There are reports that can't be delivered by a part-time blogger.
Why? They're the folks least likely to be corrupted by "the system", yet have an axe to grind so they put in the effort, and the "free market" of the net filters out the crazies and the cream rises to the top. Think of places like thehousingbubbleblog or edububble or zerohedge.
How do we find out about this century's Watergates?
Wikileaks and 80 million clones inspired by them? I don't think we'll be running out of sources anytime soon. Would "the masses" care if Watergate II happened today? My guess is no. Changing cultural values accept higher levels of corruption now. So I'm not sure it matters anyway.
The news that is presented to you... dictates how you think about world events
That in turn dictates who you might support or vote for in US elections
Yeah, but that doesn't matter. We only have rule by the 1% here with two different PR campaigns, both sides with identical goals. Since I am a consumer as opposed to a citizen, what I believe has absolutely no impact on what will happen or what the leaders will do. Getting past this realization is really very annoying and offensive because it goes against propaganda fed into our heads since we're kids, but once you get past it, you can safely ignore the noise. They'll do what they want to do to us, and I have no influence whatsoever over it. For awhile you can pretend the propaganda was true, and ignore the situation. Or you can try to fight it, but thats a waste of time and effort. Or, simply just accept it, get on with life. The purpose of a two party republic is to have the election system act as Marx's opiate of the masses. Add that to America's unusually high religiosity, Marx's original opiate... Thats how you rule over bubbas who pound their chests proclaiming their freedumb.
Then I realized that hearing lies on all sides didn't make me any more informed, it just made me think I was.
Today I'm relatively picky
There's some obvious religion analogies here, or at least analogies with my religious views. A "journalism atheist"? Some fret endlessly about what church to attend on Sunday morning, or get all tied up in mental knots trying to figure out how to "fix" people going to the wrong church, or live in terror that someone, somewhere might be having a good time instead of being FUDded into oblivion. I just ignore it and chill on Sunday and my life is far better for it. Similar, there are people who get all wound up about who is watching which propaganda broadcast, try to convince others to "switch" and watch different propaganda because their propaganda happens to actually be the truth (LOL noobs), or live in terror that someone out there might be having a good time instead of being FUDded into oblivion. I don't watch, and don't much care, and my life is far better for it.
Also there's some interesting religious comparisons WRT to "knowledge" and "belief" vs actual measurable real world influence.
Sure, just make sure you apply the same rule for any accidental fire. Fireworks, campfires, backyard BBQ, lawn burning, etc.
All your examples are tied to property, presumably with excellent records of who owns it and who's responsible for the property. Out shooting in the wilderness on public land, there's no records and its easy to get away. A blanket over both situations is not going to work.
By your logic, we should make hit-and-run road "accidents" that result in death legal too, so the perpetrators are more likely to report them.
If you report a fatal accident, how is it hit and run? Or if its hit and run, then by definition you can't report it anyway? I think you asked, very poorly, if we made it legal to report fatal accidents, would people be more likely to report them? Fatal accidents are not illegal, and are more likely to be reported by people not facing a economic death penalty, just look at the stats for hit and run by normal insured drivers vs uninsured, illegals, unlicensed, and drunks.
Anyway, whatever happened to satellite surveillance? Surely a grass fire is pretty easy to pick up on infra red? How many thousand surveillance/weather whatever satellites does the US have? Use them to save some lives.
LOL talk about an inappropriate technical solution to a social problem. You've got people right there, right on site where the fire started, right at the moment smoke rose up. Hmm maybe if we could somehow make it possible for them to use their cell phone without turning themselves into economic kamikaze. Naah we'll just launch another satellite instead.
like their employers, can know what absolute inconsiderate idiots they are dealing with
That's a really awful idea. Which part of "absolute inconsiderate idiot" are you talking about, the "starting a fire" part or the "try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't".
I think giving them the economic death penalty is going to result in eliminating a whole heck of a lot more "try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't" rather than eliminating "starting a fire". Everyone knows starting a fire is wrong and bad so absolutely no education will happen there, but teaching people that trying to put out a fire is bad, or teaching them that telling the authorities about a fire is bad, is something both a bad idea and a new idea so it'll unfortunately be somewhat effective. There seems to be little to no upside.
The other point is why rush? If you're going to intentionally, methodically destroy some lives, at least do a good job of it and have their identifies verified. I'm sure you're be offended if you were wrongly named as one of the two guys. If you're in a big hurry because of the need to strike while the irons hot and set punishment while emotionally charged, isn't that evidence you're doin' it wrong? The only thing worse than vigilante justice in general would seem to be irrational emotional reactive knee jerk vigilante justice... I'm sure the names will come out eventually, give them time to get it right. Whats the big hurry?
