Do not use visible lasers; they are too easy to track to the house they shoot from.

For blinding the drones (and not blinding live pilots) an infrared laser could be good.

Taken to higher power, a CO2 laser for a laser engraver can reach couple dozen watts fairly easily. With good focus and dwell time, perhaps could even cause structural failure of some plastic parts on the drone.

Yet another possibility is in the realm of microwaves. A sufficiently focused (perhaps from several houses, networked in an aerial defense grid) microwave beam could confuse the drone's electronics or perhaps even force internal overheat.

A guided model rocket with a suitable payload (or even just as a dumb kinetic projectile) could also do a good job. Such devices can even be unmanned and placed out as "mines", ready to be triggered by an overpassing drone. Suitable sizing of the rocket can ensure that only light, non-fatal damage will be inflicted to large manned aircraft (if hit by a mistake) while the damage to a lightweight drone will be much more extensive.

If the service gets shut down, there could be an alternative. There are smartphones in every other pocket, or so. An app that dials a number and plays a sound file, networked with other such phones in a botnet-style way (opt-in, and users able to decide what calls they approve of), without any central authority, fits into this scheme. The politicos in question then can not even block the calls based on incoming number, as each number will belong to a real person, and no number will be calling more than once per a fairly long period, which is not sufficient for harassment charges.

Using this on politicos' personal phone numbers at 6 AM would be the real fair game. If only one of ten people woken up by a robocall participate in this, it has a chance of quite decent success.

If they annoy us, let's annoy them! We can do it, we have the technology.

Isn't this a kind of a fuel cell?

Oh, the tired "logic" of nuclear waste longevity. The root cause of that is the content of actinides, with very long half-lives. However, these are fissionable, therefore can be burned - with significant energy release. It is not "waste" - it is a fuel for 4th-generation reactors.

Unless the sheeple with their panties in the twist will continue running around scared that nuclear power is baaaaad. It's these people because of whom the old plants are still in operation instead of being replaced with newer, safer ones.

Illogical.

You forgot the possibility to reprocess the spent fuel. You also forgot about fast reactors able to use the secondary raw material currently improperly called "nuclear waste". And what about thorium-cycle reactors? And breeder reactors in general? There is a plentiful supply of nuclear fuels for thousands of years if you don't insist on not seeing it.

Every energy source has its costs. Being it coal mining accidents, CO2 production, cost of dependency on fossil fuels located in politically inconvenient locations, cost of wars needed to maintain access to these resources, displacement of people because of building hydropower dams, food prices influenced by biofuels, cost of manufacture of solar arrays (and the limited amount of gallium and indium available), name it and there are associated issues.

Compare the number of people displaced because of nuclear energy accidents with the number of people displaced by hydro dam constructions, number of people killed by coal and oil mining accidents with number of people killed by reactor mishaps, and we don't even need to start including wars in the cost comparisons to see that nuclear power with all its risks and drawbacks is still way ahead of the competitors in cost, safety and reliability.

Sorry...

That way you can turn even mining the metal and refining it into services. Even finding where in the ground the ore is is a sort of a service.

What is *not* a service?

If you are alone and lonely for too long, finding a real date can be pretty difficult. However if you look like you are in demand, even if it is completely fake (as long as only you know it), your "social score" goes up. It is called social proof and it is one of the more unfair facets of social psychology.

The service can quite well serve as a way of providing such social proof, giving its users a more fair chance in other interpersonal interactions.

If it is well-executed, it could work. If not, it can backfire catastrophically, though...

Violate copyrights and patents? WHO CARES? The big players are free to buy these laws. The small players should therefore be free to have technical means to ignore them (and get away with it, which is likely if you don't run a business with that), in order to maintain the power parity on the chessboard. Only that will maintain the balance in the world, and force the big players to give the people what the people want. It's a war, so let's leverage the principle of 4tg-gen warfare and become a distributed enemy, too numerous to track, too dangerous to piss off too much, too uncontrollable to control. And, most important, have fun doing so.

The only way to get the megacorps to give us what we want is to give them choice between doing so vs us taking it anyway. Would there be iTunes without Napster?

The plebs will not make much difference. For example they will happily buy a zoned DVD player, because they do not know and do not care (and that is unlikely to change). Only afterwards they will seek help of a friend, or a friend of a friend, to get the device "repaired".

Big deal. So take a few years developing homemade microprobing systems. Quarter-watt lasers are in every DVD writer, electromagnetic lens actuators in DVDs routinely achieve submicrometer accuracy... Amazing things can be done if we don't consider them impossible.

I wouldn't be surprised if in couple years a microprobing kit is being sold on seeedstudio or sparkfun.

So go after the very principles and make the playing field equal. Few years ago SMD would be an obstacle. Few years before then, programmable chips would be an obstacle. Few years in the future, everything-on-a-chip will not be an obstacle.

Hack the planet. It's ours anyway, so let's take it back.

Along the same line of reasoning, at the moment I buy a device, I am free to choose to reverse-engineer it and publish the findings. Everything can be made open-source, every device is its own documentation. The art of reverse-engineering is the knowledge how to read that documentation.

Full and total agreement here! :)

Assuming the point-of-purchase does not log the IDs of the notes involved in the transaction. Which is pretty much possible, but one has to be aware of that possibility.

For plausible deniability, keep a stack of cash. After getting a banknote from a trackable source that can associate it with your identity, keep the note away for a week, a month, or any other amount of time you are comfortable with (and can afford). Then the time window between you accepting the note and the note being intercepted after being spent is large enough to permit significant doubts about its continued association to you.

Many of the first responders and direct participants died from beta burns, shallow large-area skin burns comparable to thermal burns.

I visited the place in 2006. With a DRSB-01 Geiger counter, modified to output the data to a GPS-equipped datalogger. The radiation level in the Chernobyl village itself was roughly the same as in Kiev. It got a bit worse in The Zone, a bit more worse in the inner zone, and the Geiger sang a merry song in the very vicinity of the Sarcophagus. But even then the radiation level was fairly low. (Sorry, I don't have other numbers than count-per-minute records from the Geiger; it was not calibrated.)

The short-halflife isotopes are decayed by now, the long-halflife ones aren't active enough to pose much risk. The principial radioisotopes in the area are Sr-90 and Cs-137, the latter comprising the majority. While Sr-90 accumulates in bones and presents some long-term hazard, caesium behaves like potassium, accumulates in muscles, and its biological half-time counts in weeks; you will literally piss it out in few months. And you won't get much into you anyway, as it is by now virtually all bound to soil particles or to solids in the biosphere; assuming you won't lick your boots, eat the dirt, or ingest the local mushrooms.

We even got to see the Red Forest. The roads themselves are pretty much decontaminated; but even off-road the radiation levels aren't catastrophical. A day won't hurt you.

I wore a thermoluminescence dosimeter, just for sure. After a day in The Zone, the total dose I got was still below the limit of the device's resolution.

It's a nice place to visit. And it's peaceful, as all the cowards, anonymous or not, go somewhere else instead.