"The media is now beginning to suggest that this recent onslaught of new viruses (with new versions of major-impact viruses being found daily) the result of a virus gang turf war..."
Good for them. The deeper they get into their pissing contest the stupider they'll become, until someone makes a mistake or goes RL on the others. Then someone will get caught, and we can seriously get down to nailing some nads to trees.
Figuratively. Probably.
If, as has been suggested, some of them are associated with spammers, perhaps we'll be able to get two nads with one nail.
The American Indians in Science and Engineering (http://aises.org/) have a similar event every year in Alburquerque. All ther regional winners attend. They're always glad to have volunteers for judging or other administrative help, and one need not be Indian to join.
For anyone considering helping out at any such event, don't forget an employer might be willing to pay your way in return for the good PR they'd get.
and put the buttons in the hand or on the table, better yet tie button press in with a command to voice recognition softare, and you've got a decent head pointer. Most other head pointers cost more (some far more) and require a reflective dot on your head and a camera to track it. There is a cheap hack of one at www.mousevision.com. But a good, cheap gyro head pointer would be greatly welcomed by the disabled.
cmowire (254489) sez: "No, comets contain water-ice. In a vaccum, ice subliminates into water vapor without an intervining liquid step."
Pressure is pressure. Kinetic pressure due to impact will overcome (by many orders of magnitude) vaccuum. Water ice impacting at interplanetary speeds will form all manner of different phases according to the chaotic nature of the impact (no idealized impacts in nature). It is extremely unlikely there was no liquid water on Mars. The question, as I stated in another thread, is "how much for how long". If it existed for minutes, we could see some of the results they're finding, but obviously that won't have anything to do with the possibility of life.
tverbeek (457094) sez: "The way to extract that information back from within the event horizon is quite simple: run time backwards....That may be nonsense talk,"
Sure it is. It's not quite up to snuff with Hawking's "imaginary time" (that is, imaginary in the sense of imagnary numbers, running perpendicular to thermodynamic time), but it's pretty good. If it's nonsense, it's the failure of language to be able to express the concepts.
Seriously, reversability is a symmetry that needs tested. It may be broken in the thermodynamic sense, but preserved via imaginary time. On the other hand, the black body radiation may indeed carry the information back out, but in a form we can't decode. I have no doubt the signals I decode represent, at some level, the processes of neurons doing their jobs. But with billions of them crammed together and locked inside a scalp, skull and dura mater, and with who knows how many processes being operated on simultaneously, I can't even begin to calculate the number of variables I'm looking at, much less how to figure out what the signal is carrying.
If they ever start a field of experimental cosmology, I'll sign up.
For immediate release: According to Darl McBride, Chief Equivocating Orator of SCO Group, "I KNEW there was more to this. They've been planning this for YEARS. Changing the spelling doesn't fool us, and dissolving the Soviet Bloc doesn't protect them. That Torvalds is obviously a COMMUNIST AGENT. Why, just take KDE, and add 3 to the D and subtract 3 from the E, which averages out to no change at all, and you get KGB! What do you say to THAT, Comrade Torvalds! From now on we're no longer wrapping Unix with a shrink-wrap license, we're using a TIN FOIL license, so you can't beam your source control rays into our product. If it works for my hat, it'll darn sure work on CD-ROMs.
It's WHAT? CIA? Not KGB? Are you sure? Oh. Well, let's see. To get from CIA to BSD, you subtract 1 from the C....."
Now let's see the data. And then the independent replication. Is there a National Institute of Stochastic Processes where I can apply for a grant? Yes, I know what that means to my chances of getting it; I think most places award grants based on some randomized process.
Oh, hell no. This is a perennial windmill to be tilted at. There's an alternate hypothesis presented every year or so, and not because the most widely accepted hypothesis doesn't do a good job of explaining the data. It's one of those unanswerables that you can make your professional mark on by going up against it. As in boxing, you don't have to win against the champ, you just have to last enough rounds.
Add a pheremone detector on each end, coupled to the other end's pheremone reproducer, and suddenly it becomes a lot easier to find out if you're going to be compatible with each other.
