Fact: Gun control is argued as being about making people safer.
Fact: It failed (for whatever reason).
Fact: Violent crime went UP by 40% since the great gun grab in Australia.
I ran the numbers myself a couple of months ago. I have a spreadsheet with my finding HERE. This spreadsheet has links to the sources for all data. It includes homicide (down a little), robbery (down a little), assault (way up), and sexual assault (way up). To put it another way, for every single person NOT murdered, an additional 671 people were assaulted. Those are the FACTS. My spreadsheet lays it all out, with data from the Australian Government.
I invite you to inspect the data sources and my formulas. It is all open-source, so to speak. You can look for traces of deception yourself. Once you are done, you can grab a nice steaming helping of crow.
DISCLOSURE: I used data from 1995 (just before the grab) and 2007 (latest data I found).
Yes, it works for ONE SHOT. Supposedly the thing destroys itself after around 10 shots or so. Also, look at the length of the barrel -- barely as long as the cartridge, which happens to be a.380, a rather underpowered cartridge in the first place.
Yes, this is cool. No, I would not shoot it, because I don't trust a plastic barrel.
Not to mention that eventually, this process could produce a weapons superior to the crap that it creates now.
Seriously? A plastic magazine I can understand (I have a couple). A plastic receiver? Maybe, just maybe. Even real "plastic pistols" have steel rails reinforcing them. A plastic barrel? No thank you. Without a decent source of steel barrels, I do not see ANYTHING good coming from this except for more "Darwin Award" candidates.
Not to mention that the "Liberators" (aka "the Darwinator") is a single-shot. Not a lot of room for improvement in single-shot guns. The tech is pretty much down to a science at this point (open action, replace bullet).
Now, if 3d printing has a way to use stronger plastics in the future, the MAYBE this will lead to some unique designs, but I would still want steel in the barrel and the bolt. And how exactly would you 3D print an extractor claw, small pins and springs, etc. that are strong enough to survive more than one shot?
People who want to ban or control guns, by definition, do not use logic. I got the statstics from the Australian web site myself. Even adjusting for population growth, violent crime went up by about 40% in the 10 years after their great gun grab. Murders did go down a little, but for every single life saved, over 600 additional people were either assaulted or sexually assaulted. That is what gun control actually does, yet nobody who WANTS gun control actually bothers to study the numbers. Links to the spreadsheet with numbers and links to the sources are HERE.
I also love the concern over "gun violence" -- as if having somebody stabbed to death is no big deal. Shouldn't people worry about violence in genera instead if focusing on one particular tool? A person stabbed to death is just as dead as a person shot to death.
We also tried "assault weapon" bans (what an arbitrary list) and bans on larger magazines. Effect on crime? Approximately zero. Clearly, that worked so well, we have to bring it back again.
My absolute favorite is that there are approximately 300,000,000 guns in the US (give or take). 2011 reported 11,101 gun homicides. That means that the gun grabbers want to restrict the rights of ALL Americans to try to stop the 0.0037% of guns that cause the problem.
To put it another way, approximately 45% of households own guns. Assuming a uniform distribution of family sizes across gun-owning and defenseless households, that means that 140,200,000 people are in a household with guns (US population in 2011 is 311,591,917). The government wants to infringe on the rights of over 300 million people to stop 11,101 criminals (assuming one criminal per murder). That means that they are passing laws in order to try to stop the 0.008% of gun owners that do bad things. To put it another way, for every single criminal that these laws try to stop, there are 12,630 honest gun owners who will be collateral damage as a result of these laws.
I never said that it was not important. My point is just that people are probably 99% certain of the outcome. If the 1% (anti-gravity) does happen, it will me a major revolution in science. Personally, I hope for the 1% outcome, because that will really drive new ideas and new theories.
Well, in all fairness, nobody was really sure about the Higgs. A lot of people were hoping, but nobody was willing to bet the farm on the mass (or even the existence of the Higgs).
