As much as I would like to be able to claim that it can be used to control the weather, such far-fetched notions are pure fantasies, spawned from the minds of those who don't understand the physics of space plasmas. Or have any notion of what a plasma is. Or how weather patterns are created. I mean hell, we were barely able to use it to generate a coherent signal using the electrojet (already quite the feat of science). How the hell could we use it to affect the weather???
Let's put on the tinfoil propeller-beanie and spin up some conjectures, shall we? B-)
For starters, your power is not limited to your own input. You're using a nonlinear process (in this case, parametric amplification) to modulate power obtained from other sources (the solar bombardment of the Earth with charged particles). You're the "control grid", not the "plate supply".
How might you get from modulated ionospheric currents to weather manipulation. There are several proposals. But let's bring Tesla into the mix (along with published experiments from the HAARP site): You could pump resonances in the ionosphere/earth-surface cavity - dumping that solar power into vertical electric fields between the Eartj and the sky.
Pumping the ~8Hz fundamental resonance (the one Tesla wanted to use as a power transmission system) would just excite the whole planet. No aim. But pumping harmonics - especially if you pumped several at once with controlled phases and possibly controlled locations of the excitation - could give you patches with higher and lower field strengths, hologram style. You'd still be aiming at large regions rather than tight locations. But TFA's conspiracy theory involves a target of subcontinental scale, so that's still fine.
How might subsonic vertical electrical fields affect weather? Modulating cloud-charging mechanisms and thus affecting nucleation of raindrops, just for starters. (Also triggering lightning, etc. The sprite/jet mechanism seems to combine with lightning and other tropospheric charge-carrying mechanisms to complete a circuit between the ionosphere and the surface. A major AC field concentration might affect that. And discharges are a negative-resistance so they can pump surface heat-engine energy into the resonances, too. More available power. Muuhhhhahaha!) Increase nucleation to dump water in places where it's useless and dry the air, dump heat-of-condensation and/or reflect sunlght to steer winds, etc. You don't have to be perfect - just reduce the rain by a fraction to dry out an area.
While we're at it, let's try earthquakes, too:
You've got single- and double-digit low frequencies to play with (and more if you're not limited to that cavity's resonance). What can you do with them? Such low frequencies penetrate the Earth's surface to considerable depth. Lots of minerals are piezoelectric. How about shaking a mechanical resonance to pump up some vibration near an earthquake fault that's got enough stress to let go? You couldn't make quakes out of thin air (or thick dirt). But moving their schedule up from "some time in the next 60 years" to "now, when they would do our nefarious plan some good" would be a useful tool. Finding the resonance wouldn't be too hard with some sensors on the ground - at these frequencies you could run a feedback loop by radio back to the control system to tune the excitation.
= = = =
Of course you're playing with plasma, with LOTS of nonlinear effects (as well as the possibility of longitudinal as well as transverse waves). The tale-spinning opportunities are boundless.
= = = =
Putting aside the beanie...
Is any of this (or other similar stuff) even remotely possible? Damfino. This yarn is about stringing together some halfway-plausible mechanisms for conspiracy theorists to talk about. HAARP is about actually doing the cutting-edge research to see whether any of the pieces (or something similar) could actually work. ("Or at least that's the cover story. Muuuhhhahaha!")
If it was real you would think we would pick better targets such as:
1. Iran...
Last night I happened to tune in "Late Night America" (a syndicated talk show heavily into discussing tinfoil-hat subjects). They had a guest who was claiming that Iran was claiming that the recent spate of earthquakes near their nearly-commissioned reactor were the result of a HAARP-based earthquake induction weapon.
Haven't done any looking into whether Iran actually DID make such a claim. But "The Claim is Out There!" (TM).
I hear butanol has a vapor pressure, ignition point, flame propagation rate, and energy content that let it be dropped in essentially straight as a substitute for gasoline, without retuning modern engines.
Congratulations. Your school board has taught children that there is a double standard. One law for the citizens. And a different law for anyone who works for the government.
