OK, the boat was in custody of the shipbuilder; that is undeniable because they built it from the ground up. The customs had neither custody nor ownership. They took custody of the ship by the threat of force. Most people call it piracy.
I don't follow why it should make any difference what currency the price is in.
If he signs the paperwork and the price is not correct then his boat is really in danger. That's exactly why he didn't sign. You should never make untruthful statements in writing when a LEO verbally instructs you to do it. LEOs are allowed to lie.
*Her* error? Where did you see that she was the root cause of the error?
The original error might be someone else's, but she enthusiastically adopted this error as her own. Thus it became her error.
I don't even understand why the owner of the boat asked permission to make changes. You can make any changes you want in any document that you sign; this is because you should sign only documents that you completely agree with. You cannot be given a fixed form and told to sign it, with penalties if you do and with penalties if you don't. A form, with *any* data filled in, is not any different from a document that you wrote entirely by hand.
press headlines "TSA ARRESTS 100 OVER TOOTHPASTE" would be hilarious
What press? That press is dead and buried. Modern MSM will not report this incident. Note also that all 100+ arrestees will be charged with a crime, and will have to plead some misdemeanor to get out. If they do not, the jails are large enough to hold 100 people, even if the toothpaste refuseniks will have to share cells with career criminals. Their trials, if it comes to that, will be separate, at different venues. You will get no PR out of this.
A couple of million dollars will buy you one (1) space-rated instrument, like a navigational aid, or a simple engine, or something else of that scale. It often takes about a million dollars to design a product here, on Earth, that is not even certified for aviation use. One engineer over one year will cost you about $250K, so four engineers over one year will eat your million just in salary - without having any money left for materials, tools, services, licenses, or just for rent of the building where they work.
However, I would rather go to an asteroid that is say 1-2 months away and then come back after a week stay.
The asteroid belt is farther than Mars. I guess you could do a flyby of one that is coming closer to Earth, but that is difficult because of wildly different speeds of your vehicle and the rock.
However in every other aspect your plan is much better. Once you are in the Belt you can get by with minimum amount of fuel because gravity there is microscopic. The volume of the Belt is tremendous, and you can find everything there. It could be the new New World. Our technology is already capable of reaching the Belt and supporting self-sustaining colonies there. In the Belt you would fly your spaceship between asteroids just as easily as you drive your car to the store on Earth. The same technology is not going to work on Mars; it would require billions of dollars - essentially, support of the whole planet - to send an expedition to Mars and to return them, just because Mars is so inconvenient for landing and so massive for takeoff. We won't even be able to fly over Mars, unless on jet propulsion.
Mars might be a better site for a space elevator, though, with not too much atmosphere to cause oscillations of the cables, with no flying vehicles that can be taken by terrorists, and with an obvious need for easy access to the surface.
Sorry that I presumed my reader didn't need me to spell out every single little detail.
It's hardly a little detail if production of 1000 spaceships of Sovereign class exhausts resources of your home planet(s), pollutes the environment and uses up lifetimes of millions of workers. Even in Star Trek spaceships were very valuable items. Elimination of personal costs (money) does not reduce societal (fiscal) costs.
Elimination of cost is possible only when a civilization becomes godlike, one way or another. For example, it can command billions of robots who do whatever the civilization wants, including obtaining energy and raw materials. In such civilization cost would be indeed not a factor. One example of such a society would be Diaspar (and even then it has constraints.)
Elimination of money is possible much earlier - when it becomes possible to provide basic resources on "as needed" basis, regardless of your contribution. Often that contribution is not even measurable; how do you measure value of a poet? However a money-less society still has constraints on how much one can use, just because there isn't enough to satisfy *any* desire. For example, if you want to have a mountain moved away because it blocks the view then you will need an approval of the society - at least because that would take terajoules of energy and will wear down an army of robots. But if you want to dig up a pool, that is entirely free.
The only thing that will make space exploration cost-effective is discoveries in physics that will allow us to move materials within gravity fields without those huge losses that we incur today. It is ridiculous to spend 20 to 50 million USD to just send one man to the LEO for a week. Costs of another trip to the Moon would be in tens of billions. Costs of a well prepared trip to Mars would be even higher. The humankind cannot afford those costs, regardless of whether they use the money or toil for free as slaves of some World Government. The planet itself cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that you don't know any of that, but the discussion is incomplete when important details are just assumed, not spelled out.
No, I am not familiar with those. Taser is all I have seen (on the Net.) I don't own any such thing.
If the attacker is already within arm's reach then you have to be very strong and agile; otherwise he will simply deflect your arm with the zapper, or grab your wrist and shove the zapper into your own neck. Humanity learned all that over the millennia of nonstop knife and sword fighting. IMO, if you allow an attacker to come close you need to be a pretty good fighter, so that the attacker can't just kick you in the knee while you are intently preparing the sparkling salvation. Note that the linked video shows that the attacker is never within reach of your arm and therefore you cannot apply the shock to his body.