That's why you should be holding the people financially responsible for this. Then they have a real incintive to make sure they are firing safely.
LOL, no, no they do not have an incentive, unlike a housefire, while target shooting or poaching out in the wilderness, you've created a huge incentive for anyone carrying or owning a gun to never, ever report a fire, making things much more unsafe. You want people who see or start a fire to Really want to hang around and report every little detail ASAP to the fire department, not make anyone who owns a gun cover their eyes and pretend to see nothing.
Its not enough that the guy who started it can't report a fire, but anyone who carries or owns a gun would be an idiot to report seeing a fire, due to the staggering economic (possibly criminal) consequence of being incorrectly blamed. Because basically everyone rural owns a gun of some type, instead of everyone with a cell phone being unpaid firewatch 24x7, the only people who can safely report seeing a wildfire are on-duty first responders.
Not to be harsh, but since I'm good at it, in general this whole discussion smacks of city boys trying to solve country boys problems for them, managing instead to make it a billion times worse. I believe the phrase is something like "don't try to tell granny how to suck eggs" or something like that. We know what we're doing, now get out of our way and leave us alone. High tech rednecks know what they're doing in their domain just as well as you know what you're doing in your domain. I will say the stereotype lives in that you never hear about sheep herders and cow milkers lecturing the city slickers how they should run a starbucks more efficiently, but you just can't stop the city slickers from telling the country boys how they need to change everything, and usually failing miserably at it.
60 years ago they got rid of the coal burning steamies. The diesels technically could start a fire, but its probably less than 0.01% as often. I don't know how long ago they switched from babbit bushings to roller bearings, but hot boxes where a wheel bearing overheats and catches fire are darn near a thing of the past. Technically it happens once in awhile, but not often, and its almost always caught with telemetry before it bursts into flame. Besides roller bearings don't have manilla rope packing like the old bushings did, theres not much to burn in there. Now a days hotboxes lead to derailments more so than fires. And hotboxing means something different to the general public now. Four previous generations worked at the railroad, I'm the first generation not to, so I grew up hearing stories of how when my grandfather was a boy, railroads started fires all the time and that was the primary concern with living near the tracks (now the concern is noise). Trains are not much of a fire danger anymore. Still happens but its a Big Deal with company wide notifications and announcements rather than, eh, just another daily thing.
Terrible idea, superficially a good one, but it would result in massive losses and deaths.
You see, legal shooting happens mostly in the wilderness. If you start handing out the economic death penalty to people who accidentally start a fire, then they would have to be economically suicidal to ever report a fire.
Imagine a tiny little grass fire starts while target shooting or poaching or whatever. You can "do the right thing" and call it in and 99% of the time the local fire department waters it down and its all good, and 1% of the time its not completely controlled but at least the FD is on it and it may wipe out a house or two, but at least the FD knows about it so evac is successful and no one dies.
With your ridiculous requirement, the shooters would be insane to economically kill themselves, so once a tiny little fire starts, rather than stomping it out themselves and calling the local fire department to water down the area, they run like hell. Obviously they'll get away every time. However 100% of tiny little grass fires will uncontrollably spread and sweep thru town killing everyone and destroying everything.
It seems a heck of a lot less people will die and a lot less destruction will occur if there is no liability to calling in a grass fire. Your plan would fail miserably.
Not seeing the "tech news" angle of this story. Two decades ago in the.mil I was a M-60 gunner (yes the reserves always has ancient gear, and 60s were obsolete since the 80s but we still had them) and I personally started a few grass fires with tracers. The.mil solution was to keep the military engineers busy by bulldozing firebreaks between adjacent ranges, heck sometimes between adjacent lanes. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out this is why some lanes were small arms only with no explosive rounds allowed. The mortar guys and other explosive rounds handled it by having firing lanes that resembled gravel pits or the surface of the moon. Don't know if they used defoliants (which are vaguely tech news, I guess) or it was a natural wasteland. I specifically recall firing a AT-4 trainer round (yes, I am old) into a gravel pit where even on the firing line you could look 360 degrees and never see any green plants. Now that I think about it, the M203 line looked about the same except we had that (supposedly toxic) orange training powder everywhere from the training loads. M203 training rounds are basically big paint balls but for some reason their paint is toxic and paintballs are non-toxic. Or maybe paintballs are toxic. Or maybe only pre-90s M203 training rounds were toxic.
