IANAL, but you might be arrested for a crime of brandishing a firearm:
1) One who brandishes a firearm, whether loaded or unloaded, in a
rude, angry, or threatening manner or uses any firearm
unlawfully in a fight is guilty of a misdemeanor. This action
is a felony if it takes place on the grounds of any day care
center or in the immediate presence of a peace officer. (Penal
Code section 417.)
The "threatening manner" is hard to prove if you are armed on a hunt, and trivially easy to prove if you are armed on campus (where usually weapons are banned, except the police.) And once a police officer approaches you this instantly becomes a felony.
When law enforcement officers start punishing, torturing or inflicting unnecessary bodily harm, they are no longer upholding the law, they are breaking and should be prosecuted.
Yes, they should. But as you saw in the recent incident, the system failed in many places simultaneously. If a senator is silently observing an act of torture of a citizen, and later comments that it's a police matter, below his "beautiful mind" to pay any attention to, then that's where the problem begins. Don't you think that if a US Senator wanted he could stop the police abuse with one word? He could - and he didn't. That's the fundamental problem here. Everything else is just technicalities, since being microwaved alive is just as wrong as being electrocuted, or as being attacked with chemical weapons.
Let me know when your friends manage to transmit at 100GHz at 2KW DC input!
Hey, if you are working with microwave stuff you should know that it's not a problem for a 100 GHz device to consume 2 kW DC:-) You might also get a few milliwatts of RF into the antenna, but that's just a side note:-) [MMIC, love them *and* hate them:-]
Yes a civilian 45 KW generator is a moderately sized package, but we are talking about a military system
A crowd control system does not need to be of a military style. Military hardware is designed to function on its own far away from support bases, and be serviced by soldiers with only basic education. Police systems do not go more than a few miles from the base, not going to be air{lifted,dropped}, won't see temperature extremes of deserts and arctic, and qualified technicians are available.
and don't forget that you have to have a dual oiling systems so the oil can be changed without shutting down the generator engine
There is no need to do that, the ray gun would be used for minutes, not for weeks. You are approaching this from design positions of a backup diesel generator of a military communications facility. This gizmo is nowhere close to that.
there could always be a nuke going off
Then there is no need to zap anyone with this toy - the people would be already thoroughly zapped with the gamma rays. We are talking about civil disturbance in a city, not a war with a nuclear superpower!
why would they sell a $5.00 dish when they can sell a $10,000.00 electronically steered phased array emitter?
It's cool, that's why:-) Besides, no moving parts - good for reliability. Also, nobody sees where you are pointing it (though a radome would take care of that as well.) Mere $10K is not an issue, trucks with those weapons will be purchased by the government[s] and distributed to police just as candy. Politicians will be at each other's throats to get a piece of the action.
I think you are also under-estimating the engineering required to generate the a 95 GHz signal at the required power-density
Well, it had been engineered already, however complex it might be. I personally stay away from any signals that are above a few GHz. That work requires a completely different mindset. But I know people who are obsessed with anything between 10 and 110 GHz, and some do very well in this.
yeah I'll just drive up in my stealth-mode Hummer, fire up the 45KW Deisel Generator and point the emmiter for the 95GHz milimeter wave transmitter that's the size of a plasma TV and hose down the crowd with pain rays and leave without anybody noticing!
As a reference, your 45 kW is just about 64 HP, and any contractor's white van is large enough to house all the equipment, and the engine is powerful enough to feed the generator until the gas tank runs dry. But if you consider that the police can use far larger trucks (with water cannons etc.) the whole question of technical constraints is moot.
In terms of precision, 100 GHz is high, which means that a small antenna can have the main beam not wider than a couple of degrees. You don't even need that high a precision. If you don't want to zap TV people... don't aim at them. Besides, your goal (as a police zapper) is not to annoy people but to control people - those are two different goals. So you zap some people but not the other, and they run where you want them to be. You don't want to do the Blackwater incident in Times Square, people should always have an escape route. If they don't have any escape they are highly likely to attack you, close and personal; then you only need to kill them all, in self-defense, regardless of how many thousands of them there are.
Ok, let's forbid dumb people to buy games, cars, homes, or even food. Let's then go back to our gated communities and relax with a glass of cold milk. But what is there, on the horizon? Fires, fires all over the place, and some peasants seemingly with pitchforks are running amok!
