I deal with documents on professional basis. This, in my industry, means that none of my documents may ever hit the cloud. (Encryption is a possibility, but it creates more problems than it solves.)
I tried OpenOffice of several versions, over the years, and all of them were buggy. The latest one, for example, corrupted the watermark in the document. This is unacceptable. I have MS Office now. It may have bugs (not that any bit me recently) but the overall quality of the software is certainly acceptable. OpenOffice does not pass that test - it is unusable in an environment where the wordprocessor will have to correctly handle all kinds of inputs, written by me or written by others.
MS Office costs about $100 per license. This is a very acceptable cost of doing business. Perhaps this would be too steep if you are a grandmother with limited resources who only wants to create a single page note about a missing cat and print it for her nearest neighbors. As a business, you want to be as sure as it ever gets that the important proposal that you are writing will be correctly opened by the soliciting party. (In many cases editable Word documents are requested, not a PDF.)
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
You'd have to have this law in all countries. Otherwise a company in the USA will be forced to hire 100,000 workers to install, one by one, the gold wire leads in ICs, and each IC will cost $100, and only 30% of them will work. But an overseas company will install one robot that will do 100,000 installs per minute, and each IC will cost $0.01 and 100% will be done right. The US company will be massively uncompetitive.
In other words, you cannot become competitive by utilizing more expensive and less efficient technologies. Humans are about as inefficient as it ever gets in manufacturing of modern high-tech products. With every decade there are fewer and fewer jobs for humans. In many cases a job can *only* be done by a machine. Human interaction remains one of few areas where people are still required. But I would be quite happy if Burger King replaces all their workers with robots. The food will be consistently assembled, it will be more healthy (with no workers sneezing at those burgers,) and the owner has room to eventually reduce the prices. Right now the owner cannot sell you the burger for less than it takes him to pay salaries of the workers. After robots are installed, the production cost will be defined by the cost of ingredients and by the amortization of the equipment, and by the service fees.
And I assume that they'll have infra-red cameras, sonar, weather sensors and g knows what else.
You are overcomplicating things. The car will drive itself only if safety checks pass successfully. For example, the visible light camera should see the road - because if the camera can't see it then the person at the wheel also can't see it, and chances are that other drivers and cars can't see this one either. The LIDAR sensors are not a replacement for a camera that is supposed to read road signs (such as "STOP. ROAD CLOSED. BRIDGE OUT.") and the road markings. LIDAR will tell you where the road physically ends, if it is delimited by something like guardrails, but only the visible light camera can tell you where the lanes are. That's the only thing that keeps the self-driving car on the correct side of the road, for example. (Until the roads are upgraded, which isn't going to happen.)
If a driver is legally monitoring the vehicle, i.e. Driving, then they are responsible for the actions of the vehicle.
It is not possible technically, and if I were in such a car I would be driving it, with all the computers turned off. The ship can have only one captain. Two will wreck the ship just because each of them will order the right thing if taken alone; but taken together they will cause a disaster. On the road, for example, you can accelerate and stay on the freeway, or you can slow down and take an exit. Both are good choices. But accelerating *and* taking an exit is probably ill-advised.
There are going to be redundancy systems needed if a sensor is blocked, or ALL of the LEDs blow at once.
No need to. It's much simpler. The car will stop and refuse to move if it cannot see the road, for any reason. Failed headlights are just as likely as a very dense fog or a blizzard.
It is of course a pretty simple test for the machine: switch the lights on and observe the increase in brightness of the camera image. You can measure the light output of the headlights quite accurately, as long as you have an idea about the reflectivity of the road.
The cost of the mistake is disproportionally high, compared to the zero cost of engraving a simple text in the mold. From that point on it costs nothing extra to manufacture. Mines can be deployed under fire, or in a covert operation, or at night - when you cannot afford the time or the light to check. The embossed text can be felt with fingers. It makes plenty of sense to have it there.
simple things like LAW rockets have instructions stuck on the side of it
Those things are not as simple as you think if they need instructions. Besides, a sticker is a very cheap thing when it allows a replacement soldier, who was never trained on this weapon, to pick it up and use. Can your army afford a situation when the general's driver, the last soldier standing in defense, couldn't fire the LAW that he had just because the manual got lost?
By the way, AK-47 does not have a field-stripping instruction manual stuck to the weapon. I would like to see how a person who is unfamiliar with the 15-step (IIRC) process would go about taking it apart. He may have to do it under fire. (A trained soldier needs about 10-15 seconds.)
You think some of the top yacht builders in the world, working for the most exacting clients for millions of dollars have somehow made a huge and epic mistake and made a yacht which actually can't sail at sea at all?
It wouldn't be unheard of. Someone had the Titanic built, after all. The science of survivability of ships existed by that time and was pretty well developed for decades. It's just nobody cared to perform the fault analysis.