I'd like to see the FAQ on where to place the detector.
I can buy that the information survives and continues to exist inside the Schwarzchild radius. But when they say:
"The strings from any subsequent material that enters the black hole would remain traceable as well. That means a black hole can be traced back to its original conditions, and information survives."... they're going to have to explain a bit harder just how it is we're supposed to be able to extract that information back out through the event horizon. Whether it continues to vibrate on linked strings or vanishes in a puff of nonreality makes no never mind if you can't get it back out.
It is almost impossible that there is no water on Mars. The planet has had its fair share of impacts. Those include an equally fair share of water bearing material, such as cometary ice. The question should not be "whether" but "how much and for how long".
"Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing?"
The quote assumes value equals only money. That opinion is valid, but is not the only opinion that's valid. Many of my favorite personal accomplishments were done for free, and some even cost me significant cash.
I haven't tried it yet, but...
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 1, Informative
... if I needed to get rid of fan noise, what I've planned on trying is piping in air from a relatively far removed vibrational air pump -- an aquarium pump -- and shut off the internal fan. It could be in its own enclosure if need be. Some of them have a pretty fair output. Using rubber hose instead of plastic would help damp any vibration coming up the hose. Another hack that might not be suitable for everyday use, but could be used for those sessions where silence is necessary, if the pump helps but isn't enough, run some of the hose through a bowl of ice water to cool the air on its way to the machine.
RetroGeek (206522) sez: "Is there some reason why these rovers do not have a fan to blow away the accumutating dust on the solar panels?"
Lack of air mass. A fan on Mars would be only 1% the efficiency of the same fan on Earth, because there's that much less air. Plus then you're using more power and using up the batteries, to not much effect.
I would have suggested an electrostatic charger, like the old Diskwasher Zerostat, for removing the charge from vinyl LPs, making them easier to clean.
Stress is the body's reaction to environmental pressures. Despite the common connotation given the word, stress is neutral. It is simply an arousing factor. And, as you've probably learned by now, it takes a certain level of arousal to do anything; we live between too much and too little.
The result of stress depends on our reaction to it. We can react negatively (distress) or positively (eustress). With respect to disease, you're focusing on the negative reactions, and that's fine. We don't much need research or clinical applications for things that don't cause us problems and can in fact be beneficial. But for your own edification, and probably also to impress the hell out of your instructor, you should cover stress, distress and eustress as described by Hans Selye. Here's a link to Wikipedia's page on the subject, with links to info on Selye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(psychology) I deal with large amounts of different kinds of technology every day. Since I'm an experimenter, I'm frequently trying to do things that either haven't been done before, or have been done a different way and it's up to me to get my stuff to work like that. The stress causes distess at first, when I'm frustrated. However, when I get it working, I get a rush of elation, obviously eustress. This is much the same as happens to programmers when their code finally runs right; it's called a "prograsm".
I mixed some polystyrene with toluene and melted it until it was a pourable liquid. I poured it on the basement floor and spread it around with a brush, effectively laminating it. I was trying to come up something that could be put on floors to protect them, could be taken back up chemically when worn, and a new layer put down. I knew I didn;t have the right combination yet because the toluene made me dizzy, but I felt I was on the right track.
Before I could figure out what combination of matrix and solvent to use, someone pointed out I could already buy floor wax at any store.
See? It *was* a good hack. I just wasn't the first to do it. Hey, I was only 14 at the time. The same thing happens fairly often to me now. That's just how science is.
My next hack will be Kline-Fogelman airfoil fins on model rockets. Nobody has ever tried airfoils with a K-F gap on both surfaces.
... it has to do with attention, specifically divided and focused attention. I've replicated some VR experimental work using VR vs. other techniques for redirecting attention. The techniques work according to how deeply the person can immerse themselves into the alternate stimulus context. Hypnosis is extremely good, but some people are better at hypnosis than others. Manipulating a physical object is exactly as effective as manipulating an object in VR (I got the same results with $20 worth of wooden blocks that someone else got with an SGI Indigio and complete submersion VR tank, worth $40K).
