The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.

While I'm in no position to buy from Monsanto, and don't know enough to advocate for or against them, the troubling impression I have of them is their business practices. This is why I had a quick look through that contract analysis.

It reminded me of something I am familiar with: software. You often have clauses that prohibit analysis or reverse engineering of software. Like the farmer doing the Monsanto contract analysis I [almost always] have no interest in doing that reverse engineering, but I definitely want others to be able to so they can look for things like security holes.

Having the attitude of 'this contract is fine because it doesn't restrict me from anything I want or would expect to do' is completely understandable, but can hide some of the real issues.

I love the Kurzgesagt videos, and again here they impress me by mentioning the issues with these companies, while completely separating it from the issue being analysed.

This was way, way more entertaining than I expected it to be.

You can kind of reverse engineer how the game is deriving the answers from player input. Kinda makes me want to muck with it myself, but not really.

BTW, this is SNES, not NES.

Blast from the past, I miss my VIC-20. I learned to program in BASIC on it, that 3.5K of RAM was painful. So you gave variables one or two-letter names and borrowed the screen memory when you didn't have to display anything.

My teacher at the time despised BASIC and told me to learn Pascal. I finally understood his contempt when my first computer job involved reverse-engineering somebody's BASIC spaghetti code on a Kaypro computer.

Reverse engineering the Linotron 202 fonts at Bell Labs has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System has been added as a related post - related requested by oritteropo.

I was actually wondering if anyone else had heard of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson... this video is going to be more interesting to people with a comp sci background (or at least a Unix or linux background).

These are the guys from Bell Labs who used a spare minicomputer to write an operating system and a sort of word processor or computerised publishing system in the 70s, before you could just buy a word processor.

The system had some interesting features, like being more portable than was normal of operating systems before it (the subject of this video) and its habit of treating every file as a text file (previous operating systems tended to treat a text file as different to a database file as different to a video file for instance).

I'm sure there are videos around here somewhere that explain it.... I know computerphile had another interview about the typesetting part:

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Reverse-engineering-the-Linotron-202-fonts-at-Bell-Labs

I haven't watched this video on Unix, but it's very likely *related=http://videosift.com/video/AT-T-Archives-The-UNIX-Operating-System too.

So if someone is gonna make a simulation of the universe..

It would likely be some Fermi Lab scientist who wanted to study the Big Bang.

They would reverse engineer the expansion of the universe as much as possible..

[ a thing that's already been done and being tweaked to get even better Planck length "resolution", as it were ]

And once they got the best estimations..

Would dump all those rules and variables into a quantum computer and run sim after sim, checking to see WHAT HAPPENS AT THE END!

Much like The Game of Life sim developed by mathematician John Conway.

Also assuming this is on another planet (pretty sure that even our primitive 21st century tech would notice something that size on earth): in just over 100 years, we traveled to another world (without FTL), found this creature, and reverse engineered it to create FTL?

Retailer strong-arming: So what? Movie studios do this to theaters all the time. So what if Best Buy only sells Apple -- in essence becomes an Apple store -- like all the other exclusive Apple stores? There will still be many willing and able competitors who will employ their entrepreneurial savvy by seeing the market need in selling non-apple tablets and make good money fulfilling that need that Best Buy may have (stupidly) stopped serving.

I repeat: Natural monopolies don't exist. And if they come about, they end up very short-lived because the world is full of competitors and competitor-wannabe's who will rush to fill any perceived market needs.

Misinformation: You find your trusted sources. The government is not one of them, I assure you. I, for example, trust way more the "Non-GMO Project" or the "Berkeley Ecology Center" far more than I would trust any (former-lobbyist/government kleptocrat) FDA-crony. Both of these (and many other) non-governmental organizations would still exist without government and in fact would be able to do more without government limiting what they can study or not about the products they inspect.

Patents: No, nothing good will ever come out of patents. If you want I will point you to countless articles I've read which show this to be the case.

