1> It's worth money. Why should MS get it for free just cuz you're a customer? They should pay you for the data. It must be worth money, cuz it must cost millions just to catch and cache all that data from 100,000,000s of MS boxen. 2> They'll eventually start using it RIAA style to attack "pirates" and "hackers". Given how often their WGA software ID's innocent people like you as having illegal copies, this is nothing but trouble for the customer. 3> Given how buggy MS S/W is anyway, how long before a phone home bug kills your box? While doing something that is completely useless to you? 4> How long until MS hands over (sells) this data to the Dept Homeland Perversity (KGB)? You wanna be the first one arrested using a sidewalk-sale-second-hand video card that some "terrorist" (MySpace.com user) got rid of? 5> Oooh, how about real cybercrime? What a plum target. Once a security hole is found in some BIOS or other tidbit, real cyber criminals could really use a database like this for finding victims. 6> While we're on the subject of "free money", is MS paying you for using your bandwidth to make money for them?
"Free" should cover *all* speech except threats and substantial disruptions of "the peace", i.e, don't yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Any constraint on other speech, including lies, means that the govt feels it is smarter than the citizenry at filtering out the noise from the signals. I'd suggest that our gov't's faux pas in filtering garbage from intel on wmd shows a lack of govt ability to discern truth and value in information. As soon as govt starts thinking in terms of "how far is too far", the govt has gone too far. The problem cited in the article is not with the speakers, it's with the listeners: A Yale law student tries to get a job, but prospective employers are believing things they read on the bathroom wall ^H^h^h^h internet. The problem isn't people speaking too freely. It's people listening too freely. And no amount of law blocking free speech can solve that problem.
with 50 billion bucks and a still-functioning business model to use in suing the world. M$ is so fricken big that one workable legal tactic is to hire all the best lawfirms so you can't get a good lawyer. I don't think he's blowing smoke as some have suggested. I really think M$ wants to sue anyone and everyone until they have finally broken Linux. M$'s real strategic difficulty is doing this without triggering antitrust actions, class action suits from competitors, a genuine revolt from other countries, the software industry,etc. Global-sized coordinated opposition is preventing M$ from launching RIAA-style attacks on the world. Oh, and one other thing is at least slowing them down: The complete and utter invalidity in any such claims.
A coupla years ago. The Linux distro on it was trashed - it had a Winmodem, no driver binary. There were Windows drivers sources on the CD, but uh..this is Linux, not Windows. Have no idea if the drivers matched the modem or not, or if they were complete. GCC was missing - no compiler at all on the CD. Also, the NIC card had no driver at all, even in source. I called tech support 2 or 3 times. Always got the same guy in India or Pakistan. He spent 30 miuntes or so trying to explain to me how to use Windows Explorer to look at network properties before I could get thru to him that the PC wasn't Windows. He said he'd have to talk to his supervisor and would call back. He did, after a few hours, and tried to explain how to download the drivers from the internet - the windows drivers, again using IE....it went on for a few more calls, finally he said he'd found some rpm's for me. He emailed them, the files were broken when they arrived. After that, he didn't answer calls. There is no way that PC configuration was tested before shipping. If WalMart is now partnering with MS (already a Linux enemy) to ship Linux, I'd be surprised if the box arrives with an actual computer inside.
So what happens when you send a pic to 911 of the cop about to bust yer chops for sending pics with yer cell phone? Fer some reason, I get mental images of cats with buttered toast strapped to their backs...
Duh. Normally, hay is not found in a bedroom in any sizeable quantities. Brick walls were used so the fire school didn't have to build a new house for every exercise. Hay was used to simulate the semi-dense fuels commonly found in houses, such as furniture, beds, etc. Hay is a more realistic simulation than gasoline, liquid oxygen, basalt, etc.
Where we once didn't have materials that could flash over in common use in the household...
Uh, talcum powder, wheat flour, any loose weave cloth used as wall hangings or bed linens, *sheet rock* (yup, get it hot enough, and it'll go up quite fwooshedly), Xmas trees, saw dust, in fact, anything that'll burn, if reduced to dust in the air, will flash over.
