The fighting back was always happening, done by individual rebels or by tiny groups of conspirators. A better question to ask is how many of the citizens, percentage-wise, have joined your fight.
Set an industry cut-off date to blackball all specialists, technicians and contractors working in these agencies from future employment in the wider commercial IT world.
I'm amazed at the power that you have over "the wider commercial IT world." But even if it is true, and if your mind control lasers in LEO are able to force all companies in the USA (or worldwide) to refuse employment to the class that is selected by you... don't you think that you'd be committing an even larger violation of human rights? Or, perhaps, "it's OK if *we* do it?"
People work for the government for several reasons; the honest desire to violate rights of their countrymen is probably a driving force for a dozen or two. The rest work for the government because it's a job of the same kind as being a police officer, a soldier, a tax collector... should you, perhaps, blackball them too? Or anyone who ever worked for any government that someone labels as oppressive?
If you want your government to behave, you should not lash out at the people at the lowest rungs of the ladder. They are not in control, and whatever you do to them they cannot change the rules. Furthermore, if you deny them employment elsewhere, they will have to stay with the government - no matter how unconstitutional their current orders might be. They wouldn't have an option to quit. The government would love to have workers who have nothing to lose. Mafia works long and hard to take newcomers past the point of no return.
If you want your government to change its ways you should start at the top - especially because the top bureaucrats are elected by you and other voters. "They don't vote for the right man," you say? Too bad - it's kind of a democracy. You need to convince voters that they shouldn't vote for liar A and instead they should vote for liar B. It's hard. But it's the only way, as long as you stick to democracy, If you do not, the strongest faction gets to install their candidate. It still may be not your faction.
THAT transaction fee. The one that is in practice necessary for anyone to pay attention to your transaction. Is there anyone in the world that owes you six confirmations of your transaction within ten minutes? Click on the link that I provided. You don't have to add a fee; and the miners don't have to service your request. It's not like they are a bank, with you as a customer. There is no contract. The rose-colored glasses are off; BTC is no longer a network of friends, and the miners are not doing it for fun - they are doing it for profit; why wouldn't they click a checkbox that says "increase my income?"
It is relevant for micropayments. They are small - from 1 cent to 10 cents, as theorized (they don't exist.) Since each BTC is large (1000 mBTC == USD$ 126) the micropayment in BTC will be between 0.1 and 1 mBTC.
Now that we established that, the transaction fee is 0.5 mBTC. It is not a percentage of the payment, it's a fixed fee. How much would you like to use a payment system that takes from 50% to 80% of your payment just for the privilege of using it? Most of your money will be spent on BTC network services. This is why BTC, as it is defined today, is not good for small payments. BTC is optimized for large payments that are rare. Billions of small payments will just flood the network, and it will slow down. The decentralized nature of BTC results in huge amount of network traffic, computations, and wasted energy.
Bitcoin is unusable for micropayments (as if anyone cares about those.) The reasons are simple. First, each BTC is very expensive (tens of US Dollars each.) Second, the fee for payment is pretty expensive. Mathematically it is small, 0.5 mBTC, but it is enormous when you want to send 1 mBTC (0.126 USD as of today.) In theory, small transactions (both in bytes and in BTC) shouldn't have the fee, but... the fee is charged anyhow.
One can rebuild the client without the fee, but then your transaction will take forever to be included into the block. Which means that it's still useless - you paid yer money but you've got nothing in return, until "the check clears."
If you bothered to pay attention to the trial it was pointed out that Zimmerman approached Martin with the gun in his hand hidden behind his back.
You must have watched a completely different trial:-) was it staged in an asylum for trolls?
A quick proof that your "theory" makes no sense. If you intend to shoot someone, you don't have to come within a fist strike range. If GZ wanted to kill TM, he'd do it from several yards away. In that case TM would be shot while standing, and no fight would occur.
Another proof: if you, the killer with a gun, are still careless enough to come close to the victim, AND instead of doing the job you engaged in a verbal confrontation, AND you got hit on the face... why, oh why you don't use that gun that you hold in your hand to kill the attacker before he pummels you senseless? The fistfight took about half a minute; multiple witnesses had time to come and see it, and GZ emerged quite bloody. That would make sense only if GZ did not have a gun in hand, and if he was reluctant to use it. In that case he would draw and fire only when he was close to being killed.
