If the Clinton Administration had really been as slick as some liked to claim, Linda Tripp wouldn't have lasted two days in the White House after the '93 Inauguration, much less long enough to make a name for someone.
The work you're looking for is unethical, not slick. Unethical behavior is not to be rewarded or admired.
Yes, I said TREASON and you need to hear it. This action is treasonous and your support for it is treasonous. This Administration is working hard to overthrow the rule of law and the principles of democracy and the Constitution. If that's not treason, I don't know what is. The Congress and the President represent all of their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them. Discrimination because someone excercised their right to support and vote for whom they please is an affront to democracy and American values.
Go look inside yourself and ask what kind of America you want to live in. One where you have to toe the party line? Or one where we're all adult enough to realize that we don't all agree on everything but we can still work together and respect each other.
If you have an American flag or anything with an American flag you should get it out of your house because you don't deserve to possess one.
The thing that bothers me about books like the Honor Harrington series is that they show a lack of critical thinking and a lack of appreciation for the numbers involved. I'm continuing on with this discussion in the hopes that perhaps I will spark some critical thinking within you and other readers of this silly thread.
As for your quote, if I remember correctly that quote was about the state of interstellar warfare prior to Basilisk Station. Basilisk was the first novel and many of the tactics talked about in it have changed as weapon systems have advanced such as the introduction of missle pod carriers and the LAC carriers which are roughly analagous to the introduction of aircraft carriers.
You said previously:
Again, the books never claim that rolling the ship was a guaranteed method of blocking a missle.
So sorry, that quote essentially said it. In any case, no one had thought of dispersing their fleet "vertically" for hundreds of years and firing missiles from different angles? Stupid history in the story is still stupid.
One of the problems with Weber's books is that he likes to have BIG things but then forgets just how damn big they are (he shows this in many of his books, not just the Honor Harrington books). The energies and velocities involved are immense. IMMENSE. Googling through On Basilisk Station again, there's mention of a missile that can accelerate at about 800 km/s^2 for around a minute. That's 800,000 m/s^2 or about 8000 G's. A powered launch tube will make an infinitesimal difference in its delta/v. The launch tube can only accelerate while the missile is in the tube. Assume a launch tube that is 100 meters long and an acceleration of 8000 G's. (You might be able to accelerate it faster but you'd have to build the missile awfully tough. Current technology has produced railguns that can accelerate the projectile at 250,000 G's. However, that's only 16 grams of solid something. Missiles in Honor Harrington are big fat things) In order to work with numbers we can understand easily I'm going to focus on the number of seconds of accelerationthat we have. So, in terms of seconds of acceleration, how much impulse is that launch tube going to give us? Going back to high school physics we can see that the time (t) to cover a distance d (starting with a velocity of 0) at constant acceleration a is:
t = sqrt(2d/a)
So, give 2 * 100 m/(800000m/s^2) = 1/4000 s^2, take the square root, gives us about.01 seconds in the tube, vs 60 seconds of acceleration that the missile can produce.
Let's even try it at 250,000 G's!
250000G's = 2,500,000m/s^2, or 2 * 100m/2500000m/s^2) 1/25000s^2 or.006 seconds, which would give you a velocity of 2,500,000m/s^2*.006s = 15000 m/s or about.018 seconds of acceleration at 8000 G's.
Hmmm...powered launch tubes that have to be slowly reloaded or banks of launch cells along the side of the ship that could be fired quickly? Having the missile change course vs the direction it's ejected from the ship is a trivial amount of delta-v. This is true even for today's missiles, which is why you see modern naval ships using vertical launch cells rather than missile launchers that can be swiveled. Where you will be using up your delta-v is in changing the velocity vector that the ship had.
The initial velocity vector is why, even if all of the things you said were correct, the maneuver wouldn't be "crossing the T" but something more like "threatening to cross". The best time to fire missile would be long before you actually crossed the enemy's line. Why? The missiles, when launched, will have your forward velocity. Because ships and missiles travel at similar velocities (not accelerations - velocities. Ships accelerate at a lesser rate but a much longer time than missiles) your forward velocity would be pretty major relative to the missiles' available delta/v. If you launch as you cross the T, the missiles wil
Weber never claims that by simply rolling the ships that they are always impervious to damage, such a stance would indeed be absurd as no vessel would ever take any damage so why have a battle anyway?