I trained in 1979ish and then they were teaching how to fight flashover. One exercise involved a fully-involved brick "bedroom". Flames were up to the ceiling and spread across the entire room. The test: Put out the fire with a 1-2 second wide spray from a 2 1/2 inch hose. That's about 10-20 gallons of water. The trick is don't spray the hay, spray the ceiling over the hay - that's where the heat is. This is opposed to the conventional technique of spraying "the base" of the fire. The near-explosive boiling of water to steam takes away a coupla hundred degrees of temprature, and the sudden increase in humidity reduces the flame potential of aerable fuels like cloth, blankets, hay, etc ("aerable" as opposed to dense fuels like solid wood). The snuff-out is impressive. I don't think the article is right about this being "new", although it's possible the info spread slowly in different regions.
Yes, we have. I've worked at NASA's training simulators since the ALT (Approach and Landing Tests) of Enterprise. I speak for myself, not for NASA or my employer. A human-rated system's safety is based on this primary rule: Don't prove it's unsafe - prove that it's safe. A good gov't management system's economics are based on this rule: Don't prove it'll work - prove that we MUST do it in order to achieve the mission. The shuttle is interfaced to the whole fricken universe in a way the PC in yer mom's basement never will be. Everything from clocks showing mission elapsed time to calculating orbits based on positions of Earth, Moon and sun, calculating doppler shift while radioing a TDRS satellite 15000 miles away and several thousands miles per hour delta velocity, etc.
Slashdotters love to roast any gov't waste of money - well here's one place the gov't DIDN'T waste money.
Remember - the shuttle talks to satellites, to ground radios, to MCC, to the ISS and Russian communications networks. All of the communications networks have to know exactly where two parties are when talking, and where the Earth itself is in its orbit around the sun. Doppler shift must be taken into account when radioing between all of these. Sure, year-end rollover is about 1-5 lines of code; how many places need that fix? This is just one example of why NASA decided it was easier to just wait a few days rather than test all of that stuff. A design limit made by rational cost-benefit analysis is not a bug in either code or design.
Yes, shuttle does support two robotic arms. The one used is the one that most people use - their right. Using a robotic arm, for a human, has the same "handedness" problems that using flesh-and-blood does. Something about the twixtears software, which is out of contract scope.
TFA carefully does NOT say that anything actually will fail, but that something might fail. Thank you, Fallon: your link (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff .html) is a good explanation. (However, the "on-board shuttle group" is actually called the "on-board systems group"). It's like this: A clock rollover (such as at midnight or the last day of the month or year) always sets something back to zero. That resetting is a risk: Is there something somewhere that doesn't take the rollover into account? It may be an obvious bug, or not so obvious - what if the problem is dynamic? For example, what if system A sends some data and rolls over, and system B rolls over and receives the data? Then it looks like stale data, but isn't. How do you test for dynamic conditions like this? Dodging this bullet is far, far cheaper than testing for it. The only time I know of that a shuttle flight software bug affected a flight was uh...STS 2 or 3 or thereabouts. The shuttle often flies an updated load on one or two of its computers before the load is installed on all of them. On this mission, a new load on one GPC dumped (crashed) at T -9 seconds or so, causing everything to shut down automatically. The shuttle launched a day or two later, after the new load was rolled back. Funny thing was, the same bug had occurred in the training simulators before launch, but was written off as a lack of fidelity of the simulator itself, not a bug in the flight software. After that, the astronauts really began to appreciate running the real GPCs with the real flight software in the simulators. PS: Although I work at NASA, this message is my own expression, and not that of NASA or my employer. I am a programmer only, not anyone with any kind of authority or insight except for my experiences here.
If the only data the RIAA had was a name, and they looked him up in the phone book to figure out who to sue, then they may actually have the wrong guy. Additionally, it depends on how the RIAA got the name in the first place. Did someone at an ISP look up at a log listing, type in the name from one record while meaning to get it from the line above or below? Etc, ETc. An incorrect name can be an indicator of a missed target; and given the RIAA's usual amount of air-tightness in their "evidence", it's not that far fetched. If the cops nabbed a guy for mugging an old lady, they'd probably have a lot more to go on than just a name to tag the accused to the crime. In that case, a name mispelling WOULD be a "technicality" that shouldn't be the only reason to set him free. The RIAA's interest in taking people to court has nothing to do with whether those they accuse are guilty - they're making their money cuz people roll over, guilty or not. So the RIAA has no reason to make sure they got the right guy - he'll probably roll over anyway, why bother?