Now, gravity on, the other hand, is a completely different aniamal.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but the way that I understand it is that gravity is simply following a straight line in curved space-time. So, a straight line is a straight line for both matter and anti-matter. If anti-matter flies up, then that totally blows the "straight-line" theory away. While I am sure that an "anti-gravity" discovery would make more than a few careers and hundreds of papers, nobody is seriously expecting that to happen. This seems to be just another "Yup, relativity still works" type of experiment.
Actually, it is also possible that there is no such thing as a black hole - but cetain parts of the universe just suck. I have known some towns like that.
In this case, you have two different theories predicting two different things. It is guaranteed that one of them (or maybe both) are wrong. The only question is: "which one is it?"
This HMC stuff is going to require new CPUs with new memory controllers on board. On the plus side, for the same bandwidth, they will use a lot fewer pins.
Of course, the down-side is the early-adoper penalty of HMC being rather expensive. I expect that if it takes off, the price will drop rapidly.
HMC does not need to sit on top of a CPU. HMC is just a way to package a lot of memory into a smaller space and use fewer pins to talk to it. In fact, because of the smaller number of traces, you are likely to be able to put the HMC closer to the CPU than is currently possible. Also, since you are wiggling fewer wires, the I/O power will go down. Currently, one RAM channel can have two DIMMs in it, so the drivers have to be beefy enough to handle that posibility. Since HMC is based on serdes, it is a point-to-point link that can be lower power.
I am sure that at speed ramps up that HMC will have its own heat problems, but sharing heat with the CPU is not one of them.
I have a passing familiarity with this technology. Everything communicates through a serial link. This means that you have the extra overhead of having to serialize the requests and transmit them over the channel. Then, the HMC memory has to de-serialize it before it can act on the request. Once the HMC had the data, it has to go back through the serializer and de-serializer again. I would be surprised if the latency was lower.
On the other hand, the interface between the controller and the RAM itself if tighly controlled by the vendor since the controller is TOUCHING the RAM chips, instead of a couple of inches away like it is now, so that means that you shold be able to tighen timings up. All communication between the RAM and the CPU will be through serial links, so that means that the CPU needs a lot less pins for the same bandwidth. A dozen pins or so will do what 100 pins used to do before. This means that you can have either smaller/cheaper CPU packages, or more bandwidth for the same number of pins, or some trade-off in between.
I, for one, welcome our new HMC overlords, and hope they do well.
The thing that I totally hate is trying to figure out what is a joke and what isn't. I am not educated enough on this particular topic to know obviously if it is a joke or not. Should I just automatically assume that there will be NO news on this site today, or is it possible that some real news might actually slip through?
Thanks for the info. I appreciate it. I have only been to places like SparkFun and Adafruit. I still try very hard to avoid eBay whenever possible, so finding a reguar storefront that sells these would be nice, but I will keep this in mind. It does look like you would have a hard time putting a shield on the "Pro Mini" as it seems to be a completely different shape/size. Would the ethernet module that you linked to looks like it might be a standard size shield...
First, a disclaimer. I am not an Arduino expert. I have one and have played around, but am not a pro. Please forgive me if I make a mistake...
The big thing is that Arduino does NOT have Ethernet. Yes, you can add it on. I just built a small project for an internet-controlled power outlet. Raspberry Pi + an SD card (around $40 total) is significantly cheaper than an Arduino plus an Ethernet shield (around $60). Plus, the Pi can be programmed in your choice of languages (Python, Perl, TCL, C++, etc.) while the Arduino . Also, a web server on Pi is just an "apt-get" away. Don't get me wrong. The Arduino has its place too. Lots of IO. analog input, PWM output, etc. But the Pi and Arduino are different beasts with different (but somewhat overlapping) targets.
Now, the concept of using a phone as a general-purpose controller is interesting, if you can overcome the IO problem. If you can find something and cobble it together go for it. However, finding a steady supply of phones would be problematic. I could order a dozen Raspberries or Arduino boards in a moment. Using an old cell phone would require hitting garage sales or thrift stores looking for old phones that actually run something you can use (such an Android). I don't think that you can program older "feature phones." You probably need something with full-blown iOS or Android, and I doubt that an older iOS device is cheaper than a Pi. That leaves Android. If you only need one or two for a particular project, you might be able to swing it. Otherwise, you can't beat a couple of mouse clicks to get a proper development platform delivered to your door for under $50.