That's something they should learn early. It will prepare them better for life.
Just think: If they didn't get lessons like this they might believe in all that "Constitution" and "Equal Protection" stuff. They might even get angry and join tinfoil-hat wingnuts like the Tea Party movement, and try to throw out government officials with a more realistic understanding of how politics works.
If I read it right, the rocket is just a convenient way to burn the N2O to get rid of it, in the simplest and cheapest way possible. They happened to have this handy rocket engine design and those can be very simple if their controls are well designed.
Getting useful heat out of the N2O is a handy side-effect. (Run a small steam cogeneration system with it if you feel ambitious. Or use it where you need a bit of extra heat.) But the main gain is the enormous extra production of methane, which can already be conveniently utilized by existing systems, now that you can safely get rid of the undesirable byproduct.
Computer room was in middle of plant on second floor. Fire sprinkler pipe went through concrete floor under raised floor via a hole lined with a somewhat oversized pipe. Was small clearance around the pipe.
Plant was shut down for model changeover (when the line workers go deer hunting and the plant engineers and related workers fix or change everything that needs fixing or changing.) Somebody was welding a cable rack near the ceiling and the smoke drifted up through the gap, into the space under the raised floor, and set off the halon. A decade's worth of dust and many of the raised floor sections went flying.
Security responded to the alarm. No sign of fire. Per procedure they switched to the backup halon tank. Half an hour later...
"Web browsers have evolved into operating systems"
No, they haven't, calm down.
I think he means that they have become application environments, giving access to all the fundamental services of the underlying operating systems, through their own API and security models, with their own set of bugs.
I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).
I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)
Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.
Standard spelling/grammar is an elitist conspiracu
on
The Great Typo Hunt
·
· Score: 1
Languages evolve by, among other things, useful "mistakes" that are adopted by the speakers and writers - with notable exceptions (such as Latin, which is no longer spoken as an L1, or French, which has a standards body and for which speaking "incorrectly" is a crime, with fines, in France).
The English language was an evolving language as of the American Revolution. But beginning about then, some people tried to standardize it.
Of course they standardized the way it was spoken on the East Coast (but added a couple rules borrowed from Latin - such as no trailing prepositions). Then they used propaganda and government education programs to spread their version and brand all the other regional variations as "improper", with the implication that the speakers and writers were either illiterate or stupid.
The thing is, market forces work so that companies naturally merge to only 3 or 4 main competitors when an industry is mature.... At this time, these larger companies are able to take advantage of economies of scale that smaller competitors cannot, and as the industry and technology is mature, new small competitors can't bring any new innovation to the table that outweighs their lack of brand recognition and economies of scale.
So far so good...
The catch is, you need a decent government in place which oversees them and makes sure that they don't form a cartel or collude in any way to screw over the customers.
And there's where you disconnect from both your own argument's internal consistency and what the "Rand-worshiping free-market fans" claim.
The catch, for the cartel-seekers, is that in order to screw over the customers they have to raise prices. And THAT over-compensates for the economies of scale and lack of opportunity for competition on innovation in a mature market. Once the upstarts start up they have to drive the prices back down to keep from being hamstrung.
Meanwhile the upstarts have second-mover advantage: They don't have to make all the design and market-choice mistakes and incur all the related costs that the established players did. Meanwhile a market never REALLY matures - science and technology march on even when the current market players aren't incorporating the incremental and breakthrough improvements. When building new plant it's about as easy to design for the latest-and-greatest as to replicate a former decade's technology - and it may actually be cheaper. Once the new guys are playing the old ones are stuck with aging plant that needs replacement or an expensive retrofit.
So, in the absence of some anticompetitive externality the lifetime of a monopoly or cartel that engages in gouging is limited. It recreates the conditions that lead to the rise of new competitors.
