I just wrote the sports director at WGN, to see what his reaction to this is, if he's just finding out about it, the lawsuits may fly when local stations react to this.
Pope Pius XII didn't stand up to Hitler, and valued the power of the Papacy above all other concerns (my opinion, based on reading http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99oct/9910pope2. htm). This same man, before becoming pope was responsible for the treaty with Hitler that forced the Center Party out of the German Political sphere, and cleared the way for Hitler's rise to power.
Other sources say that there is doubt in the matter, but most say he considered politics above matters of faith. This is very troubling.
The Catholic church now stands ready to make him a Saint... It's very troubling to me, indeed.
We've had our warning shots, this one hit. It's a minor victory of the daemons of stupidity, but has shown the existence of the threat to be real. Slashdot has lost it's innocence. It's been raped by the followers of a mediocre science fiction writer. It's time to morn our losses, and to take our anger and direct it against all the daemons of stupidity that we find. If we fail to act, the revolution will truely be over.
The revolution is not over, however, in fact it's just begun! People like myself, and doubtless others out there have tasted the freedom of expressing themselves, and are not going to let themselves get shut out again. While slashdot certainly isn't perfect, it's a great way for myself and others to have a conversation.
The scientologists have chosen to try to control our conversation. If we allow this to continue, we'll lose our voice. The choice will then be to take the conversation underground (the last resort, but effective), or to push back, hard.
I will not be censored! I, like Taco, may make my tactical retreats (such as in the Microsoft stupid EULA skirmish of last year), but I will not quit the battle. The costs of inaction are too high, and they only rise according to Warot's law: "The price of inaction against evil always rises"
It's time for the Jihad, the holy war, the fight of good against the deamons of stupidity, no matter how big or small. Rise up, my fellow citizens of the world, call things as you see them, and express yourself. The costs of inaction always rise with time, act now, while it's still easy.
--Mike--
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - Thomas Jefferson
The Secure path in NT is Control-Alt-Delete. There is a very sane reason for this, it's not allowed to be intercepted by ANY application running under NT. Thus, you can ALWAYS know that the OS is in control when you do Control-Alt-Delete. This is one of the GOOD features of the operating system, and helps prevent a trojan horse from taking your password.
It's too bad Microsoft couldn't build applications the same way, safe from Trojan Horses.
--Mike--
It's nice to know they're trying, but it's impossible to secure against someone with physical access to the hardware. Two attacks come to mind immediately:
Run Windows inside of VMware
Run a program such as GoBack
Either way you capture the data, and can go from there. You could also pull out the good old sector editors, etc.
I don't know why people insist that some things computer related should be ephemeral, and undocumentable, but they're racking up some massively bad karma along the way. It'll bite back.
If I was going to host a database with credit card numbers (or anything equally sensitive) on any of my servers, I'd NEVER leave the numbers in plaintext, or anything resembling it. In fact... I'm not sure I'd keep the numbers after they were used.
Systems get broken, hardware fails. That's why there are things like TripWire, MD5 checksums, and... most important of all... Backup Tapes. All of these are important at getting the system back to a previous, assumed "safe" or at least sane position.
Why do these people with $$,$$$,$$$ floating through their sites do stupid things like keeping the numbers in a database? We don't do that where I work, and I'll make sure we never do.
I like the idea of routing around ICANN, because there are some simple paradigm shifts that need to be made which they incapable of grasping due to the dollar wash.
I think that this particulary implementation of the idea, as it stands, is going to flop big time.
Why?... because it requires work... and the goal isn't good enough... do we really want to do all this just for some stupid domains like.film ???
It doesn't solve the basic problem, flat domains. Why should chicago.il.us be nonexistant? It could be the root for every business and person in the city. Geography makes a very good dimension to base domain names on, and should be taken advantage of. A tree structure that lets you walk down to a city or neighborhood is a very good thing.
What we need are domains that actually make some sense... and use the heirarchical namespace properly for example:
CHICAGO.IL.US could actually be open to businesses and people in Chicago... with the home page having information about the city... so if a business was in Chicago, it would be (for example).... goldcoastdogs.chicago.il.us, or ibm.chicago.il.us, government.chicago.il.us, etc.
.soft could be people who make software, with each language having a sponsor (or two).... delphi.soft would be run by borland
.rating could be used to host sites that rate the equvalent sites without the.rating at the end.... thus ibm.com.rating would give feedback about IBM's services, etc.