Besides, if you hold a gun in your hand and your opponent strikes you in the face, what will you naturally do? Answer: if you are ready to shoot, you shoot. If not, you try to protect yourself with BOTH hands. You'd throw the gun away at that point. (But of course a killer with a gun in hand would not do that.)
Martin was defending himself against Zimmerman's illegal stalking and confrontation. Period. [...] Zimmerman was the aggressor. Get it straight.
OK, let me get it straight. If, on one rainy evening, I find you looking at me once, and then walking in my general direction, you are giving me permission to attack you? Because, you know, I'm scared. So scared of you that I'm willing to start a fight with you. I hope it makes sense.
Even you would have acted the same had a strange man just appeared out of the dark, with a gun, and confronted you as you were walking home.
Yes, indeed, now I understand. I R a genius, after all. When I see a man with a gun the first thing I do is... no, I don't keep walking. That'd be as if some people are allowed to carry guns - like the police, for example. No, I don't call 911. That would be "acting white." No, I don't go home. That'd be accepting the disrespect. No Sir, I don't do any of that. You'd think a million years, and you'd still not realize what I, a Genius, would do seeing an armed man. I would hit him right in the face with my fist, and then I'd knock him down and try to kill him! Yes, that's what I'd do! Am I not a true Genius?
(BTW, this is a clear proof that TM did not know that GZ is armed.)
Otherwise you are just repeating other people's talking points that have been debunked a million times already.
an order from Iran to militants in Iraq to attack the U.S. Embassy
Mm hmm...
Mm hmm indeed. Short of that order being cryptographically signed with a private key that is known to be valid, and secure, and in sole possession of a specific Iranian official, how would anyone to know who was communicating with who? Anyone can call anyone else, say whatever they want, and that call will be carefully recorded and paraded in front of UN. That would be worth about nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if a mail server of some Iranian government office is rooted, so that a legitimately looking mail can be forged.
These days you can collect lots of actionable intelligence from communication mechanisms. However in virtually all cases you cannot prove anything with those intercepts. Perhaps a large data dump, with tens of thousands internally consistent messages that refer to known facts of the past, would be convincing. But a single message, from Alice to Bob, and with who knows how many Eves in between... it's not even funny.
a non-profit took pictures of a 'river of blood' outside a slaughterhouse that drained into a public waterway. Don't know how that ever came out.
Nothing should ever come out of it. You can drink that blood. Otherwise, if you are so concerned, you need to take care of all other life in that river first - and that life (land animals, birds, fishes, and plankton) not only bleeds into the water.
I found bad judgement in the actions of Martin and Zimmerman.
I agree, both of them failed to pick the safest possible path. GZ should have stayed in his truck, and he should have looked the other way. TM should have walked directly home. They haven't done that. However none of what they actually did - until the first blow landed - was illegal. They were not accused of walking the public streets; they were not accused of looking at people; they were not accused of talking to each other. All that is legal. (Well, GZ was actually accused of that because the DA wanted to hit him with crime of racism; but that was unfair, and it didn't work.)
Being not exceptionally careful is not a crime. You aren't careful if you choose to walk through a ghetto at midnight. But it's your right - and if you survive you won't be put on trial. All actions of GZ and TM were legal - until TM struck. That's when legality ended, and that's what got TM killed. TM would be killed just as well if he walked up to any stranger and hit him in the face. The preceding actions may have contributed to anger, or fear of disrespect, that TM seemingly had. But those actions are just as legal for them as for a man to follow a woman in a dark alley. They just go in the same direction. A woman may be scared; but legally it means nothing; she is not entitled to, for example, turning around and throwing a knife at the man. Trayvon may have been upset, but that gave him no special right to assault anyone. He held a phone in his hand all the time - he could have called 911 at any time if he had a genuine fear. He, an active football player, could have outrun pretty much anyone and be at home within seconds. There are many paths TM could have taken that don't include hitting people in the face and then trying to murder them.
Sarin is extremely deadly and not really a substance for haphazard manufacture or haphazard loading into munitions.
You are saying that the entire filthy rich state of Saudi Arabia cannot do what some small, underground sect in Japan was able to do a couple decades ago?
I suspect your society will be called "Ditch People A" by the later societies that are studying your remnants.
So what name, in your opinion, will future archeologists pick for our current society?
I'd rather prefer to live in civilization of ditch diggers rather than in civilization of idiots, liars, and moneychangers. Digging ditches, laying cables, building houses is honest work that improves the world. We need more workers of that sort, and fewer humanitarians who aren't philosophers; they are just people with irrelevant degrees in irrelevant sciences who pretend that they are needed in the society. (They aren't.)