It seems like this always happens... President does bad, bad things (fascism,perhaps). New candidate promises change and reform... Get elected, does the same bad bad things or worse.
So my theory is that whenever a new president is elected, they are taken into an office for "the talk." I have no idea, but would guess that it has something to do with nuclear weapons, aliens that look just like humans, Atlantis, and Elvis. After "the talk" the new president changes his underwear and gladly goes along with what the previous president did.
No evidence, but it does seem to fit my observations that no president takes us further away from fascism.
I run RHEL6 on my desktop... I am part of an ASIC design team. Tool vendors are picky about which versions of Linux they support, so we cannot exactly switch to Ubuntu or anything like that. So, at work, RHEL6 is my every-day desktop.
I am running RHEL6 x64 right now on my work machine. Since the only version of Flash that works on my system is hopelessly outdated, Chrome is the only way that I can actually catch the occasional Youtube video...
Not at all. I am pretty sure that there is somebody out there who could reverse-engineet it. This is rather old tech at this point. However, who is going to pay them? I would susupect that this would be too much of an effort for a hobbyist.
No. The technique described here works perfectly well for ROM images. This is because the data is actually encoded in the metal layers. I would presume that the underlying silicon is just a regular grid on transistors, so you can effectively ignore it.
Now, an actual processor, on the other hand, is a completely different can of worms. In order to reverse-engineer it, you would need not only the information from the metal layers (and not just the top metal layer), but also reverse-engineer the actual cells used in the layout.
I would guess that a chip from that area would probably have around 4-5 metal signal layers (just a wild guess). You would first need to map out each metal layer separately. If a trace goes UNDER another trace, you still need to be able to follow it. Is this possible with fancy image processing? I don't know -- If you took a bunch of pictures under a microscope with varying focus adjustments, you might be able to tease together a 3d image. Another way to approach this might be to physically grind off each metal layer at a time and take pictures. Difficult, but possible in theory.
Ok, once you have the metal layers decoded, you still need to know what the actual cells are (is that an inverter or a register). If you have access to the original libraries used to make the chip (good luck since they are typically under NDA), then you could probably use the metal-1 layout to figure out what the cell is. If you do not have the libraries, then you have to do some educated guesses to figure out what each cell is. Possible, but it would certainly take a person with some very good knowledge of CMOS circuit design to recognize the circuit. Big clues would be the size of the cell and the number of ports.
I certainly have not done this, but, given my knowledge of ASIC design (I have done a couple of chips), this is how I would probably go about it. Yes, with enough resources it is possible, but would likely be either very time-consuming or very expensive, or both.
The operation of a modern multi-tool is NOTHING like a swiss army knife. If a SAK has pliers, they are small and have little leverage. A SAK is pliers-in-the-knife. A multi-tool is knife-in-the-pliers. Having owned both, once I touched my first Leatherman, I have never carried a SAK.
Really, the ONLY advantage of a SAK is that it has a corkscrew, which is necessary if you happen to be swiss;-D
To me, one of the greatest "inventions" is the original Leatherman Super Tool and all of its children.
If you stop to think about it, the original 1911 pistol (adopted by the military in 1911) is more complex and demanding to produce than a multi-tool. If you think about it, the design of the original Super Tool is rather obvious, once you look at it. There is absolutely no technical reason that US solders could not have carried something equivalent to the Leatherman Wave back in World War I. However, nothing like that existed until Tim Leatherman made the first one back in 1980.
Most technology "evolves' once the time is right. After the invention of the transistor, everything electronic since then could not have been invented much sooner, because tech builds on earlier tech. The Leatherman Super Tool is the best example that I can think of as an example of an invention that COULD have come much sooner, but did not.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice way to twist the facts.
Fact: Gun control is argued as being about making people safer.
Fact: It failed (for whatever reason).
