I've had really mixed experiences with hardware on both sides. I'm using a mix of Win2K, XP, SimplyMepis6.5, and Ubuntu7.10. *Webcam: old Philips. 2K/XP doesn't work at all, no drivers exist. Mepis can be coerced to work without much trouble. *NI PCI GPIB controller card: 2K doesn't work at all, XP works great once I install the official drivers off the disc (although the downloaded ones don't work.) Mepis can be coerced to work with lots of trouble. *USB PIC microcontroller programmer: 2K doesn't work at all. XP used to work but suddenly stopped. Mepis doesn't work at all. *Canon LiDE flatbed scanner: 2K works when drivers loaded. XP works when drivers loaded. Mepis and Ubuntu work flawlessly right out of the box. *Olympus digital cameras 380, 420, 4040: XP works when drivers loaded from original CD but not with downloaded drivers, Mepis works right out of the box. *Creative Zen MP3 player: XP works when drivers loaded, Mepis works right out of the box. *iPOD -- as above. *Homebrew OBDII interface: XP sort of works, Mepis works well. *Linkskey 802.11g: XP claims to work when I load the drivers but the card can't actually connect. Mepis and Ubuntu both fail completely. *Microchip PIC programmer: XP works with the drivers on the original CD but not at all with downloaded drivers. Mepis and Ubuntu work perfectly out of the box.
So, *my* experience is that if you have the official, proprietary drivers in hand, XP does better than linux, but if you don't, linux consistently does better with 'any hardware you throw at it' -- and in many cases, it's hard or impossible to download functional drivers. Which is to restate what has been said many times: if it's brand-new hardware, Windows will probably be better, but if it's older hardware, linux will probably be better. Given that most customers will be using late-model hardware, since they've bought into the whole buy-a-new-one-every-two-years model, they'll be better served by Windows, but most geeks are, through a combination of cheapness and knowledge that it doesn't HAVE to be this way, keeping ancient hardware alive, they'll be better served by linux.
Yes, but... see my other replies in this thread: what happens when the grid dies because of an open somewhere upstream quite a ways, so suddenly your system sees a jump as you're now powering your neighbors' lights. Do you shut down because of that jump? How do you tell the difference between that and when you've just turned on your dryer and there's an enormous inrush current into the dryer coils? More importantly, once you have, on your own, decided how to tell the difference between big transients happening in your house and big transients happening because the grid's crashed and you're now driving someone else's house, or possibly a lineman who is trying to fix the fault -- how do you justify the decision process you used to make your machinery do what it's doing, and how do you justify that to the utility company or a judge when you're charged with negligence or even worse manslaughter? Obviously this is a solved problem, technically speaking, but it's not clear to me that it's a problem you or I as individuals want to solve with something we've cobbled together.
Re:Use a 'fan center' to isolate when grid power d
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That's a good approach. So what happens if, say, the grid goes open across the street, meaning you and your neighbors are on an isolated circuit and you're now driving their house, as well as yours -- how would that look different than driving into the grid while it was still up? Likewise, transitory opens or shorts in a windstorm might be detectable but how do you react to them? How long do you go offline? When it comes back up how do you synch up without mangling any of your electronics that rely on a fairly clean sine wave? (Not as much of a problem these days, what with switching power supplies in everything.) Obviously it can be done, but it seems Very Complicated, and may be something where you want to have a commercial concern do the engineering so that if something goes wrong, you're not the one responsible. Because, let's be clear here: we're talking about generating lethal amounts of power and driving it into wiring that goes into other people's houses and into systems that other people are maintaining.
As for alternators, basically, an alternator is a variable three-phase AC generator. A voltage regulator controls the power flowing through field winding in the alternator, based on the feedback it gets from the charging system as a whole. If you replace the voltage regulator with a simple AC input line (stepped down so as to not arc over) you can get AC out that's related to the AC in, and use that to get phase matching. It's not pretty (given that alternators want to output three-phase) but it looks possible. I don't think it's a great idea, just tempting because junk alternators are cheap.
