Microwave it. You only get geek points for this if you actually understand how your microwave oven works, at a very detailed level both in theory and in hardware. Super bonus points if you microwave your turkey from across the yard using a magnetron and parabolic reflector.
I once sketched out the resource chains to run a blast furnace on Mars and it's just staggering - if this is metallic iron and it's pure enough to be structurally sound if simply melted and cast, it'd be huge deal.
Well, it's a pretty big deal just to melt and cast iron when you're on a foreign planet with no life and CO2 for an atmosphere. And making modern useful things out of iron actually requires steel alloys, which means having other metals available and being able to control carbon content of the melt. When there's no fuel on the planet, that means you must use electric power. It takes HUGE amounts of power to run an arc furnace, and moderately use amounts to run an induction furnace. Millions of watts either way. That's a lot of solar panels to haul to Mars.
How can they believe that they can control this in a world where highly advanced 3D printing is possible at home? People will just print their own 3D printers that do not have these restrictions.
I'm sorry, but "highly advanced" home 3d printing is so far from reality that this doesn't seem plausible in our lifetimes. The last 3D printed part I ordered from a commercial manufacturer was an intricate set of inherently interlocked mechanical components laser-sintered out of a cobalt-chromium superalloy. It literally could not be manufactured by any other process. The last 3D printed part I saw produced by a "home" 3D printer (a RepRap) literally looked like a piece of poop - and it wasn't supposed to.
Commercial 3D printing is just starting to become economically viable for use as a production technology in some specialized applications. But the gap between the commercial implementations and DIY implementations is huge, and not closing very fast. Mechanical technologies develop much more slowly than electronics. In our lifetimes, we have seen unimaginable advances in electronics, but mechanical manufacturing has advanced only incrementally. And this makes sense. The advances in electronics are facilitated by advances in our understanding of the science involved. But we already understand Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, statics, strength of materials, and all the other disciplines involved in mechanical manufacturing. We understand the science very well, and have for over a century. Thus, the improvements in this field come more slowly and arise more from creativity and synthesis rather than from breakthroughs in human knowledge.
TL;DR: Moore's law doesn't apply to mechanical manufacturing; the rate of progress in this field is slow and disconnected from the rate of progress in electronics; and "highly advanced 3D printing" won't be possible at home any time in the near future.
The flippant answer to your question is that you should get whatever equipment you think will be useful for whatever projects you're doing. If you don't know what you want, then you won't be putting it to use anyway. "Electronics" is not one discipline. It's a collection of related but different fields, like different specialties in medicine. What equipment does an operating room need? Aside from a few basics, the answer depends entirely on what kind of surgery is being performed. Having a network analyzer or a service monitor in your electronics lab is great for some types of work, but if you don't already think you'll be needing those then they're just going to collect dust anyway.
I do a variety of different kinds of electronics work, but most of it is RF (ham radio), high voltage (Tesla coils, fun plasma experiments), or high power (switching power supplies), or all three (induction heating, BIG lasers, serious radio transmitters, kick-ass solid state Tesla coils, etc.). This requires an array of tools and equipment that ranges from common and universal to highly specialized. Here are my key assets:
- Fluke Scopemeter 199C, 200MHz portable digital oscilloscope. If I could keep only one test instrument, this is it. Totally worth the $4k. I literally could not do much of what I do without this tool or something similar. I love my Scopemeter. It's just the right combination of portability, durability, and signal analysis capability. The electrical isolation of the fully-insulated battery-operated unit is a huge benefit sometimes too.
- Fluke 287 digital multimeter. A very high-functioning DMM for general purpose use. RMS readings on funky waveforms over a wide frequency range. Accurate measurement of component values.
- Klein CL2000 clamp-on AC/DC ammeter and multimeter. A really great tool for general DMM use, as well as non-contact RMS measurement of high currents, both AC and DC. This bad boy can accurately measure how much current your car draws while cranking the starter, or the true RMS current of an arc welder.
- RigExpert AA-520 antenna analyzer. A rudimentary but powerful digital antenna analyzer for HF through UHF frequencies. Great for its basic purpose, but also capable of doing lots of neat tricks like tuning duplexers if you get creative with it.
