Thanks. I tried to pick a range of genres and then specific books within them that challenged the reader in one way or another. It's tough.

Rare materials. Well, rare reeds can be harder to find than gold, so let's put a $1000 raw materials price per ounce of reed used.

Time. Hand craftsmen are incredibly rare. Those skills are expensive. IT can charge $120/hr for skills twice as common. Using that as a guideline, let's say $240/hr for the skills.

If we assume it takes one year to make a flute, then the combined cost is roughly half a million per flute, so $6.5 million so far. I will assume QA would mean some flutes have to be made again from scratch. Let's assume a 50% rejection rate at the virtuoso level, which doesn't seem unreasonable given you're making the best of the best with uncontrolled materials. This raises the price to $9.75 million.

But provinence matters. These instruments had established history, the main reason a Strad is worth ten times anything with identical acoustics. We don't have enough history to bump the price up that much, but doubling sounds fair. This gives us $19.5 million.

I would start by taking the money out of the TSA official's paycheque and bank account, with the remainder seized from TSA funds. If the funds are insufficient, continue to the next department up.

I would further require the TSA to publish a public apology as a full-page announcement in every newspaper, artisan journal and music journal. Finally, I would require all TSA officials involved in any way with the harassment to serve 250 hours community service.

Weirdstone of Brisingamon//Moon of Gomrath
Neuromancer
The Sleeper Awakes
Darkness is Rising
Monkey (the abbreviated Journey to the West)
The Black Cloud
A For Andromeda
The Molecule Men
Eight Keys to Eden
Dusty Death
Spy who Came In from the Cold
633 Squadron

A manufacturer should always be 100% liable for the product they make, when used as intended under intended conditions. Warranty and fitness for purpose should not be waivable, ever. In software or hardware.

Ok, how would this work in software, since you can't prove something bug-free? You can't prove it bug-free in general, but you can prove certain cases bug-free. Also, just as imperfections happen when making anything, warranty doesn't imply 100% of theoretically valid circumstances are going to get the results you want. Equally, just as nobody expects an unmaintained car with no oil or fuel to run, nobody should reasonably expect open source to work without patches and necessary versions of support libraries.

One can also argue that open source is a prototyping system. You would expect a breadboard or an S Deck to work as expected, you would expect transistors and capacitors to do their stated tasks within the stated parameters. You do not expect the makers of any of these parts to provide added insurance against your flipflop circuit gaining intelligence and seizing control of the world. If you're a good enough inventor to build a flipflop with AI capabilities, YOU provide the insurance.

Same goes for all drones, robots, rovers and UAVs. The manufacturer should be 100% liable for what they make. Modders should be 100% liable for what they mod and all direct impacts.

(So if you turn a camera holder into a rocket launcher, you are responsible for the rocket launcher, issues due to the physical and electrical demands of that rocket launcher, etc, but the manufacturer is still responsible for any communications systems, flight control, etc, since these do not fundamentally change. It is the manufacturer who decides what to hard-code and what to measure, it is the manufacturer who decides on whether to add voltage regulators - since surges can happen under normal conditions, etc.)

Deaths caused - if it's a pre-mod design flaw, the manufacturer is responsible. Same as it would be if your car spontaneously exploded. If it's a post-mod design flaw, the modifier is responsible. If it is a design feature specifically used as such, the user is always responsible. (The qualifier is because guns are designed specifically to kill. If the gun blows up in your hands and kills you, when you don't pull the trigger, the manufacturer should not be able to argue the gun functioned as designed. If you try to kill someone and the gun kills you instead, the manufacturer should not automatically be liable, although they may be found such.)

The next stage in drone development is obvious. Operators suffer PTSD at the same rate as fighter pilots. Computers can be fooled, as Iran has demonstrated. Rat brains can already operate flight simulators. Ergo, rat brains will be installed in drones, after being trained to trigger specific responses that can be treated as fire commands when specific objects are seen. This is easier than programming a computer, and as rats are easy to produce without rare materials located in potentially hostile countries, cheaper and more reliable.

Won't there be objections? As if drone strikes aren't controversial! What do plebs matter to the military?

As for home inventors, there are already kits to control cockroach brains and games that read electrical impulses from humans. I can't imagine it will take long for someone to figure out how to use insect brains to control UAVs.

At the point where non-human nervous systems operate UAVs, is the inventor responsible for the free will decisions made by the other brain?

Using conventional lets-blame-someone logic, the answer is no. No matter what the training, no matter how small the other brain, it always had the opportunity to say no. No matter how xenophobic or genocidal it is, at the start or end, it always made the choice.

Using a scientific concept of cause-and-effect, which is a many-many web of weighted interactions, you're damn right you're responsible. Whether the daleks you have invented are under your control or not. You cannot escape your guilt by saying they did it.

Some were certainly considered but prohibited by law. Due to crypto export restrictions, it wasn't until the limits on Open Source were loosened that X was legally permitted to have any kind of meaningful security. The non-export version still had to talk to the exportable edition, after all.

Yes, X was (and is) incredibly sloppy by today's standards and yes a lot of that was due to poor decisions in the days of X10. (Yes, boundaries are a decision. MIT could have chosen any sort of access control list system they wanted, with yet another library handling it. You could have then substituted whatever you wanted, so long as the API remained the same. Pretty much futureproof, no significant extra coding, easier to maintain than what they actually did.)

The coding flaws - of which there were many - were often detectable by tools as ancient as lint.

But you must also remember, X10 and X11 were never intended as products. They were reference implementations of a protocol, not finished products intended for actual use. The different vendors were always "supposed" to provide their own.