The one technique I haven't got to try yet is implicit learning under anesthesia, which seems to work like hypnotic suggestion, but doesn't rely on the person's own ability; it works the same for everyone.
Whenever you see any study claiming "VR does so and so" question why it took VR to do so, and what else might also work. There's nothing magical about VR that almost certainly can't be done as well for cheaper.
[It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes.]
"That's physically impossible. In the absence of torque, a rotating object will rotate about precisely one axis."...etc.
In the absence of torque, and in microgravity, any angular momentum applied will remain. An object spinning on one axis, hit from the side near one of the poles, will precess, and will continue to do so unless some force acts to counter it. It's now rotating on two axes.
A body in a gravitational field will be subject to tidal stresses and be more likely to reduce angular momenta, perhaps becoming locked. Hyperion would most certainly continue to tumble if removed from its environs until and unless a foce made it stop. It tumbles chaotically, ie. changes its rotations, due to the periodic influence of Titan.
There is no drag in a vaccuum and microgravity. There is no physical force to alter any momentum an object carries. There are plenty of videos of astronauts playing with all sorts of items showing complex rotation
It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes. To move it efficiently would require these beasties being smart enough to know when to throw their rock. That's doable.
But how often will one of these things be in the right place at the right time? You would need hundreds if not thousands sitting and digging and waiting their turn.
How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max.
If that thing isn't going to get the chance to launch 1000 one pound chuncks of rock, due to not being pointed in the right direction often enough, you'd do better to slam the things into the rock to try to move it.
I think the best idea yet is building a bunch of large engines and fuel tanks, going out and capturing some rocks, herding them into stable orbit at L-4, and strap on the engines. If they're ever needed they can easily fall out of L-4, slingshot around the moon, and head out towards the incoming. A properly placed kinetic swat will send it off into a safe orbit whether or not it breaks up.
Cragen (697038) sez: "Whatever happened to the idea that something going away from us would eventually "re-appear" on the opposite side of the Universe and start heading towards us?"
It's still around, as an untestable hypothesis. It would take longer than the total lifetime of the universe to make the trip.
kinnell (607819) sez: "Unfortunately, people have been trying to develop good speech recognition for years, and it is still a long way from being viable as the main input method."
I see the problem here. Obviously practical fusion reactors, personal flying cars and cheap space transportation require voice input.
Even when voice input is made viable, my money says I'll still be needing a 5 pound Craftsman Ball Peen Input Amplifier to make sure I'm understood. After all, voice input is supposed to work well on people, and I frequently need my 5# CBPIA with them.
... when Bill "Raster Blaster" Budge joined with the initial EA "Artists"? Their first major ad was "Can a computer make you cry?". They had a vision not uncommon for that time, that computers would change society in some very significant ways, and they intended to be part of that, via gaming.
It was a lofty but honorable vision. They succeeded somewhat at first, but as business took its toll, EA became more and more a money farm. I'm sure there are still people at EA who would at least claim to hold to that vision, but for the most part, it's become "just another".
[The ATF tried asking model rocket engine manufacturers to supply them with some engines for testing. All refused. So they came up with a court order, forcing one of the manufacturers to supply some engines. They complied]
"I'm suprised the judge didn't laugh them out of the courtroom & tell them to drive down to the local hobby shop and but the engines themselves. Doesn't part of the the point of showing that consumer-grade off-the-shelf parts can be a threat showing that they can be purchased by anyone on short notice? It's not like they don't have the budget to buy these things."
They were trying to test high powered engines, greater than G class. Not many places stock those. They *did* try to purchase them at first. The manufacturers turned down the ATF purchase order.
High powered engines require some pretty stringent licensing already, developed by those in the hobby, as well as ATF licensing for low power explosives. You'd think they'd be satisfied. Particularly since the licensing brings in income and gets the users (and potential sources for leaks) registered. Theor going against the nomral grain of goobermint agency actions like that just indicates they're working way outside their already twisted framework of logic, and are simply out to score FUD points. That's become a major federal occupation since 9/11 -- pretending they're doing something to make us feel less afraid and more thankful to them for doing so, no matter whether we want it or not.