Fact is that there are many dumb people in general, and they need to be happy just as much as any smarter person. But there is another fact - people are usually smart in one aspect and dumb in another. You can find this pattern in many geniuses. I am good at math and physics, but I can't paint, sing or play music, or explain touchy-feely literature (the latter I can't even read.) I am a good draftsman, 2D or 3D, but if you put an apple in front of me I can't paint it even if my life depends on it. So am I dumb or smart? And if I have D for singing, what do you think I should do to fix that - get born again, with a new set of genes?
Good grades may also show that you have some easy life in a lousy school, playing with basic arithmetics. Bad grades may also show that your parents sent you to the best, and toughest school they could find, and the poor grade is because it took you longer than 30 seconds to propose how to calculate a volume of a starfish [that would be an integral or two.] Bad grades may also indicate that you are disabled and can't learn as fast as others. The last case is very serious, and if he refused any sale to a disabled kid he could be sued to oblivion.
The question wasn't about marriage, but the implication of premarital sex.
And here lies the problem - what makes the pharmacist think that the customer would use the drug herself, as opposed to, say, buying the pills for her married friend? Or for herself because she is getting married tomorrow? Who are you [the pharmacist] to even ask those questions?
The only problem I see is that it wasn't his company, and wasn't his place to set policy.
Absolutely right; otherwise you are perfectly free to open a store and not to sell anything to anyone. Or not to sell certain products to anyone.
However things become far more foggy when the owner (or a hired employee) selectively sells a product to one class of people but not to some other class of people. The law currently sets only a few products aside that may be sold this way, and those are controlled substances (drugs, alcohol, tobacco, explosives, some explicitly named firearms etc.)
But outside of this well-defined group of products nobody can refuse sale to some customers but not to others; for example, if you are a shop owner you may not sell to whites and to refuse to sell to blacks (or to children, except as the law specially mentions.)
So the pharmacy owner was perfectly in his right to not sell tobacco to anyone. But it would be highly illegal, though IANAL, to for example sell tobacco to men and refuse to sell to women, even if his personal experience tells him where the danger lies. He may not discriminate.
He was reserving his right to refuse business to anyone.
To be exact, the company reserved that right, and the store manager, acting as an agent of the company, abused that right. Makes plenty of sense to suspend him because it is not in company's interests to involve themselves in parenting or education, over the heads of parents and teachers who actually work with the child. By applying his own (and totally uncommon) standards he damaged the name of the business.
An analogy could be used here. You walk into the bakery and ask for a loaf of bread. The baker says "Bread is bad for you, as I can see with my experienced eye, so get out of here until you lose some weight." That would be the last time I go there just because it not baker's place to refuse sale on such capricious grounds; even accusations of discrimination could follow - people get certain rights when they are born (or even earlier, as some say.)
It will matter if the laptops are produced in the US
Even expensive laptops are not produced in the US, and the reason is costs. In the USA it would cost you $100 per laptop to just power it up, check that it works, and put it into a box. I seriously doubt that you could squeeze into this price the large amount of manual labor that assembly of notebooks typically requires. Anyone who opened a notebook knows how complicated these things are, because they are so densely packed, and you can't really automate most of the assembly steps because they require human hands and vision and touch (like the tiny Molex connectors which must be installed with tweezers.) It's best, cost-wise, if these laptops never even come close to the USA.
More importantly here RIAA asked for a default judgement - such as one without the defendant and without the trial. Such a judgement requires some proof that something bad happened and the accused did it. For example if you don't challenge the traffic cop's accusation of speeding and don't show up in court then you will be pronounced guilty by default, just on the word of the police. But there is no state-regulated police here, just a page of mp3 songs and a single IP address, and a date in 2005. The IP address says nothing about who it belongs to, and there is no testimony to that effect (or any paper to connect the defendant to the IP address.) So there is simply no case, and the judge could not convict anyone (by deafult or not) just because the plaintiff says he is guilty but can't prove it.
The judge gave the plaintiffs 30 days to redo the complaint, but considering that it took them two years to come up with this abomination there is a good chance that they will let this case go. There is another reason to not refile - the judge made it known that he does not genuflect in front of the big business. He might be even honest, o horror of horrors! Much better to go and chase someone else.
I use AutoCAD and it does not require a dongle. It locks the installation to the hardware id of the computer, which is a complex sum of various serial numbers that the computer has (the AutoCAD software itself, then the m/board, the BIOS, the CPU, the MAC address etc.) - just like Windows itself does.
However the software requires registration with Autodesk once installed, and that serial number is sent to the registration server. The server has the opportunity to decline the registration if a given copy of AutoCAD (s/n xxx-xxxxxx) is already in use somewhere. The license can be moved between computers, but I do not know if it can be released.