Zappers without flying probes may not work through some clothes, especially if they are wet. The current always flows through the path of the least resistance. (Well, technically it flows through all possible paths, but that is important only if you are using a 100 kV, 100 kA power grid transformer substation as your zapper:-) So a leather jacket may leave you defenseless.
For this and other reasons criminals do not carry shockers; they carry knives and guns. Setting the firearm aside, one might actually benefit from carrying a small (legal size) knife and learning how to use it correctly. The sight of sharpened steel has calming effect on many attackers; it also works on multiple attackers. If there are two or three guys coming at you, I doubt that they will give you 30 seconds to properly shock the thug #1 before you can switch to thug #2, and so on, in FIFO order.
Correct, and that's why if you must act then it is much safer to find the guy and beat him senseless. Violent crimes are frequent, and they have minimal punishment, but a computer crime can seriously ruin your day.
The only problem of course is that you have to be closer than you want to be to use them.
If the attacker is within arm's reach then using a firearm may be not an option anymore. Trayvon went for GZ's gun, as far as the public knows. There is a 21 foot rule just for those cases.
Using a Taser at a longer distance might work, but you'd better be ready to follow up with a firearm. This means that you hold the Taser in the other hand.
IMO, the only advantage you can get out of having a non-lethal weapon is to tell the judge that you were prepared to defend yourself non-lethally, but had to go for the lethal method when the other method failed, or couldn't be effective. As of actually *using* a pepper spray on a drug-fueled crazy man, that would be a very dangerous exercise. Do you expect him to actually *feel* the pain from the spray? There are cases when attackers were shot through, but before they fell dead they were able to cover the distance and kill the LEO. Many illegal drugs act as anesthetics; even alcohol does that.
If you are claiming some particular asteroid then it is different from all others (otherwise why to bother marking it?) If it is different then it is logical to presume that its uniqueness makes it more suitable for you - and therefore for me, since we are both mostly alike. Therefore it is advantageous for me to grab your marked asteroids - or at least to start with them and see for myself which of them are good and which of them are just decoys. I will not be at a disadvantage by doing that unless most or all of your marked asteroids are decoys. I would have a good chance to find that out through my mole at your HQ anyway; the costs of spaceflight are so high that my mole only needs to deliver one secret of yours and then he can retire to the $most_expensive_location. Nobody at your HQ would be able to resist. Wives and children sell out for even less. (But we, evil overlords, have our ways to deal with our trusted lieutenants.)
Presumably why many of those sci-fi writers mentioned previously envisioned money-less societies - apparently, the best way to make space exploration cost effective is to effectively eliminate the concept of cost.
Money and cost are not the same. Walking a thousand miles does not become any easier just because you cannot count. Cost will remain in any case - such as in lifetime of actual humans who spend their limited time on this Earth on the project, in labs and factories, instead of walking in the forest and enjoying the nature.
Citation needed. Indians were not entirely peaceful, and they had things to fight over even in a huge, featureless country with enough land for everyone.
Besides, if you ask a Mormon, North America was full of those descendants of emigrants from Palestine - and evil Indians made sure that not a trace of them remains!1!
i would, lock everything down. starting with wpa2 with a really long random string, I would even change the wireless network SSID to a random string.
(part of the crypto use the ssid in the hash). I would add, mac address auth, change all my DHCP settings. and even hide my network.
And once you do all of the above, pull the Ethernet cable out of the router. The attacker will have to go through all this pain just to discover that detail:-)
..of course it won't take long for them to find out who set up the redirects and is actually responsible for the kiddie porn.
That is very, very far from being "of course." Police wants convictions, and there is nothing else to convict than an asocial nerd in a basement, with a stash of CP in his browser's cache. Those files do not carry an indication through which router they were obtained, since the browser keeps no logs. If you have them, you have them.
The nerd, naturally, may confess to a lighter crime - such as stealing your keys and connecting to your router. You should be ready for a raid yourself, and better you keep your own nose clean - the pr0n that most people collect rarely comes with notarially certified age of all participants. This is a good example of "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind."
Framing the thief for CP would be a massive overreaction. But the thief can compromise your own IP address by *really* downloading politically incorrect materials. So I wouldn't accept any honeypot scheme where the thief is actually allowed to go outside of your LAN. Doing a good job on a honeypot for just one guy is too expensive. In essence, if you cannot guarantee that your Wi-Fi is secure then what are you doing with it? Just hoping that no hacker shows up? Either make sure it is secure, or turn it off. There is no middle ground because it can lead to trouble.
Do you really want to put the interests of Native Americans first?
No, because the current state doesn't (or shouldn't) provide infinite (going forward) advantage to currently living people just because their ancestors were under temporary and finite disadvantage a long time ago. For the same reason a descendant of a French peasant does not sue a descendant of a French noble for the oppression that the said noble may have done unto the said peasant. In worst case (such as after a war) the loser pays reparations, but otherwise hostilities end. If that's not the case, see Palestine and their Right of Return.