People who insist on living in what amounts to a tinderbox are responsible when their tinderbox catches fire burning their house down. If you don't want to burn out, build firebreaks, build stuff that doesn't burn (clay tile roofs, brick walls, etc) and don't landscape with flammable stuff. At least two people have to do something really stupid to burn down a house, the guy who started the fire and the guy who built in a tinderbox. "I know its the opening day of deer gun hunting season but I should have the right to walk thru the wilderness wearing my furry deer costume without evil hunters shooting at me, we should ban all guns so only criminals are armed". Dumbassery all around.
I see two funny assumptions / themes in most responses
1) OP only has time during the summer. Is IT willing to install / support a dev environment before the end of summer, without back charging the department thousands. Are they even willing install something "just for testing and learning" ? I'm speaking from experience, for example for a couple weeks now, four teams have been trying to add another static NAT for me, plenty of stalling and finger pointing. Everyone in management and other departments might be in full formal written support of what OP is trying to do, but due to policies and procedures, etc, it simply can't be done in the time and budget provided.
2) My boss would never let me do "Z" therefore this guy cannot possibly have management permission to do "Z". I find this extraordinarily unlikely given the nearly universal understanding and acceptance of variation in workplace WRT absolutely everything else. This is a close cousin of "I work for inhuman slavedrivers, therefore its morally inappropriate for any other working relationship to exist anywhere else". Basically the quisling approach... most working relationships are not that screwed up.
Please mod funny not insightful. Everyone knows the packs last the life of the car, guaranteed like forever, and the cost of a pack is a bit less than your rounding error above. This is a topic near and dear to my heart as my wife's Prius is nearing the end of its aesthetic life, trashed internally, dinged out externally, its really showing signs of age, and sooner or later I'll have to replace the car. Battery failures are extremely rare, so I'm not concerned about that.
I mean, Space Hippies [youtube.com]. That's pretty much the best way to make someone never want to watch a Trek show again.
Luckily there was approximately no story arc in TOS, so skip the crappy episodes. Heck just put on "The Doomsday Machine" followed by "City on the Edge of Forever" followed by "The Trouble with Tribbles" followed by "Tholian Web" followed by "Galileo Seven" followed maybe by "Court Martial", followed maybe by "space seed".
What bad things happen when you skip "space hippies" and "They stole spocks brain"? Pretty much nothing. The rest of the series still makes sense.
Don't try this with DS9's wartime episodes, that'll make no sense at all. DS9 did have the most interesting character in all of trek, that being Mr Garick.
Basically a civillian (C/A) receiver must disable itself once its calculated speed and altitude go above certain limits (CoCom Limits [wikipedia.org]), meant to prevent their use in missiles and such.
I remember some civilian GPS had much lower limits put in by the mfgr. They were terrified that someone would pay $100 for a "civilian" unit instead of paying $10000 for an aviation unit so they cut out above 100 knots and wouldn't display above 10km or so ASL.
but the DOD has the ability to selectively re-enable SA on individual satellites
Also they/we have deployed jammers. Before they had decent jammers they were pretty worried.
YES that is it. There was also its cousin the SLGR aka "plugger and slugger". The SLGR is the one I was thinking of. The size of a car radio and it ate something like 8 AA batteries at a time. What a beast. It was pretty tough, G I proof, thats for sure.
The tech that would be required to send C4 laden RC planes via GPS is not cheap, but a video camera is so it s more likely that if someone attempted something like what you said they would do it visually. GPS would just complicate things.
Even a video camera is too expensive. Cessna 172 with suicide bomber with delusions of grandeur. Much cheaper, you can steal one at any little airfield. My sig line below is not referring to GPS guidance.
Ditto the poor idea above of designing and building a cruise missile to deliver anthrax. We already know the "official" delivery mechanism is the US post office and it only costs a stamp.
There are no terror plots using a GPS that don't read like some Rube Goldberg slash Dr Doofenshmirtz comedy plot.
GPS used to have a 1km fudge factor inserted into it to prevent people using it for terrorist activities.
LOL rewriting history.mil always had the high precision codes, at least I/we did in the early 90s. I forget the nickname our handbag sized GPS receivers had, it was a long time ago. The main point was making sure our grunts on the ground could give their exact grid square to artillery support, but the other guys wouldn't have the tech. Eventually it became fairly pointless to restrict anymore, once everyone had cheap RX and it never really materialized as a tactical problem.
Also some concern about ICBM and cruise missile nav points.
It was never, until post 9/11 history rewriting, about terrorism.
To some extent, I can't figure out what to do from a terror standpoint with high accuracy GPS positions that wouldn't be just as scary with low precision.
