Metal grain boundries change if you heat the metal up. This also removes the temper, but rapid heating followed by rapid cooling (Such as by very high speed friction sanding, then submersion in water or oil) will change the crystal grain structure of the metal pretty deeply if done right.

Failing that, sanding off the top layer, then applying heat with a heat gun for a few minutes, then clenching with a cold oil pour will have the same effect, but more reliably.

Seriously, this is how heat treatment of steels works. Steels and other metal alloys go through various phases of crystal growth types under different temperature and pressure environments. They grow when hot (but not molten) which is why the metal weakens. If you heat it up hot enough, this processes changes into annealing where the crystals break down from thermal forces and the metal becomes amorphous. Flash cooling results in a densely packed matrix of tiny metal grains, which strengthens the metal.

Seriously-- all you have to do is alter the crystal growth pattern under where the serial number was. Heat treatment will do exactly that.

I wish I had your optimism.

From where I sit, the world is driven by one thing, and one thing only. The shameless desire to appropriate ever greater of material goods and or physical pleasures, by those with the means to appropriate them, at the expense of everyone else.

Take for instance, the cellphone industry.

The trend there is not to create an adaptive, versatile phone that manifests true quality of workmanship and forward thinking-- Such a device would be sold once, and would stick around far too long, reducing potential future sales figures. Instead, the devices are marketed with currently popular gimmick technologies, and are basically just hardware wrappers for ephemeral software products which can be artificially obscoleted, and thus force the consumer to keep buying, so that the operators of the cellphone manufacturing industry can continue to make money. (which may or may not be for the purpose of enriching investors, whp's only contribution is putting up some of their own financial power to fascilitate this collection of wealth, with the promise of getting their money back with interest.)

At no point in this process is it ever considered that 100% automation will destroy this cycle, as no return flow of currency into the market will happen after that point. When people arent employed (or even employable!), they don't get paid any money, and thus they have no money to spend to buy the prodcuts produced. Money only works when it is widely distributed amongst many hands. 100% automation would effectively transter 100% of all money to only a very few hands.

I hold a more prosaic view about the worth of people than is held by most people who are driven by the profit motive. As a contrived example, let's look at the case of the "not too bright, but friendly" person. In this post automation landscape, this indivudal would be completely unemployable. They aren't very bright, and all work that they are able to do is better performed by robots and software algorithms. Quite litterally, it is not in the interests of any employer, anywhere, to ever employ them, period. This person is not retarded or anything, they just aren't the brightest, and wont be winning any scholastic or academic achievement awards any time soon. In this paradigm, they are consigned to either horrible poverty and death from systemic institutional neglect-- or, living on the dole, to the chagrin of the profit motivated elite. (See for instance, Mitt Romney's rather famous quips about supporting wellfare recipients.) There isn't anything physically wrong with them, they just arent inclined to have the few remaining skills left that are in demand, and so, are simply not employable--- As the current verbiage goes, they aren't "Qualified Applicants". They will NEVER be employed, even if they want to be.

However, unlike our friend Mr Romney, I do not consider this person to be a drain on society. With money, this individual is capable of doing things in the community that improves the human condition intrinsically-- Such as helping to combat the spread of infectious diseases by being a volunteer relief aid, or providing counselling services. (Even the power elite need counseling when their mental health suffers a decline.) This person is valuable, and needs the opportunities to thrive to properly demonstrate that value. The value they represent cannot be distilled into a simple financial metric.

No person, rich or poor-- Clever or thick, is without intrinsic value. The value they represent simply cannot be easily quantified, measured, and exploited. Without opportunities to thrive, people languish, and potential is wasted.

The current tradjectory of mankind is not toward a post-scacity utopia, where financial power is what is eliminated-- It is toward a sick form of neo-feudalism, where humans simply arent worth anything to the power elite, because they have robots and AIs for everything they could possibly want, and they have the resources to make it happen.

Devil's advocate (pulled squarely out of my ass):

This may prove useful where you are using PWM bitbanged IO on the SDCard. A card with better internal noise reduction on the data leads could possibly be more reliable in such a setup, with faster bitbang IO rates.

Sony may be on to something there, but marketing it wrong.

Most consumer device deployments of uboot have a short (3 second) window in which they look for a tftp server broadcasting an update. This is very useful for developers of openwrt and pals, because it allows them to push a test image to the device's memory and boot on it.

However, it could also be used as an attack vector against home grade routers, if the NSA had a REALLY invested interest in you. Orchestrating a system reboot of your open firmware back to uboot (say, by causing a severe memory corruption event or something similar which panics the kernel-- maybe a hidden function in the LAN asic perhaps) followed by tftp of a new compromised image using say, a compromised windows workstation in the target network to do the serving.

You would have to completely replace the stock uboot on such routers to remove the small 3 second window.

One reason might be to manage which ports are forwarded, when not on-site.