The fly in this ointment (as a previous poster has pointed out) is the government. By a number of mechanisms it can (and tends to) favor the existing players and raise the barriers to the entry of new competitors - or even prescribe a monopoly. THAT's what allows cartels and monopolies to gouge for long periods.
A monopoly or cartel that doesn't mistreat its customers can continue to exist for a long time. Example: Alcoa. It had an effective monopoly on aluminum production for decades - mainly BECAUSE it priced its products low, treated its customers well, and focussed on improving its processes rather than playing zero-sum games to transfer its customers' wealth to itself. Thus competition was both unnecessary to achieve the benefits of a competitive market - and (until post-WWII demobilization enabled Reynolds and Kaiser) market forces drove investment to other areas where more value-added was available.
The problem isn't monopoly per se - it's COERCIVE monopoly. And the main source of coercion (especially coercion that limits entry to markets) is government action.
Took a look: Looks like it WAS #8 and my memory was faulty.
This is a life-or-death issue. Please ignore my previous pushing of the illusory #40 and substitute #8 wherever it occurs in the remainder of my posts above.
With that substitution, does anyone have a problem with the stopping power of a 12-gauge load of #8 at under 15 feet?
So what you're saying is that the hints about Apple's true nature as a company were there to see even back then. But they still had some claim to good will.
Like most companies they change a bit every couple decades.
In Apple's case it seems to depend on whether Jobs is in charge.
It used to be you could never find anybody who could find anything bad to say about Apple.
I guess you weren't around for the 1988-1994 "Look and Feel" suit initiated by Apple against Microsoft - with the potential of a clone directed against any project, open source or not, that looked too much like Apple's graphical interface. (Brace yourself NeWS, X. Don't bother trying, KDE, Gnome,...)
In retaliation the GCC compiler project (for starters) refused to release Macintosh versions. (An independent group of Mac users ported each new gcc release to Macs and handled Mac-related bug fixes, resulting in a several-month delay of feature enhancements and bug fixes for that platform.) Meanwhile, John Gilmore was passing out a lapel button with a really ugly worm coming out of an apple and eating a computer, with a slogan about how Apple should keep its crummy lawyers out of MY computer.
Yep, pretty close. Smaller than BBs. Think "lead pinheads".
#4 buckshot works well against human sized targets and is the minimum anyone usually recommends for self defense.
Now that depends on the range, doesn't it?
If you only intend to fire it when the perp is in the same small room or on a flight of stairs you really don't care HOW small it is. It will penetrate just fine. Doesn't have enough spread at that distance to act as separate particles - there's a column of lead an inch or so deep right behind the particles in the front row.
Beyond a few feet it's had a chance to open out and once it hits something with significant mass it fans out drastically. But if the first thing it hits besides air is the surface of the perp (and it's still flying in a tight cylindrical formation because the perp is within, say, three steps) it doesn't have a chance to disperse before punching a hole in something important.
If the perp ISN'T within three steps or so (and doesn't have his own gun pointed at you) you'll have a hard time justifying a self-defense shoot. (And if he is pointing a gun at you from down a long hall he'll have a hard time doing much once he takes the momentum equivalent of a shotgun recoil - without the mass of the shotgun to smooth it out - to a patch maybe the size of his face.)
I can't be the only one that envisioned automatic "gun cameras" here can I?
Deadly-force mantraps are illegal essentially everywhere.
Rule of thumb: In most jurisdictions you can only use deadly force to defend yourself (or another person of certain related classes) against a threat to life or limb. In some you can also use it to defend property under some circumstances.
You can't delegate the decisions to machines - especially when you personally aren't there to be at risk. (It's not just their operation that's illegal. Even setting up such a device is one or more of several crimes.)
Scenario: You're away (or died last month). Sheriff, firefighter, landlord, or heir shows shows up (with a warrant, probable cause, chasing smoke or flame, or coming to take possession of his property). "Sherrif, warrant!" / "Anybody in there? You're on fire!" / "Home at last! Let's get this door open and move in." Bash. BANG!