I think PCB tech has changed over the years. As a kid I was lifting pads all the time in the 80s, to my considerable annoyance, but I haven't lifted a pad on a new PCB in probably 15 or 20 years. Maybe they use super glue instead of elmers glue now to laminate the copper to the fiberglass. I bought a decent digital hakko iron (such that it never overtemps) a couple years back and I've never lifted a pad with that iron. I can't believe I spend my first quarter century of electronic foolishness with cheap radio shack irons, should have gotten a hakko setup decades ago (or equivalent). Given a realistic learning curve, on thru-hole my skills probably maxed out around 1985 so its not like I got any more skilled WRT to lifting pads, PCBs must simply be made better now.
Good tools make the work for your hands easier, less impacting.
Yes but the impact on the hands of snipping component leads is always going to be more painful on thru-hole than SMD (ha ha)
far less breakable parts
I've never snapped a lead off a SMD part, but done it quite a few times to thru-hole parts trying to wedge into place. I've burned a couple SMD LEDs. I've lost many 0402 parts in the rug. Overall I think the destruction rate with thru-hole is going to be higher than SMD.
i can use a soldering gun over a pencil.
They also rock for desoldering because they heat up so much, so fast. I used to use them on PL-259 connectors before I switched to propane torch for those. Then I switched to type-Ns and BNCs for everything and haven't soldered a PL259 in some years now.
Oh very well. I read it and its for utter noobs. Not exactly/. worthy material. Not bad for ladies home journal, or maybe cosmo or rolling stone, or something non-technical like wired, but not quite up to the level of/.. "What should consumers do if they don't want to be tracked this way?" is answered with something like its really nice to be tracked and you should lean back and enjoy it and you can't do anything about it but we like having meetings to discuss it, probably because of the catered food. Gee thanks, can I have 60 seconds of my life back since I didn't get much outta this?.
Well, I think I can do a little better than the article. Install adblock plus, make sure the optional ads are block in ABP. Install Ghostery, and in the wizard setup thingy make sure everything is getting blocked, especially "bug blocking". I have found bug blocking is all or nothing, if you block "all" then all new ones are also blocked, but if you unblock just one, then new ones will not be blocked. This is based on (years of?) experience not just theory. Tada, mostly done. I also use flashblock extension, because flash is used for nothing important, just overly polished completely content free marketing sites, cat videos on youtube (and you can whitelist yt if you want) but mostly flash is primarily used for spammy ads that I don't need or want to see. With the growth of ajax sites I no longer use noscript, although its not all that bad of an idea. In a riff off the original article I'd also love to attend endless privacy meetings, if no reason other than to eat the catered food.
We already have this, its called the comments section of our local dying newspaper. I would assume your local newspaper, if any, is similar. The comments on articles are exclusively filled with sloganeering by "both" sides written by paid political hacks. The problem with the business model is its already dying, because on a percentage basis, roughly no one wants to read idiotic "divide and conqueror" sloganeering. Why sling meaningless slogans on a new site, if you're already slinging them on the old site?
Build a damn tube amp. Build lots of them. You can make a killing selling them to audiophiles and guitar players.
Need to define "unable to work with the tiny component" first.
Lets say the problem is agonizing joint pain aka arthritis when snipping thru thin 22 gauge interconnect wire and thru-hole components. I'm guessing that agonizing pain will increase about a hundred fold if he has to snip thru 16 gauge filament wires.
On the other hand, lots of people weirdly confuse Parkinsons-style jitters with arthritic joint pain. In that scenario it doesn't matter that it requires more strength and force, the important thing is the parts are bigger, requires less fine dexterity.
Personally I think you're better off going solder-paste / reflow oven SMD than thru hole. Its easier to do, faster, easier to learn, easier to touch up before reflow, lower odds of burns, etc. Personally I free hand solder SMD and have done so since the 80s, but whatever works for you. The biggest problem with SMD is the old people bragging about how experienced they are therefore they'd never try something new, its a mental block not a actual technical problem.
Almost painfully obvious answer is "teach grandson how to do home electrical work".
Attention to detail is kind of important in this line of work, and a second set of highly experienced eyes is probably very helpful.
A noob can't do a worse job than the average illegal alien construction worker, so doing it yourself is not going to be any more dangerous than your average new McMansion subdivision. No time constraint and no need to nickel and dime to make the boss more profit means you can methodically make it right.
Obviously if you live in a nanny state where you require endless licenses and union membership to plug in an extension cord, this doesn't work so well, but in a free area its not too unreasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
There are reports that can't be delivered by a part-time blogger.
Why? They're the folks least likely to be corrupted by "the system", yet have an axe to grind so they put in the effort, and the "free market" of the net filters out the crazies and the cream rises to the top. Think of places like thehousingbubbleblog or edububble or zerohedge.
