For myself, I keep imagining a two to three part unmanned craft launched from Earth to one of the Near Earth Asteroids, preferrablbly a metallic one. An Ion Drive would take the whole craft there powered by 2 large solar panel arrays. On approaching the asteroid it would attach itself to the asteroid by means of a lattice of artificial gecko hairs these would tether the craft to the surface of the asteroid.
The first part of the craft is the mining section it contains a cutting laser that makes a series of concave cuts into the surface until it can plant anchors into them. The pieces of the rock so removed would be fed into its interior where an electric ARC smelter is used to heat the ore and produce metal ingots. It is powered by one of the two large solar arrays.
The second piece of the craft is the Ion Drive section, after separating from the first section it now has a hollow recess into which the metal ingots are loaded, and it will head back to Earth with one of the solar arrays powering the drive. This section spends it operational life ferrying cargo back and forth between Earth orbit and the Asteroid.
The third part of the craft is recharged by the mining section, and basically is a robot teleoperated by ground control and is used to make repairs on parts one and two, or explore the surface of the asteroid and make geological surveys for future mining targets.
The lack of human operators at the site reduces the radiation problem. Other than launching them and the 'space stuff is expensive' costs, I don't know how much more this equipment would cost than similar gear on Earth. It would not come with the damage to our environment and water supply that open pit mining does on Earth.
There are some things, rare earth magnets, lithium, iridium, platinum that could e mined in space that are both expensive and rare here, that are not so rare in space. You could say that mining them in space would bring down the cost so mining gold would be pointless as you increase the supply the worth would go down, but industrial metals would still have a value determined by their usefullness.
There is a variation of my idea where the ingots are shot back to Earth, but I like the ferry more as it reuses the Ion Drive.
I took two years of Drafting in High School in the late eighties, we had AutoCAD, we had a computer to run it, but not enough memory to run it. So everyone in the first year class learned to draw and write for blueprints. Basically if you don't know how to construct an object with pencil and paper, using AutoCAD isn't going to help. They were expecting to get more memory for folks in second year, that never happened.
One artifact of working with Blueprints is everyone did one to two pages of lettering a week so that everything on a Blueprint would be clearly legible.
To this day everyone comments on my penmanship, I only ever use cursive for signing things, everything else is printed.
2 years in drafting in high school and my printing is forever changed, 14 years in the computer industry and my typing still sucks.
As posted elsewhere in this thread, Jedi is a corruption of Jidai the name for category of period samurai movies Lucas was so fond of.
I've always heard Lucas ripped off Kurosawa, Dune (Herbert) and Lensman (Smith), but never Burroughs.
I'd be interested to read about a Burroughs connection if you've got anything to link. Closest association I can see if Luke and Leia swinging across the bridge in the Death Star in a classic Tarzan/Jane pose, which certainly was copied by Robin Hood and many other serial heroes.
Actually the AC is closer to the mark than indicated.
Jidai means Period in Japanese, like we have period dramas over here. Any sort of period drama in Japan is Jidai, the 400 years of war before the Tokugawa Era are known as the Sengoku Jidai.
Guys in bathrobes slashing swords at anything that moves, Jidai.
Kurosawa movies that Lucas ripped off, Jidai.
Silly headbands connected to funky toys, something else.
Grandparent's point, or question is basically do we want a Sourceforge of Rocketry where North Korea or Iran can check out source and build a rocket more capable than their own current designs.
The fact that most of these Open Source designs will be of the DIY type that could be built by amateurs with easily sourced components ought to raise the Spock eyebrow of at least one intel analyst.
If nothing else somebody will probalby want to know who is posting and who is lurking there.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but you have to make some choices when you're growing up, these choices all happen to you when your decision making faculties are still developing.
I don't mean the particles of experience (mistakes) that lead to better judgement later, I mean the scaffolding of the mechanism is still being developed. Teenagers and Twenty Somethings make bad descisions because the decision making part of the brain is still being finished.