Say the noobie is running a hame host, or some other daemonized process, but hasnt figured out that he needs to keep those devices on static IPs inside his private network for ease of management. As a consequence, his game server might suddenly stop responding to remote requests, because the NAT table is pointing to an IP that the device no longer owns.

Granted, this is a stretch. The noobie should have a remote management host inside his private network on a static IP that he can use to manage his devices with using a secure tunnel. But then again, this is a noobie.

Device makers like Netgear tailor their devices toward "End users", not site maintainers, or administrators. Whenever possible, I always ditch the consumer grade firmware on such devices for ones that arent made of string and bailing wire, and which dont feel like I am wearing mittens when configuring it. Things like openwrt.

There's something to be said about having a device that can be managed with a pretty GUI in a fairly painless way, however. Sadly, Netgear and pals often neuter functionality to provide this, and leave the system vulnerable to dangerous exploitation.

"Hentai tentacles" seems more appropriate.

Actually, the inclusion of a pentagonal allotropic unit inside a carbon nanotube (just rolled up graphene) was one of the first laboratory examples of a pure carbon semiconductor.

WAAAAY back in 1997
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Sponges dont regurgitate, any more than your heart can beat backwards. They are very, VERY simplistic colonial organisms. Again-- Literally-- Sucks water IN on one side, pushes water OUT on the other. They digest what gets caught. (Except when they can't, then it just sticks in there.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Because the excretory systems of simple invertebrates of this type (Corals, sponges, etc) preclude the existence of a dedicated GI tract as you would normally envision it. (A sponge is literally just two layers of cells that suck in water on one side, and push out water on the other, for instance.) They are unable to digest the particle, it stays large, and it cannot pass through. This is bad for the filter feeder, and toxic to the organism that consumes the filter feeder.

But then you couldn't showcase the actual product through the packaging! Marketing departments the world over will scream as if the apocalypse as has come!

Assumption based on uniform distribution.
Plastic distribution in the ocean is not homogeneous.

Please read up on the "gyres" in the ocean. Places where a large corriolis current causes mechanical concentration of suspened particulates in the oceans. The concentration of suspended microparticles of decaying plastic are sufficiently high in these locations that it is affecting bottom-tier filter feeders, which suck in the plastic particles as if it were plankton, then concentrate it further inside their bodies, which are then consumed by higher trophic level fauna, with toxic results.

Sounds like all you need to analyze this, is a "fake" processor.

EG, running this inside something like BOCHS, which has a built in x86 debugger, and runs a lot like a hypervisor. This encryption would need to be able to detect living inside a fully emulated system and simply refuse to operate in order to be safe from this kind of analysis. BOCHs will let you step through exactly what instructions the emulated CPU is actually doing, regardless of the data that is stored in the memory allocated to the emulator's process.

Don't get me wrong-- this makes a nasty bump in the road for career data thieves, but forensic analysis of the encryption is not completely thwarted.

Non-rythmic "pulsaion" of the heart is ventricular fibrilation, not tachycardia. Tachycardia is an abnormally fast, shallow rythm. It can LEAD to fibrilation, because it can try to contract faster than it is physically able to, leading to spasm-- but it itself is just very fast rythm.

The CPR/AED instructor is correct, however. An AED stops the heart's electrical activity after it goes crazy and stops beating in a useful rythm, but is still trying to beat. This forces the heart to pause, then start beating again. When the heart is in ventricular fibrilation, it is not pumping blood, and is instead basically just squirming around in there having a major spasm. When it stops, it is able to fill with blood again, and when it starts pumping it actually has something inside it to pump, and it gets its rythm back. (Hopefully.)

The heart starts beating again on its own. The AED does not shock it into restarting. Manual chest compression, with a full, deep compression cycle of about 1 beat per second, (Or , amusingly, about the tempo of old 1970s disco music) with appropriate compression to breath ratio for the patient (different for children than for adults) is how you restart a stopped heart, or at least buy time for EMS paramedics to provide inter-cardiac adrenaline and take over.

CPR is the major life saver; the AED is a valuable tool, but its use cases are limited. CPR trained first responders have only their fingers to check for pulses with, and to determine if the patient has entered a dangerous arythmia or not-- which is why it is a common practice to attach the pads of the AED to the patient and turn the AED on-- and the let the AED's electrical activity analyzer determine if administering a shock is appropriate or needed, while the CPR practitioner performs manual breathing and chest compressions. Trust me, full attention should be on the breathing and compressions, because letting up on the compressions, even just a little, will result in the patent's blood pressure dropping and suffering anoxia in their central nervous system and other blood hungry organs, greatly complicating their chances of recovery.