Re:Use a 'fan center' to isolate when grid power d
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm curious about this, because I've paper-designed some similar things -- trying to use car alternators as generators by driving the field coil with AC from the grid, so the output is automatically synchronized with the grid. The problem is that since you're feeding power back into the grid, how do you detect that the grid's down? coz it won't be if you're feeding power back into it. Likewise, you seem to be doing the same sort of thing: how is your fan controller going to know whether the electricity it sees is from the local coal plant or from your little cogeneration setup? If your setup works, I'd love to know how and why, because I'd love to build something like this. I just can't figure out how to get it to work without resorting to ugly, dangerous things.
>some people get their rocks off by looking at pictures of women's feet.
My girlfriend has, or had, a video of men wearing army uniforms and high heels, stepping on raw hamburger. I'm like, "*what??!?*" She's like "that's hot." I'm like, "***WHAT??!?!?***"
I guess you're designing way different types of chips than we are. We never leave *any* extra gates unless it's a part that needs on-die trimming during test, and even then, we have control of the tester and blow all the gates we've left open.
I agree that making chips fail under usage is comparatively easy: screw up the ESD protection structures. The US did this on purpose to the USSR during the Cold War and sent them chips that failed during use, causing massive damage, but I think that failure is different than the subject under consideration.
I learned BASIC because that's what HP computers spoke in 1976, when my dad started bring computers home. Since I could barely read, but liked the blinking lights, I started playing around with them and he taught me how to do data entry. Outsourcing labor even then... anyway, the old HP's from the early '70's, their first actual desktop computers, had a BASIC dialect called Rocky Mountain BASIC, because it was written largely at HP's Fort Collins and Loveland, Colorado, locations. It looked much like later versions of BASIC except for its specialized hardware control stuff -- things it used to run printers and plotters. That let me transition smoothly into the old Commodore Amiga, for which I bought an official Microsoft Basic interpreter for AmigaDOS. Still have it in its original box/packaging, somewhere -- and no shrinkwrap EULA on that MS product, either.
I grant you I'm talking purely about analog power chips, because that's what I know. I'm sure you're right about microcode -- that's probably something that could be changed. But that stuff is really optimized, isn't it? It's not like you can sneak a tcp/ip stack in there so you can do your own communication -- you'd have to go off-chip, for one thing. I don't know how big digital chips get tested. I do know that for our chips, we test hundreds of parts and thousands of chips still on the wafer for tens of thousands of conditions -- how quickly they respond to perturbations in their inputs compared to the initial silicon we had built in a different fab in the US, for instance, or how many nanoamps of leakage current pins are showing, again, compared to silicon we had done on a planet run in a completely different fab. We can easily bin out chips from different wafers, just based on their test characteristics. If anyone actually changed anything in the silicon, it would show up like a bright red flashing light. That's an understatement. It would fail so many tests it would overwhelm our error logfile server. Seriously -- we can sometimes tell when the fab has changed lots on whatever they use to clean the finished wafers. Any silicon moves and it'd be shiningly obvious. Like I said: I don't know big digital. But I find it hard to believe that when you set up your chip test hardware to test 1000 parameters per chip, many of them involving timing and power drain, a reengineered chip with changes would be able to match the original chip within 3% on every one of those parameters, especially if the people doing the reengineering don't know what those parameters are. Microcode might be easier to finagle, and completely invisible from a visibility standpoint, but the amount of testing those chips go through before they're shipped out is enormous, and that's where I think changes would be caught.