I can't count the number of things that happened before I was 20 that should have killed me, I do know my insurance company dropped me before I was 18 because 1 person can only wreck so many cars.
I was wondering a while back if we couldn't have facebook for teens, then twenty somethings, then grown ups. When you graduate from one to the other, you old comments are sealed like court records. It hit me when I was riding with a cowowrker who was tellimg me the awful stuff her daughter posted on FB.
Kids are going to do stupid crap, there's got to be a statute of limitations for your childhood. Even background investigations and bankruptcies only go back 10 years.
I guess you're right, nobody's information was ever exposed...
unless you are one of the Chinese human rights activists with a compromised Gmail account.
Or the one where they lifted people's email passwords and actual email going over wifi while collecting Streetview data.
maybe you were just going for funny and it wooshed everybody.
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Yeah Elon said they booked like 30 launches and only a third of them were government, which left some room for more than a few non Government, and non Iridium launches.
If I can boost some mining equipment to the Moon, and use one of those solar powered tugs to get my ore back to the LEO and drop it in the Ocean somewhere, eventually there would be a payoff.
And yes when you can throw something the size of the ISS up there in 3 launches, the long awaited microgravity manufacturing and some interesting vapor deposition electronics stuff with smaller whiskers and imperfections than you get on Earth are possible.
Maybe like the fly eyeballs nano solar cell story from last week, you only need the perfect space crap to build the molds, then make millions of widgets down on Earth where materials and labor costs are conventional.
Get the lift costs cheap enough and people will fill Bigelow Aerospace's hotels.
I believe Parent to be off on Resale values, in the states used Priuses were selling for more than NEW ones. Due to high demand, there are for some companies rebates and incentives to buy the new that make the cost of a new car deceptive. But the thing I think matters most is something Grandparent mentions, but I think he gets wrong.
Grandparent says you need 1 Ton of new Lithium for every new car put on the road, and to Dispose of 1 Ton of Lithium for every crashed car put in the junk yard. I think each car new and old might have a ton of Lithium in them, but he completely ignores recycling.
A 37 lb Battery for my vehicle has a Core Charge at the Auto Parts store of $12, the refundable charge the store charges me until I bring back my dead battery so they can recycle it. A 1 Ton Lead Acid battery would have a proportional core charge of $600. One would assume Lithium at $3 per pound could fetch a higher value than Lead, approximately $6,000 just in the lithium cost for 1 Ton of Lithium in the Battery.
So my new Lithium batteries might cost a fortune, but some of that will be defrayed by having an Old Lithium battery to turn in.
And the Priuses didn't take Decades to develop a secondary market.
Speaking of which, when you go to buy those second set of batteries for your All electric, expect there to be a healthy aftermarket develop with all the new battery tech in the labs right now some of it will be available to replace your old Lithium when its time for new ones.
There are still All Electric Rav4 from 1997 still running on the road on their original batteries today.
Although I got my first PC at age 9, and had my first BASIC class in 7th grade, I never saw computers as a career choice. Programmers were still perceived as 1980s movie nerds in '90 when I graduated.
So I studied Architecture and Design, when I found out how miserable the job prospects were, I drifted for a while.
While drifting I worked a lot of crappy jobs, and bought a crappy Compudyne computer from CompUSA, which I returned 3 times for repairs and finally a refund. With the refund money a friend of mine that worked in a Mom and Pop computer shop helped me build my first of many homebuilt PCs. After that I got a crappy tech support job, then an integration gig, then various support and admin jobs until finally I ended up in IT Security.
This is not a career I would have chosen for myself out of high school, and I specifically remember dropping my one college computer class because Lotus 123 and Wordperfect for DOS were crap.
I was however mechanically and technically inclined, so a test that measured aptitudes and not preferences might have picked this for me.
I own a Droid, prior to buying the Droid I had purchased a TomTom for about $99 as it was "last year's model" at Best Buy. I took it home and updated the maps for free.
