What Telecom fails to recognise is that these people are pushing the envelope of what the Internet can do, and will drive the technology economy in years to come."
Everybody wants advancement, but many want it to come at other's expense. Corporations are no different, particularly when they plan to make money through a competing business plan.
It made me wonder whether we're becoming a self-appointed nation of commandos, or whether that was someone with simply way too much time and money on his hands.
Well, there *is* a million-dollar reward for Usama bin Laden...
No matter how often I see it, I cannot help but be amazed at the stupidity of artists. I cannot help but be amazed at how inane they can be, and how, at the same time they are most inane, insipid or vulgar, they pretend to be clever or sophisticated. They argue and argue that freedom of speech is good for society, that liberty improves humanity, that society advances through uninhibited art, but then they spend their time producing the most disgusting, wretched, filthy, deranged mess they can, and many of them hope they can get public funding for doing it. Every time something like this comes up, I can't help but think of a university art gallery that I visited, in which the first display case inside the entrance showed a book, a fictional story about an animated piece of human excrement. The art community is not about art; it's about spoiled brats misbehaving to get attention!
Here's a great line from the article:
"I like imagining that somebody looking for something is suddenly projected into a completely different area."
That is so brilliant! I've *NEVER* seen a search engine do that before this guy started his project! Maybe he should get a patent on it?!
It is argued that the 1st Amendment protects the general exchange of information. This case appears to argue from this general principle that not only can people exchange information, but the use of that information in the execution of a crime is also protected. It seems to me that discovering that a person suspected of a crime had learned how to commit the crime is a justifiable pursuit of law enforcement. If a suspect having no previous training is suspected of poisoning another person, it should be relevant that the suspect had immediately prior learned how to poison someone. Likewise, if a suspect with no prior training had been found to have learned how to make bombs immediately prior to being the suspect in a bombing, it should be relevant information for a court. In a contemporary example, the fact that some suspects with no previous training had immediately prior to hijacking several jets taken several months of flight school, it would seem relevant legal information. So, it should be relevant that a suspect in a case of illegal drug manufacture had immediately prior bought a book on illegal drug manufacturing. I do not see how the right to exchange information can prohibit the legal system from learning the connection between a suspect and the source of information in a relevant case.
Here's a copy of the e-mail I sent to the guy in the story:
Hi, Matt,
I bet you are going to get lots of people telling you they have done something similiar as you did; taking photos practically every foot of a long trip. I know I can relate! I bought a digital camera in March 2000, and, since then, I've taken about 5000 pictures. When I flew from Dallas, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I constantly took pictures, often in rapid shot mode. I often joked that I must have take a picture of every mile between Dallas and Albuquerque. I wasn't being serious, but now I see you are!
My co-workers often kid me about my picture taking. One of the women at work came in one morning and said that she had parked next to my pickup truck. She said, "I assumed it was your truck; I don't know anyone else who would have a camera tripod in the passenger seat." I take pictures when I'm driving, when I'm bicycling and when I'm walking. Some day, I'd like to create a virtual world of all these photos, so that people could see what different places are like.
A few weeks ago, my camera stopped working, and I had to send it in to the factory (I'm using an Olympus C-3040, now). One of the managers at the gym asked me where my camera was. My dentist asked me where my camera was. My co-workers asked me where my camera was. Everyone knows that I don't go anywhere without my camera. Another manager at the gym managed to tell me with a straight face, "I think everyone should do that."
The first year (actually, 9 months), I put all my pictures from the year on a CD that I gave to my family members. I wasn't able to fit them all the second year. Oddly enough, no one seemed terribly upset when I failed to send out my CD the second year.
One of the nice things about the C-3040 is that it can take short movies. I like to drive around Texas, taking 1-minute movies. I can fit four of them on a 128-Meg card. Even before I bought a digital camera, before I moved to Dallas, I had the dream of outfitting my car with cameras, so that I could capture all the crazy things that people do in traffic. I was working as a newspaper deliveryman at the time, driving 100 miles a day across a town that is only about 15 miles wide, so I saw lots of crazy driving. I regret that I've captured so little of it in photos. My latest in-my-head design would use 3 cameras, each pointed out in a circle, and mounted on my truck's roof, to capture 360 degrees of craziness.
