You are correct, sir. I said that missile defense was a stupid idea right there in my post, for this very reason. The MAD doctrine virtually assures that no one in their right mind is going to launch a nuclear missile at us, because we'd launch six times as many W-88 nuclear warheads up their ass in a heartbeat. If a terrorist or some "rogue nation" - the State Departments current euphemism of the month - really wanted to nail the states, they'd carry over a 15lb nuke in a backpack and take out half of LA. And that's gonna be a lot, lot harder to defend against. Certainly for this reason NMD makes almost no sense - but the incoming administration seems hell-bent on it anyways, because they are stupid. So I offer up this laser thing as a tolerable alternative, because NMD on our own soil would wreak havoc internationally. There's a lot of good coverage of this in Slate if anyone is interested.
Doesn't this system effectively constitute a TMDS (Theater Missile Defense System)? It seems like if any such system were to have a prayer of working, it would have to be something roughly along these lines. The Achilles Heel of a ballistic MDS is of course that you can just fire off n nukes and 10^n things that look just like nukes and effectively stymy the defender's ability to shoot down the missiles that really count. I don't think there are effective ways of solving this problem within the confines of a ballistic system, despite what proponents would have you believe about their ability to "profile" missiles and determine if they are the real McCoy or not.
But it seems like, given enough computing power and electricity, a couple of these 747s could blow away a whole bunch of missiles in a relatively short amount of time. And because they are flying and not fixed on our soil, or on soil at all, they don't violate the 1972 ABM treaty either. Since the incoming administration seems very gung-ho about implementing missile defense (which is a very stupid idea... but that's another thread), it seems like this system could be the answer to their prayers, so to speak. I'm curious why more senators & congressmen haven't jumped on board with more funding for this program, or why it has recieved relatively little publicity given that the failure of our ballistic MD tests made international headlines last year.
Christ, stop and think a minute before you open your mouth. What the original poster meant to say, which is a very valid question, is does the new mp3pro "top out" at 64kbps. MP3 certainly does so, but not at 64kbps. The difference between a 256kbps MP3 and a 320kbps MP3 is almost negligable. I doubt if there are 1000 people in the world that could tell the difference. Yet the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps is extremely obvious, even to the untrained ear. So if mp3pro were to offer great advanced in sound quality up to 64kbps, but then be no different from 64kbps on, then we'd want to know about it, because it would be just like having 128kbps MP3s all over again, which aren't really that useful to some.
Exactly. I personally can't see why anyone would opt for this given other choices. 500ms latency best case scenario is just not going to cut it for anyone who gives 1/2 a damn about their Internet experience.
Funny thing about Tex is that it is bug free! Tex is open source, used by perhaps millions of people every year, yet a bug hasn't been discovered in almost a decade. In fact Knuth will pay you money if you can find a bug in Tex. It used to be a hexadecimal dollar but he started doubling it every year when that still didn't cough up any bug reports. I think Tex might be the only really large, sophisticated application in existence that can truly claim to be 100% bug free - can anyone think of another? A testament to how fscking smart Don Knuth really, is I suppose.
One word: Iris. If you want the absolute best prints from a digital source that money can buy, you will have them printed on an Iris printer. I was in an art gallery just the other day looking at photographs taken by professional photographers - e.g. museum/display quality - and was simply astounded when one of the photographers walked over to me and told me that more than half of them were printed on an Iris printer. Sure enough - she was right! From a distance of more than one inch away, the prints looked indistinguishable from developed prints. I do not use this phrase lightly, either - certain cheapo dye-sub "photograph printers" that sell for a couple hundred dollars advertise "photo quality" when they really are not, however Iris prints really are. I have been into photography for awhile and I feel I have a discriminating eye... but the Iris is just gorgeous. Can't tell an Iris print from the original, period, unless you get right up close enough to see the dots. Even then, they're only visible in light areas of the picture. Anything with color is continuous-tone.
If my word is not enough, please check out this testimonial. I think it's very compelling in its own right.
As for labs, again, colorimaging.com comes very highly regarded, although I have not used them. Chances are if you are seriously looking into Iris prints and you find a lab that can actually afford one, then they are probably well-established enough that you can trust them to produce quality output.
For anyone interested in getting into this or Geocaching, I'd reccomend heading over to your local Office Depot. They are selling the Garmin GPS III Plus for $99.98 this week. Usually it goes for $280. Also OD has a $10 off >$50 special, so you can get it for $89. Good deal, no?