You might try reading the books yourself. From On Basilisk Station (and thank you, Baen.com for putting it on online):
It also meant that deep-space battles had a nasty tendency to end in tactical draws, however important they might be strategically. When one fleet realized it was in trouble, it simply turned its ships up on their sides, presenting only the impenetrable aspects of its individual units' impeller wedges, while it endeavored to break off the action. The only counter was a resolute pursuit, but that, in turn, exposed the unguarded frontal arcs of the pursuers' wedges, inviting raking fire straight down their throats as they attempted to close. Cruiser actions were more often fought to the finish, but engagements between capital ships all too often had the formalism of some intricate dance in which both sides knew all the steps.
So, yeah, Weber realized that this tactic in his "Honorverse" would make a lot of battles moot. Unfortunately the tactic doesn't make any sense. The only way in which such a tactic of "turning the ships up on their sides" would work is if the opposing force were lined up in the same plane.
I'm sorry, the books are stupid. I had heard a lot about Honor Harrington and was looking forward to a fun read but this tactic is so stupid that I couldn't suspend my disbelief and enjoy the novels. The stupidity is so central to all of their tactics that it's just not fun.
There's also talk in one of the other novels of "crossing the T". This is a classic maneuver with battleships where you have two lines of battleships crossing at (more or less) right angles. The line "crossing" the T has all of their batteries unmasked to the side and can bring all of their guns to bear on the enemy. The line that is crossed only has their frontal batteries available and is hence at a disadvantage.
This makes no sense with (a) guided missiles, (b) warships in free flight that could stop accelerating and turn as necessary to unmask batteries and (c) warships manuevering in 3 dimensions that would not be in a line. You'll note that this tactic has not even been used in ocean warfare since WWI thanks to things like aircraft and guided missles.
Most missles do not have the fuel for sustained maneuvers and usually end up on balistic courses by the time they lock onto their targets, which is why sometimes a ship is able to roll and interpose their impenetrable gravity bands rather than the weeker sidewalls.
It's STUPID. This would assume that only one missle is on course for the ship or they're all in a plane. Were you to have shields of this nature the obvious tactic would be to fire a spread of missles which would maneuver (before running out of fuel) such that they come at the target from multiple angles. Or, if you have multiple ships firing together, you would disperse them vertically relative to the enemy such that their missles came in at different angles to the target.
I did read the books and they were stupid. David Weber's books may be entertaining but technically accurate they are not. They fall into that category of books that throw lots of technical terms around to SEEM accurate but are not.
No aces up the sleeve. I used to work for a supercomputer manufacturer back in the late 80's. Supercomputers got run over by the "Attack of the Killer Micros" (as Eugene Miya used to say). You have to look at the amount of money that's being put into R&D.
Intel is spending way more money (today) than any supercomputer manufacturer can possibly afford to. Back in the 80's it was possible (not easy, but possible) to wire up discrete components into fast processors. The Cray-1 had a 10ns clock - or 100 MHz. It's not possible to build a multi-GHz processor without having in a single chip. Designing and producing high-performance processors is extremely expensive and needs fairly large production runs to support the amount of R&D needed.
So, modern supercomputer manufacturers are not making their own processors, etc. but instead concentrating on things like high-performance interconnects and other clever ways to harness large arrays of commodity processors. Any secret government projects that were outperforming Intel/AMD would have to be putting equivalent amounts of $$ (billions) into R&D and it's kind of hard to hide that much money flowing around.
PLEASE...with the special shields where by "flipping on their sides" they can block incoming missiles?!?!? As though everything is stuck in a 2-dimensional plane - I guess the man never saw Star Trek 2.
Reverse engineering a private protocol, using tools provided under the condition that the product not be reverse engineered is a totally different ball of wax.
How about reverse-engineering SMB? Prior to about 1996 Microsoft did not publish any specs on SMB. I attended the first CIFS conference (where they started to publish the SMB specification) and there were still large parts of the protocol not publicly specified (they weren't even internally specified!!). If I remember right, Tridgell attended that conference as well, at MS' invitation.
This makes no sense. The Tokyo system was put in its current form by American planners after we defeated Japan in WWII - who used the NYC system as a model.
But, strangely, the Tokyo subway system works and the NYC does not. As you said earlier:
we wait for trains, miss express connections, clog stations. The uncertainty keeps many people using cars and taxis
The only complaints I hear about the trains here are that they're crowded. Most other Japanese cities don't have that problem and the trains run to schedule there as well. Most Tokyo residents disdain cars, taxis and buses when they need to be someplace on time.
