Honestly, seeing that much power in a demo makes the hair on the back of my neck rise (and in the 'something vile beyond comprehension this way comes' sort of way, not the 'awe at technology indistinguishable from magic' kind of way).
If you can do extremely complex and powerful things with very, very, short commands, that suggests that all those commands have a lot of internal magic baked in, quite possibly including some might-as-well-be-nondeterministic guessing to paper over any ambiguity in commands, or in output from one command moving to be input for another.
In the context of a demo, where you can carefully test, and confine yourself to some highlights from the set of programs that are both cool and well behaved, fantastic.
In the context of taking the language out into the wild, that sounds like every nightmare interaction with an unpredictable and opaque 3rd-party library that you'll never expunge from your nightmares....
I'm assuming that you don't spend north of 22 hours/day in your apartment, with thrilling breaks in the, similarly sized, exercise cage?
I mean, so long as we are ignoring salient variables, I was in this elevator the other day, and the thing was tiny and all just brushed metal, without even furniture or plumbing, just a few buttons like some sick science experiment. I probably wouldn't have made it out with my humanity intact, except that the trip took 90 seconds!
those who have attacked others or have shown to have colluded in harming people outside the prison system?
a lot of these people are bad people and deserve what they get and will never be normal
That statement evaluates to 'true' (one way of getting assigned to a supermax, or tossed in the hole, is shivving a few guards or doing something suggestive of a little of the old ultraviolence); but it's one of those 'true' statements that verges on a falsehood by omission: You aren't going to get a ticket to Florence ADX or anything without showing some character; but in 'mixed' prisons that have a general population and some isolation cells people can, and do, end up doing long solitary stints more or less at the power and merely pleasure of correctional staff. If the wrong person is in the wrong mood, there really isn't a 'floor' below which your infraction can't earn you a trip to solitary, nor, once inside, is there any real bother with 'process' similar.
Like getting sent to the principal's office, only with harrowingly high odds of psychiatric morbidity(including behaviors punishable by.....you guessed it More Solitary!, like self mutilation, a laundry list of alarming neuropsychological effects, extremely high suicide rates(despite conditions designed to make this quite difficult). Happy times.
I'm not generally accused of being a bleeding heart; but I'd be perfectly willing to argue that anyone willing to inflict prolonged solitary confinement, rather than actually-competent execution(unfortunately, this excludes most of the methods we use on humans, for some insane reason) is guilty of naivete at best, and overt sadism at worst.
It's... generally a bad sign... when a procedure is considered nasty enough that you aren't allowed to do it to lab rodents without specific justification and an IRB signoff on your protocol and that aspect specifically...
DNA testing would see the parentage of the third doner without specialized testing. Mitochondrial DNS are ONLY passed to offspring by their mothers, and given the procedure, there will still be a "DNS" mother involved, insuring that a reasonable set of parents can still be determined using the normal procedures. Not a nightmare at all.
One annoyance, for a select group, would be that such offspring would toast the assumptions behind mitochondrial inheritance modeling(since you always get the mitocondria from mommy, and the thing still has nearly as much independent genome as it did in its free-living days, mitochondrial DNA is a good trick for tracking maternity over historical time, similar to the use of Y chromosomes for historical paternity tracking.
If some kid suddenly shows up with a random(but functional) stranger's mitochondrial DNA, rather than their mother's defective stuff, they and their descendants will give some future anthropologists a dose of Extra Challenge Mode.
SO.. will the third parent be asked to pay child support by the court?
I suspect that a lawyer would advise against this; but I would be sorely tempted to point out that anyone who thinks that providing a lifetime supply of mitochondria that actually make it to the 'ATP' part of the job isn't 'child support' in a sense that makes anything after the invention of currency look like trivial stamp collecting, they are welcome to explore this hypothesis with the assistance of such obliging simulations of mitochondrial defects as cynanide, 2,4-dinitrophenol, or Flavotoxin A. Should they be available for comment afterward, I suspect they would prove... more agreeable.
If anything, in this particular arrangment, it's that deadbeat jerkoff who managed to provide a whole sperm cell who should get out the checkbook(especially if kiddo is a girl, and not even exploiting the otherwise unavailable properties of having a Y chromosome...).
