It'd be a bit more believable if they weren't just a startup.
Indeed. I'm just surprised that you haven't voiced your (usually quite loud) opinion on the issue.:-)
I mean, heck - mining ore for return to Earth is itself hugely problematic.
I personally think that mining asteroids would be more profitable, with a Mars colony serving just a support role. However, I don't think the costs of transportation are quite as high as we've been lead to believe. Scientists just aren't thinking creatively enough!:-)
Consider for a moment, what's the escape velocity of Mars? 4.1km/s? That's damn near the velocity of Project HARP, and definitely within the velocity capabilities of existing mass drivers! So launching raw materials from Mars *could* be done cheaply.
The next problem is that of reaching Earth from Low Mars Orbit. How in the world are we going to get all those materials from Mars to Earth on the cheap? Using a Hohmann transfer, it would take 6.1km/s just to get to Low Earth Orbit! Of course, why would anyone want to waste 6.1km/s, when you could use ION engines to accelerate the cargo to less than 0.9km/s, then pick up the Interplanetary Superhighway?
Once the highway dumps you back into Earth orbit, you merely need to deccelerate into the Earth's atmosphere. (I don't have a quick answer for this Delta-V, sorry.) An inexpensive, ablative epoxy/resin shield could be used for this stage, or some loss to the cargo could be accepted.
The cargo engines would then pickup Mars-bound cargo and hop back on the highway for a return trip!
I need to crunch some numbers on this, but it would be VERY cheap in comparison to most existing return models. And once the materials became valuable *in orbit* as opposed to being returned to the Earth, then the entire economic model could become highly profitable.:-)
I don't think you're actually disagreeing with me, just expanding. What I said was not that we didn't have the technology to go there (we've got lotsa' technology) but rather that no infrastructure exists to produce the technology.
For example, if you want to purchase a NERVA engine, who can you get one from? The closest thing is the TRITON engine from Pratt & Whitney, but they'd need a minimum order before they build you even one.
Who can I get airtight, inflatible habitats from? Especially habitats that can survive in low pressure, high stress situations? The closest thing there is Bigelow's work, which is also not compeleted.
Where do you get the Space Suits from? Do you purchase them from NASA?
Where do you get the interplanetary rocketry from? All the current rockets are for lifting into LEO and/or sending small probes on an interplanetary cruise.
Where does one purchase an automated, portable nuclear powerplant that can withstand extreme conditions?
All of the technology has been researched, but no infrastructure exists to produce it. And if 4Frontiers can't rely on other companies for the components they need, then they'll have to build them themselves. Are they prepared to do work into propulsion, nuclear reactors, inflatible modules, mass electrolysis equipment, portable mining equipment, new building materials/techniques, etc., etc., etc.?
Until I see signs that they are ready to take on this challenge, I'm afraid that they'll be nothing more than one more pipedream company that promised big and failed to deliver.
Perhaps the biggest space story of the week, and you've only got in two jokes and no serious posts. You're usually all over this stuff! You're not losing your touch, are you?;-)
Now getting on and off of Mars is the most expensive part. Yet at 4.1 km/s, it's far from unachievable. Because of the way that rocket engines work, the greater the Delta-V that is required, the more expensive the rocket must be. Since the delta-v for Low Mars Orbit is a bit more than half that of Earth. So it is quite feasible that existing rocketry could be used at a far lower cost.
Once in LMO, things become quite inexpensive. A Delta-V of 0.9km/s is all that's required to reach Phobos. With that tiny amount of Delta-V (which can be cheaply obtained via the use of ION engines), the spacecraft could pick up a ride on the Interplanetary Superhighway. This transfer orbit would allow the craft to get its cargo to Earth on little more than station keeping fuel.
Once at Earth, the cargo could then be decelerated and dropped into the ocean, riding atop a simple, mass produced, heat shield. The epoxy solutions used in the capsules should work extremely well and would be inexpensive to mass produce. The cargo craft could then boost itself back to the Superhighway (again with inexpensive ION engines) and repeat the process. Things become even more efficient when cargo is sent both ways.
A more in-depth analysis would be required to determine the precise craft and materials necessary to turn a profit, but it certainly *is* doable with modern technology. And with a colony on Mars, we could support Asteriod mining, a far more profitable venture.
