Worse, being omniscient, he's actually read the whole thesis.
Ah, the old question posed in The Tragedy of Man, scene 7: was Jesus and God one and the same, or just fundamentally the same? If just fundamentally, omniscience may not apply.
Oh, and look up words in a dictionary before you use them. Unless there's intelligent life on Mars, it isn't genocide.
Unless it's the planned, premeditated destruction of an ethnic or racial group, with the expressed intention of utter and complete eradication, it's not genocide. Legally speaking.
Although I'd love to see the Hague tackle 'Negligent Genocide', or similar. Maybe someone read a scroll of genocide, thinking it was some recipe?
Seriously, while we should strive to protect this planet (it's the only one we've got, so far. And the only place with beer!), we should also be looking towards other planets, with a colonial eye. The only way forward is up, and off this rock. Let me quote myself, from the prologue and epilogue of my thesis: "Space is the final frontier(1). After Humanity has conquered the seas and the sky, there will be no other choices for expansion, than out: breaking free from the planet, and creating new colonies in endless void of space, just as Columbus did in his time." [...] "[...] Because we cannot, and must not stop after one step. [...] Resource demands will grow, just as population will, and we will be forced to consider our future. If by then we were legally ready for the conquest of these lands, we could accelerate the process, and could even find a solution for the impending energy- and resource-crisis, or the planet's overpopulation, in the near future. And we have to be ready, for the time when the XVI. century's wave of colonization repeats itself, on a much greater scale, as Humanity leaves its planet, and the Columbuses of the future set off." (Italics added in places to convey the emphasis in the tone of the Hungarian text) 1: Star Trek reference was initially unintentional, but later left in place. I liked the tone too much.
But until this can come to pass, you're right: we should do everything in our power to keep our world liveable, as long as it doesn't impact our capacity to expand.
100%. Those fuckers can survive damn near anything, and they're omnipresent (the archeobacteria and other extremophiles present around geothermal vents, in deep drill-cores, and all those other places aren't the only indestructible microbes). The law of large numbers practically requires them to have been on the landers.
I think the Viking probes and all that other shit we threw at the planet already did. You can't get them microbe-less once the components are exposed to air, some spores will survive. There was some controversy that the activity seen in the Martian soil by the Vikings was due to terrestrial contamination (or the chemical activity of the soil), so the soil tests were deemed inconclusive (Gas Release was negative, along with Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer readings, and pyrolitic release. The only positive was labeled release, which may have been due to inorganic reactions), and most scientists do not accept them as proof of life.
1966, Germany (and Hungary as well): Raumpatrouille. Some of you might be old enough to remember it as Space Patrol. The default planetside communication was by videophone, with an option to disable video (used only once, when the political officer (female) at the other end of the line was getting ready for a shower).
Apart from the aforementioned Metropolis, this is probably the earliest mention of real-time video communication.
$100 says that Facebook will shortly come out with an "emergency channel" that police and other emergency crews can use to "break in" and talk to anyone, regardless of friend status.
And would that be such a bad thing? At least if it comes to an emergency, which leaves you trapped somewhere (say, an earthquake traps you in the rubble), they can give you instructions, such as first aid, survival, and possibly even zero in on your position based on what you tell them you see and hear.
Hey, if it means you get an advanced detection system for nukes on your border (not that there wouldn't be other ways, circumventing this, for the al Qaeda to smuggle one (or twelve, with one in Jericho)) into the US, it's a win-win situation. I see no problems.
You might have misunderstood me. I didn't mean passive neutron radiation detectors, I meant something like this kid built: an active scanner, that's capable of analyzing the contents of the crate without opening it (that's what the article implies). I go a bit further, the real news is not making this, it's how he crunches the data to get the contents from the reflected neutron flux/induced radiation pattern, whichever he uses. A passive neutron scanner is all dandy and fine, but can be defeated with shielding. This active scanner, developed far enough for sensitivity/crunching capacity, could detect the presence of shielding (though not its contents), which itself would be grounds for suspicion. The passive scanner would just indicate a zero or very low flux, which might be mistaken for background radiation or other, similarly innocuous, explanation.
Chill the f*ck out, and respond civilly, I did not insult you.
Nope, the bomb's fissile material is subcritical until the point of explosion, when it's compressed by an explosive charge (in crude terms, actually an explosive lens) into supercriticality. While subcritical, no amount of neutron bombardment will trigger it.
