perhaps we have beaten the point to death, but what i'm saying as that it is horrendously bad journalistic style to mention, by the way, DRM is bad, and leave it at that. You should either treat it as self-evident or say why it is bad. I think it is self-evident and therefore doesn't need to be said by the editor.
Software has an interesting property in that it costs nothing to reuse something which already exists. So very often even a "complex" system will not take a long time to put together.
Although this is true in terms of dollar cost, reuse of old code often contributes to the cruftiness of software. Take, for example, the date codes from the 1980s that people blindly patched into their applications without realizing that they might cause glitches in the year 2000. And on the whole, so much code is out there using legacy functions that should be dropped from the OS or routines not optimized for new hardware that it would be bad practice to simply reuse them. Furthermore, lots of code on the internet was not written with robustness or security in mind, so once you release a web browser (say), people might use the bugs in it to root you.
I'm not saying that code shouldn't be reused, but keep in mind that a responsible programmer will go over all the code he uses, whether or not he wrote it, with a fine-toothed comb. If he didn't write it, this is somewhat harder and takes a long time, so if there are a hundred thousand lines, well, you've got your work cut out for you.
I'm not saying DRM is good, but unlike cancer it is not self-evident that it is bad. My point is: when's the last time you looked at a newspaper, or a scientific journal, or just about any publication, and the front story was "smoking sucks"? Probably never, because there is no reason to tell people "smoking sucks." They will ignore you. You have to tell them why smoking sucks if they don't already know, and you have to give them a better reason than "it's EVIL!!!!!"
If you're going to bash DRM, which should definitely be done, bash it objectively. Write an article about *why* DRM sucks, and post it on the web, or send it to a magazine or a newspaper. "DRM sucks" is not news. "Why DRM sucks" could be interesting and informative, but it is not news either. Slashdot is, supposedly, a news site.
Conversely, if you are going to report on DRM, don't say "DRM sucks." If you appear to be unbiased or at least objective, people will take you more seriously. Therefore, if you wish to bash DRM, say why DRM is bad. That way, the people who know little about DRM will know why it is bad, not that some random Slashdot person thinks it is bad. And don't just say, "here's why DRM is bad:". Instead, write "here are some problems with / concerns about DRM". That sort of argument could be integrated into a news article without provoking posts like this one.
parent should have been modded flamebait. +4 insightful instead, so I'll bite.
Note: I am strongly against DRM, but IP is not the antichrist, it just has its places. Don't mod me troll, this is actually my opinion.
I will agree that technology is inherently iterative. Nobody has a completely new idea, ever, with the emphasis on completely. Suppose you have a useful idea, perhaps not completely new, but useful nonetheless.
Perhaps you have invented a data-exchange protocol that will allow for faster transmissions. This is not an easy thing to do, and requires substantial effort and a fairly complex lab. Now, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to email IBM and tell them about it so they can sell it, refusing to patent the idea yourself? Probably not, because there is substantial development cost. Maybe your idea wasn't original, and maybe a thousand people had it first, but you put the effort and the money into getting it implemented. How are you going to recoup your development costs? You aren't, unless you patent the device to stop IBM (say) from selling for less, because they have economy of scale and a better marketing department than you. If you are a large company, you might put the technology out for free to further your good name, but if you put a lot of money and effort into developing something, you are going to want a return on that money. Businesses would go broke otherwise.
This is especially noticeable in the (admittedly somewhat bloated) pharmaceuticals industry. Drugs are expensive to develop taking millions of dollars and years to create, plus tens of millions and several more years to test, and therefore must be patented to keep drug companies in business. It is simply not possible to turn a profit if after your $200 million dollar, 10-year development process, every other company can make your drug for the same price.
Software can be the same way. Complicated systems take a long time to write, and unless the people writing them are already filthy rich, they need some incentive before they are going to put in a hundred thousand man-hours. In our capitilistic economy, it is just not possible to make a living writing software if you allow everyone to copy it freely. Perhaps if you request that people donate if they have the money... but unless your software is insanely popular, you can't get by on that much money. People would only code in their spare time and provide no tech support. And certainly, if you wrote it in your spare time and don't need the money, open-source your software. But a guy has to eat something, not to mention pay for bandwidth and rack space...