As the old saying goes, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Still, it's nice to see someone attempting to hold to their dreams. And I'd dearly love to believe that they will carry out such dreams. Unfortunately, I (and many others here) understand what a massive undertaking it is to reach Mars at all, much less place a settlement there. Nearly every company in existance bases itself on existing infrastructures. This company would be able to leverage very little infrastructure, if any at all! (Especially if they chose to use the wealth of undeveloped space technology.)
I'd love to see their breakdown of exactly how they plan to make this mission happen, and on what buget they think they're going to acheive it on. Will they use existing rocketry technology, or will they develop their own? What are the precise economic goals? Will they be relying on any other efforts (e.g. the CEV) to achieve their goals? Just how do they think they're going to get approval for nuclear propulsion? (See the Jobs page under Engineering.) Do they have any experience in these areas, or are they making it up as they go?
No. There are far too many variables to count for me to take this on face value. There simply isn't enough info. Perhaps others could shed some light on their long-term plans?
Update: It looks like the partly plan to make their money by building the technological infrastructure themselves. According to this document, they feel that they could be turning a $29.7 million dollar profit by 2010, 15 years before they establish their settlement! This document supposedly shows their plan of attack, but it seems so preliminary that it suggests that the company plans to make it up as they go along.
Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development.
That kind of destroys the entire point of a break island.:-)
Let me put it this way: It should have been replaced due to its age in relation to the maturity of the newer versions available. Especially when compared with the insecurity of the old version vs. the proven security of the new version.
Uh, yeah. Expect that 3.0 has been the recommended replacement for nearly 10 years now. So in this case, it SHOULD have been replaced due to its age, not to mention its insecurity.
Ooo! You're right! We better tell people to stop using RSA and HTTP immediately!
Be careful about such sweeping statements, please. They're more often wrong that right. And I know of quite a few people who are happy that RSA is finally out of patent protection.:-)
In theory, it shouldn't break anything. SSL 2.0 is so old that it should have gone the way of the Dodo bird. The point of removing 2.0 from Firefox is to force an upgrade by anyone who might be lame enough to still be running such old and insecure technology.
Kudos on finally bringing Slashcode into the 21st century! The Slashdot style over on Slashcode looks absolutely wonderful, with none of the chunky layout problems that plague Slashdot itself! What I'd love to know is, how much bandwidth are you saving by using CSS? Many of the experiments done to date suggest that you could cut your bandwith usage by 30-50%! Will this update usher in a new era of faster page loading? Inquiring minds want to know!:-)
Besides being trolled, point 1 is factually incorrect. The use of GPL or LGPL doesn't matter in the case of GCC, because the output of GPLed programs is not covered by the GPL. Only if your code links to GCC or some other (L)GPL package will the GPL be invoked. Here's the relevant section of the GPL:
The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program).
Not quite. It was a bit more complicated than that. Net/1 and Net/2 (the later being fairly complete) was a version of 4.3 BSD that was free from licensing issues with USL. Supposedly that's what triggered the lawsuit.
4.4 was the branch that split into the Lite and Encumbered branches. Most BSD development from that time has progressed from the BSD-Lite branch.
What most people think of when they think of 4.4 as being the first unencumbered version is that the settlement with USL explicitly protected users who used 4.4 and higher.
If you want to get *really* technical, we're both wrong. The BSD kernel in Mach 2.5 (and in XNU) is neither above nor below the Mach portion. Rather, it's one kernel with some services handled by Mach and some by BSD. In the original design (according to the sources I've read) pretty much the entire BSD 4.2 kernel was linked in with the Mach IPC structuring. The result was that it was an even bigger monolithic kernel than before, but with support for micro-kernel extensions. Mach also added a more powerful scheduling system utilizing threads as well as processes.
20 years later, you can see practically the exact same structure in XNU.
The reason why I say that Mach is a super-kernel is that it was theoretically portable to other kernel structures. The end goal was to kick the regular kernel services upstairs, but until 3.0, it just sort of attached directly to whatever kernel it was linked with.
What isn't clear to me is, did NeXT or Apple ever upgrade to the 3.0 Mach kernel then overhaul it, or did they stick with the higher performance 2.5 series and hedge their monolithic bets?:-)
Really, squigglesquish. That post is just *bad*. (Not to mention quite offensive to quite a few different groups.)