Okay, you might call it a fusion reactor, but it's just a fusor no matter how you look at it. It could most likely be replaced with any other neutron source, since what drives this is the neutron bombardment and the detection of induced radiation, the source of neutrons doesn't matter.
Also, this is in no way revolutionary. What is revolutionary, however, is that the ICE and border guard hasn't managed to implement an automated neutron scanner yet, but a 17-years-old kid managed to. That is why I congratulate him, and hope the government takes notice of him.
That was never the aim, for the very reason you give: banning them won't make them go away. The aim was to confine warfare to the lowest possible level and make sure the soldiers don't suffer overly. Hence no expanding bullets in warfare, no X-ray-transparent shrapnel, no permanently blinding lasers or explosive shells massing less than 400g.
Anyway, drugs are easy, how do you determine what's a weapon? In an average room, I think I could list ten objects I can use to kill you (including the room itself, as the joke goes). Are the keys to my house 'weapons'? I put them up like Wolverine's claws, and punch out your eyes, than stab you in the throat with them. I stick my ball-point pen in your eye, is it a weapon? I wrap the sleeve of my jacket around your neck, and pull; does that mean I'm walking around armed and dangerous? To give an even more extreme example, the Outer Space Treaty forbids "weapons of mass destruction" (Yet another undefined term. My compiler kept throwing exceptions from all the undefined while I was writing my thesis...) in orbit, okay. What about twenty tons of iron that can be dropped just about anywhere for a one-kiloton impact? I mean, it's hardly even a weapon, it's just something that falls down from orbit, like a shooting star, yet in its effect, it's sure as hell a weapon.
That's the problem with governments banning weapons, and the resulting backlash: legislators fail to understand that everything is a weapon if you know how to use it. I'm not saying they should not be legislated, I'm saying that the backlash is inevitable, and should be controlled: I might stun you with a bottle of water, it may even knock you out, but I sure as seven hells won't be taking over a plane with that, so why ban it? On the other hand, I could modify my laptop battery to remove the power control module, then overload it for a sizable explosion, yet they wave my laptop through the checkpoint...
Napalm and flamethrowers are two different things, but technically, both are illegal as 'weapons causing inhumane suffering' according to the Geneva conventions...
And Korea too. Not a very nice sight. But those were not mounted in the palm of your hand, like the Prometheus, which is plain awesome as a penultimate-ditch backup weapon.
That's what attack bombers and cruise missiles are for. The Warthog is for when you need to get up close and personal with some entrenched tanks to show them who's boss, and artillery would be an overkill.
You managed not to kill...: Well that's good.... or blow up anything: are you sure you were doing it right?:) According to a friend of mine in the Belgian Navy, you can get anything to blow up in the military, even on accident. Like the time a friend of his was flying his model airplane, minding his own business. Suddenly, CIWS and AA turns around, the latter fires one missile and pegs his model square. Turns out he piloted above the radar floor, and got flagged as "Unknown, potentially hostile".
Anyway, cool anecdote, I wish I did something like that in my childhood. Or piloted a model airplane to annoy the radar operator on my warship...
... And come up with really expensive ways to do something that can be done easily. I swear, the Army should recruit their engineers from hackaday's suppliers, some of the things I've seen done there, especially along with their costs, would make government-sponsored dev teams proud. I'm thinking especially of the Prometheus Device by Everett Bradford (yes, I know flamethrowers against people are illegal. Which is too bad, since we'll never get to see footage of real-life Firebats in combat...).
Well, I wasn't suggesting creating a "Security code handbook", even though it seems like a good idea. If that were done, however, we'd have the same security systems across companies, with likely the same bugs and faults. In an electrical code or similar, that's okay, it's not like people are going to exploit it maliciously, but in corporate security, that's like putting a neon sign "TROUBLE APPLY HERE!". The "require them to take proper steps" was meant to be exactly what you said: an act that says "You get hacked, you get smacked (possibly in advance)!". I thought the context made that clear, but thanks for reinforcing my point.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider yourself modded +1 Informative and +1 Insightful. If I had any mod points left, that is...
No, Torchwood runs on rift energy. The Wylfa plant, now... That'll be Margaret Blaine's doing, and I know it has a major design flaw.
Worse, being omniscient, he's actually read the whole thesis.
Ah, the old question posed in The Tragedy of Man, scene 7: was Jesus and God one and the same, or just fundamentally the same? If just fundamentally, omniscience may not apply.