I've written about this before. It's all about the design of the IC -- they're tightly integrated designs. The designer works with a design team, who reviews the layout, and sends it off to get fabricated. If what comes back isn't exactly the same as what went out it's going to be *completely* obvious. First off, the most important thing is how large the die is. Nobody can change that without everything downstream breaking -- your wafersort test hardware won't match up with the die (and wafersort is done by test engineers working with the designer, so is done where the designer works). So you can't make a larger die to put extra malicious circuitry in. Secondly, every bit of the die space you have is used. There's never unused silicon because that's wasted money. People will completely relayout a design from a square to a rectangle if that means they can get 10 more chips off a wafer. So you can't sneak malicious circuitry into an existing design. And, for that matter, a designer or even an applications engineer can tell, at a glance, if the silicon that came back from the fab is the same as their design. Some of our applications engineers can tell, without a microscope, what another manufacturer's raw silicon does, just by looking at it. (Not everything, obviously, but they can say "this part is logic, this part is a big power FET, there's a bunch of ESD stuff over here...") Bottom line: if you have to trust the design, you need to have your designer and your design review team where you can see them. The fabs don't really matter that much.
Tangentially, I have a number of friends who have pacts with each other to try to make sure it's a friend who shows up first, and cleans out the things the family doesn't know about, generally involving a list of logins/passwords. If you have friends you trust, it's not a bad idea.
Beyond that, I think it's critically important to have a will and a listing of investments and contact information for those investments. When my dad died, it took us over a year just to figure out what he had and where, and it was incredibly difficult -- effort you probably don't want to force your bereaved family to expend.
*I* don't particularly like pinball despite having grown up when they were huge. I think they're boring. My girlfriend, who is a decade too young to remember when they were big, and her friends, all *love* them, and go out on a regular (bimonthly) basis to a local bar/venue that has a half-dozen mechanical pinball system, get a pitcher of Red Bull and vodka, and play until 2 AM, when I come and pick them all up and drive them home.
I was thinking the same thing -- the carbon dioxide thruster games that Asimov wrote about in the Lucky Starr games, where you have a single big CO2 pressure tank with a nozzle you can aim, and your goal is to maneuver in a cubic mile of space and knock your opponent through a set of goalposts, or the (in)famous Dr. Who episode where he was stuck in space and threw a cricket ball at something, bounced it off, caught it, and knocked himself to safety. (Which they did WRONG since he would've received 1 chunk of push from throwing it, and a second from catching it again, and they only showed the second part. Lame.) Or, another Dr. Who sport: solar racing, using sails. (again, implementation lame, since they looked like ships complete with hulls and there's no way to tack, but there was a cool idea buried down in there somewhere.)
You're making an incorrect assumption about diseases when you say "As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims": while it's true on its face, if humans are only a small part of the disease's range, it wouldn't bother the disease to kill all humans. Leprosy is only carried by humans and armadillos so it's very unlikely to kill 100% of humans. However, a disease like ebola or anthrax, if it were more communicable, could easily wipe out all humans and half a dozen other species, while still maintaining plenty of biological reservoir for its continuation. Past that, there are diseases that seem to come pretty close to 100% mortality -- rabies, tetanus, and HIV come to mind.
>You have to compare the losses that might happen if you take action, to what losses will happen if you don't take action.
I like your argument, but I think it's based on a flawed premise. If I know my neighbor's going to take a gun and go shoot a bunch of people, so instead I shoot him first, I have done exactly what you're advising -- but I still will get charged with murder. If they're doing things to a botnet that can modify infected computers, that's illegal, even if their intentions are good. You can't do something illegal to stop illegal behavior. If all they're doing is disrupting comm, then I don't know whether that's legal or not. But if they're doing things that could result in injury to users' computers, they're in the wrong, whatever their motivations.
>It is not the telco's job to evaluate the constitutionality of requests from a government agency.
It's pretty easy, really: "do you have a warrant?"
Plus, it *is* the telco companies' job to not do illegal things, just like it is any individual's job to not do illegal things -- if you do, you get in trouble for it. That's your incentive to figure out whether something is legal or not.
>I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway.