If you want to pull the analogies trick, then let's at least get *one* right (the car reference). If a mechanic sees that he's getting low voltage in the car immediately after installing a battery, doesn't it make sense to try a different battery? If a different battery has the same problem, then you can safely eliminate the battery as the cause.
No, they *think* the problem is threads. As another poster pointed out they're still plenty clueless about what's actually going on. Until they elminate a few more factors (such as software that doesn't work), they might as well make completely wild guesses.
What I know for sure is that Apple has a bridge in their compiler that allows for Java, C, and C++ to all link against ObjC. AFAI knew, all the kits were ObjectiveC code. Of course, I could be wrong about that part (wouldn't be the first time).:-)
Either way, Apple certainly goes out of their way to bring an ObjC "flavor" to their driver kits. Oh, and their documentation for the IOKit is *terrible*. At least in the Jaguar documentation I have on my laptop.:-)
s/used the BSD 4.3 and 4.4 kernels/used the BSD 4.2 and 4.3 kernels/g
The earlier versions of Mach required a Unix license to experiment with, while the later versions were completely free thanks to the 4.3 version being completely free from USL source.
More info on the Mach kernel (and why it was actually not a good implementation) here. Note that the OS X XNU kernel has been changed to eliminate the most problematic performance issues.
The problem is that this correction is still wrong. OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel.
Better, but still imprecise. The Mach kernel isn't actually a full kernel. It's a super-kernel on top of a traditional Unix kernel. For testing, the Mach research project used the BSD 4.3 and 4.4 kernels as the basis for the Mach code. By the time of Rhapsody (later OS X), however, BSD 4.x was an extremely old codebase and was in dire need of updating. So Apple did what any smart programmer would do. They grabbed the most recent evolution of the kernel source (FreeBSD) and used that as the core.
That being said, the FreeBSD part doesn't do a whole hell of a lot. Apple has mostly replaced the traditional Unix bits with NextStep Frameworks. The advantage to these frameworks is that they're much more object oriented and easier to work with than their rather primitive ancestors. The downside is that these frameworks are written in ObjectiveC, which means fun times for driver writers.:-/
And none of that changes that fact that MySQL has problems on the Mac. If you know it has problems, then why continue beating a dead horse? If you want to test MySQL again, fine. But get another application for testing in there that isn't screwed up!
I was referring to the bug in MySQL, not the Mac. The Mac's behavior is correct. That's why PostgreSQL works fine. MySQL relied on Linux-specific behavior, and got burned.:-/
In their docs they point out exactly how to stop this, it's just that mysql obviously made the decision that data integrity is more valuable then speed.
Just be glad that we get secure data out of MySQL at all. Last time I tried to install MySQL on my Mac, there were big warning signs all over the place saying, "The Mac is buggy, your data is not safe! Run away, run away!" Of course, then an Apple guy stepped up and pointed out the fact that fsync worked exactly as it should, and that MySQL needed to fix their code. They've changed the code for better data security, but AFAIK they still haven't optimized for "correct" data integrity behavior.
Oh, and OS X's task switcher sucks
Amen. Drives me nuts, too, because the FreeBSD switcher really wasn't that bad. Here's hoping that Apple gets that fixed one of these days.
Why, oh why, do they insist on MySQL? They state in the article that they learned of the FSync bug in MySQL (which many of us pointed to last time). Why don't they throw PostgreSQL in there and see how it performs?
Yeah, clearly we, the un-civilized non-Americans can't have such laws.
Probably the most enlightening comment I ever heard about Europe vs. US freedoms was in a discussion about the speed cameras in Britain. Now Britian is generally considered a *very* free country, and is actually the very basis for the US system of law. However, one gentleman made the comment that he was surprised that no British equivalent of a redneck had taken a gun to a few of those cameras. To which it was replied that it was not generally legal in Britain for citizens to own handguns.
I can't speak for all US readers, but I was rather shocked by this statement. In the US we take for granted the rights we have, and we seem to assume that they extend to other "free" countries simply because they have followed our example. But this simply isn't true, and "freedom" means different things to different systems of law.
The US system may be seen as "less efficient" and "screwed up" by our European brothers, but at times like this I realize just how free we actually are.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be a bit more believable if they weren't just a startup.
:-)
:-)
:-)
Indeed. I'm just surprised that you haven't voiced your (usually quite loud) opinion on the issue.