But let's not stray from the topic at hand!
Oh, and look up words in a dictionary before you use them. Unless there's intelligent life on Mars, it isn't genocide.
Unless it's the planned, premeditated destruction of an ethnic or racial group, with the expressed intention of utter and complete eradication, it's not genocide. Legally speaking.
Although I'd love to see the Hague tackle 'Negligent Genocide', or similar. Maybe someone read a scroll of genocide, thinking it was some recipe?
You mean ... the Lifestream? :)
Seriously, while we should strive to protect this planet (it's the only one we've got, so far. And the only place with beer!), we should also be looking towards other planets, with a colonial eye. The only way forward is up, and off this rock.
Let me quote myself, from the prologue and epilogue of my thesis:
"Space is the final frontier(1). After Humanity has conquered the seas and the sky, there will be no other choices for expansion, than out: breaking free from the planet, and creating new colonies in endless void of space, just as Columbus did in his time."
[...]
"[...] Because we cannot, and must not stop after one step. [...] Resource demands will grow, just as population will, and we will be forced to consider our future. If by then we were legally ready for the conquest of these lands, we could accelerate the process, and could even find a solution for the impending energy- and resource-crisis, or the planet's overpopulation, in the near future. And we have to be ready, for the time when the XVI. century's wave of colonization repeats itself, on a much greater scale, as Humanity leaves its planet, and the Columbuses of the future set off."
(Italics added in places to convey the emphasis in the tone of the Hungarian text)
1: Star Trek reference was initially unintentional, but later left in place. I liked the tone too much.
But until this can come to pass, you're right: we should do everything in our power to keep our world liveable, as long as it doesn't impact our capacity to expand.
100%.
Those fuckers can survive damn near anything, and they're omnipresent (the archeobacteria and other extremophiles present around geothermal vents, in deep drill-cores, and all those other places aren't the only indestructible microbes). The law of large numbers practically requires them to have been on the landers.
I think the Viking probes and all that other shit we threw at the planet already did. You can't get them microbe-less once the components are exposed to air, some spores will survive.
There was some controversy that the activity seen in the Martian soil by the Vikings was due to terrestrial contamination (or the chemical activity of the soil), so the soil tests were deemed inconclusive (Gas Release was negative, along with Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer readings, and pyrolitic release. The only positive was labeled release, which may have been due to inorganic reactions), and most scientists do not accept them as proof of life.
More like too ubiquitous when you have an endpoint in your shower too...
1966, Germany (and Hungary as well): Raumpatrouille. Some of you might be old enough to remember it as Space Patrol. The default planetside communication was by videophone, with an option to disable video (used only once, when the political officer (female) at the other end of the line was getting ready for a shower).
Apart from the aforementioned Metropolis, this is probably the earliest mention of real-time video communication.
$100 says that Facebook will shortly come out with an "emergency channel" that police and other emergency crews can use to "break in" and talk to anyone, regardless of friend status.
And would that be such a bad thing? At least if it comes to an emergency, which leaves you trapped somewhere (say, an earthquake traps you in the rubble), they can give you instructions, such as first aid, survival, and possibly even zero in on your position based on what you tell them you see and hear.
I'd say Facebook should have done that long ago.
Yeah, because the al Qaeda are so poor and undersupplied...
Hey, if it means you get an advanced detection system for nukes on your border (not that there wouldn't be other ways, circumventing this, for the al Qaeda to smuggle one (or twelve, with one in Jericho)) into the US, it's a win-win situation.
I see no problems.
You might have misunderstood me. I didn't mean passive neutron radiation detectors, I meant something like this kid built: an active scanner, that's capable of analyzing the contents of the crate without opening it (that's what the article implies). I go a bit further, the real news is not making this, it's how he crunches the data to get the contents from the reflected neutron flux/induced radiation pattern, whichever he uses.
A passive neutron scanner is all dandy and fine, but can be defeated with shielding. This active scanner, developed far enough for sensitivity/crunching capacity, could detect the presence of shielding (though not its contents), which itself would be grounds for suspicion. The passive scanner would just indicate a zero or very low flux, which might be mistaken for background radiation or other, similarly innocuous, explanation.
Chill the f*ck out, and respond civilly, I did not insult you.
Nope, the bomb's fissile material is subcritical until the point of explosion, when it's compressed by an explosive charge (in crude terms, actually an explosive lens) into supercriticality. While subcritical, no amount of neutron bombardment will trigger it.