(There is another guy, I think he is in Louisiana or Georgia, who also tries to take pictures of crazy drivers. He also has his camera mounted on a tripod in the passenger seat of his car. I had my dream before I saw his work, but he had his set up before I got mine set up. He has many of his traffic pictures on a Web page.)
Good luck on your picture taking. I think, though, that you would be better switching to digital...
The magnet in a speaker, unless it's the size of a small asteroid, won't magically erase your drives. This is a common misconception. It's not the presence of the magnetic field itself, but a very specific oscillation in the magnetic field, at microscopic distances, which can alter data on a hard disk platter. Floppies are only slightly more vulnerable.
I found an interesting Web page that might shed some light on the use of magnetic fields to erase magnetic media:
"It is important to note that the US Government guidelines class tapes of 350 Oe coercivity or less as low-energy or Class I tapes and tapes of 350-750 Oe coercivity as high-energy or Class II tapes. Degaussers are available for both types of tapes. Tapes over 750 Oe coercivity are referred to as Class III, with no known degaussers capable of fully erasing them being known, since even the most powerful commercial AC degausser cannot generate the recommended 7,500 Oe needed for full erasure of a typical DAT tape currently used for data backups."
Typical Media Coercivity Figures
Medium Coercivity
5.25" 360K floppy disk 300 Oe 5.25" 1.2M floppy disk 675 Oe 3.5" 720K floppy disk 300 Oe 3.5" 1.44M floppy disk 700 Oe 3.5" 2.88M floppy disk 750 Oe 3.5" 21M floptical disk 750 Oe Older (1980's) hard disks 900-1400 Oe Newer (1990's) hard disks 1400-2200 Oe 1/2" magnetic tape 300 Oe 1/4" QIC tape 550 Oe 8 mm metallic particle tape 1500 Oe DAT metallic particle tape 1500 Oe
"Do You Know What's Left On Your Disk? 'Data Remanence'" http://rr.sans.org/covertchannels/rem anence.php
Couldn't he claim he was soliciting work while being on TV? That has to beat putting a "Job wanted - mows lawns, watches TV, eats chips, washes cars" ad in the local paper.
No; neither method you gave is acceptable for the purposes of collecting Unemployment Insurance. In order to be eligible for UI, the applicant must submit the names and addresses of each potential employer that he *individually* contacted. He actually has to show up at the potential employer's location; he cannot claim *any* employers simply by placing an ad in the newspaper. IIRC, merely mailing a resume is not acceptable, either.
Now, wait a second - if this is true, and the atom holds together, you could step down to any arbatrary lighter element (and create very odd isotopes, since you'd have loads of neutrons sitting in a suddenly much "lighter" atom).
I'm not sure what you mean by "lighter elements." Hydrogen is the lightest element--technically, a proton is a hydrogen nuclei and a proton and an electron is an electrically neutral hydrogen atom (atomic hydrogen). Due to some quantum effect, protons like having 2 electrons in the inner-most orbital (the s orbital), so two hydrogen atoms will usually share their lone electrons, forming molecular hydrogen. If you like, you can stick a neutron or two onto the proton, and produce hydrogen isotopes, but that isn't necessary to make a hydrogen atom. Helium, however, needs neutrons to be stable.
Zephram Cochran will not invent a faster-than light engine. He will invent a engine that
approaches the speed of light.... Pluto and back in 1 hour!
Although one should note that it takes light 4 hours to get to Pluto from Earth, or nearly 8.5 hours round-trip. (Just for reference, it takes light only 8 minutes, 18 seconds to go from Sun to Earth.)
i'm really curious as to what particles CAN be ejected. Look at it mathimatically (-1) and (+1) equal O so if you take a -H and a +H you get no matter... but the law of conservation of matter and energy states that your matter must go somewere.. into entrgy.. so lots of energy cuz its 100% conversion from matter to energy
Electrons and positrons annihilate neatly into pure photons, but protons and anti-protons produce several other sub-particles, in addition to gamma rays.
if it were cool enough, they could easily store the antimatter since (IIRC) at really really low temperatures it would not interact with regular matter.
