Actually, the "expensive prostitutes" are actually your alternate characters and it's pretty easy to blow a good amount of gold on them. The most expensive single item you could hope to spend that cash on though is epic flying mount training at 5000g though; just barely scratching the surface.
I think your conception of how the contraption and cars "work" is flawed. The waves create a voltage differential that at worst causes ICs and small-gauge conductors to fry and, at best, simply overheat or malfunction. This differential would only need to be applied to any sensor that provides some sort of feedback into the car's ECU like oxygen, throttle position or mass airflow sensors. As all ECUs I've ever seen are enclosed in a metal casing which acts as a faraday shield, the only way for RF radiation to get to it is to affect the sensors which aren't shielded feeding it bad input causing the ECU to go into a safe operation mode, give the engine too much or too little gas or shutting it down altogether. That is if the EMP doesn't blow the car's fuses, at any rate.
Spark plugs are only indirectly attached to the ECU, using a coil or coilpacks to fire the plugs as relays. The plugs are situated on the head of the engine and are 1) embedded in the aluminum/steel head and 2) almost always surrounded by manifolds and other metal. The real EM radiation comes when the plugs spark but they do so safely within the confines of the engine. There's no need for any better shielding than that.
At least you have a valid point about the device working on everything in the vicinity in a freeway or crowded setting. The science is sound, the concept is old (see HERF Guns) but the government is getting to the point where it may be a viable option to, at great risk and expense, destroy private property to enforce the law.
Quite the contrary, actually. Remember that the crap flows downstream and if there is something that happens, it won't be the suits that make several times your wage that need the shower.
Documenting that you at least tried would be in your best interest IF something happens and it ends up in court but only if you can prove that you didn't pen the documents the night before you took the witness stand. IANAL, but those are my best guesses as to what happens. There isn't justice in most workplaces, it's definitely not a democracy and there is no 'innocent until proven guilty'.
The era of preloaded crap on PCs loaded from the manufacturer is far from over. Companies like Google, the different ISPs, McAfee, Symantec, etc all pay good money to get their software pre-loaded on new machines and you see some of that savings in the end. It's my belief that this is part of the reason it's so hard to buy a machine from these places without a MS OS; they lose out on their profit from this software, from selling you the OS and so on.
The FIRST thing anyone should do before evaluating their new hardware is to uninstall all of the crap that comes with it, from lolMcAfee on down to Google Desktop/Search/Toolbar. Anyone that doesn't know or doesn't know how to do that isn't someone whose opinion I would accept on the subject in the first place.
Most subjects are as hard as you make them out to be.
DRM is simply a compromise. You compromise your ability to freely copy and store your digital materials. Depending on the severity of the DRM, the owner of the media/IP could be compromising their "assurance", let's say, that purchasers of their product won't distribute the product to non-purchasers.
In the same vein as supply and demand, your want or "need" for said media dictates how much you're willing to compromise your rights in order to use the media just as the producer's belief in the demand for the product dictates the magnitude of the lock-down under which they place the product.
I have a Sony thumbdrive and I keep similar stuff on it. AVG, Spybot, Windows Updates, an installer for the mail client we use at work, device drivers, and the like. I'll keep temporary backups of local files for whatever computer I'm working on as well, which has proven a wise choice in the past. I also back up whatever projects I may be working on to the drive in addition to normal server/CD back ups.
More out of the ordinary, I keep a debugger (Olly debugger) that has helped my recover forgotten passwords and such as well as Netcat.
The thumbdrive will also boot a computer with network drivers in DOS so I can Ghost to/from network drives.
It's not the games that have changed while they've sat in our parents' basements (next to our beds). Moreso, we have changed and the way in which we approach the games. It struck a chord in me when he mentioned going to great and illegal lengths to play Super Metroid. I was similarly inspired and was willing to drive 2 miles and pay $12 for the chance to play it again on my SNES. I wasn't disappointed in the game at all as I approached the game like almost any other; I play the hero and save the galaxy. If I had picked up inflated expectations of what the game was like when I was a kid, I probably would have been sorely disappointed. It's kind of like going back to the old tire swing 20 years later, remembering how high you used to swing only to find an old worn-out tire hanging knee high from a branch you could now reach up and touch with your hand.
The Final Fantasy series is an ironic title considering there are some 14 games bearing the Final Fantasy tag spanning what MUST be a record 8 (or more) systems including PC and handhelds?