- Cheap pocket DMM's. They're like $20 and it's great to have several sitting around to use as monitors for various parameters on a system during testing. You can blow them up or fry them with an RF field and not feel too bad, saving your precious Fluke gear.
- Solomon temp-controlled soldering station. Needs no explanation. I feel that there's no need to go crazy on soldering equipment. A sub-$100 station will do the job just fine, even for fine SMD work as long as it's of decent quality. PID temperature control, low mass, and a hefty heater are all requirements.
- Granite work surface. Of all the surfaces I've worked on, I have found granite to be the best. Preferably pure black so things show up on it. It is heatproof, electrically insulating enough for any purpose, anti-static, strong, hard, and pretty affordable compared to a digital oscilloscope. A couple hundred bucks will get you a very good slab section to work on.
- Automated external defibrillator. I often work on circuits that can kill me with one false move. Having an AED nearby and showing friends and family how to use it could save my life some day. Very rapid defibrillation (within 5 minutes, preferably 2) is the ONLY effective life-saving treatment for electrocution. With very fast intervention, the chance of survival is excellent. By the time an ambulance arrives it is far too late. It's $800 well spent if it even gives me a 1% chance of not dying. Skip this if your work doesn't involve much line-voltage or higher.
Can we really trust people with all this information? Scientists usually have good intentions; it’s how the rest of the bad people use it for their own evil purposes. I think there should be some oversight, but I don't we can just trust everyone with potentially dangerous ideas.
Jesus, man. What country are you from? To an American, this sounds like Orwell's dystopia. Trusting people with potentially dangerous ideas???
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the process here, but this seems like it would create a HUGE amount of editing work. Are you manually switching which recorder's audio is used as different people speak? In other words, editing the video using as many simultaneous audio tracks as there are recorders, syncing them, and using the best one at any given instant during the video? That seems like it would add huge amounts of editing time.
If it is legal and not unreasonably dangerous for a business to use an open wifi connection, then why can't I?
If I get incorporated, does that make it safe?
No, but there's a general presumption that it's intentional when a business does it and that they understand the risks and decided to accept them. There's a (well justified) presumption that when a random house has an open AP called "Linksys" it's an accidental result of cluelessness. The sheriff isn't shutting peoples' netowrks down or threatening them with any sort of law enforcement action, they're just informing people that it's a security risk.
The only 'danger' you expose yourself to by keeping an open wifi is that a moronic lawyer claims it must have been you and decides to sue you for things you didn't do.
The proper response to that is to counter sue the lawyer and to educate the public, judges and jury that an IP address does not prove identity. I have the right to keep an open WIFI connection and if someone else uses it for bad purposes that does NOT expose me to any reasonable danger or risk.
People have the right to anonymity and that means government and lawyers do not have the right to intimidate people into making anonymity harder to obtain.
If you want to play lawyer for yourself without being one, consulting with one, or actually studying the law, you're welcome to do so. But the legal system is no place for the blindfold-and-shotgun approach. 1: Lawyers sue people on behalf of clients, not on their own. It's some other party (like a copyright holder, perhaps) that would be suing you. They are the party initiating the action, and it's up to them to decide whether to spend their hard earned money on the expensive process of suing you for something that may or may not be stupid. Their attorney may or may not be a moron or a dick, but it always takes a moronic/dick client to generate a moronic/dick lawsuit. 2: Countersuing the other party's lawyer is a good way to rapidly generate a large judgment for the other lawyer's fees, which you will have to pay if you initiate such a misguided action. 3: You may be contractually liable for other peoples' use of your open network in some circumstances. If the terms of service for your ISP so state, and the cause of action arises in a way that those terms are relevant, you could find yourself in a bad position. And while IP addresses are not proof of identity, they are evidence, and it would put you in a compromised defensive position to have your IP associated with "bad stuff". 4: The implied right of anonymous speech within the 1st Amendment is not relevant to any issues at play here. There's a misinterpretation of something going on if that seems important in this context.
Much better than that goofball sheriff in Aridzona.
Those of us in Maricopa County can worry about our sheriff; the rest of the country can worry about theirs. It's a local elected office. I do not understand the national media attention.
With that said, I do not support Arpaio or his policies and do not vote for him.