A hydrogen bubble chamber is full of liquid hydrogen matter, maintained cryogenically. The bubble chamber is used to observe sub-atomic decay and interactions, including those of matter-anti-matter interactions.
"In September 1995, Prof. Walter Oelert and an international team from Jülich IKP-KFA, Erlangen-Nuernberg University, GSI Darmstadt and Genoa University succeeded for the first time in synthesising atoms of antimatter from their constituent antiparticles."
But then, your damn religion is more important then people's lives.
I clicked on vandan's Slashdot user info (#151516), and found a list of his recent posts. Here is a direct quote from one of his posts:
"Natural selection will breed out HARMFUL mutations in the population, but what about POSITIVE mutations. There is such a thing. Rare, yes. But they do exist. How do you think we evolved out of the nothing?"
You were right; his belief is damnable. But, I suspect you did not know his belief is evolution, and vandan is an evolutionist. Here is an example of evolutionists blaming Creationists for stupid things that evolutionists say. When an evolutionist says something stupid (a la vandan), other evolutionists claim the first guy wasn't really an evolutionist, or he would not have said something stupid about evolution. You can search my talk.origins posts to find examples of evolutionists making these accusations.
Surely that's the area that would give rise to mutants if something in the process went wrong
What is the big deal you people have about mutants?! You talk as if a mutant is super-powered; they aren't! Mutants *die*! Get it? They are less-fit; they can't compete as well; *they die off*. Didn't they teach you that much in Biology? Wait, no, of course not; Biology teaches about mutation producing new life-forms, not reality.
What it doesn't mention is that radiation doesn't ALWAYS cause sterilisation - just usually. Sometimes it causes cancer. Sometimes it alters strands of DNA in eggs / sperm. And sometimes fish are born with 2 heads...
Animals have been born with extreme birth defects for about as long as animals have been reproducing, and that includes two-headed fish (and snakes and other animals). The important point is, these animals are less-successful at reproducing than normal animals. That is the ultimate goal in this program.
You would be happier if you didn't apply B-movies to real life.
Assuming that the sterilization isn't 100% effective, a few of them could reproduce with very f*cked up dna sequences.
... and that would do what? 99.999% of the time, messed up DNA sequences make a species *less* environmentally-fit, or has only a neutral effect. However, even that is moot, considering that the flies are easily made infertile. FYI, this isn't the first time this procedure has been used (the first time was, IIRC, in the 1950s).
I believe this would work similar to the sterilization programs used with screwworms
Hey! You aren't supposed to know about that; this thread is for computer geeks who only *think* they understand biology! Any comment about the fly-eradication program that was successfully used in Texas several decades ago, and has been used successfully in many other places around the world, is off-topic.
The main flaw in Cringley's argument is that Apple would not even be alive today without Microsoft's direct financial support (remember those millions that MS gave to Apple when Apple was about to go bankrupt a few years ago?). Indeed, Microsoft has always been the main vendor for Apple software (probably a large part of the reason that MS bailed out Apple--MS desires to keep that market segment alive, so that MS can sell its software to them). Now, Microsoft has always tried to kill competition, going to extremes to do so. It would not take extremes to kill Apple. So, the chances of Apple even attempting to compete with MS, much less being successful at the attempt, are very low.
As for Cringley's question, "Haven't we seen this before," the answer is, "Yes; it was called BeOS." BeOS was basically Apple's OS for the Intel. That's not to say that Be couldn't have done a better job, but the point remains that we have already seen an example of the attempt.
More to the point, this laser works where there are no clouds, that is, at high altitudes.
There is not enough energy in the beam to punch through the aerosol droplets of water in clouds. It is necessary to have a clear line of sight.
Technically, it isn't the power that is the most important consideration, but the wavelength. Ideally, the wavelength needs to be 10 times longer than the diameter of the droplets, for maximum penetration. That pretty much means microwave, rather than near-IR.
Second, lasers are VERY dangerous to use when there is a clear line of sight. The people at whom the U.S. government is shooting may have a mirror.