The two rock bands that stay in my basement when they're in town, because not having to pay for a hotel almost doubles their profits, would *love* to make the sort of money that oil workers make. One band's drummer just quit because he got a job installing cable TV lines. He didn't want to, but he has a kid to support. The guitarist is married to a woman in Spain so he can get health care when they're touring in Europe because he can't afford doctors here. Small bands are working on shoestring budgets, often well below minimum wage, because they *want* to play (and because they're hoping for a big break.)
I'm not disagreeing with your post, I'm just saying there's no money at all in music unless you're in the top 0.1% of all performers.
I have taped a duck with duct tape. It was a pet duck that had been attacked by a dog and had a huge oozing wound on its back. We were trying to get bandages on it so it wouldn't get (as much) dirt and debris in the wound while it was healing, and gauze and medical tape wasn't enough. We used a combination of duct tape and vet wrap and basically made a sort of suit for the duck that wrapped around its chest and under its wings, to hold the bandages in place. It worked.
Your coolant system patches must've used different duct tape than mine: the hot water melted the adhesive and it was leaking like a sieve in a dozen km. I managed to get home, barely.
deflect = bounce. Unless you're claiming the F117 has something like a negative index of refraction, the reflection will be in the general direction from which the radar originated, which means 'bounce back'.
My understanding, based on talking to people who have designed systems to detect stealth aircraft, is that the OP is half right. The reason the F117 has all those big blocky facets is specifically to bounce the radar back in very direct lines, like a planar mirror, rather than in all directions, like a sphere. The idea being: you absorb as much as possible in your weird ferroabsorptive paint, but what you have to reflect, you reflect in thin lines rather than in broad arcs, and if possible you reflect them upwards, away from the radar receivers.
I have a lot of trouble making the argument that high-power lasers shouldn't be regulated because they can do a *lot* of damage, instantaneously, anonymously, and if you're a pilot (I am) who is flying for money (I'm not) your career is suddenly, irrevocably screwed for something you had no control over and the person who did isn't going to be held responsible. With all that said, this is an example of nanny-state legislation. We're outlawing something that *could* be misused for the greater social good. I think there are times when that makes sense: I don't think my neighbor should be doing above-ground nuclear weapons testing in his back yard. But at the same time, once you *start* banning things for the safety of all mankind, it's easier to keep banning more and more things, and you end up in a Harrison Bergeron sort of future, where everyone is walking around encased in foam armor using speech recognition to interface to everything so nobody can be hurt by actually touching things. And that would suck. To sum up: yeah, ligh-power lasers are dangerous, and some people who use them are damn fools. But banning them moves us one step further along the path of complete blandness and the remanufacture of society as passive consumers rather than innovators, and I think the long-term danger of that to humanity as a whole is greater than the cumulative damage caused by being on the receiving end of a laser diode. But that's probably largely because I A: have high-power lasers and B: haven't been blinded by some idiot.
I'm not arguing with the overall thrust of your discussion. However, I can think of some good reasons for having a high intensity laser -- just like an arcwelder, it can be used as a tool. I'm in the process of rebuilding an old X/Y plotter to use a 250mW laser diode instead of a pen, so I can cut stuff out very precisely and very quickly. Now, that doesn't mean I'm running down the street with my 250mW laser diodes, any more than I'm running down the street with my TIG welder. But high-power lasers are useful.
Most Geiger counters are crappy for sensitivity. Scintillation counters are ridiculously sensitive. My Geiger counter can't see my smoke detector or my tritium-filled keychain toy. It does okay with big pieces of pitchblende-filled granite. If a Geiger counter says something's radioactive, it's hot enough I want to ask some questions before I spend time there.
I have no problem paying more to live in a skyscraper than my parents' basement. What I have a problem with is the skyscraper owner refusing to let my friends who live in their parents' basements come visit me, only allowing other people who are willing to pay for skyscrapers into the building. That just sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had really mixed experiences with hardware on both sides. I'm using a mix of Win2K, XP, SimplyMepis6.5, and Ubuntu7.10.
*Webcam: old Philips. 2K/XP doesn't work at all, no drivers exist. Mepis can be coerced to work without much trouble.