Also, you are saying "working for the most exacting clients for millions of dollars" - here is your answer. When your client pays you big bucks to jump, you simply ask "how high?" I'm sure there always are all kinds of safety objections to any luxury feature. The safest boat would be a submarine. But for some reason rich clients want a bit more - windows, decks, furniture that is not welded to the floor, and so on. Probably the shipbuilder prints waivers by the ton, and the ship owner signs them all. Rich people can be demanding sometimes, if not arrogant. Nothing bad can happen to them.
As a last resort, when the only alternative is to have your skin against the wavefront of the blast. A typical bunker is concrete and steel, often underground, and you may not even have blast-facing windows - it will be periscopes and fiber optic and video cameras these days.
Blast-proof windows are often as strong as advertised; however a minute scratch, or a defect in the structure of the material, can shatter them. They are not 100% reliable. Ten feet of concrete are always as reliable as you'd expect.
A blast-proof window will be replaced after the blast, even if it survived it just fine. Windows on the yacht will be exposed to forces of nature for many years, until one of them fails. Nobody is going to replace them on schedule or after a storm. If they get scratched and weakened, nobody is going to notice that - it's not the Shuttle to have techs crawling all over it with microscopes.
This means that a blast-proof window has its place as the last line of defense, where it buys you a chance to live when otherwise you should be already dead. But it would be unwise to use it as the first - and the only - line of defense.
Private yachts avoid large storms.
It takes two to tango. Do large storms avoid private yachts?
Didn't the Nextel phones have a built in frs mode for when you were out of cell service range
As I understand those were not FRS functions. FRS, being 450 MHz,,won't even work with higher band antennas.
I had a Sprint phone right around the time of acquisition of Nextel (I was using Sprint from 1999 to 2008, I think,) and the phone (Sanyo something) had the PTT button. I read the manual about what it does. The function was entirely tied to the cellular network. (Why would a carrier compete with itself by providing a convenient alternative to air minutes?) The intent was to provide communication between members of a group without dialing, by just pushing a "Talk" button. Still, it was not like a radio - one had to take turns speaking, and this was enforced by the hardware. (An FRS radio does not prevent two or three people to transmit simultaneously.)
My current phone, one of LG flip phones, also has this "PTT" button (and this is on the AT&T network.) This is also a paid feature. When I accidentally press it, the text asks me to open the phone and do some steps to sign up. I never needed this function and don't know how it works.
Israel is disproportionally important in technology and in politics. It's one of nuclear club countries. If the World War III starts, it probably will start somewhere around there.
how about we try to make good jobs available to everyone?
So how many engineers and historians are you ready to hire right now, on your savings? Other people in the country are in the same position, even if they have some business. You cannot hire a machinist if you have no machine for him to work on, and the machine costs $100K. But even if you could invest, you have no customers for this extra production.
In essence, the industry today is so efficient that it does not require many workers. Only in China they can afford thousands of laborers. In the USA if there is a factory, it's all robots. Workers are too expensive (in part due to the minimum wage law.) As result the workers are not hired. The futuristic roboticized society is not futuristic anymore, it's already here. Millions of potential peasants, who would be employed a few centuries ago, are milling around in cities, while the huge fields are worked by a machine with a lone operator. Millions of US-based potential assembly workers are sitting at home because their jobs are done by robots (for all practical purposes, a factory worker in China is indistinguishable from a robot in the USA - same low cost.) The service industry can absorb only enough workers to service paying customers; but the number of those shrinks as more and more people lose well-paid jobs. A restaurant worker simply cannot afford to dine at another restaurant.
1) No new children. You can keep your existing children but you're not allowed to produce more children while collecting unemployment benefits, unless the State thinks you should be allowed to have children.
They will defy your ban. What are you going to do about that? Euthanize those unapproved children? Take them away from their parents and hold them as hostages? Who is getting punished here?
2) No voting rights unless you contribute in various approved ways, or can prove you are actively seeking employment.
Or unless the millions of "pets of the state" start a riot.
If productivity is so high due to advances in technology etc, that we have so much excess food, so many surplus toys, luxuries etc, I see no justification to not keep humans alive and well just because they are unable or unwilling to work.
This means if all production is automated, none of the humans will be allowed to have children. The humankind will die out within a century. Or, perhaps, some pets of the state will be more equal than others - and then they will be allowed to have children?
And pets don't get to vote (otherwise they might vote themselves more and more benefits).
Pets don't vote because they are not smart enough for that. Among humans there is one category of people who never had a right to vote. Those were slaves. If there is not enough jobs, all kinds of people will become unemployed. You could deal with lazy bums today; but what if a great political agitator springs up among that crowd? Your society will burn very soon after that.
From what I see those corporations and rich people shoving their profits around to pay no tax are worse.