Most likely, that would not help the target defend itself. Mirrors behave differently at different wavelengths. In order to reflect the most light, the target would need to use mirrors constructed specifically for the wavelength of light they wish to reflect. The most reflective mirrors available commercially are dielectric mirrors, which tend to be transparent to several wavelengths outside the design range. Metal-based mirrors are rarely more than 98% reflective, and that remaining 2% gets converted into heat in the mirror, which is sufficient to destroy the mirror at high power (imagine a spray of molten metal). And, if the target might have a mirror, why couldn't the source also have a mirror?
Remember, corner cubes are mirrors that automatically aim back exactly along the direction of the arriving beam. They don't need to be pointed. There are no moving parts. They work at the speed of light.
The quality of the reflected beam (and, thus, the effectiveness of the reflected beam) depends on the quality of the corner reflector (both the individual mirrors and the alignment of those mirrors with each other). Can you guess who would make the better mirror; the U.S., or some faction hiding in a cave? Furthermore, all beams diverge; by the time the reflected beam has returned to its target, it would have lost twice as much as it had lost on the way to the corner reflector.
Third, powerful chemical lasers are very big and bulky weapons. They are also very expensive. Those who have the mental illness that makes them want to kill people like to try different methods. However, there may come a time when the citizens of the U.S. decide that they don't want to use their hard-earned money to support the activities of sick people.
As opposed to the citizens of various Moslem nations, who don't mind using their money to support mentally-warped zealots? I'm glad the U.S. military is developing better weapons.
Fourth, this laser is just one of many, many weapons designed by the U.S. government. It is a lot like angry children playing. They don't really care if the weapon is used, or who it is used to kill.
They are used to kill lethal threats to the citizens of the United States. That is sufficient.
They have never learned adult responsibility.
Unlike people who fly hijacked aircraft into buildings? Or, people who detonate bombs in restaurants full of unarmed civilians? Or, people who ambush and kill car-loads and bus-loads full of unarmed civilians? As far as I'm concerned, the U.S. can kill as many of those terrorists as weaponry permits.
They are mentally bound to their infantile conflict and have never learned to see other people as beings like themselves.
You are mentally bound to your infantile philosophy, and have never learned what people are.
It just confuses the issues when people assume that the U.S. government has some kind of healthy rationality about weapons.
The U.S. weapon rationality is working pretty well at the moment. Maybe that's what bothers you?
Cringley is admitting to violating FCC regulations, tresspassing, and theft of service
What FCC law do you believe Cringley violated? I don't see that he broke any FCC rule or law.
Cringley also made it clear that he has paid for all the bandwidth he is using. Indeed, he has been paying for service that he hasn't been using.
Tresspassing is a possibility, but the land could have been public.
I think the most likely legal violation would be building a structure without a permit, or something similar. The Bureau of Land Use would have more to say.
Re:I hate to rain on Mr Cringely's parade, but...
on
Cringely's Bank Shot
·
· Score: 1
You're the type of person who calls the cops on the local pirate radio station, aren't you?
You would rather he call the fire department, after burning it down?
The beaurcrats have already given this technology their blessing
A more worrisome problem, one that Cringley mentioned, is the land use. My brief Google search found a reference to some BLM (Bureau of Land Use) stuff, including a reference that specifically says that development on Bennett and Taylor Mountains must be carefully restricted.
this is normal loss that's otherwise just bled off into the atmosphere
There is a difference between an induction coil and an antennae. The induction coil is magnetically coupled, whereas the antennae is not. The use of induction coils under a high voltage line puts a magnetic drag on the lines that would not otherwise exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody wants advancement, but many want it to come at other's expense. Corporations are no different, particularly when they plan to make money through a competing business plan.
Well, there *is* a million-dollar reward for Usama bin Laden...
Here's a great line from the article:
"I like imagining that somebody looking for something is suddenly projected into a completely different area."
That is so brilliant! I've *NEVER* seen a search engine do that before this guy started his project! Maybe he should get a patent on it?!