I bet that if such a backdoor was discovered by China or Russia, that they'd use it as a propaganda weapon and we'd thus know about it.
It would be more realistic to expect them to use the backdoor to their advantage, while it lasts.
Some backdoors are very hard to detect because there is no obvious bug or a backdoor in any one place; with the size of the code base as it is, who would be crawling through the source of some USB driver that works just fine? As a crude example:
static int a[MAX_LENGTH];
void ioctl_handler(int i, int d) {
int *p = &a[0] + GetOffset(i, MAX_LENGTH);
*p = d;
}
There is no bug here. Now, elsewhere:
int GetOffset(int i, int len) { return (i < len?) i : (len-1); }
Welcome to poking any RAM location of your choice (limited only by sizeof(int).)
It was, but is becoming less so. Would you feel entirely comfortable steering your kids towards a shrinking field?
Automation reduces the need in workers across the board. However there are only few key areas, such as engineering and medicine, that are directly contributing to survival. They are also hard to learn, as opposed to basic agriculture and animal husbandry. None of that applies to less study-intensive and less IQ-demanding jobs. Some jobs are equally hard (a trader?) but they have no future. Even today computers are better traders than humans; people only formulate strategies to execute - and a firm needs far fewer of those.
Of course, not all engineering is the same, and it is not uniformly valuable across all civilizations. But if we start now and look 100 years ahead, engineers, doctors and scientists are pretty much the only workers who cannot be easily replaced by robots. Scientists have more remote contribution to wealth of the society, but physicists and chemists are certainly the most useful ones; the linguists who specialize in dead languages are probably the least useful. I can't say they are entirely worthless, since it may be that Mayans wrote down the exact location where their gods left their spaceship (so that we can dig it up.) But outside of that, knowledge of the past is appealing only to a few, and primarily as entertainment. One could write a SciFi book with smaller expense of money. (Well, I'm not pointing fingers at certain Holy Books. But the connection is obvious.)
I am not an expert historian, and I feel no need to study minor events of the past to know how I should act tomorrow. I only need to know major events. Someone has to do that digest for me. But how many historians the entire world needs? They aren't making any more major events of the past. The work area is limited, and it is expanding only by new digs - which are rare, and slow, and not very informative. Perhaps when someone discovers for sure how the pyramids were built that becomes another important fact of history to know. But for now they are living in their own world. The society finances science because it may be profitable one day. But as the article says, the society's grants are finite. If I could, I'd be glad to cancel social assistance to all able-bodied people and send the money to science. But that's not possible. The "useless eaters" are consuming money that could be used to discover secrets of FTL. At the same time, so many ditches are not dug yet that could hold so many fiber cables to every house! Unfortunately, for some reason many governments choose to feed the man with someone's else fish every day instead of teaching him how to fish for himself. That is a recipe for a disaster.
You just need to learn to love work that puts bread on the table. Electrical engineering is good at that. Analog RF is super good at that.
But if you a historian who specializes in Neanderthals... sorry, but your work does not put any products into stores, and doesn't make anyone's life better. It's a useful thing to do, but the overall value of your work, so far, is very low - on par with a drunken ditch digger. Even then, at the end of the day the digger will make a ditch that will be used to lay cable to a new house, and there will be light. What will you contribute, after staring at a 1x1 mm piece of bone for a whole day? If it were left to the free market, you'd be dead from hunger, just like that Neanderthal that you were studying.
Stay and help fix the problem instead of fleeing with your tail between your legs.
Does he have a duty to do that? I don't think it's in the US Constitution. However "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are explicitly listed in the Declaration of Independence. Can't fault the man for pursuing happiness in the best way he can. Generally speaking, most rebels do not live a long and happy life. A single person, one who lacks abilities of greatest leaders known to humankind, cannot affect the entire country. He can only get himself arrested and convicted for something (like drugs that will be "found" in his car.) As an alternative, someone will come up with accusations of rape (Julian Assange knows well how it's done.) Those treatments are for dangerous people, however. A mere human will be simply ignored. With newspapers, radio and TV in "good hands," the system has nothing to fear.
Coward.
