How many eight year old girls would it have to have their throats cut before you or anyone else opened the door?
You would open the door in face of so hard evidence as this? Me not. I would call mayday and go sharp down to lower altitude, so if the adversary gets an idea and opens the door, the decompression shock on the hull won't be so hard. Then I'd look for the nearest airport for emergency landing.
Alternative way is to depressurize the cabin, disable the oxygen masks for passengers, and fly in altitude where they lose consciousness but won't likely get brain damage. Not sure it can be done, it's just a theoretical guess.
The little girl with a razor blade to her throat standing in a pool of her fathers blood is right outside the door.
Either she, and perhaps a few more, dies, or everybody dies. Pick the lower price. It's nothing worse than a standard cost-minimizing problem, even if somehow bloody.
If they are willing to kill the passengers to get to your seat, it's a more than compelling reason to not let them in. Remember it's your own posterior you may save.
Once you're on the ground, *then* there's time for negotiations.
Besides, the passengers have a lot of potential weapons - stuff that can be thrown, blankets that can be used for immobilizing the attackers, suitcases for shields for close combat (better that your Samsonite gets a knife hit than you), numerical advantage that can be used for swarming the adversary. Show this approach couple times in movies, and you can be virtually certain you'll have a couple people with that idea in every flight.
I'm not sure I'd want to be able to condem her to death to save the aircraft. I'm not sure I'd want someone with that level of detachment flying my plane.
I don't care about the level of attachment of the pilot to the passengers. As a passenger, I want a pilot with as high as possible attachment to his own survival. That is enough to provide him a motivation to fly safely.
Why cut the wires at all? If the soundcard can accept a speaker used as a dynamic microphone, then just use the second headphone set as a stereo microphone and there is no cable splicing nor soldering at all.
Yup, something needs to be sacrificed for the advancement of the civilization! =)
What do you define as "advancement"? You know, for the purpose of cost-benefit analysis?
And yes, I've seen some wonderful parts of Europe - Scandinavia with its exorbitant taxes and bad productivity, or England with its equally ridiculous taxes and high cost of living.
Just couple degrees eastwards, the cost of living is not as high. Some of your work is even being "insourced" here. And taxes? Guess what you will have to pay when the chickens come home to roost and your National Debt will have to be paid.
No thank you, I'll take the US anyday with its depressing friend-killing ulcers and burnouts. At the very least, it helps us stay on top of things.
On top of - what? Manufacturing is virtually all in China, everything that can be done over the phone or Net is flocking to India and other such places, biomedical research is pushed to places like Korea, and universities are losing their attractivity for foreigners as the visa are becoming more and more annoying to get, to the soundtrack of loud cheers of European and Australasian universities. What's left is maybe the military power, though even that is taxed now by two unnecessary wars, spreading it thinner than butter on an airline-catering sandwich and pushing the whole country deeper into debt trap.
Also keep in mind that a picture of your kids on the office desk is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Sorry, but getting virtually no vacation time in exchange for this thing of "top" does not look exactly like a good deal.
A system where the fittest survive and the rest perish is what is needed, and that is what the American system is.
That's all nice - until you or your friend becomes the one who is about to perish. If you still can afford to have friends, as the race to the bottom squeezes more work time and energy of you. And don't even think about having children, they require time to be spent with them - the time that you can not spend at work.
And there are other goodies attached: depressions, burn-outs, ulcers.
Thanks for the offer, but keep this on your side of the Atlantic.
The monopolies are already changing their ways. Some publishers lower the price of their titles, others release at the same time on all the major markets instead of letting the "not worthy enough" wait (and p1r4te meanwhile).
Also, don't forget the beginning of the appearance of Creative Commons content. The Empire won't fall with a bang but with a whimper; in 10 years we may see the giants being much smaller (hopefully).
Minor detail. Moderator is used to slow down the fast neutrons from the fission to lower speeds, typically by elastic collisions, on which they more easily interact with the fissile nuclei. The materials used are usually graphite, water, or heavy water. The control rods are from material that does not just slow the neutrons down but absorbs them instead. The materials used are boron or cadmium, or steels with high content of them.