I would say that music should be free. Groups should get their money through concerts, or maybe there should be some socialistic system that supports music. I am against DRM, but intellectual property is the way the economy works today.
Meanwhile, the press is completely unbiased...
on
DRM: How To Boil A Frog
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a matter of time to see if consumers will flat-out reject this new 'enabling' technology, or let it seep into and infect their lives like the disease that it is.
OK, I am against DRM too, and will never buy a system with Palladium in it or any DRM-{en|dis}abled media player, but this is ridiculous. If you're going to call it news, please report with some degree of objectivity. The "from the...dept" line is the place for editorial comments. In this case, not only is the title rather suggestive (appropriate, too, but not impartial), but the author goes out and says DRM IS A DISEASE. While I agree, not everyone does, and you will find that your journalism becomes stronger and less controversial/offensive if you smash something subtly (or not at all) instead of openly, especially when the facts speak for themselves.
What? I'm saying that Apple shouldnt be blamed for a problem in the Pioneer drives that they put in their computers. If a Microsoft product were incompatible with a newer piece of software or hardware, i would be far from surprised, but if they were to patch it before such software or hardware were actually released, kudos to them. That just doesn't happen very often with Microsoft stuff, especially because it doesn't fail so spectacularly (decreasing their motivation to patch). It's not like things blow up if Windows crashes your computer.
wtf r these guys talking about. im talk is not nearly that pervasive in school like im a student and ive never seen ne1 write a paper in all lower case using stupid im abbr or sl@ng and w/o ne punctuation. u got to be kidding me. all the kid in my class use perfectly good english grmamar speling and punctuation on all their work and they pluralize all their word correctly and watch not to make any runon. like if ne1 turned in a paper like they say on that site 2 1 of my prof the prof would own their ass. i think some1 shuold talk to these nytimes fool and tell them their artical is just a bunch of fud.
You're blaming Apple for a problem in Pioneer's drives that won't have any effect until new technology comes out, and even then there is a free upgrade to fix the problem well in advance? Are you just looking for an excuse to bash Apple or what? They aren't the only ones that ship these drives, and the patch works on their computers.
All it says in the help is that it is adaptive and trains itself on your previous spam. It would be nice to see some source... and be able to patch it if we don't like it.... oh well, whining won't get me anywhere.
actually, i have received about 1 a day for the past two weeks (2 out of 12 were filtered), plus apple news that i havent canceled, and I have been fairly loose about giving out my address (mike_hamburg@hotmail.com).
This is not my main account anymore, I only check it twice a week for people not aware of my address change, so don't even bother to sign me up for pornspam. Part of the reason i don't get spammed much is my address has an underscore and i havent done any REALLY stupid things with it (besides enter greetingWishes.com once, that's half my spam right there), but wisely chosen names (not jsmith23) will help you not get spammed. And dont be a part of their stupid member directory.
A nice way to cut your spam in half is to kill anything with "udp" in it, because no English words (ie in the dictionary) contain this combo (unless you count mudpie), but most of that fake diploma spam has it.
IMHO the best way to make an all-electronic voting system would be to use some sort of smartcard system. If there were a smartcard available that could sign stuff transmitted to it with the user's private key, the voting machine would not be able to change the votes. (the card would have to have an lcd display to verify what you were signing). The machine would still be able to throw votes out, but this could be overcome by a paper list of who voted (much less obnoxious than a paper ballot) or a counter of people entering the voting booth, separate from the main system.
Such a smartcard would actually be useful for other purposes. It would function nicely as a credit card: you could sign the bill. Nobody could steal your cash without your actual card (or with, if it had a PIN). Nobody could change the charges afterward.
It would also be great for signing other things, like legal documents.
That said, such cards are a long way off, unless public-key crypo dramatically improves or smartcard hardware advances rapidly. A 6805 or the like just couldnt handle it.
...just a small TFT LCD display would cost you substantially more than that on digikey... it could be worth it to get one of these just for the parts...