Fact: Violent crime went UP by 40% since the great gun grab in Australia.
I ran the numbers myself a couple of months ago. I have a spreadsheet with my finding HERE. This spreadsheet has links to the sources for all data. It includes homicide (down a little), robbery (down a little), assault (way up), and sexual assault (way up). To put it another way, for every single person NOT murdered, an additional 671 people were assaulted. Those are the FACTS. My spreadsheet lays it all out, with data from the Australian Government.
I invite you to inspect the data sources and my formulas. It is all open-source, so to speak. You can look for traces of deception yourself. Once you are done, you can grab a nice steaming helping of crow.
DISCLOSURE: I used data from 1995 (just before the grab) and 2007 (latest data I found).
Wake me up when 3D metal printing becomes affordable.
Yes, it works for ONE SHOT. Supposedly the thing destroys itself after around 10 shots or so. Also, look at the length of the barrel -- barely as long as the cartridge, which happens to be a .380, a rather underpowered cartridge in the first place.
Yes, this is cool. No, I would not shoot it, because I don't trust a plastic barrel.
Seriously? A plastic magazine I can understand (I have a couple). A plastic receiver? Maybe, just maybe. Even real "plastic pistols" have steel rails reinforcing them. A plastic barrel? No thank you. Without a decent source of steel barrels, I do not see ANYTHING good coming from this except for more "Darwin Award" candidates.
Not to mention that the "Liberators" (aka "the Darwinator") is a single-shot. Not a lot of room for improvement in single-shot guns. The tech is pretty much down to a science at this point (open action, replace bullet).
Now, if 3d printing has a way to use stronger plastics in the future, the MAYBE this will lead to some unique designs, but I would still want steel in the barrel and the bolt. And how exactly would you 3D print an extractor claw, small pins and springs, etc. that are strong enough to survive more than one shot?
Must also be an American thing to not like being raped. Silly Americans.
People who want to ban or control guns, by definition, do not use logic. I got the statstics from the Australian web site myself. Even adjusting for population growth, violent crime went up by about 40% in the 10 years after their great gun grab. Murders did go down a little, but for every single life saved, over 600 additional people were either assaulted or sexually assaulted. That is what gun control actually does, yet nobody who WANTS gun control actually bothers to study the numbers. Links to the spreadsheet with numbers and links to the sources are HERE.
I also love the concern over "gun violence" -- as if having somebody stabbed to death is no big deal. Shouldn't people worry about violence in genera instead if focusing on one particular tool? A person stabbed to death is just as dead as a person shot to death.
We also tried "assault weapon" bans (what an arbitrary list) and bans on larger magazines. Effect on crime? Approximately zero. Clearly, that worked so well, we have to bring it back again.
My absolute favorite is that there are approximately 300,000,000 guns in the US (give or take). 2011 reported 11,101 gun homicides. That means that the gun grabbers want to restrict the rights of ALL Americans to try to stop the 0.0037% of guns that cause the problem.
To put it another way, approximately 45% of households own guns. Assuming a uniform distribution of family sizes across gun-owning and defenseless households, that means that 140,200,000 people are in a household with guns (US population in 2011 is 311,591,917). The government wants to infringe on the rights of over 300 million people to stop 11,101 criminals (assuming one criminal per murder). That means that they are passing laws in order to try to stop the 0.008% of gun owners that do bad things. To put it another way, for every single criminal that these laws try to stop, there are 12,630 honest gun owners who will be collateral damage as a result of these laws.
I never said that it was not important. My point is just that people are probably 99% certain of the outcome. If the 1% (anti-gravity) does happen, it will me a major revolution in science. Personally, I hope for the 1% outcome, because that will really drive new ideas and new theories.
Well, in all fairness, nobody was really sure about the Higgs. A lot of people were hoping, but nobody was willing to bet the farm on the mass (or even the existence of the Higgs).