One can only bring civil suit against another in good faith, that is, you have reason based on presentable facts, not suspicion, that your case has a chance of succeeding. The "presentable facts" must be evidence that can be used in trial. The facts do not have be complete, but they must reliably show a "tip of the iceberg" that you have been wronged. A screen print of files from someone's computer, even if the files are copies of songs you own the copyrights to, is NOT a presentable fact of wrongdoing *by anyone*. For example, as Wilke claims, the copies may be legally his thru purchase unknown to the RIAA. Unless the RIAA can show a judge that it has FACTual knowledge that those copies are almost certainly infringing, there is no presumption of guilt, and no case. An example of this would be if the copies were of songs that RIAA held rights to that had NEVER been released at all. Then finding the songs outside of the RIAA's vaults (or whereever they were kept) would be almost certainly infringing, and a lawsuit (and discovery) would be reasonable. Discovery is NOT for a fishing trip to find if the copies are legal. If the RIAA had reliable proof (or "near proof") the copies were infringing, then discovery would be to find out how they got there, who specifically may have been involved other than just the accused, how widespread the infringement went in order to establish damages, etc. GP is correct - "strongly suspecting" someone of guilt is not only NOT a basis for discovery, it's not a basis for a lawsuit in good faith. IANAL, as usual.
The moon's crust is about 20% oxygen, on average. The hard part is splitting it from the rest of the lunar regolith. 4 billion years plus getting hammered by hard radiation leave only the molecules that are really determined not to come apart. But figure out how to split the O2 easily, and all we'll have to ship up there is H2. And eventually, of course, we could ship it in from further out in the solar system...
Remember that it's on a *curving* path - that means it is continually accelerating, even if its linear velocity is constant. This takes quite a bit more math to calculate, but the multiple-thousands-of-gees is in the correct magnitude.
Angular acceleration of the magnitude needed would also cause enormous 'tidal' stresses in any solid object whirling around like that, especially the projectile itself. Since it is the largest object that is whirling (it contains the payload, so it must be bigger), it will experience the highest stress. No micro-fractures or stressed metal allowed. The cost of maintaining such a high stress carrier - or manufacturing many throw aways - will eat up a lot of savings, especially considering this thing really only has one valuable payload. Thor's hammer. Read Foot Fall by Niven/Pournelle for a description. This ring is a surface launcher for hammers. 10 kilo (about 22 pounds) payloads? 3000 launches a year? Yeah, we'll use it *wink wink* explore the moon *nudge nudge*.
Big $$$ online providers desperately want to create the monopolies they enjoy in city-wide newspapers, radio, tv advertising. Ultimately it comes down to this: Who gets the ad revenue? If the "yercity gazette" knows that ONLY its site will have the ability to present its own table of contents, guess where people in yercity have to go to see what's happening in town this weekend? Even bringing up the main page of the website will generate revenue, where a google listing doesn't (at least, not for the gazette's publishers). If the majority of the news services (i.e., 3 or more) lobby congress to enact a forced royalty, they kill two birds with one stone: The search engines ad revenue becomes the publisher's; and the small-time up-and-coming competitors are out of business, since the "cap" will be set high enough to be a significant barrier to entry. And then the web will suck just as bad as local radio, tv, and newspapers do. Other big $$$ bidniz benefits too - cuz now they'll have a bigger hammer to shut down websites that tell the TRUTH about their products and propaganda. And politicians will likewise benefit. WHo loses? Anyone without a billion bucks.