How do we find out about this century's Watergates?
Wikileaks and 80 million clones inspired by them? I don't think we'll be running out of sources anytime soon. Would "the masses" care if Watergate II happened today? My guess is no. Changing cultural values accept higher levels of corruption now. So I'm not sure it matters anyway.
The news that is presented to you ... dictates how you think about world events
That in turn dictates who you might support or vote for in US elections
Yeah, but that doesn't matter. We only have rule by the 1% here with two different PR campaigns, both sides with identical goals. Since I am a consumer as opposed to a citizen, what I believe has absolutely no impact on what will happen or what the leaders will do. Getting past this realization is really very annoying and offensive because it goes against propaganda fed into our heads since we're kids, but once you get past it, you can safely ignore the noise. They'll do what they want to do to us, and I have no influence whatsoever over it. For awhile you can pretend the propaganda was true, and ignore the situation. Or you can try to fight it, but thats a waste of time and effort. Or, simply just accept it, get on with life. The purpose of a two party republic is to have the election system act as Marx's opiate of the masses. Add that to America's unusually high religiosity, Marx's original opiate... Thats how you rule over bubbas who pound their chests proclaiming their freedumb.
Then I realized that hearing lies on all sides didn't make me any more informed, it just made me think I was.
Today I'm relatively picky
There's some obvious religion analogies here, or at least analogies with my religious views. A "journalism atheist"? Some fret endlessly about what church to attend on Sunday morning, or get all tied up in mental knots trying to figure out how to "fix" people going to the wrong church, or live in terror that someone, somewhere might be having a good time instead of being FUDded into oblivion. I just ignore it and chill on Sunday and my life is far better for it. Similar, there are people who get all wound up about who is watching which propaganda broadcast, try to convince others to "switch" and watch different propaganda because their propaganda happens to actually be the truth (LOL noobs), or live in terror that someone out there might be having a good time instead of being FUDded into oblivion. I don't watch, and don't much care, and my life is far better for it.
Also there's some interesting religious comparisons WRT to "knowledge" and "belief" vs actual measurable real world influence.
Likewise if you have a SSN.
You meant to write
Likewise if you have someone elses SSN.
Sure, just make sure you apply the same rule for any accidental fire. Fireworks, campfires, backyard BBQ, lawn burning, etc.
All your examples are tied to property, presumably with excellent records of who owns it and who's responsible for the property. Out shooting in the wilderness on public land, there's no records and its easy to get away. A blanket over both situations is not going to work.
By your logic, we should make hit-and-run road "accidents" that result in death legal too, so the perpetrators are more likely to report them.
If you report a fatal accident, how is it hit and run? Or if its hit and run, then by definition you can't report it anyway? I think you asked, very poorly, if we made it legal to report fatal accidents, would people be more likely to report them? Fatal accidents are not illegal, and are more likely to be reported by people not facing a economic death penalty, just look at the stats for hit and run by normal insured drivers vs uninsured, illegals, unlicensed, and drunks.
Anyway, whatever happened to satellite surveillance? Surely a grass fire is pretty easy to pick up on infra red? How many thousand surveillance /weather whatever satellites does the US have? Use them to save some lives.
LOL talk about an inappropriate technical solution to a social problem. You've got people right there, right on site where the fire started, right at the moment smoke rose up. Hmm maybe if we could somehow make it possible for them to use their cell phone without turning themselves into economic kamikaze. Naah we'll just launch another satellite instead.
like their employers, can know what absolute inconsiderate idiots they are dealing with
That's a really awful idea. Which part of "absolute inconsiderate idiot" are you talking about, the "starting a fire" part or the "try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't".
I think giving them the economic death penalty is going to result in eliminating a whole heck of a lot more "try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't" rather than eliminating "starting a fire". Everyone knows starting a fire is wrong and bad so absolutely no education will happen there, but teaching people that trying to put out a fire is bad, or teaching them that telling the authorities about a fire is bad, is something both a bad idea and a new idea so it'll unfortunately be somewhat effective. There seems to be little to no upside.
The other point is why rush? If you're going to intentionally, methodically destroy some lives, at least do a good job of it and have their identifies verified. I'm sure you're be offended if you were wrongly named as one of the two guys. If you're in a big hurry because of the need to strike while the irons hot and set punishment while emotionally charged, isn't that evidence you're doin' it wrong? The only thing worse than vigilante justice in general would seem to be irrational emotional reactive knee jerk vigilante justice... I'm sure the names will come out eventually, give them time to get it right. Whats the big hurry?