I can't believe I misused your/you're in the first sentence. I hate that. It was an editing error: I started by writing "You're misinterpreting..." and changed the rest of the sentence without changing the first word. Damn!
There's no legal concept of "hate speech" in USA, thankfully. There's "fighting words", but that's a different concept.
And the "fighting words" doctrine has been severely limited by subsequent jurisprudence. The incident in the seminal case on "fighting words" (cop arrested protester for calling him a "damned racketeer") would clearly constitute a civil rights violation today. The "fighting words" doctrine as an exception to 1st Amendment protection is essentially dead. It lives on, however, as a defense to battery in some jurisdictions. So you can get punched for saying some stuff, but you can't get shut up by the government.
It is still incitement. The INTENT is what matters, not the speech itself.
And this film was clearly made to incite people to do violence, knowing the target demographic of the film itself.
You're understanding of 1st Amendment jurisprudence is lacking. Have you even read any of the cases? Where in the world did you come up with the idea that intent has anything to do with it? Intent is specifically NOT adequate. The actual or probable effect must be to incite imminent lawless action. All speech is inherently protected by the 1st Amendment unless it falls into a narrow set of exceptions that exist to prevent very specific kinds of harm. Mass chaos and lawlessness are within the scope of harms that justify limitation of some kinds of speech under some limited circumstances. However, the speech at issue must be directed to cause, and actually be capable of causing "imminent lawless action". Both intent and actual ability to cause an actual dangerous, lawless result are required. And "imminent" means RIGHT THEN AND THERE. Not somewhere else later. Merely intending to incite a riot is legal, and constitutionally protected, unless you have the real ability to make it happen immediately. Merely making a political statement likely to cause your opposition elsewhere to respond violently is also legal, and constitutionally protected, as the resulting lawless action is not "imminent" in the requisite sense. Go read Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Romney and Ryan only looks good if you're a corporate asshole or a Fox-watching bah bah sheep.
I am neither. I am a small business owner, and to me, Obama looks awful. Romney/Ryan looks decent in comparison, and will get my vote. I could say that Obama only looks good if you've never taken responsibility for your own financial wellbeing, but that might be disingenuous.
And I see no language in it that has changed meaning since then; most words don't change meaning. I mean hell, you still dial the phone even though phones haven't had dials for over 40 years.
Name a single word in the Consitution that has changed meaning. I can't find one.
"Regulated". It used to mean "equipped", and now means "controlled". That's an extremely important distinction.
Is it just me, or does this sound like the most awesome life ever? Staying holed up in secure compounds with armed guards searching for terrorists. Having awesome impromptu compound-parties full of fashionable people who carry toiletries with them to "touch up" first, all equipped with the latest personal tech. Driving between compounds at 2AM in high-speed convoys of black SUV's full of "touched up" partiers to get to the next venue. Danger. Intrigue. Slashdot-submitting geeks going to clandestine parties. Why am I here in the USA?
Me, I want more of this. I want plans to 3D print a fully automatic weapon. Just to watch the heads explode at the realization that the genie is out of the bottle and ain't going back.
Do you realize that the only real obstacle to having an automatic weapon already is legal, not practical? The difference between a semi-auto and full-auto rifle is trivial from an engineering perspective. The Lightning Link is a tiny piece of stamped steel that reliably converts the AR-15 to full auto. It probably costs about $0.50 to manufacture in large quantities. You could literally make one in an afternoon from stuff you found around the house using only a Dremel. The only problem is that it's a federal offense to do so. Only Lightning Links registered with the ATF prior to May of 1986 are legally transferable for civilians. So there are only a few hundred in existence that are legal to own - and that's why a registered lightning link now costs approximately $8000 if you can find somebody selling one.
On Bill Maher's show: if GMO food truly is safe and beneficial (and it generally is if you remove Monsanto et al. from the equation), then the obvious solution is not to keep consumers from knowing what it is they're eating, but just the opposite--educate them on exactly what it is they're eating in a neutral, fact-based manner.
Rob
Right. Because that scientific, fact-based, rational approach to political action has worked so well for nuclear energy, and literally everything else it's been tried with.