I like the TomTom, when I first got it it was slow to find Satellites, after an update it finds the sats much faster now. I really like the TomTom, the estimated time of arrival in + or - minutes from your scheduled arrival time.
However I left the TomTom in my Wife's car once and had to resort to the Google Maps on my Droid while driving somewhere to pick a Craigslist listing. The Google Maps did the job just fine. If you're in the city and they have a Citysearch image of your destination its even handier if you aren't sure about the address for some reason, like it on a corner or something. I also really saying the address into the phone and letting Google figure out the address instead of typing it into the TomTom. It works most of the time.
Then I was on an audit in Pittsburgh, and driving around with a coworker and his Garmin, we were downtown the Garmin never picked up Sats, I put the same address in the Droid, and it had locations from the Phone network almost immediately. Sometimes the Garmin would get a sat one or two turns before the destination, I also hate the Garmin interface.
So overall I really like my TomTom, I never update it though as its always in my truck, so I know my maps are old again.
The Google Maps voice is agrivating, and sometimes sounds like its just guessing how to pronounce a word. Also around DC there is a 3-4 way interchange (Springfield), when you drive through it still tells you to go straight at "sign 1", "sign 2", "sign 3", "Sign 4" interchange and I think if someone didn't already know they were going the phone would still be listing possible exit ramps when you should be changing lanes.
I like the Droid because its always on me, and its always up to date.
Yeah, but seeing as you might want to park the Lunar rover, get out of you spacesuit, sleep, and maybe take a shower after a long day in the helium 3 mines. You might want to subdivide this big tube, pressurize it, wire it for internet, heating and cooling. Somewhere along the line you'll probably reinforce that structure, and when you do maybe you'll think about holding the roof up.
Also don't build in one of those low rent neighborhoods, find something classy by a big crater.
I think you don't give GP enough credit. His second point doesn't go far enough, we're having trouble eating fish right now, China is a terrible place to breathe.
Global Warming and CO2 ARE getting the Lion's share of attention, this distracts us in a big way from the other environmental disasters playing out at the same time.
The real question, is will the heat capture make you hotter or cooler?
Will the "Motion Capture" just slow you down.
In theory the waste heat is just going somwhere, and whether it evaporatoes off you or goes into a good capture system it might make you feel cooler.
However, when you put an electrical load on an electrical system in your car, it calls on the Alternator, which drags down the available horsepower of the engine, fuel effienciency, etc. Even with frictionless bearings, the magnets are taking work out of the system to convert it to energy.
There was a proposal to use some kind of springs to absorb the up and down motion in soldier's packs to create energy, maybe thatwork is already going on and is easier to absorb, wheras the alternator/AC in your car isn't trying as hard unless you tell it to, or the compressor kicks off a cooling cycle.
"For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays," said Bill McAlpine, Juno's radiation control manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a release.
According to NASA Jupiter has sizzling radiation belts surrounding its equatorial region and extend out past one of its moons, Europa, about 650,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) out from the top of Jupiter's clouds. Juniper has 63 moons.
There was a story a few years back about a Security researcher that determined the quartz units in every computer are unique and have different enough time drift to fingerprint the individual machine's traffic despite IP address changes, proxies or anything similar. Botnets attacks wouldn't be tracked back to them, but CNC traffic to the botnets should still work.
Anyways this software comes out and samples millisecond differences between computer clocks on large networks, put this together with that guys Thesis work and you've got a worse end to privacy than Facebook.
Sometimes there is something with the hacking or access, but yeah, mostly its crap. Though the gadgets that double Hacking and Access time can pay for themselves many times over. Of the two Access gets you more loot, like locked doors to apartments you can loot.
I'm playing Red Dead Redemption right now, and safecracking is a fun little mini game, the controller vibrates when you're close to the right number on the tumbler, its intuitive to anyone who's ever had a high school locker and I don't see how you could screw it up, but its kinda neat, and there is ususally some cash in the safe.