That's why you should be holding the people financially responsible for this. Then they have a real incintive to make sure they are firing safely.
LOL, no, no they do not have an incentive, unlike a housefire, while target shooting or poaching out in the wilderness, you've created a huge incentive for anyone carrying or owning a gun to never, ever report a fire, making things much more unsafe. You want people who see or start a fire to Really want to hang around and report every little detail ASAP to the fire department, not make anyone who owns a gun cover their eyes and pretend to see nothing.
Its not enough that the guy who started it can't report a fire, but anyone who carries or owns a gun would be an idiot to report seeing a fire, due to the staggering economic (possibly criminal) consequence of being incorrectly blamed. Because basically everyone rural owns a gun of some type, instead of everyone with a cell phone being unpaid firewatch 24x7, the only people who can safely report seeing a wildfire are on-duty first responders.
Not to be harsh, but since I'm good at it, in general this whole discussion smacks of city boys trying to solve country boys problems for them, managing instead to make it a billion times worse. I believe the phrase is something like "don't try to tell granny how to suck eggs" or something like that. We know what we're doing, now get out of our way and leave us alone. High tech rednecks know what they're doing in their domain just as well as you know what you're doing in your domain. I will say the stereotype lives in that you never hear about sheep herders and cow milkers lecturing the city slickers how they should run a starbucks more efficiently, but you just can't stop the city slickers from telling the country boys how they need to change everything, and usually failing miserably at it.
railroad trains
60 years ago they got rid of the coal burning steamies. The diesels technically could start a fire, but its probably less than 0.01% as often. I don't know how long ago they switched from babbit bushings to roller bearings, but hot boxes where a wheel bearing overheats and catches fire are darn near a thing of the past. Technically it happens once in awhile, but not often, and its almost always caught with telemetry before it bursts into flame. Besides roller bearings don't have manilla rope packing like the old bushings did, theres not much to burn in there. Now a days hotboxes lead to derailments more so than fires. And hotboxing means something different to the general public now. Four previous generations worked at the railroad, I'm the first generation not to, so I grew up hearing stories of how when my grandfather was a boy, railroads started fires all the time and that was the primary concern with living near the tracks (now the concern is noise). Trains are not much of a fire danger anymore. Still happens but its a Big Deal with company wide notifications and announcements rather than, eh, just another daily thing.
Terrible idea, superficially a good one, but it would result in massive losses and deaths.
You see, legal shooting happens mostly in the wilderness. If you start handing out the economic death penalty to people who accidentally start a fire, then they would have to be economically suicidal to ever report a fire.
Imagine a tiny little grass fire starts while target shooting or poaching or whatever. You can "do the right thing" and call it in and 99% of the time the local fire department waters it down and its all good, and 1% of the time its not completely controlled but at least the FD is on it and it may wipe out a house or two, but at least the FD knows about it so evac is successful and no one dies.
With your ridiculous requirement, the shooters would be insane to economically kill themselves, so once a tiny little fire starts, rather than stomping it out themselves and calling the local fire department to water down the area, they run like hell. Obviously they'll get away every time. However 100% of tiny little grass fires will uncontrollably spread and sweep thru town killing everyone and destroying everything.
It seems a heck of a lot less people will die and a lot less destruction will occur if there is no liability to calling in a grass fire. Your plan would fail miserably.
Not seeing the "tech news" angle of this story. Two decades ago in the .mil I was a M-60 gunner (yes the reserves always has ancient gear, and 60s were obsolete since the 80s but we still had them) and I personally started a few grass fires with tracers. The .mil solution was to keep the military engineers busy by bulldozing firebreaks between adjacent ranges, heck sometimes between adjacent lanes. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out this is why some lanes were small arms only with no explosive rounds allowed. The mortar guys and other explosive rounds handled it by having firing lanes that resembled gravel pits or the surface of the moon. Don't know if they used defoliants (which are vaguely tech news, I guess) or it was a natural wasteland. I specifically recall firing a AT-4 trainer round (yes, I am old) into a gravel pit where even on the firing line you could look 360 degrees and never see any green plants. Now that I think about it, the M203 line looked about the same except we had that (supposedly toxic) orange training powder everywhere from the training loads. M203 training rounds are basically big paint balls but for some reason their paint is toxic and paintballs are non-toxic. Or maybe paintballs are toxic. Or maybe only pre-90s M203 training rounds were toxic.