In other words, I want to know what the product is that I'm buying. This bill would help me with that.
In other words, the parent AC hits it on the head: this bill should be a no-brainer, because I should be able to know what I am buying.
I want to know exactly what's in a can of Coke, too, but I'm not entitled to a copy of the recipe. I want to know how the engine computer in my car works, but I'm not entitled to the source code.
I'm curious if she had a non-compete clause in her contract, and how it will all work out if she does.
Any Google employees who know the details on their typical contracts?
No matter what's in a typical Google contract, hers is certainly different. She was a top-level executive for some time, then one rung down the ladder. She has hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no way she agreed to disadvantageous terms.
Among other elements, extortion requires a threat to the person or property of the victim, or someone associated with the victim. There is none here. The information at issue was publicly released by the "victim" on their website, and later withdrawn. This is like CNN retracting a story and threatening extortion charges against anyone who dares to mirror the old version.
So they published the database on the Internet for anyone to access. I would be hard pressed to find a legal cause of action against the "hackers" (web surfers?) who browsed and saved the file. Additionally, because the database contains only a tabulation of factual information, it cannot be copyrighted. Thus, Rex Mundi may be legally allowed to publish it at will. Most of the civil causes of action that could be brought in a case of blackmail or extortion may be unsuccessful here since the "victim" PUBLICLY PUBLISHED the data themselves. Interesting case.
"While China is 50 years behind the U.S. government..."
Um. No they aren't. The US government did these same things 50 years ago, but is no longer capable of easily repeating its past feats. The first US moon landing program took less than 10 years from conceptual announcement to a giant leap for mankind. How long would it take for the US to do the same thing again? I'm not confident we even could. I'm not sure we could even replicate China's docking-to-a-station performance in 10 years, now that we've abandoned all of our previously successful manned spaceflight programs.
Slashdot Mirror
How long until someone has it cracked and running general-purpose Linux? Bonus: How long until someone makes a cluster of them?
Microwave it. You only get geek points for this if you actually understand how your microwave oven works, at a very detailed level both in theory and in hardware. Super bonus points if you microwave your turkey from across the yard using a magnetron and parabolic reflector.
I once sketched out the resource chains to run a blast furnace on Mars and it's just staggering - if this is metallic iron and it's pure enough to be structurally sound if simply melted and cast, it'd be huge deal.
Well, it's a pretty big deal just to melt and cast iron when you're on a foreign planet with no life and CO2 for an atmosphere. And making modern useful things out of iron actually requires steel alloys, which means having other metals available and being able to control carbon content of the melt. When there's no fuel on the planet, that means you must use electric power. It takes HUGE amounts of power to run an arc furnace, and moderately use amounts to run an induction furnace. Millions of watts either way. That's a lot of solar panels to haul to Mars.
How can they believe that they can control this in a world where highly advanced 3D printing is possible at home? People will just print their own 3D printers that do not have these restrictions.
I'm sorry, but "highly advanced" home 3d printing is so far from reality that this doesn't seem plausible in our lifetimes. The last 3D printed part I ordered from a commercial manufacturer was an intricate set of inherently interlocked mechanical components laser-sintered out of a cobalt-chromium superalloy. It literally could not be manufactured by any other process. The last 3D printed part I saw produced by a "home" 3D printer (a RepRap) literally looked like a piece of poop - and it wasn't supposed to.
Commercial 3D printing is just starting to become economically viable for use as a production technology in some specialized applications. But the gap between the commercial implementations and DIY implementations is huge, and not closing very fast. Mechanical technologies develop much more slowly than electronics. In our lifetimes, we have seen unimaginable advances in electronics, but mechanical manufacturing has advanced only incrementally. And this makes sense. The advances in electronics are facilitated by advances in our understanding of the science involved. But we already understand Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, statics, strength of materials, and all the other disciplines involved in mechanical manufacturing. We understand the science very well, and have for over a century. Thus, the improvements in this field come more slowly and arise more from creativity and synthesis rather than from breakthroughs in human knowledge.
TL;DR: Moore's law doesn't apply to mechanical manufacturing; the rate of progress in this field is slow and disconnected from the rate of progress in electronics; and "highly advanced 3D printing" won't be possible at home any time in the near future.