New Technology: You're discounting reverse engineering? Why? If what you claim was so, then innovators would not even bother to patent, because then they could keep the technology "secret" forever. Clearly this isn't so. But, they get patents because they know of reverse engineering and other ways that the technology would be copied if they don't get a patent. In fact, right now, they can keep it "secret" by not getting patent. For example, Coca Cola does not have a patent on its secret formula for that very reason. Look it up.

The marginal utility of R&D: This is the standard old argument for patents. But you can find creative ways to make the inventions pay off. Did the music industry disappear because of piracy? No, it is making record profits, actually! Some companies would not be as mega wealthy, perhaps. Bill Gates would still be mega rich, but maybe not as rich as he is now. But, here you are complaining about extreme "inequality" while supporting the very structures which generate it.

Ignorance may be bliss -- but thankfully, we don't all have to be as ignorant as the least informed among us.

All markets are free at inception, and no markets are free in practice. Why do you think this is?

A few ways to suppress competition, off the top of my head?
Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof strongarms retailers into not carrying competitors products.

Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof pays off widget manufacturers to not provide widgets to competitors.

Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof simply buys and buries competitors, disruptive technologies, whatever.

Free market with patents (antithetical concepts?): Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof refuses to license patents to competitors.

Free market without patents (this has too many problems to enumerate, but just picking one): Espionage. R&D is squandered when a competitor steals your trade secrets/reverse engineers your products, sells it for a pittance.

Price dumping. Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof with large cash reserves simply prices upstarts out of the market.

This list is just off the cuff, is by no means exhaustive, ignores other things like:

1) "Natural" monopolies (utilities, roads, railways, etc.)
2) Restriction of information/prevention of rational, informed consumers
a) Side note: In a free market, this is the only place you can go to for environmental protection, avoidance of the tragedy of the commons.

Edit: Okay, I may have overstated my case. Very small-scale interpersonal markets can be free. That farmer's market that's too small to attract the big guys, that's pretty free. There's a scale at which it collapses, though.

Is this what they built by reverse-engineering that U.S. drone they shot down?

There's an interesting arstechnica article on reverse engineering these engines:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

See also http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html

You know in part, I understand the companies point of view. Markups protect their software from reverse engineering, and also protect them from people who don't return equipment thinking they will just buy the box and not pay the rental on it. Also, you seem to think that the company is out to screw the customer, its not the case at all. I don't have to apologive to see the rational behind these actions, they make perfect sense and keep the resposibility on the customer for leased equipment. Also, as I said before this guy should not be paying anything himself because Geico should be covering this loss. This is another good reason not to forgive this fee, because it should reasonably be covered, thus neither the victim or the media company is bearing the burden.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^jmd:
#1 DVR's are always marked up higher then their raw components. It is the usual tax on having the convenience of the set top box.
#2 DVR with cable decoding hardware like this are generally constructed a bit better then off the shelf hardware thus adding to the cost. Also the cable decoder hardware itself is always expensive. The equipment is built to go through more then one customer in its life span.
#3 the dvr might have offered advanced features like whole house DVR (even in consumer Tivo boxs, this is big money) even if the user didn't pay for them.
The finance department doesn't go out of there way to gouge customers who have to pay for damaged hardware. Instead it is customers finding out that the finance departments are getting ripped off on the hardware they pay for.

Ok I have another question. What kind of fucking asshole defends a giant corporation like Verizon against the common man? In the war against these fucks, you apologists are first to go!

Reverse engineer that paper thin LCD money. The money made would make up for everything lost in the video.

I support this, though most people won't see their accomplishments. People need to go with the hype and at least it will bring most awareness to the Deep Web. 4chan is like some dork dada experiment - the deep dark web is deep, dark & stank. Complete anonymity is awesome when people are just & righteous, it unfortunately goes both ways though and there are plenty of Child Porn sites on the deep web that are fucking huge. More than likely your Republican senator or your priest at church are the gross fucks posting this shit.

I don't want Tor to be reverse engineered but I hope Anonymous can take down those sites and bring attention to Tor. You're either a political activist seeking refuge, a paranoid weirdo, buying drugs or uploading/downloading child porn. People should know.


Support anonymous, upvote this shit!