None of this changes the fact that boosting a bomb increases efficiency and yield consistency.
Boosting a gun-type device with tritium is a pretty mighty task. Where would you put it? Into the pit? Won't do much good there. You'd have to inject it there very quickly before the assembly, or it'd soak into the metal and you'd get hydrogen embrittlement issues.
Tritium is useful for the implosion devices, and even there you can do without; and making enough tritium is easier than making enough plutonium.
Except for the fact that a prompt-critical reaction is usually the cause of a meltdown situation.
Not really. AFAIK, the problem here is the heat from the decay of the short-lifetime isotopes left from the fission. Old, partially used fuel is much worse in this regard than brand-new. The fission can be switched off, by pushing the regulation rods in or flooding the reactor with boric acid, but the decay can't. This is why the used fuel has to be stored under water for some time.
Who the hell cares that it isn't designed to be opened? It has electronics inside, so it has to be played with. If it requires forcing the case open with a screwdriver, a hacksaw, or a Dremel, it's an annoyance but no reason to not do it.
Hack the planet, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
And don't forget to throw the designers, who thought that annoying hackers and using non-standard heads on screws is a good idea, to the sharks, as they are not worth the bullet.
Sell generic devices then. A board with an analog I/O, an IDE interface, and a suitably sized FPGA chip. Depending on the firmware it can be anything from the mentioned MP3 player to a data acquisition unit. Market it as a data acquisition unit for industrial use, or perhaps for car tuning. Make sure that within a month or any other suitable timeframe the Computer Underground releases a mod kit.
With enough spare gates in the FPGA, the disk content can even be encrypted for increased law-resistance.
As an added benefit, there'll be a do-whatever-is-told compact piece of highly hackable hardware.
The people here who vote don't want to be told they fucked up.
Vote - whom? Both sides are bought, and minority parties realistically won't make it, at least not in a reasonable timeframe.:( And if they would, they'd be bought too.
You could define "the people" as "everybody who agrees with the Party Line". Voila - all those pesky free speech problems are gone - whoever disagrees, is stripped of the "people" status and the Constitution no longer applies to him.
So the question arises, should countries, with their own values, be able to determine what content their people are exposed to?
No.
We already have more or less all information laying around, and the sky is not looking like it'd be about to fall. The spam is mildly annoying, the anti-porn people are more annoying than porn spam, and the bombs? Well, whoever didn't sleep through their high-school chemistry and physics classes does not need the Internet to build one anyway.
They would ban Microsoft, everyone would have to have linux, although there would be a sect of the government pushing for BSD. Government TV would only show Wierd Science and Real Genius, back to back, and forever!
When marketing people think that a significant percentage of people are bypassing their advertisements, they won't pay as much for the ads.
Two words: Product placement.
There are more ways to cram the advertising into their shows, product placement is just one of the better-known ways. If they lose one avenue, they find three new ways to cram their audiovisual industrial waste down our throats.
The 30-sec ad spots just make it technically easier for the advertising market, as any ad can be used in any spot, as the Market requires. There is already enough computer power available to change billboards or labels on boxes or cans in movies, in real time or almost-real time.
Advertising is like mold or politicians. It's pretty difficult to stamp out entirely.
Anything that threatens the big Telcom companies will get shut down by government. The companies will find some excuse, they can be used by terrorists, they will collapse an industry, they will cook your brians. The telcom companies have enough lawyers and lobbyists to thing of something.
Deploy the technology widescale, before the adversary can react; make it so popular that next to everybody does it (and hence a crackdown would cause a political backlash), so decentralized that there is nobody to come after who would stick out, if possible difficult to detect that it is in use, easily adaptable to modifying threat model (allowing tunnelling, VPNs, mimicking "legal" protocols...), and based on dual-use off-the-shelf components (PCs, PDAs...) that can't be easily restricted without causing too wide discomfort and possible class-action lawsuits.
Once a critical mass is reached, there is no easy way back.
a flat tax rate instead of the ridiculous graduated tax rates. (Where I can actually make more money and end up with less because my tax percentage jumps.)