I'm pretty sure that, aside from pure dickwaving, the nationalists' objective is ensuring that, when generation N+1 rolls around, those demographics have shifted a bit, N+2 more so, and so on. Once you reach critical mass, the squelching can be handled in the time-honored social manner; but until that time, state power is just soo much fun.
I find it hard to believe anything the big tech companies say after years of favors from the government.
"We are, um, shocked and outraged by these revelations, and wish to assure our customers that, honestly, we are a bunch of incompetent second-stringers, so we probably can't do too much our current level of security. Also, even if we could, we have a long and ignoble track record of being a bootlicking toadies who give our best customer service with the PRC is hunting down dissidents for Labor Camp Adventure Time, we're actually pretty good at that. So, yeah, try to think of us as 'Google': By AOL, it's give us a nostalgic tinge.
There will be one potential issue: Did they score some sweet, sweet, incriminating footage of Inconvenient Politician confessing his love of grits wrasslin' and anal twincest? Yeah, probably. However, it doesn't take a PhD in teenagerology to suspect that Her Majesty's Wiretapping Crew are now sitting on one of the largest collections of illegal kiddie porn on the planet. And the kiddies are, on the whole, the unsuspecting children of the taxpayers of the UK. If the British tabloid press is anything to go by, they like (non clerical) pedos even less than we do on this side of the pond.
As much fun as it will be to...encourage...an MP or two to take a more understanding position (just like somebody other than his wife did, and we have pictures, hint hint), I wouldn't really want to be on the receiving end of the entire population of the UK suspecting that I'm hoarding kiddie porn based on their children. If the black-bag crew are really unlucky, whatever 'license to do whatever the fuck you want, because terroristsOMG!!!' law(s) and set of interpretations may not even have considered an idea this audacious. As much as Clapper is a lying fuckwad, his 'Oh, mere metadata' driven sounds convincing, if you don't know what metadata are, or how useful they are. "Yup, hot, definitely not yet legal, naked pictures of your innocent children", by contrast, isn't even good PR, no matter how you spin it.
HELO is one of the words in the Language of The Unclean. He was probably freaked out enough at the mere implication that there are mailservers that are not Exchange Servers, lurking beyond the LAN, beyond the guiding light of NETBIOS; babbling their blasphemies across the vile chaos of TCP/IP. That you wanted him to take an innocent little Exchange server that knew only goodness and MAPI/RPC, and corrupt it, that's just fucked up. You probably got reported to the cyber police.
I think the supported models list is the same for those two. The one real nuisance (dealing with it now, thankfully not as the owner of the affected iMacs myself, or I'd be annoyed) is that Apple's 'eh, it really isn't worth the trouble of bugging people who already bought macs over license keys' policy does not extend to systems that cannot upgrade to Mavericks. Period. Systems that do support that update all fall under the 'sure, here, take it; but we'll bug you about your Apple ID all the time!' support model. Systems that don't, you can persuade one of Apple's dustier corners to quietly sell you some copies of 10.7; but the legacy chain-o-license-keys model remains in effect.
Pity the poor hatchetmen, cruelly interrupted during lunch. I, for one, fear for the future of a society that respects the privacy of others so little...
Do I think that Our Fearless Correspondent is even remotely effective in his stated aims? Not with those tactics, he'd be hard pressed to get someone to tell him the time.
Should we care about that? Do RSA's little minions deserve to throw a veil of contractual secrecy over their lunch hour, lest their delicate feelings be offended by the sight of disapproval?
In a situation where legal redress is, in all probability, a fantasy; but displeasure is very real, isn't social disapproval an excellent response? Wouldn't it be delightful if admitting to working for a spook contractor was about as pleasant as admitting that you take the long way around that school zone because you are a convicted sex offender? Now, especially without good evidence tying individual people to individual pieces of work, you don't want to go overboard; but it would be downright wholesome if the penalty for collaboration was constant exposure to contempt.
I'd usually ask what the hell is in the water down there for them to be pumping out (and electing, no less) such fine specimens of humanity; but seeing as this is West Virginia, and the locals get to ask the same question, often, would that be in poor taste?
On the plus side, we could 'regulate' Mt. Gox's little 'accidentally disappearing into the night with ~$350 million unaccounted for' misunderstanding with the same seriousness that we employed to show HSBC that (blue collar) Crime Does Not Pay (~0.001%, and no pesky criminal charges) for about $3,500. A Small Price To Pay For Rule Of Law!