.anon and.free could be used for dynamic hosted information that needs to be anonymous because of persecution.
.act could be for activities.... with examples such as photography.act, runner.act, hiker.act, etc.
Each level in the heirarchy as the "price" of getting the domain name would be required to host a list (in XHTML) of all the available subdomains that were registered, so that search engines, etc.. could make life easier, and serve as a convinent way to show what's available to everyone. A look at the chicago.il.us site would allow you to discover new businesses available, etc.
The load of mirroring could also be distributed up and down the heirarchy in a uniform manner, since the data is structured in a uniform manner, the chicago.il.us domain could be mirrored between a group of servers that are members of the domain, such as IBM, the City Government, etc.
The dispute resolution process would then go down to the local level, and namespace saturation could almost disappear. If two businesses had the same name, in the same city, they would be differnetiated by the services offered. Sams.plumbing.chicago.il.us wouln't get confused with sams.publisher.chicago.il.us, for example
So if someone can put together a heirarchical, locally administered namespace, that routes around the existing ICANN endorsed mess, I'll sign up... I've got a list of little nodes in the big tree I'd like to run, including:
amateur.photographer.chicago.il.us
apcu.computer.usergroup.chicago.il.us
amateur.photographer.us
etc....
My choices for domain names in a tree would tell you far more about me, and be far less random than a contrived name like http://basicsoftware.com ever could.
A nice side benefit to all this heirarchy is that it could serve to remove money from the domain registration system, for a lot of people, that WOULD be worth the cost.
The bozos that did the article did it in such a way that it renders in about 2 point font for the majority of the story in Netscape 4.6, and it doesn't increase in size with Control-]! I really do wish I could have read it.
Why can't Microsoft make DAV:// work for a "web folder"? It's a protocol, with a different URI... clicking on a link of that format should open a web folder.
A goal I focus on is zero cost. You've got companies working on electronics that can be printed with an inkjet printer, albeit not my HP1120c.(Yet!) The use of paper, or any cheap substrate for transistors is a good thing.
If I could build my own transistors, things get very interesting. If I can build transistors myself, that means I can print a gate array to spec.
Heck, I could even print my own CPU, FPU, or whatever... the GPL coverage of printed hardware could be very interesting.;-)
Now I can focus on my ideas from 10 years ago with programmable cells that operate on one bit at a time, talking to their neighbors in a grid... 1,000,000 single bit computers working in parallel... move over Beowolf, hello task specific metahardware.
The future is fun!
At work I've got a Windows NT Server I slapped together from parts left over from a workstation that was too decrepid for use as a workstation. It's got a number of handicaps working against it, including:
486 DX/2 - 50 Mhz processor
Only 32 MB of DRAM
BIOS patch drivers running in real mode
Runs a Telnet server, DNS, and web server
Goofy BIOS/Video card combination that dies after a warm boot
This would rule it out as a candidate for real use, right? Wrong! It NEVER dies, (it can't, won't reboot except for a power cycle). I take it down for the odd service pack, otherwise it's always there.
It's currently at 42 Days, it was past 150 when I took thinks down because I tweaked IP addresses for our network. (Yeah... NT needs to be reboot to work right... it's not perfect).
The point is that NT is stable, you just have to treat it like a server instead of a workstation.
Yes, He's a Nuclear Engineer, but that doesn't make his policy choices wise. He assumed that a once through fuel cycle was an acceptable alternative to recycling. The nuclear industry knew that public acceptance of nuclear power was dependent on a closed cycle, where the fuel is reused, and stays out of the waste stream. That is why nuclear plants have "cooling ponds" designed only as temporary storage for spent fuel, before it was to be taken away for reprocessing.
Carter figured that it was an unacceptable security risk to have civilian facilities reprocessing plutonium. While some may agree with his conclusion, I believe he was wrong. We've created a royal clusterf*ck by opening a loop that was designed to be closed. This change, which created a new artificial need to dispose of fuel instead of reusing it. Simultaneously the repercussions of this new waste removed any credible process for disposing of this otherwise reusable fuel.
We need to get our sh*t together, come up with a sane way to get value out of the fuel we have piling up, instead of treating it as waste, and get safety back into our overregulated into complacency nuclear power industry.
"You can't use nuclear fission because no one has figured out what to do with the spent radioactive waste."
