What I find interesting is that you even acknowledge that we make it far too easy for nutcases, but want to deny it to all.
I don't think that's what the previous poster meant... His language was ambiguous, but I think he meant that gun rights should not be automatically extended to everyone, as they are now -- not that they should be automatically denied to everyone.
I suspect that in particular he meant "screen out the nutcases", and so he and you are basically in agreement.
How about we fix some basic problems with inequity and other forms of injustice in our society, so that more people can get the help they need and less people snap to begin with?
I'm all for that, but I don't think it's very likely to happen any time soon. Hell, a significant portion of the US population has Stockholm Syndrome at this point, and thinks that injustice and inequity are good things, because they punish the "unworthy" (aka the poor) and reward the "productive members of society" (aka the rich).
That will hopefully sort itself out in a generation or two, but in the meantime it would be really nice to have a solution to the nutcase-with-a-gun problem that can be realistically implemented. I can't think of a better solution myself, at the moment, but it occurs to me that the saturation TV coverage of every atrocity is part of the problem... nutcase #2 sees all the attention that nutcase #1 is getting, and thinks "hey, here's a way for me to finally get noticed".... thus setting the stage for the next atrocity.
You don't need to be in good physical shape to push a button.
It seems neither tackling someone and pinning them to the ground, nor tasering them, are particularly satisfactory methods of gently subduing someone. Either one can result in injury or death.
So perhaps a better method should be developed. I'm thinking maybe a giant butterfly net...
At least if you get shot there is a plethora of places you can be hit where you don't die.
Not that I think tasers are necessarily a good idea, but the above is true of tasers as well.
A taser will stop your heart and kill you, the risk increasing with voltage and frequency of shock.
It's not "will", it's "might". And it usually doesn't. Certainly your chances of dying or being seriously injured by a taser hit are less than your chances of same when hit by a bullet.
The obvious difference would be that Google never presents its graph to the user explicitly, it only uses it internally to (hopefully) come up with more-relevant search results.
So you won't have your GUI cluttered up by the Knowledge Graph.
Nuclear capacity doesn't guarantee sovereignty. If somehow N Korea made the US mad enough, the US would bomb them anyway. Sad for S Korea, but oh well.
Sure, but the threshold for "mad enough" is a lot higher if the US has to worry about a friendly (or even US) city getting nuked as part of the exchange.
If they can plant an actual keylogger in the keyboard, even this won't help.
The trick is to bring a scale with you. Weigh your laptop before using it; if it's a bit heavier than usual, either you left a DVD in the drive or someone has added "special hardware" to it for you.;)
What good is HDD encryption when they have/had physical access to the device? [...] If you're that worried about corporate/govt espionage, there is only one defence... Don't keep the data on a mobile device. Yep it's a PITA doing everything via VPN, but it's the only secure way.
If your nemeses can defeat your HDD encryption, won't they be likely able to defeat your VPN encryption as well? The only difference is that they won't have to sneak into your hotel room to do it.
Still insecure, someone could grab it and run. For enterprise-level security, swallow the USB key. That will keep the USB key well and truly secure, while still giving you access to your data every 48 hours.
You can't declare the whole array const (or threadsafe), because you want to have multiple threads working on the same array.
True, but what the compiler can do is figure out which writable objects in the array will be accessed from each thread, and as long as each thread only reads/writes its own subset of the array, all the threads can happily work in parallel.
According to the whitepaper, their compiler already does this sort of analysis (keeping track of the set of objects accessible by each thread, given the thread's starting set of references) for individual objects, and while it doesn't currently partition arrays automatically, they are working in that direction:
"A common focus for safe data-parallelism systems is handling of arrays. The implementation currently does not support arrays directly, but via trusted library abstractions for safe data parallelism. We are currently designing a notion of a sub-array, using a combination of isolation and immutability to allow safe array partitioning for in-place updates, as well as functional data-parallelism. This part of the design is still evolving."
Compilers already try to do this for example with auto-vectorization. The problem is that they are usually quite terrible at it.
I suspect one reason they are so bad at it is they have to be very conservative in how they optimize, due to the relaxed nature of the C language. For example, if the C optimizer cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a particular memory location isn't being aliased, it can't make any assumptions about the location's value not changing at any step of the process. In practice, that means no optimizations for you.
Given that, it would seem that the Microsoft approach (using not only the higher-level language C#, but a specially customized version of C#) gives their optimizer much greater latitude. Because the language forces the programmer to annotate his objects with readable/writable/immutable tags (think C's "const" tag, but with teeth), and because the language (presumably) doesn't allow the programmer to do sneaky low-level tricks like casting away const or aliasing pointers or pointer math, the optimizer can safely make assumptions about the code that a C or C++ optimizer could never get away with. That may allow it to be more effective than you might anticipate (or maybe not, we'll see).
Did NASA refer to this as "earth-shattering" or a "breakthrough"? Since you use quote marks, I assume you can point to the quote where they said that, and aren't just using exaggerated paraphrasing so you can then criticize your straw man.