Now, gravity on, the other hand, is a completely different aniamal.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but the way that I understand it is that gravity is simply following a straight line in curved space-time. So, a straight line is a straight line for both matter and anti-matter. If anti-matter flies up, then that totally blows the "straight-line" theory away. While I am sure that an "anti-gravity" discovery would make more than a few careers and hundreds of papers, nobody is seriously expecting that to happen. This seems to be just another "Yup, relativity still works" type of experiment.
What about the four elephants on the back of giant space turtle?
Actually, it is also possible that there is no such thing as a black hole - but cetain parts of the universe just suck. I have known some towns like that.
In this case, you have two different theories predicting two different things. It is guaranteed that one of them (or maybe both) are wrong. The only question is: "which one is it?"
This HMC stuff is going to require new CPUs with new memory controllers on board. On the plus side, for the same bandwidth, they will use a lot fewer pins.
Of course, the down-side is the early-adoper penalty of HMC being rather expensive. I expect that if it takes off, the price will drop rapidly.
HMC does not need to sit on top of a CPU. HMC is just a way to package a lot of memory into a smaller space and use fewer pins to talk to it. In fact, because of the smaller number of traces, you are likely to be able to put the HMC closer to the CPU than is currently possible. Also, since you are wiggling fewer wires, the I/O power will go down. Currently, one RAM channel can have two DIMMs in it, so the drivers have to be beefy enough to handle that posibility. Since HMC is based on serdes, it is a point-to-point link that can be lower power.
I am sure that at speed ramps up that HMC will have its own heat problems, but sharing heat with the CPU is not one of them.
I have a passing familiarity with this technology. Everything communicates through a serial link. This means that you have the extra overhead of having to serialize the requests and transmit them over the channel. Then, the HMC memory has to de-serialize it before it can act on the request. Once the HMC had the data, it has to go back through the serializer and de-serializer again. I would be surprised if the latency was lower.
On the other hand, the interface between the controller and the RAM itself if tighly controlled by the vendor since the controller is TOUCHING the RAM chips, instead of a couple of inches away like it is now, so that means that you shold be able to tighen timings up. All communication between the RAM and the CPU will be through serial links, so that means that the CPU needs a lot less pins for the same bandwidth. A dozen pins or so will do what 100 pins used to do before. This means that you can have either smaller/cheaper CPU packages, or more bandwidth for the same number of pins, or some trade-off in between.
I, for one, welcome our new HMC overlords, and hope they do well.
The thing that I totally hate is trying to figure out what is a joke and what isn't. I am not educated enough on this particular topic to know obviously if it is a joke or not. Should I just automatically assume that there will be NO news on this site today, or is it possible that some real news might actually slip through?
The whole ROT-15 fiasco certainly does not help.
Boo on you /., king of putrescence.
Thanks for the info. I appreciate it. I have only been to places like SparkFun and Adafruit. I still try very hard to avoid eBay whenever possible, so finding a reguar storefront that sells these would be nice, but I will keep this in mind. It does look like you would have a hard time putting a shield on the "Pro Mini" as it seems to be a completely different shape/size. Would the ethernet module that you linked to looks like it might be a standard size shield...
First, a disclaimer. I am not an Arduino expert. I have one and have played around, but am not a pro. Please forgive me if I make a mistake...
The big thing is that Arduino does NOT have Ethernet. Yes, you can add it on. I just built a small project for an internet-controlled power outlet. Raspberry Pi + an SD card (around $40 total) is significantly cheaper than an Arduino plus an Ethernet shield (around $60). Plus, the Pi can be programmed in your choice of languages (Python, Perl, TCL, C++, etc.) while the Arduino . Also, a web server on Pi is just an "apt-get" away. Don't get me wrong. The Arduino has its place too. Lots of IO. analog input, PWM output, etc. But the Pi and Arduino are different beasts with different (but somewhat overlapping) targets.
Now, the concept of using a phone as a general-purpose controller is interesting, if you can overcome the IO problem. If you can find something and cobble it together go for it. However, finding a steady supply of phones would be problematic. I could order a dozen Raspberries or Arduino boards in a moment. Using an old cell phone would require hitting garage sales or thrift stores looking for old phones that actually run something you can use (such an Android). I don't think that you can program older "feature phones." You probably need something with full-blown iOS or Android, and I doubt that an older iOS device is cheaper than a Pi. That leaves Android. If you only need one or two for a particular project, you might be able to swing it. Otherwise, you can't beat a couple of mouse clicks to get a proper development platform delivered to your door for under $50.