If you are having a serious go at building a ship that needs no human crew (if anything, steer-by-wire is probably the easy bit, with a series of increasingly uncommon; but hard to automate fault handling and maintenance operations being the really nasty part), I'd assume the container loading crew is next on the hit list.
For non-fluid and non-containerized cargo, the fact that you can get nimble humans for peanuts, while similarly agile robots are either ruinously expensive or simply not for sale, is likely to remain in play for some time; but for containerized cargo, I'd imagine that weighing and load-balance computation are probably already partially computerized, and the containers themselves are crane loaded. Somebody come up with an effective automated tiedown mechanism and a few squads of riot pigs, and it's game over....
(Next logical step, of course, is to take advantage of the fact that the ill-secured cargo-balance-computation computer is even leakier than a corrupt insider, and simply have your rootkit exfiltrate the load manifest and vessel route, parse the container content declarations, check resale values online, and dispatch a hijack UAV if the cost/benefit calculation comes back in the black... Progress!)
It's curious: In my (layman's I neither operate nor hijack cargo vessels) estimation, threatening to destroy expensive capital equipment and ditch a whole bunch of somebody's widgets and somebody else's cargo containers(apparently, owning the boat; but leasing the containers from a company that specializes in managed container service solutions is not only something you can do; but something of a fad of late. I had no idea until just this morning...) seems like a perfectly sound mechanism of piratical leverage. And given the 'labor market flexibility' that ships flying some of the more accommodating flags of convenience enjoy, I'd expect it to carry more weight than all but the most picturesque and/or well supported by home government hostages.
However, I'm drawing a total blank on any actual examples of this. I'm pretty sure that unwieldy or otherwise unsuitable ships have been abandoned after the cargo was stripped, in some cases where it was a cargo hit, and during SOMALI PIRATEMANIA 2000/2010! I think pirates would periodically be forced by pursuit or technical problems to leave one ship for another; but no dramatic, clear-cut, 'pay up or I blow your ship up' incidents. This is particularly curious given that either having, or pretending to have, a bomb was practically a fad during the glory days of civil aviation hijackings, back in the '70s, so it's not as though 'explosives' and 'violent coercion' are concepts that people haven't tried combining, it's actually a pretty popular one.
Given that, I'm not sure whether to conclude that the pirates have considered the idea; but rejected it for some sound but non-obvious reasons, or whether it's a perfectly sound idea; but the pirates in question weren't interested in delivering innovative services. Anybody have insight on the matter, or a guess that sounds like insight?
Once you start down the dark path... Forever will it dominate your destiny.
It's not as though TLDs were ever a particularly shining moment in the history of information classification; but, after the remnant factions of the Ontology wars (remember when URLs were totally going to express useful data about the world and whatnot by being insufferably long and hierarchical?) retired or were driven into hiding, they mostly slumped, if more by erosion than sound structural engineering, into a vaguely safe and predictable structure.
And then they decided that it was just sickeningly adequate as it was and they started grafting on... things... things that should not be...in places that out not to have things there. Nothing could possibly go wrong. And oh boy, does it look like it will, good and hard.
Surely something as visible, and rife with opportunity for outrageous comedies of error, as DNS namespace collisions can simply be allowed to work itself out, through the time tested, enjoyable(for spectators), and reliable methods of endless risible fuckups followed by stilted non-denials from people who should have known better and vicious mockery from everybody else? Have we lost all sense of tradition? Taste? Humor?
(Perhaps more importantly: wouldn't it be neat if there were some sort of super cool, totally futuristic, security mechanism? One that used a secret number, that the server never told anyone, but still managed to prove that it knew, because number theory, instead of just relying on the URL being right? I bet that I'd have to go, like -25 years into the future to see a system that advanced...)
And can ignore pesky mayday calls(at best relay) unless they have automatic human assistance, rations, medical stuff on board. It's handy having humans out there in emergencies imo.
I suspect that no shipping company spokesperson, or cargo ship supplier, would get within a mile of a live mic while saying so; but do you think they'd shed too many tears if tragically certain sorts of (expensive, delay-inducing, largely unrewarding) rescue missions were simply no longer within their capabilities?