There was a system in place to recycle the fuel after it was used, but President Carter freaked out and killed it... it's called reprocessing. You can see an example of a complete, at one time ready to go, plant about 2 miles from the Dresden, Illinois ComEd plant. It's a collossal waste of money, and one of the stupidest decisions that I know of when it comes to science policy. (Ok... SSC going to Texas was almost as bad).
I must be a rare gem then, because I was able to shift gears and program a phase accumulator based phase lock loop application for a gluing machine, with all the code to deal with a set of inputs, variable line speed, etc... on a 68HC11 microcontroller... in 511 bytes! (I wanted cheap hardware, put the program in the on-board EEPROM).
I've also done OOP stuff, databases, etc... it's all just the right tools for the job. Sometimes it's nice to have GWBASIC handy, etc. If you take the time to learn the big picture as you go, the old tools still can be used to great effect, even today with OOP, and other constructs.
I have to use GOTO every once in a while in Delphi... which has very nice constructs to avoid it... because doing otherwise would just be stupid. GOTO is a tool, as good as any other statement.
While all the hype goes on for the next 20+ years until they make practical devices, I suggest that computing mesh impementations be explored. If you have a grid of 4096x4096 cmos single bit computers running at 100 Mhz (all quite slow by todays standards), you can do amazing things, like...
Pump anything you want in/out of the edges at 100Megasamples/second (at minimum), do as much hard math/matching as you need, and get the results out.
It would be possible to use "defective" chips as long as the boundary cells were all good, much like we use LCD panels with bad pixels today.
The major hurdle is ween programmers off of the von Neuman architechure, and get them into something that just seems like the biggest gate array in the universe.
--Mike--
No patents were harmed in the creation of this posting
Re:Why is the war still raging?
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 5
"If the War on Drugs is so absurd, why is the U.S.A. wasting millions of dollars on such a futile war?"
We have a culture which believes that history is bunk, and that we are all much smarter and more sophisticated than our ancestors. Because of this, we forget, or ignore, the lessons of the past, such as the experiment prohibition.
Laws such as prohibition, drug laws, etc., have the effect of turning a large percentage of our population into criminals. This effectivly cuts off the conversation between the public (now criminals) and government. The ensuing mess is reminicent of the "red scare" of the 1950's... with everyone "turning in" those around them, as to not be outcast themselves.
Cutting off the conversation has also caused the great wave of apathy apparent in voter turn out. It encourages the notion that there is nothing a citizen can (or should) do to fix things. The default behavior then becomes to wait until crisis before action, which can often be too late.
It is apparent to me that morality can not be legislated. The only two ways out at this point are to either let the experiment go to it's ugly, terrible conclusion (a totalitarian regime which destroys our republic), or to start a dialog which questions the sanity of our current course, and restores the notions of personal liberty, privacy, and freedom to do as you will (until it effects others).
We have existing laws which cover the behavior of people who chose to become intoxicated. We even have laws which permit the advertisment, sale, and use of substances that kill if used as intented. Why can't we use those same laws to allow the individual to make their own choices, and pay for the consequences?
Having long term experience with the power of Moore's Law, especially related to hard drive prices. I long ago decided to place my faith in it, and never delete a digital picture, unless it's completely unviewable. About 2 months ago, for the first time first time, I ran out of room because of pictures. I gladly spent $250 to get a spiffy new Maxtor 45Gb drive, and a nice 100ATA controller to go with it.
I have 27,000+ pictures that I have taken in the past 3 years, all backed up on CD. Everything adds up to about 11 Gigabytes, which is only 1/4 of my new $200 45Gb Maxtor ATA100 drive. I use ThumbsPlus to organize things, and it does a great job, doing the thumbnails, tracking keywords, all in an Access97 compatible format.
Ok.. here's the math.... Storage for 27,000 photos... $50. The backup on 24 CDs is about $12 of media.
--Mike--
PS: Yes, I still have ALL of my old floppies, and a 5 1/4" drive that can read them. Soon I'll put all that on my HDD, and back it up to a CD or two.
Consider this more likely scenario:
It's nice to be able to recover the sync pulses that go along with a video signal... if the lines are driven by an open collector output, with a pull-up resistor... it would be easy to ping the cable in question with a cheap gunplexer radar transciever to be able to lock into the sync much easier. (If not both, at least the horizontal). At 10 Ghz the driver might act as a diode... or just a variable capacitor... either way it's modulating the line. The antennas are small, and you can use a dish if you really want to get tricky.