You came as an immigrant without any visa clearance from the natives.
Only for a small subset of the collective "I," and only if you include long dead generations into the list. Your comment would be proper on the day when first colonists landed (without visas.) However by now those colonists paid for their visas with their labor and, sometimes, with their lives. The country is somewhat improved, compared to empty prairies of North America in 1600's.
And from the other point of view, I may be a direct descendant of Oog the Caveman who was roaming North America in time immemorial but then moved elsewhere to become my ancestor. Does this give me any advantage over American Indians? What about that plankton that washed the shores of the ancient Pangea? I'm sure I'm carrying a few genes of those organisms too. What unique privileges does this entitle me to?
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first
The politicians are already doing that. CEOs are also Americans, isn't it so? Some of the profit is donated to politicians; that's how the feedback loop is operating.
Or perhaps you meant some other Americans, like those peons in IT? How much do they donate to Congressmen?
This political system is the best the money can buy. If you don't like its results then perhaps the system ought to be replaced with something else. It would be otherwise foolish to expect a different result.
From the POV of many CEOs, american workers are overpaid, underexploited, and too pampered with benefits. Foreign workforce - who often comes from countries that we do not associate with widespread wealth - is willing to work on terms of pseudo-slavery. The american worker might just as well curl up and die, he is not needed anymore, aside from a handful of highly educated workers. The american worker cannot even be a customer because he has no job and no income to pay for things. In this aspect a rice farmer in China is a better customer, he has an honest income and can buy a gizmo once in a while. The words "customer" and "employed" are synonyms.
Positively. I have no desire to use a half-baked JS implementation if I have FoxReader (on Windows) that runs natively. Even Chrome's built-in reader often is not sufficient, and it even asks if you want to see the document in a "real" PDF reader. There is no reason to bother with crippled implementations if good ones are available for the same affordable price of $0.
Am I going to have enable javascript for every site that has a PDF that I want to view?
Not required. What you want to do is specify in settings how you want the PDF to be handled. If you select "Preview in Mozilla" then you need the JS code. If you select a different viewer then you don't need JS.
This gimmick is handy if all you have is the browser. But if you do any amount of serious work on the computer you will install better tools.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world
Android is free. The $99 that you pay for a low end tablet is all going to the manufacturer, to pay for the hardware. How will a different and less popular OS make it cheaper? What can you offer in UNIX/Linux that you cannot offer on Android? Why would you build a tablet application for Unity (using what?) and target hundreds of customers if you can build an Android application using an established and free Android SDK and target a hundred million customers? Why would you, as a customer, join a fringe group instead of a large community? (Well, some do, they bought WinRT tablets, after all.)
Nerdfest mentions below that there may be a market for Linux tablets, just as MS believes there is a market for PC tablets (non-RT.) Perhaps; there is a market for everything, as long as you don't care about its size. But there will be very few people - only some geeks - who'd want it. Professionals who need UNIX tools can get them on Android or iOS. Standard Linux applications (GIMP etc.) won't be very exciting on a tablet, considering that they aren't the easiest thing in the world on a PC. It can be even said that there are no killer applications on desktop Linux, such as those that would make you use Linux. On Windows they exist - QuickBooks, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, MS Office, etc.
It is not a viable business strategy to just hope that drinkers of your kool-aid will flock to the stores and buy your product. That didn't work for HP, and where is Canonical in comparison? Even Apple cannot go on blind hope; Apple sells because Apple's products work well, and they are worth the money to Apple's customers. If someone comes up with a Linux tablet (that has no other attractions except being Linux) then there will be just a handful of geeks who will buy it. The OpenMoko project proves this - geeks will buy everything, in small quantity. But that won't be enough to even keep the lights on. Every successful product has a good reason for its existence - it either does more, or it does it better, or it costs less. Canonical's tablet is not going to be cheaper; I am unsure how it can do more than competition, and the debate is open on whether it can do it better. A working AI who can sustain a long conversation would be a great example of such an improvement. But that has nothing to do with the OS; the code of that AI will be OS-agnostic. At this point, given that Android and Ubuntu run the same kernel, the only area of improvement is in the GUI. So the challenge is to make a GUI that is better than Android. That would be a trivial task for authors of Unity - unless they, for some reason, ask for the opinion of their customers:-)
I hope they will come up with some reason for the consumer to go out and buy an Ubuntu tablet. As things are, the competition is pretty strong. Android and iOS have all bases covered, with hundreds of thousands of applications, and with several years on the market, and with millions of deployed devices, and with the user base trained.
Sight unseen, I'd say that an Ubuntu tablet may not even win against a Windows 8 tablet. It still may be that Ubuntu people have some bright idea that hasn't occurred to Apple and Google, but that is not very likely. Price-wise, they are competing with a free OS (Android) that Google spends millions on in R&D, and with finished tablets that can be had for under $100.