1. Consider that all the non-terrorists on the 4 planes on 9/11 had obeyed security rules and abandoned their personal safety to the lack-of-guarantees of the gov't. It was the security procedures themselves that assured the terrorists that they would not have trouble controlling the entire passenger list of a jumbo jet with just 4 or 5 bad guys. They didn't try to blow up some other spot with concentrated populace because they couldn't be sure no one was carrying. 2. The govt that has taken away citizen's guns does not take on the responsibility of protecting the citizens. Specifically, if the cops know of a threat to your life in particular, they're not obligated to protect you. In fact, they're not really obligated to investigate your murder (there's no consequence for failing to arrest/convict). They're not gonna, and you can't - so who's gonna protect you? 3. If the law suddenly changed to allow people to carry guns, chaos would result. People have forgotten how to be careful, because everything dangerous is taken away from us. 4. Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. The problems there (and here) are not to be solved by instantaneously changing one variable. Things must shift slowly, as they shifted to get to the mess they're in now. Just looking at one variable and saying it's the solution or it's the problem is not realistic. Allowing citizens to take care of themselves is a good place to start. It's called freedom; sometimes democracy is mistaken for freedom. And the first thing that a person needs, and will provide for him/her self (if allowed) is personal safety and security.
Is a medium caliber handgun in the woman's purse. If crooks knew that a certain percentage of the time, the person they were about to mug was armed, there'd be a lot less mugging going on. At the very least, muggers would have to work in teams, reducing their overall effectiveness and making them easier to spot.
Re:So what exactly is it doing? It doesn't matter
on
UnBox Calls Home, A Lot
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"If it's sending performance stats...'
NO. It is never OK for the software to connect to the internet without informed consent of the OWNER of the computer. That's where security problems start - an app that isn't talking over the internet is very unlikely to get hijacked. An app that is using internet access without the computer owner's knowledge or consent is far,far more likely to be attacked.
Again, NO. It is never OK for someone to use MY computer to analyze the performance of THEIR software, unless they're willing to pay me bucks to do it. Would they let me login an use their bandwidth and one of their computers for free? Don't think so, why should I be expected to let them use mine? Just cuz I'm not a billion dollar bizniz?
Still again, NO. It is not OK to insert software into my boot sequence without my consent. That's another chink in the armor.
A thousand times, no. It should be just as easy to remove the software as it was to install it - and internet access is not a part of file deletion.
This is very, very much "an argument about substance".
Breeching the box visibly results in federal investigations, people going to jail, etc. Better to swap the cards invisibly with cards already loaded with your favorite party's votes from people found in the obituary section.
Slashdot Mirror
1> It's worth money. Why should MS get it for free just cuz you're a customer? They should pay you for the data. It must be worth money, cuz it must cost millions just to catch and cache all that data from 100,000,000s of MS boxen.
2> They'll eventually start using it RIAA style to attack "pirates" and "hackers". Given how often their WGA software ID's innocent people like you as having illegal copies, this is nothing but trouble for the customer.
3> Given how buggy MS S/W is anyway, how long before a phone home bug kills your box? While doing something that is completely useless to you?
4> How long until MS hands over (sells) this data to the Dept Homeland Perversity (KGB)? You wanna be the first one arrested using a sidewalk-sale-second-hand video card that some "terrorist" (MySpace.com user) got rid of?
5> Oooh, how about real cybercrime? What a plum target. Once a security hole is found in some BIOS or other tidbit, real cyber criminals could really use a database like this for finding victims.
6> While we're on the subject of "free money", is MS paying you for using your bandwidth to make money for them?
"Free" should cover *all* speech except threats and substantial disruptions of "the peace", i.e, don't yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
Any constraint on other speech, including lies, means that the govt feels it is smarter than the citizenry at filtering out the noise from the signals. I'd suggest that our gov't's faux pas in filtering garbage from intel on wmd shows a lack of govt ability to discern truth and value in information.
As soon as govt starts thinking in terms of "how far is too far", the govt has gone too far.
The problem cited in the article is not with the speakers, it's with the listeners: A Yale law student tries to get a job, but prospective employers are believing things they read on the bathroom wall ^H^h^h^h internet.
The problem isn't people speaking too freely. It's people listening too freely. And no amount of law blocking free speech can solve that problem.
with 50 billion bucks and a still-functioning business model to use in suing the world. M$ is so fricken big that one workable legal tactic is to hire all the best lawfirms so you can't get a good lawyer.
I don't think he's blowing smoke as some have suggested. I really think M$ wants to sue anyone and everyone until they have finally broken Linux.
M$'s real strategic difficulty is doing this without triggering antitrust actions, class action suits from competitors, a genuine revolt from other countries, the software industry,etc. Global-sized coordinated opposition is preventing M$ from launching RIAA-style attacks on the world.