Cowardice is lack of courage when facing a danger. However if you can skip the danger altogether, it often becomes wisdom. Why should I call you a coward if, on your way from A to B, instead of climbing a 10,000 feet tall mountain you just get into your car and drive around it? Most people's goals do not include change of regime in their own country; they only want to marry, get a job, buy a house, and raise kids.
Actually, electric vehicles have a much lower maintenance requirement than gas/diesel vehicles do - on average about 1/4 the cost factor and time factor.
The origin of the engine's power is irrelevant, unless somehow a car that is propelled by an electric motor is safer than the one that is propelled directly by an ICE.
Maintenance would be relevant in the areas of power {brakes,steering,etc.} but that is already electric in hybrids.
Requiring auto-guided vehicles be electric only, with max speeds of say 30 mph (typical highway speeds during rush hour) might go a long way to making them safe.
I fully agree. Not a single human would die in any such vehicle on the road. But the reasons for that lie not in their electric power, but in their speed. Most humans drive considerably faster than 30 mph, and they have a life to live instead of sitting extra hours per day in a hot tin can.
Don't wake up at 40 to find half your hair gone along with most of your life in empty pursuit of points and levels.
But what is the difference between virtual life and achievements in a game vs. life and achievements "in real life" (which may well be just as virtual.) Is chasing levels and points somehow worse than chasing money, alcohol and women, and then raising children? Do you even have a scale by which you can measure worth of any of these activities?
It's easy to say that your neighbor probably doesn't care if you are earning skill points or making babies at your house. (He would be better off if you are a gamer - gamers cause less trouble.) If so, the only scale that anyone can possibly use to judge these activities is you. Nobody else gives a damn what you do. Therefore... do what you want, unless you have a certifiably holy book that says what you shall do and what you shall not do. Then, I guess, you become a slave of that book.
Japan can produce 9 tonnes of weapon grade plutonium a year (approx some 2000 bombs), or enough to nuke all of China.
First we have to imagine that Japan can manufacture 2,000 Pu239 bombs without Chinese spies ever finding out. But even if that unlikely scenario occurs, how many of those bombs Japan can launch at China before China destroys all four islands of Japan? With Japan's population density, just a few thermonuclear strikes at major population centers will halve the population and reduce the industrial power to 0.01% of what it was. China has far more territory and people. First strike from the ancient foe will be received without surprise, but with a quiet determination to go full genocide. China has enough nukes to do just that; Japanese leaders do not commit seppuku any more; and certainly they don't take the whole country down with them.
I tried ISE 14.6 (the latest for today) and got some JRE error. I haven't tried Vivado on Win8. Both work fine on Win7. Perhaps JRE bug can be fixed by shamanic dances with a tamburine, shaking a bunch of JRE releases over the fire; but why should I do that, given that the tools are fragile enough even without my help? How badly do I need a broken netlist, or yet another crash of Impact, may it burn in Silicon Hell?
There are discussions - on Xilinx forums and in many other places - about that. The note from a moderator: "Currently, there is no road-map for Windows 8 support.." Well, they do support RHEL; maybe there is a hint in that? (I used ISE on CentOS; it worked fine.)
Correct, there's no reason to downgrade to Windows 7 if you install Windows 8 plus ClassicShell.
There are reasons. For example, Xilinx tools do not work on Win8. Xilinx "is considering" adding support for that. Meanwhile if you need to have work done, trash Win8 and install Win7. The same issue of "if even one essential application doesn't work on Linux you switch to Windows" is biting Win8 here. If one mission critical application does not work, you just replace the part that is simplest to replace - and that is certainly not the multi-$K proprietary package that can make or break your business. (It's bad enough as it is.)
I also have a feeling that while Win8 is more responsive in the UI department, it is slower in the application performance area. This is visible on large applications.
I have a box with Win8 installed, and ClassicShell. The box is going to be rebuilt for hardware-related reasons. It will emerge from the rebuild as a Win7 box. Win8 is usable after a geek hacks it, but there is no reason to go through the process if you don't have to. The positives of Win8 are few and far between, not worth the pain.
Ballmer's replacement will have to revert Win8 decisions, as doubling down on a mistake will destroy MS. So we have a good chance to outlive the Win8 "dark ages". If Win9 wants to offer Metro as an option, more power to it. I wouldn't need it, but it won't hurt me either. Win7 is the most usable professional OS that MS ever made.
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The fighting back was always happening, done by individual rebels or by tiny groups of conspirators. A better question to ask is how many of the citizens, percentage-wise, have joined your fight.