*NI PCI GPIB controller card: 2K doesn't work at all, XP works great once I install the official drivers off the disc (although the downloaded ones don't work.) Mepis can be coerced to work with lots of trouble.
*USB PIC microcontroller programmer: 2K doesn't work at all. XP used to work but suddenly stopped. Mepis doesn't work at all.
*Canon LiDE flatbed scanner: 2K works when drivers loaded. XP works when drivers loaded. Mepis and Ubuntu work flawlessly right out of the box.
*Olympus digital cameras 380, 420, 4040: XP works when drivers loaded from original CD but not with downloaded drivers, Mepis works right out of the box.
*Creative Zen MP3 player: XP works when drivers loaded, Mepis works right out of the box.
*iPOD -- as above.
*Homebrew OBDII interface: XP sort of works, Mepis works well.
*Linkskey 802.11g: XP claims to work when I load the drivers but the card can't actually connect. Mepis and Ubuntu both fail completely.
*Microchip PIC programmer: XP works with the drivers on the original CD but not at all with downloaded drivers. Mepis and Ubuntu work perfectly out of the box.
So, *my* experience is that if you have the official, proprietary drivers in hand, XP does better than linux, but if you don't, linux consistently does better with 'any hardware you throw at it' -- and in many cases, it's hard or impossible to download functional drivers.
Which is to restate what has been said many times: if it's brand-new hardware, Windows will probably be better, but if it's older hardware, linux will probably be better.
Given that most customers will be using late-model hardware, since they've bought into the whole buy-a-new-one-every-two-years model, they'll be better served by Windows, but most geeks are, through a combination of cheapness and knowledge that it doesn't HAVE to be this way, keeping ancient hardware alive, they'll be better served by linux.
Yes, but... see my other replies in this thread: what happens when the grid dies because of an open somewhere upstream quite a ways, so suddenly your system sees a jump as you're now powering your neighbors' lights. Do you shut down because of that jump? How do you tell the difference between that and when you've just turned on your dryer and there's an enormous inrush current into the dryer coils?
More importantly, once you have, on your own, decided how to tell the difference between big transients happening in your house and big transients happening because the grid's crashed and you're now driving someone else's house, or possibly a lineman who is trying to fix the fault -- how do you justify the decision process you used to make your machinery do what it's doing, and how do you justify that to the utility company or a judge when you're charged with negligence or even worse manslaughter?
Obviously this is a solved problem, technically speaking, but it's not clear to me that it's a problem you or I as individuals want to solve with something we've cobbled together.
That's a good approach. So what happens if, say, the grid goes open across the street, meaning you and your neighbors are on an isolated circuit and you're now driving their house, as well as yours -- how would that look different than driving into the grid while it was still up? Likewise, transitory opens or shorts in a windstorm might be detectable but how do you react to them? How long do you go offline? When it comes back up how do you synch up without mangling any of your electronics that rely on a fairly clean sine wave? (Not as much of a problem these days, what with switching power supplies in everything.)
Obviously it can be done, but it seems Very Complicated, and may be something where you want to have a commercial concern do the engineering so that if something goes wrong, you're not the one responsible. Because, let's be clear here: we're talking about generating lethal amounts of power and driving it into wiring that goes into other people's houses and into systems that other people are maintaining.
As for alternators, basically, an alternator is a variable three-phase AC generator. A voltage regulator controls the power flowing through field winding in the alternator, based on the feedback it gets from the charging system as a whole. If you replace the voltage regulator with a simple AC input line (stepped down so as to not arc over) you can get AC out that's related to the AC in, and use that to get phase matching. It's not pretty (given that alternators want to output three-phase) but it looks possible. I don't think it's a great idea, just tempting because junk alternators are cheap.