Okay, you might call it a fusion reactor, but it's just a fusor no matter how you look at it. It could most likely be replaced with any other neutron source, since what drives this is the neutron bombardment and the detection of induced radiation, the source of neutrons doesn't matter.
Also, this is in no way revolutionary. What is revolutionary, however, is that the ICE and border guard hasn't managed to implement an automated neutron scanner yet, but a 17-years-old kid managed to. That is why I congratulate him, and hope the government takes notice of him.
That was never the aim, for the very reason you give: banning them won't make them go away. The aim was to confine warfare to the lowest possible level and make sure the soldiers don't suffer overly. Hence no expanding bullets in warfare, no X-ray-transparent shrapnel, no permanently blinding lasers or explosive shells massing less than 400g.
Anyway, drugs are easy, how do you determine what's a weapon? In an average room, I think I could list ten objects I can use to kill you (including the room itself, as the joke goes). Are the keys to my house 'weapons'? I put them up like Wolverine's claws, and punch out your eyes, than stab you in the throat with them. I stick my ball-point pen in your eye, is it a weapon? I wrap the sleeve of my jacket around your neck, and pull; does that mean I'm walking around armed and dangerous? To give an even more extreme example, the Outer Space Treaty forbids "weapons of mass destruction" (Yet another undefined term. My compiler kept throwing exceptions from all the undefined while I was writing my thesis...) in orbit, okay. What about twenty tons of iron that can be dropped just about anywhere for a one-kiloton impact? I mean, it's hardly even a weapon, it's just something that falls down from orbit, like a shooting star, yet in its effect, it's sure as hell a weapon.
That's the problem with governments banning weapons, and the resulting backlash: legislators fail to understand that everything is a weapon if you know how to use it. I'm not saying they should not be legislated, I'm saying that the backlash is inevitable, and should be controlled: I might stun you with a bottle of water, it may even knock you out, but I sure as seven hells won't be taking over a plane with that, so why ban it? On the other hand, I could modify my laptop battery to remove the power control module, then overload it for a sizable explosion, yet they wave my laptop through the checkpoint...
But we're drifting off-topic here...
Napalm and flamethrowers are two different things, but technically, both are illegal as 'weapons causing inhumane suffering' according to the Geneva conventions...
And Korea too. Not a very nice sight. But those were not mounted in the palm of your hand, like the Prometheus, which is plain awesome as a penultimate-ditch backup weapon.
That's what attack bombers and cruise missiles are for. The Warthog is for when you need to get up close and personal with some entrenched tanks to show them who's boss, and artillery would be an overkill.
Except nobody can verify what the budget and the deadline is. Because, well, they're ... black. As in "officially, it's not there". :)
You managed not to kill...: Well that's good. ... or blow up anything: are you sure you were doing it right? :)
According to a friend of mine in the Belgian Navy, you can get anything to blow up in the military, even on accident. Like the time a friend of his was flying his model airplane, minding his own business. Suddenly, CIWS and AA turns around, the latter fires one missile and pegs his model square. Turns out he piloted above the radar floor, and got flagged as "Unknown, potentially hostile".
Anyway, cool anecdote, I wish I did something like that in my childhood.
Or piloted a model airplane to annoy the radar operator on my warship...
Or other countries' troops, given some of the sub-standard USArmy equipment they're given...
... And come up with really expensive ways to do something that can be done easily.
I swear, the Army should recruit their engineers from hackaday's suppliers, some of the things I've seen done there, especially along with their costs, would make government-sponsored dev teams proud. I'm thinking especially of the Prometheus Device by Everett Bradford (yes, I know flamethrowers against people are illegal. Which is too bad, since we'll never get to see footage of real-life Firebats in combat...).
I dare you to tell Hiro that Reason is not a weapon... :)
Well, I wasn't suggesting creating a "Security code handbook", even though it seems like a good idea. If that were done, however, we'd have the same security systems across companies, with likely the same bugs and faults. In an electrical code or similar, that's okay, it's not like people are going to exploit it maliciously, but in corporate security, that's like putting a neon sign "TROUBLE APPLY HERE!".
The "require them to take proper steps" was meant to be exactly what you said: an act that says "You get hacked, you get smacked (possibly in advance)!". I thought the context made that clear, but thanks for reinforcing my point.