You are the one who chooses to live in a country where the cost of living is five times as high,...
Well... "chooses to live in", or "is effectively trapped in"? Are you aware about relocation costs, about the problems with getting citizenship in another country, language problems, loss of social network...?
However - there isn't only the pilot in the aircraft, but the bombs too; usually many more than one. A single bomb can kill many people on the ground. What's less ethical: killing one pilot, or allowing the said pilot to kill significantly more than one person on the ground?
A similar thing to do could be a network of passive radio receivers, isolating interesting signatures and sending them to a computer cluster to correlate them and keep a real-time 3D image of the airspace without actually broadcasting like the "active" radars do. Could be coupled with a low-cost "illuminator" that would be sending out radar pulses of known properties, whose reflections would be easy to isolate by the receivers, and could be easily sacrificed (or even replaced in real-time) in case an anti-radar-missile-equipped airplane would appear in the guarded airspace. Such technology existed in 70's already, on vacuum tubes; should not be that big problem to replicate it in the age of FPGAs.
Plan C: Screw the missiles, and get a chemical laser; deuterium-fluoride will be the best choice for high-power atmospherical application like this one, the second alternative is COIL. You may like to google for MTHEL and MIRACL for details.
The nature of a missile defense system is to prevent incoming missiles from causing harm to the people. Is there anything ethically wrong with a technology that is designed to NOT kill the people?
Is the world angry at anyone besides America and Israel?
Yes, and pretty loudly. The only problem here is that America's actions and the protests against them are "louder" in comparison, making the other issues "less-visible".
Maybe Africa would be better helped if the local manufacturers would be able to make cheaper knock-offs of the AIDS meds without being threatened through WIPO? Maybe Iran wouldn't degenerate into theocracy if the CIA won't instigate the preceding changes there? Why the american bombs don't rain on Zimbabwe? Isn't deposing one dictator while leaving other ones (including but not limited to Mugabe, Kuchma, and Putin) virtually unnoticed a form of double standard as well?
Why the media always inform about the dictators only in the few months before the actions - why the news about oppression in Afghanistan started hitting mainstream press/broadcast only before the bombing campaign? Why the same happened with Iraq? Why the media don't care until there's a "humanitarian bombing" about to happen? You can be well-informed about the problems of the other parts of the world, if you follow more than only the corporate media; and because most people don't do so, the rest of the problems (including the protests/gripes/measures) go unnoticed by the Masses. Get the US-led media conglomerates more interested in other-than-immediate problems, and people start notice more than just the US actions.
You aren't being disliked for being dominant. You are being disliked for what you did to become dominant, and what you are doing in order to stay dominant.
This idea is already well-known for the military, in order to keep contact between the soldiers and share data between them. However, it can have civilian uses in situations similar to a battlefield, eg. various kinds of demonstrations. A large ad-hoc network distributed throughout the crowd, with data storage points in the rear lines and data acquisition points (microphones and cameras) in the front, possibly with real-time off-site streaming of the data from the nodes with Internet connectivity (eg. connected to local "fixed" accesspoints, or using GPRS cellphones, possibly combining the bandwidth of multiple nodes for the same streams). The cops in oppressive regimes have an unpleasant tendency to confiscate equipment (which has to be cheap to be worth the loss) and the tapes/films (which means there has to be a way to get them off-camera as soon as possible, if possible in real time, which is what this setup could be good for).
Also, if combined with wearable displays (with a bit of luck coming in couple years), could allow the people in the rear of the crowd to see by the eyes of other people (using augmented reality system - immersive VR would be impractical here; shouldn't be necessary to say, but Slashdot is recently full of nitpickers).
Same setup can be useful for investigative journalists or activists; a "suicidal warrior" can penetrate a facility, with a transmitter, sending out images of whatever they want to see. Once busted by the local security, the rest of the crew vanishes with the recordings and eventually returns with legal support for the captured hero. Could be useful for organizations like Earth First or Greenpeace. (Not limited to cameras, though; portable detectors of whatever can be used as well. A hybrid and cheap method could be eg. a pack of indicator papers, soaked into a water inside a pond in a factory, and the photograph of the paper then sent out to the rest of the crew. For organizations with unlimited funding, a LANL (or LLNL?) -developed portable GC-MS combo may fit the bill.)
Back in the Old Times where there wasn't a lawyer behind every corner, many radar researchers and technicians used to work with much stronger field strengths than you can ever squeeze out of this toy. Many are still alive and happy, the rest tends to die of old age or accidents. EM concerns are overblown.