And NO, I don't work for Office Depot. Even if I did, I'd never see any of the $$...
I'm perpetually frustrated when I see these metor showers advertised because I can't ever find a suitable place to view them. LA has horrendous light pollution and I can't ever seem to find a nice dark, eastward facing place to watch the Leonids or these or other meteor showers that require a clear view of the east sky. (Of course findind dark westward facing areas is no problem). Anyone have a favorite spot they like to go near Los Angeles that isn't too far away?
You answer your own question in an oblique sort of way. Helix Code is focusing on providing an alternative to Windows. It seems quite obvoius, to me, that the best way to do this is to hire a bunch of competent programmers and start cranking out code. Now please tell me why, in God's name, would they want to waste precious time and money training the said "puke" to use an entire other operating system and mail client and God knows what else when they can just use those resources to improve their software instead? How is this not obvious to you? I've never really investigated the market for clerical workers before, but I'm almost positive that the benchmark for proficiency is being able to use Word, Excel, Windows, and Outlook. I for one sleep better at night knowing that Miguel de Icaza is harnessing his formidable coding skills to improve Gnome than wasting a week teaching Wendy the temp how to recompile her kernel and word process in StarOffice. Focus on the ends, not the means, man!
I'm continually amazed how often this little "truism" - that geeks of a certain caliber just don't need college - comes up, considering how false it really is. I invite anyone contemplating doing this to somehow contact a CIO or HR higher-up in any medium to large tech company and ask them what problems they have with the IT workers currently in their employ. Probably 90% of the time the answer will be a variation on the following theme: a.) they cannot write/communicate coherently, and b.) they do not work well in teams. I cannot think of a better recipe for acquiring these two traits than to bury yourself behind a computer from 6th through 12th grade. If anything, geeks need college way, way more than most people. College teaches you how to live. College teaches how to do laundry. It teaches you that the world is not fair, that some professors just don't give A's, period, and probably most importantly, jolts you out of whatever Small Pond Syndrome you've been lulled into in secondary school, where you were probably the smartest person you knew. In college, you won't be:) If you're studying computer science at a good college, like mine, then this education goes even further, because the faculty is liasing with those same CIOs and HR people, listening to their complaints, and trying to come up with solutions to them. Hence all of the projects I turn in now and done in groups rather than individually, and there's a big emphasis on being able to document what you've done in well constructed setences.
Second, I don't think I've ever met a single person - ever - in any of my CS classes who found the whole "college experience as a waste of time considering [their] current skills." This is at a school that consistently ranks in the top 3 US undergrad CS programs in the country, so it's bound to attract a lot of really, really smart people. I went off to university conversant in probably 6 different languages, having written multiple, large projects in at least 3 of them. I really did think I knew my shit, and in hindsight, that wasn't really true. While there are certain areas of computer science that most geeks have probably picked up on their own (data structures, for one), you aren't going to have just gleaned everything from hacking code unless you posses an extraordinary amount of intelligence, in which case, more power to you. But I think that most people don't fit in this category, and I have the Bell Curve to back me up...
In don't think that that is correct at all in this context. You can probably get a job coding without having a degree, but depending on what you're definition of "coding" is it may or may not be what you're looking for. Coding projects that interest me certainly do seem to require a lot of formal training in CS, or at least applied math. While it is entirely possible, if you have enough job experience or can demonstrate your familiarity with a language, to go pick up some job for Acme, Inc. cranking out Java apps or maintaining some software package, most people who are actually interested in computer science itself find such jobs rather mundane. One thing you will not be doing, if you go this route, is reasearch. The poster explicitly stated that he wanted to go back to school because "most exciting/important thinking and research these days is in CS", so I think we're of the same mindset. I defy you to find someone who, unless they posses an extraordinary amount of intelligence, was able to land a job researching interesting things in the world of computer science without some sort of math, CS, or EE degree.
There used to be trains on the SF Bay Bridge, moving more people than cars and buses do now! Ooops, got rid of those...
There still are. They go under the bay in the Transbay tunnel. I'm pretty sure about this because I rode it to get to work today, from whence I write this message.