New Yorkers would resist the rush-hour hand-packing of passengers by platform workers that Tokyo passengers accept.
This is absolutely true. However, the reason for the "packers" (which are only at a few of the most crowded stations, not every station) is to get the butts of people who insisted on boarding overcrowded trains inside so the doors can close. Americans won't pack in that tight so there's no need for packers in the first place. If anything they slow the process of boarding.
As trains begin to run behind, people jam up at the platforms, take longer to board and make the train later. It sounds like NYC would benefit a lot from the opposite of packers, some workers on the platform to stop people from boarding late and holding up the trains.
And publishing the realtime "schedule" of actual trains would let people distribute the work for our individual schedules,
That's great when you don't have to be anywhere on time and you're just looking 5 minutes ahead. If you're trying to make an appointment or if your job requires you to arrive at a certain time it certainly doesn't let you make your plans in advance. The amount of "slack" that I have to plan into my appointments in Tokyo is much less.
without the overhead of a central schedule which invariably underserves some people all the time.
Any shared system is going to underserve some people some of the time. I'm talking about scheduling the trains, not scheduling people. How does the current system serve you better?
I live in Tokyo. We have a funny thing called a schedule that is posted at the platform. In order to find out how long you have to wait for the next train you can look at the schedule and then look at your watch. The schedule does not change frequently. Trains typically arrive *exactly* on time (at least to the minute). The trains (with the exception of one line) are run manually. Another poster was talking about figuring out which car to be in to be close to the stairways at the station he's getting off at. We have charts posted in the subway here that tell you what car you should be in to be next to the exits when you get off at station X.
If the Japanese can do it, why can't Americans? Maybe Mussolini made a trip over here prior to WW II. Oh, and the train lines turn a profit as well.
But most of all, my impression is that if you're using the Cocoa libraries and the Java language, you have more or less given up all the benefits of the Java platform (such as the ability to write platform-independent apps)
Depends on how you code things. We have a fairly large app written in Cocoa/Java and if you work to abstract things out a bit you can cut the amount of OS X specific code down quite a bit. For example, we have a GUI that runs under Cocoa and Swing. By factoring the code properly (Model-View-Controller) the Cocoa specific part is about 10% of the GUI code.
If you're not planning to run on anything other than OS X, though, I'd say that the pain of trying to use Java is about equal to the pain of using Objective-C.
Prior art challenges can go back to the applicant who can then put together a rebuttal. They want the patent, let them do the work. Also, more money will go to the patent lawyers, so this proposal is sure to be adopted!
I used to do supercomputer stuff back in the early '90s. We were distributing large amounts (100's of amps) of 5V and 12V power throughout the machine and we wound up with bus bars (that is, solid, large, pieces of copper) for moving it around. High amperage (regardless of voltage) means you need big conductors. That little skinny wire coming out of your external power supply won't move more than a few amps. Ideally the battery would take in high voltage, low amperage for the quick charge but that's probably not realistic.
It's not the JVM so much (though the OSS versions are a bit lacking there). It's the class libraries. Java has a very large and functional set of class libraries. If they're not available Java by itself is not terribly interesting. GNU has the GNU Classpath project which has been muddling along for a long time to recreate all of these libraries.
What upkeep? There's no upkeep on patents. If this were what MS was planning to do with the patent we would have heard plenty from their PR machine about how wonderful they were.
The best disk failure ever was on my high school's PDP 11/70 (back about 1985). The disk drive for the machine was a 60 MB (yes, megabyte) RM03 which is a removable pack drive. That is, you can open up the lid and take the actual platters out and swap in a different set. This thing is about the size of a washing machine. While not nearly of the tolerances of today's disk drives, it is still a precision piece of macinery and had a lot of filters to remove dust.
The student operator decided that he wanted to show his girlfriend how the disk worked so he spun down the disk, popped the lid and then held down the lid closed detector and spun the disk back up again. The result, of course, was an immediate head crash as soon as the heads tried to load. Oh, the joys of restoring from 9 track tape!
Pointless. Having your DNA at a crime scene only helps if then already know who you are and you are a suspect... they use it to confirm you are the bad guy. If they have no clue who you are, they can't use your DNA to find you.
Today - because the DNA database is relatively small. If they get everyone into the database it will become one of the first things they check.
Slashdot Mirror
If the Clinton Administration had really been as slick as some liked to claim, Linda Tripp wouldn't have lasted two days in the White House after the '93 Inauguration, much less long enough to make a name for someone.