I'm curious about this, because I've paper-designed some similar things -- trying to use car alternators as generators by driving the field coil with AC from the grid, so the output is automatically synchronized with the grid. The problem is that since you're feeding power back into the grid, how do you detect that the grid's down? coz it won't be if you're feeding power back into it. Likewise, you seem to be doing the same sort of thing: how is your fan controller going to know whether the electricity it sees is from the local coal plant or from your little cogeneration setup? If your setup works, I'd love to know how and why, because I'd love to build something like this. I just can't figure out how to get it to work without resorting to ugly, dangerous things.
>some people get their rocks off by looking at pictures of women's feet.
My girlfriend has, or had, a video of men wearing army uniforms and high heels, stepping on raw hamburger.
I'm like, "*what??!?*"
She's like "that's hot."
I'm like, "***WHAT??!?!?***"
I guess you're designing way different types of chips than we are. We never leave *any* extra gates unless it's a part that needs on-die trimming during test, and even then, we have control of the tester and blow all the gates we've left open.
I agree that making chips fail under usage is comparatively easy: screw up the ESD protection structures. The US did this on purpose to the USSR during the Cold War and sent them chips that failed during use, causing massive damage, but I think that failure is different than the subject under consideration.
I learned BASIC because that's what HP computers spoke in 1976, when my dad started bring computers home. Since I could barely read, but liked the blinking lights, I started playing around with them and he taught me how to do data entry. Outsourcing labor even then... anyway, the old HP's from the early '70's, their first actual desktop computers, had a BASIC dialect called Rocky Mountain BASIC, because it was written largely at HP's Fort Collins and Loveland, Colorado, locations. It looked much like later versions of BASIC except for its specialized hardware control stuff -- things it used to run printers and plotters.
That let me transition smoothly into the old Commodore Amiga, for which I bought an official Microsoft Basic interpreter for AmigaDOS. Still have it in its original box/packaging, somewhere -- and no shrinkwrap EULA on that MS product, either.
I grant you I'm talking purely about analog power chips, because that's what I know. I'm sure you're right about microcode -- that's probably something that could be changed. But that stuff is really optimized, isn't it? It's not like you can sneak a tcp/ip stack in there so you can do your own communication -- you'd have to go off-chip, for one thing.
I don't know how big digital chips get tested. I do know that for our chips, we test hundreds of parts and thousands of chips still on the wafer for tens of thousands of conditions -- how quickly they respond to perturbations in their inputs compared to the initial silicon we had built in a different fab in the US, for instance, or how many nanoamps of leakage current pins are showing, again, compared to silicon we had done on a planet run in a completely different fab. We can easily bin out chips from different wafers, just based on their test characteristics. If anyone actually changed anything in the silicon, it would show up like a bright red flashing light. That's an understatement. It would fail so many tests it would overwhelm our error logfile server.
Seriously -- we can sometimes tell when the fab has changed lots on whatever they use to clean the finished wafers. Any silicon moves and it'd be shiningly obvious.
Like I said: I don't know big digital. But I find it hard to believe that when you set up your chip test hardware to test 1000 parameters per chip, many of them involving timing and power drain, a reengineered chip with changes would be able to match the original chip within 3% on every one of those parameters, especially if the people doing the reengineering don't know what those parameters are. Microcode might be easier to finagle, and completely invisible from a visibility standpoint, but the amount of testing those chips go through before they're shipped out is enormous, and that's where I think changes would be caught.
>The other thing is that LCDs don't emit RF harmonics to nearly such an extent. The days of Tempest and Van Eck phreaking are pretty much gone.
Slashdot sez LCD's can be eavesdropped on -- it's just more difficult. Still: from three offices away is not bad, given a $2000 instrumentation budget.
I've written about this before. It's all about the design of the IC -- they're tightly integrated designs. The designer works with a design team, who reviews the layout, and sends it off to get fabricated. If what comes back isn't exactly the same as what went out it's going to be *completely* obvious. First off, the most important thing is how large the die is. Nobody can change that without everything downstream breaking -- your wafersort test hardware won't match up with the die (and wafersort is done by test engineers working with the designer, so is done where the designer works). So you can't make a larger die to put extra malicious circuitry in. Secondly, every bit of the die space you have is used. There's never unused silicon because that's wasted money. People will completely relayout a design from a square to a rectangle if that means they can get 10 more chips off a wafer. So you can't sneak malicious circuitry into an existing design.