Set an industry cut-off date to blackball all specialists, technicians and contractors working in these agencies from future employment in the wider commercial IT world.
I'm amazed at the power that you have over "the wider commercial IT world." But even if it is true, and if your mind control lasers in LEO are able to force all companies in the USA (or worldwide) to refuse employment to the class that is selected by you... don't you think that you'd be committing an even larger violation of human rights? Or, perhaps, "it's OK if *we* do it?"
People work for the government for several reasons; the honest desire to violate rights of their countrymen is probably a driving force for a dozen or two. The rest work for the government because it's a job of the same kind as being a police officer, a soldier, a tax collector... should you, perhaps, blackball them too? Or anyone who ever worked for any government that someone labels as oppressive?
If you want your government to behave, you should not lash out at the people at the lowest rungs of the ladder. They are not in control, and whatever you do to them they cannot change the rules. Furthermore, if you deny them employment elsewhere, they will have to stay with the government - no matter how unconstitutional their current orders might be. They wouldn't have an option to quit. The government would love to have workers who have nothing to lose. Mafia works long and hard to take newcomers past the point of no return.
If you want your government to change its ways you should start at the top - especially because the top bureaucrats are elected by you and other voters. "They don't vote for the right man," you say? Too bad - it's kind of a democracy. You need to convince voters that they shouldn't vote for liar A and instead they should vote for liar B. It's hard. But it's the only way, as long as you stick to democracy, If you do not, the strongest faction gets to install their candidate. It still may be not your faction.
What transaction fee?
THAT transaction fee. The one that is in practice necessary for anyone to pay attention to your transaction. Is there anyone in the world that owes you six confirmations of your transaction within ten minutes? Click on the link that I provided. You don't have to add a fee; and the miners don't have to service your request. It's not like they are a bank, with you as a customer. There is no contract. The rose-colored glasses are off; BTC is no longer a network of friends, and the miners are not doing it for fun - they are doing it for profit; why wouldn't they click a checkbox that says "increase my income?"
you can login via Facebook like I just did here to post
I'm afraid you have to surrender your geek card immediately :-)
It is relevant for micropayments. They are small - from 1 cent to 10 cents, as theorized (they don't exist.) Since each BTC is large (1000 mBTC == USD$ 126) the micropayment in BTC will be between 0.1 and 1 mBTC.
Now that we established that, the transaction fee is 0.5 mBTC. It is not a percentage of the payment, it's a fixed fee. How much would you like to use a payment system that takes from 50% to 80% of your payment just for the privilege of using it? Most of your money will be spent on BTC network services. This is why BTC, as it is defined today, is not good for small payments. BTC is optimized for large payments that are rare. Billions of small payments will just flood the network, and it will slow down. The decentralized nature of BTC results in huge amount of network traffic, computations, and wasted energy.
I lived in Toronto for a while, but I never knew that it's the capital of Canada.
Milk is not money. Money is supposed to be universally exchangeable. That's the whole purpose.
Bitcoin is unusable for micropayments (as if anyone cares about those.) The reasons are simple. First, each BTC is very expensive (tens of US Dollars each.) Second, the fee for payment is pretty expensive. Mathematically it is small, 0.5 mBTC, but it is enormous when you want to send 1 mBTC (0.126 USD as of today.) In theory, small transactions (both in bytes and in BTC) shouldn't have the fee, but... the fee is charged anyhow.
One can rebuild the client without the fee, but then your transaction will take forever to be included into the block. Which means that it's still useless - you paid yer money but you've got nothing in return, until "the check clears."
If you bothered to pay attention to the trial it was pointed out that Zimmerman approached Martin with the gun in his hand hidden behind his back.
You must have watched a completely different trial :-) was it staged in an asylum for trolls?
A quick proof that your "theory" makes no sense. If you intend to shoot someone, you don't have to come within a fist strike range. If GZ wanted to kill TM, he'd do it from several yards away. In that case TM would be shot while standing, and no fight would occur.
Another proof: if you, the killer with a gun, are still careless enough to come close to the victim, AND instead of doing the job you engaged in a verbal confrontation, AND you got hit on the face ... why, oh why you don't use that gun that you hold in your hand to kill the attacker before he pummels you senseless? The fistfight took about half a minute; multiple witnesses had time to come and see it, and GZ emerged quite bloody. That would make sense only if GZ did not have a gun in hand, and if he was reluctant to use it. In that case he would draw and fire only when he was close to being killed.
