At roughly 35 miles high per TB... assuming no compression... My data reaches nicely past the Mesophere.. into Outer SPAAACCEEE ! Of course if those Gazillion punched cards got sucked into the jet stream, the resultant shade would blot out the sun and cause global cooling on a massive scale. Hmm...

Bingo. I can recall being in the research reactor at U Mo in Columbia in the early 1970's. People forget how accessible facilities were before 9/11 . Apparently we're so used to the Police State that we've created that it's pretty much taken for granted.

Which is a great pity. The less accessible cool research is for our children, the less interested our children will be in becoming cool researchers. Big Bang Theory and Mohawk Guy nonwithstanding.

A quite logical extension of such thinking. When it comes to liberty of thought, the road to Orwell's 1984 is paved with 'good ideas' gone wrong.

In the late 1970's I purchased a copy (paper) of "the Anarchist's Handbook". Why ? I was doing research for a story I was writing for a Creative Writing class in college. I already *knew* how to make explosives.. I was an Engineering student !

Criminalizing people for their knowledge would mean that pretty much every Engineer will end up in jail. Yeah... that will definitely not help a modern world.

Sung to the copyrighted tune of "Feed the Birds". Extra points for Julie Andrews class voices.....

(These lyrics are lovingly given away for free as a public service an are in the public domain by me, their author)

Early each day on the steps of the Courthouse
The little old lawyer comes
In his own special way to the people he calls
Come buy my bags full of briefs
Come sue the little birds
Show them your greed
And you be glad if you do
Their young ones are too fat
Their nests all need stripping
All it takes is a lawsuit from you---u

Sue the birds, a million a chirp
million, million, million a chirp

Sue the birds, that's what he cries
while overhead, bird guano fills the skies

All around the courthouse the judges and bailiffs
look down as he sells his wares
although you can't see it
you know they are frowning
each time someone shows his gre--ed

My wife works in Assisted Living. She's had many situations where residents have shown signs of mental or physical degradation because of medication interactions. Not because one doctor prescribed interacting drugs, but because separate doctors prescribed interacting medications. The multi-specialist medical industry assumes that the patient is a medical expert, and can keep track of their medications AND know the interactions. All responsibility is in the hands of the patient. And guess what ? Most of us did NOT get medical training.

So a central clearinghouse system that red flags things isn't a bad idea. Most health insurance companies do it now anyway.. why ? Because they'd rather not pay for medication issues.

There's of course a darker reason... finding people who are 'doctor shopping' to enable their abuse of prescription drugs. The more centralized data is, the easier it is for a well meaning government to abuse that data for some sort of control. So...

do you REALLY want all your medications to become a public record (because we all know governments stink at privacy and security) ?

A final aside... some patients need medications that interact. My wife takes two medications that potentially interact. She's been taking them for years. But suddenly she 'cannot' because there 'is a risk'. Automating this refusal would deny patients who depend on these interactions for survival. Coding medical procedures is always a bad idea, because there has to be an exception process that involves actual human beings.

Such' 'spyware' is rife in the Corporate world, but it's called "Document retention" and "monitoring for legal cases". Corporate smart phones, computers, etc. are all equipped with methods to record everything we do. Just because some shyster could possibly want to use it as an axe to such money from our company.

You *CAN* get a job in industry writing this kind of code. Seriously. It's out there.

What you've done would cause any professional IT group to get out the hot tar, feathers, and rail. Or at least come into your office and ask you politely to remove the damn server from their facility. And never do this again. You must have missed all the security briefings, the issues with HIPPA, and whatnot when you were looking at systems. What you've done is to create a 'rogue system'.

Imagine one of your kids sets up a server in your house. You don't understand it, you don't know if it's happily sniffing network traffic to steal passwords so pizza can be ordered using your credit cards, serving up pr0n, or just running minecraft. Would you willy nilly allow the kids to open a port on your firewall without the ability to audit what they're doing ?

Of course not.

Personally I'm amazed that they only asked for an account on your little server. I would have gone over and watched while you removed it from the facility and put in in your car.

I used a Mentor Graphics Apollo workstation from 1982 for PCB design, software development, word processing, etc. It multi-tasked... compiling, reading errors (I mean *features*) and correcting the code in another window was awesome coming from a DEC environment. Windowing, mouse, etc. I never understood what all the hubbub was about... switched directly to a Mac after I left that company.

Alas, the TSA will claim "That Aint' So" (And of course add.. Whut's yer name ? Yer on the Ain't Gonna Fly No More list, Boy !"

Every nail clipper and sharpened pencil that has been intercepted was a dangerous terrorist plot averted.

I'm sure some people will be offended, but gosh darn it.. any trained soldier will tell you that training to 'think like the enemy' is a good thing. It lets you anticipate him and kill him before he kills you. If the soldier's mom is offended, I'm sorry to hear about it, but it is distinctly possible that some of her son's squad may find their lives saved at a future date by playing simulations like this one.

I hope that someone takes her aside and explains that to her.

The Film "The Net".
SouthPark's Wacky Molestation Adventure...

etc. etc. etc.

The problem of course is the assumption of guilt, which is a complete reverse of normal American law (Innocent until Proven Guilty). I recall my Dad (Professor at a major University) got hit with a few 'sexual harassment' complaints. Fortunately he had good notes. In both cases the young lady had actually offered sexual favors in exchange for grades, and he turned them down. And they then claimed it was his idea. Meetings with the Dean, hassle, etc... He and my Mom laughed about it.
 

2002 Honda Civic and I use some limited hypermiling techniques. Stick shift helps. I don't shut off the engine, but I coast when possible. If everyone drove for mileage we'd see a national 10-20% increase in fuel efficiency. Want a national CAFE rating improvement? Offer classes in fuel efficient driving.

And drivers would be safer. Driving in a fuel efficient manner requires that you be much more aware of the road in front of you and your surroundings.

Most of us just speak one language to our families, customers, coworkers, and so forth. We occasionally speak another language at home, and I'm constantly throwing words in a couple of other languages at my kids to keep them inquisitive and build their minds.

But I will happily curse in Spanish, French, German, and a little bit of Russian. Of course when someone actually understands what I'm saying, it's an embarrassing situation.

And puhleeze..... programming languages are not Spoken languages. Unless you're using voice recognition.

The point is you lose energy over distance. Even a collimated beam experiences divergence and power loss. A tiny bit of known material accelerated to a sufficient speed will not experience distance power loss in vacuum, except through collision with micrometeorites and interplanetary gases. Hence my recommendation.

It's been almost 20 years since I worked with Ground Based Free Electron Laser beam directors for the SDI project (see Starfire Lab if you want to see one), but it's a very real issue. Have you noted that railgun research is just as active as directed energy research ? Yup. There's a reason for that. Of course railgun projectiles in atmosphere have their own issues.