In an American company when something goes wrong, somebody is fired.
In a Japanese company when something goes wrong, they try to figure out what went wrong and fix it som that doesn't happen again. Explains why they overtook the US auto industry so quickly. Also explains how they turned a feudal agricultural economy in the 1800s to an industrial one only 30 years later.
Also NASA does the same thing, when a problem occurs, they look for the problem in the process that allowed the defect to get to production.
Space is hard, you don't get it right by firing people every time there is a setback, the culture you espose only gets you more of the same, nothing new, like missions to asteroids.
If you read any of the UK tech websites, a lot of landfill bound computers get shipped to Africa as "donated" computers, the companies doing the dumping get HUGE tax breaks, and the country where these are dumped get Heavy Metals in their water table.
A quick google search says this is happening in Nigeria and Nairobi
I've never left the US, Canada and Mexico, but my hair would say I spend a little time each year in Speyside, Scotland drinking water that is anywhere from 12-18 years old, usually Macallan.
Worse yet, since CSI came out forensic investigators have noticed a marked rise in the number of cases where Gloves and or Bleach were used at the scene of the crime. The Bleach is supposed to damage the DNA evidence they might leave behind.
Anyways if you want to game this system, do you drink water only where you live, and bring bottles filled at home with you, or just always buy bottled water and never drink tap?
As others have mentioned they'd probably get a lot of false positives from the local bottling company.
I also wonder what if any significance this would have for Historians with ancient jugs of wine, and other spirits? No there aren't human hairs involved, but the isotope chemistry should still hold up.
Slashdot Mirror
For myself, I keep imagining a two to three part unmanned craft launched from Earth to one of the Near Earth Asteroids, preferrablbly a metallic one. An Ion Drive would take the whole craft there powered by 2 large solar panel arrays. On approaching the asteroid it would attach itself to the asteroid by means of a lattice of artificial gecko hairs these would tether the craft to the surface of the asteroid.
The first part of the craft is the mining section it contains a cutting laser that makes a series of concave cuts into the surface until it can plant anchors into them. The pieces of the rock so removed would be fed into its interior where an electric ARC smelter is used to heat the ore and produce metal ingots. It is powered by one of the two large solar arrays.
The second piece of the craft is the Ion Drive section, after separating from the first section it now has a hollow recess into which the metal ingots are loaded, and it will head back to Earth with one of the solar arrays powering the drive. This section spends it operational life ferrying cargo back and forth between Earth orbit and the Asteroid.
The third part of the craft is recharged by the mining section, and basically is a robot teleoperated by ground control and is used to make repairs on parts one and two, or explore the surface of the asteroid and make geological surveys for future mining targets.
The lack of human operators at the site reduces the radiation problem. Other than launching them and the 'space stuff is expensive' costs, I don't know how much more this equipment would cost than similar gear on Earth. It would not come with the damage to our environment and water supply that open pit mining does on Earth.
There are some things, rare earth magnets, lithium, iridium, platinum that could e mined in space that are both expensive and rare here, that are not so rare in space. You could say that mining them in space would bring down the cost so mining gold would be pointless as you increase the supply the worth would go down, but industrial metals would still have a value determined by their usefullness.
There is a variation of my idea where the ingots are shot back to Earth, but I like the ferry more as it reuses the Ion Drive.
Is it ever.
I took two years of Drafting in High School in the late eighties, we had AutoCAD, we had a computer to run it, but not enough memory to run it. So everyone in the first year class learned to draw and write for blueprints. Basically if you don't know how to construct an object with pencil and paper, using AutoCAD isn't going to help. They were expecting to get more memory for folks in second year, that never happened.
One artifact of working with Blueprints is everyone did one to two pages of lettering a week so that everything on a Blueprint would be clearly legible.
To this day everyone comments on my penmanship, I only ever use cursive for signing things, everything else is printed.