"Time to buy my own UAV and find out what's really going on over there in Area 51."
You could get one to the top of Tikaboo Peak and launch it, no problem. They may or may not catch the model, but with the sensors they have all over around the area, they'd definitely catch you, both trudging around on the ground and the radio transmitter you'd be using. The same, though less stringent, warning would go for using one to view any sensitive area. The end result would be going to jail, and could well end up with the goobermint trying to make RC aircraft illegal, or at least heavily licensed, under PATRIOT II. Seriously.
They've already been hard at work trying to outlaw model rockets engines. They're under the impression these can be taken apart and used to make a bomb. Technically, they're correct, but it'd be far easier and cheaper to get shotgun shell reloading material and make it from that. Rocket engine propellant is designed to burn at a certain speed, not as fast as possible, and so makes a lousy explosive. That's not stopping them.
The ATF tried asking model rocket engine manufacturers to supply them with some engines for testing. All refused. So they came up with a court order, forcing one of the manufacturers to supply some engines. They complied.
ATF rented a van and set out to test these engines. They got some rockets, went out to a remote area, and started launching them. Out of the back of the van. Which contained the rest of the engines. The rest of the engines caught fire. The rented van burned to the ground. (Details, and confirmation of same by the owner of the company forced to supply the engines, available from Google Groups usenet archive for newsgroup rec.models.rockets).
They were enjoying their newfound freedom to "protect" at all costs way too much before. Now they're also humiliated, so they're tryng all the harder. If someone were to take some of the widely available still- or movie-camera carrying rockets and launch those from Tikaboo Peak, there's no doubt in my mind "America's 87th Most Popular Hobby" would be grounded without even the comfort of having lost out in a congressional vote.
Slashdot Mirror
"The media is now beginning to suggest that this recent onslaught of new viruses (with new versions of major-impact viruses being found daily) the result of a virus gang turf war..."
Good for them. The deeper they get into their pissing contest the stupider they'll become, until someone makes a mistake or goes RL on the others. Then someone will get caught, and we can seriously get down to nailing some nads to trees.
Figuratively. Probably.
If, as has been suggested, some of them are associated with spammers, perhaps we'll be able to get two nads with one nail.
The American Indians in Science and Engineering (http://aises.org/) have a similar event every year in Alburquerque. All ther regional winners attend. They're always glad to have volunteers for judging or other administrative help, and one need not be Indian to join.
For anyone considering helping out at any such event, don't forget an employer might be willing to pay your way in return for the good PR they'd get.
"The bill would make it difficult to for software to download and install itself without the user's knowledge."
I could have sworn it was already illegal. Making it "difficult" would be a step down.
and put the buttons in the hand or on the table, better yet tie button press in with a command to voice recognition softare, and you've got a decent head pointer. Most other head pointers cost more (some far more) and require a reflective dot on your head and a camera to track it. There is a cheap hack of one at www.mousevision.com. But a good, cheap gyro head pointer would be greatly welcomed by the disabled.
cmowire (254489) sez: "No, comets contain water-ice. In a vaccum, ice subliminates into water vapor without an intervining liquid step."
Pressure is pressure. Kinetic pressure due to impact will overcome (by many orders of magnitude) vaccuum. Water ice impacting at interplanetary speeds will form all manner of different phases according to the chaotic nature of the impact (no idealized impacts in nature). It is extremely unlikely there was no liquid water on Mars. The question, as I stated in another thread, is "how much for how long". If it existed for minutes, we could see some of the results they're finding, but obviously that won't have anything to do with the possibility of life.
tverbeek (457094) sez: "The way to extract that information back from within the event horizon is quite simple: run time backwards....That may be nonsense talk,"
Sure it is. It's not quite up to snuff with Hawking's "imaginary time" (that is, imaginary in the sense of imagnary numbers, running perpendicular to thermodynamic time), but it's pretty good. If it's nonsense, it's the failure of language to be able to express the concepts.