It is argued that the 1st Amendment protects the general exchange of information. This case appears to argue from this general principle that not only can people exchange information, but the use of that information in the execution of a crime is also protected. It seems to me that discovering that a person suspected of a crime had learned how to commit the crime is a justifiable pursuit of law enforcement. If a suspect having no previous training is suspected of poisoning another person, it should be relevant that the suspect had immediately prior learned how to poison someone. Likewise, if a suspect with no prior training had been found to have learned how to make bombs immediately prior to being the suspect in a bombing, it should be relevant information for a court. In a contemporary example, the fact that some suspects with no previous training had immediately prior to hijacking several jets taken several months of flight school, it would seem relevant legal information. So, it should be relevant that a suspect in a case of illegal drug manufacture had immediately prior bought a book on illegal drug manufacturing. I do not see how the right to exchange information can prohibit the legal system from learning the connection between a suspect and the source of information in a relevant case.
Here's a copy of the e-mail I sent to the guy in the story:
Hi, Matt,
I bet you are going to get lots of people telling you they have done something similiar as you did; taking photos practically every foot of a long trip. I know I can relate! I bought a digital camera in March 2000, and, since then, I've taken about 5000 pictures. When I flew from Dallas, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I constantly took pictures, often in rapid shot mode. I often joked that I must have take a picture of every mile between Dallas and Albuquerque. I wasn't being serious, but now I see you are!
My co-workers often kid me about my picture taking. One of the women at work came in one morning and said that she had parked next to my pickup truck. She said, "I assumed it was your truck; I don't know anyone else who would have a camera tripod in the passenger seat." I take pictures when I'm driving, when I'm bicycling and when I'm walking. Some day, I'd like to create a virtual world of all these photos, so that people could see what different places are like.
A few weeks ago, my camera stopped working, and I had to send it in to the factory (I'm using an Olympus C-3040, now). One of the managers at the gym asked me where my camera was. My dentist asked me where my camera was. My co-workers asked me where my camera was. Everyone knows that I don't go anywhere without my camera. Another manager at the gym managed to tell me with a straight face, "I think everyone should do that."
The first year (actually, 9 months), I put all my pictures from the year on a CD that I gave to my family members. I wasn't able to fit them all the second year. Oddly enough, no one seemed terribly upset when I failed to send out my CD the second year.
One of the nice things about the C-3040 is that it can take short movies. I like to drive around Texas, taking 1-minute movies. I can fit four of them on a 128-Meg card. Even before I bought a digital camera, before I moved to Dallas, I had the dream of outfitting my car with cameras, so that I could capture all the crazy things that people do in traffic. I was working as a newspaper deliveryman at the time, driving 100 miles a day across a town that is only about 15 miles wide, so I saw lots of crazy driving. I regret that I've captured so little of it in photos. My latest in-my-head design would use 3 cameras, each pointed out in a circle, and mounted on my truck's roof, to capture 360 degrees of craziness.
(There is another guy, I think he is in Louisiana or Georgia, who also tries to take pictures of crazy drivers. He also has his camera mounted on a tripod in the passenger seat of his car. I had my dream before I saw his work, but he had his set up before I got mine set up. He has many of his traffic pictures on a Web page.)
Good luck on your picture taking. I think, though, that you would be better switching to digital...
Sincerely,
Richard Alexander
The magnet in a speaker, unless it's the size of a small asteroid, won't magically erase your drives. This is a common misconception. It's not the presence of the magnetic field itself, but a very specific oscillation in the magnetic field, at microscopic distances, which can alter data on a hard disk platter. Floppies are only slightly more vulnerable.
m anence.php
I found an interesting Web page that might shed some light on the use of magnetic fields to erase magnetic media:
"It is important to note that the US Government guidelines class tapes of 350 Oe coercivity or less as low-energy or Class I tapes and tapes of 350-750 Oe coercivity as high-energy or Class II tapes. Degaussers are available for both types of tapes. Tapes over 750 Oe coercivity are referred to as Class III, with no known degaussers capable of fully erasing them being known, since even the most powerful commercial AC degausser cannot generate the recommended 7,500 Oe needed for full erasure of a typical DAT tape currently used for data backups."