In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
On the other hand, you aren't going to get much of a ransom for a satellite modem and a half-rack of control gear, no matter how menacing and willing to kill the hostages you look... Also, even crewed vessels of any significant size are usually wearing a beacon of some type, and if the cops are days away, so to is the nearest possible buyer for the cargo.
(Probably more relevant, with the exception of, quite atypical, security contractors brought on out of necessity for very, very, bad neighborhoods, it is usually not within the power, or the job description, of the crew to fight pirates. A drone would probably be incrementally less able to get really pissed off and make a dead hero of himself with the ships' highest-power fire hose; but that's about it.)
While it's pretty obvious why everyone involved wants this particular issue to go away, it would be...striking... if that sort of legal reasoning didn't end up causing even more of a disturbance among American corporations and their assorted hired guns than the movie did among the hicks 'n zealots subset.
Basically, something that looked a whole lot like a work for hire is suddenly not a work for hire anymore because the hireling didn't really approve of the changes made elsewhere in the production process. It's hard to imagine a theory much more dramatic than that, for any company doing business in copyrighted work slapped together by teams of employees.
In fairness, I don't envy the actress who now enjoys the attention of some of the real dregs of abrahamic monotheism, even by the tepid standards of the genre; but the idea that that makes the movie no longer a work for hire (rather than, say, a reckless endangerment suit) has no obvious 'bright line' boundaries that would prevent it from applying to much less dramatic situations. They say that doing 'rights clearance' in film sucks already, imagine if every cast member, and maybe even the memorable extras, gets veto power based on whether they approve of the post-production special effects or not... That'd be fun to try to insure.
On the plus side, it will fit in perfectly with the decor if the 'seasteaders' ever actually decide that living on a glorified oil rig is worth the reduction in marginal tax rates...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that the 'parse natural language expression and then do some 3d rendering' library is epic fun to debug if it behaves unexpectedly...
Honestly, seeing that much power in a demo makes the hair on the back of my neck rise (and in the 'something vile beyond comprehension this way comes' sort of way, not the 'awe at technology indistinguishable from magic' kind of way).
If you can do extremely complex and powerful things with very, very, short commands, that suggests that all those commands have a lot of internal magic baked in, quite possibly including some might-as-well-be-nondeterministic guessing to paper over any ambiguity in commands, or in output from one command moving to be input for another.
In the context of a demo, where you can carefully test, and confine yourself to some highlights from the set of programs that are both cool and well behaved, fantastic. In the context of taking the language out into the wild, that sounds like every nightmare interaction with an unpredictable and opaque 3rd-party library that you'll never expunge from your nightmares....
I'm assuming that you don't spend north of 22 hours/day in your apartment, with thrilling breaks in the, similarly sized, exercise cage?
I mean, so long as we are ignoring salient variables, I was in this elevator the other day, and the thing was tiny and all just brushed metal, without even furniture or plumbing, just a few buttons like some sick science experiment. I probably wouldn't have made it out with my humanity intact, except that the trip took 90 seconds!
How sad the USA has become.
If this actually struck us(at a population level) as 'sad' rather than 'fuck yeah! tough on crime!', I suspect we'd be in better shape.
those who have attacked others or have shown to have colluded in harming people outside the prison system?
a lot of these people are bad people and deserve what they get and will never be normal
That statement evaluates to 'true' (one way of getting assigned to a supermax, or tossed in the hole, is shivving a few guards or doing something suggestive of a little of the old ultraviolence); but it's one of those 'true' statements that verges on a falsehood by omission: You aren't going to get a ticket to Florence ADX or anything without showing some character; but in 'mixed' prisons that have a general population and some isolation cells people can, and do, end up doing long solitary stints more or less at the power and merely pleasure of correctional staff. If the wrong person is in the wrong mood, there really isn't a 'floor' below which your infraction can't earn you a trip to solitary, nor, once inside, is there any real bother with 'process' similar.
Like getting sent to the principal's office, only with harrowingly high odds of psychiatric morbidity(including behaviors punishable by.....you guessed it More Solitary!, like self mutilation, a laundry list of alarming neuropsychological effects, extremely high suicide rates(despite conditions designed to make this quite difficult). Happy times.