It's a prototype. I suppose the same can be achieved with a cheap PCI 802.11b card and a cheap embedd-computer core. See eg. www.soekris.com for one of them.
Bipedal hairless ape is not exactly an adaptable design; we are the product of an anomalously long-lived warm "interglacial" period. It won't last forever.
Isn't it the reason why God gave us genetic engineering?
The data the machines send are cheaper to turn into knowledge on the Earth. Even if only because of the possibility to chat up a colleague expert on the phone, without having to wait until the signal snails from Mars to Earth and back.
You still have the delays between sending commands to the robots and getting answers back. However, you can send a swarm of them, and then use the same ground team to handle them in round-robin fashion, which makes up for the delays (and provides a lot of redundancy in case of...ummm... landing problems).
With some advances in the field of artificial intelligence, you can also send autonomous robots with built-in "curiosity", automatically finding the things that could be interesting, and exploring them. A swarm of a hundred of small automatic crawlers could provide a LOT of data, with being likely to have the same weight as the comparable ship for human crew and their life support system and radiation shielding.
Actually, there isn't enough uranium to fuel nuclear power for more than two or three decades anyway.
You forget the breeder reactors. You can use plutonium as energy source in fission, and uranium around the active zone to deflect neutrons back and to convert some uranium to plutonium, which is then extracted in a reprocessing facility. This way you can recycle fuel over and over and over.
This buys more time for fusion research - the only kind of solar energy that is economically viable in large scale.
What about some format based on SGML or TeX, for the master documents, and a set of converters (possible even operating on-fly, or online), to produce the format you desire - HTML, PDF, formatted plaintext with specified line length, anything?
Why not officially call the original parmesan cheese "parmesan", and the variants "parmesanoids"? Describes the relation well enough for the customer, while keeping the distinction between the original and the copy.
Development teams based in law-heavy jurisdictions aren't the most robust way to do things these days. We still have large areas more or less outside the reach of the dirty paws of the lawyers - as I mentioned a while ago, most of South America, Africa, and Asia - with LOTS of people there, whose Net connectivity is getting better every week.
EU is not the whole world. There are other areas that are often being forgotten in the discussions; the whole region of Africa goes under the radar, together with South America, and I don't even mention Asia. For all of these, EU is largely irrelevant, together with the USA. They can fork, they have the source, and as long as they publish it, we all have it.
There are also methods where you need M of N pieces to reconstruct the secrets, eg. that you need any 3 of 5 pieces. Such approach could increase both the security (by decentralization) and the reliability (by redundancy).
Slashdot Mirror
Well... "chooses to live in", or "is effectively trapped in"? Are you aware about relocation costs, about the problems with getting citizenship in another country, language problems, loss of social network...?
There are fewer choices than what you think.
However - there isn't only the pilot in the aircraft, but the bombs too; usually many more than one. A single bomb can kill many people on the ground. What's less ethical: killing one pilot, or allowing the said pilot to kill significantly more than one person on the ground?
A similar thing to do could be a network of passive radio receivers, isolating interesting signatures and sending them to a computer cluster to correlate them and keep a real-time 3D image of the airspace without actually broadcasting like the "active" radars do. Could be coupled with a low-cost "illuminator" that would be sending out radar pulses of known properties, whose reflections would be easy to isolate by the receivers, and could be easily sacrificed (or even replaced in real-time) in case an anti-radar-missile-equipped airplane would appear in the guarded airspace. Such technology existed in 70's already, on vacuum tubes; should not be that big problem to replicate it in the age of FPGAs.
That's precisely the reason why the anti-weapon weapons are necessary. :(
Plan C: Screw the missiles, and get a chemical laser; deuterium-fluoride will be the best choice for high-power atmospherical application like this one, the second alternative is COIL. You may like to google for MTHEL and MIRACL for details.
The nature of a missile defense system is to prevent incoming missiles from causing harm to the people. Is there anything ethically wrong with a technology that is designed to NOT kill the people?
Aren't they the very reason for the Freenet project?
Better way: use UAVs. That's less funny to suggest, but cheaper and more practical. :)
Sorry, I am not that good in international politics.
Yes, and pretty loudly. The only problem here is that America's actions and the protests against them are "louder" in comparison, making the other issues "less-visible".