So it would not strike me as unreasonable for a net-connected car to download the images of a detour route within a few seconds of recognising a roadblock.
Especially if the workers have a small beacon that broadcasts at, say, 5 GHz the map of the area that shows how to drive around the work area. All cars in vicinity receive that and can act upon these instructions if they are signed and the chain of trust is good enough.
That would be better than what we have now - a mass of cars trying to get by the work area, and nobody can reliably know what path is safe until you see the cones and have to change the lane. If there is a sign "<< RIGHT LANE CLOSED <<" it still doesn't tell you how many lanes are closed, and where are the transition zones, and whether there is a worker with a STOP sign. The broadcast could easily contain all that, tied to the GPS and to local markers.
Just because we are familiar with conventional vehicles does not mean that they don't take any special considerations. Try starting that diesel engine on a cold day and going pedal to the metal as soon as you start. Or just shutting a turbocharged vehicle off immediatley after a hard drive.
I never drove diesel cars or turbocharged cars. I don't know what would happen if I use them without training. But this is not relevant. We are discussing one specific car, as furnished by the manufacturer for a preplanned trip. If the driver was not told certain things by the manufacturer's rep when he got the keys then it is assumed that he doesn't need to know those certain things. Either they are not applicable or they are presumed to be known already. The latter is impossible with an all-new car. We are left with the former: no special instruction was necessary.
Perhaps you should just admit you hate electric vehicles?
How could I do that if I own one already (a hybrid, admittedly) and I like it very much? What I don't like in Tesla and other EVs is their limitations, that are severe. The range of a Leaf would be not good enough for me, but this Tesla car can be OK. The price is, of course, off the charts - nobody in his right mind will buy a $80K car to save $100 on gas (even if that.) I also don't like the PR (usually lies) of the manufacturers who have to lie because otherwise their product is seen for what it is - not good enough yet.
Look at Toyota. They built their Prius well - so well that it was selling as hot cakes. They didn't have to lie, the car performs exactly as advertised, and there is nothing fundamental to complain about. Prius sells because it is a good car, and because it is reasonably priced. Not dirt cheap, mind you, but that is not even expected - you have to pay for quality. I did, and no regrets. I drive the car in the city, in the hills, on freeways, for hundreds of miles per day - and it works exactly as it should.
You can say that we are just conditioned, trained to use gas cars correctly. But in reality the gas cars for the mass market are simple beasts; they require a simple and quick charge when the indicator shows low fuel. That's it. No other special considerations. No need to watch the thermometer; no need to run around, in darkness, with extension cables, or play with 480V voltages or 200A currents. No need to babysit the car. No range anxiety; if I want to, I can carry cans of gas with me. No worries about battery life, overcharging, or undercharging. It's that simple. Drivers are used to simple cars; it would be an uphill battle to sell them a car that requires extra care - and all EVs, even Volt, a hybrid, require that extra care because their Li-Ion batteries do not forgive mistakes. Several Tesla Roadsters were bricked because the owners couldn't or wouldn't charge them often enough.
The Tesla EV is slowly getting there; it is already perfectly usable for many city drivers who occasionally need a 100 mile drive to the airport and back, to pick someone up. The cost doesn't make any sense, though. I'm not against all EVs, but I am strongly against bad EVs. This one is bad. The company's response - essentially an accusation that the reporter lied - is much worse, on par with Steve "you are holding it wrong" Jobs. It was wrong to say then, and it is wrong to say now. The customer is always right, even when he is wrong. The company needs positive PR; but at the moment Tesla looks like a holding tank for incompetents and a-holes. If the reporter truthfully reported what he was told to do by Tesla, their customer support is lacking indeed. And there can be no excuse for Elon Musk's flinging of tantrums; he can be triply right, but you never, ever call your customer an idiot and a liar. If you do that, every potential customer of yours will mentally try this treatment on themselves - and will not like it at all.
The car doesn't come with external battery heater that is separate from the charger. Charging the car overnight would have been sufficient because it produces heat. But that requires a charger... and we are back to square one - there was no charger anywhere in town, let alone at the hotel.
If we have a 100% (or close to it) coverage of the entire country with just 240V chargers then at least this car would be viable. Maybe not excellent, but you would have no fear of being stranded. You still would have to plan your life around the limitations of the car (such as not to drive for 24 hours straight, even if an army of demons chases you:-) but your car would be maintainable. Today, as you can see, the reporter had no way to charge the car (or to keep it warm on external power.) For that he'd have to stop for the night in Norwich, not in Groton. This is inconvenient if you need to be in one town and not in another.
There is also a concern that too much electric power is going to be wasted, if batteries require so much heating and lose charge so quickly. Gas engines get hot, so they are not an ideal either, but they at least do that only when you run the car. An EV has to be plugged in whenever you are not using it, thus drawing energy all the time.
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OK, the boat was in custody of the shipbuilder; that is undeniable because they built it from the ground up. The customs had neither custody nor ownership. They took custody of the ship by the threat of force. Most people call it piracy.