I'm not generally accused of being a bleeding heart; but I'd be perfectly willing to argue that anyone willing to inflict prolonged solitary confinement, rather than actually-competent execution(unfortunately, this excludes most of the methods we use on humans, for some insane reason) is guilty of naivete at best, and overt sadism at worst.
It's... generally a bad sign... when a procedure is considered nasty enough that you aren't allowed to do it to lab rodents without specific justification and an IRB signoff on your protocol and that aspect specifically...
DNA testing would see the parentage of the third doner without specialized testing. Mitochondrial DNS are ONLY passed to offspring by their mothers, and given the procedure, there will still be a "DNS" mother involved, insuring that a reasonable set of parents can still be determined using the normal procedures. Not a nightmare at all.
One annoyance, for a select group, would be that such offspring would toast the assumptions behind mitochondrial inheritance modeling(since you always get the mitocondria from mommy, and the thing still has nearly as much independent genome as it did in its free-living days, mitochondrial DNA is a good trick for tracking maternity over historical time, similar to the use of Y chromosomes for historical paternity tracking.
If some kid suddenly shows up with a random(but functional) stranger's mitochondrial DNA, rather than their mother's defective stuff, they and their descendants will give some future anthropologists a dose of Extra Challenge Mode.
SO .. will the third parent be asked to pay child support by the court?
I suspect that a lawyer would advise against this; but I would be sorely tempted to point out that anyone who thinks that providing a lifetime supply of mitochondria that actually make it to the 'ATP' part of the job isn't 'child support' in a sense that makes anything after the invention of currency look like trivial stamp collecting, they are welcome to explore this hypothesis with the assistance of such obliging simulations of mitochondrial defects as cynanide, 2,4-dinitrophenol, or Flavotoxin A. Should they be available for comment afterward, I suspect they would prove... more agreeable.
If anything, in this particular arrangment, it's that deadbeat jerkoff who managed to provide a whole sperm cell who should get out the checkbook(especially if kiddo is a girl, and not even exploiting the otherwise unavailable properties of having a Y chromosome...).
I'm pretty sure that, aside from pure dickwaving, the nationalists' objective is ensuring that, when generation N+1 rolls around, those demographics have shifted a bit, N+2 more so, and so on. Once you reach critical mass, the squelching can be handled in the time-honored social manner; but until that time, state power is just soo much fun.
What good is being an ethnic nationalist if you don't get to be better?
That is so fucked up.
So is the footage from your laptop (in the garage?) at 3 AM last Tuesday, citizen. That raccoon, seriously?
I find it hard to believe anything the big tech companies say after years of favors from the government.
"We are, um, shocked and outraged by these revelations, and wish to assure our customers that, honestly, we are a bunch of incompetent second-stringers, so we probably can't do too much our current level of security. Also, even if we could, we have a long and ignoble track record of being a bootlicking toadies who give our best customer service with the PRC is hunting down dissidents for Labor Camp Adventure Time, we're actually pretty good at that. So, yeah, try to think of us as 'Google': By AOL, it's give us a nostalgic tinge.
Thank you.
There will be one potential issue: Did they score some sweet, sweet, incriminating footage of Inconvenient Politician confessing his love of grits wrasslin' and anal twincest? Yeah, probably. However, it doesn't take a PhD in teenagerology to suspect that Her Majesty's Wiretapping Crew are now sitting on one of the largest collections of illegal kiddie porn on the planet. And the kiddies are, on the whole, the unsuspecting children of the taxpayers of the UK. If the British tabloid press is anything to go by, they like (non clerical) pedos even less than we do on this side of the pond.
As much fun as it will be to...encourage...an MP or two to take a more understanding position (just like somebody other than his wife did, and we have pictures, hint hint), I wouldn't really want to be on the receiving end of the entire population of the UK suspecting that I'm hoarding kiddie porn based on their children. If the black-bag crew are really unlucky, whatever 'license to do whatever the fuck you want, because terroristsOMG!!!' law(s) and set of interpretations may not even have considered an idea this audacious. As much as Clapper is a lying fuckwad, his 'Oh, mere metadata' driven sounds convincing, if you don't know what metadata are, or how useful they are. "Yup, hot, definitely not yet legal, naked pictures of your innocent children", by contrast, isn't even good PR, no matter how you spin it.