Or, if they want to keep the progressive nature of the thing, use a smooth curve, probably something polynomial or exponential, possibly with a percentage cap somewhere.
Then you take the income, feed it to an equation, get a result. Regardless where on the curve you are, a small change in input results in a corresponding small change on the output; never in a sharp change, like with the "staircase" of brackets.
But that would make too much sense, so it can't be implemented.
The word has been destroyed by the media. We need a new term, and the sooner, the better.
Won't work. Sooner or later, the media catch on and the cycle will continue. It is not worth the effort to play the cat-and-mouse game.
However, we can fight back. If they destroyed our name, our revenge may lie in destroying their form. Won't be much loss anyway - the traditional investigative journalism was replaced by mass-produced junk news.
Blogs, podcasting, Wikimedia and Ohmynews are the first steps.
Slashdot Mirror
You would open the door in face of so hard evidence as this? Me not. I would call mayday and go sharp down to lower altitude, so if the adversary gets an idea and opens the door, the decompression shock on the hull won't be so hard. Then I'd look for the nearest airport for emergency landing.
Alternative way is to depressurize the cabin, disable the oxygen masks for passengers, and fly in altitude where they lose consciousness but won't likely get brain damage. Not sure it can be done, it's just a theoretical guess.
The little girl with a razor blade to her throat standing in a pool of her fathers blood is right outside the door.
Either she, and perhaps a few more, dies, or everybody dies. Pick the lower price. It's nothing worse than a standard cost-minimizing problem, even if somehow bloody.
If they are willing to kill the passengers to get to your seat, it's a more than compelling reason to not let them in. Remember it's your own posterior you may save.
Once you're on the ground, *then* there's time for negotiations.
Besides, the passengers have a lot of potential weapons - stuff that can be thrown, blankets that can be used for immobilizing the attackers, suitcases for shields for close combat (better that your Samsonite gets a knife hit than you), numerical advantage that can be used for swarming the adversary. Show this approach couple times in movies, and you can be virtually certain you'll have a couple people with that idea in every flight.
I'm not sure I'd want to be able to condem her to death to save the aircraft. I'm not sure I'd want someone with that level of detachment flying my plane.
I don't care about the level of attachment of the pilot to the passengers. As a passenger, I want a pilot with as high as possible attachment to his own survival. That is enough to provide him a motivation to fly safely.
Why cut the wires at all? If the soundcard can accept a speaker used as a dynamic microphone, then just use the second headphone set as a stereo microphone and there is no cable splicing nor soldering at all.
Well, I saw such things being said and meant completely seriously. In some cases even by professional economists. *shudder*
It was sarcasm the whole time - get it?
Now yes. The Simpsonese "d'uh" is on me.
What do you define as "advancement"? You know, for the purpose of cost-benefit analysis?
And yes, I've seen some wonderful parts of Europe - Scandinavia with its exorbitant taxes and bad productivity, or England with its equally ridiculous taxes and high cost of living.
Just couple degrees eastwards, the cost of living is not as high. Some of your work is even being "insourced" here. And taxes? Guess what you will have to pay when the chickens come home to roost and your National Debt will have to be paid.
No thank you, I'll take the US anyday with its depressing friend-killing ulcers and burnouts. At the very least, it helps us stay on top of things.
On top of - what? Manufacturing is virtually all in China, everything that can be done over the phone or Net is flocking to India and other such places, biomedical research is pushed to places like Korea, and universities are losing their attractivity for foreigners as the visa are becoming more and more annoying to get, to the soundtrack of loud cheers of European and Australasian universities. What's left is maybe the military power, though even that is taxed now by two unnecessary wars, spreading it thinner than butter on an airline-catering sandwich and pushing the whole country deeper into debt trap.
Also keep in mind that a picture of your kids on the office desk is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Sorry, but getting virtually no vacation time in exchange for this thing of "top" does not look exactly like a good deal.
Really?
That's all nice - until you or your friend becomes the one who is about to perish. If you still can afford to have friends, as the race to the bottom squeezes more work time and energy of you. And don't even think about having children, they require time to be spent with them - the time that you can not spend at work.
And there are other goodies attached: depressions, burn-outs, ulcers.