In any case, it seems that if the software installs and can be registered with Autodesk then it is legit. And probably that's the case, since nobody can sell broken stuff for seven years. There are plenty of unsold old copies of Autodesk software, and it often works better than the last year's Vista lookalike.
People measure their mass, which just happens to be proportional to their weight at any given point in space. The proof of that is in the units that they get their readings in. Newton and gram are SI units of force and mass. There is no contradiction.
I think (though IANAL) this is exactly why lawyers are reluctant to put their clients on the stand. They most definitely will be asked inconvenient questions. If Joe did in fact download the music then it's in his interest to stay away from the fight and let his lawyer to do the work - such as to attack the accusation, prove that Joe couldn't do it, and so on. But Joe can't be compelled to testify against himself.
If you look at the original complaint you will see that there is no link to the defendant, and no proof that the list of a few MP3 files is real, was captured in a reliable way, or links to any specific computer at all. Basically, the question is where did the name of the defendant come from? The complaint, as is, is no better than just a randomly generated letter that accuses citizen $foo of infringement $bar, where $foo is assigned from a phone book and $bar is assigned from top music charts, with no proof at all.
Yes, my reply was misleading - I replied to someone who asked about private keys, and I immediately expanded those to OTPs. An OTP is a special case of a private key, and indeed it is not vulnerable to cryptanalysis. But a private key, being a limited size entity, is applied to multiple blocks of plaintext, and as result it is possible (in theory) to pick a 128- or 256-bit key that decrypts all those blocks into something that you can recognize as plaintext. Which might be a text, or an image, or a ZIP archive with all its unique tags and blocks, etc. etc. However once you peel the outer layer, the inner payload is probably more vulnerable if it is even encrypted; its head might be just XORed with its tail to randomize the plaintext, but that's no encryption.
I can agree with you and with dunkelfalke that the "rod" root is also part of words meaning "to be born" (rodit'cya is modern; "porodit'" or "urodit'sya" are older, and "rozhdestvo" (Christmas) is probably one of the oldest.)
However I feel no links between "Rodina" and {"motherland","mother Russia"}. The expression "mother Russia" stands on its own, and I probably can trace it back to 1700's. The word "motherland" does not even have a back-translation to Russian - none that I can think of, at least, that would be different from "mother Russia", and the latter is rarely used. It may have sense for western journalists to stick to a familiar, easy term for their [western] audiences, but such usage has no effect on the original word.
IMO, not directly affected. One-time pads are still useful.
The only catch might exist if there is an algorithm for a quantum computer to find a [secret, shared] key that produces a plaintext in a human language. That's probably the only way to break the OTP (aside from stealing the key.) However this is also easy to obscure - roughly speaking, create a ZIP file and apply a OTP to it. If the OTP's plaintext is not recognizable as such there is no way to accept the key and start working on the second layer of encryption.
Mozhno skazat' "Rodina" (you could say "Rodina") but the word does not really mean "motherland". The word "Rodina" shares the root with "rod" (clan, family group) and "roditel'" (parent.) Considering the latter possibility, the patriarchal nature of the society (starting from the earliest Slavic founders) tells us that the parent here means "father", and not "mother". The gender (feminine) of the word itself does not seem to reflect motherhood; it's more likely to be derived from generally feminine names of land areas. So "Rodina" could be interpreted as "land of my clan", but I do not have much basis for this conclusion - the word is pretty old and I am not a linguist.
Slashdot Mirror
(copied from here)
The "threatening manner" is hard to prove if you are armed on a hunt, and trivially easy to prove if you are armed on campus (where usually weapons are banned, except the police.) And once a police officer approaches you this instantly becomes a felony.
Yes, they should. But as you saw in the recent incident, the system failed in many places simultaneously. If a senator is silently observing an act of torture of a citizen, and later comments that it's a police matter, below his "beautiful mind" to pay any attention to, then that's where the problem begins. Don't you think that if a US Senator wanted he could stop the police abuse with one word? He could - and he didn't. That's the fundamental problem here. Everything else is just technicalities, since being microwaved alive is just as wrong as being electrocuted, or as being attacked with chemical weapons.