And, for that matter, a designer or even an applications engineer can tell, at a glance, if the silicon that came back from the fab is the same as their design. Some of our applications engineers can tell, without a microscope, what another manufacturer's raw silicon does, just by looking at it. (Not everything, obviously, but they can say "this part is logic, this part is a big power FET, there's a bunch of ESD stuff over here...")
Bottom line: if you have to trust the design, you need to have your designer and your design review team where you can see them. The fabs don't really matter that much.
Tangentially, I have a number of friends who have pacts with each other to try to make sure it's a friend who shows up first, and cleans out the things the family doesn't know about, generally involving a list of logins/passwords. If you have friends you trust, it's not a bad idea.
Beyond that, I think it's critically important to have a will and a listing of investments and contact information for those investments. When my dad died, it took us over a year just to figure out what he had and where, and it was incredibly difficult -- effort you probably don't want to force your bereaved family to expend.
*I* don't particularly like pinball despite having grown up when they were huge. I think they're boring. My girlfriend, who is a decade too young to remember when they were big, and her friends, all *love* them, and go out on a regular (bimonthly) basis to a local bar/venue that has a half-dozen mechanical pinball system, get a pitcher of Red Bull and vodka, and play until 2 AM, when I come and pick them all up and drive them home.
I was thinking the same thing -- the carbon dioxide thruster games that Asimov wrote about in the Lucky Starr games, where you have a single big CO2 pressure tank with a nozzle you can aim, and your goal is to maneuver in a cubic mile of space and knock your opponent through a set of goalposts, or the (in)famous Dr. Who episode where he was stuck in space and threw a cricket ball at something, bounced it off, caught it, and knocked himself to safety. (Which they did WRONG since he would've received 1 chunk of push from throwing it, and a second from catching it again, and they only showed the second part. Lame.) Or, another Dr. Who sport: solar racing, using sails. (again, implementation lame, since they looked like ships complete with hulls and there's no way to tack, but there was a cool idea buried down in there somewhere.)
You're making an incorrect assumption about diseases when you say "As for diseases, there is no earthly disease that kills 100% of its victims": while it's true on its face, if humans are only a small part of the disease's range, it wouldn't bother the disease to kill all humans.
Leprosy is only carried by humans and armadillos so it's very unlikely to kill 100% of humans. However, a disease like ebola or anthrax, if it were more communicable, could easily wipe out all humans and half a dozen other species, while still maintaining plenty of biological reservoir for its continuation.
Past that, there are diseases that seem to come pretty close to 100% mortality -- rabies, tetanus, and HIV come to mind.
>You have to compare the losses that might happen if you take action, to what losses will happen if you don't take action.
I like your argument, but I think it's based on a flawed premise. If I know my neighbor's going to take a gun and go shoot a bunch of people, so instead I shoot him first, I have done exactly what you're advising -- but I still will get charged with murder.
If they're doing things to a botnet that can modify infected computers, that's illegal, even if their intentions are good. You can't do something illegal to stop illegal behavior.
If all they're doing is disrupting comm, then I don't know whether that's legal or not. But if they're doing things that could result in injury to users' computers, they're in the wrong, whatever their motivations.
>It is not the telco's job to evaluate the constitutionality of requests from a government agency.
It's pretty easy, really: "do you have a warrant?"
Plus, it *is* the telco companies' job to not do illegal things, just like it is any individual's job to not do illegal things -- if you do, you get in trouble for it. That's your incentive to figure out whether something is legal or not.
Nothing wrong with greedy. Just, when you're competing with 'free' you better bring a lot to the table.
>I'm pretty sure that their wage is somewhat lower than the average artist on tour, but they have to do it anyway.