Corporations are voting with their feet. They are free to not incorporate in California. You cannot force them to open the office where they don't want to. Corporations are also free to do or not do business from certain locations. That is logical, and that is freedom, even though by exercising that freedom they deny you the money that you consider to be yours (why?) To solve this conflict you need to fix the tax laws in your own country, so that businesses have a reason to work there and to pay taxes there. If your tax rate is 100% why would you be surprised when you learn that all businesses closed overnight?
Paying the same tax rate I do will make them poorer but isn't going to make them poor.
Rich individuals already pay the same, or higher, individual tax. If you try to increase taxation all you get is exodus of rich people from your country. The problem is that rich people are just as sensitive to unfairness as poor people. Nobody wants to work long and hard and take risks just to see his income taken away by the tax man. Consider the situation of a gambler:
The gambler bets his life on a chance that the dice's output is even. The house throws the dice. If it shows 3 the gambler hangs himself. The local newspaper publishes a small footnote in a tiny font. If the dice shows 4 the gambler wins 100 million. And then the tax man shows up and wants to take 80% (or whatever) of the revenue. But, Sir, where were you when the gambler was killing himself for the loss? If you want a share of the success then you, fairly, should have a share in the failure as well, isn't it so? But no, the laws are written such that the government is allowed to skim off the success, but they have nothing to do with a failure. Risk it all - if you lose it's your loss alone, but if you win then it's our win together.
I still have seen no evidence that they actually work to reduce accidental shootings.
It's hard to get such evidence when the gun did not fire and nobody was killed and the police was not called. We do not know how many such cases of prevented NDs have occurred. You will not get your numbers, and the speculation (a.k.a. the thought experiment) is all that is available.
In fact a GAO report says that the only safeties that would reduce accidental shootings are: child-proof safeties, and loaded chamber indicators.
There is not one individual safety measure, aside from your gun being melted down, that would be always successful in prevention of accidents. Accidents among adults are pretty rare, but when they do happen (like the famous quail hunting accident) the safety would have played no role - the operator intended the weapon to discharge, and it did. The intent was wrong (or unfortunate, depending on who is responsible.) The mechanical safety would affect the rate of slipped fingers, oversized gloves, triggers caught in something (especially when holstering,) and other mishandling that in the end pulls the trigger. The safety lever only restricts this particular avenue of ND, not any other. To make a car analogy, to put the car in gear you have to press the brake pedal. An adult wouldn't need that because he is always cognizant, right? You cannot make even that joke when a child is present in the running car. The Alt-Ctrl-Del requires three keys to be pressed. It's a relatively safe function only starting with NT-based Windows; before that in DOS it was an instant reboot, with all your data lost, and in DOS-based Windows it was a blue screen where you could cancel the reboot.
With regard to children, no measures are adequate. The children open gun safes in seconds; they certainly can find out where the keys are - they are very inquisitive and curious, they are at home far more than their parents, and even if they are supervised by a granny, that granny is not going to follow the child everywhere. The cable lock is a sufficient protection of children only until the child finds a friend with a Dremel tool or a larger grinder - or with a nail to open the lock (those locks are ordered from China for a few dollars apiece.)
The chamber indicator is hard to see even when you want to see it. Some.22LR semi-autos are prone to misfeeds, so racking the bolt/slide does not always result in chambering the round. An indicator is helpful here. A child wouldn't even know what that indicator means. IMO, the only reliable way to keep a gun away from the uninitiated child is to not have it at the house at all. Some ranges/stores offer secure storage alongside their own firearms, and the fees are minor, compared to the overall expense of raising a child.
Games have more detailed video walkthroughs than the OS made by a billion dollar company. The MS Web site is useless if you want facts. As it was said many times before, MS is a sales company first and foremost. Tech company it is not; it just so happened, historically, that the product that MS is selling is software.
I have an RC build of Win8, and I never saw this tutorial. Perhaps it is present in the production build, but how would I know that without gilding Ballmer's hand? Should I buy a pig in a poke just to find out what's inside the poke?
It took me nearly five minutes to figure out how to close a Metro app the first day I used it,
On a PC it's Alt-F4, if you are old enough to remember Windows 3.1 keyboard shortcuts. Everyone else you need to invoke the anti-charms bar (whatever it is called) and from there you can close.
So, if I'm properly trained and don't aim my gun at people and keep my finger out of the trigger guard until I'm aiming at something I want to destroy then what is the safety doing for me?
There are many safeties in a gun, and the wise thing is to use all of them (as the circumstances permit; if you are in Afghanistan your rules may be different.) For example:
A gun that you don't have with you will not fire.
A gun that you don't have an ammo for will not fire.
A gun that is partially taken apart (bolt removed) or locked with a cable lock will not fire.
