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.

Won't work. The hardware is not really that specialized (a couple stepper motors, a few motor drivers which can be done from basic parts, some electronics that can be built around Arduino-class chips... If anybody tries some funny business, all they manage to achieve is getting more gray-economy business to cash-strapped engineering students able to assemble the stuff together.

The hardest-hit industry will probably be toys. Fear for your life, Mattel!

Easier. ATA specs support Host Protected Area. Set it properly and you can store data in there, without it being easily visible. Another trick of ATA specs is the password; the disk itself can be set inaccessible. (I assume it can be broken through in a lab easily, but I don't think a customs drone will be able to do anything with that.) As a cover story, claim the disk is damaged and you are hired to find if you can recover the data.

The fun described in the parent post can be also implemented by altering the drive's firmware. An open-source disk drive, now *that* would be a fun thing to have!

Anocracy? Does it mean "government by assholes"? It'd describe current geopolitical systems pretty accurately...

True. However also remember there are subjects with strong interest on the upkeep of the tension in the region. Also remember previous incidents with official explanations, from the Tonkin Gulf to the battleship Maine.

You mean this torpedo incident? You may like to check the Chinese and Russian versions of the analysis. The version you seem to consider correct is about as watertight as Cheonan during her final minutes.

Also, detonating a spherical-implosion nuke is quite a dark art. Accidental explosion will be everything but symmetrical, and the yield will be a fizzle at best and most likely the event will result merely in localized plutonium dispersal.

The more modern two-point low-yield elliptical-pit designs are potentially more dangerous; they have to be specifically designed to fizzle at asymmetrical detonation, to prevent accidental higher-yield energy release. As they typically have just two detonators at the opposite end of the ellipsoid, and the shock wave is self-shaping towards the center, the risk is higher there. Some zero-yield to low-yield tests were done just before the test ban in order to make sure this safety measure is working (in some cases it did not). As pretty much all contemporary designs are boosted, I assume the stronglink/weaklink scheme incorporates also a breakdown of the primary-secondary coupling system under accident conditions (e.g. exposition to fire), limiting the yield to at worst just few kilotons of the primary (and likely way less than that due to the suboptimal compression symmetry even in case of detonation of the primary stage explosive).