2 years in drafting in high school and my printing is forever changed, 14 years in the computer industry and my typing still sucks.
WHAT?
As posted elsewhere in this thread, Jedi is a corruption of Jidai the name for category of period samurai movies Lucas was so fond of.
I've always heard Lucas ripped off Kurosawa, Dune (Herbert) and Lensman (Smith), but never Burroughs.
I'd be interested to read about a Burroughs connection if you've got anything to link. Closest association I can see if Luke and Leia swinging across the bridge in the Death Star in a classic Tarzan/Jane pose, which certainly was copied by Robin Hood and many other serial heroes.
Actually the AC is closer to the mark than indicated.
Jidai means Period in Japanese, like we have period dramas over here. Any sort of period drama in Japan is Jidai, the 400 years of war before the Tokugawa Era are known as the Sengoku Jidai.
Guys in bathrobes slashing swords at anything that moves, Jidai.
Kurosawa movies that Lucas ripped off, Jidai.
Silly headbands connected to funky toys, something else.
Grandparent's point, or question is basically do we want a Sourceforge of Rocketry where North Korea or Iran can check out source and build a rocket more capable than their own current designs.
The fact that most of these Open Source designs will be of the DIY type that could be built by amateurs with easily sourced components ought to raise the Spock eyebrow of at least one intel analyst.
If nothing else somebody will probalby want to know who is posting and who is lurking there.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but you have to make some choices when you're growing up, these choices all happen to you when your decision making faculties are still developing.
I don't mean the particles of experience (mistakes) that lead to better judgement later, I mean the scaffolding of the mechanism is still being developed. Teenagers and Twenty Somethings make bad descisions because the decision making part of the brain is still being finished.
I can't count the number of things that happened before I was 20 that should have killed me, I do know my insurance company dropped me before I was 18 because 1 person can only wreck so many cars.
I was wondering a while back if we couldn't have facebook for teens, then twenty somethings, then grown ups. When you graduate from one to the other, you old comments are sealed like court records. It hit me when I was riding with a cowowrker who was tellimg me the awful stuff her daughter posted on FB.
Kids are going to do stupid crap, there's got to be a statute of limitations for your childhood. Even background investigations and bankruptcies only go back 10 years.
I guess you're right, nobody's information was ever exposed...
unless you are one of the Chinese human rights activists with a compromised Gmail account.
Or the one where they lifted people's email passwords and actual email going over wifi while collecting Streetview data.
maybe you were just going for funny and it wooshed everybody.
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Yeah Elon said they booked like 30 launches and only a third of them were government, which left some room for more than a few non Government, and non Iridium launches.
He3 costs $40,000 per Troy ounce, its useful in Fusion research and Medical imaging technology.
http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Helium
If I can boost some mining equipment to the Moon, and use one of those solar powered tugs to get my ore back to the LEO and drop it in the Ocean somewhere, eventually there would be a payoff.
And yes when you can throw something the size of the ISS up there in 3 launches, the long awaited microgravity manufacturing and some interesting vapor deposition electronics stuff with smaller whiskers and imperfections than you get on Earth are possible.
Maybe like the fly eyeballs nano solar cell story from last week, you only need the perfect space crap to build the molds, then make millions of widgets down on Earth where materials and labor costs are conventional.
Get the lift costs cheap enough and people will fill Bigelow Aerospace's hotels.
I believe Parent to be off on Resale values, in the states used Priuses were selling for more than NEW ones. Due to high demand, there are for some companies rebates and incentives to buy the new that make the cost of a new car deceptive. But the thing I think matters most is something Grandparent mentions, but I think he gets wrong.
Grandparent says you need 1 Ton of new Lithium for every new car put on the road, and to Dispose of 1 Ton of Lithium for every crashed car put in the junk yard. I think each car new and old might have a ton of Lithium in them, but he completely ignores recycling.
