I say screw safety. If you want this thing to be a real geekmowbile, you need to go big and flashy. Real big, and reeeeal flashy.
1) Buy an old ride-on lawnmower, and patch the steering system into the onboard waterproof laptop. Running, of course, your favorite flavour of Linux.
2) Mount a satelite dish on top to communicate with "home base".
3) Install wireless broadcasting points underground for the unit to use in locating safe "pathways". Also, rig some sort of rudimentary vision system (preferably a VHS camcorder also patched into your laptop) to avoid stray objects. Make sure this vision system is mounted on an all-point swivel base, so you can simultaneously surviel your neighbors.
4) Program your Linux system with a speech synthesizer, and patch that into onboard speakers. Again, preferably some sort of stone-age boombox.
5) Label your craft "NCC-1701", and set it free to roam your lawn.
6) (optional) If you're concerned about the security of this craft, I suggest you install an "attack first and ask questions later" defense system commonly known as a "goose".
Agreed. But another thing that the RIAA is trying to do is keep control on their market base, not merely maximize their profits short-term.
In this sense, as with the oil cartel, they're thinking in terms of maximizing future profits. The only problem is, of course, that they're doing it with an inherently short-sighted business model, because unlike OPEC, their product is neither essential to our economic survival, nor are the costs associated with circumventing their controls very high. Creating sustainable biodiesel reserves, for instance, is an expensive (though at current prices viable) solution to rising oil costs, whereas cracking encryption schemes can sometimes be nothing more than a hobby for a good hacker.
I would argue that no matter what they do, until they can rid the world of the horrid evil of backward compatibility, the RIAA is up the creek without a paddle.
This is true. I work at a company running CNC equipment, each of our machines running a copy of NT4, which works, albeit slowly. Our office terminals/servers are always fairly up to date; our accounting software is Windows-only, so we run XP and 98.
But the main problem, I think, is that the machines we run NT on are not particularly upgradable. As in, we can't rip the insides of the machine out, replace the CPU, motherboards, etc, in order to run an OS that takes more processing speed and RAM to run. So as long as these machines are alive and kicking, they are going to run NT.
I see a similar situation in a lot of non-customer-facing applications.
Slashdot Mirror
And I don't think anyone is pointing to IE and saying "look at this one flaw".
The point is that IE operates much the same way a sewer grate does. There's a whole lot of holes. And it takes a long time to get them fixed.
If it were a comparison to Firefox, we have one exploitable hole, compared to how many for IE?
I can imagine US spy sats trained only to image people of certain minorities.
Which in my university, happens to be caucasian males. But I digress.
Well heck, if we're going to tether it to an asteroid, why don't we use a bunch of these things and tether it to the moon?
Not to mention you'd get rid of those pesky tides.
I say screw safety. If you want this thing to be a real geekmowbile, you need to go big and flashy. Real big, and reeeeal flashy.
1) Buy an old ride-on lawnmower, and patch the steering system into the onboard waterproof laptop. Running, of course, your favorite flavour of Linux.
2) Mount a satelite dish on top to communicate with "home base".
3) Install wireless broadcasting points underground for the unit to use in locating safe "pathways". Also, rig some sort of rudimentary vision system (preferably a VHS camcorder also patched into your laptop) to avoid stray objects. Make sure this vision system is mounted on an all-point swivel base, so you can simultaneously surviel your neighbors.
4) Program your Linux system with a speech synthesizer, and patch that into onboard speakers. Again, preferably some sort of stone-age boombox.
5) Label your craft "NCC-1701", and set it free to roam your lawn.
6) (optional) If you're concerned about the security of this craft, I suggest you install an "attack first and ask questions later" defense system commonly known as a "goose".
Combine this with that story the other day about railguns, sprinkle with a good dose of paranoia, and you get:
"iTMS Laying Down Tracks So Railguns Can Fire Apples in Europe!"
Hmmm.
I was excited to know there was a Minix community, but then I started poking around my nursing home, and gosh darn, everyone's excited!
Agreed. But another thing that the RIAA is trying to do is keep control on their market base, not merely maximize their profits short-term. In this sense, as with the oil cartel, they're thinking in terms of maximizing future profits. The only problem is, of course, that they're doing it with an inherently short-sighted business model, because unlike OPEC, their product is neither essential to our economic survival, nor are the costs associated with circumventing their controls very high. Creating sustainable biodiesel reserves, for instance, is an expensive (though at current prices viable) solution to rising oil costs, whereas cracking encryption schemes can sometimes be nothing more than a hobby for a good hacker. I would argue that no matter what they do, until they can rid the world of the horrid evil of backward compatibility, the RIAA is up the creek without a paddle.
This is true. I work at a company running CNC equipment, each of our machines running a copy of NT4, which works, albeit slowly. Our office terminals/servers are always fairly up to date; our accounting software is Windows-only, so we run XP and 98.
But the main problem, I think, is that the machines we run NT on are not particularly upgradable. As in, we can't rip the insides of the machine out, replace the CPU, motherboards, etc, in order to run an OS that takes more processing speed and RAM to run. So as long as these machines are alive and kicking, they are going to run NT.
I see a similar situation in a lot of non-customer-facing applications.