Oh, and one other thing is at least slowing them down: The complete and utter invalidity in any such claims.
A coupla years ago. The Linux distro on it was trashed - it had a Winmodem, no driver binary. There were Windows drivers sources on the CD, but uh..this is Linux, not Windows. Have no idea if the drivers matched the modem or not, or if they were complete. GCC was missing - no compiler at all on the CD. Also, the NIC card had no driver at all, even in source. ...it went on for a few more calls, finally he said he'd found some rpm's for me. He emailed them, the files were broken when they arrived. After that, he didn't answer calls.
I called tech support 2 or 3 times. Always got the same guy in India or Pakistan. He spent 30 miuntes or so trying to explain to me how to use Windows Explorer to look at network properties before I could get thru to him that the PC wasn't Windows. He said he'd have to talk to his supervisor and would call back. He did, after a few hours, and tried to explain how to download the drivers from the internet - the windows drivers, again using IE.
There is no way that PC configuration was tested before shipping. If WalMart is now partnering with MS (already a Linux enemy) to ship Linux, I'd be surprised if the box arrives with an actual computer inside.
So what happens when you send a pic to 911 of the cop about to bust yer chops for sending pics with yer cell phone?
Fer some reason, I get mental images of cats with buttered toast strapped to their backs...
Duh. Normally, hay is not found in a bedroom in any sizeable quantities. Brick walls were used so the fire school didn't have to build a new house for every exercise. Hay was used to simulate the semi-dense fuels commonly found in houses, such as furniture, beds, etc. Hay is a more realistic simulation than gasoline, liquid oxygen, basalt, etc.
Where we once didn't have materials that could flash over in common use in the household...
Uh, talcum powder, wheat flour, any loose weave cloth used as wall hangings or bed linens, *sheet rock* (yup, get it hot enough, and it'll go up quite fwooshedly), Xmas trees, saw dust, in fact, anything that'll burn, if reduced to dust in the air, will flash over.
I trained in 1979ish and then they were teaching how to fight flashover. One exercise involved a fully-involved brick "bedroom". Flames were up to the ceiling and spread across the entire room. The test: Put out the fire with a 1-2 second wide spray from a 2 1/2 inch hose. That's about 10-20 gallons of water.
The trick is don't spray the hay, spray the ceiling over the hay - that's where the heat is. This is opposed to the conventional technique of spraying "the base" of the fire.
The near-explosive boiling of water to steam takes away a coupla hundred degrees of temprature, and the sudden increase in humidity reduces the flame potential of aerable fuels like cloth, blankets, hay, etc ("aerable" as opposed to dense fuels like solid wood). The snuff-out is impressive.
I don't think the article is right about this being "new", although it's possible the info spread slowly in different regions.
Yes, we have. I've worked at NASA's training simulators since the ALT (Approach and Landing Tests) of Enterprise. I speak for myself, not for NASA or my employer.
A human-rated system's safety is based on this primary rule:
Don't prove it's unsafe - prove that it's safe.
A good gov't management system's economics are based on this rule:
Don't prove it'll work - prove that we MUST do it in order to achieve the mission.
The shuttle is interfaced to the whole fricken universe in a way the PC in yer mom's basement never will be. Everything from clocks showing mission elapsed time to calculating orbits based on positions of Earth, Moon and sun, calculating doppler shift while radioing a TDRS satellite 15000 miles away and several thousands miles per hour delta velocity, etc.
Slashdotters love to roast any gov't waste of money - well here's one place the gov't DIDN'T waste money.
Remember - the shuttle talks to satellites, to ground radios, to MCC, to the ISS and Russian communications networks.
All of the communications networks have to know exactly where two parties are when talking, and where the Earth itself is in its orbit around the sun. Doppler shift must be taken into account when radioing between all of these.
Sure, year-end rollover is about 1-5 lines of code; how many places need that fix?
This is just one example of why NASA decided it was easier to just wait a few days rather than test all of that stuff.
A design limit made by rational cost-benefit analysis is not a bug in either code or design.
Yes, shuttle does support two robotic arms. The one used is the one that most people use - their right. Using a robotic arm, for a human, has the same "handedness" problems that using flesh-and-blood does. Something about the twixtears software, which is out of contract scope.