The flippant answer to your question is that you should get whatever equipment you think will be useful for whatever projects you're doing. If you don't know what you want, then you won't be putting it to use anyway. "Electronics" is not one discipline. It's a collection of related but different fields, like different specialties in medicine. What equipment does an operating room need? Aside from a few basics, the answer depends entirely on what kind of surgery is being performed. Having a network analyzer or a service monitor in your electronics lab is great for some types of work, but if you don't already think you'll be needing those then they're just going to collect dust anyway.
I do a variety of different kinds of electronics work, but most of it is RF (ham radio), high voltage (Tesla coils, fun plasma experiments), or high power (switching power supplies), or all three (induction heating, BIG lasers, serious radio transmitters, kick-ass solid state Tesla coils, etc.). This requires an array of tools and equipment that ranges from common and universal to highly specialized. Here are my key assets:
- Fluke Scopemeter 199C, 200MHz portable digital oscilloscope. If I could keep only one test instrument, this is it. Totally worth the $4k. I literally could not do much of what I do without this tool or something similar. I love my Scopemeter. It's just the right combination of portability, durability, and signal analysis capability. The electrical isolation of the fully-insulated battery-operated unit is a huge benefit sometimes too.
- Fluke 287 digital multimeter. A very high-functioning DMM for general purpose use. RMS readings on funky waveforms over a wide frequency range. Accurate measurement of component values.
- Klein CL2000 clamp-on AC/DC ammeter and multimeter. A really great tool for general DMM use, as well as non-contact RMS measurement of high currents, both AC and DC. This bad boy can accurately measure how much current your car draws while cranking the starter, or the true RMS current of an arc welder.
- RigExpert AA-520 antenna analyzer. A rudimentary but powerful digital antenna analyzer for HF through UHF frequencies. Great for its basic purpose, but also capable of doing lots of neat tricks like tuning duplexers if you get creative with it.
- Cheap pocket DMM's. They're like $20 and it's great to have several sitting around to use as monitors for various parameters on a system during testing. You can blow them up or fry them with an RF field and not feel too bad, saving your precious Fluke gear.
- Solomon temp-controlled soldering station. Needs no explanation. I feel that there's no need to go crazy on soldering equipment. A sub-$100 station will do the job just fine, even for fine SMD work as long as it's of decent quality. PID temperature control, low mass, and a hefty heater are all requirements.
- Granite work surface. Of all the surfaces I've worked on, I have found granite to be the best. Preferably pure black so things show up on it. It is heatproof, electrically insulating enough for any purpose, anti-static, strong, hard, and pretty affordable compared to a digital oscilloscope. A couple hundred bucks will get you a very good slab section to work on.
- Automated external defibrillator. I often work on circuits that can kill me with one false move. Having an AED nearby and showing friends and family how to use it could save my life some day. Very rapid defibrillation (within 5 minutes, preferably 2) is the ONLY effective life-saving treatment for electrocution. With very fast intervention, the chance of survival is excellent. By the time an ambulance arrives it is far too late. It's $800 well spent if it even gives me a 1% chance of not dying. Skip this if your work doesn't involve much line-voltage or higher.
Can we really trust people with all this information? Scientists usually have good intentions; it’s how the rest of the bad people use it for their own evil purposes. I think there should be some oversight, but I don't we can just trust everyone with potentially dangerous ideas.
Jesus, man. What country are you from? To an American, this sounds like Orwell's dystopia. Trusting people with potentially dangerous ideas???
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the process here, but this seems like it would create a HUGE amount of editing work. Are you manually switching which recorder's audio is used as different people speak? In other words, editing the video using as many simultaneous audio tracks as there are recorders, syncing them, and using the best one at any given instant during the video? That seems like it would add huge amounts of editing time.
If it is legal and not unreasonably dangerous for a business to use an open wifi connection, then why can't I? If I get incorporated, does that make it safe?
No, but there's a general presumption that it's intentional when a business does it and that they understand the risks and decided to accept them. There's a (well justified) presumption that when a random house has an open AP called "Linksys" it's an accidental result of cluelessness. The sheriff isn't shutting peoples' netowrks down or threatening them with any sort of law enforcement action, they're just informing people that it's a security risk.