OK, so first of all, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. There are Greek copies of it (although not originals) which appear to be simple copies of the original (not translated at all). Revelation was a letter written by John, so the events there were not even recorded from Hebrew oral tradition. So you need no math to transcribe it, just copy the words as they appear. Innumerate scribes would have been more likely to leave the numbers the same, having no knowledge of what to change them to.
Secondly, the old testament is written in Hebrew, not Greek, and there many Hebrew copies, which agree pretty well with each other (Hebrew scribes were very meticulous about copying scripture, copied everything letter for letter even if they thought it contained errors, etc) and with the Septuagint, a very early Greek translation of the Old Testament. The bible only says pi==3 if you assume that the 10 and 30 are exact measurements (not rounded at all: even if the 30 were exact, the 10 could be rounded from 30/pi, about 9.55) and that they were measured on the outside of the bowl (instead of the circumference being around the inside). Unlikely.
Now, it seems that John could multiply because the 144,000 was broken into 12 groups of 12,000. Also, he does not need to square 10,000 for three reasons: first, the product does not have a name in Greek, just as you said. Secondly, it was written as two myriads of myriads, and only as 200 million upon translation into English. Third, he did not count them or compute their number: he heard it, presumably from his guide or from God. Revelation was a vision, remember?
In any case, the bible may contain some innacuracies, but it seems to me that these numbers were probably at least transcribed accurately.
Ancient peoples didn't have a short-hand for numbers as large as a million. IIRC the ancient greeks only had terms to count up to 10,000.
You are, in fact, correct. Sort of. The Greek reads (in the text I have here):
kai 'o arithmos twn strateumatwn tou 'ippikou dismuriades muriadwn, hkousa ton arithmon autwn. h=eta, w=omega, '=rough breathing, like the letter h
i.e. and the number of_the troops of_the cavalry two_myriads of_myriads, I_heard the number of_them. So yes, it does actually say two hundred million. Now, it is possible that John was exaggerating, or that two hundred million has some meaning in gematria, but then, you could argue that the whole book was that way.
sorry to be nitpicky and offtopic, but technically it has to be a battle to be Armageddon. At the end of the world (according to the book of Revelation), there will be a "last battle" on the planes of Har-Megiddo, transliterated as Armageddon, and one of the forces will have two hundred million soldiers. These planes were the site of several previous bloody battles, so it is fitting that the last one should be there.
Any real terrorist organization will always find it easier to place a truckload of C4 outside a dam and hit the button than to break into the computer and open the floodgates. It is not "easy" for "just anyone" to break into these systems. I would worry more about vulnerable computers controlling these sites being taken out by one of the far-too-many script kiddies, by accident. After all, there are many more script kiddies than terrorists. Realizing his find, some 15-year jackass in New York opens the floodgates of Hoover Dam and kills a million people just for the hell of it, then goes and wanks off with the porn in his other window. Kids these days. But suffice it to say, I'm not too worried about that either.
What terrorists could do is take most of the internet down with a Warhol or Flash worm, which could be done by terrorists and would take out all vulnerable computers in about a minute. While not killing anyone, this would be horrible for the economy.
you are only half-right. Certainly the internet is not a life-support machine and nobody would die if it were shut down completely. However, remember that it is an important means of communication and distribution. Similarly, if all postal services were shut down, the world would not end, or if all major highways leading into several metropolan areas were sabotaged at night, nobody would die. But in any of these cases, this great inconvenience would badly damage the rather fragile economy. The stock market would crash and we would enter a recession, which would last much longer than the damage itself. So while the physical damage would be minor, it would be considered a major blow to the nation, whose foundation lies not in democracy, but in capitalism.
"Electric cars" that charge off the power grid are just moving their fossil fuel consumption over to a power plant (unless the power is provided by nuclear generation, which has its own huge set of problems).
...but the hydrogen for a fuel cell would be produced by stripping natural gas (produces CO2) or by hydrolysis (uses that same electricity, and more of it). Or else you would have to use methane or some other hydrocarbon in the first place. How is that cleaner again?