Typical Media Coercivity Figures
Medium Coercivity
5.25" 360K floppy disk 300 Oe
5.25" 1.2M floppy disk 675 Oe
3.5" 720K floppy disk 300 Oe
3.5" 1.44M floppy disk 700 Oe
3.5" 2.88M floppy disk 750 Oe
3.5" 21M floptical disk 750 Oe
Older (1980's) hard disks 900-1400 Oe
Newer (1990's) hard disks 1400-2200 Oe
1/2" magnetic tape 300 Oe
1/4" QIC tape 550 Oe
8 mm metallic particle tape 1500 Oe
DAT metallic particle tape 1500 Oe
"Do You Know What's Left On Your Disk? 'Data Remanence'"
http://rr.sans.org/covertchannels/re
No; neither method you gave is acceptable for the purposes of collecting Unemployment Insurance. In order to be eligible for UI, the applicant must submit the names and addresses of each potential employer that he *individually* contacted. He actually has to show up at the potential employer's location; he cannot claim *any* employers simply by placing an ad in the newspaper. IIRC, merely mailing a resume is not acceptable, either.
I'm not sure what you mean by "lighter elements." Hydrogen is the lightest element--technically, a proton is a hydrogen nuclei and a proton and an electron is an electrically neutral hydrogen atom (atomic hydrogen). Due to some quantum effect, protons like having 2 electrons in the inner-most orbital (the s orbital), so two hydrogen atoms will usually share their lone electrons, forming molecular hydrogen. If you like, you can stick a neutron or two onto the proton, and produce hydrogen isotopes, but that isn't necessary to make a hydrogen atom. Helium, however, needs neutrons to be stable.
Although one should note that it takes light 4 hours to get to Pluto from Earth, or nearly 8.5 hours round-trip. (Just for reference, it takes light only 8 minutes, 18 seconds to go from Sun to Earth.)
Electrons and positrons annihilate neatly into pure photons, but protons and anti-protons produce several other sub-particles, in addition to gamma rays.
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad12no v97_1.htm
A hydrogen bubble chamber is full of liquid hydrogen matter, maintained cryogenically. The bubble chamber is used to observe sub-atomic decay and interactions, including those of matter-anti-matter interactions.
http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST200 1/bubblechambers/glug.pdf
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/msad12no v97_1.htm
"FIRST ATOMS OF ANTIMATTER PRODUCED AT CERN"
"In September 1995, Prof. Walter Oelert and an international team from Jülich IKP-KFA, Erlangen-Nuernberg University, GSI Darmstadt and Genoa University succeeded for the first time in synthesising atoms of antimatter from their constituent antiparticles."
http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/Releases96/PR01.96E AntiHydrogen.html
I clicked on vandan's Slashdot user info (#151516), and found a list of his recent posts. Here is a direct quote from one of his posts:
"Natural selection will breed out HARMFUL mutations in the population, but what about POSITIVE mutations. There is such a thing. Rare, yes. But they do exist. How do you think we evolved out of the nothing?"
You were right; his belief is damnable. But, I suspect you did not know his belief is evolution, and vandan is an evolutionist. Here is an example of evolutionists blaming Creationists for stupid things that evolutionists say. When an evolutionist says something stupid (a la vandan), other evolutionists claim the first guy wasn't really an evolutionist, or he would not have said something stupid about evolution. You can search my talk.origins posts to find examples of evolutionists making these accusations.
He probably believes that man arose from pre-human species; he's probably an evolutionist.
What is the big deal you people have about mutants?! You talk as if a mutant is super-powered; they aren't! Mutants *die*! Get it? They are less-fit; they can't compete as well; *they die off*. Didn't they teach you that much in Biology? Wait, no, of course not; Biology teaches about mutation producing new life-forms, not reality.
Animals have been born with extreme birth defects for about as long as animals have been reproducing, and that includes two-headed fish (and snakes and other animals). The important point is, these animals are less-successful at reproducing than normal animals. That is the ultimate goal in this program.
You would be happier if you didn't apply B-movies to real life.
Hey! You aren't supposed to know about that; this thread is for computer geeks who only *think* they understand biology! Any comment about the fly-eradication program that was successfully used in Texas several decades ago, and has been used successfully in many other places around the world, is off-topic.