HELO is one of the words in the Language of The Unclean. He was probably freaked out enough at the mere implication that there are mailservers that are not Exchange Servers, lurking beyond the LAN, beyond the guiding light of NETBIOS; babbling their blasphemies across the vile chaos of TCP/IP. That you wanted him to take an innocent little Exchange server that knew only goodness and MAPI/RPC, and corrupt it, that's just fucked up. You probably got reported to the cyber police.
I think the supported models list is the same for those two. The one real nuisance (dealing with it now, thankfully not as the owner of the affected iMacs myself, or I'd be annoyed) is that Apple's 'eh, it really isn't worth the trouble of bugging people who already bought macs over license keys' policy does not extend to systems that cannot upgrade to Mavericks. Period. Systems that do support that update all fall under the 'sure, here, take it; but we'll bug you about your Apple ID all the time!' support model. Systems that don't, you can persuade one of Apple's dustier corners to quietly sell you some copies of 10.7; but the legacy chain-o-license-keys model remains in effect.
Makes mixed deployments a blast, I must say.
Pity the poor hatchetmen, cruelly interrupted during lunch. I, for one, fear for the future of a society that respects the privacy of others so little...
Do I think that Our Fearless Correspondent is even remotely effective in his stated aims? Not with those tactics, he'd be hard pressed to get someone to tell him the time.
Should we care about that? Do RSA's little minions deserve to throw a veil of contractual secrecy over their lunch hour, lest their delicate feelings be offended by the sight of disapproval?
In a situation where legal redress is, in all probability, a fantasy; but displeasure is very real, isn't social disapproval an excellent response? Wouldn't it be delightful if admitting to working for a spook contractor was about as pleasant as admitting that you take the long way around that school zone because you are a convicted sex offender? Now, especially without good evidence tying individual people to individual pieces of work, you don't want to go overboard; but it would be downright wholesome if the penalty for collaboration was constant exposure to contempt.
I'd usually ask what the hell is in the water down there for them to be pumping out (and electing, no less) such fine specimens of humanity; but seeing as this is West Virginia, and the locals get to ask the same question, often, would that be in poor taste?
On the plus side, we could 'regulate' Mt. Gox's little 'accidentally disappearing into the night with ~$350 million unaccounted for' misunderstanding with the same seriousness that we employed to show HSBC that (blue collar) Crime Does Not Pay (~0.001%, and no pesky criminal charges) for about $3,500. A Small Price To Pay For Rule Of Law!
If you are having a serious go at building a ship that needs no human crew (if anything, steer-by-wire is probably the easy bit, with a series of increasingly uncommon; but hard to automate fault handling and maintenance operations being the really nasty part), I'd assume the container loading crew is next on the hit list.
For non-fluid and non-containerized cargo, the fact that you can get nimble humans for peanuts, while similarly agile robots are either ruinously expensive or simply not for sale, is likely to remain in play for some time; but for containerized cargo, I'd imagine that weighing and load-balance computation are probably already partially computerized, and the containers themselves are crane loaded. Somebody come up with an effective automated tiedown mechanism and a few squads of riot pigs, and it's game over....
(Next logical step, of course, is to take advantage of the fact that the ill-secured cargo-balance-computation computer is even leakier than a corrupt insider, and simply have your rootkit exfiltrate the load manifest and vessel route, parse the container content declarations, check resale values online, and dispatch a hijack UAV if the cost/benefit calculation comes back in the black... Progress!)
It's curious: In my (layman's I neither operate nor hijack cargo vessels) estimation, threatening to destroy expensive capital equipment and ditch a whole bunch of somebody's widgets and somebody else's cargo containers(apparently, owning the boat; but leasing the containers from a company that specializes in managed container service solutions is not only something you can do; but something of a fad of late. I had no idea until just this morning...) seems like a perfectly sound mechanism of piratical leverage. And given the 'labor market flexibility' that ships flying some of the more accommodating flags of convenience enjoy, I'd expect it to carry more weight than all but the most picturesque and/or well supported by home government hostages.