I don't follow why it should make any difference what currency the price is in.
If he signs the paperwork and the price is not correct then his boat is really in danger. That's exactly why he didn't sign. You should never make untruthful statements in writing when a LEO verbally instructs you to do it. LEOs are allowed to lie.
*Her* error? Where did you see that she was the root cause of the error?
The original error might be someone else's, but she enthusiastically adopted this error as her own. Thus it became her error.
I don't even understand why the owner of the boat asked permission to make changes. You can make any changes you want in any document that you sign; this is because you should sign only documents that you completely agree with. You cannot be given a fixed form and told to sign it, with penalties if you do and with penalties if you don't. A form, with *any* data filled in, is not any different from a document that you wrote entirely by hand.
You can't confiscate something from someone unless that someone has possession of the thing being confiscated.
The owner of the boat had possession of it from the day he paid the first dollar for it. Who else would it belong to? Tooth Fairy?
press headlines "TSA ARRESTS 100 OVER TOOTHPASTE" would be hilarious
What press? That press is dead and buried. Modern MSM will not report this incident. Note also that all 100+ arrestees will be charged with a crime, and will have to plead some misdemeanor to get out. If they do not, the jails are large enough to hold 100 people, even if the toothpaste refuseniks will have to share cells with career criminals. Their trials, if it comes to that, will be separate, at different venues. You will get no PR out of this.
The agent == DHS. DHS consists of agents.
A couple of million dollars will buy you one (1) space-rated instrument, like a navigational aid, or a simple engine, or something else of that scale. It often takes about a million dollars to design a product here, on Earth, that is not even certified for aviation use. One engineer over one year will cost you about $250K, so four engineers over one year will eat your million just in salary - without having any money left for materials, tools, services, licenses, or just for rent of the building where they work.
However, I would rather go to an asteroid that is say 1-2 months away and then come back after a week stay.
The asteroid belt is farther than Mars. I guess you could do a flyby of one that is coming closer to Earth, but that is difficult because of wildly different speeds of your vehicle and the rock.
However in every other aspect your plan is much better. Once you are in the Belt you can get by with minimum amount of fuel because gravity there is microscopic. The volume of the Belt is tremendous, and you can find everything there. It could be the new New World. Our technology is already capable of reaching the Belt and supporting self-sustaining colonies there. In the Belt you would fly your spaceship between asteroids just as easily as you drive your car to the store on Earth. The same technology is not going to work on Mars; it would require billions of dollars - essentially, support of the whole planet - to send an expedition to Mars and to return them, just because Mars is so inconvenient for landing and so massive for takeoff. We won't even be able to fly over Mars, unless on jet propulsion.
Mars might be a better site for a space elevator, though, with not too much atmosphere to cause oscillations of the cables, with no flying vehicles that can be taken by terrorists, and with an obvious need for easy access to the surface.
Sorry that I presumed my reader didn't need me to spell out every single little detail.
It's hardly a little detail if production of 1000 spaceships of Sovereign class exhausts resources of your home planet(s), pollutes the environment and uses up lifetimes of millions of workers. Even in Star Trek spaceships were very valuable items. Elimination of personal costs (money) does not reduce societal (fiscal) costs.
Elimination of cost is possible only when a civilization becomes godlike, one way or another. For example, it can command billions of robots who do whatever the civilization wants, including obtaining energy and raw materials. In such civilization cost would be indeed not a factor. One example of such a society would be Diaspar (and even then it has constraints.)
Elimination of money is possible much earlier - when it becomes possible to provide basic resources on "as needed" basis, regardless of your contribution. Often that contribution is not even measurable; how do you measure value of a poet? However a money-less society still has constraints on how much one can use, just because there isn't enough to satisfy *any* desire. For example, if you want to have a mountain moved away because it blocks the view then you will need an approval of the society - at least because that would take terajoules of energy and will wear down an army of robots. But if you want to dig up a pool, that is entirely free.
The only thing that will make space exploration cost-effective is discoveries in physics that will allow us to move materials within gravity fields without those huge losses that we incur today. It is ridiculous to spend 20 to 50 million USD to just send one man to the LEO for a week. Costs of another trip to the Moon would be in tens of billions. Costs of a well prepared trip to Mars would be even higher. The humankind cannot afford those costs, regardless of whether they use the money or toil for free as slaves of some World Government. The planet itself cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that you don't know any of that, but the discussion is incomplete when important details are just assumed, not spelled out.
No, I am not familiar with those. Taser is all I have seen (on the Net.) I don't own any such thing.
If the attacker is already within arm's reach then you have to be very strong and agile; otherwise he will simply deflect your arm with the zapper, or grab your wrist and shove the zapper into your own neck. Humanity learned all that over the millennia of nonstop knife and sword fighting. IMO, if you allow an attacker to come close you need to be a pretty good fighter, so that the attacker can't just kick you in the knee while you are intently preparing the sparkling salvation. Note that the linked video shows that the attacker is never within reach of your arm and therefore you cannot apply the shock to his body.