Last I checked, though this could change if Bush becomes president, you could plunk this thing down on 70% of the Earth and not have to worry about hitting anything except fish. Are the same idiots who concieved Iridium going to be the ones firing them down onto the other 30%? Cause it seems to me like taking object A, shooting it in an almost perfectly Newtonian environment (space) towards point B, with acceleration due to gravity G already known, etc. etc., should be a pretty easy math problem to work out. Especially if you already figured out a way to build them, blast them into space atop what amounts to a huge stick of dynamite, position them into geosynchronous orbit, and, oh yeah, provide phone service for the entire world. Can someone elaborate as to how in the world they could possibly de-orbit one of these things into my back yard?
Going 200 miles from ground to orbit is, from the standpoint of space exploration, almost inconsequential; that we or some other spacefaring country manages to do it about once a month should be telling. I think what he means is that there is no way to accomplish deep space exploration with the propulsion technology we have now. None. No matter how many improvments we make to ballistic propulsion, it simply will not get the job done. Hence, without a breakthrough, completely new form of transportation, space exploration will remain at a relative standstill. Historically, this has happened quite a few times in the past - no matter how much we improved upon the piston engine, cheap, long-range air transport was never feasible until the advent of the jet engine. Similarly, the steam engine was never viable for cars; in order for cars to even exist, a whole new paradigm, the internal combustion engine, had to be invented. Etc... you can trace this all the way back to wind-powered sailboats, if you want.
On the contrary, PDF has solved a great many of the problems that used to plague portable document publishing. It provides precise control over layout and display of documents. It relies on PostScript, so the quality of its displayed and printed output is potentially very high. Need I mention its portable. The only two problems with PDF, both minor, are its speed (PDFs do take awhile to render, at least on my system) and the sort of fascist content/copyright-control mechanisms embedded into the format. The latter really isn't even a weakness, however; it's more me editorializing. Also support for hypertext could be better. Most people find PDF an attractive and secure means for distributing their documents. I'm interested to know what makes you hate it.
The Shelby Cobra, McLaren F1, MG BGT, Triumph Stag, and Jaguar XK-120, each a bona-fide classic, were all built in Britain. Land Rover is British and are built like tanks. And then there's the Citroen... the overall suckiness of that car pretty much outweighs everything else, I suppose, so I guess you are right:)
You know it's funny: this assignment sounds like a lot of homework I've had to do this semester. Just in my experience, want to know what the answer was in every case? A Scheme program.
Scheme is not AMAZINGLY bad or inefficient at anything. In fact, it (and more generally, Lisp) is arguably the greatest computer language in the history of the world. It still scares me to realize that designers of almost every other language in the modern computing era have had Lisp staring them in the face for the past half-century yet somehow still manage to miss the boat when it comes to simple, powerful things that should be in every language. A few examples would include: first-class procedures; lambda/unnamed functions; "scalar"/typeless variables; simple, non-ambiguous prefix notation; automatic memory management... I could go on.
My advice to you is to write your own hash table. It will consist of lists, car, and cdr - in others words, the same simple, basic things you've used to make pretty much everything else in Scheme. It will look infinitely more elegant that a bunch of cruddy database bindings which may or may not function as advertised.
Oh, and don't forget: Scheme can be compiled. I find this fact is frequently overlooked by C(++) bigots who shit on Scheme for being slow. Bigloo will almost always be within a few percentage points of an equivalent C program. With that in mind I'd remind you that Scheme isn't AMAZINGLY slow at anything: your algorithms are. If your program isn't running up to snuff then well my friend, as buddies in tech support used to say: PEBUAK.
It's a question of semantics. I think the original poster's idea of mission critical was more along the lines of "If this computer crashes, X will lose millions of dollars, nuclear war will break out, etc." That's how most people would define mission critical. A good example of this would be Ebay's Sun E10000 Starfire server, which is mission critical in the sense that when it crashed last year, they lost millions of dollars in business and the very existence of the company could have been threatened had it gone on for an extended period of time. Another example would be any one of hundreds of air traffic control computers, which rely on the finest in 1960's computing technology (read: vacuum tubes) to make sure that your jet flies from point A to point B without bumping into any other jets. If they were to crash on a wide enough scale, and there were no backups, a lot of people's lives would be in danger. A lot, lot more people wouldn't be able to fly until service would be restored. Those type of scenarios are traditionally regarded as "mission critical".
Contrast that with what you are saying and it's a weak comparison, at best. As a college student I think I'm well qualified in saying that public use/lab computers certainly aren't mission critical to my education, or anyone else's I know. When my internet access goes AWOL, I somehow still manage to educate myself by doing things like (god forbid) reading books. When my Sun Netray terminal dies for no apparent reason in the computer science labs, I do math homework. Certainly it's an annoyance but computers that crash periodically are of no real concern to me from an educational standpoint.