I mean, heck - mining ore for return to Earth is itself hugely problematic.
I personally think that mining asteroids would be more profitable, with a Mars colony serving just a support role. However, I don't think the costs of transportation are quite as high as we've been lead to believe. Scientists just aren't thinking creatively enough!
Consider for a moment, what's the escape velocity of Mars? 4.1km/s? That's damn near the velocity of Project HARP, and definitely within the velocity capabilities of existing mass drivers! So launching raw materials from Mars *could* be done cheaply.
The next problem is that of reaching Earth from Low Mars Orbit. How in the world are we going to get all those materials from Mars to Earth on the cheap? Using a Hohmann transfer, it would take 6.1km/s just to get to Low Earth Orbit! Of course, why would anyone want to waste 6.1km/s, when you could use ION engines to accelerate the cargo to less than 0.9km/s, then pick up the Interplanetary Superhighway?
Once the highway dumps you back into Earth orbit, you merely need to deccelerate into the Earth's atmosphere. (I don't have a quick answer for this Delta-V, sorry.) An inexpensive, ablative epoxy/resin shield could be used for this stage, or some loss to the cargo could be accepted.
The cargo engines would then pickup Mars-bound cargo and hop back on the highway for a return trip!
I need to crunch some numbers on this, but it would be VERY cheap in comparison to most existing return models. And once the materials became valuable *in orbit* as opposed to being returned to the Earth, then the entire economic model could become highly profitable.
I don't think you're actually disagreeing with me, just expanding. What I said was not that we didn't have the technology to go there (we've got lotsa' technology) but rather that no infrastructure exists to produce the technology.
For example, if you want to purchase a NERVA engine, who can you get one from? The closest thing is the TRITON engine from Pratt & Whitney, but they'd need a minimum order before they build you even one.
Who can I get airtight, inflatible habitats from? Especially habitats that can survive in low pressure, high stress situations? The closest thing there is Bigelow's work, which is also not compeleted.
Where do you get the Space Suits from? Do you purchase them from NASA?
Where do you get the interplanetary rocketry from? All the current rockets are for lifting into LEO and/or sending small probes on an interplanetary cruise.
Where does one purchase an automated, portable nuclear powerplant that can withstand extreme conditions?
All of the technology has been researched, but no infrastructure exists to produce it. And if 4Frontiers can't rely on other companies for the components they need, then they'll have to build them themselves. Are they prepared to do work into propulsion, nuclear reactors, inflatible modules, mass electrolysis equipment, portable mining equipment, new building materials/techniques, etc., etc., etc.?
Until I see signs that they are ready to take on this challenge, I'm afraid that they'll be nothing more than one more pipedream company that promised big and failed to deliver.
Perhaps the biggest space story of the week, and you've only got in two jokes and no serious posts. You're usually all over this stuff! You're not losing your touch, are you? ;-)
Never underestimate the economics of scale.
For reference, here's the Delta-V chart that I'll be referencing.
Now getting on and off of Mars is the most expensive part. Yet at 4.1 km/s, it's far from unachievable. Because of the way that rocket engines work, the greater the Delta-V that is required, the more expensive the rocket must be. Since the delta-v for Low Mars Orbit is a bit more than half that of Earth. So it is quite feasible that existing rocketry could be used at a far lower cost.
Once in LMO, things become quite inexpensive. A Delta-V of 0.9km/s is all that's required to reach Phobos. With that tiny amount of Delta-V (which can be cheaply obtained via the use of ION engines), the spacecraft could pick up a ride on the Interplanetary Superhighway. This transfer orbit would allow the craft to get its cargo to Earth on little more than station keeping fuel.
Once at Earth, the cargo could then be decelerated and dropped into the ocean, riding atop a simple, mass produced, heat shield. The epoxy solutions used in the capsules should work extremely well and would be inexpensive to mass produce. The cargo craft could then boost itself back to the Superhighway (again with inexpensive ION engines) and repeat the process. Things become even more efficient when cargo is sent both ways.
A more in-depth analysis would be required to determine the precise craft and materials necessary to turn a profit, but it certainly *is* doable with modern technology. And with a colony on Mars, we could support Asteriod mining, a far more profitable venture.
As the old saying goes, "if it's too good to be true, it probably is."