Oh, wait, you could use photosynthetic bacteria, some of which make hydrogen and oxygen. But if that became economically practical, we could use it for power generation too...
... for several reasons. Let's go through some of them: 1) Batteries suck. Even the best ones are expensive, don't hold enough charge per unit weight or volume to come within an order of magnitude of gas, and take a long time to charge.
2) Electric engines suck at high RPM. Gas engines suck at low RPM. Electric engines are horrible on the highway unless your car is really light.
3) People don't want light cars, even if this is best for the environment, because all the mother-trucking heavy 3-ton pickups and SUVs out on the road will crush them like a VW Bug in an accident.
4) Electric engines are expensive and not as efficient as gas ones. The industry has a hundred years of experience in making gas auto engines and not nearly as much in electric.
5) It pollutes just as much anyway. Most people get their power from a coal or oil-fired plant, or maybe natural gas. Since charging and then discharging the battery is fairly inefficient, especially at high speeds, it can even pollute more than a gas engine.
6) Those EVs on the site are ugly, as are the Prius and the Insight. People don't want to buy ugly cars.
7) The cars are more expensive than gas cars. The decreased fuel cost does not offset this completely, and it doesn't help the environment much unless you have a nuke plant in your neighborhood, which you probably don't, because evironmentalists hate nuke plants (even though they are probably better for the environment). They have crappy performance on the highway and they are ugly. So what is your motivation for buying?
Most asteroids approach at speeds of several kilometers per second. To catch them without popping, the airbag would have to fly out into space, turn around, match speeds with the asteroid, deploy (possibly not in that order) and then fire its rockets the other way to deflect it.
Wouldn't it be easier just to land on it? Or nuke it?
You could do some damage if you hacked into one of those, like flood out a laundromat, ruin lots of peoples clothes, etc. Some things were just not made to be internet connected.
Some of the features that could be abused (from esuds.net): *sell injected detergent and fabric softener as part of a wash [snip] * service machines on an as-needed basis, reducing service costs and machine down time
So you can break the machines and flood the laundromat with suds. How reassuring.
um... it seems they're made of metal. So, shouldn't be any more nasty to the environment than, say, a few bottle caps. Not that bottle caps are good for the environment, but wouldn't it be more effective to ban, say, styrofoam than plasmonic materials?
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps we have beaten the point to death, but what i'm saying as that it is horrendously bad journalistic style to mention, by the way, DRM is bad, and leave it at that. You should either treat it as self-evident or say why it is bad. I think it is self-evident and therefore doesn't need to be said by the editor.
Software has an interesting property in that it costs nothing to reuse something which already exists. So very often even a "complex" system will not take a long time to put together.
Although this is true in terms of dollar cost, reuse of old code often contributes to the cruftiness of software. Take, for example, the date codes from the 1980s that people blindly patched into their applications without realizing that they might cause glitches in the year 2000. And on the whole, so much code is out there using legacy functions that should be dropped from the OS or routines not optimized for new hardware that it would be bad practice to simply reuse them. Furthermore, lots of code on the internet was not written with robustness or security in mind, so once you release a web browser (say), people might use the bugs in it to root you.
I'm not saying that code shouldn't be reused, but keep in mind that a responsible programmer will go over all the code he uses, whether or not he wrote it, with a fine-toothed comb. If he didn't write it, this is somewhat harder and takes a long time, so if there are a hundred thousand lines, well, you've got your work cut out for you.
I'm not saying DRM is good, but unlike cancer it is not self-evident that it is bad. My point is: when's the last time you looked at a newspaper, or a scientific journal, or just about any publication, and the front story was "smoking sucks"? Probably never, because there is no reason to tell people "smoking sucks." They will ignore you. You have to tell them why smoking sucks if they don't already know, and you have to give them a better reason than "it's EVIL!!!!!"
If you're going to bash DRM, which should definitely be done, bash it objectively. Write an article about *why* DRM sucks, and post it on the web, or send it to a magazine or a newspaper. "DRM sucks" is not news. "Why DRM sucks" could be interesting and informative, but it is not news either. Slashdot is, supposedly, a news site.