If you can't tell I'm squarely in the corner of the original poster. When the computers do work, which is most of the time, they are godawful slow. I would gladly trade a little bit more uptime from something to work on besides a PPro 200 running Slowlaris x86, a 486 with Windows, or one of 250 Sun Netray NCs all feeding into the same antiquated Sun E5K. Hooray for public schools, I guess:)
Two things. First, as far as I'm concerned the DMCA and UCITA are basically irrelevant with regard to any decision I make. I should haven't to expound to Slashdot about what a farce both those laws are, so suffice it to say that at least in my opinion he has moral authority, if not an obligation, to violate those laws as necessary. Second, and related to that, it's only illegal if you get caught. Which he won't.
It has been done, and it's called the Phoenix missile. Each of the things you mention (topographical recognition, GPS guidance) exists in the guidance computer of the Phoenix. You can nuclear-tip them, too, so any disparity b/t the firepower of a guided missile and a bomber is, erm, mitigated, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, sir. I said that missile defense was a stupid idea right there in my post, for this very reason. The MAD doctrine virtually assures that no one in their right mind is going to launch a nuclear missile at us, because we'd launch six times as many W-88 nuclear warheads up their ass in a heartbeat. If a terrorist or some "rogue nation" - the State Departments current euphemism of the month - really wanted to nail the states, they'd carry over a 15lb nuke in a backpack and take out half of LA. And that's gonna be a lot, lot harder to defend against. Certainly for this reason NMD makes almost no sense - but the incoming administration seems hell-bent on it anyways, because they are stupid. So I offer up this laser thing as a tolerable alternative, because NMD on our own soil would wreak havoc internationally. There's a lot of good coverage of this in Slate if anyone is interested.
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But it seems like, given enough computing power and electricity, a couple of these 747s could blow away a whole bunch of missiles in a relatively short amount of time. And because they are flying and not fixed on our soil, or on soil at all, they don't violate the 1972 ABM treaty either. Since the incoming administration seems very gung-ho about implementing missile defense (which is a very stupid idea... but that's another thread), it seems like this system could be the answer to their prayers, so to speak. I'm curious why more senators & congressmen haven't jumped on board with more funding for this program, or why it has recieved relatively little publicity given that the failure of our ballistic MD tests made international headlines last year.
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I paid ~300 for a 40 meg hard drive in the early 90s. Nuff said.
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Christ, stop and think a minute before you open your mouth. What the original poster meant to say, which is a very valid question, is does the new mp3pro "top out" at 64kbps. MP3 certainly does so, but not at 64kbps. The difference between a 256kbps MP3 and a 320kbps MP3 is almost negligable. I doubt if there are 1000 people in the world that could tell the difference. Yet the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps is extremely obvious, even to the untrained ear. So if mp3pro were to offer great advanced in sound quality up to 64kbps, but then be no different from 64kbps on, then we'd want to know about it, because it would be just like having 128kbps MP3s all over again, which aren't really that useful to some.
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Ted Nancy was Jerry Seinfeld. How this is topical I know not.
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Exactly. I personally can't see why anyone would opt for this given other choices. 500ms latency best case scenario is just not going to cut it for anyone who gives 1/2 a damn about their Internet experience.
Funny thing about Tex is that it is bug free! Tex is open source, used by perhaps millions of people every year, yet a bug hasn't been discovered in almost a decade. In fact Knuth will pay you money if you can find a bug in Tex. It used to be a hexadecimal dollar but he started doubling it every year when that still didn't cough up any bug reports. I think Tex might be the only really large, sophisticated application in existence that can truly claim to be 100% bug free - can anyone think of another? A testament to how fscking smart Don Knuth really, is I suppose.
If my word is not enough, please check out this testimonial. I think it's very compelling in its own right.
As for labs, again, colorimaging.com comes very highly regarded, although I have not used them. Chances are if you are seriously looking into Iris prints and you find a lab that can actually afford one, then they are probably well-established enough that you can trust them to produce quality output.
And NO, I don't work for Office Depot. Even if I did, I'd never see any of the $$...
Holy crap! I never knew that.