An unloaded gun that is locked in a container will not fire.
A gun that is in your holster but not loaded will not fire.
A gun that is in your holster and loaded, but without a round in the chamber will not fire.
A gun that is in your hand, loaded and with a round in the chamber will probably not fire if a certain mechanical lever is in the "S" position.
A gun that is in your hand, loaded and ready to fire, will not kill anyone if you always keep it pointed to the safe direction (or downrange, which is also safe.)
And so on. We take many different measures all the time to make sure that those evil guns don't suddenly decide to go on a rampage. As you can see, most of those safety measures are something that *you* do - not some spring or some catch in the gun. The role of the mechanical safety in this list is very small. However all those measures are reducing the chance of an ND. Given that NDs are not a joke, you generally try to do your best to make sure that the weapon only fires when you want it to. There may be a situation when all that separates you from many years of prison is a small mechanical lever on your firearm. It is your choice to use it or to ignore it, just as it is your choice to follow (or not) all other gun safety rules.
With regard to the idiot who was pointing weapons at people and then saying "the safety was on." Let's imagine there is no safety, as you advocate. The idiot would be saying instead "I thought it was not loaded", or "I wasn't going to pull the trigger", or some other inane excuse. Worse still, he would have shot you because the safety is not there, and his brain is not capable of handling the idea of not pointing guns at people.
I personally select firearms with mechanical safeties. Not because I don't trust myself - but because I want yet another, however small, protection against AD/ND. The default state for all my firearms is "do not fire." This makes them, as configured, less suitable for a battle. But I must confess, I don't often participate in armed conflicts. If a firefight is looming, though - such as if I see three men trying to force the door of my home at night - it takes just a second to insert the magazine, release the safety (all the way down) and rack the slide. After that it's a point and click exercise. If a gun owner cannot memorize a couple of very simple moves, he doesn't deserve to own a gun. It's a large responsibility, after all.
Eh. If I have "stuff" that I need holes in, I use a drill.
It is against the Fish and Game code of all 57 states to approach a deer with a cordless drill and then start drilling holes in him. Even the deer knows that.
but that's really just a simulation of killing things
In part true, but largely it is a competition to find out who has the steadiest hand and the sharpest eye. The easiest way to kill things is by blowing them up; but we don't plant landmines on deer paths, don't we? It is an art to use a rifle at a large distance against small targets. Perhaps you prefer chess, and other people prefer throwing of a javelin. But it is a sport nevertheless, even when nothing gets killed except paper.
I'd say most physical sports originate in war. Running? Necessary in war. Throwing javelins? Don't even ask. Lifting heavy things, throwing heavy objects, balancing on objects... all that is part of the ancient warfare. The entire sport is a war without casualties. In team sports it is as close to the real battle as it gets, with medals and prestige and fame at stake.
I like to point out that "some guns" are designed specifically for the purpose of killing people, to the detriment of other legitimate reasons for owning a gun, like killing animals for food.
What gun, outside of artillery, is not usable in a competition? Some distances (beyond 1 mile) require.50BMG or other specialty calibers if you want the bullet to even reach the target.
Perhaps an AK-47 would be a poor choice for a target shooter. However it had been used in hunting (in the single shot mode.) Full-auto is never used, except in movies.
But even regardless of all that, there is still plenty of violence in the world. If your ship is surrounded by Somali pirates what do you do - tell them that they are not welcome, or start firing at them with everything you got? If a thug approaches a small woman in a dark alley to rape her, what the woman is supposed to do - to become a victim or to spend a few rounds on the attacker? Some point at Europe where firearms are heavily regulated; but such people in Europe become victims and sometimes die, and nobody cares to count them. Can you imagine London riots if all the population of London was armed? Those riots wouldn't even begin; those rioters wouldn't be taking a chance to get a few new holes in their bodies; and using their own firearms against peaceful citizens would give them a life sentence in prison, if they survive the capture. Training with firearms has the same purpose as boxing or weightlifting or karate - it teaches you how to use violence to further your goals. When a gang member works out he is preparing to kick your teeth out. When an honest citizen works out (in a gym or at a range) he is preparing to defend himself, his family and perhaps his country against that gang member. Isn't that one of the usual duties of a man, in all societies? If someone comes to your house, beats up your wife and steals your child, what are you going to do as you watch this - are you just going to use choice words to express your displeasure? Threaten to write a letter to the United Nations, perhaps?
Slashdot Mirror
I deal with documents on professional basis. This, in my industry, means that none of my documents may ever hit the cloud. (Encryption is a possibility, but it creates more problems than it solves.)
I tried OpenOffice of several versions, over the years, and all of them were buggy. The latest one, for example, corrupted the watermark in the document. This is unacceptable. I have MS Office now. It may have bugs (not that any bit me recently) but the overall quality of the software is certainly acceptable. OpenOffice does not pass that test - it is unusable in an environment where the wordprocessor will have to correctly handle all kinds of inputs, written by me or written by others.