TFA carefully does NOT say that anything actually will fail, but that something might fail. Thank you, Fallon: your link (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff .html) is a good explanation. (However, the "on-board shuttle group" is actually called the "on-board systems group").
It's like this: A clock rollover (such as at midnight or the last day of the month or year) always sets something back to zero. That resetting is a risk: Is there something somewhere that doesn't take the rollover into account? It may be an obvious bug, or not so obvious - what if the problem is dynamic? For example, what if system A sends some data and rolls over, and system B rolls over and receives the data? Then it looks like stale data, but isn't. How do you test for dynamic conditions like this?
Dodging this bullet is far, far cheaper than testing for it.
The only time I know of that a shuttle flight software bug affected a flight was uh...STS 2 or 3 or thereabouts. The shuttle often flies an updated load on one or two of its computers before the load is installed on all of them. On this mission, a new load on one GPC dumped (crashed) at T -9 seconds or so, causing everything to shut down automatically. The shuttle launched a day or two later, after the new load was rolled back.
Funny thing was, the same bug had occurred in the training simulators before launch, but was written off as a lack of fidelity of the simulator itself, not a bug in the flight software.
After that, the astronauts really began to appreciate running the real GPCs with the real flight software in the simulators.
PS: Although I work at NASA, this message is my own expression, and not that of NASA or my employer. I am a programmer only, not anyone with any kind of authority or insight except for my experiences here.
It wasn't me, the convict claimed.
I remembered, but could never forgive.
None remembered, so it happened again.
He fell to his death, starving.
If the only data the RIAA had was a name, and they looked him up in the phone book to figure out who to sue, then they may actually have the wrong guy.
Additionally, it depends on how the RIAA got the name in the first place. Did someone at an ISP look up at a log listing, type in the name from one record while meaning to get it from the line above or below? Etc, ETc. An incorrect name can be an indicator of a missed target; and given the RIAA's usual amount of air-tightness in their "evidence", it's not that far fetched.
If the cops nabbed a guy for mugging an old lady, they'd probably have a lot more to go on than just a name to tag the accused to the crime. In that case, a name mispelling WOULD be a "technicality" that shouldn't be the only reason to set him free.
The RIAA's interest in taking people to court has nothing to do with whether those they accuse are guilty - they're making their money cuz people roll over, guilty or not. So the RIAA has no reason to make sure they got the right guy - he'll probably roll over anyway, why bother?
One can only bring civil suit against another in good faith, that is, you have reason based on presentable facts, not suspicion, that your case has a chance of succeeding. The "presentable facts" must be evidence that can be used in trial. The facts do not have be complete, but they must reliably show a "tip of the iceberg" that you have been wronged.
A screen print of files from someone's computer, even if the files are copies of songs you own the copyrights to, is NOT a presentable fact of wrongdoing *by anyone*. For example, as Wilke claims, the copies may be legally his thru purchase unknown to the RIAA. Unless the RIAA can show a judge that it has FACTual knowledge that those copies are almost certainly infringing, there is no presumption of guilt, and no case. An example of this would be if the copies were of songs that RIAA held rights to that had NEVER been released at all. Then finding the songs outside of the RIAA's vaults (or whereever they were kept) would be almost certainly infringing, and a lawsuit (and discovery) would be reasonable.
Discovery is NOT for a fishing trip to find if the copies are legal. If the RIAA had reliable proof (or "near proof") the copies were infringing, then discovery would be to find out how they got there, who specifically may have been involved other than just the accused, how widespread the infringement went in order to establish damages, etc.
GP is correct - "strongly suspecting" someone of guilt is not only NOT a basis for discovery, it's not a basis for a lawsuit in good faith.
IANAL, as usual.
Artificial Intelligence studying Artificial Information...This could start an Artificial War.
The moon's crust is about 20% oxygen, on average. The hard part is splitting it from the rest of the lunar regolith. 4 billion years plus getting hammered by hard radiation leave only the molecules that are really determined not to come apart.
But figure out how to split the O2 easily, and all we'll have to ship up there is H2. And eventually, of course, we could ship it in from further out in the solar system...
Remember that it's on a *curving* path - that means it is continually accelerating, even if its linear velocity is constant. This takes quite a bit more math to calculate, but the multiple-thousands-of-gees is in the correct magnitude.