The work you're looking for is unethical, not slick. Unethical behavior is not to be rewarded or admired.
Yes, I said TREASON and you need to hear it. This action is treasonous and your support for it is treasonous. This Administration is working hard to overthrow the rule of law and the principles of democracy and the Constitution. If that's not treason, I don't know what is. The Congress and the President represent all of their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them. Discrimination because someone excercised their right to support and vote for whom they please is an affront to democracy and American values.
Go look inside yourself and ask what kind of America you want to live in. One where you have to toe the party line? Or one where we're all adult enough to realize that we don't all agree on everything but we can still work together and respect each other.
If you have an American flag or anything with an American flag you should get it out of your house because you don't deserve to possess one.
The thing that bothers me about books like the Honor Harrington series is that they show a lack of critical thinking and a lack of appreciation for the numbers involved. I'm continuing on with this discussion in the hopes that perhaps I will spark some critical thinking within you and other readers of this silly thread.
.01 seconds in the tube, vs 60 seconds of acceleration that the missile can produce.
.006 seconds, which would give you a velocity of 2,500,000m/s^2*.006s = 15000 m/s or about .018 seconds of acceleration at 8000 G's.
As for your quote, if I remember correctly that quote was about the state of interstellar warfare prior to Basilisk Station. Basilisk was the first novel and many of the tactics talked about in it have changed as weapon systems have advanced such as the introduction of missle pod carriers and the LAC carriers which are roughly analagous to the introduction of aircraft carriers.
You said previously:
Again, the books never claim that rolling the ship was a guaranteed method of blocking a missle.
So sorry, that quote essentially said it. In any case, no one had thought of dispersing their fleet "vertically" for hundreds of years and firing missiles from different angles? Stupid history in the story is still stupid.
One of the problems with Weber's books is that he likes to have BIG things but then forgets just how damn big they are (he shows this in many of his books, not just the Honor Harrington books). The energies and velocities involved are immense. IMMENSE. Googling through On Basilisk Station again, there's mention of a missile that can accelerate at about 800 km/s^2 for around a minute. That's 800,000 m/s^2 or about 8000 G's. A powered launch tube will make an infinitesimal difference in its delta/v. The launch tube can only accelerate while the missile is in the tube. Assume a launch tube that is 100 meters long and an acceleration of 8000 G's. (You might be able to accelerate it faster but you'd have to build the missile awfully tough. Current technology has produced railguns that can accelerate the projectile at 250,000 G's. However, that's only 16 grams of solid something. Missiles in Honor Harrington are big fat things) In order to work with numbers we can understand easily I'm going to focus on the number of seconds of accelerationthat we have. So, in terms of seconds of acceleration, how much impulse is that launch tube going to give us? Going back to high school physics we can see that the time (t) to cover a distance d (starting with a velocity of 0) at constant acceleration a is:
t = sqrt(2d/a)
So, give 2 * 100 m/(800000m/s^2) = 1/4000 s^2, take the square root, gives us about
Let's even try it at 250,000 G's!
250000G's = 2,500,000m/s^2, or 2 * 100m/2500000m/s^2) 1/25000s^2 or
Hmmm...powered launch tubes that have to be slowly reloaded or banks of launch cells along the side of the ship that could be fired quickly? Having the missile change course vs the direction it's ejected from the ship is a trivial amount of delta-v. This is true even for today's missiles, which is why you see modern naval ships using vertical launch cells rather than missile launchers that can be swiveled. Where you will be using up your delta-v is in changing the velocity vector that the ship had.
The initial velocity vector is why, even if all of the things you said were correct, the maneuver wouldn't be "crossing the T" but something more like "threatening to cross". The best time to fire missile would be long before you actually crossed the enemy's line. Why? The missiles, when launched, will have your forward velocity. Because ships and missiles travel at similar velocities (not accelerations - velocities. Ships accelerate at a lesser rate but a much longer time than missiles) your forward velocity would be pretty major relative to the missiles' available delta/v. If you launch as you cross the T, the missiles wil
Actually, password12 is a completely possible password using their scheme.
Weber never claims that by simply rolling the ships that they are always impervious to damage, such a stance would indeed be absurd as no vessel would ever take any damage so why have a battle anyway?