Thanks for the offer, but keep this on your side of the Atlantic.
Also, don't forget the beginning of the appearance of Creative Commons content. The Empire won't fall with a bang but with a whimper; in 10 years we may see the giants being much smaller (hopefully).
If I remember it correctly.
Boosting a gun-type device with tritium is a pretty mighty task. Where would you put it? Into the pit? Won't do much good there. You'd have to inject it there very quickly before the assembly, or it'd soak into the metal and you'd get hydrogen embrittlement issues.
Tritium is useful for the implosion devices, and even there you can do without; and making enough tritium is easier than making enough plutonium.
It's good enough to illuminate the keyhole in the dark. Weak light, yes, but does the job.
Not really. AFAIK, the problem here is the heat from the decay of the short-lifetime isotopes left from the fission. Old, partially used fuel is much worse in this regard than brand-new. The fission can be switched off, by pushing the regulation rods in or flooding the reactor with boric acid, but the decay can't. This is why the used fuel has to be stored under water for some time.
Hack the planet, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
And don't forget to throw the designers, who thought that annoying hackers and using non-standard heads on screws is a good idea, to the sharks, as they are not worth the bullet.
It is known as The Cellphone. Nothing new here.
With enough spare gates in the FPGA, the disk content can even be encrypted for increased law-resistance.
As an added benefit, there'll be a do-whatever-is-told compact piece of highly hackable hardware.
If they want war, they can have it.
Did you ever hear about an art gallery brawl?
Vote - whom? Both sides are bought, and minority parties realistically won't make it, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. :( And if they would, they'd be bought too.
The best democracy money can buy...
Most likely it splashes into the ocean. Then we'll see an interesting tidal wave.
Prepare your surfboards.
You could define "the people" as "everybody who agrees with the Party Line". Voila - all those pesky free speech problems are gone - whoever disagrees, is stripped of the "people" status and the Constitution no longer applies to him.
No.
We already have more or less all information laying around, and the sky is not looking like it'd be about to fall. The spam is mildly annoying, the anti-porn people are more annoying than porn spam, and the bombs? Well, whoever didn't sleep through their high-school chemistry and physics classes does not need the Internet to build one anyway.
So where is the problem?
In the words of The One Who Shouldn't Be Named:
BRING IT ON!
Two words: Product placement.
There are more ways to cram the advertising into their shows, product placement is just one of the better-known ways. If they lose one avenue, they find three new ways to cram their audiovisual industrial waste down our throats.
The 30-sec ad spots just make it technically easier for the advertising market, as any ad can be used in any spot, as the Market requires. There is already enough computer power available to change billboards or labels on boxes or cans in movies, in real time or almost-real time.
Advertising is like mold or politicians. It's pretty difficult to stamp out entirely.
Two words: ActiveX exploit. .xpi file for Mozilla, but Mozilla asks by default.
I also met attempts to install an
Deploy the technology widescale, before the adversary can react; make it so popular that next to everybody does it (and hence a crackdown would cause a political backlash), so decentralized that there is nobody to come after who would stick out, if possible difficult to detect that it is in use, easily adaptable to modifying threat model (allowing tunnelling, VPNs, mimicking "legal" protocols...), and based on dual-use off-the-shelf components (PCs, PDAs...) that can't be easily restricted without causing too wide discomfort and possible class-action lawsuits.
Once a critical mass is reached, there is no easy way back.
Or, if they want to keep the progressive nature of the thing, use a smooth curve, probably something polynomial or exponential, possibly with a percentage cap somewhere.
Then you take the income, feed it to an equation, get a result. Regardless where on the curve you are, a small change in input results in a corresponding small change on the output; never in a sharp change, like with the "staircase" of brackets.
But that would make too much sense, so it can't be implemented.
Won't work. Sooner or later, the media catch on and the cycle will continue. It is not worth the effort to play the cat-and-mouse game.
However, we can fight back. If they destroyed our name, our revenge may lie in destroying their form. Won't be much loss anyway - the traditional investigative journalism was replaced by mass-produced junk news.
Blogs, podcasting, Wikimedia and Ohmynews are the first steps.
The victory is ours.