Seriously, reversability is a symmetry that needs tested. It may be broken in the thermodynamic sense, but preserved via imaginary time. On the other hand, the black body radiation may indeed carry the information back out, but in a form we can't decode. I have no doubt the signals I decode represent, at some level, the processes of neurons doing their jobs. But with billions of them crammed together and locked inside a scalp, skull and dura mater, and with who knows how many processes being operated on simultaneously, I can't even begin to calculate the number of variables I'm looking at, much less how to figure out what the signal is carrying.
If they ever start a field of experimental cosmology, I'll sign up.
For immediate release: According to Darl McBride, Chief Equivocating Orator of SCO Group, "I KNEW there was more to this. They've been planning this for YEARS. Changing the spelling doesn't fool us, and dissolving the Soviet Bloc doesn't protect them. That Torvalds is obviously a COMMUNIST AGENT. Why, just take KDE, and add 3 to the D and subtract 3 from the E, which averages out to no change at all, and you get KGB! What do you say to THAT, Comrade Torvalds! From now on we're no longer wrapping Unix with a shrink-wrap license, we're using a TIN FOIL license, so you can't beam your source control rays into our product. If it works for my hat, it'll darn sure work on CD-ROMs.
It's WHAT? CIA? Not KGB? Are you sure? Oh. Well, let's see. To get from CIA to BSD, you subtract 1 from the C....."
Now let's see the data. And then the independent replication. Is there a National Institute of Stochastic Processes where I can apply for a grant? Yes, I know what that means to my chances of getting it; I think most places award grants based on some randomized process.
Oh, hell no. This is a perennial windmill to be tilted at. There's an alternate hypothesis presented every year or so, and not because the most widely accepted hypothesis doesn't do a good job of explaining the data. It's one of those unanswerables that you can make your professional mark on by going up against it. As in boxing, you don't have to win against the champ, you just have to last enough rounds.
Add a pheremone detector on each end, coupled to the other end's pheremone reproducer, and suddenly it becomes a lot easier to find out if you're going to be compatible with each other.
I'd like to see the FAQ on where to place the detector.
I can buy that the information survives and continues to exist inside the Schwarzchild radius.
... they're going to have to explain a bit harder just how it is we're supposed to be able to extract that information back out through the event horizon. Whether it continues to vibrate on linked strings or vanishes in a puff of nonreality makes no never mind if you can't get it back out.
But when they say:
"The strings from any subsequent material that enters the black hole would remain traceable as well. That means a black hole can be traced back to its original conditions, and information survives."
It is almost impossible that there is no water on Mars. The planet has had its fair share of impacts. Those include an equally fair share of water bearing material, such as cometary ice. The question should not be "whether" but "how much and for how long".
"Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing?"
The quote assumes value equals only money. That opinion is valid, but is not the only opinion that's valid. Many of my favorite personal accomplishments were done for free, and some even cost me significant cash.
... if I needed to get rid of fan noise, what I've planned on trying is piping in air from a relatively far removed vibrational air pump -- an aquarium pump -- and shut off the internal fan. It could be in its own enclosure if need be. Some of them have a pretty fair output. Using rubber hose instead of plastic would help damp any vibration coming up the hose. Another hack that might not be suitable for everyday use, but could be used for those sessions where silence is necessary, if the pump helps but isn't enough, run some of the hose through a bowl of ice water to cool the air on its way to the machine.
RetroGeek (206522) sez: "Is there some reason why these rovers do not have a fan to blow away the accumutating dust on the solar panels?"
Lack of air mass. A fan on Mars would be only 1% the efficiency of the same fan on Earth, because there's that much less air. Plus then you're using more power and using up the batteries, to not much effect.
I would have suggested an electrostatic charger, like the old Diskwasher Zerostat, for removing the charge from vinyl LPs, making them easier to clean.
Stress is the body's reaction to environmental pressures. Despite the common connotation given the word, stress is neutral. It is simply an arousing factor. And, as you've probably learned by now, it takes a certain level of arousal to do anything; we live between too much and too little.