I'm perpetually frustrated when I see these metor showers advertised because I can't ever find a suitable place to view them. LA has horrendous light pollution and I can't ever seem to find a nice dark, eastward facing place to watch the Leonids or these or other meteor showers that require a clear view of the east sky. (Of course findind dark westward facing areas is no problem). Anyone have a favorite spot they like to go near Los Angeles that isn't too far away?
You answer your own question in an oblique sort of way. Helix Code is focusing on providing an alternative to Windows. It seems quite obvoius, to me, that the best way to do this is to hire a bunch of competent programmers and start cranking out code. Now please tell me why, in God's name, would they want to waste precious time and money training the said "puke" to use an entire other operating system and mail client and God knows what else when they can just use those resources to improve their software instead? How is this not obvious to you? I've never really investigated the market for clerical workers before, but I'm almost positive that the benchmark for proficiency is being able to use Word, Excel, Windows, and Outlook. I for one sleep better at night knowing that Miguel de Icaza is harnessing his formidable coding skills to improve Gnome than wasting a week teaching Wendy the temp how to recompile her kernel and word process in StarOffice. Focus on the ends, not the means, man!
Sorry; I wasn't intending to contradict something you said. Just adding my 2 cents to the topic in general.
Second, I don't think I've ever met a single person - ever - in any of my CS classes who found the whole "college experience as a waste of time considering [their] current skills." This is at a school that consistently ranks in the top 3 US undergrad CS programs in the country, so it's bound to attract a lot of really, really smart people. I went off to university conversant in probably 6 different languages, having written multiple, large projects in at least 3 of them. I really did think I knew my shit, and in hindsight, that wasn't really true. While there are certain areas of computer science that most geeks have probably picked up on their own (data structures, for one), you aren't going to have just gleaned everything from hacking code unless you posses an extraordinary amount of intelligence, in which case, more power to you. But I think that most people don't fit in this category, and I have the Bell Curve to back me up...
The Mensa cutoff is 132, my friend. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, "You can always tell the 131s from the 132s". :)
In don't think that that is correct at all in this context. You can probably get a job coding without having a degree, but depending on what you're definition of "coding" is it may or may not be what you're looking for. Coding projects that interest me certainly do seem to require a lot of formal training in CS, or at least applied math. While it is entirely possible, if you have enough job experience or can demonstrate your familiarity with a language, to go pick up some job for Acme, Inc. cranking out Java apps or maintaining some software package, most people who are actually interested in computer science itself find such jobs rather mundane. One thing you will not be doing, if you go this route, is reasearch. The poster explicitly stated that he wanted to go back to school because "most exciting/important thinking and research these days is in CS", so I think we're of the same mindset. I defy you to find someone who, unless they posses an extraordinary amount of intelligence, was able to land a job researching interesting things in the world of computer science without some sort of math, CS, or EE degree.
There used to be trains on the SF Bay Bridge, moving more people than cars and buses do now! Ooops, got rid of those... There still are. They go under the bay in the Transbay tunnel. I'm pretty sure about this because I rode it to get to work today, from whence I write this message.
Last I checked, though this could change if Bush becomes president, you could plunk this thing down on 70% of the Earth and not have to worry about hitting anything except fish. Are the same idiots who concieved Iridium going to be the ones firing them down onto the other 30%? Cause it seems to me like taking object A, shooting it in an almost perfectly Newtonian environment (space) towards point B, with acceleration due to gravity G already known, etc. etc., should be a pretty easy math problem to work out. Especially if you already figured out a way to build them, blast them into space atop what amounts to a huge stick of dynamite, position them into geosynchronous orbit, and, oh yeah, provide phone service for the entire world. Can someone elaborate as to how in the world they could possibly de-orbit one of these things into my back yard?
Going 200 miles from ground to orbit is, from the standpoint of space exploration, almost inconsequential; that we or some other spacefaring country manages to do it about once a month should be telling. I think what he means is that there is no way to accomplish deep space exploration with the propulsion technology we have now. None. No matter how many improvments we make to ballistic propulsion, it simply will not get the job done. Hence, without a breakthrough, completely new form of transportation, space exploration will remain at a relative standstill. Historically, this has happened quite a few times in the past - no matter how much we improved upon the piston engine, cheap, long-range air transport was never feasible until the advent of the jet engine. Similarly, the steam engine was never viable for cars; in order for cars to even exist, a whole new paradigm, the internal combustion engine, had to be invented. Etc... you can trace this all the way back to wind-powered sailboats, if you want.