People who insist on living in what amounts to a tinderbox are responsible when their tinderbox catches fire burning their house down. If you don't want to burn out, build firebreaks, build stuff that doesn't burn (clay tile roofs, brick walls, etc) and don't landscape with flammable stuff. At least two people have to do something really stupid to burn down a house, the guy who started the fire and the guy who built in a tinderbox. "I know its the opening day of deer gun hunting season but I should have the right to walk thru the wilderness wearing my furry deer costume without evil hunters shooting at me, we should ban all guns so only criminals are armed". Dumbassery all around.
I see two funny assumptions / themes in most responses
1) OP only has time during the summer. Is IT willing to install / support a dev environment before the end of summer, without back charging the department thousands. Are they even willing install something "just for testing and learning" ? I'm speaking from experience, for example for a couple weeks now, four teams have been trying to add another static NAT for me, plenty of stalling and finger pointing. Everyone in management and other departments might be in full formal written support of what OP is trying to do, but due to policies and procedures, etc, it simply can't be done in the time and budget provided.
2) My boss would never let me do "Z" therefore this guy cannot possibly have management permission to do "Z". I find this extraordinarily unlikely given the nearly universal understanding and acceptance of variation in workplace WRT absolutely everything else. This is a close cousin of "I work for inhuman slavedrivers, therefore its morally inappropriate for any other working relationship to exist anywhere else". Basically the quisling approach... most working relationships are not that screwed up.
Please mod funny not insightful. Everyone knows the packs last the life of the car, guaranteed like forever, and the cost of a pack is a bit less than your rounding error above. This is a topic near and dear to my heart as my wife's Prius is nearing the end of its aesthetic life, trashed internally, dinged out externally, its really showing signs of age, and sooner or later I'll have to replace the car. Battery failures are extremely rare, so I'm not concerned about that.
I mean, Space Hippies [youtube.com]. That's pretty much the best way to make someone never want to watch a Trek show again.
Luckily there was approximately no story arc in TOS, so skip the crappy episodes. Heck just put on "The Doomsday Machine" followed by "City on the Edge of Forever" followed by "The Trouble with Tribbles" followed by "Tholian Web" followed by "Galileo Seven" followed maybe by "Court Martial", followed maybe by "space seed".
What bad things happen when you skip "space hippies" and "They stole spocks brain"? Pretty much nothing. The rest of the series still makes sense.
Don't try this with DS9's wartime episodes, that'll make no sense at all. DS9 did have the most interesting character in all of trek, that being Mr Garick.
Basically a civillian (C/A) receiver must disable itself once its calculated speed and altitude go above certain limits (CoCom Limits [wikipedia.org]), meant to prevent their use in missiles and such.
I remember some civilian GPS had much lower limits put in by the mfgr. They were terrified that someone would pay $100 for a "civilian" unit instead of paying $10000 for an aviation unit so they cut out above 100 knots and wouldn't display above 10km or so ASL.
but the DOD has the ability to selectively re-enable SA on individual satellites
Also they/we have deployed jammers. Before they had decent jammers they were pretty worried.
YES that is it. There was also its cousin the SLGR aka "plugger and slugger". The SLGR is the one I was thinking of. The size of a car radio and it ate something like 8 AA batteries at a time. What a beast. It was pretty tough, G I proof, thats for sure.
The tech that would be required to send C4 laden RC planes via GPS is not cheap, but a video camera is so it s more likely that if someone attempted something like what you said they would do it visually. GPS would just complicate things.
Even a video camera is too expensive. Cessna 172 with suicide bomber with delusions of grandeur. Much cheaper, you can steal one at any little airfield. My sig line below is not referring to GPS guidance.
Ditto the poor idea above of designing and building a cruise missile to deliver anthrax. We already know the "official" delivery mechanism is the US post office and it only costs a stamp.
There are no terror plots using a GPS that don't read like some Rube Goldberg slash Dr Doofenshmirtz comedy plot.
GPS used to have a 1km fudge factor inserted into it to prevent people using it for terrorist activities.
LOL rewriting history .mil always had the high precision codes, at least I/we did in the early 90s. I forget the nickname our handbag sized GPS receivers had, it was a long time ago. The main point was making sure our grunts on the ground could give their exact grid square to artillery support, but the other guys wouldn't have the tech. Eventually it became fairly pointless to restrict anymore, once everyone had cheap RX and it never really materialized as a tactical problem.
Also some concern about ICBM and cruise missile nav points.
It was never, until post 9/11 history rewriting, about terrorism.
To some extent, I can't figure out what to do from a terror standpoint with high accuracy GPS positions that wouldn't be just as scary with low precision.
Lifted pads suck.