Zappers without flying probes may not work through some clothes, especially if they are wet. The current always flows through the path of the least resistance. (Well, technically it flows through all possible paths, but that is important only if you are using a 100 kV, 100 kA power grid transformer substation as your zapper :-) So a leather jacket may leave you defenseless.
For this and other reasons criminals do not carry shockers; they carry knives and guns. Setting the firearm aside, one might actually benefit from carrying a small (legal size) knife and learning how to use it correctly. The sight of sharpened steel has calming effect on many attackers; it also works on multiple attackers. If there are two or three guys coming at you, I doubt that they will give you 30 seconds to properly shock the thug #1 before you can switch to thug #2, and so on, in FIFO order.
Correct, and that's why if you must act then it is much safer to find the guy and beat him senseless. Violent crimes are frequent, and they have minimal punishment, but a computer crime can seriously ruin your day.
The only problem of course is that you have to be closer than you want to be to use them.
If the attacker is within arm's reach then using a firearm may be not an option anymore. Trayvon went for GZ's gun, as far as the public knows. There is a 21 foot rule just for those cases.
Using a Taser at a longer distance might work, but you'd better be ready to follow up with a firearm. This means that you hold the Taser in the other hand.
IMO, the only advantage you can get out of having a non-lethal weapon is to tell the judge that you were prepared to defend yourself non-lethally, but had to go for the lethal method when the other method failed, or couldn't be effective. As of actually *using* a pepper spray on a drug-fueled crazy man, that would be a very dangerous exercise. Do you expect him to actually *feel* the pain from the spray? There are cases when attackers were shot through, but before they fell dead they were able to cover the distance and kill the LEO. Many illegal drugs act as anesthetics; even alcohol does that.
If you are claiming some particular asteroid then it is different from all others (otherwise why to bother marking it?) If it is different then it is logical to presume that its uniqueness makes it more suitable for you - and therefore for me, since we are both mostly alike. Therefore it is advantageous for me to grab your marked asteroids - or at least to start with them and see for myself which of them are good and which of them are just decoys. I will not be at a disadvantage by doing that unless most or all of your marked asteroids are decoys. I would have a good chance to find that out through my mole at your HQ anyway; the costs of spaceflight are so high that my mole only needs to deliver one secret of yours and then he can retire to the $most_expensive_location. Nobody at your HQ would be able to resist. Wives and children sell out for even less. (But we, evil overlords, have our ways to deal with our trusted lieutenants.)
Presumably why many of those sci-fi writers mentioned previously envisioned money-less societies - apparently, the best way to make space exploration cost effective is to effectively eliminate the concept of cost.
Money and cost are not the same. Walking a thousand miles does not become any easier just because you cannot count. Cost will remain in any case - such as in lifetime of actual humans who spend their limited time on this Earth on the project, in labs and factories, instead of walking in the forest and enjoying the nature.
Citation needed. Indians were not entirely peaceful, and they had things to fight over even in a huge, featureless country with enough land for everyone.
Besides, if you ask a Mormon, North America was full of those descendants of emigrants from Palestine - and evil Indians made sure that not a trace of them remains!1!
i would, lock everything down. starting with wpa2 with a really long random string, I would even change the wireless network SSID to a random string. (part of the crypto use the ssid in the hash). I would add, mac address auth, change all my DHCP settings. and even hide my network.
And once you do all of the above, pull the Ethernet cable out of the router. The attacker will have to go through all this pain just to discover that detail :-)
That is very, very far from being "of course." Police wants convictions, and there is nothing else to convict than an asocial nerd in a basement, with a stash of CP in his browser's cache. Those files do not carry an indication through which router they were obtained, since the browser keeps no logs. If you have them, you have them.
The nerd, naturally, may confess to a lighter crime - such as stealing your keys and connecting to your router. You should be ready for a raid yourself, and better you keep your own nose clean - the pr0n that most people collect rarely comes with notarially certified age of all participants. This is a good example of "sow the wind, reap the whirlwind."
Framing the thief for CP would be a massive overreaction. But the thief can compromise your own IP address by *really* downloading politically incorrect materials. So I wouldn't accept any honeypot scheme where the thief is actually allowed to go outside of your LAN. Doing a good job on a honeypot for just one guy is too expensive. In essence, if you cannot guarantee that your Wi-Fi is secure then what are you doing with it? Just hoping that no hacker shows up? Either make sure it is secure, or turn it off. There is no middle ground because it can lead to trouble.
Do you really want to put the interests of Native Americans first?
No, because the current state doesn't (or shouldn't) provide infinite (going forward) advantage to currently living people just because their ancestors were under temporary and finite disadvantage a long time ago. For the same reason a descendant of a French peasant does not sue a descendant of a French noble for the oppression that the said noble may have done unto the said peasant. In worst case (such as after a war) the loser pays reparations, but otherwise hostilities end. If that's not the case, see Palestine and their Right of Return.