MS Office costs about $100 per license. This is a very acceptable cost of doing business. Perhaps this would be too steep if you are a grandmother with limited resources who only wants to create a single page note about a missing cat and print it for her nearest neighbors. As a business, you want to be as sure as it ever gets that the important proposal that you are writing will be correctly opened by the soliciting party. (In many cases editable Word documents are requested, not a PDF.)
A good wordprocessor is not a good target for an F/OSS project. It's a lot of boring, thankless work. Nobody has an itch that has to be scratched in such a masochistic way. That's why F/OSS wordprocessors are all not very good. Same goes for accounting systems, CAD systems, and many more. Often a F/OSS project just can't muster enough resources to complete the project. A for-profit company has no such problem; they just pay money, and developers show up for work.
It will also aid DNA experimenting to program life
I guess you want a pet greasel.
Plus you'll finally get that hyper-lifelike robot to fuck, thouh human behavior (not counting remote control) is still a little off.
A man's ideal woman can be programmed in a couple lines of code, as long as you have an automatic kitchen somewhere.
You'd have to have this law in all countries. Otherwise a company in the USA will be forced to hire 100,000 workers to install, one by one, the gold wire leads in ICs, and each IC will cost $100, and only 30% of them will work. But an overseas company will install one robot that will do 100,000 installs per minute, and each IC will cost $0.01 and 100% will be done right. The US company will be massively uncompetitive.
In other words, you cannot become competitive by utilizing more expensive and less efficient technologies. Humans are about as inefficient as it ever gets in manufacturing of modern high-tech products. With every decade there are fewer and fewer jobs for humans. In many cases a job can *only* be done by a machine. Human interaction remains one of few areas where people are still required. But I would be quite happy if Burger King replaces all their workers with robots. The food will be consistently assembled, it will be more healthy (with no workers sneezing at those burgers,) and the owner has room to eventually reduce the prices. Right now the owner cannot sell you the burger for less than it takes him to pay salaries of the workers. After robots are installed, the production cost will be defined by the cost of ingredients and by the amortization of the equipment, and by the service fees.
Seems to me to be a right to own anything, including a car.
Only as long as you can legally acquire the item. If nobody sells it to you ... too bad.
It can also mean "adjusted" or "tuned", but normally referred to machinery or procedures, not people or military units such as a militia.
I suggest you go and tell that to the regular army.
And I assume that they'll have infra-red cameras, sonar, weather sensors and g knows what else.
You are overcomplicating things. The car will drive itself only if safety checks pass successfully. For example, the visible light camera should see the road - because if the camera can't see it then the person at the wheel also can't see it, and chances are that other drivers and cars can't see this one either. The LIDAR sensors are not a replacement for a camera that is supposed to read road signs (such as "STOP. ROAD CLOSED. BRIDGE OUT.") and the road markings. LIDAR will tell you where the road physically ends, if it is delimited by something like guardrails, but only the visible light camera can tell you where the lanes are. That's the only thing that keeps the self-driving car on the correct side of the road, for example. (Until the roads are upgraded, which isn't going to happen.)
If a driver is legally monitoring the vehicle, i.e. Driving, then they are responsible for the actions of the vehicle.
It is not possible technically, and if I were in such a car I would be driving it, with all the computers turned off. The ship can have only one captain. Two will wreck the ship just because each of them will order the right thing if taken alone; but taken together they will cause a disaster. On the road, for example, you can accelerate and stay on the freeway, or you can slow down and take an exit. Both are good choices. But accelerating *and* taking an exit is probably ill-advised.
There are going to be redundancy systems needed if a sensor is blocked, or ALL of the LEDs blow at once.
No need to. It's much simpler. The car will stop and refuse to move if it cannot see the road, for any reason. Failed headlights are just as likely as a very dense fog or a blizzard.
It is of course a pretty simple test for the machine: switch the lights on and observe the increase in brightness of the camera image. You can measure the light output of the headlights quite accurately, as long as you have an idea about the reflectivity of the road.
why mines say "front towards enemy"
The cost of the mistake is disproportionally high, compared to the zero cost of engraving a simple text in the mold. From that point on it costs nothing extra to manufacture. Mines can be deployed under fire, or in a covert operation, or at night - when you cannot afford the time or the light to check. The embossed text can be felt with fingers. It makes plenty of sense to have it there.
simple things like LAW rockets have instructions stuck on the side of it
Those things are not as simple as you think if they need instructions. Besides, a sticker is a very cheap thing when it allows a replacement soldier, who was never trained on this weapon, to pick it up and use. Can your army afford a situation when the general's driver, the last soldier standing in defense, couldn't fire the LAW that he had just because the manual got lost?