You might try reading the books yourself. From On Basilisk Station (and thank you, Baen.com for putting it on online):
It also meant that deep-space battles had a nasty tendency to end in tactical draws, however important they might be strategically. When one fleet realized it was in trouble, it simply turned its ships up on their sides, presenting only the impenetrable aspects of its individual units' impeller wedges, while it endeavored to break off the action. The only counter was a resolute pursuit, but that, in turn, exposed the unguarded frontal arcs of the pursuers' wedges, inviting raking fire straight down their throats as they attempted to close. Cruiser actions were more often fought to the finish, but engagements between capital ships all too often had the formalism of some intricate dance in which both sides knew all the steps.
So, yeah, Weber realized that this tactic in his "Honorverse" would make a lot of battles moot. Unfortunately the tactic doesn't make any sense. The only way in which such a tactic of "turning the ships up on their sides" would work is if the opposing force were lined up in the same plane.
I'm sorry, the books are stupid. I had heard a lot about Honor Harrington and was looking forward to a fun read but this tactic is so stupid that I couldn't suspend my disbelief and enjoy the novels. The stupidity is so central to all of their tactics that it's just not fun.
There's also talk in one of the other novels of "crossing the T". This is a classic maneuver with battleships where you have two lines of battleships crossing at (more or less) right angles. The line "crossing" the T has all of their batteries unmasked to the side and can bring all of their guns to bear on the enemy. The line that is crossed only has their frontal batteries available and is hence at a disadvantage.
This makes no sense with (a) guided missiles, (b) warships in free flight that could stop accelerating and turn as necessary to unmask batteries and (c) warships manuevering in 3 dimensions that would not be in a line. You'll note that this tactic has not even been used in ocean warfare since WWI thanks to things like aircraft and guided missles.
Most missles do not have the fuel for sustained maneuvers and usually end up on balistic courses by the time they lock onto their targets, which is why sometimes a ship is able to roll and interpose their impenetrable gravity bands rather than the weeker sidewalls.
It's STUPID. This would assume that only one missle is on course for the ship or they're all in a plane. Were you to have shields of this nature the obvious tactic would be to fire a spread of missles which would maneuver (before running out of fuel) such that they come at the target from multiple angles. Or, if you have multiple ships firing together, you would disperse them vertically relative to the enemy such that their missles came in at different angles to the target.
I did read the books and they were stupid. David Weber's books may be entertaining but technically accurate they are not. They fall into that category of books that throw lots of technical terms around to SEEM accurate but are not.
No aces up the sleeve. I used to work for a supercomputer manufacturer back in the late 80's. Supercomputers got run over by the "Attack of the Killer Micros" (as Eugene Miya used to say). You have to look at the amount of money that's being put into R&D.
Intel is spending way more money (today) than any supercomputer manufacturer can possibly afford to. Back in the 80's it was possible (not easy, but possible) to wire up discrete components into fast processors. The Cray-1 had a 10ns clock - or 100 MHz. It's not possible to build a multi-GHz processor without having in a single chip. Designing and producing high-performance processors is extremely expensive and needs fairly large production runs to support the amount of R&D needed.
So, modern supercomputer manufacturers are not making their own processors, etc. but instead concentrating on things like high-performance interconnects and other clever ways to harness large arrays of commodity processors. Any secret government projects that were outperforming Intel/AMD would have to be putting equivalent amounts of $$ (billions) into R&D and it's kind of hard to hide that much money flowing around.
PLEASE...with the special shields where by "flipping on their sides" they can block incoming missiles?!?!? As though everything is stuck in a 2-dimensional plane - I guess the man never saw Star Trek 2.
They didn't publish CIFS until 1996 or 1997.
Reverse engineering a private protocol, using tools provided under the condition that the product not be reverse engineered is a totally different ball of wax.
How about reverse-engineering SMB? Prior to about 1996 Microsoft did not publish any specs on SMB. I attended the first CIFS conference (where they started to publish the SMB specification) and there were still large parts of the protocol not publicly specified (they weren't even internally specified!!). If I remember right, Tridgell attended that conference as well, at MS' invitation.
This makes no sense.
The Tokyo system was put in its current form by American planners after we defeated Japan in WWII - who used the NYC system as a model.
But, strangely, the Tokyo subway system works and the NYC does not. As you said earlier:
we wait for trains, miss express connections, clog stations. The uncertainty keeps many people using cars and taxis
The only complaints I hear about the trains here are that they're crowded. Most other Japanese cities don't have that problem and the trains run to schedule there as well. Most Tokyo residents disdain cars, taxis and buses when they need to be someplace on time.
New Yorkers would resist the rush-hour hand-packing of passengers by platform workers that Tokyo passengers accept.