Conversely, if you are going to report on DRM, don't say "DRM sucks." If you appear to be unbiased or at least objective, people will take you more seriously. Therefore, if you wish to bash DRM, say why DRM is bad. That way, the people who know little about DRM will know why it is bad, not that some random Slashdot person thinks it is bad. And don't just say, "here's why DRM is bad:". Instead, write "here are some problems with / concerns about DRM". That sort of argument could be integrated into a news article without provoking posts like this one.
parent should have been modded flamebait. +4 insightful instead, so I'll bite.
... but unless your software is insanely popular, you can't get by on that much money. People would only code in their spare time and provide no tech support. And certainly, if you wrote it in your spare time and don't need the money, open-source your software. But a guy has to eat something, not to mention pay for bandwidth and rack space...
Note: I am strongly against DRM, but IP is not the antichrist, it just has its places. Don't mod me troll, this is actually my opinion.
I will agree that technology is inherently iterative. Nobody has a completely new idea, ever, with the emphasis on completely. Suppose you have a useful idea, perhaps not completely new, but useful nonetheless.
Perhaps you have invented a data-exchange protocol that will allow for faster transmissions. This is not an easy thing to do, and requires substantial effort and a fairly complex lab. Now, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to email IBM and tell them about it so they can sell it, refusing to patent the idea yourself? Probably not, because there is substantial development cost. Maybe your idea wasn't original, and maybe a thousand people had it first, but you put the effort and the money into getting it implemented. How are you going to recoup your development costs? You aren't, unless you patent the device to stop IBM (say) from selling for less, because they have economy of scale and a better marketing department than you. If you are a large company, you might put the technology out for free to further your good name, but if you put a lot of money and effort into developing something, you are going to want a return on that money. Businesses would go broke otherwise.
This is especially noticeable in the (admittedly somewhat bloated) pharmaceuticals industry. Drugs are expensive to develop taking millions of dollars and years to create, plus tens of millions and several more years to test, and therefore must be patented to keep drug companies in business. It is simply not possible to turn a profit if after your $200 million dollar, 10-year development process, every other company can make your drug for the same price.
Software can be the same way. Complicated systems take a long time to write, and unless the people writing them are already filthy rich, they need some incentive before they are going to put in a hundred thousand man-hours. In our capitilistic economy, it is just not possible to make a living writing software if you allow everyone to copy it freely. Perhaps if you request that people donate if they have the money
I would say that music should be free. Groups should get their money through concerts, or maybe there should be some socialistic system that supports music. I am against DRM, but intellectual property is the way the economy works today.
It's a matter of time to see if consumers will flat-out reject this new 'enabling' technology, or let it seep into and infect their lives like the disease that it is.
OK, I am against DRM too, and will never buy a system with Palladium in it or any DRM-{en|dis}abled media player, but this is ridiculous. If you're going to call it news, please report with some degree of objectivity. The "from the...dept" line is the place for editorial comments. In this case, not only is the title rather suggestive (appropriate, too, but not impartial), but the author goes out and says DRM IS A DISEASE. While I agree, not everyone does, and you will find that your journalism becomes stronger and less controversial/offensive if you smash something subtly (or not at all) instead of openly, especially when the facts speak for themselves.
What? I'm saying that Apple shouldnt be blamed for a problem in the Pioneer drives that they put in their computers. If a Microsoft product were incompatible with a newer piece of software or hardware, i would be far from surprised, but if they were to patch it before such software or hardware were actually released, kudos to them. That just doesn't happen very often with Microsoft stuff, especially because it doesn't fail so spectacularly (decreasing their motivation to patch). It's not like things blow up if Windows crashes your computer.
wtf r these guys talking about. im talk is not nearly that pervasive in school
like im a student and ive never seen ne1 write a paper in all lower case using stupid im abbr or sl@ng and w/o ne punctuation. u got to be kidding me. all the kid in my class use perfectly good english grmamar speling and punctuation on all their work and they pluralize all their word correctly and watch not to make any runon. like if ne1 turned in a paper like they say on that site 2 1 of my prof the prof would own their ass. i think some1 shuold talk to these nytimes fool and tell them their artical is just a bunch of fud.