Being able to lock onto the sync pulse would make it a lot easier for a software system to pick out the pixels, and compensate for clock jitter, delays, etc.
Of course... this is just off the top of my head, and I don't have any kind of security clearance (and never have)... just good old Ham radio experience.
The only possiblity (very remote IMHO) is to load a metal matrix with deuterium atoms using electrochemical loading, then to imploded said matrix using a compressive exposion. This (with the appropriate other triggers) could then cause a large number of the deuterium ions to overcome the columb (sp?) barrier, and to fuse... thus creating heat, and a large flux of neutrons. An asymmetric shield around the device could then create an asymmetric source of ionizing radiation, which gives you the proper field strengths required to do this right.
The only problem is that cold fusion doesn't work. (or does it??)
All this amounts to is a big single pulse generator, AKA lightning. There have been thousands of lightning strikes on homes, businesses, etc... the simple fact is that some gear will get wiped out, in computers it's usually network cards (unless it's a fiber drop) and power supplies. While this is a major pain in the ass, it's definitely not the end of the world.
There just isn't enough energy available in a non-nuclear device to do a huge amount of damage. The FCC rules about cutting emissions from computers do have us shielding the heck out of things these days, which just happens to be a good way to keep out EMP pulses such as the one generated by this type of weapon.
I'd much rather deal with this type of threat than something that will kill and injure people.;-)
It seems to me that if you are doing N effects on a file, you should be able to pipeline the data through N processors. The code may be tricky (isn't this just the type of thing beowolf clusters are actually for?), but shouldn't be hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
--Mike--
Other sources say that there is doubt in the matter, but most say he considered politics above matters of faith. This is very troubling.
The Catholic church now stands ready to make him a Saint... It's very troubling to me, indeed.
--Mike--
The revolution is not over, however, in fact it's just begun! People like myself, and doubtless others out there have tasted the freedom of expressing themselves, and are not going to let themselves get shut out again. While slashdot certainly isn't perfect, it's a great way for myself and others to have a conversation.
The scientologists have chosen to try to control our conversation. If we allow this to continue, we'll lose our voice. The choice will then be to take the conversation underground (the last resort, but effective), or to push back, hard.
I will not be censored! I, like Taco, may make my tactical retreats (such as in the Microsoft stupid EULA skirmish of last year), but I will not quit the battle. The costs of inaction are too high, and they only rise according to Warot's law: "The price of inaction against evil always rises"
It's time for the Jihad, the holy war, the fight of good against the deamons of stupidity, no matter how big or small. Rise up, my fellow citizens of the world, call things as you see them, and express yourself. The costs of inaction always rise with time, act now, while it's still easy.
--Mike--
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance - Thomas Jefferson
It's too bad Microsoft couldn't build applications the same way, safe from Trojan Horses.
--Mike--
The revolution is over, I'm depressed.
--Mike--
- Run Windows inside of VMware
- Run a program such as GoBack
Either way you capture the data, and can go from there. You could also pull out the good old sector editors, etc.I don't know why people insist that some things computer related should be ephemeral, and undocumentable, but they're racking up some massively bad karma along the way. It'll bite back.
--Mike--
Systems get broken, hardware fails. That's why there are things like TripWire, MD5 checksums, and... most important of all... Backup Tapes. All of these are important at getting the system back to a previous, assumed "safe" or at least sane position.
Why do these people with $$,$$$,$$$ floating through their sites do stupid things like keeping the numbers in a database? We don't do that where I work, and I'll make sure we never do.
--Mike--
I think that this particulary implementation of the idea, as it stands, is going to flop big time.
Why? ... because it requires work ... and the goal isn't good enough... do we really want to do all this just for some stupid domains like .film ???
It doesn't solve the basic problem, flat domains. Why should chicago.il.us be nonexistant? It could be the root for every business and person in the city. Geography makes a very good dimension to base domain names on, and should be taken advantage of. A tree structure that lets you walk down to a city or neighborhood is a very good thing.
What we need are domains that actually make some sense... and use the heirarchical namespace properly for example:
- CHICAGO.IL.US could actually be open to businesses and people in Chicago... with the home page having information about the city... so if a business was in Chicago, it would be (for example).... goldcoastdogs.chicago.il.us, or ibm.chicago.il.us, government.chicago.il.us, etc.