The result of stress depends on our reaction to it. We can react negatively (distress) or positively (eustress). With respect to disease, you're focusing on the negative reactions, and that's fine. We don't much need research or clinical applications for things that don't cause us problems and can in fact be beneficial. But for your own edification, and probably also to impress the hell out of your instructor, you should cover stress, distress and eustress as described by Hans Selye. Here's a link to Wikipedia's page on the subject, with links to info on Selye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(psychology)
I deal with large amounts of different kinds of technology every day. Since I'm an experimenter, I'm frequently trying to do things that either haven't been done before, or have been done a different way and it's up to me to get my stuff to work like that. The stress causes distess at first, when I'm frustrated. However, when I get it working, I get a rush of elation, obviously eustress. This is much the same as happens to programmers when their code finally runs right; it's called a "prograsm".
I mixed some polystyrene with toluene and melted it until it was a pourable liquid. I poured it on the basement floor and spread it around with a brush, effectively laminating it. I was trying to come up something that could be put on floors to protect them, could be taken back up chemically when worn, and a new layer put down. I knew I didn;t have the right combination yet because the toluene made me dizzy, but I felt I was on the right track.
Before I could figure out what combination of matrix and solvent to use, someone pointed out I could already buy floor wax at any store.
See? It *was* a good hack. I just wasn't the first to do it. Hey, I was only 14 at the time. The same thing happens fairly often to me now. That's just how science is.
My next hack will be Kline-Fogelman airfoil fins on model rockets. Nobody has ever tried airfoils with a K-F gap on both surfaces.
... it has to do with attention, specifically divided and focused attention. I've replicated some VR experimental work using VR vs. other techniques for redirecting attention. The techniques work according to how deeply the person can immerse themselves into the alternate stimulus context. Hypnosis is extremely good, but some people are better at hypnosis than others. Manipulating a physical object is exactly as effective as manipulating an object in VR (I got the same results with $20 worth of wooden blocks that someone else got with an SGI Indigio and complete submersion VR tank, worth $40K).
The one technique I haven't got to try yet is implicit learning under anesthesia, which seems to work like hypnotic suggestion, but doesn't rely on the person's own ability; it works the same for everyone.
Whenever you see any study claiming "VR does so and so" question why it took VR to do so, and what else might also work. There's nothing magical about VR that almost certainly can't be done as well for cheaper.
[It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes.]
"That's physically impossible. In the absence of torque, a rotating object will rotate about precisely one axis."...etc.
In the absence of torque, and in microgravity, any angular momentum applied will remain. An object spinning on one axis, hit from the side near one of the poles, will precess, and will continue to do so unless some force acts to counter it. It's now rotating on two axes.
A body in a gravitational field will be subject to tidal stresses and be more likely to reduce angular momenta, perhaps becoming locked. Hyperion would most certainly continue to tumble if removed from its environs until and unless a foce made it stop. It tumbles chaotically, ie. changes its rotations, due to the periodic influence of Titan.
There is no drag in a vaccuum and microgravity. There is no physical force to alter any momentum an object carries. There are plenty of videos of astronauts playing with all sorts of items showing complex rotation
It is almost inevitable that any incoming rock will be rotating on all 3 axes. To move it efficiently would require these beasties being smart enough to know when to throw their rock. That's doable.
But how often will one of these things be in the right place at the right time? You would need hundreds if not thousands sitting and digging and waiting their turn.
How much will these things weigh? With a nuke generator, and drilling and launching equipment to handle a pound of rock at a time over and over, say 1000 pounds max.
If that thing isn't going to get the chance to launch 1000 one pound chuncks of rock, due to not being pointed in the right direction often enough, you'd do better to slam the things into the rock to try to move it.
I think the best idea yet is building a bunch of large engines and fuel tanks, going out and capturing some rocks, herding them into stable orbit at L-4, and strap on the engines. If they're ever needed they can easily fall out of L-4, slingshot around the moon, and head out towards the incoming. A properly placed kinetic swat will send it off into a safe orbit whether or not it breaks up.