It seems like this always happens... President does bad, bad things (fascism,perhaps). New candidate promises change and reform... Get elected, does the same bad bad things or worse.
So my theory is that whenever a new president is elected, they are taken into an office for "the talk." I have no idea, but would guess that it has something to do with nuclear weapons, aliens that look just like humans, Atlantis, and Elvis. After "the talk" the new president changes his underwear and gladly goes along with what the previous president did.
No evidence, but it does seem to fit my observations that no president takes us further away from fascism.
I run RHEL6 on my desktop... I am part of an ASIC design team. Tool vendors are picky about which versions of Linux they support, so we cannot exactly switch to Ubuntu or anything like that. So, at work, RHEL6 is my every-day desktop.
I am running RHEL6 x64 right now on my work machine. Since the only version of Flash that works on my system is hopelessly outdated, Chrome is the only way that I can actually catch the occasional Youtube video...
Don't forget about telling noobs about the great warez site at 127.0.0.1.
Not at all. I am pretty sure that there is somebody out there who could reverse-engineet it. This is rather old tech at this point. However, who is going to pay them? I would susupect that this would be too much of an effort for a hobbyist.
No. The technique described here works perfectly well for ROM images. This is because the data is actually encoded in the metal layers. I would presume that the underlying silicon is just a regular grid on transistors, so you can effectively ignore it.
Now, an actual processor, on the other hand, is a completely different can of worms. In order to reverse-engineer it, you would need not only the information from the metal layers (and not just the top metal layer), but also reverse-engineer the actual cells used in the layout.
I would guess that a chip from that area would probably have around 4-5 metal signal layers (just a wild guess). You would first need to map out each metal layer separately. If a trace goes UNDER another trace, you still need to be able to follow it. Is this possible with fancy image processing? I don't know -- If you took a bunch of pictures under a microscope with varying focus adjustments, you might be able to tease together a 3d image. Another way to approach this might be to physically grind off each metal layer at a time and take pictures. Difficult, but possible in theory.
Ok, once you have the metal layers decoded, you still need to know what the actual cells are (is that an inverter or a register). If you have access to the original libraries used to make the chip (good luck since they are typically under NDA), then you could probably use the metal-1 layout to figure out what the cell is. If you do not have the libraries, then you have to do some educated guesses to figure out what each cell is. Possible, but it would certainly take a person with some very good knowledge of CMOS circuit design to recognize the circuit. Big clues would be the size of the cell and the number of ports.
I certainly have not done this, but, given my knowledge of ASIC design (I have done a couple of chips), this is how I would probably go about it. Yes, with enough resources it is possible, but would likely be either very time-consuming or very expensive, or both.
The operation of a modern multi-tool is NOTHING like a swiss army knife. If a SAK has pliers, they are small and have little leverage. A SAK is pliers-in-the-knife. A multi-tool is knife-in-the-pliers. Having owned both, once I touched my first Leatherman, I have never carried a SAK.
Really, the ONLY advantage of a SAK is that it has a corkscrew, which is necessary if you happen to be swiss ;-D
To me, one of the greatest "inventions" is the original Leatherman Super Tool and all of its children.
If you stop to think about it, the original 1911 pistol (adopted by the military in 1911) is more complex and demanding to produce than a multi-tool. If you think about it, the design of the original Super Tool is rather obvious, once you look at it. There is absolutely no technical reason that US solders could not have carried something equivalent to the Leatherman Wave back in World War I. However, nothing like that existed until Tim Leatherman made the first one back in 1980.
Most technology "evolves' once the time is right. After the invention of the transistor, everything electronic since then could not have been invented much sooner, because tech builds on earlier tech. The Leatherman Super Tool is the best example that I can think of as an example of an invention that COULD have come much sooner, but did not.