As for Cringley's question, "Haven't we seen this before," the answer is, "Yes; it was called BeOS." BeOS was basically Apple's OS for the Intel. That's not to say that Be couldn't have done a better job, but the point remains that we have already seen an example of the attempt.
More to the point, this laser works where there are no clouds, that is, at high altitudes.
There is not enough energy in the beam to punch through the aerosol droplets of water in clouds. It is necessary to have a clear line of sight.
Technically, it isn't the power that is the most important consideration, but the wavelength. Ideally, the wavelength needs to be 10 times longer than the diameter of the droplets, for maximum penetration. That pretty much means microwave, rather than near-IR.
Second, lasers are VERY dangerous to use when there is a clear line of sight. The people at whom the U.S. government is shooting may have a mirror.
Most likely, that would not help the target defend itself. Mirrors behave differently at different wavelengths. In order to reflect the most light, the target would need to use mirrors constructed specifically for the wavelength of light they wish to reflect. The most reflective mirrors available commercially are dielectric mirrors, which tend to be transparent to several wavelengths outside the design range. Metal-based mirrors are rarely more than 98% reflective, and that remaining 2% gets converted into heat in the mirror, which is sufficient to destroy the mirror at high power (imagine a spray of molten metal). And, if the target might have a mirror, why couldn't the source also have a mirror?
Remember, corner cubes are mirrors that automatically aim back exactly along the direction of the arriving beam. They don't need to be pointed. There are no moving parts. They work at the speed of light.
The quality of the reflected beam (and, thus, the effectiveness of the reflected beam) depends on the quality of the corner reflector (both the individual mirrors and the alignment of those mirrors with each other). Can you guess who would make the better mirror; the U.S., or some faction hiding in a cave? Furthermore, all beams diverge; by the time the reflected beam has returned to its target, it would have lost twice as much as it had lost on the way to the corner reflector.
Third, powerful chemical lasers are very big and bulky weapons. They are also very expensive. Those who have the mental illness that makes them want to kill people like to try different methods. However, there may come a time when the citizens of the U.S. decide that they don't want to use their hard-earned money to support the activities of sick people.
As opposed to the citizens of various Moslem nations, who don't mind using their money to support mentally-warped zealots? I'm glad the U.S. military is developing better weapons.
Fourth, this laser is just one of many, many weapons designed by the U.S. government. It is a lot like angry children playing. They don't really care if the weapon is used, or who it is used to kill.
They are used to kill lethal threats to the citizens of the United States. That is sufficient.
They have never learned adult responsibility.
Unlike people who fly hijacked aircraft into buildings? Or, people who detonate bombs in restaurants full of unarmed civilians? Or, people who ambush and kill car-loads and bus-loads full of unarmed civilians? As far as I'm concerned, the U.S. can kill as many of those terrorists as weaponry permits.
They are mentally bound to their infantile conflict and have never learned to see other people as beings like themselves.
You are mentally bound to your infantile philosophy, and have never learned what people are.
It just confuses the issues when people assume that the U.S. government has some kind of healthy rationality about weapons.
The U.S. weapon rationality is working pretty well at the moment. Maybe that's what bothers you?
If you really want to know, here is a good explanation: http://www.lns.com/papers/FCCPart15_and_the_ISM_2. 4G_Band.index
What FCC law do you believe Cringley violated? I don't see that he broke any FCC rule or law.
Cringley also made it clear that he has paid for all the bandwidth he is using. Indeed, he has been paying for service that he hasn't been using.
Tresspassing is a possibility, but the land could have been public.
I think the most likely legal violation would be building a structure without a permit, or something similar. The Bureau of Land Use would have more to say.
You would rather he call the fire department, after burning it down?
A more worrisome problem, one that Cringley mentioned, is the land use. My brief Google search found a reference to some BLM (Bureau of Land Use) stuff, including a reference that specifically says that development on Bennett and Taylor Mountains must be carefully restricted.
http://ci.santa-rosa.ca.us/City_Hall/City_Council
There is a difference between an induction coil and an antennae. The induction coil is magnetically coupled, whereas the antennae is not. The use of induction coils under a high voltage line puts a magnetic drag on the lines that would not otherwise exist.