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
We need portable energy, but we also need cheap bulk energy storage.
There are lots of wind farms and solar farms out there, and the times they produce power don't always correspond with the times power is needed. This results in excess power being wasted, and also in power not being available sometimes when it is required (e.g. at night or when the wind stops).
If we had an economic way to store lots of power, we could supplement these places with battery banks to temporarily store a few hours (or days) worth of excess power, and presto -- they'd become as reliable as coal or nuclear plants. That would make renewable energy much more usable.
Did that fear really stop George W. Bush and co. from invading? Not really...
The above is precisely why Iran feels the need to develop actual nuclear weapons -- because a nuclear deterrent is the only sure way to keep the US from invading Iran.
It'd be better to just sub contract the postal service out to UPS and FedEx at that point.
A lot of the things the USPS does (e.g. serving distant rural areas) are not profitable and never will be. So we'd either end up subsidizing UPS and FedEx to serve those areas, or we'd end up with no postal service to those areas. Dunno if either of those options are acceptable to you, but I don't the public would benefit much from either of them.
Sounds like a good investment actually. They could use those 44 raptors to bomb UPS, DHL and Fedex and they'll have more business overnight.
I think they'd be better off destroying the Internet (in particular email and the various automated bill-paying mechanisms), as that is their real competition.
Better anticipate on the things you want to do on Mars, than to send over raw materials and a 3D printer, and think... "gosh, what shall we put together today?"
It's more like "gosh, what broke today?"
Assuming a 3D printer could work on Mars (no idea if that's possible), you could use it to greatly increase efficiency. Instead of sending over 2 or 3 of every possible item that might break or wear out, you could just send over 2 or 3 3D printers, and use them to replace broken tools as necessary. (Including, of course, worn-out 3D printers;^))
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What I find interesting is that you even acknowledge that we make it far too easy for nutcases, but want to deny it to all.
I don't think that's what the previous poster meant... His language was ambiguous, but I think he meant that gun rights should not be automatically extended to everyone, as they are now -- not that they should be automatically denied to everyone.
I suspect that in particular he meant "screen out the nutcases", and so he and you are basically in agreement.
How about we fix some basic problems with inequity and other forms of injustice in our society, so that more people can get the help they need and less people snap to begin with?
I'm all for that, but I don't think it's very likely to happen any time soon. Hell, a significant portion of the US population has Stockholm Syndrome at this point, and thinks that injustice and inequity are good things, because they punish the "unworthy" (aka the poor) and reward the "productive members of society" (aka the rich).
That will hopefully sort itself out in a generation or two, but in the meantime it would be really nice to have a solution to the nutcase-with-a-gun problem that can be realistically implemented. I can't think of a better solution myself, at the moment, but it occurs to me that the saturation TV coverage of every atrocity is part of the problem... nutcase #2 sees all the attention that nutcase #1 is getting, and thinks "hey, here's a way for me to finally get noticed".... thus setting the stage for the next atrocity.
You don't need to be in good physical shape to push a button.
It seems neither tackling someone and pinning them to the ground, nor tasering them, are particularly satisfactory methods of gently subduing someone. Either one can result in injury or death.
So perhaps a better method should be developed. I'm thinking maybe a giant butterfly net...
At least if you get shot there is a plethora of places you can be hit where you don't die.
Not that I think tasers are necessarily a good idea, but the above is true of tasers as well.
A taser will stop your heart and kill you, the risk increasing with voltage and frequency of shock.
It's not "will", it's "might". And it usually doesn't. Certainly your chances of dying or being seriously injured by a taser hit are less than your chances of same when hit by a bullet.
The obvious difference would be that Google never presents its graph to the user explicitly, it only uses it internally to (hopefully) come up with more-relevant search results.
So you won't have your GUI cluttered up by the Knowledge Graph.
Nuclear capacity doesn't guarantee sovereignty. If somehow N Korea made the US mad enough, the US would bomb them anyway. Sad for S Korea, but oh well.
Sure, but the threshold for "mad enough" is a lot higher if the US has to worry about a friendly (or even US) city getting nuked as part of the exchange.
Eventually the moon will replace Florida as *the ultimate* retirement community.
The reason everyone retires to Florida is because the weather doesn't get too cold in the winter. I'm not sure how the moon is going to compete there.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Who is this "we", kemo sabe? And what gives "us" the right to stop anyone from going to the moon?
Wouldn't sending a nuclear power source be more practical and reliable? It works for Curiosity...
If they can plant an actual keylogger in the keyboard, even this won't help.
The trick is to bring a scale with you. Weigh your laptop before using it; if it's a bit heavier than usual, either you left a DVD in the drive or someone has added "special hardware" to it for you. ;)
What good is HDD encryption when they have/had physical access to the device? [...] If you're that worried about corporate/govt espionage, there is only one defence... Don't keep the data on a mobile device. Yep it's a PITA doing everything via VPN, but it's the only secure way.