Besides, if you hold a gun in your hand and your opponent strikes you in the face, what will you naturally do? Answer: if you are ready to shoot, you shoot. If not, you try to protect yourself with BOTH hands. You'd throw the gun away at that point. (But of course a killer with a gun in hand would not do that.)
Martin was defending himself against Zimmerman's illegal stalking and confrontation. Period. [...] Zimmerman was the aggressor. Get it straight.
OK, let me get it straight. If, on one rainy evening, I find you looking at me once, and then walking in my general direction, you are giving me permission to attack you? Because, you know, I'm scared. So scared of you that I'm willing to start a fight with you. I hope it makes sense.
Even you would have acted the same had a strange man just appeared out of the dark, with a gun, and confronted you as you were walking home.
Yes, indeed, now I understand. I R a genius, after all. When I see a man with a gun the first thing I do is ... no, I don't keep walking. That'd be as if some people are allowed to carry guns - like the police, for example. No, I don't call 911. That would be "acting white." No, I don't go home. That'd be accepting the disrespect. No Sir, I don't do any of that. You'd think a million years, and you'd still not realize what I, a Genius, would do seeing an armed man. I would hit him right in the face with my fist, and then I'd knock him down and try to kill him! Yes, that's what I'd do! Am I not a true Genius?
(BTW, this is a clear proof that TM did not know that GZ is armed.)
Otherwise you are just repeating other people's talking points that have been debunked a million times already.
Mm hmm...
Mm hmm indeed. Short of that order being cryptographically signed with a private key that is known to be valid, and secure, and in sole possession of a specific Iranian official, how would anyone to know who was communicating with who? Anyone can call anyone else, say whatever they want, and that call will be carefully recorded and paraded in front of UN. That would be worth about nothing. I wouldn't be surprised if a mail server of some Iranian government office is rooted, so that a legitimately looking mail can be forged.
These days you can collect lots of actionable intelligence from communication mechanisms. However in virtually all cases you cannot prove anything with those intercepts. Perhaps a large data dump, with tens of thousands internally consistent messages that refer to known facts of the past, would be convincing. But a single message, from Alice to Bob, and with who knows how many Eves in between... it's not even funny.
a non-profit took pictures of a 'river of blood' outside a slaughterhouse that drained into a public waterway. Don't know how that ever came out.
Nothing should ever come out of it. You can drink that blood. Otherwise, if you are so concerned, you need to take care of all other life in that river first - and that life (land animals, birds, fishes, and plankton) not only bleeds into the water.
I found bad judgement in the actions of Martin and Zimmerman.
I agree, both of them failed to pick the safest possible path. GZ should have stayed in his truck, and he should have looked the other way. TM should have walked directly home. They haven't done that. However none of what they actually did - until the first blow landed - was illegal. They were not accused of walking the public streets; they were not accused of looking at people; they were not accused of talking to each other. All that is legal. (Well, GZ was actually accused of that because the DA wanted to hit him with crime of racism; but that was unfair, and it didn't work.)
Being not exceptionally careful is not a crime. You aren't careful if you choose to walk through a ghetto at midnight. But it's your right - and if you survive you won't be put on trial. All actions of GZ and TM were legal - until TM struck. That's when legality ended, and that's what got TM killed. TM would be killed just as well if he walked up to any stranger and hit him in the face. The preceding actions may have contributed to anger, or fear of disrespect, that TM seemingly had. But those actions are just as legal for them as for a man to follow a woman in a dark alley. They just go in the same direction. A woman may be scared; but legally it means nothing; she is not entitled to, for example, turning around and throwing a knife at the man. Trayvon may have been upset, but that gave him no special right to assault anyone. He held a phone in his hand all the time - he could have called 911 at any time if he had a genuine fear. He, an active football player, could have outrun pretty much anyone and be at home within seconds. There are many paths TM could have taken that don't include hitting people in the face and then trying to murder them.
Sarin is extremely deadly and not really a substance for haphazard manufacture or haphazard loading into munitions.
You are saying that the entire filthy rich state of Saudi Arabia cannot do what some small, underground sect in Japan was able to do a couple decades ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway
I suspect your society will be called "Ditch People A" by the later societies that are studying your remnants.
So what name, in your opinion, will future archeologists pick for our current society?