And a good safe to store it in when you're away somewhere you can't take it with you. (Some jurisdictions blame YOU if a neighborhood gangsta lifts it and uses it somewhere else. So you don't want to depend on locked cases or hidey-holes.)
Get a fire safe. Not only do they help protect stuff against damage in a fire, they're double-walled with a layer of firebrick between the walls. This makes them heavy enough that it takes a special piece of equipment to move them. So the bad guys can't just haul it off somewhere else to crack it ^even if you don't bolt it to the floor with the locknuts inside).
and if that doesn't work: more gun.
Once you've got enough "stopping power" to make the threat credible and follow through if you're called, you don't need to go larger. As McClary's law of firepower says: "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet." Which in this case means "they can't". Housebreakers don't go in for (ineffective) arms races. They are more into avoiding "houses that shoot" in favor of less dangerous prey.
Decent sized pistol for one-on-one or few-on-one, shotgun if mobs-on-one might be an issue, and you're golden.
For home defense load your 12-gauge shotgun with fine birdshot loads, like number 40: It's just as effective as 00 if there's nothing but air between gun and target - but gets stopped by a couple layers of drywall at any significant distance - so you don't need to include the neighbors in the exercise. Fragmenting or greatly expanding hollowpoint bullets (such as "Golden Saber" or "Silvertip") in the pistol for the same reason (and also so it doesn't go THROUGH the bad guy and hit the neighbors if the perp is such a fool that you actually have to fire.)
According to FBI stats, safest (in terms of victim injury/death percentages) defense (by a BUNCH) is with-gun, next safest is knuckling under, and everything else is far worse.
Mandatory mindset: IF you have picked up the gun you have ALREADY DECIDED that you WILL fire if the perp attacks despite it. Get that figured out in your head before considering picking up the gun - or even getting one for self/home defense. You need to already be past that internal conflict to fire in time if it is necessary.
Take the NRA "Personal Protection" firearms course - before deciding what (if any) gun to buy or dedicate for the purpose. Excellent, cheap, customized for your area and its laws, taught by certified instructors with the legal issues handled by an official of the jurisdiction. A weekend's instruction (or several evening sessions) and you'll have the skills, competence, and understanding of the law and its fallout necessary to know when to defend and do it properly.
Perhaps because, if the total load is too great, they DDoS the machines of the market itself and trading slows to a crawl. Then there's nothing to skim.
My problem here is the quote "Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges". How can you have unknown entities trading?
I'd bet the identity (adequate to execute the trade if it matches a counterparty) is known to the market operators (or at least their computers) but that information is not exported to the market participants (including the analyst(s) who noticed these patterns).
The market operators may not have been aware of the patterns until it hit the media. Even if they were, they have no great incentive to do anything about it - or even the ability to do anything about it immediately, since they are bound by their published trading rules until they go through the process of changing them.
(The market operators' main incentives to change rules to suppress this would be reducing the load on their computers from the bogus trades and heading off perceptions about the market being excessively unfair to ordinary traders.)
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I would like to be able to claim that it can be used to control the weather, such far-fetched notions are pure fantasies, spawned from the minds of those who don't understand the physics of space plasmas. Or have any notion of what a plasma is. Or how weather patterns are created. I mean hell, we were barely able to use it to generate a coherent signal using the electrojet (already quite the feat of science). How the hell could we use it to affect the weather???
Let's put on the tinfoil propeller-beanie and spin up some conjectures, shall we? B-)
For starters, your power is not limited to your own input. You're using a nonlinear process (in this case, parametric amplification) to modulate power obtained from other sources (the solar bombardment of the Earth with charged particles). You're the "control grid", not the "plate supply".
How might you get from modulated ionospheric currents to weather manipulation. There are several proposals. But let's bring Tesla into the mix (along with published experiments from the HAARP site): You could pump resonances in the ionosphere/earth-surface cavity - dumping that solar power into vertical electric fields between the Eartj and the sky.