If your nemeses can defeat your HDD encryption, won't they be likely able to defeat your VPN encryption as well? The only difference is that they won't have to sneak into your hotel room to do it.
You take the USB key with you around your neck.
Still insecure, someone could grab it and run. For enterprise-level security, swallow the USB key. That will keep the USB key well and truly secure, while still giving you access to your data every 48 hours.
You can't declare the whole array const (or threadsafe), because you want to have multiple threads working on the same array.
True, but what the compiler can do is figure out which writable objects in the array will be accessed from each thread, and as long as each thread only reads/writes its own subset of the array, all the threads can happily work in parallel.
According to the whitepaper, their compiler already does this sort of analysis (keeping track of the set of objects accessible by each thread, given the thread's starting set of references) for individual objects, and while it doesn't currently partition arrays automatically, they are working in that direction:
"A common focus for safe data-parallelism systems is handling of arrays. The implementation currently does not support arrays directly, but via trusted library abstractions for safe data parallelism. We are currently designing a notion of a sub-array, using a combination of isolation and immutability to allow safe array partitioning for in-place updates, as well as functional data-parallelism. This part of the design is still evolving."
Compilers already try to do this for example with auto-vectorization. The problem is that they are usually quite terrible at it.
I suspect one reason they are so bad at it is they have to be very conservative in how they optimize, due to the relaxed nature of the C language. For example, if the C optimizer cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a particular memory location isn't being aliased, it can't make any assumptions about the location's value not changing at any step of the process. In practice, that means no optimizations for you.
Given that, it would seem that the Microsoft approach (using not only the higher-level language C#, but a specially customized version of C#) gives their optimizer much greater latitude. Because the language forces the programmer to annotate his objects with readable/writable/immutable tags (think C's "const" tag, but with teeth), and because the language (presumably) doesn't allow the programmer to do sneaky low-level tricks like casting away const or aliasing pointers or pointer math, the optimizer can safely make assumptions about the code that a C or C++ optimizer could never get away with. That may allow it to be more effective than you might anticipate (or maybe not, we'll see).
Did NASA refer to this as "earth-shattering" or a "breakthrough"? Since you use quote marks, I assume you can point to the quote where they said that, and aren't just using exaggerated paraphrasing so you can then criticize your straw man.
We need portable energy, and molten anything is not an answer.
We need portable energy, but we also need cheap bulk energy storage.
There are lots of wind farms and solar farms out there, and the times they produce power don't always correspond with the times power is needed. This results in excess power being wasted, and also in power not being available sometimes when it is required (e.g. at night or when the wind stops).
If we had an economic way to store lots of power, we could supplement these places with battery banks to temporarily store a few hours (or days) worth of excess power, and presto -- they'd become as reliable as coal or nuclear plants. That would make renewable energy much more usable.
Did that fear really stop George W. Bush and co. from invading? Not really...
The above is precisely why Iran feels the need to develop actual nuclear weapons -- because a nuclear deterrent is the only sure way to keep the US from invading Iran.
Shucks, none of my local airports seem to be near the equator. And I don't fly since the TSA started assaulting and irritating travelers.
I guess the previous poster should have written "will be possible for those who are willing to make an effort".
It'd be better to just sub contract the postal service out to UPS and FedEx at that point.
A lot of the things the USPS does (e.g. serving distant rural areas) are not profitable and never will be. So we'd either end up subsidizing UPS and FedEx to serve those areas, or we'd end up with no postal service to those areas. Dunno if either of those options are acceptable to you, but I don't the public would benefit much from either of them.
Sounds like a good investment actually. They could use those 44 raptors to bomb UPS, DHL and Fedex and they'll have more business overnight.
I think they'd be better off destroying the Internet (in particular email and the various automated bill-paying mechanisms), as that is their real competition.
When machines start translating languages on the fly, people will stop learning other languages and that's a bad thing.
Also, when automobiles start moving people and goods over long distances, people will stop riding horses, and that's a bad thing.
As for charging yourself, how do you want to wait around a "gas station" while your battery charges?
Of course not, you'd let it recharge overnight while you sleep, just like you do with your cell phone.
Given the 60 mile range on this vehicle, you won't be making any long trips with it anyway, so I don't think that recharging will be an issue.
and a counter to that is the US Navy Nuclear program which has not had ANY accidents in its history
It's probably not a coincidence that the US Navy is also a not-for-profit institution, and therefore has only minimal incentives to cut corners.
Enjoy your legally mandated return the 16th century, UK!
If you're expecting everyone to go back to using wood for fuel, I think the Druids are going to have something to say about that...
Better anticipate on the things you want to do on Mars, than to send over raw materials and a 3D printer, and think... "gosh, what shall we put together today?"
It's more like "gosh, what broke today?"
Assuming a 3D printer could work on Mars (no idea if that's possible), you could use it to greatly increase efficiency. Instead of sending over 2 or 3 of every possible item that might break or wear out, you could just send over 2 or 3 3D printers, and use them to replace broken tools as necessary. (Including, of course, worn-out 3D printers ;^))