The two rock bands that stay in my basement when they're in town, because not having to pay for a hotel almost doubles their profits, would *love* to make the sort of money that oil workers make. One band's drummer just quit because he got a job installing cable TV lines. He didn't want to, but he has a kid to support. The guitarist is married to a woman in Spain so he can get health care when they're touring in Europe because he can't afford doctors here.
Small bands are working on shoestring budgets, often well below minimum wage, because they *want* to play (and because they're hoping for a big break.)
I'm not disagreeing with your post, I'm just saying there's no money at all in music unless you're in the top 0.1% of all performers.
I have taped a duck with duct tape. It was a pet duck that had been attacked by a dog and had a huge oozing wound on its back. We were trying to get bandages on it so it wouldn't get (as much) dirt and debris in the wound while it was healing, and gauze and medical tape wasn't enough. We used a combination of duct tape and vet wrap and basically made a sort of suit for the duck that wrapped around its chest and under its wings, to hold the bandages in place. It worked.
Your coolant system patches must've used different duct tape than mine: the hot water melted the adhesive and it was leaking like a sieve in a dozen km. I managed to get home, barely.
deflect = bounce.
Unless you're claiming the F117 has something like a negative index of refraction, the reflection will be in the general direction from which the radar originated, which means 'bounce back'.
My understanding, based on talking to people who have designed systems to detect stealth aircraft, is that the OP is half right. The reason the F117 has all those big blocky facets is specifically to bounce the radar back in very direct lines, like a planar mirror, rather than in all directions, like a sphere. The idea being: you absorb as much as possible in your weird ferroabsorptive paint, but what you have to reflect, you reflect in thin lines rather than in broad arcs, and if possible you reflect them upwards, away from the radar receivers.
I have a lot of trouble making the argument that high-power lasers shouldn't be regulated because they can do a *lot* of damage, instantaneously, anonymously, and if you're a pilot (I am) who is flying for money (I'm not) your career is suddenly, irrevocably screwed for something you had no control over and the person who did isn't going to be held responsible.
With all that said, this is an example of nanny-state legislation. We're outlawing something that *could* be misused for the greater social good. I think there are times when that makes sense: I don't think my neighbor should be doing above-ground nuclear weapons testing in his back yard. But at the same time, once you *start* banning things for the safety of all mankind, it's easier to keep banning more and more things, and you end up in a Harrison Bergeron sort of future, where everyone is walking around encased in foam armor using speech recognition to interface to everything so nobody can be hurt by actually touching things. And that would suck.
To sum up: yeah, ligh-power lasers are dangerous, and some people who use them are damn fools. But banning them moves us one step further along the path of complete blandness and the remanufacture of society as passive consumers rather than innovators, and I think the long-term danger of that to humanity as a whole is greater than the cumulative damage caused by being on the receiving end of a laser diode. But that's probably largely because I A: have high-power lasers and B: haven't been blinded by some idiot.
I'm not arguing with the overall thrust of your discussion. However, I can think of some good reasons for having a high intensity laser -- just like an arcwelder, it can be used as a tool. I'm in the process of rebuilding an old X/Y plotter to use a 250mW laser diode instead of a pen, so I can cut stuff out very precisely and very quickly. Now, that doesn't mean I'm running down the street with my 250mW laser diodes, any more than I'm running down the street with my TIG welder. But high-power lasers are useful.
Most Geiger counters are crappy for sensitivity. Scintillation counters are ridiculously sensitive. My Geiger counter can't see my smoke detector or my tritium-filled keychain toy. It does okay with big pieces of pitchblende-filled granite.
If a Geiger counter says something's radioactive, it's hot enough I want to ask some questions before I spend time there.
I have no problem paying more to live in a skyscraper than my parents' basement.
What I have a problem with is the skyscraper owner refusing to let my friends who live in their parents' basements come visit me, only allowing other people who are willing to pay for skyscrapers into the building. That just sucks.