Pumping the ~8Hz fundamental resonance (the one Tesla wanted to use as a power transmission system) would just excite the whole planet. No aim. But pumping harmonics - especially if you pumped several at once with controlled phases and possibly controlled locations of the excitation - could give you patches with higher and lower field strengths, hologram style. You'd still be aiming at large regions rather than tight locations. But TFA's conspiracy theory involves a target of subcontinental scale, so that's still fine.
How might subsonic vertical electrical fields affect weather? Modulating cloud-charging mechanisms and thus affecting nucleation of raindrops, just for starters. (Also triggering lightning, etc. The sprite/jet mechanism seems to combine with lightning and other tropospheric charge-carrying mechanisms to complete a circuit between the ionosphere and the surface. A major AC field concentration might affect that. And discharges are a negative-resistance so they can pump surface heat-engine energy into the resonances, too. More available power. Muuhhhhahaha!) Increase nucleation to dump water in places where it's useless and dry the air, dump heat-of-condensation and/or reflect sunlght to steer winds, etc. You don't have to be perfect - just reduce the rain by a fraction to dry out an area.
While we're at it, let's try earthquakes, too:
You've got single- and double-digit low frequencies to play with (and more if you're not limited to that cavity's resonance). What can you do with them? Such low frequencies penetrate the Earth's surface to considerable depth. Lots of minerals are piezoelectric. How about shaking a mechanical resonance to pump up some vibration near an earthquake fault that's got enough stress to let go? You couldn't make quakes out of thin air (or thick dirt). But moving their schedule up from "some time in the next 60 years" to "now, when they would do our nefarious plan some good" would be a useful tool. Finding the resonance wouldn't be too hard with some sensors on the ground - at these frequencies you could run a feedback loop by radio back to the control system to tune the excitation.
= = = =
Of course you're playing with plasma, with LOTS of nonlinear effects (as well as the possibility of longitudinal as well as transverse waves). The tale-spinning opportunities are boundless.
= = = =
Putting aside the beanie...
Is any of this (or other similar stuff) even remotely possible? Damfino. This yarn is about stringing together some halfway-plausible mechanisms for conspiracy theorists to talk about. HAARP is about actually doing the cutting-edge research to see whether any of the pieces (or something similar) could actually work. ("Or at least that's the cover story. Muuuhhhahaha!")
Of cour
If it was real you would think we would pick better targets such as:
1. Iran ...
Last night I happened to tune in "Late Night America" (a syndicated talk show heavily into discussing tinfoil-hat subjects). They had a guest who was claiming that Iran was claiming that the recent spate of earthquakes near their nearly-commissioned reactor were the result of a HAARP-based earthquake induction weapon.
Haven't done any looking into whether Iran actually DID make such a claim. But "The Claim is Out There!" (TM).
Butanol, actually.
I hear butanol has a vapor pressure, ignition point, flame propagation rate, and energy content that let it be dropped in essentially straight as a substitute for gasoline, without retuning modern engines.
Does anybody have better info than this rumor?
Congratulations. Your school board has taught children that there is a double standard. One law for the citizens. And a different law for anyone who works for the government.
That's something they should learn early. It will prepare them better for life.
Just think: If they didn't get lessons like this they might believe in all that "Constitution" and "Equal Protection" stuff. They might even get angry and join tinfoil-hat wingnuts like the Tea Party movement, and try to throw out government officials with a more realistic understanding of how politics works.
Horrors!
B-b
If I read it right, the rocket is just a convenient way to burn the N2O to get rid of it, in the simplest and cheapest way possible. They happened to have this handy rocket engine design and those can be very simple if their controls are well designed.
Getting useful heat out of the N2O is a handy side-effect. (Run a small steam cogeneration system with it if you feel ambitious. Or use it where you need a bit of extra heat.) But the main gain is the enormous extra production of methane, which can already be conveniently utilized by existing systems, now that you can safely get rid of the undesirable byproduct.