- .soft could be people who make software, with each language having a sponsor (or two).... delphi.soft would be run by borland
- .rating could be used to host sites that rate the equvalent sites without the
.rating at the end.... thus ibm.com.rating would give feedback about IBM's services, etc.
- .anon and
.free could be used for dynamic hosted information that needs to be anonymous because of persecution.
- .act could be for activities.... with examples such as photography.act, runner.act, hiker.act, etc.
Each level in the heirarchy as the "price" of getting the domain name would be required to host a list (in XHTML) of all the available subdomains that were registered, so that search engines, etc.. could make life easier, and serve as a convinent way to show what's available to everyone. A look at the chicago.il.us site would allow you to discover new businesses available, etc.The load of mirroring could also be distributed up and down the heirarchy in a uniform manner, since the data is structured in a uniform manner, the chicago.il.us domain could be mirrored between a group of servers that are members of the domain, such as IBM, the City Government, etc.
The dispute resolution process would then go down to the local level, and namespace saturation could almost disappear. If two businesses had the same name, in the same city, they would be differnetiated by the services offered. Sams.plumbing.chicago.il.us wouln't get confused with sams.publisher.chicago.il.us, for example
So if someone can put together a heirarchical, locally administered namespace, that routes around the existing ICANN endorsed mess, I'll sign up... I've got a list of little nodes in the big tree I'd like to run, including:- amateur.photographer.chicago.il.us
- apcu.computer.usergroup.chicago.il.us
- amateur.photographer.us
- etc....
My choices for domain names in a tree would tell you far more about me, and be far less random than a contrived name like http://basicsoftware.com ever could.A nice side benefit to all this heirarchy is that it could serve to remove money from the domain registration system, for a lot of people, that WOULD be worth the cost.
--Mike--
--Mike--
If I could build my own transistors, things get very interesting. If I can build transistors myself, that means I can print a gate array to spec.
Heck, I could even print my own CPU, FPU, or whatever... the GPL coverage of printed hardware could be very interesting. ;-)
Now I can focus on my ideas from 10 years ago with programmable cells that operate on one bit at a time, talking to their neighbors in a grid... 1,000,000 single bit computers working in parallel... move over Beowolf, hello task specific metahardware. The future is fun!
--Mike--
- 486 DX/2 - 50 Mhz processor
- Only 32 MB of DRAM
- BIOS patch drivers running in real mode
- Runs a Telnet server, DNS, and web server
- Goofy BIOS/Video card combination that dies after a warm boot
This would rule it out as a candidate for real use, right? Wrong! It NEVER dies, (it can't, won't reboot except for a power cycle). I take it down for the odd service pack, otherwise it's always there.It's currently at 42 Days, it was past 150 when I took thinks down because I tweaked IP addresses for our network. (Yeah... NT needs to be reboot to work right... it's not perfect).
The point is that NT is stable, you just have to treat it like a server instead of a workstation.
--Mike--
Yes, He's a Nuclear Engineer, but that doesn't make his policy choices wise. He assumed that a once through fuel cycle was an acceptable alternative to recycling. The nuclear industry knew that public acceptance of nuclear power was dependent on a closed cycle, where the fuel is reused, and stays out of the waste stream. That is why nuclear plants have "cooling ponds" designed only as temporary storage for spent fuel, before it was to be taken away for reprocessing.
Carter figured that it was an unacceptable security risk to have civilian facilities reprocessing plutonium. While some may agree with his conclusion, I believe he was wrong. We've created a royal clusterf*ck by opening a loop that was designed to be closed. This change, which created a new artificial need to dispose of fuel instead of reusing it. Simultaneously the repercussions of this new waste removed any credible process for disposing of this otherwise reusable fuel.
We need to get our sh*t together, come up with a sane way to get value out of the fuel we have piling up, instead of treating it as waste, and get safety back into our overregulated into complacency nuclear power industry.
--Mike--
There was a system in place to recycle the fuel after it was used, but President Carter freaked out and killed it... it's called reprocessing. You can see an example of a complete, at one time ready to go, plant about 2 miles from the Dresden, Illinois ComEd plant. It's a collossal waste of money, and one of the stupidest decisions that I know of when it comes to science policy. (Ok... SSC going to Texas was almost as bad).