Still, it's nice to see someone attempting to hold to their dreams. And I'd dearly love to believe that they will carry out such dreams. Unfortunately, I (and many others here) understand what a massive undertaking it is to reach Mars at all, much less place a settlement there. Nearly every company in existance bases itself on existing infrastructures. This company would be able to leverage very little infrastructure, if any at all! (Especially if they chose to use the wealth of undeveloped space technology.)
I'd love to see their breakdown of exactly how they plan to make this mission happen, and on what buget they think they're going to acheive it on. Will they use existing rocketry technology, or will they develop their own? What are the precise economic goals? Will they be relying on any other efforts (e.g. the CEV) to achieve their goals? Just how do they think they're going to get approval for nuclear propulsion? (See the Jobs page under Engineering.) Do they have any experience in these areas, or are they making it up as they go?
No. There are far too many variables to count for me to take this on face value. There simply isn't enough info. Perhaps others could shed some light on their long-term plans?
Update: It looks like the partly plan to make their money by building the technological infrastructure themselves. According to this document, they feel that they could be turning a $29.7 million dollar profit by 2010, 15 years before they establish their settlement! This document supposedly shows their plan of attack, but it seems so preliminary that it suggests that the company plans to make it up as they go along.
Did you read the next sentence?
:-)
Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development.
That kind of destroys the entire point of a break island.
Let me put it this way: It should have been replaced due to its age in relation to the maturity of the newer versions available. Especially when compared with the insecurity of the old version vs. the proven security of the new version.
Happy?
Uh, yeah. Expect that 3.0 has been the recommended replacement for nearly 10 years now. So in this case, it SHOULD have been replaced due to its age, not to mention its insecurity.
Ooo! You're right! We better tell people to stop using RSA and HTTP immediately!
:-)
Be careful about such sweeping statements, please. They're more often wrong that right. And I know of quite a few people who are happy that RSA is finally out of patent protection.
In theory, it shouldn't break anything. SSL 2.0 is so old that it should have gone the way of the Dodo bird. The point of removing 2.0 from Firefox is to force an upgrade by anyone who might be lame enough to still be running such old and insecure technology.
CmdrTaco? I have exactly two words for you.
:-)
This. Rocks.
Kudos on finally bringing Slashcode into the 21st century! The Slashdot style over on Slashcode looks absolutely wonderful, with none of the chunky layout problems that plague Slashdot itself! What I'd love to know is, how much bandwidth are you saving by using CSS? Many of the experiments done to date suggest that you could cut your bandwith usage by 30-50%! Will this update usher in a new era of faster page loading? Inquiring minds want to know!
Thank you, please drive through.
Not quite. It was a bit more complicated than that. Net/1 and Net/2 (the later being fairly complete) was a version of 4.3 BSD that was free from licensing issues with USL. Supposedly that's what triggered the lawsuit.
4.4 was the branch that split into the Lite and Encumbered branches. Most BSD development from that time has progressed from the BSD-Lite branch.
More Info Here
What most people think of when they think of 4.4 as being the first unencumbered version is that the settlement with USL explicitly protected users who used 4.4 and higher.
If you want to get *really* technical, we're both wrong. The BSD kernel in Mach 2.5 (and in XNU) is neither above nor below the Mach portion. Rather, it's one kernel with some services handled by Mach and some by BSD. In the original design (according to the sources I've read) pretty much the entire BSD 4.2 kernel was linked in with the Mach IPC structuring. The result was that it was an even bigger monolithic kernel than before, but with support for micro-kernel extensions. Mach also added a more powerful scheduling system utilizing threads as well as processes.
:-)
20 years later, you can see practically the exact same structure in XNU.
The reason why I say that Mach is a super-kernel is that it was theoretically portable to other kernel structures. The end goal was to kick the regular kernel services upstairs, but until 3.0, it just sort of attached directly to whatever kernel it was linked with.
What isn't clear to me is, did NeXT or Apple ever upgrade to the 3.0 Mach kernel then overhaul it, or did they stick with the higher performance 2.5 series and hedge their monolithic bets?
Really, squigglesquish. That post is just *bad*. (Not to mention quite offensive to quite a few different groups.)
If you want to pull the analogies trick, then let's at least get *one* right (the car reference). If a mechanic sees that he's getting low voltage in the car immediately after installing a battery, doesn't it make sense to try a different battery? If a different battery has the same problem, then you can safely eliminate the battery as the cause.