Parent is a troll, but I'll bite.
You're blaming Apple for a problem in Pioneer's drives that won't have any effect until new technology comes out, and even then there is a free upgrade to fix the problem well in advance? Are you just looking for an excuse to bash Apple or what? They aren't the only ones that ship these drives, and the patch works on their computers.
All it says in the help is that it is adaptive and trains itself on your previous spam. It would be nice to see some source... and be able to patch it if we don't like it.... oh well, whining won't get me anywhere.
yep. anything containing the words etesian and realgar and mangelwurzel has a 99.9% probability of being spam :-)
actually, i have received about 1 a day for the past two weeks (2 out of 12 were filtered), plus apple news that i havent canceled, and I have been fairly loose about giving out my address (mike_hamburg@hotmail.com).
This is not my main account anymore, I only check it twice a week for people not aware of my address change, so don't even bother to sign me up for pornspam. Part of the reason i don't get spammed much is my address has an underscore and i havent done any REALLY stupid things with it (besides enter greetingWishes.com once, that's half my spam right there), but wisely chosen names (not jsmith23) will help you not get spammed. And dont be a part of their stupid member directory.
A nice way to cut your spam in half is to kill anything with "udp" in it, because no English words (ie in the dictionary) contain this combo (unless you count mudpie), but most of that fake diploma spam has it.
IMHO the best way to make an all-electronic voting system would be to use some sort of smartcard system. If there were a smartcard available that could sign stuff transmitted to it with the user's private key, the voting machine would not be able to change the votes. (the card would have to have an lcd display to verify what you were signing). The machine would still be able to throw votes out, but this could be overcome by a paper list of who voted (much less obnoxious than a paper ballot) or a counter of people entering the voting booth, separate from the main system.
Such a smartcard would actually be useful for other purposes. It would function nicely as a credit card: you could sign the bill. Nobody could steal your cash without your actual card (or with, if it had a PIN). Nobody could change the charges afterward.
It would also be great for signing other things, like legal documents.
That said, such cards are a long way off, unless public-key crypo dramatically improves or smartcard hardware advances rapidly. A 6805 or the like just couldnt handle it.
That's just like saying that it's cleaner to make electricity than to burn the fuel in cars... true in theory, but not in practice.
...just a small TFT LCD display would cost you substantially more than that on digikey... it could be worth it to get one of these just for the parts...
OK, so first of all, the New Testament was originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. There are Greek copies of it (although not originals) which appear to be simple copies of the original (not translated at all). Revelation was a letter written by John, so the events there were not even recorded from Hebrew oral tradition. So you need no math to transcribe it, just copy the words as they appear. Innumerate scribes would have been more likely to leave the numbers the same, having no knowledge of what to change them to.
Secondly, the old testament is written in Hebrew, not Greek, and there many Hebrew copies, which agree pretty well with each other (Hebrew scribes were very meticulous about copying scripture, copied everything letter for letter even if they thought it contained errors, etc) and with the Septuagint, a very early Greek translation of the Old Testament. The bible only says pi==3 if you assume that the 10 and 30 are exact measurements (not rounded at all: even if the 30 were exact, the 10 could be rounded from 30/pi, about 9.55) and that they were measured on the outside of the bowl (instead of the circumference being around the inside). Unlikely.
Now, it seems that John could multiply because the 144,000 was broken into 12 groups of 12,000. Also, he does not need to square 10,000 for three reasons: first, the product does not have a name in Greek, just as you said. Secondly, it was written as two myriads of myriads, and only as 200 million upon translation into English. Third, he did not count them or compute their number: he heard it, presumably from his guide or from God. Revelation was a vision, remember?