Computer room was in middle of plant on second floor. Fire sprinkler pipe went through concrete floor under raised floor via a hole lined with a somewhat oversized pipe. Was small clearance around the pipe.
Plant was shut down for model changeover (when the line workers go deer hunting and the plant engineers and related workers fix or change everything that needs fixing or changing.) Somebody was welding a cable rack near the ceiling and the smoke drifted up through the gap, into the space under the raised floor, and set off the halon. A decade's worth of dust and many of the raised floor sections went flying.
Security responded to the alarm. No sign of fire. Per procedure they switched to the backup halon tank. Half an hour later...
Which is just as well, since I was torn between Informative and Funny. B-)
"Web browsers have evolved into operating systems"
No, they haven't, calm down.
I think he means that they have become application environments, giving access to all the fundamental services of the underlying operating systems, through their own API and security models, with their own set of bugs.
... what about the malicious applications which don't wanna to be sandboxed???
Build a launcher that sandboxes itself and then execs (or whatever) them.
What version of Solaris were you running? Sun gave free y2k patches for all current (and some old) versions of the OS.
Don't recall. But it was old and as I recall I did check: It was behind the horizon for the free patches.
I'd inherited the machine from a startup that shut down, as part of a severance agreement shortly before they went belly-up.
I'd had high hopes for Sun's stuff back in '85. But even before being eaten by Oracle they always seemed to be roadblocking any attempt to work with the guts of their system, even for internal use only. Meanwhile, Linux made good on the GNU promise and the freeing of BSD provided an additional open alternative OS (at least three of 'em if you count the project splits as distinct).
I abandoned Solaris on the last of my own machines for Y2K, rather than shell out for upgrades. (Only Linux machines at home at the moment - except for one firewalled-off Windows machine for my wife to run student-Autocad and certain true Windows applications for classwork.)
Some Open Solaris fans tried to claim things were more open than I perceived them to be. But this development underscores the correctness of my choice.
Languages evolve by, among other things, useful "mistakes" that are adopted by the speakers and writers - with notable exceptions (such as Latin, which is no longer spoken as an L1, or French, which has a standards body and for which speaking "incorrectly" is a crime, with fines, in France).
The English language was an evolving language as of the American Revolution. But beginning about then, some people tried to standardize it.
Of course they standardized the way it was spoken on the East Coast (but added a couple rules borrowed from Latin - such as no trailing prepositions). Then they used propaganda and government education programs to spread their version and brand all the other regional variations as "improper", with the implication that the speakers and writers were either illiterate or stupid.
Amusingly, most white-collar criminals are actually republicans.
Amusingly, most white-collar criminals are actually democrats but spread the myth that such crooks are mostly republicans. B-)
The thing is, market forces work so that companies naturally merge to only 3 or 4 main competitors when an industry is mature. ... At this time, these larger companies are able to take advantage of economies of scale that smaller competitors cannot, and as the industry and technology is mature, new small competitors can't bring any new innovation to the table that outweighs their lack of brand recognition and economies of scale.
So far so good...
The catch is, you need a decent government in place which oversees them and makes sure that they don't form a cartel or collude in any way to screw over the customers.
And there's where you disconnect from both your own argument's internal consistency and what the "Rand-worshiping free-market fans" claim.
The catch, for the cartel-seekers, is that in order to screw over the customers they have to raise prices. And THAT over-compensates for the economies of scale and lack of opportunity for competition on innovation in a mature market. Once the upstarts start up they have to drive the prices back down to keep from being hamstrung.
Meanwhile the upstarts have second-mover advantage: They don't have to make all the design and market-choice mistakes and incur all the related costs that the established players did. Meanwhile a market never REALLY matures - science and technology march on even when the current market players aren't incorporating the incremental and breakthrough improvements. When building new plant it's about as easy to design for the latest-and-greatest as to replicate a former decade's technology - and it may actually be cheaper. Once the new guys are playing the old ones are stuck with aging plant that needs replacement or an expensive retrofit.