  When you stop to give breaths, their blood pressure drops back down to 0. This is why 2-person CPR is better than 1-person CPR. If you can conscript a bystander to assist in providing CPR for an arythmia victim, the chances of your patient surviving increase. The major things of concern are the quality of the airway, the quality of the compressions given, the number and frequency of rescue breaths provided, and the amount of time that CPR has been administered. (Chances of good recovery start depleting rapidly after having to start CPR. Manual chest compression gives some blood pressure and blood oxygenation, but is NOT a substitute for normal heart and lung function. The sooner tha patient stabilizes by developing a pulse and respirations, the better the prognosis of the patient in most cases.)

CPR is stopped only when the patient develops a stable rythm and respiration cycle, when EMS paramedics arrive to relieve you, when a doctor pronounces death, or when you are too exhausted to continue.

The AED is there to help you get a patient out of ventricular fibrilation or shock induced tachycardia (which often leads to ventricular fibrilation). That's all it's for. The rest is up to the responder's skill at delivering chest compressions and rescue breaths to maintain oxygenated blood flow and blood pressure levels. That's just the way it is.

Ok, Let's focus on these answers that you have wider selection sets to make a mental image over than just people you know.

That would be 1-5, and 10.

1)
You say that you have never heard a female pilot over the intercom. How strongly does this paint the image that pilots are all male? (Or, how shocked would you be to hear a female pilot informing you of mid-air turbulence?) Would you say this would be encouraging for women to become pilots?

According to the Airline Pilots Association, only 5% of commercial aircraft pilots are female.
CNN has a story that tries to address some of the issues that might be involved in why there is a huge disparity there as well. Some of the reasons given are less likely to apply, given the statistical increase in women choosing careers over family in recent decades, so take some of the answers with a grain of salt.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL...

2)
Prior to the 1980s, only 19% of flight attendants were male. In 2007 that number had risen to 26%. Some attribute this to progressive social policies that encouraged males to take up "less manly" careers, as many stories in that time period discussed issues such as daycares operated by male caregivers, and other "controversial" subjects, which helped push back against the perception that flight attendant is a female job.

http://www.prb.org/Publication...

http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
(A german article from Speigel circa 2012 concerning efforts in Germany to recruit more male childcare workers.)

http://www.boston.com/communit...
(An Op-Ed concerning the "Controversial" practice of leaving children in a male care-giver's custody, circa 2009)

Exactly how much impact the "Softening" of social reactions to males entering "Traditionally Female" occupations has had on the uptick in males serving as flight attendants is not known, and probably cannot be well known, but I would expect that it is at least partially attributable, as the societal reaction towards a male entering such a career has relaxed somewhat in recent decades.

3)
According to the bureau of labor statistics, 51% of gas station employees are female. Granted, this value contains retail positions. The occupation of "Attendant" as it relates to gas stations typically involves this retail counter interaction these days, but the more historical view is of the guy outside who helped you at full service stations (a thing of the past, I know), which more parallels with automotive repair. The same statistics breakdown has 9.3% worksforce as female in automotive repair. Sadly, they don't give trend data, just snapshot data.

Depending on your perception of what "Gas station attendant" is, there is either a very slight lead for women in the industry, or a major lead by men in the industry.

4)
Labor statistics for "Retail Trade" have female participation (overall) listed at 48.3%. In various sub-categories, women dominate sales, while in others, men lead. Most hover in the 40-60%, with some leaning one way, and some to the other. Sales seems to be something that does not, intrinsically, have a gender bias, excepting in specailty products tailored or marketed to a specific gender.

5)
Labor statistics for "Administration of human resources" cites a 69% statistic for females. That's nearly 50% greater liklihood of your HR director being female over being male.

10)
Scientific research and development cites a 47% statistic.
Again, very close to 50% split.

There's other interesting data in there, concerning computer equipment manufacture-- 29% industry wide are female.
Compared to 28% overall for durable goods manufacturing (Of which computer parts manufacture is a subset)

More interesting is the breakdowns inside the overall durable goods sector-- Medical equipment manufacture is nearly a 50-50 split, at 57.9% male and 42.1% female employee statistics. This sector would include everything from cardiac pumps to rubber gloves. There would have to be some significant deviations both ways in the industry for some sub-segments of this market to swing one way, and others to swing the other, for it to level out this close to parity -- especially in light of the overall dominance males have in the durable good manufacture market. (What do you suppose the secret sauce could be?)

The implication of "Insult" is purely your own bias peeking through.

People do make their own decisions, but they dont make those decisions in a vacuum. They make them based on their subjective experiences, and cultural emulation starts heavily in childhood.

This is why highly religious families tend to have highly religious children, etc. It is also why propoganda works, and a number of other such fun things.

Rather than "Being offended" by the statement, by trying to straw-man in some hidden message about how "Women can decide on their own! Oh noes!", take it as "Women are susceptable to propoganda, just as men are."

When you control a good portion of a child's attention, you control a good portion of that child's formative experience pool, and you can use that to help shape the child's world view, and thus what decisions they will make.

There was no hidden mysogenistic message here, other than what your own mind conjured up. Just asserting the reality that people dont make decisions in a vacuum.