--Mike--
I've also done OOP stuff, databases, etc... it's all just the right tools for the job. Sometimes it's nice to have GWBASIC handy, etc. If you take the time to learn the big picture as you go, the old tools still can be used to great effect, even today with OOP, and other constructs.
--Mike--
--Mike--
Pump anything you want in/out of the edges at 100Megasamples/second (at minimum), do as much hard math/matching as you need, and get the results out.
It would be possible to use "defective" chips as long as the boundary cells were all good, much like we use LCD panels with bad pixels today.
The major hurdle is ween programmers off of the von Neuman architechure, and get them into something that just seems like the biggest gate array in the universe.
--Mike--
No patents were harmed in the creation of this posting
We have a culture which believes that history is bunk, and that we are all much smarter and more sophisticated than our ancestors. Because of this, we forget, or ignore, the lessons of the past, such as the experiment prohibition.
Laws such as prohibition, drug laws, etc., have the effect of turning a large percentage of our population into criminals. This effectivly cuts off the conversation between the public (now criminals) and government. The ensuing mess is reminicent of the "red scare" of the 1950's... with everyone "turning in" those around them, as to not be outcast themselves.
Cutting off the conversation has also caused the great wave of apathy apparent in voter turn out. It encourages the notion that there is nothing a citizen can (or should) do to fix things. The default behavior then becomes to wait until crisis before action, which can often be too late.
It is apparent to me that morality can not be legislated. The only two ways out at this point are to either let the experiment go to it's ugly, terrible conclusion (a totalitarian regime which destroys our republic), or to start a dialog which questions the sanity of our current course, and restores the notions of personal liberty, privacy, and freedom to do as you will (until it effects others).
We have existing laws which cover the behavior of people who chose to become intoxicated. We even have laws which permit the advertisment, sale, and use of substances that kill if used as intented. Why can't we use those same laws to allow the individual to make their own choices, and pay for the consequences?
It's time to choose, destruction, or a way out.
--Mike--
- Progams are written in C, which doesn't like to do bounds checking
- Programmers turn off bounds checking, because it slows things down too much
- It's too difficult to do bounds checking code that works cross-platform
- Bounds checking isn't a language feature, it belongs in the OS
- Because OS designs tend to be flat, non-object-oriented, this will be a problem forever
- Mike... you just don't have a clue... the real reason involves Natalie Portman, Nudity, and Hot Grits
Well... what's up? Why have I never had this problem with my stuff? I do my programming in Delphi under Windows.--Mike--
I have 27,000+ pictures that I have taken in the past 3 years, all backed up on CD. Everything adds up to about 11 Gigabytes, which is only 1/4 of my new $200 45Gb Maxtor ATA100 drive. I use ThumbsPlus to organize things, and it does a great job, doing the thumbnails, tracking keywords, all in an Access97 compatible format.
Ok.. here's the math.... Storage for 27,000 photos... $50. The backup on 24 CDs is about $12 of media.
--Mike--
PS: Yes, I still have ALL of my old floppies, and a 5 1/4" drive that can read them. Soon I'll put all that on my HDD, and back it up to a CD or two.
--Mike--
It's nice to be able to recover the sync pulses that go along with a video signal... if the lines are driven by an open collector output, with a pull-up resistor... it would be easy to ping the cable in question with a cheap gunplexer radar transciever to be able to lock into the sync much easier. (If not both, at least the horizontal). At 10 Ghz the driver might act as a diode... or just a variable capacitor... either way it's modulating the line. The antennas are small, and you can use a dish if you really want to get tricky.
Being able to lock onto the sync pulse would make it a lot easier for a software system to pick out the pixels, and compensate for clock jitter, delays, etc.
Of course... this is just off the top of my head, and I don't have any kind of security clearance (and never have)... just good old Ham radio experience.
Mike - ka9dgx
The only problem is that cold fusion doesn't work. (or does it??)
--Mike--
There just isn't enough energy available in a non-nuclear device to do a huge amount of damage. The FCC rules about cutting emissions from computers do have us shielding the heck out of things these days, which just happens to be a good way to keep out EMP pulses such as the one generated by this type of weapon.
I'd much rather deal with this type of threat than something that will kill and injure people. ;-)
--Mike--
This is a natural for parallel processing.
--Mike--