On the contrary, PDF has solved a great many of the problems that used to plague portable document publishing. It provides precise control over layout and display of documents. It relies on PostScript, so the quality of its displayed and printed output is potentially very high. Need I mention its portable. The only two problems with PDF, both minor, are its speed (PDFs do take awhile to render, at least on my system) and the sort of fascist content/copyright-control mechanisms embedded into the format. The latter really isn't even a weakness, however; it's more me editorializing. Also support for hypertext could be better. Most people find PDF an attractive and secure means for distributing their documents. I'm interested to know what makes you hate it.
The Shelby Cobra, McLaren F1, MG BGT, Triumph Stag, and Jaguar XK-120, each a bona-fide classic, were all built in Britain. Land Rover is British and are built like tanks. And then there's the Citroen... the overall suckiness of that car pretty much outweighs everything else, I suppose, so I guess you are right :)
You know it's funny: this assignment sounds like a lot of homework I've had to do this semester. Just in my experience, want to know what the answer was in every case? A Scheme program.
... I could go on.
Scheme is not AMAZINGLY bad or inefficient at anything. In fact, it (and more generally, Lisp) is arguably the greatest computer language in the history of the world. It still scares me to realize that designers of almost every other language in the modern computing era have had Lisp staring them in the face for the past half-century yet somehow still manage to miss the boat when it comes to simple, powerful things that should be in every language. A few examples would include: first-class procedures; lambda/unnamed functions; "scalar"/typeless variables; simple, non-ambiguous prefix notation; automatic memory management
My advice to you is to write your own hash table. It will consist of lists, car, and cdr - in others words, the same simple, basic things you've used to make pretty much everything else in Scheme. It will look infinitely more elegant that a bunch of cruddy database bindings which may or may not function as advertised.
Oh, and don't forget: Scheme can be compiled. I find this fact is frequently overlooked by C(++) bigots who shit on Scheme for being slow. Bigloo will almost always be within a few percentage points of an equivalent C program. With that in mind I'd remind you that Scheme isn't AMAZINGLY slow at anything: your algorithms are. If your program isn't running up to snuff then well my friend, as buddies in tech support used to say: PEBUAK.
(Problem Exists Between User And Keyboard)
It's a question of semantics. I think the original poster's idea of mission critical was more along the lines of "If this computer crashes, X will lose millions of dollars, nuclear war will break out, etc." That's how most people would define mission critical. A good example of this would be Ebay's Sun E10000 Starfire server, which is mission critical in the sense that when it crashed last year, they lost millions of dollars in business and the very existence of the company could have been threatened had it gone on for an extended period of time. Another example would be any one of hundreds of air traffic control computers, which rely on the finest in 1960's computing technology (read: vacuum tubes) to make sure that your jet flies from point A to point B without bumping into any other jets. If they were to crash on a wide enough scale, and there were no backups, a lot of people's lives would be in danger. A lot, lot more people wouldn't be able to fly until service would be restored. Those type of scenarios are traditionally regarded as "mission critical".
:)
Contrast that with what you are saying and it's a weak comparison, at best. As a college student I think I'm well qualified in saying that public use/lab computers certainly aren't mission critical to my education, or anyone else's I know. When my internet access goes AWOL, I somehow still manage to educate myself by doing things like (god forbid) reading books. When my Sun Netray terminal dies for no apparent reason in the computer science labs, I do math homework. Certainly it's an annoyance but computers that crash periodically are of no real concern to me from an educational standpoint.
If you can't tell I'm squarely in the corner of the original poster. When the computers do work, which is most of the time, they are godawful slow. I would gladly trade a little bit more uptime from something to work on besides a PPro 200 running Slowlaris x86, a 486 with Windows, or one of 250 Sun Netray NCs all feeding into the same antiquated Sun E5K. Hooray for public schools, I guess
Two things. First, as far as I'm concerned the DMCA and UCITA are basically irrelevant with regard to any decision I make. I should haven't to expound to Slashdot about what a farce both those laws are, so suffice it to say that at least in my opinion he has moral authority, if not an obligation, to violate those laws as necessary. Second, and related to that, it's only illegal if you get caught. Which he won't.
It has been done, and it's called the Phoenix missile. Each of the things you mention (topographical recognition, GPS guidance) exists in the guidance computer of the Phoenix. You can nuclear-tip them, too, so any disparity b/t the firepower of a guided missile and a bomber is, erm, mitigated, I suppose.