No, they *think* the problem is threads. As another poster pointed out they're still plenty clueless about what's actually going on. Until they elminate a few more factors (such as software that doesn't work), they might as well make completely wild guesses.
What I know for sure is that Apple has a bridge in their compiler that allows for Java, C, and C++ to all link against ObjC. AFAI knew, all the kits were ObjectiveC code. Of course, I could be wrong about that part (wouldn't be the first time). :-)
:-)
Either way, Apple certainly goes out of their way to bring an ObjC "flavor" to their driver kits. Oh, and their documentation for the IOKit is *terrible*. At least in the Jaguar documentation I have on my laptop.
Gah, I knew I should have checked that:
s/used the BSD 4.3 and 4.4 kernels/used the BSD 4.2 and 4.3 kernels/g
The earlier versions of Mach required a Unix license to experiment with, while the later versions were completely free thanks to the 4.3 version being completely free from USL source.
More info on the Mach kernel (and why it was actually not a good implementation) here. Note that the OS X XNU kernel has been changed to eliminate the most problematic performance issues.
The problem is that this correction is still wrong. OS X has never been based on FreeBSD's kernel.
:-/
Better, but still imprecise. The Mach kernel isn't actually a full kernel. It's a super-kernel on top of a traditional Unix kernel. For testing, the Mach research project used the BSD 4.3 and 4.4 kernels as the basis for the Mach code. By the time of Rhapsody (later OS X), however, BSD 4.x was an extremely old codebase and was in dire need of updating. So Apple did what any smart programmer would do. They grabbed the most recent evolution of the kernel source (FreeBSD) and used that as the core.
That being said, the FreeBSD part doesn't do a whole hell of a lot. Apple has mostly replaced the traditional Unix bits with NextStep Frameworks. The advantage to these frameworks is that they're much more object oriented and easier to work with than their rather primitive ancestors. The downside is that these frameworks are written in ObjectiveC, which means fun times for driver writers.
Uh, no. My point was not PostgreSQL specifically, but rather that MySQL doesn't work so why not try something that does?
MySQL has its uses, but if it's broke, either fix it or try something else.
And none of that changes that fact that MySQL has problems on the Mac. If you know it has problems, then why continue beating a dead horse? If you want to test MySQL again, fine. But get another application for testing in there that isn't screwed up!
It's not a bug.
:-/
I was referring to the bug in MySQL, not the Mac. The Mac's behavior is correct. That's why PostgreSQL works fine. MySQL relied on Linux-specific behavior, and got burned.
In their docs they point out exactly how to stop this, it's just that mysql obviously made the decision that data integrity is more valuable then speed.
Just be glad that we get secure data out of MySQL at all. Last time I tried to install MySQL on my Mac, there were big warning signs all over the place saying, "The Mac is buggy, your data is not safe! Run away, run away!" Of course, then an Apple guy stepped up and pointed out the fact that fsync worked exactly as it should, and that MySQL needed to fix their code. They've changed the code for better data security, but AFAIK they still haven't optimized for "correct" data integrity behavior.
Oh, and OS X's task switcher sucks
Amen. Drives me nuts, too, because the FreeBSD switcher really wasn't that bad. Here's hoping that Apple gets that fixed one of these days.
Why, oh why, do they insist on MySQL? They state in the article that they learned of the FSync bug in MySQL (which many of us pointed to last time). Why don't they throw PostgreSQL in there and see how it performs?
Yeah, clearly we, the un-civilized non-Americans can't have such laws.
Probably the most enlightening comment I ever heard about Europe vs. US freedoms was in a discussion about the speed cameras in Britain. Now Britian is generally considered a *very* free country, and is actually the very basis for the US system of law. However, one gentleman made the comment that he was surprised that no British equivalent of a redneck had taken a gun to a few of those cameras. To which it was replied that it was not generally legal in Britain for citizens to own handguns.
I can't speak for all US readers, but I was rather shocked by this statement. In the US we take for granted the rights we have, and we seem to assume that they extend to other "free" countries simply because they have followed our example. But this simply isn't true, and "freedom" means different things to different systems of law.
The US system may be seen as "less efficient" and "screwed up" by our European brothers, but at times like this I realize just how free we actually are.