This is absolutely true. However, the reason for the "packers" (which are only at a few of the most crowded stations, not every station) is to get the butts of people who insisted on boarding overcrowded trains inside so the doors can close. Americans won't pack in that tight so there's no need for packers in the first place. If anything they slow the process of boarding.
As trains begin to run behind, people jam up at the platforms, take longer to board and make the train later. It sounds like NYC would benefit a lot from the opposite of packers, some workers on the platform to stop people from boarding late and holding up the trains.
And publishing the realtime "schedule" of actual trains would let people distribute the work for our individual schedules,
That's great when you don't have to be anywhere on time and you're just looking 5 minutes ahead. If you're trying to make an appointment or if your job requires you to arrive at a certain time it certainly doesn't let you make your plans in advance. The amount of "slack" that I have to plan into my appointments in Tokyo is much less.
without the overhead of a central schedule which invariably underserves some people all the time.
Any shared system is going to underserve some people some of the time. I'm talking about scheduling the trains, not scheduling people. How does the current system serve you better?
I live in Tokyo. We have a funny thing called a schedule that is posted at the platform. In order to find out how long you have to wait for the next train you can look at the schedule and then look at your watch. The schedule does not change frequently. Trains typically arrive *exactly* on time (at least to the minute). The trains (with the exception of one line) are run manually. Another poster was talking about figuring out which car to be in to be close to the stairways at the station he's getting off at. We have charts posted in the subway here that tell you what car you should be in to be next to the exits when you get off at station X.
If the Japanese can do it, why can't Americans? Maybe Mussolini made a trip over here prior to WW II. Oh, and the train lines turn a profit as well.
But most of all, my impression is that if you're using the Cocoa libraries and the Java language, you have more or less given up all the benefits of the Java platform (such as the ability to write platform-independent apps)
Depends on how you code things. We have a fairly large app written in Cocoa/Java and if you work to abstract things out a bit you can cut the amount of OS X specific code down quite a bit. For example, we have a GUI that runs under Cocoa and Swing. By factoring the code properly (Model-View-Controller) the Cocoa specific part is about 10% of the GUI code.
If you're not planning to run on anything other than OS X, though, I'd say that the pain of trying to use Java is about equal to the pain of using Objective-C.
Sell your liver
Prior art challenges can go back to the applicant who can then put together a rebuttal. They want the patent, let them do the work. Also, more money will go to the patent lawyers, so this proposal is sure to be adopted!
What have you done this century?
Who the hell wants his house walls built only from concrete ??
Someone who can't afford a house?
AWWWWWWWWWW
How is a Mac mini going to help me?
By keeping you from the dark side?
I used to do supercomputer stuff back in the early '90s. We were distributing large amounts (100's of amps) of 5V and 12V power throughout the machine and we wound up with bus bars (that is, solid, large, pieces of copper) for moving it around. High amperage (regardless of voltage) means you need big conductors. That little skinny wire coming out of your external power supply won't move more than a few amps. Ideally the battery would take in high voltage, low amperage for the quick charge but that's probably not realistic.
It's not the JVM so much (though the OSS versions are a bit lacking there). It's the class libraries. Java has a very large and functional set of class libraries. If they're not available Java by itself is not terribly interesting. GNU has the GNU Classpath project which has been muddling along for a long time to recreate all of these libraries.
What upkeep? There's no upkeep on patents. If this were what MS was planning to do with the patent we would have heard plenty from their PR machine about how wonderful they were.
The best disk failure ever was on my high school's PDP 11/70 (back about 1985). The disk drive for the machine was a 60 MB (yes, megabyte) RM03 which is a removable pack drive. That is, you can open up the lid and take the actual platters out and swap in a different set. This thing is about the size of a washing machine. While not nearly of the tolerances of today's disk drives, it is still a precision piece of macinery and had a lot of filters to remove dust.
The student operator decided that he wanted to show his girlfriend how the disk worked so he spun down the disk, popped the lid and then held down the lid closed detector and spun the disk back up again. The result, of course, was an immediate head crash as soon as the heads tried to load. Oh, the joys of restoring from 9 track tape!
Pointless. Having your DNA at a crime scene only helps if then already know who you are and you are a suspect... they use it to confirm you are the bad guy. If they have no clue who you are, they can't use your DNA to find you.
Today - because the DNA database is relatively small. If they get everyone into the database it will become one of the first things they check.
You're posting on /. - YES!