A 37 lb Battery for my vehicle has a Core Charge at the Auto Parts store of $12, the refundable charge the store charges me until I bring back my dead battery so they can recycle it. A 1 Ton Lead Acid battery would have a proportional core charge of $600. One would assume Lithium at $3 per pound could fetch a higher value than Lead, approximately $6,000 just in the lithium cost for 1 Ton of Lithium in the Battery.
So my new Lithium batteries might cost a fortune, but some of that will be defrayed by having an Old Lithium battery to turn in.
And the Priuses didn't take Decades to develop a secondary market.
Speaking of which, when you go to buy those second set of batteries for your All electric, expect there to be a healthy aftermarket develop with all the new battery tech in the labs right now some of it will be available to replace your old Lithium when its time for new ones.
There are still All Electric Rav4 from 1997 still running on the road on their original batteries today.
Although I got my first PC at age 9, and had my first BASIC class in 7th grade, I never saw computers as a career choice. Programmers were still perceived as 1980s movie nerds in '90 when I graduated.
So I studied Architecture and Design, when I found out how miserable the job prospects were, I drifted for a while.
While drifting I worked a lot of crappy jobs, and bought a crappy Compudyne computer from CompUSA, which I returned 3 times for repairs and finally a refund. With the refund money a friend of mine that worked in a Mom and Pop computer shop helped me build my first of many homebuilt PCs. After that I got a crappy tech support job, then an integration gig, then various support and admin jobs until finally I ended up in IT Security.
This is not a career I would have chosen for myself out of high school, and I specifically remember dropping my one college computer class because Lotus 123 and Wordperfect for DOS were crap.
I was however mechanically and technically inclined, so a test that measured aptitudes and not preferences might have picked this for me.
I own a Droid, prior to buying the Droid I had purchased a TomTom for about $99 as it was "last year's model" at Best Buy. I took it home and updated the maps for free.
I like the TomTom, when I first got it it was slow to find Satellites, after an update it finds the sats much faster now. I really like the TomTom, the estimated time of arrival in + or - minutes from your scheduled arrival time.
However I left the TomTom in my Wife's car once and had to resort to the Google Maps on my Droid while driving somewhere to pick a Craigslist listing. The Google Maps did the job just fine. If you're in the city and they have a Citysearch image of your destination its even handier if you aren't sure about the address for some reason, like it on a corner or something. I also really saying the address into the phone and letting Google figure out the address instead of typing it into the TomTom. It works most of the time.
Then I was on an audit in Pittsburgh, and driving around with a coworker and his Garmin, we were downtown the Garmin never picked up Sats, I put the same address in the Droid, and it had locations from the Phone network almost immediately. Sometimes the Garmin would get a sat one or two turns before the destination, I also hate the Garmin interface.
So overall I really like my TomTom, I never update it though as its always in my truck, so I know my maps are old again.
The Google Maps voice is agrivating, and sometimes sounds like its just guessing how to pronounce a word. Also around DC there is a 3-4 way interchange (Springfield), when you drive through it still tells you to go straight at "sign 1", "sign 2", "sign 3", "Sign 4" interchange and I think if someone didn't already know they were going the phone would still be listing possible exit ramps when you should be changing lanes.
I like the Droid because its always on me, and its always up to date.
Yeah, but seeing as you might want to park the Lunar rover, get out of you spacesuit, sleep, and maybe take a shower after a long day in the helium 3 mines. You might want to subdivide this big tube, pressurize it, wire it for internet, heating and cooling. Somewhere along the line you'll probably reinforce that structure, and when you do maybe you'll think about holding the roof up.
Also don't build in one of those low rent neighborhoods, find something classy by a big crater.
You're right, screw the Configuration Manager and his fancy Test Environment...
Commit all changes to the Production Planet now.
I think you don't give GP enough credit. His second point doesn't go far enough, we're having trouble eating fish right now, China is a terrible place to breathe.