You came as an immigrant without any visa clearance from the natives.
Only for a small subset of the collective "I," and only if you include long dead generations into the list. Your comment would be proper on the day when first colonists landed (without visas.) However by now those colonists paid for their visas with their labor and, sometimes, with their lives. The country is somewhat improved, compared to empty prairies of North America in 1600's.
And from the other point of view, I may be a direct descendant of Oog the Caveman who was roaming North America in time immemorial but then moved elsewhere to become my ancestor. Does this give me any advantage over American Indians? What about that plankton that washed the shores of the ancient Pangea? I'm sure I'm carrying a few genes of those organisms too. What unique privileges does this entitle me to?
I expect there will be no relief in sight until Americans start electing politicians that put the interests of Americans first
The politicians are already doing that. CEOs are also Americans, isn't it so? Some of the profit is donated to politicians; that's how the feedback loop is operating.
Or perhaps you meant some other Americans, like those peons in IT? How much do they donate to Congressmen?
This political system is the best the money can buy. If you don't like its results then perhaps the system ought to be replaced with something else. It would be otherwise foolish to expect a different result.
From the POV of many CEOs, american workers are overpaid, underexploited, and too pampered with benefits. Foreign workforce - who often comes from countries that we do not associate with widespread wealth - is willing to work on terms of pseudo-slavery. The american worker might just as well curl up and die, he is not needed anymore, aside from a handful of highly educated workers. The american worker cannot even be a customer because he has no job and no income to pay for things. In this aspect a rice farmer in China is a better customer, he has an honest income and can buy a gizmo once in a while. The words "customer" and "employed" are synonyms.
How does noscript affect this?
Positively. I have no desire to use a half-baked JS implementation if I have FoxReader (on Windows) that runs natively. Even Chrome's built-in reader often is not sufficient, and it even asks if you want to see the document in a "real" PDF reader. There is no reason to bother with crippled implementations if good ones are available for the same affordable price of $0.
Am I going to have enable javascript for every site that has a PDF that I want to view?
Not required. What you want to do is specify in settings how you want the PDF to be handled. If you select "Preview in Mozilla" then you need the JS code. If you select a different viewer then you don't need JS.
This gimmick is handy if all you have is the browser. But if you do any amount of serious work on the computer you will install better tools.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that they're primarily targeting consumers in the developing world and corporations/organizations in the developed world
Android is free. The $99 that you pay for a low end tablet is all going to the manufacturer, to pay for the hardware. How will a different and less popular OS make it cheaper? What can you offer in UNIX/Linux that you cannot offer on Android? Why would you build a tablet application for Unity (using what?) and target hundreds of customers if you can build an Android application using an established and free Android SDK and target a hundred million customers? Why would you, as a customer, join a fringe group instead of a large community? (Well, some do, they bought WinRT tablets, after all.)
Nerdfest mentions below that there may be a market for Linux tablets, just as MS believes there is a market for PC tablets (non-RT.) Perhaps; there is a market for everything, as long as you don't care about its size. But there will be very few people - only some geeks - who'd want it. Professionals who need UNIX tools can get them on Android or iOS. Standard Linux applications (GIMP etc.) won't be very exciting on a tablet, considering that they aren't the easiest thing in the world on a PC. It can be even said that there are no killer applications on desktop Linux, such as those that would make you use Linux. On Windows they exist - QuickBooks, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, MS Office, etc.
It is not a viable business strategy to just hope that drinkers of your kool-aid will flock to the stores and buy your product. That didn't work for HP, and where is Canonical in comparison? Even Apple cannot go on blind hope; Apple sells because Apple's products work well, and they are worth the money to Apple's customers. If someone comes up with a Linux tablet (that has no other attractions except being Linux) then there will be just a handful of geeks who will buy it. The OpenMoko project proves this - geeks will buy everything, in small quantity. But that won't be enough to even keep the lights on. Every successful product has a good reason for its existence - it either does more, or it does it better, or it costs less. Canonical's tablet is not going to be cheaper; I am unsure how it can do more than competition, and the debate is open on whether it can do it better. A working AI who can sustain a long conversation would be a great example of such an improvement. But that has nothing to do with the OS; the code of that AI will be OS-agnostic. At this point, given that Android and Ubuntu run the same kernel, the only area of improvement is in the GUI. So the challenge is to make a GUI that is better than Android. That would be a trivial task for authors of Unity - unless they, for some reason, ask for the opinion of their customers :-)
I hope they will come up with some reason for the consumer to go out and buy an Ubuntu tablet. As things are, the competition is pretty strong. Android and iOS have all bases covered, with hundreds of thousands of applications, and with several years on the market, and with millions of deployed devices, and with the user base trained.
Sight unseen, I'd say that an Ubuntu tablet may not even win against a Windows 8 tablet. It still may be that Ubuntu people have some bright idea that hasn't occurred to Apple and Google, but that is not very likely. Price-wise, they are competing with a free OS (Android) that Google spends millions on in R&D, and with finished tablets that can be had for under $100.
