the high road. May they enjoy continued healthy sales and goodwill with their enthusiast community.
I suspect we already have 90% of the pieces in place for fully automated takeoff, flight and landing of commercial airliners. I've wondered for years why we don't install a hijacking duress switch in the plane that would:
* Release a potent, fast-acting sleep gas
* Lock out all internal controls completely
* Autonomously land the plane at the nearest satisfactory airport, perhaps with rudimentary guidance from the nearest control tower
In any case, our antiquated flight telemetry and control systems should be improved along the way. It's surprising that we couldn't even be sure what had become of the missing planes, or which planes had crashed, until the smoke cleared.
I am still in shock, and my sympathies go out to those traumatized by this cruel tragedy. Let's all hope for brighter days ahead.
> "Jesus, how many different types of cars do we need?"
People gripe about SUVs all the time. So in that light, why are we pigging up the world with cycle and memory guzzling, unreliable garbage like Windows? Save the planet -- stop using MS!