World War 1 is an excellent example of degeneracy. But let's face it, there is a level of honesty in charging machine guns and gassing enemy trenches. A depraved honesty, but honesty nonetheless.

Blackwater vehicles machine-gunning civilian populations for the hell of it, drones launching missiles at kids going to peace conferences - this lacks even the honesty.

Even earlier, the Charge of the Light Brigade was supposedly described as "magnificent, but it isn't war". I suppose the same could really be said of the Dambuster raid. There was nothing magnificent about Tora Bora, or the use of large radius, indiscriminate incendiaries earlier. Nor the use of cluster bombs colour coded to look like food drops.

The deliberate bombing of air raid shelters in Iraq was arguably worse than the Nazi bombings of London in the Blitz. The Nazis had no capacity to aim and seem to have been relatively indiscriminate. Bad enough to be a war crime and unacceptable to any civilized people. Firing laser-targeted missiles knowingly at civilian shelters, that goes from mere grotesquely savage incompetence to willful mass murder. To me, there is no question that having the capacity to do less harm but using it to inflict more is the greater evil and the more degenerate.

As it stands, I only get replies from bots and eharmony has scientifically proven that nobody on the face of the planet is compatible with me. Yes, I am serious. Yes, this is the main reason I brew very strong, very high quality mead. Inside work, I'm a meaningless drone in a stagnant occupation. Outside of work, the only company I keep is a three gallon jar. It's not a good conversationalist but it has a greater capacity for thought than my co-workers, which is something.

The older I get, the more I realize that Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was an optimist.

Ah, but how will the Force size up against my psychic paper telling the Jedi that his powers were eaten by a small dog?

Only information wants to be free. Brownian motion generators are random, thus devoid of information.

Not quite. The tools would be invented by someone, eventually. And that someone will have just the same accountability issues as the NSA. So you are guaranteed tools of this power being used by some megalomaniac or diabolical mastermind. So they cannot be factors in the equation.

The first question is how to upgrade security to the point that no such tool can ever work. Future tools, who knows, but this grade of attack must be permanently beyond anyone's capability.

I can picture ways of making it very, very hard - at a price - but a total solution is going to be a challenge.

Killing a bunch of wageslave (or just regular slave) engineers in the process. When the innocent become expendable, no matter how valid the cause, when murder and terror become alternatives to diplomacy, the aggressor is not fit even to be spat upon. You know why William Gibson's Neuromancer was so wrong? Technology is progressing far faster, sure, but that's normal in sci-fi. No, William Gibson's mistake was in not foreseeing how degenerate humanity can get.

If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.

You are correct about the list of suspects. Though it needn't be anti-American beliefs. Timothy McVeigh doubtless sincerely believed he was the one being pro-America.

And, yes, one or two nutters will generate next to no footprint. Given that the NSA tracks everything, footprints smaller than regular social circles (which will be dozens of people) will likely be drowned out in the noise. Six or so people playing Wild West with military surplus hardware is probably about the upper limit, both of what cannot be seen by seeing everything and what can hold together through the drugs and whiskey.

That would be enough to cause concern. Not a vast amount. Survivalists are the most dangerous breed of pro-American, at the individual level, but can barely cooperate with themselves. Those able to cooperate are political or religious fruitcakes, which automatically means their intellectual prowess rivals that of a delinquent teenage hedgehog.

True, but they exist in a full information game. One side or the other, if they follow a perfect strategy, will always win, no matter what the other side does. This is ONLY true for one side. For purists, I'll rephrase: one side will always win or draw, which is equal to saying that zero or or one sides can guarantee a win.

It is my ambition, or rather one of mine, to prove that material science favours the builders, that it is theoretically possible to build something that cannot be damaged or destroyed by the application of external momentum or energy.

Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of. To deal with actual, meaningful contingencies (trees taking out power lines, trucks driving into power lines, drunk Air Force commanders ordering live-fire practice on power lines, etc) there should be zero points of failure. Anywhere.

If a meteorite of the kind that lit up Russia early in the year, or the kind that lit up California the year before, hit a substation, no amount of armour will prevent serious damage. The CA one, discussed here as I recall, was the size of a minibus. The fragments that reached the surface - and reports say there were many - were certainly far more dangerous to a transformer than a few grams of lead.

You have to assume such a strike is inevitable. Prevention is impossible. Shielding would be stupid. That leaves option number 3 - make it not matter. It's cheap, easy, effective against any type of outage and provided you have decent routing protocols operating over a bidirectional mesh topology, resilience increases anywhere from superlinearly to exponentially.

Then what? Then you don't care if it's a meteorite, an airliner falling out the sky, an army tank driver on speedballs or Bob Bobkins, the brother and first cousin of Joe Bobkins, out hunting things that'll stay still long enough for him to point his rocket launcher. It. Just. Won't. Matter. Worth. A. Damn. The flicker of your LED house lights will barely register with even super-sensitivities. The routing protocols would have established new pathways to all destinations in microseconds, with the decisions being implemented a millisecond or two later. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.

There's an expense to redundancy, just as there is an expense to not having bridges fall in rivers. But it's a very small expense. The outages from the ice storms and rain storms? Those are big expenses. Big RECURRING expenses. With redundancy alone, due to the statistical nature of line loss, you could get extremely close to zero outage for anyone. Ever. Redundancy (down to as small a scale as practical), smarter placement of utilities (ie: not on thin poles in ice storm prone areas) and better material choices (aluminium cables?!) combined could guarantee the system would survive uninterrupted anything short of a nuclear bomb.

(You could design a complete infrastructure on a national scale that actually could withstand a full-blown nuclear war, but a lack of users would make it pointless. Unless we have developed AI by then. In which case, they and The Machines they'd need to maintain the system could endure pretty much indefinitely.)