Angular acceleration of the magnitude needed would also cause enormous 'tidal' stresses in any solid object whirling around like that, especially the projectile itself. Since it is the largest object that is whirling (it contains the payload, so it must be bigger), it will experience the highest stress.
No micro-fractures or stressed metal allowed. The cost of maintaining such a high stress carrier - or manufacturing many throw aways - will eat up a lot of savings, especially considering this thing really only has one valuable payload.
Thor's hammer. Read Foot Fall by Niven/Pournelle for a description. This ring is a surface launcher for hammers. 10 kilo (about 22 pounds) payloads? 3000 launches a year? Yeah, we'll use it *wink wink* explore the moon *nudge nudge*.
Big $$$ online providers desperately want to create the monopolies they enjoy in city-wide newspapers, radio, tv advertising. Ultimately it comes down to this: Who gets the ad revenue? If the "yercity gazette" knows that ONLY its site will have the ability to present its own table of contents, guess where people in yercity have to go to see what's happening in town this weekend? Even bringing up the main page of the website will generate revenue, where a google listing doesn't (at least, not for the gazette's publishers). If the majority of the news services (i.e., 3 or more) lobby congress to enact a forced royalty, they kill two birds with one stone: The search engines ad revenue becomes the publisher's; and the small-time up-and-coming competitors are out of business, since the "cap" will be set high enough to be a significant barrier to entry.
And then the web will suck just as bad as local radio, tv, and newspapers do.
Other big $$$ bidniz benefits too - cuz now they'll have a bigger hammer to shut down websites that tell the TRUTH about their products and propaganda. And politicians will likewise benefit. WHo loses? Anyone without a billion bucks.
PS - no, I don't play video games.
1. Consider that all the non-terrorists on the 4 planes on 9/11 had obeyed security rules and abandoned their personal safety to the lack-of-guarantees of the gov't. It was the security procedures themselves that assured the terrorists that they would not have trouble controlling the entire passenger list of a jumbo jet with just 4 or 5 bad guys. They didn't try to blow up some other spot with concentrated populace because they couldn't be sure no one was carrying.
2. The govt that has taken away citizen's guns does not take on the responsibility of protecting the citizens. Specifically, if the cops know of a threat to your life in particular, they're not obligated to protect you. In fact, they're not really obligated to investigate your murder (there's no consequence for failing to arrest/convict). They're not gonna, and you can't - so who's gonna protect you?
3. If the law suddenly changed to allow people to carry guns, chaos would result. People have forgotten how to be careful, because everything dangerous is taken away from us.
4. Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. The problems there (and here) are not to be solved by instantaneously changing one variable. Things must shift slowly, as they shifted to get to the mess they're in now. Just looking at one variable and saying it's the solution or it's the problem is not realistic.
Allowing citizens to take care of themselves is a good place to start. It's called freedom; sometimes democracy is mistaken for freedom. And the first thing that a person needs, and will provide for him/her self (if allowed) is personal safety and security.
Is a medium caliber handgun in the woman's purse. If crooks knew that a certain percentage of the time, the person they were about to mug was armed, there'd be a lot less mugging going on. At the very least, muggers would have to work in teams, reducing their overall effectiveness and making them easier to spot.
"If it's sending performance stats...'
NO. It is never OK for the software to connect to the internet without informed consent of the OWNER of the computer. That's where security problems start - an app that isn't talking over the internet is very unlikely to get hijacked. An app that is using internet access without the computer owner's knowledge or consent is far,far more likely to be attacked.
Again, NO. It is never OK for someone to use MY computer to analyze the performance of THEIR software, unless they're willing to pay me bucks to do it. Would they let me login an use their bandwidth and one of their computers for free? Don't think so, why should I be expected to let them use mine? Just cuz I'm not a billion dollar bizniz?
Still again, NO. It is not OK to insert software into my boot sequence without my consent. That's another chink in the armor.
A thousand times, no. It should be just as easy to remove the software as it was to install it - and internet access is not a part of file deletion.
This is very, very much "an argument about substance".
Breeching the box visibly results in federal investigations, people going to jail, etc.
Better to swap the cards invisibly with cards already loaded with your favorite party's votes from people found in the obituary section.