So, in the absence of some anticompetitive externality the lifetime of a monopoly or cartel that engages in gouging is limited. It recreates the conditions that lead to the rise of new competitors.
The fly in this ointment (as a previous poster has pointed out) is the government. By a number of mechanisms it can (and tends to) favor the existing players and raise the barriers to the entry of new competitors - or even prescribe a monopoly. THAT's what allows cartels and monopolies to gouge for long periods.
A monopoly or cartel that doesn't mistreat its customers can continue to exist for a long time. Example: Alcoa. It had an effective monopoly on aluminum production for decades - mainly BECAUSE it priced its products low, treated its customers well, and focussed on improving its processes rather than playing zero-sum games to transfer its customers' wealth to itself. Thus competition was both unnecessary to achieve the benefits of a competitive market - and (until post-WWII demobilization enabled Reynolds and Kaiser) market forces drove investment to other areas where more value-added was available.
The problem isn't monopoly per se - it's COERCIVE monopoly. And the main source of coercion (especially coercion that limits entry to markets) is government action.
[Quotes from Texas laws permitting use of lethal force to defend property and codifying a "fleeing felon" rule]
Indeed, Texas was the main exception I was aware of when I included "in most jurisdictions" in the earlier post.
Took a look: Looks like it WAS #8 and my memory was faulty.
This is a life-or-death issue. Please ignore my previous pushing of the illusory #40 and substitute #8 wherever it occurs in the remainder of my posts above.
With that substitution, does anyone have a problem with the stopping power of a 12-gauge load of #8 at under 15 feet?
So what you're saying is that the hints about Apple's true nature as a company were there to see even back then. But they still had some claim to good will.
Like most companies they change a bit every couple decades.
In Apple's case it seems to depend on whether Jobs is in charge.
You missed the point... There's no such thing as #40 birdshot.
Gee. I guess that box of #40 loads I've got in the safe next to the shotgun doesn't really exist.
Tell 'ya what. I'll go take a look later on. It's been a long time since I bought it. Maybe my memory of the magic number is faulty.
It used to be you could never find anybody who could find anything bad to say about Apple.
I guess you weren't around for the 1988-1994 "Look and Feel" suit initiated by Apple against Microsoft - with the potential of a clone directed against any project, open source or not, that looked too much like Apple's graphical interface. (Brace yourself NeWS, X. Don't bother trying, KDE, Gnome, ...)
In retaliation the GCC compiler project (for starters) refused to release Macintosh versions. (An independent group of Mac users ported each new gcc release to Macs and handled Mac-related bug fixes, resulting in a several-month delay of feature enhancements and bug fixes for that platform.) Meanwhile, John Gilmore was passing out a lapel button with a really ugly worm coming out of an apple and eating a computer, with a slogan about how Apple should keep its crummy lawyers out of MY computer.
What the hell is #40 birdshot? fine sand?
Yep, pretty close. Smaller than BBs. Think "lead pinheads".
#4 buckshot works well against human sized targets and is the minimum anyone usually recommends for self defense.
Now that depends on the range, doesn't it?
If you only intend to fire it when the perp is in the same small room or on a flight of stairs you really don't care HOW small it is. It will penetrate just fine. Doesn't have enough spread at that distance to act as separate particles - there's a column of lead an inch or so deep right behind the particles in the front row.
Beyond a few feet it's had a chance to open out and once it hits something with significant mass it fans out drastically. But if the first thing it hits besides air is the surface of the perp (and it's still flying in a tight cylindrical formation because the perp is within, say, three steps) it doesn't have a chance to disperse before punching a hole in something important.
If the perp ISN'T within three steps or so (and doesn't have his own gun pointed at you) you'll have a hard time justifying a self-defense shoot. (And if he is pointing a gun at you from down a long hall he'll have a hard time doing much once he takes the momentum equivalent of a shotgun recoil - without the mass of the shotgun to smooth it out - to a patch maybe the size of his face.)