Hey, if you are working with microwave stuff you should know that it's not a problem for a 100 GHz device to consume 2 kW DC :-) You might also get a few milliwatts of RF into the antenna, but that's just a side note :-) [MMIC, love them *and* hate them :-]
A crowd control system does not need to be of a military style. Military hardware is designed to function on its own far away from support bases, and be serviced by soldiers with only basic education. Police systems do not go more than a few miles from the base, not going to be air{lifted,dropped}, won't see temperature extremes of deserts and arctic, and qualified technicians are available.
and don't forget that you have to have a dual oiling systems so the oil can be changed without shutting down the generator engine
There is no need to do that, the ray gun would be used for minutes, not for weeks. You are approaching this from design positions of a backup diesel generator of a military communications facility. This gizmo is nowhere close to that.
there could always be a nuke going off
Then there is no need to zap anyone with this toy - the people would be already thoroughly zapped with the gamma rays. We are talking about civil disturbance in a city, not a war with a nuclear superpower!
why would they sell a $5.00 dish when they can sell a $10,000.00 electronically steered phased array emitter?
It's cool, that's why :-) Besides, no moving parts - good for reliability. Also, nobody sees where you are pointing it (though a radome would take care of that as well.) Mere $10K is not an issue, trucks with those weapons will be purchased by the government[s] and distributed to police just as candy. Politicians will be at each other's throats to get a piece of the action.
I think you are also under-estimating the engineering required to generate the a 95 GHz signal at the required power-density
Well, it had been engineered already, however complex it might be. I personally stay away from any signals that are above a few GHz. That work requires a completely different mindset. But I know people who are obsessed with anything between 10 and 110 GHz, and some do very well in this.
As a reference, your 45 kW is just about 64 HP, and any contractor's white van is large enough to house all the equipment, and the engine is powerful enough to feed the generator until the gas tank runs dry. But if you consider that the police can use far larger trucks (with water cannons etc.) the whole question of technical constraints is moot.
In terms of precision, 100 GHz is high, which means that a small antenna can have the main beam not wider than a couple of degrees. You don't even need that high a precision. If you don't want to zap TV people ... don't aim at them. Besides, your goal (as a police zapper) is not to annoy people but to control people - those are two different goals. So you zap some people but not the other, and they run where you want them to be. You don't want to do the Blackwater incident in Times Square, people should always have an escape route. If they don't have any escape they are highly likely to attack you, close and personal; then you only need to kill them all, in self-defense, regardless of how many thousands of them there are.
Fact is that there are many dumb people in general, and they need to be happy just as much as any smarter person. But there is another fact - people are usually smart in one aspect and dumb in another. You can find this pattern in many geniuses. I am good at math and physics, but I can't paint, sing or play music, or explain touchy-feely literature (the latter I can't even read.) I am a good draftsman, 2D or 3D, but if you put an apple in front of me I can't paint it even if my life depends on it. So am I dumb or smart? And if I have D for singing, what do you think I should do to fix that - get born again, with a new set of genes?
Good grades may also show that you have some easy life in a lousy school, playing with basic arithmetics. Bad grades may also show that your parents sent you to the best, and toughest school they could find, and the poor grade is because it took you longer than 30 seconds to propose how to calculate a volume of a starfish [that would be an integral or two.] Bad grades may also indicate that you are disabled and can't learn as fast as others. The last case is very serious, and if he refused any sale to a disabled kid he could be sued to oblivion.
Actually, the less the bosses say the less likely they are to be sued for wrongful dismissal.
And here lies the problem - what makes the pharmacist think that the customer would use the drug herself, as opposed to, say, buying the pills for her married friend? Or for herself because she is getting married tomorrow? Who are you [the pharmacist] to even ask those questions?
Absolutely right; otherwise you are perfectly free to open a store and not to sell anything to anyone. Or not to sell certain products to anyone.
However things become far more foggy when the owner (or a hired employee) selectively sells a product to one class of people but not to some other class of people. The law currently sets only a few products aside that may be sold this way, and those are controlled substances (drugs, alcohol, tobacco, explosives, some explicitly named firearms etc.)
But outside of this well-defined group of products nobody can refuse sale to some customers but not to others; for example, if you are a shop owner you may not sell to whites and to refuse to sell to blacks (or to children, except as the law specially mentions.)
So the pharmacy owner was perfectly in his right to not sell tobacco to anyone. But it would be highly illegal, though IANAL, to for example sell tobacco to men and refuse to sell to women, even if his personal experience tells him where the danger lies. He may not discriminate.
To be exact, the company reserved that right, and the store manager, acting as an agent of the company, abused that right. Makes plenty of sense to suspend him because it is not in company's interests to involve themselves in parenting or education, over the heads of parents and teachers who actually work with the child. By applying his own (and totally uncommon) standards he damaged the name of the business.
An analogy could be used here. You walk into the bakery and ask for a loaf of bread. The baker says "Bread is bad for you, as I can see with my experienced eye, so get out of here until you lose some weight." That would be the last time I go there just because it not baker's place to refuse sale on such capricious grounds; even accusations of discrimination could follow - people get certain rights when they are born (or even earlier, as some say.)