I think PCB tech has changed over the years. As a kid I was lifting pads all the time in the 80s, to my considerable annoyance, but I haven't lifted a pad on a new PCB in probably 15 or 20 years. Maybe they use super glue instead of elmers glue now to laminate the copper to the fiberglass. I bought a decent digital hakko iron (such that it never overtemps) a couple years back and I've never lifted a pad with that iron. I can't believe I spend my first quarter century of electronic foolishness with cheap radio shack irons, should have gotten a hakko setup decades ago (or equivalent). Given a realistic learning curve, on thru-hole my skills probably maxed out around 1985 so its not like I got any more skilled WRT to lifting pads, PCBs must simply be made better now.
Good tools make the work for your hands easier, less impacting.
Yes but the impact on the hands of snipping component leads is always going to be more painful on thru-hole than SMD (ha ha)
far less breakable parts
I've never snapped a lead off a SMD part, but done it quite a few times to thru-hole parts trying to wedge into place. I've burned a couple SMD LEDs. I've lost many 0402 parts in the rug. Overall I think the destruction rate with thru-hole is going to be higher than SMD.
i can use a soldering gun over a pencil.
They also rock for desoldering because they heat up so much, so fast. I used to use them on PL-259 connectors before I switched to propane torch for those. Then I switched to type-Ns and BNCs for everything and haven't soldered a PL259 in some years now.
especially because I haven't logged into any web services on that machine
Let me guess, except for google because you're using chrome on both browsers.
Oh very well. I read it and its for utter noobs. Not exactly /. worthy material. Not bad for ladies home journal, or maybe cosmo or rolling stone, or something non-technical like wired, but not quite up to the level of /.. "What should consumers do if they don't want to be tracked this way?" is answered with something like its really nice to be tracked and you should lean back and enjoy it and you can't do anything about it but we like having meetings to discuss it, probably because of the catered food. Gee thanks, can I have 60 seconds of my life back since I didn't get much outta this?.
Well, I think I can do a little better than the article. Install adblock plus, make sure the optional ads are block in ABP. Install Ghostery, and in the wizard setup thingy make sure everything is getting blocked, especially "bug blocking". I have found bug blocking is all or nothing, if you block "all" then all new ones are also blocked, but if you unblock just one, then new ones will not be blocked. This is based on (years of?) experience not just theory. Tada, mostly done. I also use flashblock extension, because flash is used for nothing important, just overly polished completely content free marketing sites, cat videos on youtube (and you can whitelist yt if you want) but mostly flash is primarily used for spammy ads that I don't need or want to see. With the growth of ajax sites I no longer use noscript, although its not all that bad of an idea. In a riff off the original article I'd also love to attend endless privacy meetings, if no reason other than to eat the catered food.
a site aimed at 'on-topic' conversation
We already have this, its called the comments section of our local dying newspaper. I would assume your local newspaper, if any, is similar. The comments on articles are exclusively filled with sloganeering by "both" sides written by paid political hacks. The problem with the business model is its already dying, because on a percentage basis, roughly no one wants to read idiotic "divide and conqueror" sloganeering. Why sling meaningless slogans on a new site, if you're already slinging them on the old site?
The placebo effect from homeopathy is pretty neat, but on the downside you have to be a fucking idiot for it to work.
You make it sound like a religion
Build a damn tube amp. Build lots of them. You can make a killing selling them to audiophiles and guitar players.
Need to define "unable to work with the tiny component" first.
Lets say the problem is agonizing joint pain aka arthritis when snipping thru thin 22 gauge interconnect wire and thru-hole components. I'm guessing that agonizing pain will increase about a hundred fold if he has to snip thru 16 gauge filament wires.
On the other hand, lots of people weirdly confuse Parkinsons-style jitters with arthritic joint pain. In that scenario it doesn't matter that it requires more strength and force, the important thing is the parts are bigger, requires less fine dexterity.
Personally I think you're better off going solder-paste / reflow oven SMD than thru hole. Its easier to do, faster, easier to learn, easier to touch up before reflow, lower odds of burns, etc. Personally I free hand solder SMD and have done so since the 80s, but whatever works for you. The biggest problem with SMD is the old people bragging about how experienced they are therefore they'd never try something new, its a mental block not a actual technical problem.
grandfather is a retired electrician
Almost painfully obvious answer is "teach grandson how to do home electrical work".
Attention to detail is kind of important in this line of work, and a second set of highly experienced eyes is probably very helpful.
A noob can't do a worse job than the average illegal alien construction worker, so doing it yourself is not going to be any more dangerous than your average new McMansion subdivision. No time constraint and no need to nickel and dime to make the boss more profit means you can methodically make it right.
Obviously if you live in a nanny state where you require endless licenses and union membership to plug in an extension cord, this doesn't work so well, but in a free area its not too unreasonable.