In any case, the bible may contain some innacuracies, but it seems to me that these numbers were probably at least transcribed accurately.
kai 'o arithmos twn strateumatwn tou 'ippikou dismuriades muriadwn, hkousa ton arithmon autwn.
h=eta, w=omega, '=rough breathing, like the letter h
i.e. and the number of_the troops of_the cavalry two_myriads of_myriads, I_heard the number of_them. So yes, it does actually say two hundred million. Now, it is possible that John was exaggerating, or that two hundred million has some meaning in gematria, but then, you could argue that the whole book was that way.
sorry to be nitpicky and offtopic, but technically it has to be a battle to be Armageddon. At the end of the world (according to the book of Revelation), there will be a "last battle" on the planes of Har-Megiddo, transliterated as Armageddon, and one of the forces will have two hundred million soldiers. These planes were the site of several previous bloody battles, so it is fitting that the last one should be there.
Any real terrorist organization will always find it easier to place a truckload of C4 outside a dam and hit the button than to break into the computer and open the floodgates. It is not "easy" for "just anyone" to break into these systems. I would worry more about vulnerable computers controlling these sites being taken out by one of the far-too-many script kiddies, by accident. After all, there are many more script kiddies than terrorists. Realizing his find, some 15-year jackass in New York opens the floodgates of Hoover Dam and kills a million people just for the hell of it, then goes and wanks off with the porn in his other window. Kids these days. But suffice it to say, I'm not too worried about that either.
What terrorists could do is take most of the internet down with a Warhol or Flash worm, which could be done by terrorists and would take out all vulnerable computers in about a minute. While not killing anyone, this would be horrible for the economy.
Just my $0.02
you are only half-right. Certainly the internet is not a life-support machine and nobody would die if it were shut down completely. However, remember that it is an important means of communication and distribution. Similarly, if all postal services were shut down, the world would not end, or if all major highways leading into several metropolan areas were sabotaged at night, nobody would die. But in any of these cases, this great inconvenience would badly damage the rather fragile economy. The stock market would crash and we would enter a recession, which would last much longer than the damage itself. So while the physical damage would be minor, it would be considered a major blow to the nation, whose foundation lies not in democracy, but in capitalism.
Oh, wait, you could use photosynthetic bacteria, some of which make hydrogen and oxygen. But if that became economically practical, we could use it for power generation too...
... for several reasons. Let's go through some of them:
1) Batteries suck. Even the best ones are expensive, don't hold enough charge per unit weight or volume to come within an order of magnitude of gas, and take a long time to charge.
2) Electric engines suck at high RPM. Gas engines suck at low RPM. Electric engines are horrible on the highway unless your car is really light.
3) People don't want light cars, even if this is best for the environment, because all the mother-trucking heavy 3-ton pickups and SUVs out on the road will crush them like a VW Bug in an accident.
4) Electric engines are expensive and not as efficient as gas ones. The industry has a hundred years of experience in making gas auto engines and not nearly as much in electric.
5) It pollutes just as much anyway. Most people get their power from a coal or oil-fired plant, or maybe natural gas. Since charging and then discharging the battery is fairly inefficient, especially at high speeds, it can even pollute more than a gas engine.
6) Those EVs on the site are ugly, as are the Prius and the Insight. People don't want to buy ugly cars.
7) The cars are more expensive than gas cars. The decreased fuel cost does not offset this completely, and it doesn't help the environment much unless you have a nuke plant in your neighborhood, which you probably don't, because evironmentalists hate nuke plants (even though they are probably better for the environment). They have crappy performance on the highway and they are ugly. So what is your motivation for buying?
Most asteroids approach at speeds of several kilometers per second. To catch them without popping, the airbag would have to fly out into space, turn around, match speeds with the asteroid, deploy (possibly not in that order) and then fire its rockets the other way to deflect it.
Wouldn't it be easier just to land on it? Or nuke it?
You could do some damage if you hacked into one of those, like flood out a laundromat, ruin lots of peoples clothes, etc. Some things were just not made to be internet connected.
Some of the features that could be abused (from esuds.net):
*sell injected detergent and fabric softener as part of a wash
[snip]
* service machines on an as-needed basis, reducing service costs and machine down time
So you can break the machines and flood the laundromat with suds. How reassuring.
um... it seems they're made of metal. So, shouldn't be any more nasty to the environment than, say, a few bottle caps. Not that bottle caps are good for the environment, but wouldn't it be more effective to ban, say, styrofoam than plasmonic materials?