So it would not strike me as unreasonable for a net-connected car to download the images of a detour route within a few seconds of recognising a roadblock.
Especially if the workers have a small beacon that broadcasts at, say, 5 GHz the map of the area that shows how to drive around the work area. All cars in vicinity receive that and can act upon these instructions if they are signed and the chain of trust is good enough.
That would be better than what we have now - a mass of cars trying to get by the work area, and nobody can reliably know what path is safe until you see the cones and have to change the lane. If there is a sign "<< RIGHT LANE CLOSED <<" it still doesn't tell you how many lanes are closed, and where are the transition zones, and whether there is a worker with a STOP sign. The broadcast could easily contain all that, tied to the GPS and to local markers.
Just because we are familiar with conventional vehicles does not mean that they don't take any special considerations. Try starting that diesel engine on a cold day and going pedal to the metal as soon as you start. Or just shutting a turbocharged vehicle off immediatley after a hard drive.
I never drove diesel cars or turbocharged cars. I don't know what would happen if I use them without training. But this is not relevant. We are discussing one specific car, as furnished by the manufacturer for a preplanned trip. If the driver was not told certain things by the manufacturer's rep when he got the keys then it is assumed that he doesn't need to know those certain things. Either they are not applicable or they are presumed to be known already. The latter is impossible with an all-new car. We are left with the former: no special instruction was necessary.
Perhaps you should just admit you hate electric vehicles?
How could I do that if I own one already (a hybrid, admittedly) and I like it very much? What I don't like in Tesla and other EVs is their limitations, that are severe. The range of a Leaf would be not good enough for me, but this Tesla car can be OK. The price is, of course, off the charts - nobody in his right mind will buy a $80K car to save $100 on gas (even if that.) I also don't like the PR (usually lies) of the manufacturers who have to lie because otherwise their product is seen for what it is - not good enough yet.
Look at Toyota. They built their Prius well - so well that it was selling as hot cakes. They didn't have to lie, the car performs exactly as advertised, and there is nothing fundamental to complain about. Prius sells because it is a good car, and because it is reasonably priced. Not dirt cheap, mind you, but that is not even expected - you have to pay for quality. I did, and no regrets. I drive the car in the city, in the hills, on freeways, for hundreds of miles per day - and it works exactly as it should.
You can say that we are just conditioned, trained to use gas cars correctly. But in reality the gas cars for the mass market are simple beasts; they require a simple and quick charge when the indicator shows low fuel. That's it. No other special considerations. No need to watch the thermometer; no need to run around, in darkness, with extension cables, or play with 480V voltages or 200A currents. No need to babysit the car. No range anxiety; if I want to, I can carry cans of gas with me. No worries about battery life, overcharging, or undercharging. It's that simple. Drivers are used to simple cars; it would be an uphill battle to sell them a car that requires extra care - and all EVs, even Volt, a hybrid, require that extra care because their Li-Ion batteries do not forgive mistakes. Several Tesla Roadsters were bricked because the owners couldn't or wouldn't charge them often enough.
The Tesla EV is slowly getting there; it is already perfectly usable for many city drivers who occasionally need a 100 mile drive to the airport and back, to pick someone up. The cost doesn't make any sense, though. I'm not against all EVs, but I am strongly against bad EVs. This one is bad. The company's response - essentially an accusation that the reporter lied - is much worse, on par with Steve "you are holding it wrong" Jobs. It was wrong to say then, and it is wrong to say now. The customer is always right, even when he is wrong. The company needs positive PR; but at the moment Tesla looks like a holding tank for incompetents and a-holes. If the reporter truthfully reported what he was told to do by Tesla, their customer support is lacking indeed. And there can be no excuse for Elon Musk's flinging of tantrums; he can be triply right, but you never, ever call your customer an idiot and a liar. If you do that, every potential customer of yours will mentally try this treatment on themselves - and will not like it at all.
The car doesn't come with external battery heater that is separate from the charger. Charging the car overnight would have been sufficient because it produces heat. But that requires a charger... and we are back to square one - there was no charger anywhere in town, let alone at the hotel.
If we have a 100% (or close to it) coverage of the entire country with just 240V chargers then at least this car would be viable. Maybe not excellent, but you would have no fear of being stranded. You still would have to plan your life around the limitations of the car (such as not to drive for 24 hours straight, even if an army of demons chases you :-) but your car would be maintainable. Today, as you can see, the reporter had no way to charge the car (or to keep it warm on external power.) For that he'd have to stop for the night in Norwich, not in Groton. This is inconvenient if you need to be in one town and not in another.
There is also a concern that too much electric power is going to be wasted, if batteries require so much heating and lose charge so quickly. Gas engines get hot, so they are not an ideal either, but they at least do that only when you run the car. An EV has to be plugged in whenever you are not using it, thus drawing energy all the time.