Global Warming and CO2 ARE getting the Lion's share of attention, this distracts us in a big way from the other environmental disasters playing out at the same time.
For instance Clean water scarcity.
The real question, is will the heat capture make you hotter or cooler?
Will the "Motion Capture" just slow you down.
In theory the waste heat is just going somwhere, and whether it evaporatoes off you or goes into a good capture system it might make you feel cooler.
However, when you put an electrical load on an electrical system in your car, it calls on the Alternator, which drags down the available horsepower of the engine, fuel effienciency, etc. Even with frictionless bearings, the magnets are taking work out of the system to convert it to energy.
There was a proposal to use some kind of springs to absorb the up and down motion in soldier's packs to create energy, maybe thatwork is already going on and is easier to absorb, wheras the alternator/AC in your car isn't trying as hard unless you tell it to, or the compressor kicks off a cooling cycle.
I hear the maintenance of the foot pumps can be a problem, but otherwise they're quite stylish.
FTFA
"For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays," said Bill McAlpine, Juno's radiation control manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a release.
According to NASA Jupiter has sizzling radiation belts surrounding its equatorial region and extend out past one of its moons, Europa, about 650,000 kilometers (400,000 miles) out from the top of Jupiter's clouds. Juniper has 63 moons.
There was a story a few years back about a Security researcher that determined the quartz units in every computer are unique and have different enough time drift to fingerprint the individual machine's traffic despite IP address changes, proxies or anything similar. Botnets attacks wouldn't be tracked back to them, but CNC traffic to the botnets should still work.
Anyways this software comes out and samples millisecond differences between computer clocks on large networks, put this together with that guys Thesis work and you've got a worse end to privacy than Facebook.
Or something.
Duh, he's "Prince"
Obviously there's someone new over at the copy editor's desk.
Sometimes there is something with the hacking or access, but yeah, mostly its crap. Though the gadgets that double Hacking and Access time can pay for themselves many times over. Of the two Access gets you more loot, like locked doors to apartments you can loot.
I'm playing Red Dead Redemption right now, and safecracking is a fun little mini game, the controller vibrates when you're close to the right number on the tumbler, its intuitive to anyone who's ever had a high school locker and I don't see how you could screw it up, but its kinda neat, and there is ususally some cash in the safe.
Thankfully the Japanese don't see it that way.
In an American company when something goes wrong, somebody is fired.
In a Japanese company when something goes wrong, they try to figure out what went wrong and fix it som that doesn't happen again. Explains why they overtook the US auto industry so quickly. Also explains how they turned a feudal agricultural economy in the 1800s to an industrial one only 30 years later.
Also NASA does the same thing, when a problem occurs, they look for the problem in the process that allowed the defect to get to production.
Space is hard, you don't get it right by firing people every time there is a setback, the culture you espose only gets you more of the same, nothing new, like missions to asteroids.
If you read any of the UK tech websites, a lot of landfill bound computers get shipped to Africa as "donated" computers, the companies doing the dumping get HUGE tax breaks, and the country where these are dumped get Heavy Metals in their water table.
A quick google search says this is happening in Nigeria and Nairobi
http://makeitfair.org/the-facts/news/news-item-1
I've never left the US, Canada and Mexico, but my hair would say I spend a little time each year in Speyside, Scotland drinking water that is anywhere from 12-18 years old, usually Macallan.
Worse yet, since CSI came out forensic investigators have noticed a marked rise in the number of cases where Gloves and or Bleach were used at the scene of the crime. The Bleach is supposed to damage the DNA evidence they might leave behind.
Anyways if you want to game this system, do you drink water only where you live, and bring bottles filled at home with you, or just always buy bottled water and never drink tap?
As others have mentioned they'd probably get a lot of false positives from the local bottling company.
I also wonder what if any significance this would have for Historians with ancient jugs of wine, and other spirits? No there aren't human hairs involved, but the isotope chemistry should still hold up.