Maybe Africa would be better helped if the local manufacturers would be able to make cheaper knock-offs of the AIDS meds without being threatened through WIPO? Maybe Iran wouldn't degenerate into theocracy if the CIA won't instigate the preceding changes there? Why the american bombs don't rain on Zimbabwe? Isn't deposing one dictator while leaving other ones (including but not limited to Mugabe, Kuchma, and Putin) virtually unnoticed a form of double standard as well?
Why the media always inform about the dictators only in the few months before the actions - why the news about oppression in Afghanistan started hitting mainstream press/broadcast only before the bombing campaign? Why the same happened with Iraq? Why the media don't care until there's a "humanitarian bombing" about to happen? You can be well-informed about the problems of the other parts of the world, if you follow more than only the corporate media; and because most people don't do so, the rest of the problems (including the protests/gripes/measures) go unnoticed by the Masses. Get the US-led media conglomerates more interested in other-than-immediate problems, and people start notice more than just the US actions.
Excuse me, I have to go back to turn my computer off and on.
/me ducks
Iran. Viet Nam. Central America. Strongarming other countries to follow US-friendly economical policies is unimportant in comparison. Enough said.
The Microsoft parallel is a fitting one.
Also, if combined with wearable displays (with a bit of luck coming in couple years), could allow the people in the rear of the crowd to see by the eyes of other people (using augmented reality system - immersive VR would be impractical here; shouldn't be necessary to say, but Slashdot is recently full of nitpickers).
Same setup can be useful for investigative journalists or activists; a "suicidal warrior" can penetrate a facility, with a transmitter, sending out images of whatever they want to see. Once busted by the local security, the rest of the crew vanishes with the recordings and eventually returns with legal support for the captured hero. Could be useful for organizations like Earth First or Greenpeace. (Not limited to cameras, though; portable detectors of whatever can be used as well. A hybrid and cheap method could be eg. a pack of indicator papers, soaked into a water inside a pond in a factory, and the photograph of the paper then sent out to the rest of the crew. For organizations with unlimited funding, a LANL (or LLNL?) -developed portable GC-MS combo may fit the bill.)
Back in the Old Times where there wasn't a lawyer behind every corner, many radar researchers and technicians used to work with much stronger field strengths than you can ever squeeze out of this toy. Many are still alive and happy, the rest tends to die of old age or accidents. EM concerns are overblown.
It's a prototype. I suppose the same can be achieved with a cheap PCI 802.11b card and a cheap embedd-computer core. See eg. www.soekris.com for one of them.
Isn't it the reason why God gave us genetic engineering?
You still have the delays between sending commands to the robots and getting answers back. However, you can send a swarm of them, and then use the same ground team to handle them in round-robin fashion, which makes up for the delays (and provides a lot of redundancy in case of ...ummm... landing problems).
With some advances in the field of artificial intelligence, you can also send autonomous robots with built-in "curiosity", automatically finding the things that could be interesting, and exploring them. A swarm of a hundred of small automatic crawlers could provide a LOT of data, with being likely to have the same weight as the comparable ship for human crew and their life support system and radiation shielding.
You forget the breeder reactors. You can use plutonium as energy source in fission, and uranium around the active zone to deflect neutrons back and to convert some uranium to plutonium, which is then extracted in a reprocessing facility. This way you can recycle fuel over and over and over.
This buys more time for fusion research - the only kind of solar energy that is economically viable in large scale.
What about some format based on SGML or TeX, for the master documents, and a set of converters (possible even operating on-fly, or online), to produce the format you desire - HTML, PDF, formatted plaintext with specified line length, anything?
Why not officially call the original parmesan cheese "parmesan", and the variants "parmesanoids"? Describes the relation well enough for the customer, while keeping the distinction between the original and the copy.
Development teams based in law-heavy jurisdictions aren't the most robust way to do things these days. We still have large areas more or less outside the reach of the dirty paws of the lawyers - as I mentioned a while ago, most of South America, Africa, and Asia - with LOTS of people there, whose Net connectivity is getting better every week.
Make the per-install charge the responsibility of the end user? The dev team will be out of the enforcement game.
EU is not the whole world. There are other areas that are often being forgotten in the discussions; the whole region of Africa goes under the radar, together with South America, and I don't even mention Asia. For all of these, EU is largely irrelevant, together with the USA. They can fork, they have the source, and as long as they publish it, we all have it.
There are also methods where you need M of N pieces to reconstruct the secrets, eg. that you need any 3 of 5 pieces. Such approach could increase both the security (by decentralization) and the reliability (by redundancy).