Even expensive laptops are not produced in the US, and the reason is costs. In the USA it would cost you $100 per laptop to just power it up, check that it works, and put it into a box. I seriously doubt that you could squeeze into this price the large amount of manual labor that assembly of notebooks typically requires. Anyone who opened a notebook knows how complicated these things are, because they are so densely packed, and you can't really automate most of the assembly steps because they require human hands and vision and touch (like the tiny Molex connectors which must be installed with tweezers.) It's best, cost-wise, if these laptops never even come close to the USA.
That is unfortunate indeed. We'll see if the amended complaint has more facts in it...
Twice the average speed if you want constant acceleration.
The judge gave the plaintiffs 30 days to redo the complaint, but considering that it took them two years to come up with this abomination there is a good chance that they will let this case go. There is another reason to not refile - the judge made it known that he does not genuflect in front of the big business. He might be even honest, o horror of horrors! Much better to go and chase someone else.
However the software requires registration with Autodesk once installed, and that serial number is sent to the registration server. The server has the opportunity to decline the registration if a given copy of AutoCAD (s/n xxx-xxxxxx) is already in use somewhere. The license can be moved between computers, but I do not know if it can be released.
In any case, it seems that if the software installs and can be registered with Autodesk then it is legit. And probably that's the case, since nobody can sell broken stuff for seven years. There are plenty of unsold old copies of Autodesk software, and it often works better than the last year's Vista lookalike.
Keep dreaming ...
People measure their mass, which just happens to be proportional to their weight at any given point in space. The proof of that is in the units that they get their readings in. Newton and gram are SI units of force and mass. There is no contradiction.
Velikaya otechestvennaya voyna, not bolshaya. "Great Patriotic War" is the official translation to English.
I think (though IANAL) this is exactly why lawyers are reluctant to put their clients on the stand. They most definitely will be asked inconvenient questions. If Joe did in fact download the music then it's in his interest to stay away from the fight and let his lawyer to do the work - such as to attack the accusation, prove that Joe couldn't do it, and so on. But Joe can't be compelled to testify against himself.
If you look at the original complaint you will see that there is no link to the defendant, and no proof that the list of a few MP3 files is real, was captured in a reliable way, or links to any specific computer at all. Basically, the question is where did the name of the defendant come from? The complaint, as is, is no better than just a randomly generated letter that accuses citizen $foo of infringement $bar, where $foo is assigned from a phone book and $bar is assigned from top music charts, with no proof at all.
Yes, my reply was misleading - I replied to someone who asked about private keys, and I immediately expanded those to OTPs. An OTP is a special case of a private key, and indeed it is not vulnerable to cryptanalysis. But a private key, being a limited size entity, is applied to multiple blocks of plaintext, and as result it is possible (in theory) to pick a 128- or 256-bit key that decrypts all those blocks into something that you can recognize as plaintext. Which might be a text, or an image, or a ZIP archive with all its unique tags and blocks, etc. etc. However once you peel the outer layer, the inner payload is probably more vulnerable if it is even encrypted; its head might be just XORed with its tail to randomize the plaintext, but that's no encryption.
However I feel no links between "Rodina" and {"motherland","mother Russia"}. The expression "mother Russia" stands on its own, and I probably can trace it back to 1700's. The word "motherland" does not even have a back-translation to Russian - none that I can think of, at least, that would be different from "mother Russia", and the latter is rarely used. It may have sense for western journalists to stick to a familiar, easy term for their [western] audiences, but such usage has no effect on the original word.
The only catch might exist if there is an algorithm for a quantum computer to find a [secret, shared] key that produces a plaintext in a human language. That's probably the only way to break the OTP (aside from stealing the key.) However this is also easy to obscure - roughly speaking, create a ZIP file and apply a OTP to it. If the OTP's plaintext is not recognizable as such there is no way to accept the key and start working on the second layer of encryption.
Mozhno skazat' "Rodina" (you could say "Rodina") but the word does not really mean "motherland". The word "Rodina" shares the root with "rod" (clan, family group) and "roditel'" (parent.) Considering the latter possibility, the patriarchal nature of the society (starting from the earliest Slavic founders) tells us that the parent here means "father", and not "mother". The gender (feminine) of the word itself does not seem to reflect motherhood; it's more likely to be derived from generally feminine names of land areas. So "Rodina" could be interpreted as "land of my clan", but I do not have much basis for this conclusion - the word is pretty old and I am not a linguist.