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Actually, the "expensive prostitutes" are actually your alternate characters and it's pretty easy to blow a good amount of gold on them. The most expensive single item you could hope to spend that cash on though is epic flying mount training at 5000g though; just barely scratching the surface.
I think your conception of how the contraption and cars "work" is flawed. The waves create a voltage differential that at worst causes ICs and small-gauge conductors to fry and, at best, simply overheat or malfunction. This differential would only need to be applied to any sensor that provides some sort of feedback into the car's ECU like oxygen, throttle position or mass airflow sensors. As all ECUs I've ever seen are enclosed in a metal casing which acts as a faraday shield, the only way for RF radiation to get to it is to affect the sensors which aren't shielded feeding it bad input causing the ECU to go into a safe operation mode, give the engine too much or too little gas or shutting it down altogether. That is if the EMP doesn't blow the car's fuses, at any rate.
Spark plugs are only indirectly attached to the ECU, using a coil or coilpacks to fire the plugs as relays. The plugs are situated on the head of the engine and are 1) embedded in the aluminum/steel head and 2) almost always surrounded by manifolds and other metal. The real EM radiation comes when the plugs spark but they do so safely within the confines of the engine. There's no need for any better shielding than that.
At least you have a valid point about the device working on everything in the vicinity in a freeway or crowded setting. The science is sound, the concept is old (see HERF Guns) but the government is getting to the point where it may be a viable option to, at great risk and expense, destroy private property to enforce the law.
All I saw was "kill and short circuit the sex life" and "old folks". Now you're telling me it's a cure for drug-resistant bacteria? Win-win.
Quite the contrary, actually. Remember that the crap flows downstream and if there is something that happens, it won't be the suits that make several times your wage that need the shower.
Documenting that you at least tried would be in your best interest IF something happens and it ends up in court but only if you can prove that you didn't pen the documents the night before you took the witness stand. IANAL, but those are my best guesses as to what happens. There isn't justice in most workplaces, it's definitely not a democracy and there is no 'innocent until proven guilty'.
The era of preloaded crap on PCs loaded from the manufacturer is far from over. Companies like Google, the different ISPs, McAfee, Symantec, etc all pay good money to get their software pre-loaded on new machines and you see some of that savings in the end. It's my belief that this is part of the reason it's so hard to buy a machine from these places without a MS OS; they lose out on their profit from this software, from selling you the OS and so on.
The FIRST thing anyone should do before evaluating their new hardware is to uninstall all of the crap that comes with it, from lolMcAfee on down to Google Desktop/Search/Toolbar. Anyone that doesn't know or doesn't know how to do that isn't someone whose opinion I would accept on the subject in the first place.
Most subjects are as hard as you make them out to be.
DRM is simply a compromise. You compromise your ability to freely copy and store your digital materials. Depending on the severity of the DRM, the owner of the media/IP could be compromising their "assurance", let's say, that purchasers of their product won't distribute the product to non-purchasers.
In the same vein as supply and demand, your want or "need" for said media dictates how much you're willing to compromise your rights in order to use the media just as the producer's belief in the demand for the product dictates the magnitude of the lock-down under which they place the product.
I have a Sony thumbdrive and I keep similar stuff on it.
AVG, Spybot, Windows Updates, an installer for the mail client we use at work, device drivers, and the like. I'll keep temporary backups of local files for whatever computer I'm working on as well, which has proven a wise choice in the past. I also back up whatever projects I may be working on to the drive in addition to normal server/CD back ups.
More out of the ordinary, I keep a debugger (Olly debugger) that has helped my recover forgotten passwords and such as well as Netcat.
The thumbdrive will also boot a computer with network drivers in DOS so I can Ghost to/from network drives.
It's not the games that have changed while they've sat in our parents' basements (next to our beds). Moreso, we have changed and the way in which we approach the games. It struck a chord in me when he mentioned going to great and illegal lengths to play Super Metroid. I was similarly inspired and was willing to drive 2 miles and pay $12 for the chance to play it again on my SNES. I wasn't disappointed in the game at all as I approached the game like almost any other; I play the hero and save the galaxy. If I had picked up inflated expectations of what the game was like when I was a kid, I probably would have been sorely disappointed. It's kind of like going back to the old tire swing 20 years later, remembering how high you used to swing only to find an old worn-out tire hanging knee high from a branch you could now reach up and touch with your hand.
The Final Fantasy series is an ironic title considering there are some 14 games bearing the Final Fantasy tag spanning what MUST be a record 8 (or more) systems including PC and handhelds?
Hail, Remora.