By the way, AK-47 does not have a field-stripping instruction manual stuck to the weapon. I would like to see how a person who is unfamiliar with the 15-step (IIRC) process would go about taking it apart. He may have to do it under fire. (A trained soldier needs about 10-15 seconds.)
You think some of the top yacht builders in the world, working for the most exacting clients for millions of dollars have somehow made a huge and epic mistake and made a yacht which actually can't sail at sea at all?
It wouldn't be unheard of. Someone had the Titanic built, after all. The science of survivability of ships existed by that time and was pretty well developed for decades. It's just nobody cared to perform the fault analysis.
Also, you are saying "working for the most exacting clients for millions of dollars" - here is your answer. When your client pays you big bucks to jump, you simply ask "how high?" I'm sure there always are all kinds of safety objections to any luxury feature. The safest boat would be a submarine. But for some reason rich clients want a bit more - windows, decks, furniture that is not welded to the floor, and so on. Probably the shipbuilder prints waivers by the ton, and the ship owner signs them all. Rich people can be demanding sometimes, if not arrogant. Nothing bad can happen to them.
Windows can be built to withstand bomb blasts
As a last resort, when the only alternative is to have your skin against the wavefront of the blast. A typical bunker is concrete and steel, often underground, and you may not even have blast-facing windows - it will be periscopes and fiber optic and video cameras these days.
Blast-proof windows are often as strong as advertised; however a minute scratch, or a defect in the structure of the material, can shatter them. They are not 100% reliable. Ten feet of concrete are always as reliable as you'd expect.
A blast-proof window will be replaced after the blast, even if it survived it just fine. Windows on the yacht will be exposed to forces of nature for many years, until one of them fails. Nobody is going to replace them on schedule or after a storm. If they get scratched and weakened, nobody is going to notice that - it's not the Shuttle to have techs crawling all over it with microscopes.
This means that a blast-proof window has its place as the last line of defense, where it buys you a chance to live when otherwise you should be already dead. But it would be unwise to use it as the first - and the only - line of defense.
Private yachts avoid large storms.
It takes two to tango. Do large storms avoid private yachts?
Didn't the Nextel phones have a built in frs mode for when you were out of cell service range
As I understand those were not FRS functions. FRS, being 450 MHz, ,won't even work with higher band antennas.
I had a Sprint phone right around the time of acquisition of Nextel (I was using Sprint from 1999 to 2008, I think,) and the phone (Sanyo something) had the PTT button. I read the manual about what it does. The function was entirely tied to the cellular network. (Why would a carrier compete with itself by providing a convenient alternative to air minutes?) The intent was to provide communication between members of a group without dialing, by just pushing a "Talk" button. Still, it was not like a radio - one had to take turns speaking, and this was enforced by the hardware. (An FRS radio does not prevent two or three people to transmit simultaneously.)
My current phone, one of LG flip phones, also has this "PTT" button (and this is on the AT&T network.) This is also a paid feature. When I accidentally press it, the text asks me to open the phone and do some steps to sign up. I never needed this function and don't know how it works.
Israel is disproportionally important in technology and in politics. It's one of nuclear club countries. If the World War III starts, it probably will start somewhere around there.
"It's different when *we* do it"
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
What makes you think that those four different mental health agencies pursue different goals?
How is providing a service that costs billions of dollars in infra structure not doing anything?
There is plenty of useless but expensive services provided by astrologers, priests, some book writers...
how about we try to make good jobs available to everyone?
So how many engineers and historians are you ready to hire right now, on your savings? Other people in the country are in the same position, even if they have some business. You cannot hire a machinist if you have no machine for him to work on, and the machine costs $100K. But even if you could invest, you have no customers for this extra production.
In essence, the industry today is so efficient that it does not require many workers. Only in China they can afford thousands of laborers. In the USA if there is a factory, it's all robots. Workers are too expensive (in part due to the minimum wage law.) As result the workers are not hired. The futuristic roboticized society is not futuristic anymore, it's already here. Millions of potential peasants, who would be employed a few centuries ago, are milling around in cities, while the huge fields are worked by a machine with a lone operator. Millions of US-based potential assembly workers are sitting at home because their jobs are done by robots (for all practical purposes, a factory worker in China is indistinguishable from a robot in the USA - same low cost.) The service industry can absorb only enough workers to service paying customers; but the number of those shrinks as more and more people lose well-paid jobs. A restaurant worker simply cannot afford to dine at another restaurant.
1) No new children. You can keep your existing children but you're not allowed to produce more children while collecting unemployment benefits, unless the State thinks you should be allowed to have children.
They will defy your ban. What are you going to do about that? Euthanize those unapproved children? Take them away from their parents and hold them as hostages? Who is getting punished here?