I'd rather prefer to live in civilization of ditch diggers rather than in civilization of idiots, liars, and moneychangers. Digging ditches, laying cables, building houses is honest work that improves the world. We need more workers of that sort, and fewer humanitarians who aren't philosophers; they are just people with irrelevant degrees in irrelevant sciences who pretend that they are needed in the society. (They aren't.)
I bet that if such a backdoor was discovered by China or Russia, that they'd use it as a propaganda weapon and we'd thus know about it.
It would be more realistic to expect them to use the backdoor to their advantage, while it lasts.
Some backdoors are very hard to detect because there is no obvious bug or a backdoor in any one place; with the size of the code base as it is, who would be crawling through the source of some USB driver that works just fine? As a crude example:
static int a[MAX_LENGTH];
void ioctl_handler(int i, int d) {
int *p = &a[0] + GetOffset(i, MAX_LENGTH);
*p = d;
}
There is no bug here. Now, elsewhere:
int GetOffset(int i, int len) { return (i < len?) i : (len-1); }
Welcome to poking any RAM location of your choice (limited only by sizeof(int).)
It was, but is becoming less so. Would you feel entirely comfortable steering your kids towards a shrinking field?
Automation reduces the need in workers across the board. However there are only few key areas, such as engineering and medicine, that are directly contributing to survival. They are also hard to learn, as opposed to basic agriculture and animal husbandry. None of that applies to less study-intensive and less IQ-demanding jobs. Some jobs are equally hard (a trader?) but they have no future. Even today computers are better traders than humans; people only formulate strategies to execute - and a firm needs far fewer of those.
Of course, not all engineering is the same, and it is not uniformly valuable across all civilizations. But if we start now and look 100 years ahead, engineers, doctors and scientists are pretty much the only workers who cannot be easily replaced by robots. Scientists have more remote contribution to wealth of the society, but physicists and chemists are certainly the most useful ones; the linguists who specialize in dead languages are probably the least useful. I can't say they are entirely worthless, since it may be that Mayans wrote down the exact location where their gods left their spaceship (so that we can dig it up.) But outside of that, knowledge of the past is appealing only to a few, and primarily as entertainment. One could write a SciFi book with smaller expense of money. (Well, I'm not pointing fingers at certain Holy Books. But the connection is obvious.)
I am not an expert historian, and I feel no need to study minor events of the past to know how I should act tomorrow. I only need to know major events. Someone has to do that digest for me. But how many historians the entire world needs? They aren't making any more major events of the past. The work area is limited, and it is expanding only by new digs - which are rare, and slow, and not very informative. Perhaps when someone discovers for sure how the pyramids were built that becomes another important fact of history to know. But for now they are living in their own world. The society finances science because it may be profitable one day. But as the article says, the society's grants are finite. If I could, I'd be glad to cancel social assistance to all able-bodied people and send the money to science. But that's not possible. The "useless eaters" are consuming money that could be used to discover secrets of FTL. At the same time, so many ditches are not dug yet that could hold so many fiber cables to every house! Unfortunately, for some reason many governments choose to feed the man with someone's else fish every day instead of teaching him how to fish for himself. That is a recipe for a disaster.
You just need to learn to love work that puts bread on the table. Electrical engineering is good at that. Analog RF is super good at that.
But if you a historian who specializes in Neanderthals... sorry, but your work does not put any products into stores, and doesn't make anyone's life better. It's a useful thing to do, but the overall value of your work, so far, is very low - on par with a drunken ditch digger. Even then, at the end of the day the digger will make a ditch that will be used to lay cable to a new house, and there will be light. What will you contribute, after staring at a 1x1 mm piece of bone for a whole day? If it were left to the free market, you'd be dead from hunger, just like that Neanderthal that you were studying.
Stay and help fix the problem instead of fleeing with your tail between your legs.
Does he have a duty to do that? I don't think it's in the US Constitution. However "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are explicitly listed in the Declaration of Independence. Can't fault the man for pursuing happiness in the best way he can. Generally speaking, most rebels do not live a long and happy life. A single person, one who lacks abilities of greatest leaders known to humankind, cannot affect the entire country. He can only get himself arrested and convicted for something (like drugs that will be "found" in his car.) As an alternative, someone will come up with accusations of rape (Julian Assange knows well how it's done.) Those treatments are for dangerous people, however. A mere human will be simply ignored. With newspapers, radio and TV in "good hands," the system has nothing to fear.
Coward.