I can't be the only one that envisioned automatic "gun cameras" here can I?
Deadly-force mantraps are illegal essentially everywhere.
Rule of thumb: In most jurisdictions you can only use deadly force to defend yourself (or another person of certain related classes) against a threat to life or limb. In some you can also use it to defend property under some circumstances.
You can't delegate the decisions to machines - especially when you personally aren't there to be at risk. (It's not just their operation that's illegal. Even setting up such a device is one or more of several crimes.)
Scenario: You're away (or died last month). Sheriff, firefighter, landlord, or heir shows shows up (with a warrant, probable cause, chasing smoke or flame, or coming to take possession of his property). "Sherrif, warrant!" / "Anybody in there? You're on fire!" / "Home at last! Let's get this door open and move in." Bash. BANG!
a gun
And a good safe to store it in when you're away somewhere you can't take it with you. (Some jurisdictions blame YOU if a neighborhood gangsta lifts it and uses it somewhere else. So you don't want to depend on locked cases or hidey-holes.)
Get a fire safe. Not only do they help protect stuff against damage in a fire, they're double-walled with a layer of firebrick between the walls. This makes them heavy enough that it takes a special piece of equipment to move them. So the bad guys can't just haul it off somewhere else to crack it ^even if you don't bolt it to the floor with the locknuts inside).
and if that doesn't work: more gun.
Once you've got enough "stopping power" to make the threat credible and follow through if you're called, you don't need to go larger. As McClary's law of firepower says: "You can't stop a bullet with a bigger bullet." Which in this case means "they can't". Housebreakers don't go in for (ineffective) arms races. They are more into avoiding "houses that shoot" in favor of less dangerous prey.
Decent sized pistol for one-on-one or few-on-one, shotgun if mobs-on-one might be an issue, and you're golden.
For home defense load your 12-gauge shotgun with fine birdshot loads, like number 40: It's just as effective as 00 if there's nothing but air between gun and target - but gets stopped by a couple layers of drywall at any significant distance - so you don't need to include the neighbors in the exercise. Fragmenting or greatly expanding hollowpoint bullets (such as "Golden Saber" or "Silvertip") in the pistol for the same reason (and also so it doesn't go THROUGH the bad guy and hit the neighbors if the perp is such a fool that you actually have to fire.)
According to FBI stats, safest (in terms of victim injury/death percentages) defense (by a BUNCH) is with-gun, next safest is knuckling under, and everything else is far worse.
Mandatory mindset: IF you have picked up the gun you have ALREADY DECIDED that you WILL fire if the perp attacks despite it. Get that figured out in your head before considering picking up the gun - or even getting one for self/home defense. You need to already be past that internal conflict to fire in time if it is necessary.
Take the NRA "Personal Protection" firearms course - before deciding what (if any) gun to buy or dedicate for the purpose. Excellent, cheap, customized for your area and its laws, taught by certified instructors with the legal issues handled by an official of the jurisdiction. A weekend's instruction (or several evening sessions) and you'll have the skills, competence, and understanding of the law and its fallout necessary to know when to defend and do it properly.
why hasn't this whole market fallen apart yet?
Perhaps because, if the total load is too great, they DDoS the machines of the market itself and trading slows to a crawl. Then there's nothing to skim.
My problem here is the quote "Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges". How can you have unknown entities trading?
I'd bet the identity (adequate to execute the trade if it matches a counterparty) is known to the market operators (or at least their computers) but that information is not exported to the market participants (including the analyst(s) who noticed these patterns).
The market operators may not have been aware of the patterns until it hit the media. Even if they were, they have no great incentive to do anything about it - or even the ability to do anything about it immediately, since they are bound by their published trading rules until they go through the process of changing them.
(The market operators' main incentives to change rules to suppress this would be reducing the load on their computers from the bogus trades and heading off perceptions about the market being excessively unfair to ordinary traders.)
So basically what Motorola did for the Droid X?
Or what Intel has been selling as a feature for years.