2) No voting rights unless you contribute in various approved ways, or can prove you are actively seeking employment.
Or unless the millions of "pets of the state" start a riot.
If productivity is so high due to advances in technology etc, that we have so much excess food, so many surplus toys, luxuries etc, I see no justification to not keep humans alive and well just because they are unable or unwilling to work.
This means if all production is automated, none of the humans will be allowed to have children. The humankind will die out within a century. Or, perhaps, some pets of the state will be more equal than others - and then they will be allowed to have children?
And pets don't get to vote (otherwise they might vote themselves more and more benefits).
Pets don't vote because they are not smart enough for that. Among humans there is one category of people who never had a right to vote. Those were slaves. If there is not enough jobs, all kinds of people will become unemployed. You could deal with lazy bums today; but what if a great political agitator springs up among that crowd? Your society will burn very soon after that.
From what I see those corporations and rich people shoving their profits around to pay no tax are worse.
Corporations are voting with their feet. They are free to not incorporate in California. You cannot force them to open the office where they don't want to. Corporations are also free to do or not do business from certain locations. That is logical, and that is freedom, even though by exercising that freedom they deny you the money that you consider to be yours (why?) To solve this conflict you need to fix the tax laws in your own country, so that businesses have a reason to work there and to pay taxes there. If your tax rate is 100% why would you be surprised when you learn that all businesses closed overnight?
Paying the same tax rate I do will make them poorer but isn't going to make them poor.
Rich individuals already pay the same, or higher, individual tax. If you try to increase taxation all you get is exodus of rich people from your country. The problem is that rich people are just as sensitive to unfairness as poor people. Nobody wants to work long and hard and take risks just to see his income taken away by the tax man. Consider the situation of a gambler:
The gambler bets his life on a chance that the dice's output is even. The house throws the dice. If it shows 3 the gambler hangs himself. The local newspaper publishes a small footnote in a tiny font. If the dice shows 4 the gambler wins 100 million. And then the tax man shows up and wants to take 80% (or whatever) of the revenue. But, Sir, where were you when the gambler was killing himself for the loss? If you want a share of the success then you, fairly, should have a share in the failure as well, isn't it so? But no, the laws are written such that the government is allowed to skim off the success, but they have nothing to do with a failure. Risk it all - if you lose it's your loss alone, but if you win then it's our win together.
I still have seen no evidence that they actually work to reduce accidental shootings.
It's hard to get such evidence when the gun did not fire and nobody was killed and the police was not called. We do not know how many such cases of prevented NDs have occurred. You will not get your numbers, and the speculation (a.k.a. the thought experiment) is all that is available.
In fact a GAO report says that the only safeties that would reduce accidental shootings are: child-proof safeties, and loaded chamber indicators.
There is not one individual safety measure, aside from your gun being melted down, that would be always successful in prevention of accidents. Accidents among adults are pretty rare, but when they do happen (like the famous quail hunting accident) the safety would have played no role - the operator intended the weapon to discharge, and it did. The intent was wrong (or unfortunate, depending on who is responsible.) The mechanical safety would affect the rate of slipped fingers, oversized gloves, triggers caught in something (especially when holstering,) and other mishandling that in the end pulls the trigger. The safety lever only restricts this particular avenue of ND, not any other. To make a car analogy, to put the car in gear you have to press the brake pedal. An adult wouldn't need that because he is always cognizant, right? You cannot make even that joke when a child is present in the running car. The Alt-Ctrl-Del requires three keys to be pressed. It's a relatively safe function only starting with NT-based Windows; before that in DOS it was an instant reboot, with all your data lost, and in DOS-based Windows it was a blue screen where you could cancel the reboot.
With regard to children, no measures are adequate. The children open gun safes in seconds; they certainly can find out where the keys are - they are very inquisitive and curious, they are at home far more than their parents, and even if they are supervised by a granny, that granny is not going to follow the child everywhere. The cable lock is a sufficient protection of children only until the child finds a friend with a Dremel tool or a larger grinder - or with a nail to open the lock (those locks are ordered from China for a few dollars apiece.)
The chamber indicator is hard to see even when you want to see it. Some .22LR semi-autos are prone to misfeeds, so racking the bolt/slide does not always result in chambering the round. An indicator is helpful here. A child wouldn't even know what that indicator means. IMO, the only reliable way to keep a gun away from the uninitiated child is to not have it at the house at all. Some ranges/stores offer secure storage alongside their own firearms, and the fees are minor, compared to the overall expense of raising a child.
Games have more detailed video walkthroughs than the OS made by a billion dollar company. The MS Web site is useless if you want facts. As it was said many times before, MS is a sales company first and foremost. Tech company it is not; it just so happened, historically, that the product that MS is selling is software.