Cowardice is lack of courage when facing a danger. However if you can skip the danger altogether, it often becomes wisdom. Why should I call you a coward if, on your way from A to B, instead of climbing a 10,000 feet tall mountain you just get into your car and drive around it? Most people's goals do not include change of regime in their own country; they only want to marry, get a job, buy a house, and raise kids.
Actually, electric vehicles have a much lower maintenance requirement than gas/diesel vehicles do - on average about 1/4 the cost factor and time factor.
The origin of the engine's power is irrelevant, unless somehow a car that is propelled by an electric motor is safer than the one that is propelled directly by an ICE.
Maintenance would be relevant in the areas of power {brakes,steering,etc.} but that is already electric in hybrids.
Requiring auto-guided vehicles be electric only, with max speeds of say 30 mph (typical highway speeds during rush hour) might go a long way to making them safe.
I fully agree. Not a single human would die in any such vehicle on the road. But the reasons for that lie not in their electric power, but in their speed. Most humans drive considerably faster than 30 mph, and they have a life to live instead of sitting extra hours per day in a hot tin can.
Don't wake up at 40 to find half your hair gone along with most of your life in empty pursuit of points and levels.
But what is the difference between virtual life and achievements in a game vs. life and achievements "in real life" (which may well be just as virtual.) Is chasing levels and points somehow worse than chasing money, alcohol and women, and then raising children? Do you even have a scale by which you can measure worth of any of these activities?
It's easy to say that your neighbor probably doesn't care if you are earning skill points or making babies at your house. (He would be better off if you are a gamer - gamers cause less trouble.) If so, the only scale that anyone can possibly use to judge these activities is you. Nobody else gives a damn what you do. Therefore... do what you want, unless you have a certifiably holy book that says what you shall do and what you shall not do. Then, I guess, you become a slave of that book.
Japan can produce 9 tonnes of weapon grade plutonium a year (approx some 2000 bombs), or enough to nuke all of China.
First we have to imagine that Japan can manufacture 2,000 Pu239 bombs without Chinese spies ever finding out. But even if that unlikely scenario occurs, how many of those bombs Japan can launch at China before China destroys all four islands of Japan? With Japan's population density, just a few thermonuclear strikes at major population centers will halve the population and reduce the industrial power to 0.01% of what it was. China has far more territory and people. First strike from the ancient foe will be received without surprise, but with a quiet determination to go full genocide. China has enough nukes to do just that; Japanese leaders do not commit seppuku any more; and certainly they don't take the whole country down with them.
I tried ISE 14.6 (the latest for today) and got some JRE error. I haven't tried Vivado on Win8. Both work fine on Win7. Perhaps JRE bug can be fixed by shamanic dances with a tamburine, shaking a bunch of JRE releases over the fire; but why should I do that, given that the tools are fragile enough even without my help? How badly do I need a broken netlist, or yet another crash of Impact, may it burn in Silicon Hell?
There are discussions - on Xilinx forums and in many other places - about that. The note from a moderator: "Currently, there is no road-map for Windows 8 support.." Well, they do support RHEL; maybe there is a hint in that? (I used ISE on CentOS; it worked fine.)
The difference between embezzlement and severance pay is in just a few signatures of company's officers.
Correct, there's no reason to downgrade to Windows 7 if you install Windows 8 plus ClassicShell.
There are reasons. For example, Xilinx tools do not work on Win8. Xilinx "is considering" adding support for that. Meanwhile if you need to have work done, trash Win8 and install Win7. The same issue of "if even one essential application doesn't work on Linux you switch to Windows" is biting Win8 here. If one mission critical application does not work, you just replace the part that is simplest to replace - and that is certainly not the multi-$K proprietary package that can make or break your business. (It's bad enough as it is.)
I also have a feeling that while Win8 is more responsive in the UI department, it is slower in the application performance area. This is visible on large applications.
I have a box with Win8 installed, and ClassicShell. The box is going to be rebuilt for hardware-related reasons. It will emerge from the rebuild as a Win7 box. Win8 is usable after a geek hacks it, but there is no reason to go through the process if you don't have to. The positives of Win8 are few and far between, not worth the pain.
Ballmer's replacement will have to revert Win8 decisions, as doubling down on a mistake will destroy MS. So we have a good chance to outlive the Win8 "dark ages". If Win9 wants to offer Metro as an option, more power to it. I wouldn't need it, but it won't hurt me either. Win7 is the most usable professional OS that MS ever made.