However, I'm drawing a total blank on any actual examples of this. I'm pretty sure that unwieldy or otherwise unsuitable ships have been abandoned after the cargo was stripped, in some cases where it was a cargo hit, and during SOMALI PIRATEMANIA 2000/2010! I think pirates would periodically be forced by pursuit or technical problems to leave one ship for another; but no dramatic, clear-cut, 'pay up or I blow your ship up' incidents. This is particularly curious given that either having, or pretending to have, a bomb was practically a fad during the glory days of civil aviation hijackings, back in the '70s, so it's not as though 'explosives' and 'violent coercion' are concepts that people haven't tried combining, it's actually a pretty popular one.
Given that, I'm not sure whether to conclude that the pirates have considered the idea; but rejected it for some sound but non-obvious reasons, or whether it's a perfectly sound idea; but the pirates in question weren't interested in delivering innovative services. Anybody have insight on the matter, or a guess that sounds like insight?
Once you start down the dark path... Forever will it dominate your destiny.
It's not as though TLDs were ever a particularly shining moment in the history of information classification; but, after the remnant factions of the Ontology wars (remember when URLs were totally going to express useful data about the world and whatnot by being insufferably long and hierarchical?) retired or were driven into hiding, they mostly slumped, if more by erosion than sound structural engineering, into a vaguely safe and predictable structure.
And then they decided that it was just sickeningly adequate as it was and they started grafting on... things... things that should not be...in places that out not to have things there. Nothing could possibly go wrong. And oh boy, does it look like it will, good and hard.
Surely something as visible, and rife with opportunity for outrageous comedies of error, as DNS namespace collisions can simply be allowed to work itself out, through the time tested, enjoyable(for spectators), and reliable methods of endless risible fuckups followed by stilted non-denials from people who should have known better and vicious mockery from everybody else? Have we lost all sense of tradition? Taste? Humor?
(Perhaps more importantly: wouldn't it be neat if there were some sort of super cool, totally futuristic, security mechanism? One that used a secret number, that the server never told anyone, but still managed to prove that it knew, because number theory, instead of just relying on the URL being right? I bet that I'd have to go, like -25 years into the future to see a system that advanced...)
And can ignore pesky mayday calls(at best relay) unless they have automatic human assistance, rations, medical stuff on board. It's handy having humans out there in emergencies imo.
I suspect that no shipping company spokesperson, or cargo ship supplier, would get within a mile of a live mic while saying so; but do you think they'd shed too many tears if tragically certain sorts of (expensive, delay-inducing, largely unrewarding) rescue missions were simply no longer within their capabilities?
In the middle of the ocean, any kind of 'cops' would be days away.
On the other hand, you aren't going to get much of a ransom for a satellite modem and a half-rack of control gear, no matter how menacing and willing to kill the hostages you look... Also, even crewed vessels of any significant size are usually wearing a beacon of some type, and if the cops are days away, so to is the nearest possible buyer for the cargo.
(Probably more relevant, with the exception of, quite atypical, security contractors brought on out of necessity for very, very, bad neighborhoods, it is usually not within the power, or the job description, of the crew to fight pirates. A drone would probably be incrementally less able to get really pissed off and make a dead hero of himself with the ships' highest-power fire hose; but that's about it.)
While it's pretty obvious why everyone involved wants this particular issue to go away, it would be...striking... if that sort of legal reasoning didn't end up causing even more of a disturbance among American corporations and their assorted hired guns than the movie did among the hicks 'n zealots subset.
Basically, something that looked a whole lot like a work for hire is suddenly not a work for hire anymore because the hireling didn't really approve of the changes made elsewhere in the production process. It's hard to imagine a theory much more dramatic than that, for any company doing business in copyrighted work slapped together by teams of employees.
In fairness, I don't envy the actress who now enjoys the attention of some of the real dregs of abrahamic monotheism, even by the tepid standards of the genre; but the idea that that makes the movie no longer a work for hire (rather than, say, a reckless endangerment suit) has no obvious 'bright line' boundaries that would prevent it from applying to much less dramatic situations. They say that doing 'rights clearance' in film sucks already, imagine if every cast member, and maybe even the memorable extras, gets veto power based on whether they approve of the post-production special effects or not... That'd be fun to try to insure.
On the plus side, it will fit in perfectly with the decor if the 'seasteaders' ever actually decide that living on a glorified oil rig is worth the reduction in marginal tax rates...