I have an RC build of Win8, and I never saw this tutorial. Perhaps it is present in the production build, but how would I know that without gilding Ballmer's hand? Should I buy a pig in a poke just to find out what's inside the poke?
It took me nearly five minutes to figure out how to close a Metro app the first day I used it,
On a PC it's Alt-F4, if you are old enough to remember Windows 3.1 keyboard shortcuts. Everyone else you need to invoke the anti-charms bar (whatever it is called) and from there you can close.
So, if I'm properly trained and don't aim my gun at people and keep my finger out of the trigger guard until I'm aiming at something I want to destroy then what is the safety doing for me?
There are many safeties in a gun, and the wise thing is to use all of them (as the circumstances permit; if you are in Afghanistan your rules may be different.) For example:
And so on. We take many different measures all the time to make sure that those evil guns don't suddenly decide to go on a rampage. As you can see, most of those safety measures are something that *you* do - not some spring or some catch in the gun. The role of the mechanical safety in this list is very small. However all those measures are reducing the chance of an ND. Given that NDs are not a joke, you generally try to do your best to make sure that the weapon only fires when you want it to. There may be a situation when all that separates you from many years of prison is a small mechanical lever on your firearm. It is your choice to use it or to ignore it, just as it is your choice to follow (or not) all other gun safety rules.
With regard to the idiot who was pointing weapons at people and then saying "the safety was on." Let's imagine there is no safety, as you advocate. The idiot would be saying instead "I thought it was not loaded", or "I wasn't going to pull the trigger", or some other inane excuse. Worse still, he would have shot you because the safety is not there, and his brain is not capable of handling the idea of not pointing guns at people.
I personally select firearms with mechanical safeties. Not because I don't trust myself - but because I want yet another, however small, protection against AD/ND. The default state for all my firearms is "do not fire." This makes them, as configured, less suitable for a battle. But I must confess, I don't often participate in armed conflicts. If a firefight is looming, though - such as if I see three men trying to force the door of my home at night - it takes just a second to insert the magazine, release the safety (all the way down) and rack the slide. After that it's a point and click exercise. If a gun owner cannot memorize a couple of very simple moves, he doesn't deserve to own a gun. It's a large responsibility, after all.
Eh. If I have "stuff" that I need holes in, I use a drill.
It is against the Fish and Game code of all 57 states to approach a deer with a cordless drill and then start drilling holes in him. Even the deer knows that.
but that's really just a simulation of killing things
In part true, but largely it is a competition to find out who has the steadiest hand and the sharpest eye. The easiest way to kill things is by blowing them up; but we don't plant landmines on deer paths, don't we? It is an art to use a rifle at a large distance against small targets. Perhaps you prefer chess, and other people prefer throwing of a javelin. But it is a sport nevertheless, even when nothing gets killed except paper.
I'd say most physical sports originate in war. Running? Necessary in war. Throwing javelins? Don't even ask. Lifting heavy things, throwing heavy objects, balancing on objects... all that is part of the ancient warfare. The entire sport is a war without casualties. In team sports it is as close to the real battle as it gets, with medals and prestige and fame at stake.
I like to point out that "some guns" are designed specifically for the purpose of killing people, to the detriment of other legitimate reasons for owning a gun, like killing animals for food.
What gun, outside of artillery, is not usable in a competition? Some distances (beyond 1 mile) require .50BMG or other specialty calibers if you want the bullet to even reach the target.
Perhaps an AK-47 would be a poor choice for a target shooter. However it had been used in hunting (in the single shot mode.) Full-auto is never used, except in movies.
But even regardless of all that, there is still plenty of violence in the world. If your ship is surrounded by Somali pirates what do you do - tell them that they are not welcome, or start firing at them with everything you got? If a thug approaches a small woman in a dark alley to rape her, what the woman is supposed to do - to become a victim or to spend a few rounds on the attacker? Some point at Europe where firearms are heavily regulated; but such people in Europe become victims and sometimes die, and nobody cares to count them. Can you imagine London riots if all the population of London was armed? Those riots wouldn't even begin; those rioters wouldn't be taking a chance to get a few new holes in their bodies; and using their own firearms against peaceful citizens would give them a life sentence in prison, if they survive the capture. Training with firearms has the same purpose as boxing or weightlifting or karate - it teaches you how to use violence to further your goals. When a gang member works out he is preparing to kick your teeth out. When an honest citizen works out (in a gym or at a range) he is preparing to defend himself, his family and perhaps his country against that gang member. Isn't that one of the usual duties of a man, in all societies? If someone comes to your house, beats up your wife and steals your child, what are you going to do as you watch this - are you just going to use choice words to express your displeasure? Threaten to write a letter to the United Nations, perhaps?
That Chesterfield ad is generally truthful in what it says. It only lies in what it doesn't say. But this tactic is still in use today.