The only 'danger' you expose yourself to by keeping an open wifi is that a moronic lawyer claims it must have been you and decides to sue you for things you didn't do. The proper response to that is to counter sue the lawyer and to educate the public, judges and jury that an IP address does not prove identity. I have the right to keep an open WIFI connection and if someone else uses it for bad purposes that does NOT expose me to any reasonable danger or risk. People have the right to anonymity and that means government and lawyers do not have the right to intimidate people into making anonymity harder to obtain.
If you want to play lawyer for yourself without being one, consulting with one, or actually studying the law, you're welcome to do so. But the legal system is no place for the blindfold-and-shotgun approach.
1: Lawyers sue people on behalf of clients, not on their own. It's some other party (like a copyright holder, perhaps) that would be suing you. They are the party initiating the action, and it's up to them to decide whether to spend their hard earned money on the expensive process of suing you for something that may or may not be stupid. Their attorney may or may not be a moron or a dick, but it always takes a moronic/dick client to generate a moronic/dick lawsuit.
2: Countersuing the other party's lawyer is a good way to rapidly generate a large judgment for the other lawyer's fees, which you will have to pay if you initiate such a misguided action.
3: You may be contractually liable for other peoples' use of your open network in some circumstances. If the terms of service for your ISP so state, and the cause of action arises in a way that those terms are relevant, you could find yourself in a bad position. And while IP addresses are not proof of identity, they are evidence, and it would put you in a compromised defensive position to have your IP associated with "bad stuff".
4: The implied right of anonymous speech within the 1st Amendment is not relevant to any issues at play here. There's a misinterpretation of something going on if that seems important in this context.
Applause!
Much better than that goofball sheriff in Aridzona.
Those of us in Maricopa County can worry about our sheriff; the rest of the country can worry about theirs. It's a local elected office. I do not understand the national media attention.
With that said, I do not support Arpaio or his policies and do not vote for him.
I can't believe I misused your/you're in the first sentence. I hate that. It was an editing error: I started by writing "You're misinterpreting..." and changed the rest of the sentence without changing the first word. Damn!
Either way, slander/libel is a civil offense, not criminal, and it requires the offended party to sue.
Well that would sure shut up the anti-Muslim crowd! Muhammad v. Nakoula.
There's no legal concept of "hate speech" in USA, thankfully. There's "fighting words", but that's a different concept.
And the "fighting words" doctrine has been severely limited by subsequent jurisprudence. The incident in the seminal case on "fighting words" (cop arrested protester for calling him a "damned racketeer") would clearly constitute a civil rights violation today. The "fighting words" doctrine as an exception to 1st Amendment protection is essentially dead. It lives on, however, as a defense to battery in some jurisdictions. So you can get punched for saying some stuff, but you can't get shut up by the government.
It is still incitement. The INTENT is what matters, not the speech itself.
And this film was clearly made to incite people to do violence, knowing the target demographic of the film itself.
You're understanding of 1st Amendment jurisprudence is lacking. Have you even read any of the cases? Where in the world did you come up with the idea that intent has anything to do with it? Intent is specifically NOT adequate. The actual or probable effect must be to incite imminent lawless action. All speech is inherently protected by the 1st Amendment unless it falls into a narrow set of exceptions that exist to prevent very specific kinds of harm. Mass chaos and lawlessness are within the scope of harms that justify limitation of some kinds of speech under some limited circumstances. However, the speech at issue must be directed to cause, and actually be capable of causing "imminent lawless action". Both intent and actual ability to cause an actual dangerous, lawless result are required. And "imminent" means RIGHT THEN AND THERE. Not somewhere else later. Merely intending to incite a riot is legal, and constitutionally protected, unless you have the real ability to make it happen immediately. Merely making a political statement likely to cause your opposition elsewhere to respond violently is also legal, and constitutionally protected, as the resulting lawless action is not "imminent" in the requisite sense. Go read Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Romney and Ryan only looks good if you're a corporate asshole or a Fox-watching bah bah sheep.
I am neither. I am a small business owner, and to me, Obama looks awful. Romney/Ryan looks decent in comparison, and will get my vote. I could say that Obama only looks good if you've never taken responsibility for your own financial wellbeing, but that might be disingenuous.