Cragen (697038) sez: "Whatever happened to the idea that something going away from us would eventually "re-appear" on the opposite side of the Universe and start heading towards us?"
It's still around, as an untestable hypothesis. It would take longer than the total lifetime of the universe to make the trip.
kinnell (607819) sez: "Unfortunately, people have been trying to develop good speech recognition for years, and it is still a long way from being viable as the main input method."
I see the problem here. Obviously practical fusion reactors, personal flying cars and cheap space transportation require voice input.
Even when voice input is made viable, my money says I'll still be needing a 5 pound Craftsman Ball Peen Input Amplifier to make sure I'm understood. After all, voice input is supposed to work well on people, and I frequently need my 5# CBPIA with them.
... when Bill "Raster Blaster" Budge joined with the initial EA "Artists"? Their first major ad was "Can a computer make you cry?". They had a vision not uncommon for that time, that computers would change society in some very significant ways, and they intended to be part of that, via gaming.
It was a lofty but honorable vision. They succeeded somewhat at first, but as business took its toll, EA became more and more a money farm. I'm sure there are still people at EA who would at least claim to hold to that vision, but for the most part, it's become "just another".
[The ATF tried asking model rocket engine manufacturers to supply them with some engines for testing. All refused. So they came up with a court order, forcing one of the manufacturers to supply some engines. They complied]
"I'm suprised the judge didn't laugh them out of the courtroom & tell them to drive down to the local hobby shop and but the engines themselves. Doesn't part of the the point of showing that consumer-grade off-the-shelf parts can be a threat showing that they can be purchased by anyone on short notice? It's not like they don't have the budget to buy these things."
They were trying to test high powered engines, greater than G class. Not many places stock those. They *did* try to purchase them at first. The manufacturers turned down the ATF purchase order.
High powered engines require some pretty stringent licensing already, developed by those in the hobby, as well as ATF licensing for low power explosives. You'd think they'd be satisfied. Particularly since the licensing brings in income and gets the users (and potential sources for leaks) registered. Theor going against the nomral grain of goobermint agency actions like that just indicates they're working way outside their already twisted framework of logic, and are simply out to score FUD points. That's become a major federal occupation since 9/11 -- pretending they're doing something to make us feel less afraid and more thankful to them for doing so, no matter whether we want it or not.
"Time to buy my own UAV and find out what's really going on over there in Area 51."
You could get one to the top of Tikaboo Peak and launch it, no problem. They may or may not catch the model, but with the sensors they have all over around the area, they'd definitely catch you, both trudging around on the ground and the radio transmitter you'd be using. The same, though less stringent, warning would go for using one to view any sensitive area. The end result would be going to jail, and could well end up with the goobermint trying to make RC aircraft illegal, or at least heavily licensed, under PATRIOT II. Seriously.
They've already been hard at work trying to outlaw model rockets engines. They're under the impression these can be taken apart and used to make a bomb. Technically, they're correct, but it'd be far easier and cheaper to get shotgun shell reloading material and make it from that. Rocket engine propellant is designed to burn at a certain speed, not as fast as possible, and so makes a lousy explosive. That's not stopping them.
The ATF tried asking model rocket engine manufacturers to supply them with some engines for testing. All refused. So they came up with a court order, forcing one of the manufacturers to supply some engines. They complied.
ATF rented a van and set out to test these engines. They got some rockets, went out to a remote area, and started launching them. Out of the back of the van. Which contained the rest of the engines. The rest of the engines caught fire. The rented van burned to the ground. (Details, and confirmation of same by the owner of the company forced to supply the engines, available from Google Groups usenet archive for newsgroup rec.models.rockets).
They were enjoying their newfound freedom to "protect" at all costs way too much before. Now they're also humiliated, so they're tryng all the harder. If someone were to take some of the widely available still- or movie-camera carrying rockets and launch those from Tikaboo Peak, there's no doubt in my mind "America's 87th Most Popular Hobby" would be grounded without even the comfort of having lost out in a congressional vote.