And I see no language in it that has changed meaning since then; most words don't change meaning. I mean hell, you still dial the phone even though phones haven't had dials for over 40 years.
Name a single word in the Consitution that has changed meaning. I can't find one.
"Regulated". It used to mean "equipped", and now means "controlled". That's an extremely important distinction.
Is it just me, or does this sound like the most awesome life ever? Staying holed up in secure compounds with armed guards searching for terrorists. Having awesome impromptu compound-parties full of fashionable people who carry toiletries with them to "touch up" first, all equipped with the latest personal tech. Driving between compounds at 2AM in high-speed convoys of black SUV's full of "touched up" partiers to get to the next venue. Danger. Intrigue. Slashdot-submitting geeks going to clandestine parties. Why am I here in the USA?
Me, I want more of this. I want plans to 3D print a fully automatic weapon. Just to watch the heads explode at the realization that the genie is out of the bottle and ain't going back.
Do you realize that the only real obstacle to having an automatic weapon already is legal, not practical? The difference between a semi-auto and full-auto rifle is trivial from an engineering perspective. The Lightning Link is a tiny piece of stamped steel that reliably converts the AR-15 to full auto. It probably costs about $0.50 to manufacture in large quantities. You could literally make one in an afternoon from stuff you found around the house using only a Dremel. The only problem is that it's a federal offense to do so. Only Lightning Links registered with the ATF prior to May of 1986 are legally transferable for civilians. So there are only a few hundred in existence that are legal to own - and that's why a registered lightning link now costs approximately $8000 if you can find somebody selling one.
On Bill Maher's show: if GMO food truly is safe and beneficial (and it generally is if you remove Monsanto et al. from the equation), then the obvious solution is not to keep consumers from knowing what it is they're eating, but just the opposite--educate them on exactly what it is they're eating in a neutral, fact-based manner.
Rob
Right. Because that scientific, fact-based, rational approach to political action has worked so well for nuclear energy, and literally everything else it's been tried with.
In other words, I want to know what the product is that I'm buying. This bill would help me with that.
In other words, the parent AC hits it on the head: this bill should be a no-brainer, because I should be able to know what I am buying.
I want to know exactly what's in a can of Coke, too, but I'm not entitled to a copy of the recipe. I want to know how the engine computer in my car works, but I'm not entitled to the source code.
I'm curious if she had a non-compete clause in her contract, and how it will all work out if she does. Any Google employees who know the details on their typical contracts?
No matter what's in a typical Google contract, hers is certainly different. She was a top-level executive for some time, then one rung down the ladder. She has hundreds of millions of dollars. There's no way she agreed to disadvantageous terms.
Does that mean that Microsoft didn't like MSNBC's political bias, or that NBC didn't like Microsoft's insertion of political bias on MSNBC.com?
Among other elements, extortion requires a threat to the person or property of the victim, or someone associated with the victim. There is none here. The information at issue was publicly released by the "victim" on their website, and later withdrawn. This is like CNN retracting a story and threatening extortion charges against anyone who dares to mirror the old version.
So they published the database on the Internet for anyone to access. I would be hard pressed to find a legal cause of action against the "hackers" (web surfers?) who browsed and saved the file. Additionally, because the database contains only a tabulation of factual information, it cannot be copyrighted. Thus, Rex Mundi may be legally allowed to publish it at will. Most of the civil causes of action that could be brought in a case of blackmail or extortion may be unsuccessful here since the "victim" PUBLICLY PUBLISHED the data themselves. Interesting case.
"While China is 50 years behind the U.S. government..."
Um. No they aren't. The US government did these same things 50 years ago, but is no longer capable of easily repeating its past feats. The first US moon landing program took less than 10 years from conceptual announcement to a giant leap for mankind. How long would it take for the US to do the same thing again? I'm not confident we even could. I'm not sure we could even replicate China's docking-to-a-station performance in 10 years, now that we've abandoned all of our previously successful manned spaceflight programs.
use your phone as a local wifi hotspot
This would require me to subscribe to a plan with tethering, which is still luxury-priced in the United States market.
No, it just requires that you root your android device.